So yesterday I watched Neverwhere again, with the commentary on, listening to Neil Gaiman 'bibbling on' about it. Most of which seemed to consist of him bitching about the BBC in various ways and complaining about scenes that were cut and that they insisted on lighting for film but shooting for video.

Dude, chill, it's an excellent and beloved book and series and even if the locations - despite being real - ended up looking 'fake' it only added to the dream-like surreality of the series and, in my opinion for what it's worth, added to the overall feel of the series.

Amongst other details I hadn't necessarily been aware of before:

• The Velvets sleep together, hanging upside, in a hall somewhere and emerge at night, mysteriously, as though from out of nowhere, just like the real beautiful Goth Girls of London! (apart from the sleeping upside down in a hall bit).
• There's a whole Wizard of Oz theme going through it that I somehow completely missed - probably due to not being much of an Oz fan. Can I use this?
• The Black Friars names are all something to do with the colour black.
• The Ordeal was meant to end with a tube train full of dead bodies/ghosts of the previous failures - this DOES appear in the Graphic Novel.
• Islington was intended to be androgynous - again, this does happen in the Graphic Novel.
• Stockton is meant to be - 'Rupert Murdoch, only worse.'
• The Great Beast of London is meant to be the Great Boar of London, based on a real story - which I think is in Stephen Inwood's 'A History of London' - which is a fine book. I know I've read the real story somewhere.
• Hunter was meant to be more seductive, hidden strength, hidden power, that's why Richard mistakes her for a hooker. She was never meant to be so blatant.
• Iliaster - The homeless man who helps Richard to the Ratspeakers, was a noble, perhaps even a king, long ago.
• The Ratspeakers are meant to have much more rat-like traits, more like Anaesthesia confronting Ruislip, less like a Royal Shakespeare performance.
• They used The Clink a lot - worth looking into even though it's not actually mentioned.
• The Marquis de Carabas was meant to be bald and the character was written pretty much as Neil's take on Doctor Who would be. Patterson Joseph was definately robbed of the role!
• Neverwhere was almost entirely shot on location.

So, I re-watched the 1996 series the other day. It's amazing, and frightening, to think of how many years ago that was now. Overall, the film has held up well, in no small part due to being set amongst timeless craziness and homeless squalor that doesn't age so badly as high octane, high fashion series. The only thing that sets it in the past like that are the mobile phones which are, mercifully, only briefly seen. Seeing it again floods me with nostalgia, laying in bed watching the series with my girlfriend at the time, time spent in London at the Electric Ballroom or around Camden, which frankly often looked like The Floating Market at the time and many of the extras in the market scenes are people I recognise from those days!

The series takes a lot of flak for being like the Old Style Doctor Who, shaky sets and so on. Personally I found it still looked really good and the restrictions of budget and the type of cameras used gave it a sort of honest verisimilitude that makes it seem more real and helps me suspend my disbelief. Really the only thing that lets it down terrible are the fight scenes which are poorly cut and choreographed. Even though they're not meant to be high-flying wire-fu spectaculars and there's not many of them, they really do make poor Hunter look dappy.

I managed to find a few little details I missed before and which I'll now incorporate into the game A-Z, so it was useful and also reminded me what a tour-de-force the performances for Croup and Vandemar were. Now I need to re-watch it again with the commentary on. I also found myself a DVD player with a very good screen-capture capability. I'm not going to use screen caps for the new book, but it does give me the opportunity to really peruse the detail of certain scenes, which is very helpful.

Feel free to offer any suggests of places/people that might be found in London Below as some people have!

Reading the Graphic Novel
The Graphic Novel (Or trade paperback) version of Neverwhere is the collected edition of DC/Vertigo's comic series of the book by Mike Carey and Glenn Fabry. You can find it on Amazon HERE.

It's a strange thing to see a completely new visual take on something that was very much established by the TV series but, fortuntely, Fabry seems to manage to keep his tendency to make everyone over muscled somewhat in check. The overall vision is much more out-and-out fantastical than the TV series - unlimited by the BBC budget obviously - but it loses a little something in that I think, there's less of a feeling of weirdness at the edges, which is important to Neverwhere in my opinion, and it plunges more directly into a complete, Alice in Wonderland, otherspace.

Particularly jarring, though I don't know why, is the depiction of Croup and Vandemar who were so very well played in the TV series that it's hard to see them any other way, though the idea of a Dickensian Fagin and a giant Teddy Boy are great they just don't quite gel with C&V as written, for me.

