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So when I’m busy NOT reading stories on here, I’m also busy not reading shit I actually bought, however that’s probably going to change soon. (Actually reading my gamebooks I mean, not reading stuff here of course)

The problem is, I’ve acquired so many over the past few years, it’s a bit of tyranny of choice thing not knowing which series to start with and such. Like should I start with the most recent series I bought or the first one I bought? Should I start with a gamebook that’s a one shot and done or should I just delve into the series that connects with other books in the series?

Maybe by posting these here some of you lot might have some responses, or perhaps one of you has even played some of these and have an opinion. Ultimately the goal is to get through them all and write review of them too.

Anyway let’s go over them in no logical order other than my own.

Fabled Lands

Alright so this would technically be the oldest of all the series seeing as it originally came out in the 90s, just unfortunately never came out in the US, or at least not around where I lived. It’s been revived a few times and I even managed to play an early digital version of it back around 2010 or so. (And I think it was a somewhat altered version and only consisted of two of the books)

Arguably the biggest “gimmick” of this series is its basically like playing a sandbox RPG, just in book format. You go roaming about the land getting into adventures and each book is a separate land with its own cultures, struggles, etc. You don’t finish one book and move on to the immediate next one since they’re all part of a greater whole.

There were originally supposed to be 12 books to complete the set, but only 6 were ever published, however with this newest revival a seventh book has been added and it seems to be the thickest of the lot. Flipping through the books, I do see passages numbering in 600-800 range. The last one even hitting 1200, but these books I have are larger than the normal paperback size so they’re able to fit more entries per page and many of them aren’t very big. Still it’s obviously a lot despite the books not being as thick as you’d think with that many entries.

I’ll probably do this series a little later since it’s technically not complete even if you don’t need all the books to enjoy the series. Plus I have played some of it as I said digitally and out of all these books, there might actually be some of you that played this one. (Digital or real book) Maybe by the time I get through some of these other gamebooks, the Fabled Lands series will be complete.

Alright moving on…

The Vulcanverse

This would be the other series where all the books interconnect like giant sandbox to create a greater world. Again these books are much more oversized than a normal paperback so despite having a lot of entries, they aren’t as thick as one might think.

I only have the most basic information, but it seems to be an ancient world type setting (Greece inspired mainly). It also was based on some online game that involves (ugh) NFTs. Happily the gamebooks obviously don’t require such eye blinding cryptobro nonsense. Though the main reason why these interested me is due to being written by the same authors of Fabled Lands. Apparently they wrote these to help fund some of the Fabled Land book revival and try to get the new ones made (Like the seventh one) Do what you gotta I guess.

Set up mechanics seems similar to the Fabled Lands so I imagine these will be similar just a different world. Again I’ll probably save this series for later.

One Shots

So when I first started on my mission searching for gamebooks, Rider of the Black Sun and Sword of the Bastard Elf were among the first ones I found and bought. When I got them I didn’t expect them to be as big as they actually were.

Rider is actually the only one of these books that has a hard cover, it’s pretty sizable too. I think the entries are coming close to 1000 if not already there. From what I can tell this one might actually have a “main story” and then a “side one” you play later as a different character. I suppose it would be like if I combined Necromancer and Death Song into one story. (Hey there’s an idea for later)

Obviously haven’t played it yet, but it’s set up in chapters so it’s definitely going for a “novel” approach. Even has a built in bookmarker.

Sword is probably the biggest of all the gamebooks I have, coming in at nearly at 2000 entries along with being oversized. From what I can gather, the tone of this one is going more for humor and the character I think is more of a ne’er do well type so should hopefully be an interesting change from what all the others are like. (Hoping for a Rogues like tone)

Initial plans were definitely to play these two and…just like with all great plans shit happened so it didn’t get done. Tempted to read these ones first because of that.

As for The Castle of Blackwood Moors, I have no idea. I got that one a lot later and haven’t even looked at it much. The most recognizable thing about it is the wrap around map of the world on the front and back cover. I feel like it’s going to either be much better than expected or very meh.

