All five Vulcanverse books are now available in ebook format for Kindle and as watermarked PDFs on DriveThruRPG. If your friends scoff at the very suggestion, saying, "But the full-colour hardbacks look so amazingly collectible!" -- well, they have a point, but you can counter with the fact that you'll be getting the entire open-world series (6115 gamebook sections, and getting on for three quarters of a million words) for less than the price of a single paperback book.

The Sisyphean task facing me was hyperlinking all those sections. You can see from the image above what the text looked like. I had the five books in Word and I was quickly able to convert all the centred numbers to headings. You can hyperlink to headings, so that was the first hurdle. But then I thought about the task ahead. More than six thousand sections meant about twelve thousand hyperlinks to put in. If I did those by hand it would take weeks of mind-numbing labour.

Ah, but that's 2024 thinking. We're in the future now. I keep extolling the benefit of writing with AI. What better use of it could there be than saving me hours and hours of drudgery? I presented the problem to Gemini 2.5 Pro:

"I have several Word documents into which I need to insert hyperlinks. Each document has numbered sections, typically from 1 digit to 4 digits -- so, for example, 1, 2, 3... to 1499, 1500, 1501, say. Those numbers are styled as headings in Word. Then in the body of the text I have a bunch of links, also numbered, like so: ► 1, ► 2, etc. I want to link those so that the number after the arrow is hyperlinked to the corresponding heading. For example, given ► 188 the "188" would link to to the heading labelled 188. Rather than do this laboriously by hand, I'm hoping you can write me a macro that will add all the hyperlinks automatically."

Gemini quickly came back with a macro to run in Word. And here's a bonus: a human coder would certainly have told me that I should have written the book in Twine to begin with -- in other words, "I wouldn't start from here." But I had it all in Word, so who cares what I should have done if I'd thought about it a couple of years ago? I needed the solution to this problem right now. LLMs don't scold you, they just get on with it.

Gemini's macro hyperlinked the whole of a Vulcanverse book in a few minutes. The only snag was that it hyperlinked every instance of a number N to heading N, and that included hyperlinking stat bonuses, the costs of items for sale, and numbers given in difficulty checks -- whereas I only wanted it to hyperlink numbers that followed a ► , ie in the format "► N", indicating a player option. Gemini suggested a couple of fixes but those didn't work. At this point it was time for the human writer to earn his keep. I said:

"The new macro is inserting hyperlinks for all instances of ► N but also hyperlinking any number N regardless of whether or not it was prefixed by "► ". I have thought of a possible solution that would save me having to completely reformat the original document. What if I replaced all "► N" with "► xyzN". If you rewrite the macro to search only for "xyzN" and hyperlink those, I can then globally remove the "xyz" and we should be left with hyperlinks only where we want them. I suggest this on the theory that it's the search for ► that is confusing the VBA editor."

That met with Gemini's approval. "Your proposed workflow is a classic troubleshooting technique," it said. "If the target is ambiguous, make it unambiguous. By 'salting' the numbers you care about with a unique prefix, you create a perfect, undeniable target for the macro, completely eliminating the possibility of it acting on the wrong numbers. I am confident this will work."

The best-laid plans of mice, men and machines... The new macro added the hyperlinks, and as promised the hyperlink was only on the numerical part of any instance of "xyzN" (so that I could remove the "xyz" without losing the link), but any given link for a number N didn't necessarily point to the heading N, but to the first occurrence of the number N anywhere in the Word document. Since a number frequently might be mentioned before the heading corresponding to that number, we were still stuck.

My first thought was that the macro was having trouble identifying the headings, so a possible fix would be to run a macro that created a set of bookmarks from the headings. So, for example, heading 323 would lead to the creation of a bookmark labelled bookmark_323 (because bookmarks can’t have names that only comprise digits). We’d end up with a bookmark list: bookmark_0001, bookmark_0002, etc, all the way to bookmark_1800 or whatever. Then we could run a modified version of the hyperlinking macro that would only link to corresponding numbers in the bookmark list.

