Guess what Verena is working on…

Since the beginning of Time (and perhaps before), many have travelled to the Lands of Dream and written about their journeys. Some of these tales are warnings, others are maps to roads that we may follow; all have been of great assistance in my own endeavours. Thus I have decided that once each week, in the late hours of Friday or the early hours of Saturday (or Caturday, as it is called in Katsouli), I will write here to tell you of one such story.

Today’s tale is Idle Days on the Yann, by one of the greatest of the travelling storytellers, Lord Dunsany. Few other tales have taught me so much, or influenced my portal-making so profoundly. Let the words flow over you like the mighty river, and enjoy the strange places they will show you.

Dear sentient beings categorized according to mostly arbitrary social constructs,

I thought this would be a fine opportunity to let you know that The Sea Will Claim Everything is now on special offer. Yes, you can now purchase the magical portal often abbreviated to TSWCE for 42% less of your coinage!

Remember all the wonderful things critics had to say about it?

For those looking for an adventure with a sense of wonder, The Sea Will Claim Everything is a must-have.
– Adventure Gamers

It’s a beautiful experience, one that made me truly proud of what the medium can accomplish.
– Mash Those Buttons

At first glance, the game’s cutesy, cartoony graphics and simplistic interface give the impression that this is a juvenile game designed for small children. However, it soon becomes apparent that the game is in fact a deeply political, philosophical, and even academic narrative that defies easy description. It is to adventure games what Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa is to murder mystery novels.
– Adventure Classic Gaming

The Sea Will Claim Everything made me want to hide uselessly under my desk, but for being a game that dared to engage with this kind of subject matter in powerful and persuasive ways. It was not half-hearted; it did not feel like a lecture. It felt authentic, in ways so delightfully evocative it’s frightening.
– Bit Creature

From the wonderfully vibrant hand-drawn visuals, to the offbeat descriptions of nearly everything on every screen, to the brilliant soundtrack, to the elegantly poignant characters, to the game’s clever handling of the fourth wall, I found myself deeply engrossed and sad to see it all eventually come to an end.
– Adventure Lantern

It’s like a five year old with a degree in comparative literature.
– Scripted Sequence

And there are even more reviews! Yes, this must be a remarkably unique game, right? So grasp opportunity while it’s in your hand… wait, that’s doesn’t make sense. Grasp opportunity when… erm, make use of this unique offer… err… by the seven-eared hyperfox, I hate marketing speak. Look, it’s a great game, quite unlike most other games, and you should buy it now and play it and tell your friends about it. OK?

Yours truly,

Julian the Announcement Fox

If you have played my Lands of Dream games, you will have noticed a wide variety of non-game influences: the poetry of William Blake, the short stories of Lord Dunsany and H.P. Lovecraft, postcolonial theory, ancient Greek philosophy, world mythology, contemporary politics, and so on. It makes sense, of course, since in the Lands of Dream everything ever imagined is real, even postcolonial theory (hah). But one of the strongest of all influences, one of the most basic building blocks of these games, is the Quest for Glory series by Lori and Corey Cole.

The first Quest for Glory game I ever played was Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness (1994). I didn’t even have a computer of my own at the time, but my friend Stelios did, so we played it together on his (well, technically his father’s) Intel 80486. I think we only understood about half of the text and pretty much nothing about how to win, but it was completely spellbinding. The atmosphere was powerful, the characters were memorable, and the adventure/RPG hybrid gameplay made anything seem possible. The land of Mordavia was eerie, beautiful and often terrifying – especially at night, when the really nasty monsters came out.

The game informed us that it had been designed by Lori & Corey Cole and that the other games in the series were called So You Want To Be A Hero (1989), Trial by Fire (1990) and Wages of War (1992).

We never finished the game, but it made a huge impression on me; so a few years later, when I had a PC of my own, I got my hands on the entire series up to that point in the form of the Quest for Glory Anthology. And that’s when my journey through Gloriana really began.

And what a journey it was! From humble beginnings in Spielburg through increasingly grand adventures in Shapeir and Fricana to the dark lands of Mordavia that I’d visited before, it was a stunning series of adventures through mythologically-inspired settings. And since the games allowed you to import your character from one game to the next, it really did feel like one long journey.

But there’s more to the genius of the Quest for Glory games than that. After all, what I’ve just described could be any generic fantasy series with settings inspired by real-world mythologies. And the Quest for Glory games are anything but generic.

