The pinnacle of open world solo gamebooks?

The Vulcanverse books have not had a lot of reviews, apart from some by NFT/crypto fans that I think were just puffing the books to support the online world, and I've been wondering about that. Do people not bother with Amazon reviews any more? Are the books so big that people who bought them haven't had time to play them yet? Do they just hate them so much that they can't be arsed? 

Then I came across this review (above) by Joonseok Oh and it made my week. I know that Joonseok is a experienced and discerning gamer as he's completed all four Vulcanverse books and acquired all the codewords and titles. So his opinion would carry weight with me either way, and I'm mightily relieved he's in favour of the series.

Open world gamebooks are an acquired taste, and can be hard to get used to if you were raised on the here's-your-quest structure of series like Fighting Fantasy. In an open world book you are being invited to explore and find your own adventures. You won't necessarily get steered into a major quest right away. Not everything is a fight or a puzzle followed by a reward. Because you have freedom to explore, there are things you'll miss first time round -- but it's a sandbox. You can come back and try later.

As Vulcanverse might be the last gamebooks I write, I'm hoping they'll eventually pick up more reviews. Not necessarily good ones, either. Though it's encouraging to get 5 stars, I'm just as interested in the negative reviews if they have thoughtful points to make. On Amazon you see books with tens of thousands of 4- and 5-star reviews, but any considered feedback is worth having. And from an author's point of view, all publicity is good publicity. 

Blinking into the light

Happy New Year! I expect you've had more than enough of Vulcanverse to be getting on with, so here's a link to the comics I swiped that panel from. I'm just amazed that the artist (Richard E Jennings) predicted more than half a century ago what Jamie's study would look like.

Also, as I'm endlessly optimistic, here are links to my Mirabilis: Year of Wonders comic with Leo Hartas and Martin McKenna. If you're ever going to read Mirabilis, New Year is the time ('cause that's when the story starts) and at least it earned more reviews than the Vulcanverse books managed.

By the light of the night it'll all seem all right

A few weeks ago I got a call from Amazon to talk about the Halloween releases for Alexa. They’d seen my Frankenstein app and wondered if it could be turned into an interactive audio story.

I’d already talked to a few audiobook companies about that. Frankenstein is tailor-made for audio. It’s narrated by Victor Frankenstein, whose confidant and advisor you are, and written “to the moment” (ie in the present continuous tense). And I’ve been banging on about audio adventure games since I worked at Eidos in the mid-90s. So Amazon’s suggestion was perfect, except…

It’s over 150,000 words. That’s about twenty hours of audio. I’d have to edit all the text, it would need to be cast, recorded, have sound effects added, coded – and all that within five weeks, assuming one month was enough for testing.

So naturally I said I’d do it. Not only that, I’d recently talked to a company called Mythmaker Media about working on an interactive audio project, so how about hooking them in?

“We already have a developer in mind for Frankenstein,” the Amazon guy said, “but why don’t I talk to Mythmaker anyway? Maybe there’s another project you can do with them.”

A few days later, that one got the green light too. Now, as well as editing Frankenstein, I had to write an interactive audio drama from scratch. Only seven thousand words, but it had to be scary (Halloween, remember) and it had be a completely innovative model of interactive storytelling. (Otherwise why do it?)

Skype chirruped again. “What about your gamebook Crypt of the Vampire? That could be an Alexa app, couldn’t it? Can you get that ready for Halloween?”

I said yes on the basis that you can’t have too many irons in the fire; something always goes wrong. And a few days later the Frankenstein developer, having run the numbers for actors’ fees and studio time, asked if it would work with synthesized speech.

“Not really. Victor has to come across as impassioned, driven, stressed, increasingly desperate… But look, the story is in six parts. The second part is different from the others. It’s the monster’s story told in second person, so you are the monster. That might just work with synthesized speech. And it’s just thirty thousand words, so I’d have time to edit it and add markup. Pauses, interjections, that kind of thing.”

They lost interest. Not to worry, as I still had the drama with Mythmaker Media (that’s called “Fright Tonight”) and the gamebook, by now retitled “The Vampire’s Lair” because it’s snappier. Or bitier.

