Gamebooks / Choose Your Own Adventure / Fighting Fantasy

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...

(bear in mind this was written 34 years ago, but the advice is still sound. It's also a part of Gamebook history worth knowing about. Joe Dever was the author of the Lone Wolf gamebooks)

So here, for aspiring gamebook writers is...

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

Growing up, I had a hard time finding people to play RPGs with. Fortunately, somewhere along the way, I discovered Choose Your Own Adventure books. However, they never fully scratched that RPG itch. But then, double fortunately, I discovered the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks.

The series began back in the 80s, but has made a major resurgence in the past couple. The Huntress series was released last year. It brought wildly inventive new mechanics to what I thought was possible with a gamebook. And now, all the original books are being reprinted into their Definitive Editions.

But, Lone Wolf is no longer simply just a gamebook series. Lone Wolf – Adventures in Magnamund is coming to tabletops with the Dragonbane system.

The Dragonbane system, from Free League, is dead simple to learn. It’s a d20 based system, where every skill is ranked from 1 to 18. Roll below your skill rank to succeed. Rolling a 1 is called ‘rolling a dragon’ and triggers powerful special effects!

Of course, there are a variety of Professions, 10 in the core book. There are your standard fantasy fare: Fighter, Mage, Hunter, and Thief, but also the more obtuse Artisan, Merchant, Mariner, and Scholar.

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

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Back in the 80s, Fighting Fantasy did some innovative work in the solo adventure field. And this was before the term “solo RPG” was as widely used as it is today. While there are some elements that might feel familiar, like turning to page 52 if you decide to pick the goblin’s pocket, these books also had their own dice system. Your character had three stats: Skill, Stamina, and Luck, and you’d roll d6s when making certain decisions and pick up an inventory of items along the way.

Funnily enough, the series was launched by Sir Ian Livingstone (of Games Workshop fame) and Steve Jackson—though not the Steve Jackson of SJ Games. Soon, it will also be that Steve Jackson. Here’s what we know.

Steve Jackson Games announced that they have worked out a new deal with Sir Ian Livingstone to bring back the Fighting Fantasy series to the United States. Livingstone and Jackson co-created the solo Choose Your Own Adventure series back in 1982, where players use their own judgment to decide where the story takes them. The series uses a combination of nonlinear narratives with dice-rolling tabletop RPG mechanics to give players multiple paths that will either lead to glory or death. Now, the series will make a return to the U.S. market next year as five new books will be in the works for 2025. We have more info below on the new set from the announcement.

Here’s a look at the announcement from Steve Jackson Games:

“In 1982, British game designers Sir Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson introduced Fighting Fantasy, a revolutionary set of solo adventure books that combined nonlinear narratives with dice-rolling tabletop RPG mechanics. Now, this fantastical, multi-million-selling book series returns to the United States thanks to an historic 50-book publishing collaboration with Steve Jackson Games.”

Fifty books is a lot of books, first of all. But it does look like the whole series is back on the table. Including the Fighting Fantasy books that were written by Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games. Because the confusion doesn’t stop at just here being two people named Steve Jackson who work in the gaming industry like that.

According to Steve Jackson Games, the first five books are due to be released in early 2025, with five more coming later in the year. That’s ten solo adventures you can tromp off on after the year turns. So get ready to see how many different ways you die, either by your own choice or by the dice falling where they may.

Ian Livingstone has also released a statement:

"To have a new publisher in the USA is a special moment in the history of Fighting Fantasy," said Sir Ian Livingstone. "We have known Steve Jackson for more than 40 years, having distributed Steve Jackson Games in the 1980s when we owned Games Workshop. Steve also wrote three fantastic Fighting Fantasy books, which caused a lot of confusion at the time when people didn't realize there were two Steve Jacksons! We look forward to exciting times ahead in the USA for new and existing Fighting Fantasy fans."

Original press release

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.

