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Back in 2011, when I was working on trying to convert The Struggle for Empire into an RPG setting, I gave an illustrated talk about the evolution of military SF and this book's significance at the annual Eastercon SF convention.

I was going to incorporate it into the worldbook as an appendix but that never happened, so I've now decided to put it on line as a separate PDF. Please let me know if you spot any typos etc!

Victorian and Edwardian Military SF

While it was quite a lot of work I quite enjoyed doing the PDF conversion of FF4, and I think I've added some fun stuff to it. I'm now thinking about trying to do more, probably in the new year.

So far the game material that already exists in PDF form is the following:

Forgotten Futures Rules
Forgotten Futures Introductory Adventure - Taking the Tunnel. There was a problem with the link to the PDF which has now been fixed.
The Forgotten Futures Compendium
Forgotten Futures IV - The Carnacki Cylinders
Forgotten Futures X - The Tooth and Claw Role Playing Game - a licensed game based on Jo Walton's novel
Forgotten Futures XI - Perilous Planets - Stanley Weinbaum's SF

The ones I HAVEN'T done are the following:

Forgotten Futures I - The A.B.C. Files - Kipling's SF. The pro is that it's small and only has one adventure, and that I've already converted the fiction to PDF. The con is that it would need a disproportionate amount of work since I've made lots of changes to the rules in nearly 30 years, would probably want to rewrite the airship construction sequence completely, etc. etc.

Forgotten Futures II - The Log of the Astronef - George Griffith's interplanetary SF. Much bigger, but possibly needing fewer major changes.

Forgotten Futures III - George E. Challenger's Mysterious World. Based on The Lost World and the other Professor Challenger stories. Needs some work, and I really DON'T want to do the fiction part since The Land of Mist is DREADFUL... On the other hand I do have all of the illos from at least the first two novels now, and I think most of the rest will be in the Strand Magazine files at archive.org

Forgotten Futures V - Goodbye Piccadilly. Lots of adventures and settings with the common theme of the destruction of London or other changes to the place. Probably not difficult to convert, and it does feature a very silly giant monster attack. No, not actually Kitten Kong, but close...


Forgotten Futures VI - Victorian Villainy - Adventures with extra melodrama, including dramatic monologues and asides to the audience. And lots of villainy, of course. No especial problems except that there's a LOT of source material of varying quality and the conversion would be a bit of a pain.

Forgotten Futures VII - Tsar Wars - Based on George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution and Olga Romanoff or The Syren of the Skies, a tale of revolution sweeping the world and anarchy triumphant. Can't see any huge problems, and I may be able to reuse some of the original game art rather than having to redo everything.

Forgotten Futures VIII - Fables and Frolics - based on Five Children and It and other Nesbit fiction. I think that the art is now out of copyright (it wasn't when I originally wrote this so I had to roll my own)  and I'd have to hunt down the originals since I never scanned them, but again I think all of the relevant issues of The Strand Magazine are on line at Archive.org so that's not a huge problem.

Forgotten Futures IX - It's my own invention - a bit of a departure and more steampunk than most of the others, four game settings based on common SF / Scientific Romance ideas:
Flight and a war against the supernatural with The Queen's Own Aerial Hussars
Automata (useful, deadly, or whatever) and a global conspiracy with Swiss Movement
A race to the moon in The Space Bubble
and time travel, with the smallest possible time machine a 2400 ton steamship, in Past Out, Future Home
Nothing particularly difficult about this one, I think, and again the art may be reusable.

So if you were me, and bearing in mind that I'm not actually earning money from this, which would you tackle next?

I've reached a point with this now where I've either fixed everything or am blind to my own errors (probably the latter), so I'm going to go public with links to everything, if you spot any problems PLEASE let me know about them. I'll be putting links to this on my site and uploading the files to other sites in a week or so once I'm sure there are no huge problems.

One thing I'm aware of is that a few illustrations that have some white space may look slightly yellow. This is actually something that's gone wrong with the current releases of Adobe Acrobat, hopefully other PDF viewers won't have a problem. You may be able to fix it by messing around with Acrobat's accessibility settings. These are free downloads as usual, but there's a Paypal tip link on my site if anyone wants to use it - please include a message saying what the money is for! This has ended up as SIX files:

The Carnacki Cylinders
https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/FF4-Worldbook.pdf
The worldbook with some updates and minor second thoughts, lots of new art including pictures of all major characters and creatures, etc.