By this point I'd begun to lose confidence in Gemini 2.5 Pro so I turned instead to Claude Sonnet 4. I didn't give Claude my proposed solution of creating a bookmark list as I wanted to test it properly against Gemini, so I just showed it the macro I had been using and told it the problem. "I can see the issue with your macro," said Claude almost immediately. "The problem is in how you're creating the hyperlinks. When you use SubAddress:=headingNumberText, Word is searching for the first occurrence of that text anywhere in the document, not specifically looking for a heading with that text. The solution is to create proper bookmarks for your headings first, then link to those bookmarks. Here's a corrected version of your macro that should work properly."

Now, this was encouraging. Claude had come up with the same solution as me (not always a good sign in and of itself, admittedly) and its code was considerably tighter than Gemini's. Not only that, Claude's macro ran faster and with no errors. Some twenty minutes later I had all five Vulcanverse books fully hyperlinked. (And the Fabled Lands books after ten or fifteen minutes more.) It's a perfect example of how AI tools can make a writer's life so much easier. All the words and storylines are by me and Jamie, all the illustrations are by Mattia Simone and the art team at Vulcan Forged; only the grunt work was done by machine.

American GIs returning home from the war found their society had changed in disturbing ways. The homecoming boys found women's new confidence and independence both alluring and threatening. At the same time the soldiers had to adjust from being brave heroes to nine-to-fivers -- if they could find work at all. And they brought back their own demons, the aftereffects of having faced death and being expected to kill. The tough masculinity that was so prized in wartime was out of place and brittle in peacetime America. And over all of that hung the shadows of the atom bomb and the almost unimaginable monstrosity of the Holocaust.

No wonder it was the heyday of noir.

Noir and hardboiled fiction are adjacent and often people get them mixed up. Author Megan Abbott explains the difference:

"The common argument is that hardboiled novels are an extension of the wild west and pioneer narratives of the 19th century. The wilderness becomes the city, and the hero is usually a somewhat fallen character, a detective or a cop. At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored. [...] In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable. In that sense, noir speaks to us powerfully right now, when certain structures of authority don’t make sense any longer, and we wonder: Why should we abide by them?"

The best noir game I can think of is the original Max Payne, which is a long way from the hardboiled 1930s background that is the default setting for Cthulhu roleplaying. Paweł Dziemski and I have drawn on noirish elements for our upcoming Cthulhu 2050 gamebook, locating them a century on from classic noir's origins. There are some RPGs like Gumshoe that lend themselves to the hardboiled milieu, but up till now there haven't been many specifically for noir in a mid-20th century setting. Which is why Alexander and Mina Stojanovic's Infinite Night looks so interesting.

Here the world is definitely a morally murky one. To paraphrase the rulebook, the game takes place in a Los Angeles that reeks of desperation, betrayals, and deals gone wrong. Infinite Night has an elegant dice pool system based on three stats: Brutality, Cunning, and Seduction. Rolls are quick and simple, modified where appropriate by Reputation (War Hero, Driver, Night Owl, etc). Instead of tracking hit points, injury and emotional trauma impose conditions that reduce some rolls. Personal contacts provide a roster of supporting characters to ease PCs into adventures. I like it because it's a system that is there when you need it but that doesn't get in the way of the story.

Currently it's only available as an ebook -- Kindle link here; Apple version here. I don't know whether there'll be a print edition, but Future Pixels who publish it have an Infinite Night MMO in the works. Noir gaming has a bright future ahead.

And... while we're talking about ebooks, this is a good time to mention that The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun, the first two books in the Vulcanverse open-world gamebook series, are now out on Kindle and on DriveThruRPG at a special low introductory price. If you've been thinking of giving the Vulcanverse a try, now is the perfect time.

Would-be Fabled Lands reader Saif Azam wrote recently to ask if we have a large-print edition of the books. Saif had been under the impression that the large-format edition would have a larger font size.

