Solo gamebooks often struggle to escape the nostalgic gravity of 1980s paperbacks, but independent imprint Hammerforge Chronicles proved there is real contemporary demand when their debut, Legion of the Necromancer, was fully funded within 24 hours in late 2025. Founded by writer James Gill and illustrator James Isaacs, both former editorial staffers at Metal Hammer, the duo has returned to crowdfunding with Tentacles of the Void. Swapping gothic necromancy for the claustrophobic corridors of a derelict starship, their second 400-section solo adventure met its initial £3,000 target in just six hours.
Set aboard the dying research vessel Fedai Alvarez, Tentacles of the Void pulls inspiration from classic Fighting Fantasy, Alien, and Space Hulk. Players wake from cryosleep into a hostile alien infestation, managing dwindling resources, solving structural puzzles, and rolling through tactical combat encounters without a human Game Master to temper the threat. We caught up with Gill and Isaacs to discuss plotting non-linear branching paths in presentation software, the logistics of hand-inked sci-fi illustration, and why modern gamebook design needs fewer arbitrary sudden-death traps.
From twenty-four hours to six, Tentacles of the Void smashed its funding goal in record time compared to Legion of the Necromancer. What specific operational changes or audience momentum shifted between your first campaign and this launch to accelerate that velocity?
James Gill:
I think the key is brand – our reputation – albeit a nascent one. It’s our second book, rather than our first, and the audience now knows us and, more importantly, trusts us. We didn’t necessarily change that much operationally.
If somebody bought Legion of the Necromancer and liked it, then pledging for the next book is a relatively easy decision. Equally, there will have been people who were interested in the first campaign but were perhaps sitting on the fence because we were new and unproven. Well, we’ve now made a book, delivered it and people seem to like it.
There’s also a much greater awareness of Hammerforge Chronicles now. We’ve had a year of selling books, meeting people at conventions, talking to gamebook fans and generally getting ourselves out there. So I think we’re reaching more people.
Of course, there are a lot of unknowns. We’re a year on, we’re making science fiction rather than fantasy, which might appeal to a slightly different audience, and the wider economic and geopolitical situation has changed. Tariffs, elections, consumer confidence and all those things might have an impact, and it’s impossible to isolate them.
We’ve certainly learned things from the first campaign, particularly about where our audience is. But really, I think it comes down to the fact that people know us now. If they liked the first one, it’s much easier to say, “Oh, these guys. I liked their first book. I’m in.”
Moving from the dark fantasy realm of Aelrathia in Legion of the Necromancer to the dying spaceship Fedai Alvarez in Tentacles of the Void is a sharp thematic pivot. How did your writing and design processes need to adapt when transitioning from gothic swords-and-sorcery to claustrophobic sci-fi horror?
James Gill:
The actual writing process didn’t necessarily change, but the tone and language certainly did.
With Legion, I was writing in this sort of Lovecraftian, Tolkienesque universe, where the language wants to feel a little more old-worldly. Whereas sci-fi horror, in my mind, has the tone of the movie Aliens. It’s hard-bitten, hard-boiled, action-oriented, quite military and quite American.
In terms of the design process, Legion was my first gamebook, so I didn’t really know what I was doing! Other than trying to work out what I loved about the original Fighting Fantasy books and make our own version of that. Of course, inspiration strikes and things change, so it wasn’t a straight copy.
With Tentacles, I understood a lot more about plot and structure, about burying the things the player will need later, like codes and information, within the story. I was able to introduce a few more mechanics and make the gameplay a little more intricate, although it’s still fairly straightforward by modern standards.
I think it’s about control. When you do something for the first time, you’re working it out as you go along. Then people play it, respond to it and you start to understand which buttons you’re pushing. You can think, “Oh, OK, I need to lean a bit more into this, or a bit more into that.”
I’m much more narrative-led than mechanics-led. There are still codes, puzzles, items to collect and decisions to make, of course, but I always say to people at events that I want our gamebooks to feel like a novel that you’re steering, rather than a game in a book. That’s really what I’m trying to achieve.
James Isaacs:
For me, the main difference was moving on from a more natural, earthy style of illustration within the fantasy world to a more architectural style of illustration which comes from being inside a spaceship. I basically gorged myself on Akira, trying to find a way to use clean lines and perspective in an exciting way.
Solo gamebooks live or die by their pacing and branching architecture across 400 reference sections. What mapping tools do you use to track dead ends, backtracking fatigue, and resource economy so the player feels tested rather than trapped?