This is all good stuff to see as this time around I've gone more with the idea of a reinterpretation, especially art-wise, so the approach in the Graphic Novel is a good, cautionary tale to see what's right and what's wrong.

All the characters, save those from London Above are much more exaggerated. Door looks like a goth-punk princess rather than a homeless girl and The Marquis is a (literally) black skinned dandy in 18th century finery.

There's some new bit characters, like Don, sniffing after Jessica, that could be incorporated in and some new ideas like Old Bailey claiming to have been trained by Egon Ronay (to stew Rook? I think not...). Islington is a proper, winged angel and very androgynous, which works well as an image and is more in keeping with ideas of angels, though an angel stripped of its wings is also effectual.

There's a half dozen extra hints, people and background details that can be worked up into something for the game, so re-reading that's been quite useful. Onto the book next and my DVD copy of the series should arrive in a day or two!

System
The idea behind imploding/exploding 1s and 6s is that they can account of the occasional bout of good or bad luck without over-dominating as criticals can in other systems, like Cyberpunk 2020. A professional, competent character can expect to succeed even if they roll a one, at least at a usual task, it'll take a string of bad luck to make them screw up and 6s allow anyone to - occasionally - have that string of heroic luck that makes all the difference. How this might work in practice could be:

Example One:
Sutter the Crouch Ender is trying to scramble away from one of The Shepherds who is pursuing him after a failed raid on the Shepherds to free one of the groups friends. Sutter tries to escape by wriggling through a sewer grate that he knows is too small for the Shepherd to follow. Normally the Games Master would let this just go ahead, but since he's being pursued and is under duress the GM demands a roll. Sutter is 'Small' and 'Wriggly' and is a 'Professional Tunnel Rat'. This gives him a bidding total of 5. The grate is 'Small' and ''Rusty' and 'Stinks', giving it a bidding total of 3. Sutter rolls a 6, another 6 (explodes) and a three. This gives him a roll total of 7 (6, +1 for the extra six, nothing for the three). The grate rolls 5. Sutter's total is 12, the grate's total is 8. Sutter's through the grate and away by a considerable margin.

Example Two:
Bork is a Bravo, he finds himself facing down a guard from Earl's Court. Bork is a 'Professional Bravo' and is 'Wiry', ''Lithe' and 'Deadly'. That gives him a bidding total of six. The Earl's Court Guard is a 'Professional Man at Arms' and it 'Tough as old boots' and 'Experienced'. He's also 'Old' which Bork bids against him. The Guard has a bidding total of 4. Bork rolls 1, 1 again and then six. This gives him a roll+bid total of 6, He scores one for his initial roll, takes away the 1 from the second and discards the six. The Earl's Court Guard rolls 4, getting a total of 8. Enough to beat Bork who's had a hard time of it in this fight so far.

Well, I just re-read through Neverwhere 2nd Edition to see what I had and where I need to go and I've laid out the skeleton of the new book. Basically that's what I do with any project, I start by outlining the chapters, sections, headings and subheadings that I predict are going to be there and create a skeleton upon which to hang the rest of the writing. Then, when I'm actually writing the piece, I go back and I fill in the gaps with material, bit by bit. It helps break up an otherwise daunting task into a lot of smaller, more managable jobs.

Frankly though, I'm in awe of myself seven years ago, the 2nd Edition of Neverwhere is bursting with creativity and, while it's rough around the edges and not necessarily clear enough in some places that creativity shines through. Kudos younger me, kudos! What definitely does need attention however, is the system.

Currently in the second edition a character is made up of a description of five adjectives and three skill levels, when you approach a task you tap into appropriate adjectives, apply a skill if appropriate, roll a d10 and add it on comparing against a difficulty/enemy to see if you win. That's pretty much the complete extent of it.

I want to change this a little and here's some of the rules changes I think I'll make.

