As well as co-creating Golden Dragon, Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors, Oliver Johnson has written a number of excellent fantasy novels. There's the Lightbringer trilogy and also a very fine opening volume in a new series, The Knight of the Fields. Unfortunately you'll look for that last one in vain. Publishers raved that it was the best fantasy they'd seen all year -- and then decided it was "too 1990s" (I wonder what they think A Game of Thrones is?) and wanted rewrites to give it a more conventionally heroic ending.

Fantasy publishers are idiots, but luckily Oliver has turned his talents to a field where the gatekeepers are more discerning: the conspiracy thriller. Caller Unknown, out next week, entangles its protagonist in a world of cults, terrorists and corrupt politics. Take a look at Michael Jecks' review in Shots magazine to see the kind of rave reception it's getting. If you enjoy the Winter Soldier/Three Days of the Condor kind of paranoia vibe delivered with the immediacy of a murky modern thriller, don't miss it.

How come I'd never heard until now of Cardinal Cox? No, not the hottie from Friends -- Cardinal Cox is a poet who specializes in the eldritch, the macabre, and the wondrous, with poetry cycles devoted to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and the like. He has been poet-in-residence at a Victorian cemetery, at a 15th century Gothic church, and at the Dracula Society.

I was introduced to his work by a friend who picked up some of his chapbooks at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton recently and was kind enough to see that they would find a home with me. Look out for the Codex Nemedia, with poems about Conan, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane; and the Codex Yog-Sothoth, which includes lines that could have been penned for Queen Nyx in the Vulcanverse series:

His poetry is accompanied by amusing and recondite notes to delight the hearts of every true SF/fantasy nerd. I particularly liked the reference to the Bramford apartment building and the translation of the Phaistos Disc. If the Cardinal doesn't run Call of Cthulhu games then he really ought to. One reviewer said of his work: "Earth is a part of the story but, as in much Lovecraftian literature, Earth and our species are by no means as important as we humans tend to think."

He has a collection called Grave Goods that is available on Amazon and is described thus:

"Yes, there are vampires. Plus ancient gods, Frankenstein's creation at the back of a drive-in, Dr Jekyll's sister's guest house, suburban devil worshippers, ship-wrecked sailors, alchemists, murderers, and an alien plant."

I think it was Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson who first started using keywords in gamebooks. Prior to that, a gamebook might say something like, "If you met the old man in the almshouse and he gave you a piece of stained glass, turn to X." 

You can see the problem. What if I don't remember if I met the old man or not? That's especially likely if I've played through the adventure several times and can't remember whether I met him on this run-through or a previous one.

The other advantage of keywords is that they don't give the game away. The keyword for getting the stained glass fragment wouldn't be GLASS, for example, or even VITREOUS but something unrelated to the story event -- OBLIQUITY, for example. That way, if you come across the keyword without having triggered the event that would give it to you, you have no idea what effect it would have. That's particularly important in open world gamebooks like Vulcanverse and Fabled Lands, though there are cases where it's fine to know why an event is triggered -- getting arrested if you're a wanted fugitive, for example, or being granted an audience with the king because you're the court champion -- and in those cases we typically use a title like Godslayer or Saviour of Iskandria.

Keywords can serve one of two functions. The first is to record if an event has happened. For example, has the player ever met Baroness Ravayne? Once they have, that can't be undone. So in design terms that's a flag. The other use of keywords is to track a state that can change. An example of that would be whether they are an ally or enemy of Baroness Ravayne. Prior to meeting her, neither can apply. But once they are able to enter those states, there could be ways to flip them; you might become the Baroness's enemy, then redeem yourself and become her ally, then do something to make yourself an enemy again.

How many keywords do we need for this kind of set-up? I'll give you an example from The Pillars of the Sky, the fourth book in the Vulcanverse series. We've actually discussed this before. If you want to familiarize yourself with the scenario, here's a short demo version. The gist of it is that the player comes across a valley in perpetual darkness and finds a switch that lets them turn the sun on and off. (Here in London in icy January I could do with something like that.)