Expeditionary Company

While Fabled Lands and the Vulcanverse might be an interconnected series, you technically don’t need all the books to play them. You could easily just have any one from the series and jump in.

You can’t do that with this one. You NEED the first 3 books of it. You have to think of this as a gamebook with a SHITLOAD of rules to the point where it needed two more books just to cover all the encounters AND then added a 4th book in case you want to add even MORE rules for some fucking insane reason.

Concept is you’re running a merchant caravan and traveling from city to city making profit in a fantasy setting. You need to track how long it’ll take, your supplies, your goods, your guards, the weather, etc. Obviously as always, you’ll get into unexpected adventures along the way.

Oh, also the world is fucking DYING too. This is a doomed world and shit isn’t getting much better, so I’m guessing your humble company at some point can get roped into trying to fix things so the end of the world doesn’t happen. (Or just ignore it and watch the world burn I guess)

Honestly, it’s all a great concept, but the problem is obvious. It’s complex as hell. If I’m playing this one, I better set everything else aside because it’s going to take all my focus and time.

Destiny Quest

Now these books are pretty damn thick. Most of them in that near 1000 passages range if not over it in at least one of the books. The covers look like they’re more of a fantasy novel series rather than gamebooks.

A quick glance through and they’re not really slacking in the story aspect from what I can tell so the series in general is more similar to what I saw from glancing through the Rider book. The actual game mechanics seems to allow for multiple ways to build up your character depending on your class, so there’s some variation here. The first three books don’t seem to be connected other than set in the same world I believe. The fourth and fifth books seem to be part of the “Sands of Time Trilogy.” I don’t think you’re doing some sort of Lonewolf thing of carrying your character over from one book to the next though.

The sixth book of the series appears to be a little different than the others. In fact I think it might be more of a “spinoff” rather than part of the series proper. It’s smaller for one thing and seems to focus more on combat. That one actually came with a separate “battle book” you’re supposed to use for the combat system.

This is another series I might do later, not sure if I should read these before or after something like the Fabled Lands/Vulcanverse though.

Roll On Adventures

Alright taking an “L” on these.

The reason being I think all the illustrations in these books are AI and I can’t find any named illustrator in the credits. When I first looked at the books I thought something looked a little “off” but most of the pics that were displayed in the examples seemed fine and I didn’t notice any of the obvious weird finger shit on them. Glancing through them now and I’m seeing the horrible mistakes in some of the pics.

Oh well, what’s done is done. It’s entirely possible the actual gamebooks are fine and it’s just guilty of using AI shit. I dunno though, these are probably the least thick of all the books. Probably more similar to the average paperback gamebook size found back in the 80s.

I’m definitely not motivated to play these anytime soon. Might play these dead last.

Happily I don’t have to end this on a bad note, because I recently bought this series…

Savage Realms

And this is the series that has got me in the mood to actually play all these fucking books as opposed to just buying more to sit on my shelf to look pretty.

I gotta say the covers on these probably copy the old 80s Fighting Fantasy books the most. In fact going through some of the notes made in the books, at least one of the authors mentions that’s what inspired him and has a picture of the US cover of Warlock of Firetop Mountain inside.

The books all vary in thickness, though all of them are oversized. I think the larger ones are in the 500 range with passage numbers. Six of the nine books all take place in the same fantasy world, but three of them have completely different settings. Horror, Post Apocalyptic and Science Fiction. The FF series dabbled in different settings too, so I’m interested in seeing if they succeed in designing a good science fiction gamebook which never seemed to work as well in the FF series.

The illustrations in this one are all by real artists thankfully. I think one of them actually did artwork for the FF series at one time.

Strongly leaning towards playing these first of course.

Well that’s all I got so far.

Feel free to make comments, suggestions or whatever below.

I am jealous of this horde.

If it were me, Fabled Lands all the way, I only played the fanmade javascript version but I loved the open world concept and a printed version just seems like a whole little expedition to embark on with maps and notebooks and things.

But Wasteland and the Lovecraftian one intrigue me, and maybe you'd like something a little different than the typical boilerplate fantasy.

More for the ever growing library!

Dangerous Worlds

I actually looked these over before when there were only the first two showing up, then later I saw there were four of them so I nabbed them all.

