Jamie Thomson, Dave Morris and Paul Mason talk about Gameboo

[aggsol]

On reddit someone posted a video of Jamie Thomson, Dave Morris and Paul Mason talking about gamebooks including FF and Fabled Lands. It's real fun to watch.

[Wilf]

Thank you for posting this. The Brexit gamebook had somehow flown under my radar. It's still available on Amazon, though. Because of you, Dave Morris has just sold a book!

[aggsol]

I had great fun with the Brexit book. Now or never, it's a good time to read it now.

[thealmightymudworm]

Thanks for this, it's very interesting – especially for someone like me who's relatively ignorant of gamebooks compared to some on this forum.

(I've posted some timings in the comments on there.)

A couple of random thoughts:

They refer to Mark Smith as "Min" several times. It can't be a coincidence that there's a character named 'Lord Min' in ToD, who is a thief you might tangle with over killing a guard. Perhaps it's common knowledge that this is a cameo but I wasn't aware. (Someone's mentioned something before about the characters Tyutchev and Cassandra in that but I forget the details.)

It's funny to hear that Paul Mason has no truck with playing with dice given the notorious cheat-traps in his books.

Particularly interesting was the disagreements at the end:
Firstly over whether overt stats are a necessary(ish) evil in gamebooks that ideally would be hidden from the reader, and certainly from the player if there's a computer game version.
Secondly about the nature of a 'win' in a gamebook, whether those have to be gold and glory or whether it can be downbeat or involve self-sacrifice.

JT rather disagreeing with the other two on both points. I was slightly more with him really.

One thing I will never understand is why Paul Mason considers the 'true' win in TCT as secluding yourself in a monastery. But I've said that before on the TCT thread.

[kieran]

Sept 2, 2019 2:49:22 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

They refer to Mark Smith as "Min" several times. It can't be a coincidence that there's a character named 'Lord Min' in ToD, who is a thief you might tangle with over killing a guard. Perhaps it's common knowledge that this is a cameo but I wasn't aware. 

Yep Lord Min is a reference to Mark Smith. Wonder if any other of the other thieves in the gang were named after FF authors?

[bloodbeasthandler]

Sept 2, 2019 11:44:38 GMT kieran said:

Sept 2, 2019 2:49:22 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

They refer to Mark Smith as "Min" several times. It can't be a coincidence that there's a character named 'Lord Min' in ToD, who is a thief you might tangle with over killing a guard. Perhaps it's common knowledge that this is a cameo but I wasn't aware. 

Yep Lord Min is a reference to Mark Smith. Wonder if any other of the other thieves in the gang were named after FF authors?

Though not one of the thieves from ToD, I believe that Olvar the Chaos Bringer (from Avenger!) is a character played by Oliver Johnson.

Tyutchev and Cassandra were certainly based upon characters played by friends from Jamie Thomson's roleplaying group.

[thealmightymudworm]

Sept 2, 2019 20:44:43 GMT bloodbeasthandler said:

Sept 2, 2019 11:44:38 GMT kieran said:

Yep Lord Min is a reference to Mark Smith. Wonder if any other of the other thieves in the gang were named after FF authors?

Though not one of the thieves from ToD, I believe that Olvar the Chaos Bringer (from Avenger!) is a character played by Oliver Johnson.

Tyutchev and Cassandra were certainly based upon characters played by friends from Jamie Thomson's roleplaying group.

Cool. 

Is that link supposed to go somewhere? It doesn't seem to.

[bloodbeasthandler]

I haven't the faintest idea why it's pretending to be a link. It wasn't meant to be one! I must have pressed something in error.

[bloodbeasthandler]

Sept 2, 2019 2:49:22 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

One thing I will never understand is why Paul Mason considers the 'true' win in TCT as secluding yourself in a monastery. But I've said that before on the TCT thread.

Yeah, I don't get that either. Those mercenaries need stopping for sure. Either Paul's got different ideas about these sorts of things than I do or he's being mischievous. 

In the Fighting Fantazine interview with him, he describes the Riddling Reaver (one of my favourite FF characters by the way) as a post-modernist hero.. the Reaver being a character that psychologically tortures then murders the ruler of Kallamehr in public, cruelly balanced a jar of spiders on a woman's head after slitting the throat of the court magician. He pours molten lead down people's throats, animates the dead in macabre little scenes [the sailors at cards] and preserves his enemies in pickle jars at the dinner table!

 

Maybe the answer is: I don't understand post-modernism.  

[elnombre]

Moe put it best

[babbagefart]

Great interview. Well worth a watch.

Thanks for that particular steer.

[sleepyscholar]

Sept 8, 2019 9:10:48 GMT bloodbeasthandler said:

Sept 2, 2019 2:49:22 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

One thing I will never understand is why Paul Mason considers the 'true' win in TCT as secluding yourself in a monastery. But I've said that before on the TCT thread.

Yeah, I don't get that either. Those mercenaries need stopping for sure. Either Paul's got different ideas about these sorts of things than I do or he's being mischievous. 

In the Fighting Fantazine interview with him, he describes the Riddling Reaver (one of my favourite FF characters by the way) as a post-modernist hero.. the Reaver being a character that psychologically tortures then murders the ruler of Kallamehr in public, cruelly balanced a jar of spiders on a woman's head after slitting the throat of the court magician. He pours molten lead down people's throats, animates the dead in macabre little scenes [the sailors at cards] and preserves his enemies in pickle jars at the dinner table!

 

Maybe the answer is: I don't understand post-modernism.  