For The Vampire’s Lair I’ve teamed up with a programmer called Kevin Glick. We decided to strip out all the game-heavy mechanics: hit points, skill rolls, things like that. It’s audio, after all, though in fact there’s a Fire Tablet option with some toothsome graphics by Leo Hartas. The way it works now, you play until you die, and you can then either buy another life and keep going, or you can restart from the beginning. (And, yes, of course it’s possible to play right through to the end without having to buy a single life.)

So I hauled out a copy of Crypt of the Vampire, my first ever gamebook from way back in 1984, and embarked on what I thought would be a simple editing job. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, as they say, the enemy in this case being reality. Too much of Crypt was a dungeon bash when what Kevin and I needed was a haunted house adventure. Too many encounters depended on dice rolls. All of that needed to be rewritten. Also, it needed to be scary. Fun-scary, you understand, like pumpkin lanterns and spray-can cobwebs. The orcs had to go.

Luckily I wrote “Fright Tonight” first, because plunging into the flowchart for Crypt and completely rewriting about half of the book would have burned out my creative psyche for weeks. But I got it done, and the result should be soon available on Amazon as an Alexa Skill. (Yeah, don’t blame me; that’s what they call them.) Just say, “Alexa, enter The Vampire’s Lair,” and get ready for some agreeable chills.

The supersize option

All of the Fabled Lands books are now back in print in large format editions. These are 8" by 10", matching the original 1990s books -- though not, unfortunately, with those old fold-out covers that marked FL out as a hybrid of RPG, gamebook and boardgame.

But here's a heads-up. If you're ordering from Amazon, you're very likely to see a message telling you the books are "temporarily out of stock". The reason for that is they're set up for print on demand, which means that when you order a copy, Amazon sends a request to the printer (Ingram Spark) and your copy is added to the print queue. So naturally it isn't in stock at the time you order; that's the point of print on demand.

That message doesn't appear if you order the smaller format books because we set those up on Createspace, another POD company that Amazon bought a few years ago. It does seem as if Amazon's policy is to list books printed by rival POD companies as out of stock, but not to do that if the book is printed by Createspace.

Point is, you should get your book delivered in the same time either way. Amazon might tell you it'll take 1-2 months, or even that they are unable to say when the book will be delivered, but the fact is it'll probably arrive within a fortnight. Some Amazon customers have told me they even received an email from Amazon saying that they couldn't give a delivery date, only for the book to turn up that very same day.

There are other options, though. You can ask your local physical bookstore to order a copy for you. If they say they don't know how to do that, give them the ISBN and tell them to look on Gardners.

Or you can buy from Barnes & Noble who, not having their own print division, are happy just to supply what the customer wants without all the hassle.

Over the Blood-Dark Sea
The Plains of Howling Darkness
The Court of Hidden Faces
Lords of the Rising Sun

The snag there is that the first two books are printed by Createspace, who won't supply to B&N, so you have to get those from Amazon. It's a war, and book buyers are in the middle of it. Don't let the Soulwatch grind you down.

Fabled Lands launching on Kindle

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.

A gamebook giveaway

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...

All I want for Christmas

Seems a bit cheeky to ask, but I reckon Santa knows I've been nice. If I can have one wish, what would really make a big difference to the future of Fabled Lands Publishing as a whole would be to get more reviews on Amazon.

Reviews are what Amazon's search engine notices and flags up for other potential readers. The best book in the world with two or three reviews will languish in obscurity. But even real stinker with 50+ reviews (yeah, I'm looking at you, Dan Brown) is the rolling snowball that will get bigger and bigger until all you can see are little feet and heads poking out like the cover of Coils of Hate.

If everybody who regularly reads this blog could find the time to review a single gamebook on Amazon right now, that would bring gamebooks back into the spotlight overnight. If just one person in ten who's reading this went and wrote a quick review of, say, The Court of Hidden Faces then we'd break the 50+ barrier in time for Christmas.