We don't have large-print editions, but there are a couple of options if you find the font in the books too small. First there's the Kindle edition, which allows you to set your own preferred font size. That's only book 1, The War-Torn Kingdom, as far as Fabled Lands is concerned, though there are Kindle editions of all the Critical IF gamebooks.

There's also Jonathan Mann's Java Fabled Lands (formerly the FLApp). Use Accessibility settings or zoom in on your screen for easier-to-read text.

If you followed last week's installments of the Conclave campaign and want the full novella, it's now available on Kindle. This brings the story to a conclusion, fixes some of the plot holes, fleshes out some scenes, and also includes background details of the narrator, Surma. To quote from the blurb:

Creation is losing the flavour of things, becoming colourless and uniform under the skin of reality. This is why the old songs lose their melody, why the fisherman’s catch is mostly minnows, why the young cast their elders out into the cold, why the storms are violent and unseasonal, and dragons hide in distant clouds.

The world is an archipelago of a hundred islands, beyond whose furthest shores lies illimitable ocean. Magic is real, though rarely tamed, and the College of Wizards maintains a careful balance so that use of magic does not damage the fabric of reality.

But now a new force is at work, twisting and blurring the true names of things that are the root of all that exists. If it goes on unchecked, magic and wonder will drain away. Even life and death will cease to have meaning.

Seven of the greatest sorcerers of the age are invited by the Master Summoner of the College of Wizards to travel to the island of Dain at the archipelago’s heart. The Summoner’s hope is that this conclave, untainted by the politics and intrigues of the College and unrestrained by nature, will be able to hold back the force that is picking reality apart.

Yet to be effective in their fight, the conclave must first work the hardest spell of all -- trust.

If anyone who read the first seven installments on the blog feels like giving the book a review on Amazon -- well, consider yourself rich in undying gratitude! Surprisingly (but also quite pleasingly) some readers have praised it as homage to Ursula K Le Guin -- and as I still haven't read the Earthsea books that's surely a first. An anticipatory homage!

By one of those strokes of serendipity I discovered this week that the filmmaker Michael Powell wanted to make a movie of the Earthsea trilogy. It was designed as a project for his film school students and it was only five minutes long, but what a treasure that would be if it still exists anywhere. Powell incidentally was just as baffled as I am that the trilogy was published in the UK by Puffin (Penguin Books' children's imprint). That's the reason I didn't notice it back in my teens when I was devouring a lot of fantasy and SF. When Powell asked Le Guin why it went to Puffin and not Penguin's adult line, she said, 'Because Kaye Webb is a smart cookie.' I suspect it was because it was assumed back then that a fantasy novel written by a woman must be for ten year olds, so it's surprising that Le Guin thought it was a good decision. I guess it didn't hurt her in the long run.

OK, don't say I never did anything for you, coz the Critical IF gamebook series is free on Kindle through till Sunday. The four books are diceless, so they actually work pretty well as ebooks (hyperlinked, obviously). Not an offer to be sneezed at, eh?

And come back on Friday for Camelot Eclipsed, a complete roleplaying campaign set in the days after King Arthur's fall. That should awaken the dragon.

A lot of people said that the Blood Sword series would make great novels, so in 1997 I took the plunge and revisited the gamebooks in order to convert them into regular fiction. If I'd anticipated the writing being a cakewalk - just a cut-n-paste job, right? - it only took a few days to demolish that notion. I needed to add a lot of text, for one thing, because in between the options in a gamebook there's an implied train of thought process and action that is left entirely to the reader's (ie player's) imagination. For a novel all that has to go onto the page.

And then there was the little question of a protagonist - or two. I rejected having a complete party of adventurers. I didn't want it to feel like a game write-up, for one thing. These were supposed to be proper novels, and having too many characters tends to throw a story out of focus. You've seen X-Men: The Last Stand, you know what I'm talking about. In the end I imported my own character Caelestis, a Vancean rogue who had appeared briefly in Tim Harford's Legend campaign, but on realizing that he was too much of a reprobate to serve as standalone lead in a middle grade series I created a "warrior monk" character (a sort of Capellar-in-training, I guess) called Altor who could come out with all the traditionally heroic lines.

