When you’re planning a gamebook, think also about making choices meaningful. The choices that I like writing are the ones with consequences. The giveaway there is that there’s a tickbox or keyword that means the player’s decision will have some effect later. Go left or right? That’s just navigation. Steal the other guy’s food or go hungry yourself? There’s a choice that matters.
An interview with Dave Morris, author of many gamebooks, including Heart of Ice, the September book for the 100 Endings Book Club. Latest in series of gamebook interviews.
Disclosure - I'm a DriveThru RPG affiliate.
Chat with Dave Morris, Prolific Gamebook Author
Dave Morris is the author and co-author of many gamebooks, including the Golden Dragon series, Critical IF, Blood Sword and many others. He and Jamie Thomson (interview here) have written Fabled Lands (Books 1-6) and completed VulcanVerse, both open-world gamebook series.
We have the first gamebook, heart of ice thoughts with 2 related questions, writing open-world gamebooks, the dragon warriors rpg and the advice for writing gamebooks books. Among other questions.
What was your gaming story before writing gamebooks?
Back when I was at school a bunch of my friends were in the war studies group. They played tabletop wargames with armies of miniatures. I wasn’t interested in that (too much painting, for one thing) but I liked hex-grid boardgames.
One weekend I got my hands on a copy of Empire of the Petal Throne. That was my introduction to roleplaying games and I never looked back.
How did your first gamebook come to be?
Other children’s publishers had noticed how Puffin Books had grabbed the much-coveted boys’ market with Fighting Fantasy. Their belief was that boys lost interest in reading around age 10, though in my experience that was just because they weren’t publishing SF, fantasy or comic books, which I and my friends devoured by the satchel-full.
Anyway, FF (Fighting Fantasy) blazed the trail and by 1984 every UK publisher wanted their own series.
I’d been writing an RPG for Games Workshop but they landed the RuneQuest UK licence instead, so I was suddenly in need of a job. I wrote to a few publishers and Angela Sheehan at Grafton asked me to come and see her. A couple of hours later I had a contract for the first Golden Dragon gamebooks.
What do you think makes Heart of Ice well regarded among gamebook fans?
(Heart of Ice was our first book for the 100 Endings Book Club)
I wish I knew. I’d like to bottle the lightning again!
It probably helped that it grew out of a roleplaying mini-campaign I’d run a few times, so I was able to draw on a cast of characters who had all been thoroughly fleshed out in play.
Also it’s a type of story I like, one that you often see in spaghetti Westerns: a disparate group of characters forced into uneasy alliance to achieve a goal. That allowed me to explore themes like why people want power and what they’ll do to get it.
It must have helped that the SF setting felt fresh after years of writing mostly medieval-flavoured fantasy. And I was able to sound a serious note by tackling the subject of climate change, an impending global disaster that was being widely ignored then as now.
But mostly it was just that perfect storm of things coming together. As a writer you always hope that will happen but you can’t control it.
What games/media inspired Heart of Ice and/or its mechanics?
(Bonus question from joseph41901 on the Rand Roll Discord)
As it happens I can answer the question about Heart of Ice in more detail than joseph41901 might have expected, as I talked about it in an interview a while back:
“Heart of Ice got started as a role-playing session. I can pinpoint it exactly to Christmas 1976. I was back home after my first term at college and I needed a scenario for a large number of players. Believe it or not, I started with the idea of doing a serious version of It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, kind of the way Failsafe Point is a serious version of Dr Strangelove. The idea of Du-En came from marvelling at the buildings of Christ Church in Oxford, absolutely deserted late on a frosty night after the end of term, with the buildings lit up pale against this immense field of stars and the unyielding smell of cold sandstone.
"After the first game session, I was walking home with one of the players and he said how he was imagining Du-En as a movie, and what he liked was that the focus of the session had been in the tension among the characters camped out in this ruined, snow-filled city. It was big end-of-the-world action but it was centred on a small group of characters. And a mere 18 years later I took all that and put it into the book.
"I’d had an idea in my mind of it as a Sergio Leone movie. It’s that combination of operatic/ mythic significance with ordinary messy human life – the fly walking in the sweat of a man’s face. Leone’s films are all about how the stories we construct make sense of what would otherwise be a short, meaningless existence."
