Fighting Fantasy is the gamebook series with many of those 'one true path' things, Lone Wolf with the disciplines, etc tended to be a little more forgiving, combat balance notwithstanding in some books.

Yeah, there's several books with multiple paths to success and only a handful with big fail states; Book 2 is actually one of those which is worse about it, while on the other hand, book 5, "Shadow on the Sands", is probably the best gamebook I've ever read and one with a multitude of possible roads to success, including accounting for the possibility of different abilities and inventories between people who started playing in that book and those who accumulated stuff from playing the previous four, and it only kills you when you make a genuine mistake in how you handle things. Lone Wolf as a series is probably better than most others, although outside of the Lone Wolf I've only read a limited amount of gamebooks, so maybe one of our other players has more knowledge of the genre might be willing to offer a more nuanced perspective on it?

Still traumatised from playing through "Creature of Havoc"...  (O.o)'

I actually enjoyed that one :) Funny mentioning that one after speaking of dice rolling rather than getting ot chose what your character does though :p


Lair of the Sorcerer or whatever it was called (book 24) was the one that really got me. Even when you get all the items to line up, even with the best skill score... the actual fight is still a case of 'lose two combat rounds with the boss villain and instantly die'. It's like... dice smashingly unfair.


The Deathtrap Dungeon books had as part of the game of the dungeon that you were looking for items, so could get to the end then fail because you didn't find them all. But that seemed logical, because it was actually a game (within a game).

The one that made no sense was the first Port Blacksand book (City of Thieves?) where you haave to collect three items to kill the bad guy. Fail, and game over. Except.... thenwhen you go to get the guy, your wisard advisor is all 'wait, I made a mistake, you only need two of them...not sure which, good luck!'. So a) you could have had the right two ingredients to start with, but are stopped from trying, and b) you don't know which two, there are no clues anywhere about this, so literally even if you fought to get all three for a while first, when you finally get to the end of the book you have a literal 33% chance of winning, as it's a pure guess!


Speaking of Port Blacksand, the newest book they released (Port of Periol or something like that) is kinda an interesting 'walk around everywhere from old books' except to cram in all that nostalgia, there's no real decision making. Every decision where you make the wrong turning is basically instant death, and some battles just have the unfair 'not have the right item, then die' to make them hard. I think some of the decisions you can be advised about ahead of time, but it's still pretty brutal one true path!

One of the few gamebooks I read was Avenger! from the Way of the Tiger series; that one was interesting in that there definitely were portions where "you either have this item or you die", or fights were "you don't have this item/ability, game over", BUT on the other hand, there were always at least two alternative paths to avoid those situations - and most of the time, the game provided indications on what the right path was, although they required paying extremely careful attention to what happened. And of course, while the various fights in the game were mostly up to die rolls (and I believe that only two were mandatory, and every other one was optional), the final fight was unique in that you had to choose which techniques to use against your opponent round by round, and needed to string up a logical progression (based on what was known of the villain) to win the battle. It was very interesting.

I think Dusk Rat would probably like the "Virtual Reality" series more; that one has very good reviews across the various adventures which are all independent from each other, although I only personally played one of the lot (Twist of Fate), so, while I quite liked that one, I can't vouch for the rest. The series' claim to fame was that it had no die rolls at all, using only your decisions and the disciplines you picked at the beginning to determine outcomes; so if you didn't take a skill that made you good in a fight, you better avoid putting yourself in situation where you had to fight, and so on. Twist of Fate had something like four different paths to choose from and, interestingly, two different "successful" endings. I replayed that one a lot.

Fabled Lands was an interesting series in that it was a sort of experiment in "freeform exploration" gamebook, with each numbered section being a location rather than an event, and each book being a wider region of the world; it was interesting, but by its very nature it resulted in a bit of a scattershot structure, and the series was never finished so a number of world region were missing and thus impossible to explore. I'm not sure I'd recommend it absolutely, but it's a curiosity if nothing else, although it pretty much confirms that location based exploration is better done with videogames, rather than gamebooks, whose real strength (however rarely it's actually realized) is in the ability to create multiple-path stories much more easily.

On that note, not sure if I mentioned it, but "Magium" is a phone App (although I believe there's a PC version as well) that is basically a virtual gamebook, and also one with no die rolling, several very divergent path (as in, it's possible to get party members killed in a book, and then the following book accounts for that and offers hugely different paths depending on who is still alive), and is very well-written, although still currently unfinished (the author releases a new chapter every few months, every books has about eleven chapters, and the author stated there's still at least two books to go after the current one is over). So, that's also one where bad things only happen based on your choices, which again is probably the best approach to a gamebook, since randomness is another of those things that videogames have a much easier time implementing.
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:31, Mon 22 Feb 2021.

I've... actually taken up collecting gamebooks and the like- it's amazing what you used to be able to find at garage/yard sales and flea markets before everything went to blazes.

