Valiant sees readers take on the role of the titular Valiant, an agent of the Crown’s secret service tasked with keeping instability from escalating into all-out war. In a world of Enlightened super-science, the journey ahead is sure to be filled with horrors, espionage, and challenges you must overcome.
“Valiant represents something new for the Dystopian Age. An opportunity for players to live, breathe, and explore this rich setting, from the depths of its Promethean Complexes to the streets of Cairo, and the very skies themselves. Adventure and intrigue await.”
Edward Spence, Game Designer
With the announcement that you can expect Valiant in your hands in early March, we’ve taken some time to sit down with Jonathan Green, the author of Valiant and previous Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, to discuss bringing this iconic format to the Dystopian Age.
Jonathan Green, Author
Hi Jon, thank you for taking some time to talk to us about the upcoming gamebook set in the Dystopian Age, Valiant. We’re excited to share more information with the community!
To start, for those unfamiliar, how would you describe what a gamebook is?
“My Pleasure! Well, a gamebook is an interactive novel in which the reader becomes the protagonist. They choose the course of the adventure by turning to different numbered sections throughout the book. The addition of some simple RPG rules and dice-rolling mechanics introduces an element of chance, with events sometimes being influenced by the roll of the dice.”
“With Valiant, rather than having a dice roll randomly determine all aspects, such as your stats, you get to choose where your strengths and weaknesses lie by allocating a pool of points as you see fit. It’s a great mix of giving players meaningful choices but also letting dice rolls create a new adventure each time"
Do you feel the stories of the Dystopian Age are well-suited to be told through the medium of a gamebook?
“In a conventional novel, you have to decide on one set of events for the narrative to follow. However, with a gamebook, you can explore alternative scenarios. You can have a lot of fun with the world-building, allowing the reader to discover more about the world by taking an alternative route on a new playthrough through the adventure that they otherwise would have missed. It truly creates a sense of exploration.”
“The Dystopian Age is a wonderfully rich world, and gamebooks are a great way to experience it from a different perspective. With Dystopian Wars or Armoured Clash, you are offered a top-down view, whereas with a gamebook, the perspective shifts, allowing you to experience it from the bottom up. See what the cities of the world are like by walking through their streets. Find out how it feels to be in the middle of a sea battle from the deck of a battleship with the crew milling around you. Even visit previously unexplored parts of the setting, such as the Promethean Complexes of the Enlightened.”
How has working on Valiant differed from any other adventure gamebook you have previously worked on?
“For a start, the Dystopian Age setting was new to me! There was a lot more involvement from the Warcradle team, so it felt like we were developing a game together as much as it was me writing a gamebook.”
“As Agent Valiant is a spy, parts of the adventure were more investigative than previous adventures I have written, and it certainly wasn’t a case of moving from one battle to the next, whilst avoiding deadly traps.”
Do you have any advice for budding Agents eager to begin their journey through Valiant?
“Keep your wits about you, and keep an eye on those stats!”
“There isn’t an excessive number, although it was fun coming up with some of the endings! I would also say that the adventure is fair rather than difficult. Like I said above, you just need to keep your wits about you and keep an eye on your stats!”
Would you be able to tell us who your favourite character in Valiant is?
“I actually really enjoyed creating the character of Valiant. Although the reader is Valiant, and gets to shape them and decide what they do as they progress through the adventure, at the same time, you uncover snippets of the agent’s backstory to get a greater understanding of the character you embody.”
”I am going to be vague now to avoid spoilers, but I also enjoyed including a major character from the setting and exploring one of the possibly lesser-known factions that appear there. That’s all I can say for now.”
Questions from the Community
We’ve also posed some questions from our Discord community for Jon to answer. If you have any burning questions you want answered or want a place to talk about our games with like-minded people, make sure to join our Discord server.
The blog post mentioned that the main character in Valiant is being left more ambiguous to help readers identify with the character and have more of their own creative input. Is Valiant a name that is passed down to anyone taking up that particular position in the Crown’s intelligence, or is it purely a way for readers to express their own creativity?
“Whilst Valiant is a codename, and therefore it should very easily be passed from one agent to another, the Valiant of the gamebooks is the same person. However, details of their appearance and gender have been intentionally left out, precisely so the reader can envisage themselves as the character.”
How do you go about the organisation of so many different story paths a player can choose? Do you have a particular method, as I can imagine it could get chaotic quite quickly!
“I do have a method that I have honed over the last 32 years of writing adventure gamebooks. Flowcharts - that’s the key! Lots and lots of flowcharts. To explain my process in detail would take a long time. To keep things brief, the adventure is broken down into a Prologue and three Acts, each of which is divided into a number of Scenes. Before I start writing, I decide roughly how many sections will be in each Scene and use this as a guide for when I put fingers to keyboard. No plan ever remains unchanged, but at least in this way, I am able to keep things under control so that the adventure doesn’t exceed a reasonable section count.”
With the Dystopian Age being such a vast and varied setting, what was the process like for deciding what setting and characters to include? Did anything speak to you as a “I have to include this”?
“To begin with, I was given a brief that stated what Warcradle wanted in the adventure, such as multiple locations and a pre-credits scene, as in the Bond films, but I was given a lot of freedom in terms of what to include in the adventure itself. Having come up with a rough outline for the adventure, which suggested certain locations and, in turn, led to the inclusion of particular factions and, therefore, various troop types.”
”There were all sorts of things I wanted to include, but I couldn’t fit them all into this first adventure. But I have plans to include them in later adventures.”