• Characters are still defined by five adjectives and three skill levels but I'm going to account for adverbs and change the description of the skill levels. Adverbs describe multiples or strong traits, eg: 'Very strong' for two and something else like 'extremely' for three. Skills will come in Novice, Professional and Master capabilities and will be quite broad, more like professions I think.
• The dice will change to a d6 - being more accessible and 6s and 1s will 'implode' or 'explode'. If you roll a '1' you take that away from your total and roll again, continuing to roll and take away if you continue to get 1s. Sixes will go the other way, adding 6 each time (or possibly only adding one). This allows for consistency in characters that are really good at things, occasional nasty botches and also wild, luck-fuelled success.
• There'll be victory consequences and however much you beat a difficulty by lets you buy consequences. EG you might negate someone's traits by injuring or humiliating them, or give them new negative traits that can count against them.
• Characters will be able to take negative or 'mixed' traits at character creation.
• Static challenges will also be governed by words. EG: A wall might be 'Slippery' and 'smooth' and 'very tall'.

Let me know what you think.

Here we are then...

The push got a grand total of 176 new followers spread across Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and Livejournal which is pretty healthy going I reckon! I'm now committed to producing a new edition of Neverwhere and commissioning some additional art (Raven, I'll be in touch soonish about that when I have a more definite plan for the book).

I'd like to keep this communication and rapport going between the people who've decided to follow me and who want to see the new edition come about. I want your suggestions - not that I'll necessarily use them - things you'd like to see, features of London that you think I missed, streets and stations that would make good features of London Below, maybe ideas from your own games that worked well. I've already slightly altered the title (see above) based on the negative feedback from the previous post, but try and make any comments a little more helpful and directing, eh? 'It sucks' doesn't much help me out.

The first thing I need to do, as I discussed, is to re-read and re-watch Neverwhere in its various original forms, book, TV Series and Graphic Novel as well as re-reading the old version of the game (something I've already done, wincing at the terrible presentation, something that will improve greatly I assure you.

I'll keep you all updated here on a regular basis, but I can't guarantee that being a daily occurance as it looks like I'm still going to have a lot of freelancing on my plate and I'll have to squeeze Neverwhere in around that.

Some initial thoughts I have are:

• Working The London Eye, The Millenium Dome and The Gherkin in, as well as any other developments in London that have come about since 1996 (ye gods I'm old) when the TV series first came along. This would include parts of the Jubilee Line Extension and the extensions of the Docklands Light Railway.
• Adding in some adventure seeds and expanding many of the A-Z entries.
• The system will remain largely the same, maybe a bit more finesse for the multiples/skill levels and better knack definitions. The major difference will be in (optional!) more codified consequences and working out negative adjectives and their implication. Basically I'm thinking that when you win a challenge you can dictate certain levels of outcome depending how much you beat the target by.

First things first though, reading! In depth reading at that!

0. Preparation
It's obvious that I've hit the sufficient number of adds and followers that I wanted in order to meet the trigger to develop Neverwhere 3rd Edition, so between contracted work, that'll be the thing I work on next. In preparation for that I intend to a) Re-read the book, b) Re-watch the series, c) Read the graphic novel version. I'll also re-read the 2nd Edition of the game, it having been some years since we put it together.

1. Primarily for Laptop/Screen
Any form of print is going to result in direct profit for someone. So that's right out. The game can only be developed for home-printing and for giving away electronically. This means it's only going to be 72dpi - at least the elements that aren't scalable - and optimised for landscape at proportions approximate to US Letter, so it could still be printed. It'll be PDFed and, depending on time, interlinked/hotlinked between pages - may as well do that if it's primarily going to be electronic access.

2. Expanded rules - but not TOO expanded.
We were ahead of the game by quote a few years when we wrote Neverwhere with systems like PDQ, FATE and HeroQuest now using these narrative, descriptive, non-statistical terms for character definition. Neverwhere has a certain purity to it though and it's easy for non-gamers to get the idea of just describing characters. There's a purity and simplicity here that I want to preserve, without all the complications and add ons that - to one degree or another - swallow up the advantage of the simplicity in these other systems. Neverwhere does need some more (optional!) hard and fast rules though for governing things like combat, consequences and so on.

3. Rewrite/Rework/Remodel
Neverwhere 2nd Edition is basically sound as a book, it just needs a lot better presentation and a good going over to make sure of everything. A reorganisation, a bit of updating, a few additions and an improved system.

4. Unified Art
All art will be done by Raven Morrison for this edition to give it a unified look and feel. I'll be working on the layout etc to try and give it a 'found object' fanzine/manuscript look, in keeping with the background and idea of the book.

Way back in the mists of time I got permission from Red Hat on behalf of Mssrs Henry and Gaiman to make a non-profit version of an RPG based upon Neverwhere. This is the second version made and it will be replaced in due course with a third edition, but meanwhile, here's the link to download the pdf.