The Pentacle Files
https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/FF4-Adventures.pdf
The adventures with lots of new art and some revisions, including a new adventure by Alex Stewart.

Carnacki the Ghost Finder
https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/FF4-Carnacki.pdf
The original stories with illos from the magazine appearances of the first six stories. There's also a little chapbook I found in the British Library that is a mashup of the first four stories, plus a poem which has nothing to do with Carnacki, which Hodgson's American publishers printed in 1910 to register the copyright. It's basically a clip show of exciting bits and not incredibly coherent, but interesting if you like REALLY obscure literary curiosities. I've also put that on line as a separate file for the literary scholars:
https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/FF4-Chapbook.pdf

The Electric Pentacle Handbook
https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/FF4-Pentacle.pdf
A brief history of Carnacki's most iconic invention with notes on the technology, scenario ideas, some floor plans and an instruction manual which can be printed as a little booklet.

And finally, a floor plan for Carnacki's laboratory as described in The Hog - might be useful to someone.
https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/FF4-Laboratory.pdf

I've now uploaded an ePub version of The Struggle for Empire. Please let me know if you have any problems with it

https://forgottenfutures.co.uk/struggle/struggle.epub

It looks like I won't be able to add images from The Haunted Jarvee at present, if they exist at all. This is due to a series of mistakes...

Back when I originally wrote my Carnacki sourcebook I appear to have been given a 1912 date for this story (or misunderstood something and gave the wrong date). This turns out to be a mistake - The Premier Magazine, in which it appeared, was first published in 1912, and the date I gave was the first issue. Unfortunately the story was published posthumously, in March 1929.

The British Library's catalogue entry for this magazine gave me the impression that they had the full run on microfilm - this turns out to be incorrect, they only have February 1917 to December 1921. The catalogue has now been amended to make this clearer.

I think that back in the 1990s I was told that this had no illustrations - unfortunately I can't currently check, since I can't find a copy of the issue in question. But if someone out there has access to a magazine collection that includes it I would be VERY grateful if you could take a look and let me have photos or scans of any illustrations. If there is artwork, info on the artist would be useful.

Update: It looks like the Bodelian Library may have it - Periodical Issues 753761697 - in their closed stack. I have no idea how I can get to look at this; is there some way to request a scan or something?

Many thanks!

A couple of years ago I put illustrated versions of Kipling's With The Night Mail and As Easy as A.B.C. on line, with some notes on their publication and variations.

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff1/nm-abc.pdf

As Easy as A.B.C. was serialized over two issues of The London Magazine. At the time I said

The cover of the March [1912] issue was related to this story; unfortunately it was not included in the bound volume from which this was scanned. The illustration on the next page was originally a small photograph of a very battered copy of the magazine; I’ve corrected perspective etc. but couldn’t do much about its size. I don’t know if the April issue’s cover was relevant; any information would be welcome.

I've just found an image of the April issue's cover and it has nothing to do with Kipling, it's a bit of mawkish patriotism, a generic British soldier hugging the flag, so apologies to anyone who has actually tried to research this for me!



Later: Of course there is a sort of connection. Kipling wrote The Flag of Their Country (May 1899), one of the Stalky & Co. stories, which is basically an attack on unthinking flag-waving patriotism.

I've uploaded a backup, but at the moment it's only accessible as forgottenfutures.org - files that were accessed as forgottenfutures.com or forgottenfutures.co.uk are giving error messages. I'm still waiting to hear back from technical support about this, hopefully it's fixable.

 Since I'm EU based I need to post a GDPR statement for my web site etc:

I think this sums things up pretty well.

I've just sent refunds to everyone who didn't reply to my email re the end of Forgotten Futures. It'll be interesting to see what happens - I sent out 31 payments, I'm willing to bet at least 3 or 4 will be problematic.

and 20 minutes later one person has declined the payment and told me he wants the money to go to charity - apparently an earlier email to me vanished somewhow...

The copy of A Bid For Fortune I bought recently has a frontispiece missing from my previous copy, and it's absolutely wonderful:



They don't make villains like that any more, you just can't get the wood. (Stanley L Wood, the illustrator, in this case.)