I used two keywords. Quell identifies whether the player has found the switch. So that's the first kind of keyword mentioned above, a logic flag. Once you've found the switch, you can't unfind it. The other keyword, Quire, records if the sun is currently on. If you go back to the switch and flip it to the off position, you lose the keyword Quire. Anytime you're in the valley, if you have Quire then the sun is shining, and if you don't it's pitch dark. So Quire records a state.

Typically you want to limit the number of keywords used in a book, as the reader is going to have to check through a list every time a keyword is called. In a multi-book series it helps a bit if the designer uses different letters of the alphabet for each book, as we did in Fabled Lands and Vulcanverse, but it's still preferable not to have too many. Initially I tried to economize in The Pillars of the Sky by only using Quire for the valley with the artificial sun. That meant there was no difference between the sun being off because the player hadn't found the switch and the sun being off because they had found the switch and left it in its original position. Later on I discovered that there were circumstances where it mattered whether the player had found the switch, so I had to bring in Quell too.

A slightly more streamlined (if less aesthetic) solution would have been to have Quire-ON and Quire-OFF as keywords, using ON and OFF to designate substates. Then I wouldn't have needed Quell as I'd be able to infer the state by asking, "Do you have a Quire-* keyword?" -- or maybe, more elegantly, "Do you have any form of Quire keyword?" I wouldn't do that in code as it's cleaner to differentiate the flag (has the switch been found?) from the state (is the switch up or down)? In fact, if the code isn't visible to the player, in an app version for example, I'd have both Quell and Quire-ON/OFF. As you will appreciate, technically I don't need the ON/OFF substates in that case because all conditions can be derived from simple combinations of Quell and Quire:

• Quell && Quire = The player has switched the sun on
• Quell && !Quire = The player has switched the sun off
• !Quell = The player hasn't found the switch

So the only reason for having the Quire substates is the belt-and-braces principle that when debugging it helps to have everything spelled out. Trust me on this -- currently I'm coding all the Vulcanverse books as a web app and O! the bugs!

If you try playing the demo, here's a moment from Workshop of the Gods that gives a hint of how that sunless valley came about:

The sands are trickling away on the preorders for Whispers Beyond The Stars -- just hours left now to reserve your copy. Backers will get the app version delivered right after the campaign ends, with the hardcover edition to follow later in the year. Meanwhile, here's me and Paweł talking about death in gamebooks.

There's one more day left to get your tentacles (or other partly squamous, partly rugose appendages) around a copy of Whispers Beyond the Stars, the new gamebook co-authored by me and Paweł Dziemski. People keep labelling it as cyberpunk, but I think that's missing the point that both SF and our ideas of the future have moved on. A friend of mine nailed it when he described Whispers as "Cthulhu in the Age of Neo-Feudalism".

The story is set in 2050. You play Alex Dragan, who has just been released from prison and whose attempts to reclaim his/her/their life are destined to be wrecked by the incursion of entities who have been plotting the subjugation of Earth for over a century.

Paweł went on The Hardboiled GMshoe to talk about how we developed the Cthulhu 2050 concept, in particular the way we co-wrote the book. This wasn't like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain or Keep of the Lich Lord, with one person writing everything up to the midway point and then the other taking over. Instead, we began by designing the world background and themes. Then I wrote the whole adventure from start to finish in outline, leaving threads for my co-author to develop later in more detail. It's a true collaboration:

Paweł: "At the begining we had a couple of workshop meetings to discuss how the world will look in 2050, from the perspective of geopolitics, energy, technology, space industry. We wrote the year by year history from 2025 until 2050 as well. Then we discussed the overall story. Then Dave wrote 200 sections as a main end-to end-thread, then I wrote the alternative storylines (another 450 sections) discussing with Dave from time to time to be on the same page. Finally I wrote the app that interprets the story and provides all the game mechanics."

There will be hardback, paperback and app editions, and the English version of the app will be available to backers as soon as the campaign concludes tomorrow. But if you want to be part of this adventure, better be quick. There's no option to "eternal lie" where crowdfunding is concerned.

More Lovecraftian musings from me and Paweł. We don' need no steenkin' genre. And remember, as recently as the beginning of the century our lives today were still science fiction.

There are still a few days to go to reserve your copy of Whispers Beyond The Stars. Don't look back with regrets.