I know a lot of people still enjoy gamebooks - and not just the folks who were there in the '80s and '90s, but a whole new generation too. But as long as the hobby stays in the shadows, publishers will continue to ignore it. A slew of reviews on Amazon would crash through their bubble of complacency like that Titantic-shaped starship on that episode of Doctor Who.

So if you ever got pleasure from one of my or Jamie's or Oliver's gamebooks - or anyone else's, come to that; I've included a few notable ones in the list below - and you can find a couple of minutes just to write one or two sentences as an Amazon review, you could make our Christmas wish come true. You don't even have to buy a copy. Here are a few suggestions - just pick one of these titles, or choose another favourite gamebook if you prefer. No turkeys in this lot, I guarantee it.

Tune in on Christmas Eve for the seasonal FL freebie. And in the meantime, rest you merry.

A noose of light

I probably don’t have to declare at this stage that I’m kind of an admirer of Russ Nicholson’s artwork. I’ve wanted his illustrations in my books since way back in 1984, when I had to track him down to Papua New Guinea to get him to supply the drawings for Eye of the Dragon.

And everybody knows that as far as the Fabled Lands series is concerned, Russ is “the third author” (it’s like being the Fifth Beatle, only with less hair). His imagination made it real, gave it substance, and that’s not just my and Jamie’s opinion – just look at how the apps drew on his original art.

Likewise Leo Hartas, not just an artist who is brilliant at conveying charm in his quirkily imaginative scenes, but one of my closest friends and, of course, my creative partner on projects like Mirabilis.

As I was lucky enough to get these guys as the illustrators of my Virtual Reality books in the mid-90s, you can bet that I wanted to retain their illustrations in the new incarnation of those books under the Critical IF imprint. And yet, Once Upon A Time In Arabia (the book formerly known as Twist of Fate) does not feature Russ’s great pictures, instead relying for visual embellishment on the more obscure (these days) William Harvey. No, not the blood guy.

I am very conscious that gamebooks are all about the nostalgia. Switching things around is as welcome to most gamebook aficionados as a bacon sarnie to a Salafi. So why the change?

To explain that, first I must ask you to cast your mind back – or, indeed, just click the link – to the announcement that Fabled Lands LLP would be partnering with Osprey Books to bring back Virtual Reality in digital format. Because the original plan to do them in HTML5 was deemed too expensive, we decided to go with EPUB3 format, which we thought would be cheaper. (It wasn’t, but that’s a detail.)

It soon turned out that we wouldn’t be able to have much interior artwork in any EPUB3 versions. As in, no art at all once you were past the prologue. So each book was to have two or three black and white illustrations. These were not by Russ or Leo and I wasn’t involved in commissioning them. No big deal, I thought, as I could still use the original artwork in the print editions. Then it turned out there were to be no print editions after all, only the ebooks.

Dry your tears. For various reasons, the planned partnership was abandoned and the ebooks canned. Still, we had the books all edited and ready to go – and Createspace makes it very easy to publish paperbacks and distribute them via Amazon. So, after quickly striking agreements with Russ and Leo, we were back in business.

Except… These are pictures you don’t want to mess up. Only sharp high-resolution images would do. I finally got the best quality my scanner is capable of by razor-blading copies of the VR books to pieces and scanning at 600 dpi. It worked out fine for Heart of Ice, Necklace of Skulls and Down Among the Dead Men. The snag is that I had no spare copy of Twist of Fate (I hope you’ll forgive me not wanting to mutilate the only one I had left) and it would cost $150 to buy a spare on Amazon. Hence the decision was taken to resort to the illustrations of Mr Harvey, which had the benefit of being (a) specifically drawn for the Arabian Nights and (b) out of copyright for seventy-seven years. Oh, and pretty good. Not Russ or Leo quality, but evocative enough.

As Scheherazade’s beleaguered heroes are fond of saying, God alone is all-powerful. OK then. But I managed three out of four, and I can live with that.

Land of the free

I can't for the life of me guess what triggered it, but Fabled Lands has been enjoying a bit of a sales surge in America this week. Jamie and I always felt FL had the potential to succeed over the Pond where other British gamebooks had failed, given - in our opinion - a slightly less derivative fantasy setting and a hopefully superior level of gameplay. But our only official release in the USA was as "Quest", and those books received worse distribution than the 1918 'flu vaccine.