A few weeks into the writing, I accepted Ian Livingstone's offer of a job as game designer at Domark (later Eidos Interactive) which made writing the Chronicles of the Magi trilogy a bit of a juggling act. I enjoyed it, though. Solving problems is my thing, and every scene threw up plenty of those. For instance, to get around the way the first Blood Sword book was really detached from the rest, being effectively a gameplay tutorial, I moved the opening scene of The Kingdom of Wyrd to the start of the first Chronicles novel. That got us right into the quest - though with rather more plot-twists along the way than the gamebooks needed to have. Here's (almost) the moment our two heroes first meet:

Altor reached for the banner, but just then there came a loud outcry from the far side of the square. He looked up to see the young dandy he had encountered earlier. His cloak swept out behind him like a bat’s wings as he ran, and hot on his heels were several guardsmen of the night watch.

‘Stop that thief!’ bawled the irate sergeant of the guards as the young man came racing past the booth.

Altor stepped forward without thinking and put out one arm. The dandy skidded to a halt in front of him and glanced up in surprise. For an instant their eyes locked, and Altor saw a look not of panic but of agile cunning. Then the young man ducked under his outstretched arm and reached for the last pennant. Altor lunged for it too. They both gripped the shaft at the same time.

The guardsmen pounded to a halt and began to fan out. ‘So, villain,’ gasped the sergeant, ‘will you come quietly?’

The dandy looked at him in disdain. ‘Villain, you say? I am Caelestis, the champion of Magus... of Magus...’

He turned to Altor who, although bewildered by the turn of events, found himself saying, ‘Magus Balhazar.’

‘Champion?’ The sergeant tucked his thumbs in his belt and rocked with breathless laughter. ‘You’re no champion, lad. You’re just a pickpocket and I’m taking you in.’

Caelestis stared back at him defiantly. The other guards hefted their cudgels and stood glowering. For a moment there was a tense silence, then the steward cleared his throat. ‘The youngster’s right. You can’t arrest him now he’s taken Magus Balhazar’s banner.’

Altor suddenly realized what was happening. Tugging the banner away from Caelestis, he said, ‘I was here first. Rightfully it is I who should be Magus Balhazar’s champion.’

‘Aha!’ cried the sergeant in triumph. ‘As I thought. Arrest him.’

Two of the guardsmen stepped closer. Caelestis wove away from them and snatched back the banner. ‘Not so fast. The banner is mine. How can this oaf be the magus’s champion? He doesn’t even have a weapon.’

It was true. Altor had left his sword buried in Magus Byl’s black heart. Rather than go into that now, he simply planted himself in a solid stance with his big arms folded across his chest. ‘I need no weapons. The monks of my order are trained to fight with empty hands if need be.’

‘Indeed?’ Caelestis cocked an eyebrow. ‘I doubt whether Magus Balhazar will be impressed.’

Altor snorted in derision. ‘Do you think he’ll be impressed by having a pickpocket as his champion?’

The sergeant flung up his arms in exasperation. ‘Enough!’ He turned to the steward. ‘What is the law? Are both these youths now employed by Magus Balhazar? Frankly I’d be happy to arrest the pair of them.’

‘I have committed no crime!’ protested Altor.

‘And I myself am merely a suspect,’ added Caelestis, ‘until my case comes to trial.’

The steward leaned on the rail in front of his booth and stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Both took the banner at the same time, so both are eligible to serve the magus. Consequently they are immune from prosecution.’

At this the guards gave sighs of disappointment and started to wander off. The sergeant spat on the ground to show his opinion of the steward’s judgement. Fixing Caelestis with a beady stare, he said, ‘Just you wait, lad. I’ll be waiting outside the Battlepits for you, and if you fail then you won’t be able to count on the magus’ protection.’

‘If he fails,’ said the steward laconically, ‘then he’ll be past caring about the laws of mortal men.’