There may have been a bit of mischief involved.

But millions of people enjoy watching a series of movies about a misogynistic, government-licensed assassin. And Fleming wrote the books around the time post-modernism was allegedly transforming our world through its impact on architecture.

I think the point I was making about the Riddling Reaver was not that he was a morally admirable hero. He patently isn't. But I wrote him from his point of view, and I certainly agreed with his scheme of exploding naive black-and-white moral categories. George R R Martin gets garlanded with plaudits for writing a fantasy epic that eschews simplistic moral categories, while I get bollocked for saying I sympathise with one of my characters who happens to function as a villain. I dunno, there's no justice in the world... that's probably the fault of post-modernism, too.

[bloodbeasthandler]

Aug 9, 2020 7:20:36 GMT sleepyscholar said:

Sept 8, 2019 9:10:48 GMT bloodbeasthandler said:

Yeah, I don't get that either. Those mercenaries need stopping for sure. Either Paul's got different ideas about these sorts of things than I do or he's being mischievous. 

In the Fighting Fantazine interview with him, he describes the Riddling Reaver (one of my favourite FF characters by the way) as a post-modernist hero.. the Reaver being a character that psychologically tortures then murders the ruler of Kallamehr in public, cruelly balanced a jar of spiders on a woman's head after slitting the throat of the court magician. He pours molten lead down people's throats, animates the dead in macabre little scenes [the sailors at cards] and preserves his enemies in pickle jars at the dinner table!

 

Maybe the answer is: I don't understand post-modernism.  

There may have been a bit of mischief involved.

But millions of people enjoy watching a series of movies about a misogynistic, government-licensed assassin. And Fleming wrote the books around the time post-modernism was allegedly transforming our world through its impact on architecture.

I think the point I was making about the Riddling Reaver was not that he was a morally admirable hero. He patently isn't. But I wrote him from his point of view, and I certainly agreed with his scheme of exploding naive black-and-white moral categories. George R R Martin gets garlanded with plaudits for writing a fantasy epic that eschews simplistic moral categories, while I get bollocked for saying I sympathise with one of my characters who happens to function as a villain. I dunno, there's no justice in the world... that's probably the fault of post-modernism, too.

The variety of endings and paths available in The Crimson Tide is one of its strengths but works better with older readers than with younger ones who in my opinion are more ‘black-and-white-minded’, if you know what I mean. I played the book when it first came out and in my first playthrough was delighted to find myself going down the gladiator route, getting those big bonuses to SKILL, STAMINA and FEROCITY, tracked down and confronted the mercenary band at the first opportunity and got a lethal headbutt for my troubles. Cue much frowning and question marks appearing over my head. Since I’d seen options to fight them with such weapons as use of magic, martial arts and whatnot, I thought there was clearly more than one way to skin this particular cat, but throughout the aim was to find and slay the mercenary leader.
It took a lot of plays to realise I was going about it the wrong way. 



The Riddling Reaver as a character has always interested me and I’ve always had a soft spot for him. To me and my FF-playing classmates in the summer of 87 he was an out-and-out-stop-the-blighter-at-all-costs villain albeit one not motivated by the usual (evil) aims. We had our mission, we saw his methods, were outraged by his use of us as tools to recover the Pendulum of Fate, and spent many enjoyable lunchtimes working against him and his plans. He ended up in the lava but none of us thought that was the end of him.

Brilliant stuff which I fondly remember to this day, and something I'll be DM-ing for my children in the not too distant future. 

In Slaves of the Abyss him coming down that rope and helping out forced a bit of a reassessment for sure.

[sleepyscholar]

Aug 9, 2020 13:45:19 GMT bloodbeasthandler said:

The Riddling Reaver as a character has always interested me and I’ve always had a soft spot for him. To me and my FF-playing classmates in the summer of 87 he was an out-and-out-stop-the-blighter-at-all-costs villain albeit one not motivated by the usual (evil) aims. We had our mission, we saw his methods, were outraged by his use of us as tools to recover the Pendulum of Fate, and spent many enjoyable lunchtimes working against him and his plans. He ended up in the lava but none of us thought that was the end of him.

Brilliant stuff which I fondly remember to this day, and something I'll be DM-ing for my children in the not too distant future. 

In Slaves of the Abyss him coming down that rope and helping out forced a bit of a reassessment for sure.

I hope you were reassured when he kicked your ass at some point in a subsequent book!

But the answer was right there in Riddling Reaver in all that stuff about the Pendulum of Fate: he wasn't a character who simply fitted into a 'villain'-shaped hole. Granted, he was an amalgamation of all sorts of characters like The Riddler (obviously), V (from Vendetta), Loki, Anansi and sundry others. But that was because I saw him as an archetypal trickster, who had to be mysterious, but also somehow familiar. Sure, it was a curveball when Steve Jackson had him portrayed as a bloody lizard. But you just work with what you have! Most importantly, I wanted him to be both infuriating and enjoyable (while evading the traditional good/evil role). After all, he worked for Pete Tamlyn's cat (after whom Titan's Trickster God of Luck and Chance was named).

Incidentally, my favourite name for him is Tyven med de Tusind Tricks (which was the name of the Danish translation). I've just put that name into Google translate, and you can't imagine how annoyed I was that it wasn't translated into English as 'Riddling Reaver'. Even more annoying, when I asked Google to translate Riddling Reaver into Danish, it translated it as 'Riddling Reaver'. 'Don't be Evil!' they (used to) say. Well, that was a dead giveaway, wasn't it!