Hi everyone, just wanted to provide an update as the campaign to fund The Battle Within hits 2 weeks left. That’s right, 6 Jun 16 - the end of the campaign - is coming up fast, so this is really the final hoo-rah to gain the necessary pre-orders to meet the funding goal. Please find a new video on the funding page, enjoy some pictures which are blasts from the past and thanks for all your support so far! Also, if you know anybody who’s sitting on the fence or just haven’t gotten around to pre-ordering, please let them know the end of the campaign is coming and their support would be much appreciated. Thanks again!
Alastair Luft
Earlier this week, Geek & Sundry posted a very cool article about how Dungeons & Dragons was successfully being used in social therapy. In The Punch Escrow, I predict that games will replace therapy as we know it in the future.
Here’s an excerpt from the chapter Hiraeth:
In 1979 Edward Packard published the first commercially successful novel in what would become a very popular 20th century series of books called “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.” In many ways this was a bridging of the worlds of interactive games and books (they didn’t have coms at the time, so they just wrote stuff down on paper), because the reader would play an active role in the narrative by choosing what the protagonist did next from a series of options. Rather delightfully, at least one option usually led to instant death.
"The Cave of Time" was the title of the first adventure published in that series. It was an imaginative story that took its readers on a journey through several real and fictional periods of time, from the end of the entire universe to the days of Camelot and the round table. The story’s mechanism for time travel was rather brilliantly not some fantastic device invented by a Vernian mad professor, but rather a series of tunnels that transported the reader through time, depending on which tunnel they chose.
Sometime in the early 22nd century, with the ubiquitousness of virtual reality and immersive gaming, a team comprised of cognitive neuroscientists and gaming technology experts created a psychoanalytical game based on The Cave Of Time. The virtual-reality game sought to help diagnose individuals with mental conditions, ideally with the aim of identifying such ailments before degeneration took effect. Using real-time analytics of eye movement, heart rate, neural activity, and facial expression, the games provided players with the opportunity to practice engaging in realistic social situations all in the context of a choose your own adventure scenario. The choices people made were helpful in establishing their mental state and whether they suffered from any psychological irregularities. The game itself eventually crossed over into the mainstream when modifications enabled players to edit content and endings. People would record their travels through the caves, personalizing outcomes. The caves became microcosms of their own universe and timelines.
After the Last War, many attempted to play out alternate strategies and endings to the war in The Cave of Time. Eventually it became common wisdom that the Last War would have taken place regardless of what was done in the immediate years preceding it, the prevailing common wisdom was that the clockwork which led to the war’s advent was put into action thousands of years ago. Still, to this day people still try to go back in time through the caves in search of answers.
Yahoo...finally I discovered Random.Org to solve my raffle picking strategy! This fine site generates random numbers between 1 and 100 which enabled me to remove the stress of trying to link my Grand Prize Draw to a UK lottery...which sadly only goes up to 60!
So, after some embarrassingly early selections of family members!!! The winner at number 16 in the last hundred orders is...drum roll...Kyle James. Contact me through DM or email me at touchwoodpicturesltd.com with a paypal address so I can speed $100 to your in tray.
Meanwhile, the first chapter of BRUGES BLOOD the follow up novel to LOUISIANA BLOOD is up for comment on INKSHARES. Also anybody that has a few credits can grab Louisiana Blood HERE at a reduced price. Happy weekend!
The short story "The Dread Harvester" has been completed for release, in tandem with fancy cover art! If you’re already a pre-order supporter of Seeking the Elephant, you can DM me for a copy of this story.
If you have YET to support Seeking the Elephant, then this is the DAY FOR YOU!
Going forward on all pre-orders:
"The Dread Harvester" short story is both a parallel tale & origin story for the antagonist of Seeking the Elephant, a mysterious woman who controls the empty wreckage of San Francisco after The Collapse. She may be Maggi Lopez’s most dangerous enemy, but how did she come to be that? What history does she share with Maggi? What price would Maggi pay for the mistakes of her youth? Pre-order Seeking the Elephant to get "The Dread Harvester," and find out TODAY!