The books were and are amazing examples of clever, carefully optimized design, though their complexity was a barrier to my 9-year-old brain and, notwithstanding the ingenuity, the dungeons were very small. It amounted to a gamebook simulation of a fight in a basement. There were two pairs of books (i.e. two battles and four single-player adventures): White Warlord and Black Baron, then Scarlet Sorcerer and Emerald Enchanter. These appear to sell for hundreds of dollars each on eBay.

Previously: Ace of Aces: or, why you should Do Maths as a game designer

"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.

Game is avalaible for free, online: https://adeptus7.itch.io/dominion

I am constantly improving the game, adding new content and mechanics, so Your feedback would matter.

If you are hesitant to play the game, I invite you to watch/listen to the reviews:

Indie Sampler (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM6f4UCEgWU

[BOKC] BlancoKix (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgNpSKToOSg

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.

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Choose Your Own Adventures are essentially a look-up table: after each page the player is presented with a list of options and the page to turn to if you choose that option—a look-up table that converts their choice into the next page number.

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First: what is Ace of Aces? It’s a two-player World War One dogfighting game. One of you is the Red Baron, one of you is Snoopy Biggles, and you attempt to line the other up in your sights for some dakka dakka dakka. So far so several other board games. What sets Ace of Aces apart is the ingenious interface: you play with a pair of picture books, one for the German pilot, one for the Allied pilot. Each page of the book shows you the view of your enemy given your current position.

Each page has a list of manoeuvres you can choose from and the page to turn to that “performs” the manoeuvre. I’ve put “performs” in quotes, but as we’ll see, the look-up table actually has this maths encoded into the page numbers, it’s some sneaky-clever design.

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.

His reply was jovial. "I'm Russell Ginns, aka Clyde Bosco, aka R U Ginns, aka Matt Wayne. I'm glad you're having fun diving into ancient texts and primordial game design. And I'm happy to answer any questions I can. This is a great blast from the past. Give me a day or so to try to recall some more of the details or anecdotes for you. It was more than a few years ago! "

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The full list of Nintendo Adventure Books is follows:

1. Double Trouble - Clyde Bosco
2. Leaping Lizards - Clyde Bosco
3. Monster Mix-Up - Bill McCay
4. Koopa Capers - Bill McCay
5. Pipe Down! - Clyde Bosco
6. Doors to Doom - Bill McCay
7. Dinosaur Dilemma - Clyde Bosco
8. Flown the Koopa - Matt Wayne
9. The Crystal Trap - Matt Wayne
10. The Shadow Prince - Matt Wayne
11. Unjust Desserts - Matt Wayne
12. Brain Drain - Matt Wayne

First though, did he write all of them?

"I am confident I wrote books 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8," recalls Ginns, adding that "I might have written 10. And I'm pretty sure I did 6, but I could be mistaken. I'm trying to recall who wrote the other books. I developed the whole series concept, but now that I think about the Zelda titles, I think a guy named Ritchie Chevat was the author of those two. I worked with him way back. Lovely fun guy. I might have his info for you somewhere."

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If anyone is curious to read the Nintendo Adventure Books, they're available on eBay, but we were able to find the entire series on the Internet Archive, too.

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.

Choose Your Own Adventure was the brainchild of Edward Packard, who based his branching-path “gamebooks” on the interactive bedtime stories he told his children. Packard presented the idea to indie publisher and RPG writer R.A. Montgomery, who published Packard’s Sugarcane Island as the first installment in Vermont Crossroads Press’ Adventures of You series in 1976. Two years later, Montgomery left the press and approached another publisher, Bantam Books, with The Adventures of You. Bantam rechristened the series and launched it as Choose Your Own Adventure in 1979.

A publishing phenomenon was born.

The eight covers on the list below span the first two decades of Choose Your Own Adventure history. That time period produced some of the wackiest, most memorable covers, but it’s not without its problems. Many of the books and their covers contained racist stereotypes, most predominantly of the Yellow Peril and Islamophobic varieties. Thankfully, the series’ contemporary iterations have attempted to rectify these issues to some degree.

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Classic Choose Your Own Adventure book covers fall more or less neatly into two broad categories: “Does What It Says on the Tin” and “WTF Am I Looking At.” Both are entirely valid.