For one thing, there’s the gameplay. When the game begins, you get to choose a character class (Magic User, Thief, Fighter) and assign skill points, and this RPG element makes a huge difference. Almost every puzzle can be solved in multiple ways, and there are whole chunks of story that are entirely specific to your type of character. I’ve yet to see any “proper” RPG that makes your choice of character class feel this significant. It feels great to be a thief and have access to the secret Thieves’ Guild, or to be a magic user and be able to get a desired object from a hard-to-reach spot simply by casting Fetch. And even better than that is the fact that you can become a Paladin, a character class only available within the course of the game itself (in Trial by Fire), and that this really means something in terms of the good you can do in the world.

The latter is only possible because there is a world to care about. Yes, the Quest for Glory games are full of humour – at times very, very silly humour. But the majority of the people you meet are not jokes; they are not quest-givers with big exclamation marks over their heads, essentially indistinguishable from GUI elements. The characters in these games have that most elusive of qualities – grace. They are people, not gameplay functions. Even one of the major villains of the series movingly turns out to be a far more complex individual than you would expect. Silliness, beauty and heartbreak all co-exist in the Quest for Glory universe, as they do in ours.

And so you care. You want to be a hero not for your own selfish reasons, but because you want to help. You play a Paladin not because you want the +100 Sword of Powergaming, but because it will allow you to put a tormented soul to rest. It’s a great feeling and a significant accomplishment.

Another element that unifies and strengthens the experience of playing the Quest for Glory games is that the later games aren’t so much sequels as simply chapters of a larger story; unlike most series, Quest for Glory was planned from the beginning, with the third game being inserted for storytelling reasons. This gives the games a sense of coherence and reality that is rare in this medium. (This is also a main characteristic of another one of my major influences, Babylon 5. I like it when writers know where they’re going.) It also means that reoccuring characters start to feel like old friends. When you meet some of them again in the last game, after having been separated from them in Shadows of Darkness, you experience genuine joy.

Speaking of the last game, Dragon Fire was published in 1998 after a vocal campaign by fans pretty much forced Sierra not to abandon the series without a finale. It’s a little different from the first four games, especially in that the RPG and action elements are a tad more pronounced, but I think it’s a lovely game. The Graeco-Roman atmosphere, the incredible score by Chance Thomas, the sheer plesasure of exploring the island of Marete… it might actually be my favourite of the series, even though the story in Shadows of Darkness is more moving.

Nah, I can’t really decide. They’re both brilliant. The entire series is brilliant. There you go.

—

I’m sure that those of you who know my games can see some of the similarities. The RPG elements are missing (I’m keeping them for another game), but the rest should be familiar. People and places that you can care about; stories in which villains aren’t always villains; planned interconnections between the games; silliness and seriousness co-existing, not seen as negations of each other; a love of mythological themes; attention to detail… and of course an abundance of absolutely terrible puns.

That is not to say that the Lands of Dream games are “tribute” games or that I was trying to recreate Quest for Glory. Lori and Corey Cole showed me what was possible, and I took off from there and went on a journey of my own.

Well, not entirely of my own! Because I, too, have a co-designer. She didn’t play Quest for Glory growing up (she played Companions of Xanth), but the fact that all these years later, Jonas & Verena Kyratzes are making games that people love in the same way that I loved Quest for Glory is simply amazing.

—

I started writing this before the Coles put up their Kickstarter for a new game, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. Unlike many Kickstarter projects, this isn’t just a thinly-disguised remake or appeal to nostalgia, but an original game. If you have some money you’d like to invest in a crowdfunded project, you should strongly consider investing it here. I really want to see what these personal heroes of mine can come up with without a publisher breathing down their necks. I suspect it will be glorious.

Notes:

1. I grabbed the screenshots from the net. Hope no-one minds.
2. There’s a fantastic authorized remake of Trial by Fire.
3. The way Quest for Glory handles day/night still puts modern games to shame.
4. I tried to avoid spoilers. Go get the games from GOG. Experience the story yourself.
5. Really, do support that Kickstarter.
6. And, you know, totally buy The Sea Will Claim Everything.

This is why I keep telling stories from the Lands of Dream.

Chelonian Hill

A new entry has been added to the Oneiropolis Compendium! More will follow shortly; we’re finally catching up with stuff.

Noted reporter Brobdingous Glob interviews Julian the Announcement Fox for The Brobdingous Glob Show.

Glob: Hello Julian, pleased to meet you.

Julian: Pleased to meet you too, Mr. Glob. I don’t get a lot of visitors these days.

Glob: I was going to ask about that. The site has been rather quiet lately. Why is that?

Julian: Well, I guess mostly it’s because Jonas and Verena have been quite busy. Making a living can be exhausting in the world they live in.

