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.

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While coveted across the Atlantic, prospective players in the US had been stuck scouting for ways to ship the books "overseas or via online auction sites" as the Kickstarter page notes. That will no longer be a problem, thanks to the series being picked up by Texas-based publisher Steve Jackson Games last year.

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Now, writers Steve Jackson (UK), Steve Jackson (US), and Sir Ian Livingstone are working together to bring us revisions of the classic original series, which will contain original black and white artwork "when possible," as well as larger print and better fo

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.

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Anyway, inspired by his son's lack of interest in reading, Daniel Pucha, an electronics and programming entrepreneur (who prefers to go by the name Dana) decided to develop his own handheld device, called the Ink Console (via The Verge), that can be used to play/read CYOA books. While the prototype looks like nothing more than a simple e-ink reader, the device offers more than just an interface for electronic books.

That's because while you'll be able to purchase new books to read/play in the form of tiny cartridges that you pop into the device (which Dana calls Gamebooks), he and developer Rafa Laguna a

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/21844856

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...

(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

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

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 d

"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 (v

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. Eac

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!

<laughs>

"

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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 b

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,

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 &amp; the golden piece at the bottom) but I can't for the life of me solve this. ::: spoiler 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 &amp; 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 mass

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 fin