You can’t really go wrong with their “The World of Orlandes” series. I don’t think it really has an official name to the series though since they used to just call them all “Gamebook Adventures”
There are 12 of these and honestly I never came across a bad one. Some of course are still better than others, but again I thought all of them were pretty good.
They’re basically modern versions of the old Fighting Fantasy series, except a little more fair and with a better combat system.
The games all take place in the same world and more than a few are loosely linked in some way to each other, but you don’t really need to play them in order. I think only 2 of them are direct sequels to earlier books.
An Assassin in Orlandes leads to Curse of the Assassin
Slaves of Rema leads to Sultans of Rema
I think that’s it so far for the direct sequels. As I said, most make minor references to other locations in other books.
Second choice would be the reissues of the Fighting Fantasy books from the 80s.
Some of them are straight reissues with little to no changes to them. A couple of them like Blood of the Zombies and BloodBones are brand new games (Or semi-brand new in BloodBones case).
Appointment with FEAR and Starship Traveller are basically the same but have some new additions to them which makes play slightly differently than they originally did. Warlock of Firetop Mountain I guess has had a complete overhaul, almost making it more like a turn based board game feel. (Again just by the screen shots, haven’t played it yet though)
In general though the combat system is much more simplistic and the books are a lot less forgiving. Probably staying true to their 80s roots.
There have only been two others I bothered to download. One of them was Infinite Universe and Gun Dogs.
I downloaded Infinite Universe since at the time Tinman only had 8 books out and I had already played the first 7 from their Orlandes series, so I figured I’d check out their scifi attempt.
For whatever reason, these things never translate as well into the scifi settings. The FF series had this problem too at times. Infinite Universe wasn’t bad or anything, but it just didn’t grab me.
Gun Dogs was done by Gary Chalk who had illustrated the Lone Wolf books as well as the old Talisman boardgame, so I definitely was interested. This one was cool, but it felt a little on the short side, and it seemed to promise that more books in this series were going to come, but they never did. (Or at least they haven’t yet)
Haven’t played any of the others, though Sons of Uruzime (Lovecraft setting) looks sort of interesting along with The Complete Sagas of Firewolf (4 gamecocks in 1 it says).
