#trying to turn a roleplay world into a proper book series but the main story won't be able to show all the work that my friends and I have

[magic-allity]

What sorts of things or aspects do you like to get to know about a character and their story? Like, if you were to make some sort of form or layout, what criteria or questions would you ask?

[pixelgrotto]

Schattenjäger Archives

The Gabriel Knight series is something special. I knew it when I played the first one, Sins of the Fathers, nearly 20 years ago and was so entranced by its story of a roguish mystery writer solving a conspiracy of voodoo murders that I was inspired to write a poem based on the game’s themes. (Here it is, dug up from the depths of my old PC for your viewing pleasure. It ain’t bad considering that I wrote it in the 8th grade.) I even considered applying to Tulane University for college so I could be in New Orleans, the site of the first game’s events, and I know from trawling through various message boards and YouTube channels that I’m not the only one who’s been bitten by the bug to see the scenes of Gabriel’s meanderings in person. This is a series of thrillers, with heavily researched plots similar to things that might’ve made The New York Times’ bestseller list back in 1996, and one of the main strengths that differentiated Gabriel Knight from other adventure games of the era - which were largely content with make-believe settings - were the real-world locations, from the most famous city in Louisiana to Bavaria to a tiny vale in France. Each of these locales seemed to come so vibrantly alive, teeming with delicious darkness just waiting to be expunged. 

Much of this is due to the effort of series matriarch Jane Jensen, a novelist who just so happened to fall into the adventure game business at Sierra in the 90s. Jane serves as a nice example of a video game creator who’s an actual writer and not just a designer trying to be a writer, and after helping the company produce the best King’s Quest game (KQVI), she won the right to make her own series. Gabriel Knight was the result, and the franchise would go on to span three games, plus a remake, detailing the adventures of the titular schattenjäger, or “shadow hunter,” as he tackles aspects of the supernatural across the world. 

I went and played through each game over the past month. (I also read the paperback novelizations that Jane wrote for games one and two - you can read my reviews on Goodreads here and here.) There are some warts, mostly due to your typical silly adventure game puzzles of the 90s that were designed to sell hint books, but by far and large, the writing and characterization that Jane put on display make up for these shortcomings. The first entry, Sins of the Fathers, intertwines a voodoo cult with an exploration of Gabriel’s German heritage and features perhaps the best implementation of Sierra’s classic “icon bar” interface. The second, The Beast Within, is nowadays known as one of the few good FMV titles to emerge from an era where the video game industry was frightfully obsessed with emulating Hollywood, and boasts an intricate plot that somehow manages to tie werewolves into the legends of the “mad” king of Bavaria, Ludwig II. The third and last game in the saga, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, is probably the one that’s aged the worse, with frumpy polygonal graphics, an odd interface that’s emblematic of how early 3D games just didn’t know what to do with their cameras, and some truly mind-numbing puzzles - including an infamous one involving cat fur and a mustache that got criticized for “killing” adventure games back in 1999. Nevertheless, it still manages to tell a cool tale of the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the blood of Jesus Christ and vampires, though the bloodsuckers are admittedly underdeveloped compared to the voodoo practitioners and werewolves of entries one and two. 

A Gabriel Knight 4 was never made, and it wasn’t due to the cat mustache puzzle. Adventure games simply fell out of favor at the dawn of the 2000s, and Sierra was eventually sold off and quite depressingly went out of business soon afterwards. Jane Jensen dabbled in the casual games industry for a while before mostly disappearing to work on books until 2014, when she used Kickstarter funds to produce a 20th Anniversary remake of Sins of the Fathers, hoping to summon up enough new interest in the schattenjäger to possibly revive the series for real. Despite solid reviews, the sales numbers of the remake didn’t quite translate into cold, hard cash (an unfortunate phenomenon that’s plagued every Gabriel Knight game, not just the 20th anniversary rehash), and it seems that barring a miracle, a proper GK4 will never materialize. Jane Jensen also appears content to write gay erotica under her pen name of Eli Easton for the time being, since novels about handsome men sexing each other apparently yield more consistent sales numbers. Ah well. 

There’s a lot to love in the Gabriel Knight franchise, from the aforementioned historical research that went into each game’s plot, to the Elton John-influenced soundtracks done by Jane’s husband Robert Holmes, to the fact that Gabriel was voiced by frickin’ Tim Curry in Sins of the Fathers and Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, to the highly likable Grace Nakimura, Gabriel’s Japanese American assistant who provides a foil to her occasionally dickish boss and also serves as one of the earliest and realest examples of a playable woman of color in interactive entertainment. (At one point in the third game, she receives an email from her overly anxious Asian mother about how she needs to get married or go back to graduate school, which is one of the most relatable things I’ve seen in a video game.) Fans of the series would go on to honor these themes in mysterious ways, and Wadjet Eye’s Blackwell games and Kathy Rain are prime examples of titles made by independent creators who were obviously heavily influenced by Jane Jensen’s work. On a slightly different personal level, even I’ve done my part in keeping the spirit alive - the main character I recently created to play in the tabletop Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game is essentially a 1920s version of Gabriel Knight with glasses. 

Prior to the release of the Sins of the Fathers remaster, Jane Jensen put out a short story called The Temptation that was eventually turned into an online comic. It details the beginning of a new adventure for Mr. Knight, loosely based off of concepts involving ghosts and witches that Jane was originally going to use for the fourth entry in the series. Gabriel appears more driven than ever in the span of its pages. Even if he never receives another game, the schattenjäger is still out there, keeping watch over Schloss Ritter, prepping for the next macabre mission into the heart of darkness. May he succeed, may he be reunited with Grace, and until that miracle occurs and Gabriel Knight 4 becomes a reality, perhaps this is the best possible way to remember him. 

Artwork and screenshots assembled from the promotional materials and respective MobyGames pages for each game. All courtesy of Sierra and Pinkerton Road Studio.