The higher a book gets in the charts, the more chance it will get noticed by new readers. Books either get into a positive feedback loop where they climb up and up, or they bob briefly and then sink again. So my appeal today is that if you're in the US and you've been thinking of buying a Fabled Lands book, this is the time when it would do the most good.

I'm assuming that, having taken a look, a new reader would want the series to continue. A lot of people do say that, and believe me it warms the cockles of my and Jamie's hearts to hear it, but it could be that I just don't get to hear from the ones who hate the whole idea and are glad the series ended halfway through. I can see why FL may not appeal to some gamebook fans. Instead of a single quest, issued to you at the start as though you'd just tossed your hat onto a stand outside M's office, in Fabled Lands you are a completely free agent and you have to define your own objectives. That's how I like to roleplay. I hate hate hate when the "Games Master" (or umpire, as I prefer to say) tries to steamroller us with a predesignated plotline. So FL really just reflects that style of play. But if you prefer a dictatorship, as some gamers do, then you may find yourself wandering aimlessly hoping that somebody will tell you what to do - or at least give you your motivation.

Given all that, it does make me wonder why FL was reasonably successful in Britain (one of the least free of all Western democracies) but struggled to find readers in the USA. Maybe the new wave of interest will pick up and we can turn that around. If you're in the US, you can find the books right here.

The Dark Lord arrives in America

To coincide with the release of Dark Lord: The Early Years in US hardcover this week, Jamie has an exclusive interview with the International Reading Association; "My name is Dirk, but you may call me Master."

The interview gives you a taste of the side-splitting humour that won Jamie a shortlist nomination for the 2012 Roald Dahl Prize. Not only that, it's full of brilliant creative insights like this one:

'[Dark Lord] is a classic fish out of water/odd couple plot, but it also parodies its genre, albeit in a loving way. It lampoons fantasy, but it is also a cracking fantasy tale in itself, though I do say it myself. It's also interesting that this book probably couldn't have been written thirty years ago. Its time is now because everyone knows what a Dark Lord is, the imagery, the “trope” is everywhere.'

...though the truth is you can't study to acquire authorial talent like Jamie's, you have to be born with it. Curse him.

You can buy Book One in hardcover from the Amazon.com link below, and UK readers can still get it in paperback, as well as the sequel A Fiend in Need. I know, I know, you want him to write more Fabled Lands books - but really, take a look at the Dirk Lloyd series as they are genuine modern children's classics that I believe will be read and enjoyed by kids and grown-ups for generations to come.

Books with backbone

I said it probably wouldn't hold delivery up for more than 24 hours, and already Amazon have the slightly revised edition of Book Five back on sale, now with altered spine font to make it consistent with Books 1-4. (Oliver, you can stop brushing your teeth now.)

But I'm not bothered about fonts and point sizes, you're saying? What about the content, you ask? Well, the new edition has attractive greyscale maps which are a big improvement on the pure black-&-white of the first four books.

And it also has the six pre-generated characters from the original 1996 Pan Macmillan edition - one of whom (see if you can guess) is Jamie's own all-time favourite player character from our roleplaying campaign.

Silver linings

Okay, the bad news first because it isn't that bad. Amazon is listing Book Five as "currently unavailable". This is just for a day or two and is while we get our new printer to sort out a couple of minor details. You can still place orders, and it probably won't delay delivery by more than 24 hours or so.

The good news is that this should improve consistency of printing between the first four books and these latest ones. So please bear with us - it's a learning curve, but it's an upward one. And another bit of good news is that we're now expecting to have Book Six on sale before the end of September. Tell your friends. Come to that, tell your enemies.

Back in print: The Court of Hidden Faces!

Back on sale today for the first time in at least a decade, it's Fabled Lands Book 5: The Court of Hidden Faces, and I don't think I could do better than quote the back cover blurb:

SET OUT ON A JOURNEY OF UNLIMITED ADVENTURE

At THE COURT OF HIDDEN FACES, no one is who they seem. The sinister lords of the Uttakin go masked to hide their treachery. The secret police of the god Ebron kill those who flout their fanatical codes. In this tyrannical realm of betrayal and assassination, life is cheap. But rich rewards await the adventurer courageous enough to penetrate this hostile land.