James Gill:
I use Google Slides, which is essentially like PowerPoint, to map everything out.
I’ll usually divide the story into chunks, which might be parts of the mission or different zones, and then build a hierarchy. So there’s the whole story arc, then perhaps an episodic arc within that, then the smaller individual nodes and encounters.
I’ll colour-code the different types of interaction, what’s nestled within another area and how the sections connect. I’ll also use little symbols and arrows to show where a code is needed, where a particular piece of equipment comes into play or how something relates to another part of the story.
That’s important because you want a good rhythm of finding things that become useful later on.
In terms of resource economy, pacing and fatigue, I think the most important thing is playtesting.
Our beta readers are absolutely invaluable because, having designed the story, I know exactly where everything is. Even when I try to take a random route through the adventure, I’m still making decisions based on knowledge I already have.
A beta reader doesn’t have that knowledge. So it’s incredibly useful when somebody comes back and says, “Well, I couldn’t get past this bit because I didn’t have enough resources.” And I’m thinking, “Well, you’re supposed to go and get those two meals from over there so you can regenerate your strength.” But they don’t know that! So their insights are essential.
There’s also something interesting about the perceived size of the adventure. Looking at my map, I know it isn’t some vast, sprawling open-world game. There’s a relatively contained structure beneath it, but for the player discovering everything for the first time, it can feel enormous.
My analogy would be that if I blindfolded you, put you in a car and drove you around the same few streets for two hours, you’d probably think you’d travelled miles. But actually you’d just been going around a relatively small area.
I think gamebooks can work a bit like that. You don’t necessarily need an enormous physical footprint to create a convincing sense of exploration.
Tentacles has a central route through the adventure, but there are lots of choices about how you travel along it, what you discover and how you prepare yourself.
That’s where a lot of the enjoyment comes from.
In a traditional roleplaying game, a Game Master calibrates dread, but in a solo gamebook, the mechanics must do all the heavy lifting. How do the dice-based combat and cryosleep resource loops simulate the mechanical dread found in inspirations like Alien and Space Hulk?
James Gill:
I think there’s a particular kind of dread that comes from rolling dice, and that’s true of pretty much every Fighting Fantasy book. The moment something is out of your hands, you’ve introduced another level of tension because now it’s down to luck. But I think the real jeopardy comes from what’s at stake.
If you’re rolling a die to see whether you’ve found something useful on the floor, that’s one level of jeopardy. If you’re rolling against a huge adversary, or you’ve been stabbed by something and you’re trying to find out whether you’ve been poisoned, that’s something else entirely.
Personally, I don’t particularly like too many sudden deaths based purely on dice rolls. I prefer to give the player some agency, or at least a chance to recover from mistakes. Although we all remember keeping a finger in the previous reference when we played Fighting Fantasy, just in case something dreadful happened!
Having said all that, for me the real dread comes from the writing and the story and, of course, James’ art.
If you’re trapped aboard a dying spaceship, surrounded by horrible, Tyranid-like aliens and constantly close to death, then it’s the writing that has to bring that situation to life.
I always felt that some of the original Fighting Fantasy adventures had relatively thin passages, even when something absolutely horrific was happening. The encounter might be brilliant, but you’d sometimes only get a few lines describing it.
I wanted to spend more time on the atmosphere, the characters and the experience of actually being there.
The mechanics create jeopardy, certainly. But I think good writing can create just as much dread.
James Isaacs illustrates everything by hand. How do you maintain a punishing 400-section production schedule without compromising the dense, gothic, and industrial art style that defines the physical books?
James Gill:
Well, it takes about a year!
The first book took us roughly a year and the second has taken a bit longer. But I wouldn’t really describe the schedule as punishing.
We’re both completely obsessed with making these books. I’ll spend long stretches writing at the weekend and try to get a couple of hours in during the week. James does much the same with the illustrations. It’s something we fit around our working lives, and it takes as long as it takes.
James Isaacs:
I don’t think we could make these books any other way. We both really lose ourselves in the process; Gill obviously with the construction of the story, gameplay and cool ways to die, and I obsess over trying to bring the best parts of the adventure to life in ink. It takes me about one full day to complete a single-page illustration, but there’s always a lot of to-and-fro with Gill, checking in on details with simple pencil sketches before I start on the final image.
So yeah, it can be quite time-consuming to make these books, but we never want to compromise on quality in anything we do. And we’ve been very lucky with the success of the books so far, so fingers crossed that we can, in time, devote more of our daily lives to making more. Hopefully more than one a year!