The Chronicles of the Magi books are due to be republished on Kindle by Fabled Lands LLP at the end of the month and you can pre-order them now at a special introductory price:

The Sword of Life
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

The Kingdom of Dreams
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

The City of Stars
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

We've been planning for some time to get the Fabled Lands books out in digital form, so it was great when the Amazon Kindle team reached out to us late last year to make that a reality. Turns out there are some big gamebook fans over there at their offices in the Evergreen State. They've been thinking for some time that the FL books would be perfect for the Kindle and offered to do the work with us to convert them.

Fast forward a couple of months and here we are about to release The War-Torn Kingdom as an interactive ebook. If this one is as well received as we and Amazon are hoping, you can expect to see the rest of the series rolling out over the next few months. And of course you don't actually need to own a Kindle to play these books - they'll run on the Kindle App for any device.

The text has been revised for this edition. There are no major new quests or anything, but the prose is tighter as befits a 21st century reincarnation of the books. If you want to check it out for yourself, the book goes on sale tomorrow but you should pre-order right now as it may not stay at that special introductory price forever.

As a follow-up to the launch of the large-format Fabled Lands books, Jamie and I have two copies of The War-Torn Kingdom to give away.

All you have to do to win one of these large format books is go here and watch Marco Arnaudo's review of the Critical IF books - which is no hardship because his reviews are brilliantly entertaining and it's worth watching them all.

Every entrant has a chance of winning one of the new books; a 3 on 3d6 should about do it. So a critical, to you GURPS players out there.

But wait - that's not all. The Kindle edition of War-Torn Kingdom is coming out next Friday (Feb 5) and you can pre-order that right here.

And you thought Christmas was over...

Here's hard evidence that the next Way of the Tiger paperback is in the works. Expect this third volume in the series to be on sale in the next month or so. Avenger learns that he/she is the rightful king/queen of a city state. (What is it about epic fantasy and benevolent absolute monarchies, anyway?) A non-rightful king, the usurper of the title, has been driving the people into poverty with a package of misguided austerity measures and propping up his popularity by demonizing minority groups. All very prophetic for a book written in the 1980s, I must say. He might have got away with it too if not for worshipping a god called Vile - bit of a giveaway, that.

Anyway, Avenger must take over the throne and do his/her best to rule. But if you want to catch up with the good old days when all he/she had to do was hide behind rubber plants and throw darts at people, the first two books in the series are available on Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Amazon Italy, and - well, you get the picture.

And don't forget that David Walters' authorized prequel to the series, Ninja, is available in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Lots more Way of the Tiger news coming up over the next couple of months, but first here's a peek into the near future. There'll be four Critical IF paperback books (with covers by the awesomely talented Jon Hodgson, interior art by Leo Hartas, Russ Nicholson and William Harvey) and at least one of the four is out in revised Kindle and paperback editions that you can get right now (see below). The rest are coming in just under a month.

Feel free to spread the word and please, please, please circulate the image above everywhere you can. The more people who hear about it, and who review it on Amazon, the more chance we have of bringing back other classic gamebook series like Blood Sword and Falcon.

I'm used to the idea that most visitors to this blog are really only interested in Fabled Lands news, maybe with a side order of 1990s gamebooks - and hey, I'm not knocking it. It's nice to have your work appreciated, even if it is sixteen-year-old work. But I didn't retire or anything, and naturally I think I'm a better writer now than I was back then, so I hope the hardcore gamebook fans will allow me the occasional indulgence of talking about what I'm working on nowadays.

One such project is of course Frankenstein, which came out earlier this year on iPad and iPhone. I'm right now working with Spirit Entertainment (the new FL app developers) on Kindle and EPUB versions of that, which should be published by Profile Books this autumn. And next year there might even be a print edition - which is not easy, because this is an interactive novel rather than a gamebook, so telling the reader about the characters' degree of alienation or trust is not exactly conducive to the literary experience. But I'll see if I can figure something out.

And then there's my ongoing comics epic Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, created with Leo Hartas and Martin McKenna. This is my labour of love. The work that I would still do if I was stranded on a desert island with no one to read it.