These are all about 500 passages, a couple of the books a little more than that. The third one looks to be scifi while the other three are probably grimdark fantasy. All in all they look to be a good addition to the collection.

I grabbed them all off Amazon. I haven't seen any gamebooks actually sold in a bookstore (let alone game shop) in decades.

Even more for the ever growing collection!

Critical IF (plus one)

So this is the Critical IF series by Dave Morris. He's one of the big ones when it comes to gamebooks given that he created Fabled Lands series and the Golden Dragon series  (Which I've reviewed in the RR!) Easily up there with Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson and Joe Dever.

All 4 of these seem to be one shots and have vastly different settings. (One of them even scifi, we'll see how that goes) All of them are just below the 500 passage mark so they're sizable.

The other book to the side of those is by David Velasco who also designed the Expeditionary Company books. He's Spainish and has rep for making story driven stuff and doing different things with game mechanics for these types of books. Already on the cover it says "Gamebook for ADULTS" and of course descriptions going on about the degeneracy you can engage in because in Spain it's the most normal thing ever.

In any case, I'll definitely play this before Expeditionary company books which still look like you might need an accountant to help with all the potential number crunching. for that series. 400 passages seems about the size of a regular Fighting Fantasy book, but I'm guessing these passages are on the longer side, because there's definitely gotta be more pages in this than the average FF book.

Just looking through the thread and these are all really cool, I didn't even realize they still made books.

Yep, rectangular scrolls of wisdom aren't just for the ancients and are still made today!

Still need to get around to playing some of them. (The struggle)

Lol I meant printed gamebooks, I thought they were all from the 1980s or something.

Did you ever get around to playing The Sword of the Bastard Elf? That was the one that caught my eye the most in this thread.

About the farthest I got was the first Savage Realms book and not even complete. I still got it bookmarked where I was months ago.

The collection never ends!

New Tokyo 2130

And holy shit, this has got to be one of the more ambitious gamebook series in this thread. It's done by the same guys who did Expeditionary Company which I can't say if this is more or less ambitious than that one, but this one has to be on par with it and I would think it's probably a bit more polished.

So what is it exactly? Well it's a cyberpunk setting and you're a bounty hunter. Your overall goal is to make enough money (1 million Imperial Yen!) and get enough status (10 EMP) so you get your ass to Mars because Earth is a dying shithole. You've got a limited amount of time to do this too because there's not going to be shuttles sticking around forever so chop chop!

There's a shitload of stats and things to keep track of here (7 pages I count of the stat sheets alone). This is basically the Cyberpunk 2077 video game in book format.

Five of those books in that picture you actually need in order to play the game since you'll be jumping back and forth between books. The five books aren't self contained adventures like in Fabled Lands where you could just own one book and still play.

Again this is more similar to how Expeditionary Company works except that only had three books and an optional fourth one. Overall the five books together have a total 2861 passages and they all mostly look fairly sizable. Each book is pretty thick. The first book of course contains all the rules, but there's links to their website which apparently contains even more rules and clarifications in the case of errors and updates.

As for the final sixth book, that one is optional and doesn't really contain anything directly game related. However, it's a massive world building info dump. About 200 pages just talking about the setting and how things got this fucked up and all of that good stuff. While not needed, there's no reason not to get it as well if you've already gone all in on this to begin with.

Might be awhile before I get to this one, but it's definitely one to look forward to.

I like this trend of creating an entire complicated CRPG in dead tree form, I need to collect some of these for the next time the power goes out for a week.

Nice find! This seems right up my alley with the cyberpunk theme. I checked for an online preview of the first book, and it straight-up shows pages of stat sheets and some of the setup rules, without actually previewing the story itself. Found that to be pretty funny, in a good way. Previewed another book to get a sense of the writing style and choice structure, and it looks pretty great. The hardest part would be finding time to sit down with a series like that, but that's something I could see myself diving into later this year.

These posts always make me jealous!

More books for the hoard!

The Way of the Tiger (Plus one)

This series is actually an old one, going back to the golden age of the 80s for gamebook popularity. You play as some monk/ninja combo going on various adventures. It’s a bit like an AZN version of the Lonewolf books in that you can keep things from book to book if you play them order.

