AUGUST
UPDATES:
The Interloper's Tale is now available as an interactive game on this site. (This chapter from The Quanta-B Tales contains spoilers.)
Last month I published the first part of a new Star Trek serial based on the adventures of Rachel Garrett. The novella Flagship is a story in ten parts that follows the adventures of the USS Enterprise-C during the Lost Era of Trek between the movies and TNG. Each part will be released on the last Sunday of each month.
RPG NIGHT
Recently I had the opportunity to run a game at the Starbase Leicester RPG night, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it as I was having my own adventure on a cycling tour down to Dorset.
I discovered Dungeons & Dragons in the bedroom of a friend of mine who I’d met on a YTS course. I didn’t really know anything about the game, but over the course of that Sunday afternoon in 1988 I learned what roleplaying games were and it kind of blew my mind. The idea of a game where the only limits were your imagination, and the imagination of the other people you were playing with, was transformative. Up until that point in my life my imagination had always been something I’d had to reign in; a problem that got in the way.
The concept of coming up with anything you could think of, especially if you were running the game, was like stepping outside into daylight for the first time after growing up inside a cave. Not only was it your imagination that was being used, but everyone else’s. The game was a shared hallucination where rules and dice moderated what was possible, rather than physics or reason.
Soon I had found other people at my work placement who’d played D&D and I introduced my friend to them so we could form a group. I group quickly began to grow and we’d all meet up on a Saturday night and play all kinds of different rpgs, from Traveller to Bushido, Vampire the Masquerade to Star Wars, and of course Star Trek. I hadn’t really watched Star Trek before playing it, though I knew of its existence, but I borrowed some tapes and quickly got up to speed on TNG.
Eventually I started running games of my own and this then became the gateway drug into writing. At first I tried to write down the crazy adventures we’d been on, but somehow they were never quite the same on the page as they were on the night. Over the years our little rpg group began to drift apart as we all got jobs, girlfriends, wives and other commitments.
There is a series of some really interesting videos on D&D by a chap named Galen Wood. He's been playing the game for over 50 years and I would imagine there are a lot of people my age and older who have been playing for that long.
BALDUR'S GATE 3
There have been various attempts over the years to capture the thrill of Dungeons & Dragons in video games, but the best must surely be the Baldur’s Gate series. I played the first one a lot, but always got stuck at a certain point when the enemies became impossible to beat. The latest entry into the franchise is every bit as good as the original and does manage to capture the same feel as the original. These games aren’t the same as a real life session of course, but they are as close as you can get to the experience on a computer.
My first couple of play throughs went badly wrong when I selected the single save option, thinking that this would heighten the tension by making every decision more significant, but both times I ended up getting stuck in a battle against a large group of foe that I was ill-equipped to beat. I also cheated a bit by installing some mods that allowed me to increase the party size limit (I seem to remember the original let you have six members).
On the third attempt I managed to get together a party of adventurers who were able to just about hold their own, and recruit Karlach the Barbarian (who we were actually supposed to kill). Looking online for a few hints I was surprised at how many different ways there were to navigate the plot and a lot of the decisions you made in the game had consequences for later on.
My only gripe was the puzzles in the game which didn’t seem to have been thought through very well. I kept finding myself totally stuck, not because of the puzzles themselves but the way I was supposed to interact with them not being intuitive.
Eventually the game came to a grinding halt for me when I had to slay a foe who was effectively immortal and dealt more damage in a single blow than any of my party members had the hit points to survive. I retried this battle several times, looked up strategy guides online and even tried installing cheats, but the result was always the same. Having lost patience I eventually uninstalled the game, resolving to restart again with another new character at some later date when I’ve forgotten most of what I did the first time around.
INTERACTIVE FICTION
A while ago, during the Interactive Fiction craze, I joined a Meetup group that was run by Emily Short. I’d seen a documentary on YouTube called ‘Get Lamp’, which tracked the evolution of text adventures from the original ‘adventure’ through to Zork and then the fabulously creative Infocom games like ‘A Mind Forever Voyaging’ and ’The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’ The doc featured interviews with many of the people who had worked at Infocom and also to a new generation of creators who were writing new and inventive games for a modern audience (check out the game called ‘Get Pig’.) As I looked into the genre I discovered that one of the most prolific and acclaimed creators was Emily Short.
I had the pleasure of meeting Emily on a couple of occasions as well as a number of other luminaries in the IF scene. I had a couple of good ideas for games, but lacked the programming skills to successfully implement them. I was hoping that I might meet someone in the group who was a programmer who I could team up with or hire to make my ideas a reality, but alas it was not to be.
To be fair to the software, which was called Inform, it was incredibly easy to use because it ran on natural language. To create a room all you had to do was write; the lounge is north of the kitchen. The game would then create two rooms called ‘lounge’ and ‘kitchen’ and compile a map of the relationship between those locations. To add a door you simply wrote, the door is between the Kitchen and the Lounge, and to put objects into the game you just had to write, the silver key is in the Kitchen.
One of the ideas I had was called ‘Beam Me Up’, which was going to be a game where you explored planets and had to choose which crew members to take with you, the idea being that the outcome would change depending on who you took. The idea for this game came back to be recently when I started to notice a resurgence of interest in choose-your-adventure (CYOA) books, like the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson. There have been recently been attempts at writing new books in the genre (see my earlier review of Curse of Cthulu) and of course it was something I’d done for one of the chapters of The Quanta-B Tales.
Having successfully created a sort or mini-game CYOA I knew I had enough experience to at least have a got at making an entire book, and I had developed a few techniques and processes to manage the complexity of a branching path narrative. One piece of software I remember hearing about during my attempts at IF was called Twine, and so I downloaded it to see if I could adapt The Interloper’s Tale to run in it. I am pleased to report that it was actually very easy to put all the numbered sections into Twine and link them together, and the Tale is now available on this website to play.
The Beam Me Up idea is much more ambitious than a single chapter however, but only in scale. Technically the method for creating it will be the same, and I will break the story up into separate sections to work on. I plan to make a proof of concept episode and put it into Twine for people to play.
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