Last year Gary Chalk called me up to talk about collaborating on a graphic novel. How that came about was that Gary, who lives in France, had been at the supermarket a few days before and he ran into an elderly woman he knew who said, “Why aren’t you at Saint-Malo, Monsieur Chalk? I thought every artist went? Even my grandson took his portfolio.”

Saint-Malo is the venue for one of France’s biggest comics conventions – bande dessinée, I should say –and Gary’s immediate reaction was to rush home, dump his groceries on the kitchen table, grab a few art samples, and drive to Saint-Malo that afternoon.

“Quite a few publishers said they’d take a look at anything I have to show them,” he told me. “So how about it? Do you want to write something and I’ll draw it?”

Did I? You’d have to hold me back with an electric prod. Gary is a fun guy to bounce ideas around with, his artwork is uniquely captivating and gloriously inventive, and I enjoy writing for comics more than just about any other medium.

After some brainstorming over Skype, I went back to Gary with a proposal for Jewelspider – a series of bande dessinée books set in Legend, the Dragon Warriors universe, some five hundred years after DW. Think Down Among the Dead Men’s Tudor world of magic and faerie and you’re not far off. I figured that the combination of flintlocks, faerie woods, rude mechanicals, half-timbered cottages and horror would suit Gary’s style to a T. Here's the overview:



No doubt you will have spotted that the plot borrows from the scenario “Silent Night” which I ran on this blog one Christmas and which I later intended to use as the basis for an interactive story app. Only, this being fiction rather than a game or gamebook, that wasn’t what the story was really about. What interested me most was the Shakespearean career of John Barley, and how being a changeling gave him a special relationship with the world of the imaginary. Some deconstruction of the storytelling process itself seemed likely to feature.

Just as Will Shakespeare liked to mix comedy and high drama – the Joss Whedon of his day – I set out to create a similar blend. Horror on its own bores me; it’s too one-note. Humour helps to add the human dimension that makes the horrific elements more disturbing. And in regard to storytelling I always use disturbing in a good sense, of course.

That’s where Gary and I didn’t see eye to eye. So don’t get excited, because (as I maybe should have said at the start) this collaboration is never going to come to pass. Gary hates that whole Joss Whedon vibe, you see, and he felt the comedy elements I’d included, particularly with my Will Kemp like character Pip Cabbage, destroyed the suspension of disbelief.

Well, not every project comes off and that’s a hard truth you just have to get used to as a writer. Because the writing happens before everything else, you end up with an awful lot of abandoned fragments of development work. Jamie and I have got whole TV scripts and samples of novels that fell on stony ground and now languish in the attic or the far unvisited corners of our hard drives. I briefly toyed with finding another artist to work with, but it’s already a struggle finding the funds to pay Leo and Nikos to work on Mirabilis. I don’t really need another comic book to finance!

So here is that unfinished script. Too jokey? Or a fine blend of the humorous and the macabre? I leave it to you to decide…

Eighteen months back, Leo Hartas talked me into starting work on an interactive story app. Leo is a very persuasive fellow, and it sounded such a beautiful plan the way he told it. I’d write the thing, Leo would do the artwork, and his coder friend would put it together in his spare time.

I really should have known better. Spare time is pretty much a mythical concept anyway, and so the chance of such a project ever happening decreases exponentially with the size of the team. After six weeks and two Skype calls, the coder admitted he was too busy and Leo got a contract to illustrate six kids’ books. The project went quietly back to bed and set the alarm clock for never.

Still, all experience is useful. Some of the writing made its way into a novel called The Mage of Dust and Bone that Jamie and I may yet finish. And I had enough fresh insights about gamebook app design to fill this blog post. So not a total loss.

The app, which was going to be called Winter’s Rage, was a sandbox adventure based on the Christmas scenario here a while back. The map would serve as the top level of navigation through the story, as in Fabled Lands. Nothing new about that; it’s been a staple of CRPGs from Might and Magic right through to Sorcery.

Encounters

‘When you have an encounter, you’ll drop down from the map to a location screen that will be mainly text.’

‘I could do illustrations for each location,’ said Leo.

‘No. Doesn’t work. See, we’re used to using a map in real life without thinking about it. Our brains have the subroutine that means we look at where we are on a map and that’s part of our seamless word-view. But as soon as you put a picture of a church, say, in front of somebody who up till then has been picturing the world as a map or via text, suddenly they’re thinking, hmm, that’s not a real church, that’s a drawing. So then you’ve broken suspension of disbelief.’

‘But I thought you said you'll be wanting little mugshots of the characters’ faces for when they’re saying something?’

‘That’s different. When the brain is used to interpreting images symbolically – a figure on a map, a face next to some dialogue – then artwork doesn’t pull you out of the story. Given that we have to have text, simply because it’s cheap, we need to let the text be the player’s main “world rendering medium” and any artwork has to conform to that design principle. That is unless you can find a million dollars down the back of the sofa, in which case we’ll do it all in a 3D environment with audio.’

‘Text it is.’

We came up with a screen template for locations like this:


OK, OK, gimme a break - I'm the designer, all right? Leo would've done the art. Anyway, at the top you’ve got the location name (The Bank Road in this example) and under that a brief description that sets the scene. Then you’ve got the faces of the characters who are here. In this case there’s a Blind Man who you just met at the start of the adventure and who is accompanying you along the road. Your answers to his questions are creating your character at this point – eg he begins by asking if you’re familiar with these parts, and you can answer either ‘I’m an outsider’ or ‘I grew up not far from here’.

But I digress. The point here is that you’ve just had an encounter, that’s why the view has dropped down from the map level. The encounter is with the Robber. So then we look at the pane below, which is the dialogue. This is where the action of the story gets presented. Why? Because the key to keeping the player’s attention is writing in the moment. That’s not new either; it was invented, or at least popularized as a novelistic technique, by Samuel Richardson in the mid-18th century. If you’ve read my Frankenstein app, you’ll see the same technique in action throughout. The entire text there is what Victor Frankenstein is saying to you, so his words must carry all the narrative, rather like in a radio play.

The advantage of placing the narrative emphasis on dialogue is that readers of an app will skip descriptive text. Description is less compelling to an untutored eye even in a regular novel, and when you’re leaning forward waiting for the next decision point, the temptation to scan for surface meaning may become irresistible.

Not so in the case of dialogue, because we’re attuned to care about other people and what they say. Arguably the main reason for these big, energy-hungry brains is to interpret the nuances of meaning in speech.

The way we planned to do it in the app, the dialogue would appear one speech bubble at a time, with a beat between them. You could read and re-read it at your own pace, obviously. The beats were there just to reinforce the sense of them speaking in real time, rather than everybody’s dialogue appearing at once like on the page of a book.

So the Robber says, ‘Hand it over. All your money.’ And it turns out your blind companion also has something to say: ‘Gar John’s-son, I know your voice. Have you turned to thievery now?’

(Later in the adventure, you will typically be travelling with a companion – more about them in a minute. For example, if your companion was Fosse the hunter, in this encounter he’d now chip in with: ‘Huh. Since when wasn’t he a thief? Five years old and I caught him taking rabbits from my traps.’)

Options

Then at the bottom of the screen, under the dialogue for the encounter, you’ve got the DECIDE tab. When you tap on that, you’re presented with your options. Why not display them right away? Extra unnecessary taps/clicks are usually a bad idea on an interface, aren’t they? Yes, but here it’s to stop your eye just scanning straight down to the bottom of the screen for the options. It keeps you in the story.

If you tap DECIDE, in this case you’ll get two options to choose between:

• ‘It’s not gold you’ll be getting from me, it’s cold steel.’
• ‘I don’t need to fight you.’

As often as possible, like there, an option will be a line of dialogue. Say you choose not to fight. That dialogue gets added to the scroll underneath what’s been said already. Then, after a beat, the Robber will reply to you:

‘I don’t need to fight you.’
   {set #Spared_Robber = true}
   // #Spared_Robber is an inline conditional not visible to user
   // sets reminder that Gar Johnson may be encountered later
   {beat}
Robber: ‘I’m starving. I was sick. Couldn’t get no work.’

And your options now:

• ‘Take this coin and buy yourself some bread.’ { if #Status_Noble == true }
• ‘Winter’s hard on everyone. You’ll survive.’
• ‘Come and see me at the manor house. Maybe I’ll find a job for you.’

Options can be conditional, as in the example above where the option to give the robber a coin is only available if the player is an aristocrat.

Companions

You pick up companions at the manor house, which is the player's base of operations for the game. You can only pick one companion to accompany you at any given time. You can change companion when you return to the manor house, though sometimes they may be absent on their own errands, depending on the adventure timeline.

Companions become more loyal to you over time, assuming they see you solving problems and showing good leadership. A companion who is more loyal to you will volunteer more personal information (possibly unlocking backstories) and also uses their skills more effectively. Therefore it makes sense not to switch companions too often. Balance that against the need to have the right companion with the right skills for specific tasks.

When you return to the manor house you can show any clues to the steward or the NPC companions you didn't pick up - so you can get the benefit of advice from any of those four listed with a delay, but only the one companion you pick to go with you will notice things, prompt you during investigation, help in fights, unlock subplots, etc.

A possible mechanism for giving the player hints is that when you’re at the manor house, companions will talk to each other (‘You won’t believe what I saw up on the heath, Sir Werian…’) based on their preset relationships, and if you listen in you will get the benefit of their theories.

NPC companions add an element of communitas and emotional grip to an adventure game - a discovery I made by happy accident when writing Down Among the Dead Men, though I guess the germ of it was there in the interactions with the faltyn in the Blood Sword series. As a rule, people are way more interested in character and the development of relationships than they are in facts and the development of plot. Given that Winter's Rage was to be a gamebook app constructed almost entirely through dialogue, and an investigative adventure at that, having a foil for the player to interact with was essential. Not only did the choice of companion on each mission mean a set of skills and insights that would customize the experience, the companion also gave me as writer another pair of eyes and another voice to interlocute the world for the player. And, as this is an adventure with a ticking clock, interjections from the companions can be used to ratchet up the tension.

Takeaways

Text is inexpensive, but there are some tasks it doesn't handle well. Artwork is useful for the top-level navigation of the adventure (ie the map) and to depict the faces of nonplayer characters. But don't be tempted to use more than that. Presented with a little judicious artwork, the brain interprets it symbolically; too much and your "gamebook app" becomes a broken CRPG.

Also, use dialogue as much as possible in place of descriptive text. Even in the example above, in the final version I'd probably have lost that descriptive line "a robber steps out" in favour of a companion saying, 'It's a robber!' or 'Now who's this?' or 'This guy looks a bit shifty' depending on which companion it was, the time of day, that kind of thing. After all, you know you've dropped down from the map level because an encounter was triggered, and you can see the guy's face has appeared in the mugshot pane. You don't really need a stage direction to tell you what's going on here.

In order to get maximum mileage out of dialogue, focus on writing to the moment. Listen to radio plays. Read how it's done in something like Pamela, Riddley Walker or the Frankenstein app I mentioned above. Anything you can let the dialogue carry, do so. Strip down descriptive text to the barest scene-setting. Don't tell when you can show. There's nothing new about any of this; it's just that it hasn't often been applied to interactive literature before.


Writing this, I’m thinking it’s a shame we never got to do the game. It was to be the first in a series of interactive adventures set in the world of Legend. If I’d only had a coder with no wife and kids and re-enactment hobby to eat into his leisure time, eh? Ah well, it’s water under the (half built) bridge.

Midsummer is a good time to talk about the Devil. I don't mean the Biblical fellow. (Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub... They're not even the same character, are they?) In English folk tales he has another persona, as Sybil Marshall reminds us:

"The medieval folk-concept of the Devil, as distinct from that preached by the Church, is of Rex Mundi - large, dark, and handsome, infinitely attractive, a jolly fellow full of pranks and merriment and still displaying some of the attributes of his counterparts in pagan times."

In older English legends, the Devil tends to be a ferocious adversary, often scaly or horned, whose main function is to make saints look cool. And making those early British saints look cool is quite a task.

When we meet the Devil in English folk tales, though, he usually comes clothed as a squire or, if he's feeling particularly wicked, maybe a monk or a parson. In this guise he has a little bit of faerie about him, and seems to borrow the aspect of Odin or Cernunnos rather than God's erstwhile favourite angel. He enjoys a challenge - building a bridge in a night, a riddling contest, or even a simple wrestling match. He is a trickster, sometimes so cunning that he outwits himself. If you are familiar with the TV show Once Upon A Time, this is pretty much the character of Rumpelstiltskin, only without the Hollywoodized origin story.

Saints are far too boring to appear in any decent folk tale, all preachy and chinbearded as they are, but many an English hero named Jack shows his mettle by outsmarting the Devil. Souls are sometimes wagered, and in the wager the Devil's greed will usually see him come off worse. I'm sure we're supposed to sympathize a little when, returning a farmer's wife, he gripes that...

“...I've been the Devil the whole of my life
But I never knew hell till I met your wife.”

I'm not just rambling, honest. There's a point to all this. If you cast your mind back to midwinter, at the end of the Legend scenario "Silent Night", I put in a throwaway line that had Mitch Edgeworth justifiably raising an eyebrow:

"At midnight on Christmas Day, the Devil comes to Crossgate Manor and offers to play a game of chess for a favour."

Clearly this was to be a story seed for the referee to extemporize a minor epilogue incident, perhaps with a single player, to contrast with the desperate danger and action of the preceding few hours and possibly to set up an ongoing relationship in the campaign. The Devil might enjoy having one mortal friend to play chess with just as much as Morpheus is fond of an occasional glass of wine with Hob Gadling.

Mitch did preface his comment by saying that he's not a role-player, which explains the confusion. Encountering the Devil over chess might very well develop into an interesting ongoing storyline, but setting up the idea in a scenario takes no more than one line. In real games, half a page of notes are ample for running a session of several hours, and scenarios like "Silent Night" are written up only to explain to somebody else how that adventure might be run. In our own game, the denouement came in the forest, not in Crossgate Manor, and the key to defeating Duruth and his knaves was completely unexpected and yet perfect. It arose out of nowhere, a story created from the participation of the group where the best parts have no individual origin. Which, in a nutshell, explains why I am a role-player.

The picture, by the way, is Pan, not the Devil. Image copyright Ian Greig and used here under Creative Commons Licence.

If you're planning on running this year's Yuletide scenario "Silent Night" then here are a few bits and pieces that could come in handy.

First, Tim Harford's description of his character Tall Tom Tattertail, inspired in part by the character of Cole Hawlings from John Masefield's 1935 novel The Box of Delights:

"I still need to sketch out some more backstory, but the idea of a near-demented once-great sorcerer is still there. His most powerful item is the Felicitous Purse, a small black velvet sack with a jewel-studded clasp. It has a panoply of powers that Tom has completely forgotten the use of.

"What Tom does remember is that the purse is remarkably capacious; holding the purse gives the wearer fortitude ("recover will" lost through spellcasting) and the power to help others (through fortify, deflect and major healing) and to avoid trouble (through blur and blink, although these would attract great attention and are best avoided).

"Tom once owned a fine and generously-proportioned bowl, spoon and knife which he confiscated from an over-bold ogre. He gave the bowl and the spoon to a fairy maiden who was impatient to eat a large pot of scalding porridge. The knife - a large dagger to human eyes - now dances and fights to defend Tom with surprising deftness. he cannot remember what happened to the dish and the spoon and believes they ran away together.

"Tom's sole remaining inherent power is that of his voice: he will sometimes make suggestions to people in the most genial manner; these suggestions are strangely persuasive."

Tim had already suggested making him a slightly befuddled old conjurer, and that played rather well into the Mathan story so I worked it in. Tall Tom got the following magical items, which are the kind I like because they enable interesting twists in the story rather than being about zappy artillery effects:

A toy coach 
Throw it onto a fire and a full-sized coach with silent driver will arrive, taking you to the first place you name. The coach covers ten miles an hour regardless of the condition of the roads. It must not carry more than seven people (excluding the driver). When it has reached its destination – or returned home, if it’s a round trip – the coach departs and the toy will be found in the ashes of the next fire you sleep beside.

A puppet of a hound
Put the puppet's nose to something associated with a person or object and then drop it in a stream. A full-sized hound will jump out of the stream and will lead you unerringly to the one you seek. You must then give the dog a bone, which it will bury before running off. Dig at that spot to get the toy back.

A puppet of a plague doctor
Put a nail clipping or lock of hair in his bag, and that person (only one at a time!) gets +5 on HT rolls to recover from wounds, disease or poison.

A puppet of a skeleton
Put a nail clipping or lock of hair in the sack the puppet carries, and that person is cursed: all rolls at -1 until they achieve a successful roll when in danger, whereupon that successful roll is itself nullified but the curse ends. You cannot curse the same person again.

A puppet trumpeter
Will wake you with a toot of its horn (which only you can hear) if anyone enters with hostile intent into the room in which you are sleeping.

A puppet of a harpist (Orpheus?)
Bury in a cemetery at sunset. At midnight it will dig its way out of the ground and answer three yes/no questions. (Usual Divination penalties for repeated questions on the same subject.)

A puppet of a serving maid

Leave it in a room with people you wish to spy on. It will answer three yes/no questions about what they said or did.

The players were given these guidelines about wealth and status when generating their characters. (Apologies about the use of dollars in medieval Ellesland, but that's the convention in GURPS.)
Wealth listed in the table is your personal disposable cash with which to buy equipment. You’ll be assumed to have clothing appropriate to your status. High status characters will also have a household with servants, but if you want any special servants (that ex-Harbinger for example) then you’ll need to spend points. You can, of course, lend gear to each other.

Status 4 comes with automatic Status 5 character as a prepaid Patron/Duty package (will only apply in the game on a 6 or less). Status 2 and 3 come with Patron/Duty to level above (will apply on 9 or less).

For characters of Status 1-3: if you swear fealty to another player-character of higher status, you get 10 points for your feudal duty to him/her. That is, he/she is your Patron. The character to whom loyalty is sworn gets 5 points for each vassal.

Struggling and impoverished characters
You can opt to be struggling (-10 points, halve starting wealth) or impoverished (-15 pts, one-fifth starting wealth). But wait – wouldn’t a struggling Status 4 character, for example, just have the same wealth as a regular Status 3 character at the same points cost – and have higher status? You might think you can game it, but a struggling character cannot afford the clothing that marks his/her rank under the sumptuary laws. Therefore, if you take a struggling Status 4 character, everyone who doesn’t know your circumstances will simply react to you as you appear, ie Status 3. As for the people who do know: those of equal or higher status will indeed regard you as Status 4 but those of lower rank will have a -1 reaction to you because, to them, your poverty is the first sign that your line is slipping down nearer to their own status. All in all, given the extra responsibilities of a high-status character, you should consider carefully before taking either of these options.

Research
The authentic medieval atmosphere is Legend's main USP. Lately I've found The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer to be a really useful source of information and inspiration for this period:

The Christmas Dragon Warriors game is something of a tradition. Our gaming group uses GURPS, but you should have no trouble converting the scenario to other rule systems.

Background

• Lady Perdita – Sir Pelagius’s wife, 19 years old, beautiful in a roses-&-cream, softly rounded, quietly forebearing way; she’s pregnant but nobody knows that yet.
• Lady Olivia – Sir Pelagius’s mother, 55 years old, a bit high maintenance and panicky
• Ryger – Sir Pelagius’s cousin, a squire (missing)
• Ogen – the steward, a little over-familiar in a daft-headed Luna Lovegood way: “You have found your way home, young sir, so you have.”
• Hywel – a blind Cornumbrian bard, about 40, who occasionally has visions of the future, which he of course sings of cryptically.
• Rodwulf – the reeve (spokesman for the villeins) a bit hotheaded, huge shock of red hair, burly, intelligent
• Father Gules – village priest (Patrick Magee)

“Now the wild weathers of the world are wakened. Clouds cover the hills and keenly cast their sleet on man and beast. Bitter breath of the north blows, biting the flesh of all living things, filling the dales with snowdrifts, while in the dark of the deep earth the old lord lies and listens. Free of his fetters, he seeks his three knaves, long buried beneath the burden of faith. In air is one, another water, darkness for the third, and under fire lies his hand and the sword. Seven days he has to reclaim them, and if he does then the New Year will find the hall cold and the wing of death upon the land.”

The “seven days” are from Boar’s Head (Dec 17) to Christmas Eve (Dec 24). If parish records are found (they’d be at the priest’s house in Moyses) the characters will learn Duruth was killed on December 17.

• Garstan – a freeman, appoints himself spokesman but has little idea what’s going on.
• Ector – old guy employed as baliff/caretaker of the small manor house.
• Fessick – the reeve (senior villein), big fat foreman type, superficially jolly but a bit depressive.
• Alewife Gerty – a wily old biddy with a few cantrips.
• Bendrack – formerly the sexton, now making ends meet as a labourer despite being nominally a freeman, hence a bit disgruntled.
• Poth – local teenager, a bit of a tearaway, seems a bit subnormal in a James Dean way.
• Barlon – Poth’s widowed dad, cottar; hunts a bit; loner
• Toggen – a shepherd who happens to be in the village currently (trading wool) but usually lives on the shoulder of the heath.
• Mardy – Garstan’s daughter; fancies Poth but would never admit it

• A black-faced figure being carried towards a church or cathedral being built. (Architecture or Local Knowledge to see that it’s Netherford Cathedral.) The rune below it (see below) is Air.
• A black-faced figure being carried towards a spring with a halo of light around it. The rune (see below) is Water.
• A black-faced figure being led (not carried) as though blind towards a monastery (Architecture to recognize it’s Cornumbrian.) The rune (below) is Darkness.
• A procession, preceded by a priest, with a sword (Vision -3 to spot a black hand holding it) being carried on a trestle or slab on the back of a cart. Ahead lies a great hall or castle. The rune is Fire.
• A black-faced figure, his jaw bound with a soudarion, is being walled up in a church that anyone can see is this one. The rune is Earth.

• Duruth’s body under rocks (earth) where the holy spring flows.
• Duruth’s sword and hand under the altar stone of the old church* now repurposed as the manor house’s hearth stone (fire).
• Guile under rocks where the spring at the head of the Hollybrook runs out.
• Splinters in a hollowed beam in the cathedral spire (air) then being built.
• Sores as a scullion at the monastery – he’s lost his memory (darkness), thinks he’s mortal.

• Duruth fights with his shield (1d6+3 crushing damage) until he regains the sword Koth.
• When wielding Koth, if he injures a limb, the subject must make a WL roll to resist or the limb is withered (it looks really shrivelled and mummified).
• He can remove his soudarion (cloth to bind the jaw of a corpse) only when reunited with all three knaves. This gives him the ability to say terrible, unrepeatable things that will cause Madness (Magic p58) – cast as skill 15, range 1m, resist with IQ or EQ (no modifier), takes two full rounds, only one person affected.

• The Knave of Splinters is almost as evil as his master, single minded, can lose his temper, very tough in a fight.
• Special power: Terrify – if he hits someone for ¹/₂HT or more, they and anyone within 3m must make a Fright Check (that’s Will, not IQ).

• The Knave of Guile is tall, cadaverously thin.
• Special power: Seeming – he can put on an illusion, requires an IQ roll at -5 to vaguely notice something amiss, another to tie it to him specifically.

• The Knave of Sores seems doltish, misguided where the others are evil, an idiot savant with magic powers.
• Spells: Glissade (AG to avoid falling), Mist (visibility 3m), Doubles (2 illusory duplicates who vanish if hit), Webbing (three consecutive DX -4 rolls to escape, or cut two strands by first making DX and then attack roll – needn’t be consecutive)
• Special power: Plague – anyone touching him (including in combat) must make a HT roll or start to suffer fever, -1 from skills per round to –d6, roll HT each day to recover; crit fail = -1 Reaction permanently from scarring.

The Lady Sisypha arrives

At dusk on Dec 19, there’s a knock at the door. It’s a hunchback carrying a huge travelling chest, which he (nearly incomprehensibly) describes as “t’lady’s belon’ins”. As he moves aside, they get their first view of the Lady Sisypha – though she will not give that name, or any name.








There are several potholes to be found here and there across the moors. These interconnect with shallow underground streams running between them. It used to be said that sheep thieves would drop a stolen sheep into one and collect it later from another.

1. Weapons are legal in the city, but not (of course) within the cathedral precincts without permission of the bishop.
2. Curfew is at 6pm, when the vespers bell rings, when people have one hour to get to their place of lodging or leave before the city gates are locked.
3. After curfew, the watch patrols in groups of six (Sword 13; captain in scale, others cuirboilli; carry horns to summon aid).
4. Anyone out after curfew who is not of Status 1+ and carrying a lantern will be arrested.

The bishop is Lord Vulnifex (think of John Hurt) brother-in-law of the Marquess.

• Tybalt – Bow 16, Vision 14
• Ortmund – Bow 15, Vision 15
• Guy – Bow 16, Vision 16

• Bowls
• Backgammon (called Tables)
• Dice* (a three-dice game called Raffle)
• Merrils (nine men’s morris)
• Chess*

• Camp-ball (football played three-way between the parishes on Christmas Eve)
• Wrestling (ladies not approved of)
• Falconry

 



Players in my game were: Aaron Fortune, Paul Gilham, Tim Harford, Oliver Johnson, Zelah Meyer, Frazer Payne, Tim Savin. Many thanks to them; and to all FL blog readers: season's greetings, and may you have a happy New Year.

Crossgate Manor map by Lee Barklam. See more of Lee's Legend maps on The Cobwebbed Forest. Other art by kind permission of Jon Hodgson and Serpent King Games, publishers of the new edition of Dragon Warriors.