The Ultimate Guide to Gamebooks

At the gate you are confronted by a tall guard wearing a black chainmail coat and iron helmet. He steps forward, barring the way with his pike, saying, ‘Who would enter Port Blacksand uninvited? State the nature of your business or go back the way you came.’ Will you:

Tell him wish to be taken to Nicodemus? Turn to 202
Tell him you wish to sell some stolen booty? Turn to 33
Attack him quickly with sword? Turn to 49
 City of Thieves by Ian Livingstone. Fighting Fantasy Book 5 (Puffin Series)


Back in the 70s whilst the peace and love movement was raging two things occurred that unlike flares and Saturday Night Fever would unleash a movement that would not only be relevant nearly 50 years later but also more popular than ever. The first was the ever-popular Dungeons and Dragons. The second was the release of Choose Your Own Adventure Books by Bantam publishing.


The CYOA series of books were the brainchild of Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery. They had already written and released a couple of gamebooks, but it was when they approached Bantam publishing that they really took off. These books set what has become known as the “American Tradition” in gamebooks, stories where the reader is given a choice of what to do/say or where to go. The settings covered everything from the wild west through to outer space and Sherwood forest. The even had licensed releases including young Indiana Jones and Star Wars versions. For the record, I owned number 47: The Outlaws of Sherwood Forest.


Imagine a room, well a hall actually, filled with 5000 people all playing D&D. In this hall is a representative of Puffin books (Puffin is the longstanding children’s imprint of Penguin). This is what led to Puffin approaching Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, two of the co-founders of Games Workshop, to write a book about role playing games. Instead, they came up with the Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Fighting Fantasy was born. Fighting Fantasy differed from CYOA in that alongside being given choices you also had dice roles and character creation. It set the mould for what was to become known as the “British Tradition”. This involved books with rules relating much more to the game mechanics of Role-Playing Games. The genre grew and included amongst others the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever, The Way of the Tiger by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson and also involving Jamie Thomson alongside Dave Morris was the legendary Fabled Lands series.


The Fabled Lands series of gamebooks was the most ambitious ever developed. Originally planned to be a series of 12 books (only seven have been released to date), the books are an open-ended sandbox of an adventure where you can choose from different characters complete missions, side missions, jump between books, have open ended trade in market places and even save your in-game stuff at various points. In fact, it is more like an mmorpg than a series of books and bear in mind it was written before the 1994 launch of the world wide web and predates mmorpgs.


So where does that bring us to today? Gamebooks are like single player RPGs. A book, a couple of six-sided dice, a pencil and some paper and you have hours of game time. So why not try one for yourself. You could even try to complete one without cheating. Not many people can say that.

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