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.

Using dice and a pencil, you will become Judge Dredd as he faces off against the Dark Judges, or guide Nemesis the Warlock as they race through the Torture Tube, or help Sláine steal the Cauldron of Blood from the Tower of Glass!

Written by John Wagner, Pat Mills, and Simon Geller, with art by Bryan Talbot, Garry Leach, Graham Manley, John Ridgway, Kevin O’Neill, Mark Farmer, Mike Collins, Nik Williams, Steve Dillon, David Lloyd, Glenn Fabry, and David Pugh, this is the definitive collection of these fantastic dice-based role-playing games.

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 have loved the Lone Wolf series since I was naught but a wee lad, so imagine my excitement upon discovering the idea is making a triumphant return to Kickstarter under the Sound Realms platform.

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The game itself plays out something like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. The narrator describes what’s going on as any good Dungeon Master would, until you reach a point where you need to make a decision. But what sets the Lone Wolf series above the rest is the depth of the RPG elements found within. In the Lone Wolf series, it’s not just choosing your own adventure path. There is character stats, equipment, items, quests, skill checks, and of course, combat!

I feel like an idiot.

Studying the carving you deduce that the inscription around it reveals how to open the door. If you can work out the number hidden in the puzzle, turn to the paragraph with that number.

Remember what the tribesman told you: "Back two, forward two. Back two, forward two."

I see the three arrows (top right of the skull, snake's tail & the golden piece at the bottom) but I can't for the life of me solve this.

I found the solution online but I still don't understand how it works.

it's 275

The most logical reading I can come up with is "RARA" which doesn't feel very Roman numeral-y (but Roman numerals might not even be needed.)

So... would someone be kind enough to explain this puzzle to me?

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.

Still, Netflix continues to drop the occasional interactive story, and we’re continuing to rank each one based on how interactive it actually is. The service’s latest interactive special, the ambitious We Lost Our Human, prompted a new update of our rankings. This list considers whether a given Netflix interactive special is fun to play, what kind of story it’s telling, and whether your choices actually have any effect on how that story unfolds.

cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/80877

[ 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?’

“We said, off the cuff, ‘Rather than write a book about the hobby… could we write something that lets people actually experience the hobby?’ And we sent her the concept of a stripped down role-playing game, with the book itself replacing the Dungeon Master, offering the reader multiple choices. But we didn’t want it to be just about choosing paragraphs, we wanted a dice-based game system. So we came up with SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK, trying to keep things as light as possible so people weren’t bogged down with the complexity of the game. Geraldine was massively enthusiastic, but apparently the head of Penguin Books laughed so much he banged his head on the table. He thought it was a ridiculous idea – why would anyone want an interactive book? Books are linear, end of story. It took at least another year before anyone said ‘OK, let’s do this…’

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By Spring 1983, the duo were spearheading a literary revolution. Role-playing games, once the esoteric interest of a whiskery minority, had become a national obsession for a generation of youngsters. After that slowburning start, those first three Fighting Fantasy books – incredibly – toppled the previously unassailable Roald Dahl to occupy the top three positions of the Sunday Times’ children’s bestsellers list. TV appearances followed: Ian recalls appearing on BBC1’s monolithic children’s programme Saturday Superstore, where a bemused John Craven asked if the duo planned to ever write a “proper book”.

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The immersive nature of the books, however, brought an unexpectedly dark twist.

The rumblings began in local newspapers, with the front page of the Reading Evening Post from 6th March 1985 making for fascinatingly lurid reading. “Mother calls for ban on ‘devil worship’ books in schools,” screamed the headline. “The 23-year-old Sunninghill mother, who wants to remain anonymous, believes they are unsuitable material for children and has burned the Fighting Fantasy adventure books. She is prepared to put up a fight to get the books banned, and is planning a petition. She said other mums were also concerned about the books, which she said describe devil worship, witchcraft and voodoo. She claimed that her son, aged 11, came out in pinprick marks after reading them. Mr Nicholas Holmes-Clough, minister of Bracknell Pentecostal Church, told his congregation on Sunday: ‘Anything of the occult is evil. We want to keep it well away from our children’.”