Will you uncover the secrets of the High King’s citadel, where no mortal has trod for ten generations? Or wrest the holy sword from the crypt of Kizil Irmak, the Harbinger of War? Or find the key that unlocks the greatest secret of all – the means to open the Gate of Time and travel back into the past?

Your fate is in your own hands. You choose your skills, your goals, where you will venture and what you will do. The only limit is your imagination. The choices are all yours. And success will give you the power to venture ever deeper into the amazing role-playing world that is Fabled Lands.

Book 6 isn't far behind - it's already at proof stage, so with luck and a following wind it could be on sale in just a few weeks. I know, I know - we should have had them both out last year. But better late than never. Let's light a taper now and pray to Ebron that sales will allow us to restart (or should that be kickstart?) the series.

Actually, you could help with that. Jamie and I believe that Fabled Lands are some of the best gamebooks out there. Nothing else is like them, that's for sure. But they came late in the big gamebook boom of the '80s and early '90s, and because of that they aren't nearly as well known as our other work, even though we think they are as fresh and innovative today as they were back then.

If there's one single thing that will bring Fabled Lands to a wider audience, it's reviews - especially on Amazon. I appreciate that old-time fans of the series won't necessarily want to buy the new edition, but that's no reason not to drop onto Amazon and say what you thought of one of the books. It doesn't need to be an essay for the Times Literary Supplement, just a star rating and a couple of sentences will do. It takes about as long as brewing a cup of tea.

The more reviews we get, the higher we climb on Amazon's recommendations list and so the more people will get to hear of the books. Just twenty or thirty reviews can make a significant difference, so if you know anybody who has enjoyed an FL book but hasn't got round to a review: please feel free to pester them, shame them, hassle and hector them mercilessly until they give in. And then award yourself a free blessing of your choice, for verily you will be a hero of the land of Harkuna and your glory will be shouted in its halls.


We hope that the book will soon also be available from Amazon Italy, Amazon Germany, Amazon France and Amazon Spain. As we're using Createspace as the printer, and Amazon own Createspace, distribution to European Amazon outlets should follow pretty swiftly after the US and UK.

More seasonal freebies

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.

Episode 1.1 is "Stung!" which first appeared in DFC #30 (the 2008 Christmas issue). Jack is about to face a duel to the death when he finds an ancient two-headed coin that's destined to change his life forever. Get "Stung!" from the Kindle Store US here and UK here.

Episode 1.2 is "The Door in the Water". Jack meets Gus for the first time - but it's in a dream, so maybe it doesn't count. And when he wakes up he goes witch-hunting, only it turns out the witch is the one with the killing jar. That's in the Kindle Store US here and UK here.

Episode 1.3, "The Wrong Side of Bedlam" sees Gus (that's Talisin of the Shining Brow to us) escaping from a padded cell, Jack trapped in a witch bottle, and the boffins of the Royal Mythological Society explaining what's in store now the green comet has reappeared. It's in the Kindle Store US here and UK here.

And if you don't have a Kindle, don't despair, because all of those early episodes are online right here.

Top of the world mwahaha

He's here at last - and the world may never be quite the same again. I'm talking about Dirk Lloyd, the boy with the soul and the intellect of the Lord of all Evil. Sauron as a schoolboy, Tom Riddle's more sinister younger brother, Darth Vader Junior - call him whatever you like, as long as you remember to add "Master" in suitably respectful tones.

The first Dirk Lloyd book is officially out this week, though if you live in London and have been into Waterstone's any time in the last fortnight you may have seen it already. The UK edition, that is; US readers will need to wait a few months, but Jamie and I got the news in the last few days that the US rights have just sold to Bloomsbury for a good five-figure sum, so Dirk will soon be conquering America too.