The industry is torn between ultra-budget zines and luxury collector items, as shown by your A5 folio hardbacks with fabric finishes and foil covers. Where does Hammerforge position itself in that debate, and how do material quality choices affect fulfilment logistics for a small team?
James Gill:
For us, it’s not really a moral debate about cheap books versus expensive books.
This is our hobby, and in our day jobs we all have to compromise, work for clients and answer to bosses. Hammerforge is one of the few areas of our lives where we don’t have a boss. We can do exactly what we like, which is to create beautiful, brilliant, fun things that we’d love to own ourselves.
Pretentious as it might sound, that’s our guiding principle. We’re certainly not going to build a second job where we have to compromise and make things we wouldn’t buy ourselves.
We don’t make a great deal of money from Hammerforge, and what money we do make we want to spend on doing really cool things.
Because it’s lovely when somebody comes up to us at an event, or sends an email, and says they absolutely love the illustrations, or the paper stock, or even the free pencil we put in with the books. We’ve had people comment on what a nice pencil it is, with a decent rubber on the end! And I love that.
The production and fulfilment side obviously has to work. We have printing costs, packaging, international postage and all the other practical things involved in producing physical books. We’ve learned quite a lot about those things over the last year.
But creatively, we’re guided by what we’d love to make and own.
And once you’re freed from the pressure of trying to make lots of money, it’s amazing how much more fun you can have, and how many beautiful things you’re prepared to create for people.
Having spent years in the trenches of print music journalism with Metal Hammer, how has the contraction of traditional print media informed your approach to community-funded publishing and physical artefact production?
James Gill:
I wouldn’t say the contraction of print media has particularly influenced our approach. It’s more the experience of working in publishing itself.
James, in particular, is a master print designer and illustrator. He’s spent years working in professional publishing, and that means we’re able to bring a level of production knowledge and visual expertise to the finished books that we’re very fortunate to have.
That sounds like bragging, but it’s simply our background. I’m not a professional game designer, for example. I can’t claim to bring some incredibly complex, innovative system of mechanics to gamebooks. What I can bring is my writing and storytelling experience, and James brings his extraordinary ability to make things look beautiful. So we lean into those strengths.
There’s certainly a nostalgia element to the whole thing, too. We’ve both spent years surrounded by magazines, books, artwork and printed things. And we’ve seen how much that world has changed, with print declining in all sorts of areas.
Perhaps that makes the physical object feel even more special.
But fundamentally, I think it’s our professional experience of making things for print, combined with a love of those things, that’s shaped Hammerforge.
With thousands of tabletop projects fighting for backer attention on Kickstarter every month, what does an independent publisher have to do differently in 2026 to cut through the noise and retain backer trust?
James Gill:
It’s difficult to say, but personally I think it’s about people. They want to know who you are, what’s your story and why you’re doing it. If somebody likes sci-fi gamebooks, then hopefully they’ll be interested in what we’re making. But why choose ours over somebody else’s? Why trust us?
I think James and I try to put ourselves into the mix a bit.
We’re two nerdy, middle-aged blokes making videos, talking to each other about our books, showing people the artwork and generally getting a bit overexcited about the things we’re creating.
We’re real human beings. We’re not bots. There’s no AI involved in creating our books, and I think people appreciate that. They can see the enthusiasm and the work that’s gone into them.
I think people also like feeling part of something.
I’m a huge music fan, and I’ve always loved watching interviews with musicians, seeing them on television or reading about how they made their records. You get to know a little about the people behind the thing you love. So we wanted to do something similar with Hammerforge.
And we’re also very keen on providing genuinely good customer service. We don’t get hundreds of orders coming through the website every day, so when somebody orders a book or sends us an email, it’s usually one of us who replies. There’s no giant customer-service machine or chatbot. You get us.
And, frankly, my fragile little ego loves it when somebody buys a book and I get to send them a message, perhaps saying something completely random.
And, of course, having successfully made and delivered our first book makes it easier for people to trust us with the second.
Early readers praised Legion of the Necromancer for its novel restart-point mechanic and path variety. How do you approach the psychology of failure in a solo gamebook so that dying doesn’t feel like a punishment, but an invitation to explore a different branch?
James Gill:
My starting point is that I never particularly enjoyed sudden deaths in the original Fighting Fantasy books.
Although, like everybody else, I always kept a finger in the previous reference, so it didn’t necessarily matter too much!