Interestingly one of creators of this series not only was involved with the Fabled Lands series, but they actually wrote one of the Fighting Fantasy books that I enjoyed a lot (Talisman of Death) This series is even set in that same world (Orb) with some of the characters from that FF book. Had I known that at the time, I might’ve given the series more attention.

The funny thing is I actually owned the first book at one time, but for whatever reason I skimmed the first few pages and never got hooked into it. Maybe I was just too into the Fighting Fantasy books and traditional western fantasy at the time or maybe I was just being racist.

But I’m older and slightly less racist now (Or just laid back with it), so I figured it would be cool to go back and collect these. Since I never kept up on the series, there were a few extra I stumbled upon. 

One was the series originally ended on a major cliffhanger. Basically book six ended with the protagonist being stuck somewhere and impeding DOOM approaching. This actually was deliberate due to there being issues with the publisher at the time and the authors just said fuck it and trolled everyone. Wasn’t until 27 years later that the cliffhanger was resolved with a seventh book.

The other was besides a new seventh book there was a prequel or “Book 0” so grabbed that one as well.

The other book you see in that image is another Savage Realms one. This tenth book is a little smaller than the others and is another fantasy setting. I wasn’t sure if that company was still putting out books, but I guess they are. Since this one seems a lot more slimmed down in all ways (Text and art) I’m guessing they had to cut costs. Still not using AI art though, so they’ve stayed true to that at least.

ETERNAL would fit right in with the one word title gang over here.

The original books all had an exclamation point at the end of their one word titles too. They should've kept that, though they do have it back for the last book.

“End, don’t you think it’s time you actually played though the gamebooks you already have?”

“No.”

Lone Wolf

The Lone Wolf series is probably one of the better known gamebook series ranking up there with Fighting Fantasy and the official CYOA books. It was created by the late Joe Dever who was actually interviewed by the old CYStian Fleshnblood which can be found in the article section right here on this very site!

Set up for these gamebooks is generally playing as the same protagonist and keeping the same shit you acquired from book to book. It’s more of a serialized set of adventures rather than “one offs” like the FF series or “sandbox” like Fabled Lands.

I actually had these on the list for awhile, but kept putting them off mainly because of them being well known enough that you could always find them. Seeing as I’ve bought just about all the current major gamebook out there, figured I’d finally just grab these.

This was another series I actually did own at one point or partially owned. I had up to book 8 and then I sort of lost interest in them mainly due to a weird “bug” in the eighth book I had. Like a couple pages in I got a passage that lead to the ending. I actually thought maybe this was a mistake on my part, but no the book I had apparently had a weird misprint that lead instantly to the end.

After that I sort of tossed the book aside and never bothered looking for the rest which might’ve been just as well since I don’t remember seeing them sold too many places shortly after that. In fact it seems the later books weren’t sold in the US at all and the last ones that were sold here were chopped down in content anyway.

The exact number of books, varies a bit. Originally there were 28 and they all got reprinted at some point. That number has been extended to 32 since Joe’s son Ben finished the series after his dad died. There’s also a “Junior” edition which i guess tones shit down and makes it easier. There’s even extended versions of some of the books, so there’s definitely variety on the same old classic shit.

I ended up getting a collection which included the first 12 books which from what I can tell generally are considered the best of the bunch by the fans. I think it might be due to the later books going way into that “epic level” and focusing on rebuilding the order (Nobody likes becoming a desk jockey)

And the later books you aren’t even the original lone wolf anymore, you’re some snot nosed noob. Though probably had to do that due to Lonewolf becoming the head of the new order and can’t be running all over the map killing death lords and such.

There is of course the Project Aon which is a fan run site that allows you to download ALL of Joe Dever’s work for free, but I always like having the actual books.

While the covers may have completely new art, happily the old Gary Chalk art inside the books is still there. (Pretty well known artwork especially if you were buying Games Workshop stuff during the 80s) These new ones seem to have a lot of extra lonewolf world lore too so that’s a cool addition.