A week later, Holmes-Clough had stepped up his efforts, claming to have delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street. “I’ve had lots of phone calls from parents, saying how their children had been mentally affected by such books,” he told the paper. “Children go back to bed-wetting and start having nightmares at the age of nine or 10…”

Nevertheless, by 1986, the campaign had escalated. Steve Jackson’s House of Hell, a Hammer-inspired quest to survive the night in a Borley Rectory-style haunted mansion, proved a tipping point. With its uncharacteristic modern-day setting, it brought Fighting Fantasy’s Devil-worshippers and psychopathic Skeletons closer to the real world than ever before. For some, that was a step too far. “OCCULT BOOK BANNED” blared the front page of the Burton Mail on 9th October 1986. “A ‘nasty’ children’s fantasy book which dabbles in the occult has been banned from library shelves. Church officials say Steve Jackson’s House of Hell is dangerous to children because of its supernatural contents and pictures. Now the book has prompted Leicestershire library chiefs to review the way they select children’s material…”

By December, one particular Christian group had gone into overdrive, publishing a newsletter entitled Danger – Children At Play and warning of the dangers of what they called “video nasties in print”.

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.

“It’s really in many ways a personal memoir rather than a business book,” Livingstone says in Episode 547 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s all about the trials and tribulations of that early journey, and how we might have failed several times.”

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Ian Livingstone on writing Fighting Fantasy gamebooks:

I have 400 numbers ready to allocate as I design on the fly, so I have a basic story arc in mind and some protagonists and monsters in mind, and then set off with number 1, and then it splits out to “If you want to go one way, go to 22. If you want to go the other way, go to 104.” And cross those off the master list, and keep a record of the branching on a flowchart, and make notations of all the encounter points and what you might find where, and make sure there are no cul-de-sacs and that the economy is balanced, and it’s not too difficult. Also going back and [forth] along the multiple paths, so if you need a key to open a locked door, you have to go back and put the key in a room where you might find it.

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.

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Now, Fighting Fantasy celebrates its latest landmark anniversary with the release of two new books published by Scholastic this September. Warlock’s co-authors, and FF’s co-founders, have written a book each: Sir Ian Livingstone returns for his 17th main-series adventure, Shadow of the Giants, while Sorcery! author Steve Jackson returns for his first FF book in 36 years with Secrets of Salamonis, set in a walled, wealthy citadel on Titan’s continent of Allansia.

10. Warlock of Firetop Mountain
11. Armies of Death
12. Seas of Blood
13. Night Dragon
14. Appointment with F.E.A.R
15. House of Hell
16. Legend of the Shadow Warriors
17. Deathtrap Dungeon
18. Sorcery!
19. City of Thieves

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!

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First released in 1980, Ace of Aces is the first of the Handy Rotary Series. It was a series of game books that were designed to be played in a 2 player game. The principle of each game was that each page would represent a specific game state of both players.

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.

Might fill in some gaps but, unless there's something really good later in the series, there are so many FF books that I don't really feel the urge to catch 'em all. There's plenty of other interesting gamebooks out there to try.

cross-posted from: https://rabbitea.rs/post/25012

I found out about and got hold of these during lockdown.

Bookwyrm links:

The Genesis Quest

The Hypnosis Enigma

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?

In this interactive gamebook, you make the decisions, and you suffer the consequences.

Choose wisely or die trying!

I've played the first book a few times and really enjoyed it, though not managed to finish it yet. It's more complicated to play than a Fighting Fantasy book, with many clues and objects to track. With that, I ended up spending some time creating a spreadsheet to track my progress, then I added some code to roll dice, then I added code to handle combat tracking. It's probably riddled with bugs, but should anyone want to use it, here it is (Google Sheets).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1035876

This is a fun way to dive into the history of the Fighting Fantasy book series.

If you're wanting a less interactive option, then there's a single linear video to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oHlNlzxahw