Marcus Rowland & Forgotten Futures

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MARCUS ROWLAND is a London-based laboratory technician and author of FORGOTTEN FUTURES, the Scientific Romance Role Playing Game, a tabletop RPG based on Victorian and Edwardian science fiction and fantasy. The game is published as HTML and graphics files, distributed as shareware. A spinoff project is the FORGOTTEN FUTURES CD-ROM, a growing collection of Victorian and Edwardian articles, stories and illustrations (last update July 2008). A few of these articles are on this site, see the links below. The latest release for the game is a new departure, based on a recent novel with a quasi-Victorian setting; FORGOTTEN FUTURES X: THE TOOTH AND CLAW ROLE PLAYING GAME, set in the world of Jo Walton's World Fantasy Award-winning novel and featuring dragons as player characters. Disks were sent to registered users at the end of July 2008, and it is available on CD-ROM now and will be on line at the end of August.

Added on September 21st 2008, THE FORGOTTEN FUTURES COMPENDIUM adds two new adventures by Marcus Rowland and Alex Stewart, and a collection of Victorian and Edwardian advertisements with adventure outlines.

From 29th July 2008 the fourth FORGOTTEN FUTURES CHARITY CD-ROM is available. This contains Forgotten Futures X plus 16mb of extra material, a sampler for the full FF CD-ROM, and two silent movies; Melies' A Voyage To The Moon / Le Voyage dans la Lune [1902] and the original Lost World with effects by Willis O'Brien. So far the Charity CD-ROMs and other projects have raised more than £1860 for cancer research.

Marcus is also the author of DIANA: WARRIOR PRINCESS, its supplement ELVIS: THE LEGENDARY TOURS, and THE ORIGINAL FLATLAND ROLE PLAYING GAME

Marcus was the regular games columnist for Odyssey Magazine throughout its life, but the magazine has now ceased publication. Some SF and fantasy published in shared world anthologies in the eighties is here

Marcus is single, and lives with 6000+ books, 1000+ games and supplements, and three pets, Sam Snake, Murphy and Cobb, corn snakes who have more sense than to get involved with role playing games or science fiction. He has occasionally been known to dabble in fanfiction, which can be found on several sites.

He doesn't usually talk about himself in the third person. See his livejournal if you want a more regular update on his life.

Old Articles Etc.
A few examples of the material on the Forgotten Futures CD-ROM - to save web site space and minimise downloading time some illustrations have been reduced in size:

• NEW! Futures Dictates of Fashion by W. Cade Gall.
  An article on the history of fashion from the late 19th century to the 1970s... published in 1893 and not perhaps terribly serious.
• NEW! An Episode of Flatland by Charles Hinton.
  A different sort of two-dimensional world, the first time a complete uncut version has been put on line. Included on the FF CD-ROM release 6 and possibly the next Flatland RPG supplement.
• NEW! D'Ordel's Pantechnicon is a wonderful satire on the Victorian and Edwardian magazines used as a source for Forgotten Futures - it includes rules for creating your own, a sample magazine, and more, and explains a LOT about illustrated magazines of the period.
• Thorne Smith's Fantasy Novels (all of them!)
  American readers should NOT follow this link since the stories are still in copyright in the USA. This will not be included on the FF CD-ROM.
• Pharos the Egyptian by Guy Boothby
• The River of Death by Fred M. White - Now complete! (818k)
• The Vickers Airship Catalogue - A catalogue produced circa 1923 with plans and illustrations (1.3 mb)
• Saved From Hydrophobia by E. H. Julian - An account of the disease and Pasteur's treatment. (343k)
• Perpetual Motion Seekers (anon) - describing several strange inventions. (1 mb)
• Snake Charming by Mark Lane - A visit to a snake-charming show. (526k)
• Zig-Zags At The Zoo by By Arthur Morrison and J.A. Shepherd - A humorous article on snakes at the London Zoo. (722k)
• Victorian Colour 3D Photography! (356k)
• Victorian Fax Machines! (506k)
• Nikola Tesla! (965k)
• Baron Munchausen! (2 mb including illustrations)
• A Transatlantic Tunnel (hurrah!) and Jules Verne (sort of)... (155k)
• New Kings on Old Thrones, an article on "true kings" of the Jacobite "monarchy" and other claimants to royalty. (152k)
• My Strange Pets and Other Memories of Country Life, a detailed account of a Victorian Scots farmer and menagerie-owner's life in the 19th and early 20th century. (550k)
• What The World May Come To, a serious article proving that the earth will eventually be pyramid-shaped! (121k)
• My School Days by Edith Nesbit; a memoir originally serialised in 1896-7, I'm not sure if it ever appeared elsewhere, which sheds some interesting light on her fiction. (279k)

Books in Microsoft Reader e-book format
I've been experimenting with this format. At the moment it seems too limited for the main Forgotten Futures documents, all of which include graphics larger than the maximum it allows, so I'm converting a few books that have few or no illustrations, are short enough for the conversion to work, and have aroused some interest in their HTML versions. There should be a few more of these e-books on the next release of the FF CD-ROM, but all material will also be present in HTML versions.

• The Poison Belt by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (149k).
  Note: This is my first attempt at converting Forgotten Futures source material to this format; see Forgotten Futures III for an HTML version.
• Mr. Justice Raffles by E. W. Hornung (219k).
  A neglected novel featuring Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. Note that this book contains racial stereotyping which modern readers may find offensive. An HTML version is on the FF CD-ROM
• The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (198k).
  The classic nineteenth century hidden civilisation novel, in which an underground explorer discovers a buried Utopia. An HTML version is on the FF CD-ROM

See some favourite links

"We are all victims of this slime. They... ...fill our mailboxes with gibberish that would get them indicted if people had time to press charges" [Hunter S. Thompson predicts junk e-mail, 1985 (from Generation of Swine)]