This is the first of the all-new concepts that Jamie and I dreamt up for Fabled Lands LLP. We've kept pretty busy since, so there'll be more news on the way soon, but in the meantime you can get the first instalment of Dirk's adventures on Amazon now, with book two coming in the spring. There's more info on the Spark Furnace of course. And here's a taste of what it's like if you live in Dirk's world:

This just in -

I just got a heads up from Jamie Wallis at Greywood Publishing to say that the Fabled Lands RPG is now on Amazon UK. If you're Stateside, it's still on Amazon US, of course - and there, as bargain hunters will probably have already noticed, at a slightly lower price than the British edition.

Jamie also told me to tell you that the Sokara sourcebook will be out in September and the Golnir book in December. So lots of background material, scenarios, creature, characters, locations, maps and items to come. Better roll your characters now.

Oh, double-taking at that cover? It was Greywood's original mock up using Kevin Jenkins's beautiful painting from The War Torn Kingdom (FL Book One). Who wouldn't want to live in that castle?

Game on

A few years ago, Leo Hartas and I pitched the idea of a series of books called Game Gurus, each of which took an in-depth look at the creative, artistic and gameplay aspects of a specific genre. When the publisher told us that they, not we, owned the series we kind of lost interest in writing any more, but not before we completed the titles on Strategy and Role-Playing games, still available on Amazon US (preceding links) and at bargain prices on Amazon UK here and here.

Fabled Lands players! A call to arms

The new edition Fabled Lands books are now on sale. In the USA you can get them from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and in the UK from Amazon.co.uk. (Continental European customers, check your local Amazon.) It's taken a lot of work to get these new copies ready in time for Christmas, but the real work starts now. Because it's not enough to have the FL books available to buy, we need to get the word out to the multitude of role-playing or gamebook or fantasy enthusiasts - to every potential FL reader, in fact.

This is where you can help. When Dragon Warriors was re-released by Magnum Opus Press, it found a devoted but unfortunately rather tiny market among longtime DW fans who were loyal enough to want to own deluxe hardback editions of the books. And God bless you Legend players, every one. But we're not following that niche strategy with Fabled Lands. That's why we didn't publish new edition FL as expensive hardbacks for hardcore fans. In real terms, the 2nd edition FL books are actually about 20% cheaper than the original 1995 editions. We wanted them to be affordable so that they can attract a whole new bunch of readers - not only adult fans of the original books, but a whole new generation of players also. The iPad and paper-&-pencil RPGs will build on this.

Here are a few ways you can get involved:

1. If you already own the original books then you probably don't want to buy them all over again. But have you got friends who are into fantasy adventure games? Give the books as gifts.
2. If you got the FL books as scanned PDFs - well, shame on you :) but we're still glad to have you as a fan, and now you can atone by buying legit copies.
3. We need reviews! Fabled Lands has built up an impressive star rating on Amazon over the years, but a new edition sets the counter to zero. So you can help out by getting a review up there. (And thanks Alberto, Matthew, James and A.Seegert - your early reviews are really appreciated!)
4. Listmania works too. Create a list of your favorite books on Amazon - "10 great role-playing gamebooks" or "10 fantasy classics" or whatever. Including FL books on your lists raises their profile.
5. If you have a blog of your own, post a link. If you don't, pester the blogs you regularly read with news of the FL 2nd edition.
6. Tweet about us. Maybe mention a cool thing that happened to you during an FL adventure - that's a great hook to get new readers to take a look.

Did I mention that we need reviews? Seriously, most fantasy RPG books like Dragon Warriors sink into oblivion because the small group of true devotees fail to spread the word of their enthusiasm to a wider audience. So if you enjoy adventuring in the Fabled Lands and want to help us try and continue the series, tell everyone you know. Tell them right now. The FL revival starts here!

Global conquest

A couple of people asked about whether the Fabled Lands 2nd edition books would be available in Canada, and the answer is yes. You can order them for CDN$9.16 each, just search on Amazon.ca for "Fabled Lands 1: the War-Torn Kingdom" etc. And in Germany and France for 8.99 euros from Amazon.de and Amazon.fr respectively. I don't know about Australia and NZ yet, but we're looking into it.

Ahem

The first four new edition FL books are now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Need I say more?