Gamebooks / Choose Your Own Adventure / Fighting Fantasy

I was just nosing about and stumbled across inklewriter, which seems a very quick and easy way to get started writing a gamebook, and is the little brother to Ink which was used to adapt the Sorcery! gamebooks. However, there are a lot of options out there. So I thought I’d throw this one open to you all - what have you been using and how does it compare to other offerings.

Hey all! I basically grew up with Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf (playing them in secret in the classroom during classes). I always found it weirdly comforting how small the worlds were. A few hundred numbered passages, some dice rolls, a basic sword and backpack system, and yet a feeling of agency. I even think I feel more agency playing gamebooks than, say, a massive RPG like Baldur’s gate 2, I can’t quite explain why. I see game design leaning toward the endless with branching narratives and procedural systems and massive inventories. It’s just that to me, the more stuff you cram in, the more mechanical it feels sometimes. In the eighties and nineties, there was a kind of elegance to knowing that everything in the story was hand-written and that your choices, even though limited, mattered because Ian Livingstone (or some such pioneer) wrote them.

More than 40 years after its initial inception, the classic Fighting Fantasy book series is back as a Kickstarter campaign collection, owing to a book deal with Steve Jackson Games. Trailing an intimidating legacy behind it, this marks a milestone for the classic choose-your-own-adventure style RPG as it finally comes to the US, along with larger print and a host of original artwork to accompany it.

No good thing ever dies, Stephen King once wrote, and while he was talking about hope, the saying could well be applied to the hugely popular ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books from the 1980/1990s. That’s because one person has decided to revisit the magic of those books and old-school text-based RPGs, by inventing a bespoke e-ink handheld device for reading and gaming.

Not the whole game/comic, which is a superb creation from Al Ewing.

When interviewing a gamebook author, a document was mentioned by Joe Dever on writing gamebooks. I tried tracking it down on the internet, but couldn’t find it. Probably because it was written in 1990, distributed in a newsletter…

Lone Wolf – Adventures in Magnamund is an upcoming TTRPG which will set players in the world of Magnamund. Beware the Helghast!

Talk about a blast from gaming’s past, Steve Jackson Games announced that it will be rereleasing the Fighting Fantasy solo adventure series.

Gamebook writer Joe Dever is most famous for his Lone Wolf series, highly ranked among “choose-your-own adventure"-like branching novels with role-playing elements. But he also created a series I remembered only dimly from my 1980s British childhood: gamebooks that were fully-fledged multiplayer grid-based dungeon crawlers. Combat Heroes contained not only a page for facing each cardinal direction for every square in the dungeon, but variants of each showing every possible orientation and position of your adversary for each player-vs-player pair of books, including them hiding behind objects. There’s an elegant if intimidating system for determining which page to jump to. On top of that, somehow stuffed into the ~400 pages, each book includes a single-player quest replete with items to pick up and use.

“Dominion of Darkness” is an interactive fiction strategy/rpg text-based game in which the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness with the goal of conquering the world. He will carry out his plans by making various decisions. He will build his army and send it into battles, weave intrigues and deceptions, create secret spy networks and sectarian cults, recruit agents and commanders, corrupt representatives of Free Peoples and sow discord among them, collect magical artifacts and perform sinister plots. Note – one game takes about 1 hour, but the premise is that the game can be approached several times, each time making different decisions, getting different results and discovering something new.

Every now and again you come across something that stretches your brain in a new direction. Last week I stumbled on a magic trick of a Choose Your Own Adventure: Al Leonardi’s Ace of Aces, a paper computer running a first-person shooter, programmed in 1980—eleven years before Wolfenstein 3D, the “first” first-person shooter.

In our Lost Zelda Games article, we mentioned interviewing the gentleman behind the Nintendo Adventure Books. Reaching that point required an interesting detour - the books were credited to Clyde Bosco, Bill McCay, and Matt Wayne, all of whom seemed impossible to find online (the comic artist Matt Wayne is not the same person). However, we were able to find Russell Ginns, whose website mentions the books briefly. Unsure of what to expect, we made contact, hoping maybe he knew one of the authors or could point us in their direction. As it turns out, all the books were written under pseudonyms.

2024 marks the 45th anniversary of the Choose Your Own Adventure series’ inception. We’re celebrating here by ranking the classic Choose Your Own Adventure book covers of the 20th century and presenting you with the best of the best. If you’re due for a dose of nostalgia, keep scrolling to relive those rainy Saturday afternoons spent trying to find all 25 — or more — possible endings.

Originally published during the adventure gamebook boom of the 1980s, Dice Man has never been reprinted in its entirety before, but now the complete run of the popular magazine is presented in this massive collection.

Back in 1989, a game maker and author named Joe Dever had a wild idea. He had already set up a whole fantasy series set in the world of Magnamund from his Lone Wolf gamebook series. Ever the innovator, Dever concocted the idea of PhoneQuest. In PhoneQuest, people could dial a number on their phone and listen to, essentially, an interactive audio drama set in the Lone Wolf setting.

I feel like an idiot.

2018’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and 2019’s You vs. Wild marked a new phase for Netflix’s interactive shows, which started off with relatively simple interactive experiments for kids in 2017, designed to test the waters for actual Netflix games down the road. These Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories became some of Netflix’s more distinctive offerings for a short while, but they’re getting rarer as Netflix’s focus shifts toward skill tests like Cat Burglar and Trivia Quest.

[ sourced from The Verge ]

“We used to run Games Days in the early days,” he says. “By 1979, other traders were coming in… so we had several thousand people turning up to play games. Penguin took a stand to promote their book, Playing Politics. The editor, Geraldine Cook, was just fascinated by the enthusiasm of the people playing Dungeons & Dragons. She said to Steve and me, ‘Have you ever considered writing a book about the whole role-playing hobby?’

Ian Livingstone is the cofounder of Games Workshop, the legendary UK game company behind Warhammer 40,000. In his new book Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop, Livingstone recounts the company’s humble beginnings.

Forty years, 26 different languages, and 20 million books sold. Fighting Fantasy’s stats paint an impressive picture; figures that are as impressive as rolling a fabled 12-24-12 score for skill, stamina and luck before setting off to give some orcs a damn good thrashing. There’s much more to the series’ legacy to gaming than sheer numbers though.

Ace of Aces could be one of the most unique games you’ve seen in a long time. Using only two game books to simulate an entire aerial combat!

Dug out my gamebooks and dusted off the Fighting Fantasy ones. There should also be some FF magazines around, although they weren’t boxed with the books, so it might be a bit before they emerge.

A gamebook with BASIC programs to type in!

RISE OF THE ANCIENTS BK1: BRUIDD An unlikely invitation compels you to travel to the remote coastal town of Broodhaven to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime competition. There, you soon discover that nothing is as it seems. As you progress through each increasingly dangerous round of the contest, the secrets of the town and its noble families are slowly revealed. A hidden history conceals the truth of your own identity and the real reason why you were summoned here. That which sleeps awakens, and so it falls upon you to confront and overcome an ancient and unimaginable terror! Only you can unlock the past and break the dark cycle! A family legacy must be fulfilled. Destiny awaits! Can you stop the nobles of Broodhaven from unleashing a hideous chaos upon the world, or suffer a fate far worse than death?