I definitely like these reprints way better than what I’ve seen them do to the FF series reprints that’s for sure.

Ah here we go, gamebooks I HAVE played. Well, some of them. Project Aon is a cool place and one of the reasons I really like Joe Dever.

"I would be especially pleased if my granting of the rights to distribute my books in this way was seen as my 'millennium gift' to all those devoted readers who have kept the Kai flag flying high, through all the good times, and the not-so-good. It would make me very proud indeed if this enterprise laid the foundations of a lasting legacy, securing the longevity of Lone Wolf by making my creation freely and readily accessible to current and future online generations. For them, for us, for Sommerlund and the Kai.…"
Joe Dever 1999

The late 90s and early 2000s were a special time when the internet was viewed by many as a way to give FREEDOM to creative works, before corpos figured out how to charge money for everything there too. (Though ngl this thread with all the fancy physical books makes me jealous.)

So, read a bit on project aom and have to ask this: The amount of content seems comparable to storygames here, but adventure books do some things that are rare here, such as picking skills, right-left choices and random combat.

I may be wrong but I think these would be things people would complain about in a storygame.

Has the medium evolved and we have just figured out better ways to do storygames? Or was this great and will it always be great, should we do it? Or have the times changed, and back in the old days you bought a book and then didn't mind to read the same book twice with only say a different skill that might in the end only allow to circumvent one fight or so?

Mazes were also common in interactive fiction, and they objectively sucked. Random deaths and "unfair" consequences have just gone out of fashion. I don't care so much about some things like the right/left choices, but I think it was also a given that with physical books people cheated pretty freely so "balance issues" mattered less. Or I always used to hold the last couple of places in a book when I wasn't sure about the choice, or fudge a dice result with zero intent of dying and replaying from the start on a bad result.

A lot of things about the stories themselves are different too, when IF was most commonly a dungeon crawl or other straightforward adventure, it was more like a single player campaign with the narrator as your DM. (And again, unfair deaths were the style at the time there too, the DM wasn't your storytelling partner helping you realize your character's arc or whatever, but the enemy looking for excuses to TPK your ass in the pettiest ways and the most sadistic traps they could come up with.)

And nowadays anyway, probably starting in the early 2000s, IF of all kinds started taking on expectations of a more "literary" bent with the indie community at the reins, where instead of being Conan by default raiding a temple to dark gods, you might find yourself navigating the POV character's feelings about being gay and depressed. I remember in particular the parser IF community at the height of the stick up their ass went through a years long period of really just scorning any kind of fantasy because they were trying so hard to get away from being perceived of as mere "games".

Well everyone here sort of has a different style of how they make their stories. Some do contain a few of the elements you see in some of the gamebooks. It sort of depends on how ambitious the author is with what they want to code.

A good example would’ve been Madglee’s “Mommy Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?” if he hadn’t taken it down due to hiding out from the law. You could pick certain skills and distribute the stats which could result in different ways of handling certain situations.

As I remember Mizal’s “Don’t Get Date Raped” story (Unpublished for some unknown reason) had randomized people raping you, so I’m sure randomized combat is doable. 

In fact, I think Pedo Mod Kiel’s Other World story (Now deleted) had randomized combat in places, but it sort of sucked a lot and it bogged down his story really.

Probably for stories that add more game stuff are people like Berka, Killa, Gryphon and a couple others that did one story and disappeared.

I mean me personally, I keep everything simple and just do straight writing and the only code I’m using is bolding or italicizing the font in places. Hell, Ninja keeps it even simpler and doesn’t even bother with branching half the time. Lol.

I wrote one story that was more gamelike, with inventory, stats, etc, it was a slog and I fucking hated it. So lesson was learned a long time ago that it isn’t the style that I want to write in.

Usually though if someone does do something more ambitious it gets high praise around here so might be worth attempting if someone is feeling motivated for the warm and fuzzies.

I might try to do something, but there is certainly an uncanny valley between game and story. I guess more gamey can only really work if the story is compressed into fairly short snippets.

Secrets of the Crag is another one.

Tried that, but got to play it more. I thought that was what End meant when he said Gryphon.