What was the process for balancing Heart of Ice - ensuring how different skills were equally relevant, how different paths and playstyles were viable, etc?
(Bonus question from DM-Jay on the Rand Roll Discord)
DM-Jay’s question is a good one as picking four skills from a list of twelve gives nearly 500 different combinations. I made sure that there was no combination of skills that couldn’t complete the adventure by making sure that it was possible to proceed through every critical pinch point in the flowchart using nine of the skills.
For balancing it was a question of keeping a list of each time a skill could be used, and next to that I’d give a qualitative rating of how significant a difference it made.
So if I saw that SHOOTING was getting used more often than ROGUERY, say, I could either add more places where ROGUERY helped or else bump up how big a difference it made to the adventure in cases where ROGUERY applied. (Put like that it sounds complicated, but really I was just keeping notes on a scrap of paper as I wrote.)
Which has been your favourite gamebook to write?
Apart from Heart of Ice, you mean?
The hardest to write, and for that reason very satisfying, was probably Workshop of the Gods (from the VulcanVerse series). I had to tie up the storyline across four other books as well as making the fifth book an open-world exploration of the city. I had dozens of pages of notes on all the plot threads that had to be pulled together and it took over a year.
I enjoyed writing Down Among The Dead Men and the Blood Sword books too, especially the middle ones, but they were all a lot easier than Vulcanverse.
Fabled Lands were all a joy to write, but if I had to pick a favourite it’d be Lords of the Rising Sun because of my interest in Heian Japan.
What are the highlights and challenges of writing open-world gamebooks?
The best thing is the freedom to improvise.
That’s how I like to run roleplaying games; I have a core set of events worked out in detail, i.e. the timeline of what would happen if the player-characters did nothing, but the moment we start playing I know there’s no point – and no fun – in being bound to a script.
With an open-world gamebook I’m largely making it up as I go and at the same time there’s a bit at the back of my mind that’s continually fitting each new character, encounter, item, event or whatever into a bigger picture.
The challenge is to make it all work, as you can’t patch a print book as easily as you can a computer game. Occasionally a bug makes it through, like those places in Fabled Lands where you can mine infinite shards, and I ought to go back and fix them but my interest is always on the next book.
How did you end up writing so many brand-affiliated gamebooks such as Transformers, Knightmare and HeroQuest?
I had a good relationship with Philippa Dickinson and Sue Cook at Transworld, and they knew I always delivered a book on time (which is rarer than you’d think) so whenever they had a franchise like that they’d get me to write it.
It’s good politics, too. You write four Thunderbirds books in six weeks and the publisher is so grateful that they’ll listen the next time you pitch one of your own series.
What was the story behind Dragon Warriors? Does it have a future?
(There's a Dragon Warriors solo actual play from 2024 on Rand Roll)
Roleplaying games in the early 1980s were expensive. Often they came in a box, and you could only buy them in hobby stores.
Dragon Warriors was released in a series of paperbacks that were priced to be pocket money purchases. DW was in most bookshops. All six books together cost just over a tenner, which is around £45 in today’s money.
My blunder was in using polyhedral dice. Since the whole point was to make the game accessible to new players, it should have needed only d6. Oliver Johnson kept telling me that, but (as usual) I thought I was right.
The most interesting thing about Dragon Warriors for me isn’t the rules, it’s the flavour of its fantasy. I loathe that brand of fantasy where you go into a tavern and there’s a bar and an emo elf and a couple of comedy dwarves and whatever.
It’s like fantasy with all the magic taken out of it. Once you go down that route, just using fantasy creatures as “races”, you’re going to have to create something else to stand for the wonder and enchantment that ought to suffuse any fantasy setting. Anyway, that’s my take on it, so I created the Dragon Warriors world to be more haunting and faerie-like. It’s also very low fantasy compared to, say, D&D.