Among my collection (alongside the piles of Choose Your Own Adventure and Time Machine) and on my tablet, there are a few I have to give a shoutout to because they've been worth a lot of replays:

- I've been rummaging through Steve Jackson's 'Sorcery!' series, even though I have little to no idea as to what I'm doing with it.  All I know is that it's a lot of fun to try and muddle through, even if I can't seem to figure out how to progress in it.

- Choice of Games puts out a good number of 'books' on mobile, and they've since expanded to Steam as well.  There are lots of possibilities out there, but I've had the most fun with the first three books of the Heroes' Rise set (The Prodigy, The Hero Project, Herofall).  This is a publisher where you'll have to do a little bit of digging because they have so much to play- they even have licensed books in some White Wolf properties.  There's 113 of their books on Steam, so... at least there's a lot?  You might pay from $3 to $8 for each, but honestly, I've not really regretted anything off their list yet.  Plus: you can share saves between PC and mobile versions.

- Dungeons and Dragons put out two kinds of gamebooks in the 80s- there's the usual CYOA with a D&D theme, but there's also a pile of gamebooks much like Lone Wolf, only each is a self-contained, individual adventure run on a variant of what I think is first or second-edition D&D.  It's a simple enough system, but it's got enough meat to kill an afternoon.

- There were a few gamebooks set in the Lord of the Rings universe- I have a pair of them, and they're pretty good for being that old.  They even come with regular and advanced rulesets if you want a challenge.

There's a couple of games that kind of straddle the line between gamebook and RPG, as well- I can point you in the direction of a few of those, too, if you want.

In reply to Rain Feather (msg # 170):

That brings back memories, as well as a bit of envy - "The Shamutanti Hills" is the first gamebook I ever played, but I was never able to find the others, and in general gamebook never had as much of a market here, so they are difficult to find.

You ever play "Hyperspace"?
That...  Was...  Weird!  Hehe.

Yeah, Creature of Havoc was ok once you figured out how to decode the language thing, and get into the habit of shifting page references at the right times.
It had a lot of dead-end paths though, but it wasn't like: "You made the wrong choice, you're dead!  Your life and quest end here!"
It often just continued normally, as if you'd made the right choice, and even offered you more choices.  Lulling you into a false sense of security.  Except that, from that point on, EVERY choice you'd pick would eventually lead to your horrible death!  hehe.

And that bit in the final area was just evil.  You wander into the wrong room, and the door locks behind you.  Also you have to fight an enemy in there.  You win the fight, no problem, you think.
So you might explore the room, looking for shinies...  Then the enemy you just killed regenerates and jumps you.  So you fight it again!  You win again, and think, ok, that was weird, I'd better get out of here.  So you examine the door that locked behind you.  Before you can figure out how to open it, the enemy gets up and attacks you again!
Yep, you're basically looped into fighting this thing again and again and again for eternity, or until you die, or just give up, hehe.

But yeah, it was certainly an interesting challenge, very different from the usual "go through a dungeon, kill stuff, get shiny things, ???, profit!" of other Fighting Fantasy books.

I've never really been into gamebooks. I've played one or two and I've seen a couple played via livestream but that's about it. I'd rather have more choice in the adventure beyond "You see a monster and decide to charge at it before it sees you. If you have <item> turn to page X. If you don't, turn to page Y" and it's like...yeah, but what if I don't want to charge the monster? What if I want to hide in a tree and wait for it to go away, or maybe just retreat back the way I came and go somewhere else? Or maybe I want to try and use my rope to set up a trap for it. Or maybe throw that vial of poison I picked up at that other place. But the game is like "No, you must only take these options and if you pick the wrong one, you are dead...but we're probably not gonna tell you which is actually the wrong one so haha good luck with that". I realise some are probably better about it than others and actually do give you some kind of chance, but eh...I'd rather play a game where I'm more in control of my character. Otherwise I'm not playing the game, but more being played by the game, and any choice is out of my hands. If my character's entire survival comes down to something I have to do (eg roll a specific number on a die), then I'm not sure what the point is. I might as well be "roleplaying" as an emotionless, barely-sentient golem/robot thing ;).

If you liked "Tomb of Horrors", you'll probably like "Creature of Havoc" ;)  hehe.

Actually in that one you kind of have an excuse for your character being a bit barely-sentient at the start.  Since you start off with no memory, no identity, and driven mostly by pure instinct which basically boils down to: "You find a thing.  Can I eat it, or can it eat me?"

Sorcery is a great series. I was loaned Crown of Kings to start with, to get thrown in to the deep end, and then many years later found Khare in the library. It's taken years of waiting for the reprints before I managed to get all four books and actually play through it as a campaign.

I believe I could still lay out all 48 spells - probably with costs and items if needed - from memory with few pauses / mistakes :p


There's a small series called the Catacomb series for TSR (https://gamebooks.org/Series/68/Show) that seems pretty insane. Not sure if that's the ones you mean Rain Feather, or if that's something else. The system itself is simplistic, but it seems to have many fun small choices and just a good humour to them. Especailly gnomes 100, dragons 0, which is based on Dragonlance!