Glob: But you don’t live in that world?

Julian: No, I live here on the site. Sometimes I go out on the rest of the internet.

Glob: To do what?

Julian: Oh, exploring, hunting, fox things.

Glob: Is it nice?

Julian: I suppose. It’s gotten a bit crowded in parts lately. I prefer to keep to the wilder areas. Blogs no-one reads, old abandoned websites…

Glob: Ever discovered anything amazing?

Julian: Many things.

Glob: Could you tell us about one?

Julian: There’s a forgotten forum where old spambots meet to exchange long-dead links and talk about the early days of internet advertising. Some of them have gone a bit peculiar, if you know what I mean, so now instead of male enhancement pills and underdressed young humans they’re trying to sell vibraharps and baked beans, but it’s fascinating.

Glob: That sounds amazing. Speaking of strange places, are we going to get a new story from the Lands of Dream anytime soon?

Julian: Well, there’s Ithaka of the Clouds-

Glob: Which Jonas has been talking about for years. Is it ever actually going to get made?

Julian: Yes, certainly. It’s just very big.

Glob: Can you tell us something about it?

Julian: I guess you already know that it’s a trollish love story. It’s also quite the epic adventure! And it’s more of a straightforward journey than some of the other stories – there’s plenty of exploration, of course, but it’s all about moving forward, about going from one place to another.

Glob: Sounds exciting! Will that definitely be our next visit to the next Lands of Dream?Julian: Maybe, maybe not. There might be something smaller, more contained before it.

Glob: Oh? What can you tell us?

Julian: I don’t really know much about it. I do know Jonas doesn’t want to be known as the guy who only makes Lands of Dream games, so he might be working on something else first.

Glob: What about this idea of remaking some of his older works? Has he told you anything about that?

Julian: Only a little. He can be a bit secretive, you know. He’s mentioned that he would definitely like to remake both The Museum of Broken Memories and The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge, and he once muttered something about updating the visual elments of The Book of Living Magic, but I think he’s somewhat conflicted about that. I don’t know if I should be saying this, but I’m pretty sure he simply doesn’t have the money to work on these projects at the moment, because they’re not commercial, and getting a sponsorship for a Lands of Dream game is quite hard.

Glob: But why? People seem to like them.

Julian: You’ll have to ask Jonas about that, I’m just a fox. Besides, I don’t really like to get involved in all this indie gaming business. It’s tedious.

Glob: I can certainly understand that. One more question, then: what’s your favourite place in the Lands of Dream?

Julian: Hmmm… a difficult choice, but I’d have to say Oneiropolis. It’s incomparable, really. Multi-layered, fluid, ancient, eternal. Or at least I hope so.

Glob: I wasn’t going to mention it, but since you sort of hinted at it… what’s your opinion on Urizen?

Julian: He’s an idiot and I wonder if he knows how much damage he’s doing.

Glob: Do you think he’ll win? Can Oneiropolis be conquered?

Julian: I hope not.

Glob: Will we ever find out? Will there ever be a story or portal about it?

Julian: Jonas tells me there will be a book. But I think he’ll need to be a bit more successful to be able to write it. I don’t know if that’s likely to happen, but here’s hoping.

Glob: Is there no other way for us to find out more about Oneiropolis?

Julian: You could go there using your imagination, of course.

Glob: A lot of people believe that imaginary travel is too dangerous these days. Is there no other way?

Julian: Well, there is the one obvious way, of course. The one that always takes you through Oneiropolis.

Glob: And that is?

Julian: Death.

Glob: Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s all the time we’ve got this week. Many thanks to Julian the Announcement Fox for agreeing to talk to us. I hope you’ve all bought The Sea Will Claim Everything, a portal to the Lands of Dream, available for only $10, one tenth of the value of a real indie game developer. Check back next week for more news and interviews from the strange world of the internet.

A new interview with Jonas has been published by Adventure Classic Gaming. They asked some interesting questions, and as an added bonus the picture gallery includes a special look at what the other side of the window to the Lands of Dream looks like.

This is a prayer that I once overheard in the Shadow Quarter of Oneiropolis.

O forces of the unseen world,
I know not whether you exist,
Or whether I speak to the cruel void.
But if despite my fear,
And my unspoken certainty,
There are those who listen above:

Let there yet be days
Of sunshine and music
In homes untouched by death
While the scent of youth still lingers.
Let my journey prove fruitful
Before the cold night comes.

The translation is a little rough, as few of the languages of Earth have the subtlety of the ancient words spoken in Oneiropolis, but nevertheless it has often been on my mind lately.