Nowadays, folkloric fantasy is well represented by lots of contemporary RPGs, so there’s less reason for players to seek out a forty-year-old system. There are still some unrevealed DW gems, though, such as Robert Dale’s campaign set in the port town of Brymstone. That was to have appeared in the seventh book, if we’d got that far, but it’s better to have waited because Robert’s version built up themes of conflict between the old nobility and the rising merchant class, weaving that alongside some chilling folk horror stuff, whereas to fit it into DW book 7 we were going to flatten the finale to a boss fight. I don’t know if and when Brymstone will see the light of day. It would have been good to have it mark DW’s 40th anniversary this year, but now we might have to wait for the half-century.
As for the future… I’m working on a new streamlined RPG called Jewelspider, set in the same world as Dragon Warriors, with illustrations by Inigo Hartas, who’s the son of Leo Hartas who illustrated the original books. There have been sneak peeks of that on my Patreon page.
What advice would you give to aspiring gamebook writers?
First there’s the advice I’d give to any aspiring writer: look for inspiration outside your own culture and time, because it’s impossible to create original work if you’ve overtrained on the same kinds of stories as everyone else.
Find books and movies that aren’t what you’d usually go for. Open up to new influences. This will be difficult at first. Watching a hundred-year-old German film, for example, your first thought might be, “This is a story badly told.” That’s only because you’re conditioned to think in terms of the story patterns and tropes of the 21st century Anglosphere. Shake those off. Go back to primary sources wherever possible.
As to gamebooks specifically, the most important advice is to learn to use AI well. I meet two kinds of people – those who say, “AI is always useless, I ask it things and it hallucinates,” and those who say, “Every day I find a new use for AI.”
The first group are just using it wrong. AI is a new item in the writer’s toolbox. It’s not going to write a book for you (well, not a good one) but there are many other ways it can take the drudgery out of your work so that you can concentrate on the creative part. And it’s not going away. The advice to learn to use it properly applies to every single career on the planet, in fact, not just writing.
When you’re planning a gamebook, think also about making choices meaningful. The choices that I like writing are the ones with consequences. The giveaway there is that there’s a tickbox or keyword that means the player’s decision will have some effect later. Go left or right? That’s just navigation. Steal the other guy’s food or go hungry yourself? There’s a choice that matters.
Where can people find you online?
I’m on Patreon and I try to update the Fabled Lands blog every week or two – it’s about gamebooks, roleplaying, and anything that interests me, not just FL. Stuff that doesn’t fit there goes on my Substack “Hallucinations & Confabulations”. I still occasionally drop in on Facebook, Bluesky and Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) but never for long.
Is there anything else you would like to talk about?
There’s my comic book Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, created with Leo Hartas and the late Martin McKenna. That’s my pride and joy, though sadly we never finished it because – well, the publishers were no help, let’s leave it at that!
Then there’s Can You Brexit?, a gamebook that basically forced me to write it. It’s almost quaint to look back now on the satirical version of politicians in 2016 and think about how most of them have just faded away. Ten years on, the only ones we still have are Trump, Farage, Erdoğan, and Putin. (Don’t they say the cockroaches will survive even a nuclear war?)
We could have talked about my gamebook version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which was interesting because almost everybody knows the movies rather than the book – which means that they don’t really know the story at all. I switched Victor’s university from Ingolstadt to Paris because the story was taking place in the early 1790s and that was too good a resonance to pass up. (The National Convention closed the university in 1793, but by that time the creature was already alive.)
There’s also my upcoming gamebook Whispers Beyond The Stars, written with Paweł Dziemski, which is a Lovecraftian SF/horror story set in 2050.
And looking further out, I’ve been planning an open-world survival horror gamebook based on the Shadow King computer game that Jamie Thomson and I were developing at Eidos in the 1990s. I have reams of notes for the rules but I haven’t yet settled on the best way to approach the writing. First person or second person? Period or modern? Surreal or grounded? The mechanics alone can only take you so far.
Finishing Up
If you haven't tried one of Dave's gamebooks, go and give them a try. Many are available in digital format at DriveThruRPG.
There are many more articles on Rand Roll. Plus a Rand Roll Discord and instagram of Random Tables. I also create Generators at Chaos Gen and have a monthly random tools Newsletter.