Of course, you need the possibility of death. That’s what creates jeopardy and makes you concentrate a bit harder. But I think it’s important to strike a balance. There should be some sort of punishment, if you like, for making a bad decision or having bad luck.
The problem with dying is that the whole thing is over. And that can be incredibly frustrating when you’ve invested a lot of time in your adventure, made all these decisions, collected equipment and worked your way through the story.
For some people, the idea of having to go right back to the beginning means they’ll simply put the book down and think, “Oh, I’ll do that another time.” And then they might never pick it up again.
So I like the idea of giving people a downside or a penalty for getting something wrong, while allowing them to carry on where possible.
That’s something I’ve tried to do more with Tentacles.
Having said that, I do think sudden deaths have their place. They’re an important part of the jeopardy. And particularly towards the end of the adventure, when you’re approaching the final challenges, the stakes should be getting higher.
That’s where the really horrible consequences belong.
You operate as a strict two-person publishing unit. How do editorial disagreements get resolved when the writer and the illustrator view a scene’s atmosphere through completely different lenses?
James Gill:
We have a collaborative yet compartmentalised decision-making structure. We obviously talk about each other’s work, share ideas and make suggestions. But ultimately James gets to make all the visual decisions and I get to make the writing decisions.
James Isaacs:
I think because both the art and the writing feed off each other, we have this amazing symbiotic thing going on. I always check in with Gill at the start of every illustration, and he runs any big story or gameplay changes past me just so we’re both aware of what’s going on. I think it’s the only way to make a successful book.
Beyond hitting funding targets and clearing fulfilment logistics, what does a genuinely successful gamebook look like to you creatively?
James Gill:
Two things, really.
The first is people saying they love the illustrations. I can’t take any credit for those, obviously, but James’s talent is astonishing.
When we were making the first book, he’d sometimes ask me what needed illustrating next, and I’d say something like, “Well, it’s a sort of Cthulhu statue that’s coming alive. Or is it coming alive?”
And then three days later I’d get this absolutely astonishing piece of artwork appearing in WhatsApp.
That feeling I got when I first saw it? That’s what we want other people to experience.
And when people come up to our stand at events, pick up a book, start leafing through it and become completely entranced by the pen-and-ink drawings, that’s creative success as far as I’m concerned.
The second thing is the story itself.
Of course, it’s lovely when somebody says, “That was a great quest.” That’s always nice to hear. But what I particularly enjoy is when somebody mentions something specific. Perhaps they thought the dialogue was great, or they really liked a particular character. Maybe they found the maze really tricky, or they were genuinely sad when somebody died.
I love hearing those things because I’m a story person first and foremost. When somebody picks up on a little detail, remembers a character or a particular moment from the adventure, that means an enormous amount. That’s what creative success looks like to me.
Now that Tentacles of the Void is out on Kickstarter alongside its companion novelisation, Escape from the Fedai Alvarez, what is next on the horizon for Hammerforge Chronicles, and where can our readers find the campaign to back your work?
James Gill:
Well, I’ve already completed a first draft of book three.
It’s a little more ambitious in terms of the mechanics, the story and how those two things work together, so there’s quite a lot still to do. Balancing everything is going to take some work.
We’re also talking about other gamebooks, some of which would take us back to Aelrathia, the world of Legion of the Necromancer, while others might explore completely different genres.
I think that’s part of the fun for us, really. We love gamebooks and there are so many different worlds, genres and stories you can explore through the format. So we’ll keep thinking about what we’d enjoy making and, hopefully, what other people would enjoy playing.
In the meantime, Tentacles of the Void is live on Kickstarter, along with the companion novel, Escape from the Fedai Alvarez.
We’ve got the standard paperback, a rather lovely green-foil hardback, digital editions and a whole collection of other goodies, including art cards and prints.
And we’d absolutely love people to come and have a look.
If you’re a fan of Fighting Fantasy, Alien, Space Hulk or just the idea of making horrible decisions aboard a dying spaceship, hopefully you’ll find something to enjoy.
And thanks to everyone who’s supported us so far. It’s because of you that we get to keep making these ridiculous things.
The campaign for Tentacles of the Void is currently live on Kickstarter, offering standard paperback and premium foil-embossed hardback editions alongside the companion novella Escape from the Fedai Alvarez. For tabletop hobbyists seeking a solo experience that prioritises hand-drawn craft and fair mechanical tension over cheap instant-death traps, the corridors of the Fedai Alvarez look ready to claim your dice.
Quick Links
- Kickstarter: Tentacles of the Void