Played a lot of the Fighting Fantasy books.  The local library had a few of them in, those and the Choose your own Adventure ones were my first introduction to interactive books, followed quickly by the Lone Wolf ones, which the library also had a couple of (unfortunately not all of them, especially not the first series, and not in any kind of order, so was slightly confused about the actual storyline for a while!)
"Ok, so basically, I'm a medieval Jedi?  Not sure who I'm supposed to be fighting, but I'll figure it out in time.  Oh, there seems to be things trying to kill me, so I'll just kill them right back and hope they're evil!"  hehe.

They had one of the Freeway Warrior books in too.  The 3rd one, if I remember right.

Played through the Avenger series too.  Like the Tenchu games in book form!

Good times :D

Also Dusk Rat would be proud of my other Kai character.  She's currently setting a bunch of Kraan loose to fly free as the wind! :)

So, just to check, has everybody ensured they have saved everything they wanted to save from the game? I will be putting it up to be deleted in two weeks, after which it could take anywhere from one day to six months before the site remove it, so if you haven't saved what you need from it, you might want to hurry up and do so!

Also, Swift Fox, I'm wondering if you managed to finish your re-read or not? I must admit that having your ongoing commentary, especially on the stuff you didn't see (like the various Memory/Prologue threads, or various private threads, such as Dusk Rat's adventure with Peacock or Sabre Fox's negotiation with Valador) was very interesting for me to read, to get a sense of how well I managed to convey what I wanted to through those threads. :)

I haven't really started re-reading yet, but I can save the pages over the weekend for when I do!

Is there any way you could tweak Thread XI into one thread with 1000 posts or under and the overflow in another extra thread?  I'm trying to archive the gameplay threads on my HD and it's the only one that won't expand into a single-screen view- I think that's the reason why, but I could be wrong!

There's two more threads which are above 1000 posts, actually - OOC 7th and the "Dusk & Sabre Memory" - but if you use the D/L function, then it'll visualize the entire thread anyway (just without the avatar pics), and then you can save it as a html page. So, you could try that.

If it does't work, I could try and compress the whole thing (as in, every thread as I have them saved on my PC) into an archive and send it via e-mail to any of you who wanted it or didn't feel up to going through every thread themselves. That would involve giving your e-mail to me, however, even if only in PM, and I wouldn't want anybody to do that if they don't want to; while I wouldn't misuse that information, you have no way to know that. Which is why I suggest at least trying the D/L button first. Note that the button doesn't appear on the responsive version of the site, only on the traditional one.

Let me know if that works! ^_^
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:29, Thu 04 Mar 2021.

"D/L" function is GM only I think.
I've only seen that appear once before, and I was a GM in the game where it did.  Not seeing it here anyway.

Finished the read through, but I don't think I'll save it.  Combination of limited drive space at the moment and the fact that it remains unfinished (though this is probably the longest I've ever seen a forum-based RP run for).

Uh, you appear to be completely correct, Swift Fox; I'd never noticed that the D/L function was a GM only option. Then I guess having me send the whole thing to anybody who wants it is really the easiest and only solution? That's a bit annoying, but I suppose if anybody is interested, let me know.

For reference, the total of the uncompressed files is 47 MB, and the compressed archive in .rar is 12.7 MB. I'm not sure if that'd take up too much space or not.

So, Swift Fox, any comments to make after re-reading everything?

Hmm, mostly just cringing at some of my earlier posts and enjoying all the bits I didn't get to see (which definitely cleared up some stuff I didn't quite 'get' during the game)  :)

A lot has happened since that first day we set out together.  Both on and offline!  hehe.

Alright, I'll be signing the game up for deletion tomorrow - according to the site rules it could take anywhere from one day to six months before the game is deleted after I do that, but I think it's time for it.

If anybody wants me to send them the .rar archive of the game, you can ask me either through rmail, or in the other game I'm currently running (called Wicked Spheres), if you prefer that, at any time. If you have any other requests, or just want to tell me something, that's also a good way to find me.

Well, with that said, I just want to make one last note that it was great to run this game for such an exceptional group of players, and that it has meant more to me than I can easily explain, and that's mostly the merit of you all, as players. So, a lot of thanks for making this story possible.

And thank you for running it!


I know where to reach you to ask for the archive when I finally have time to pour through it :)

Anytime :)

If you're ever running another one, let me know.
Still got some character ideas yet to be explored.

In reply to Swift Fox (msg # 186):

I'm very taken with the evil game I'm running right now, but if I ever start another, I'll certainly be looking to you all as possible players before I go looking for anybody else - which, as I'm sure you all remember, is what I did with the Wicked game, as well. :)

It was a very good experience, infact Im thinking of using Foxy in any more games I run that require a front line fighter :)

On that note, if anyone is interested in playing another LW game, please send me a message and I can set one up.

Since im currently running one with just Swift atm, I like the single player aspect of the game that makes it a bit more casual and not prone to people doing more than others so its your own adventure.

So if anyone would like a single player LW adventure please let me know :)

Considering we're literally fighting against time and the universe in the other game, I'm not against a little help :)  hehe.