Recently Mirabilis was released on the NOOK and in the iBookstore, but the important scoop du jour is that it's just out on Kindle and for this week only the first two issues are discounted down to - oh, absolutely free. Well, how about that. There's never been a better time to try it out. And if you like it, let me know. Writers are more like cats than sharks, you know. We like to be stroked.

A universe away from the Gothic tragedy of Frankenstein, never mind the swashbuckling epic adventure of Fabled Lands, there is the tradition of urbane (sic) fantasy pioneered by Saki and Lord Dunsany. Such stories usually belong to the category that SF academic Farah Mendlesohn calls liminal, in that the weird elements are presented as matter-of-factly as waking up to find deer crossing your back lawn. That wyvern perched on the chimney pot opposite may be no less alarming than a tiger on the loose from the zoo, but it's no more peculiar either. We all know how easy it can be to stray over into the Twilight Zone.

These Kindle giveaway offers (for Frankenstein's Legions and Abraxas) have been proving popular, and I'm still too snowed under with work on my Frankenstein interactive novel to be blogging regularly, so here's a new free promo. The Kindle book in question this time is The Lost Prince, a fantasy adventure novel for 8-12 year-olds by Jamie Thomson (author of the best-selling Dark Lord: The Teenage Years - as if you needed to be told that).

"Gasping back tears of horror and anger, Varren shimmied his way down the well. In the circle of light above his head three ugly, scarred, war-bitten faces appeared, staring down at him. One of them was readying his crossbow. Varren released his grip and fell straight down into the water. A crossbow quarrel whooshed into the water next to him. He hauled himself out, and into a side tunnel just above the water level. He’d used this way in and out of the castle for years. He hurried off down the tunnel, the sounds of battle fading away behind him."

There was such an enthusiastic response to our special free offer on the ebook edition of Frankenstein's Legions that we thought we'd do it all over again this week with Abraxas, the science fantasy world that Jamie and I devised for an MMO back when we worked at Eidos.

Just to let Kindle owners know that we're having a promotion for Frankenstein's Legions, the steampunk sequel to Mary Shelley's Gothic SF classic by award-winning author John Whitbourn. You can pick up the Frankenstein's Legions ebook from Amazon US or Amazon UK and if you grab it this week it's free. Yep, free as air, free as lightning, free as a mad hunchback without a care in the world - but only for the rest of this week, so act now. The promotion starts Wednesday February 1st (Pacific Standard Time) and runs till midnight Saturday.

A cross-post from the Mirabilis blog today for any comic book fans who found a Kindle under the Christmas tree. Leo Hartas, Martin McKenna and I have just re-released the Kindle mini-episodes collecting the first thirty pages of Mirabilis: Winter volume 1. If you're signed up for Amazon Prime you can borrow the Kindle episodes anytime, but even if not you can get the first two completely free tomorrow or Saturday.

I wrote a few months ago about the brilliant, award-winning Binscombe Tales series written by my friend and writing mentor John Whitbourn, concluding that "the stories would be perfect for Kindle, but John is never going to sanction that."

As a follow-up to the previous post, I'm pleased to announce that Fabled Lands Publishing has just released a Kindle edition (Amazon US here and Amazon UK here) of award-winning SF author John Whitbourn's latest novel, Frankenstein's Legions.

This blog has had a lot of coverage in the past of Abraxas, the lost continent that Jamie and I originally developed as a massively-multiplayer game world. It's definitely a setting that inspires us and we'd like to do something with it - though whether as a series of fantasy novels, a roleplaying game, a comic book, or something else remains to be seen.

News of Jamie's latest fictional masterwork tomorrow, but in the meantime Fabled Lands fans may want to pick up a copy of his fantasy novel on Kindle: US here and UK here and Europe here. (That isn't actually the cover image above, the resolution on the original art not being high enough for Kindle, but a nice design all the same combining Megara's inspired artistic élan and Jamie's... er, instinctive design sense.) The blurb will give you the general idea: