12/5/2023 0 Comments Fabled lands trainerAnd by the way I needed it – my first Vulcanverse book overran by 900 sections and those sections are far wordier than FL. Since then the only gamebooks I’ve done are Frankenstein and Can You Brexit? So you could see the work on Vulcanverse as me getting back into training. The last open-world gamebook I wrote was back in the ‘90s. It’s like expansions on a videogame.Īlso, unlike poor Mirabilis, FL is dormant rather than extinct. There are a very few quests from future books that tie back into books 1-7, and those aside the effect of having more books is simply to extend the borders of the explorable world. There is no single storyline in FL, so it’s not like you can’t complete it. First, FL is not unfinished in the way A Song of Ice & Fire is. If you are miffed about Vulcanverse gamebooks coming out when Fabled Lands is still unfinished, let me offer two arguments in consolation. Like my Brexit gamebook they are things that I'd be devoting my energy to if I could pick and choose my projects, but like Leonardo I have to work on what patrons demand, not on what pleases me. They sit there half-completed but don't even enjoy the small but dedicated fanbase of Fabled Lands. Other projects that are patiently waiting for my time: Abraxas and Tetsubo. Art is the killer cost there, and the publishers who were willing to take it on wanted indentured servitude and ownership of the IP forever. More heart-wrenchingly, I was unable to go on with my Mirabilis comic. Still, the Patreon is financing artwork and at least when Jewelspider appears it will look all the better for the delay. Jewelspider is emphatically not abandoned, but it has had to take a back seat to paying gigs. Backers on Patreon of my Jewelspider RPG have been patiently waiting a whole year for that. If he just tore through to the end it wouldn’t be very good. I assume he takes time out to work on other things because he wants to stay creatively fresh. GRRM is certainly rich enough to just plough on and write all the Song of Ice & Fire books. But there’s no other way to raise the funds, so I’m just going to have to bite the bullet. Marketing and all that businessy stuff appeals to me about as much as drain-cleaning. I’d need to run a Kickstarter to finance the art and production, and believe me the very thought makes my heart sink. That could be the long-planned Shadow King or it could be something else. If I don’t find any paid work after finishing my stint on the Vulcanverse books, my first priority is the Jewelspider RPG, but right after that I figure I may as well start writing a new gamebook. Paul Gresty is already working on Fabled Lands book 8. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Obviously I’d rather work on my own thing than on somebody else’s IP, and you usually get a better book when the writer is free to let their imagination fly. They can afford to knock out five books – or rather, to finance Fabled Lands Publishing to do the books. The gamebooks are barely even small change to them, the equivalent of handing out bags with your brand logo on. The difference with Vulcanverse is that it’s funded by a multimillion-dollar company with blockchain transactions constantly pumping cash up its arm. And then we have to drum up cash to pay for artwork, a map and a cover. Even if we found a few spare months and wrote one, there’s also all the checking (oh, those flowcharts!), editing, and typesetting. The short answer is that the funds are simply not there to pay for everything required to do a Fabled Lands book. Why are you writing these instead of getting on with more Fabled Lands? People have been asking about the Vulcanverse gamebooks (in a few cases even with a slight whiff of dudgeon) so I thought now would be a good time to answer a few FAQs.
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