Gamebooks

Thanks for the heads up.

Not sure if i will ever pick it up to read but got a ecopy of the mall saved.

Special special mention: the Joe Dever two-player books which literally transposed the visuals of a Dungeon Master-style isometric computer game to the printed page. Weird, weird idea.

Oh, I've seen those! I had two, in fact: Black Baron vs White Warlord. That was a trip.

The Combat Heroes series! Those were amazing in their time. I had all four, but the flying wizards one Scarlet Sorcerer/Emerald Enchanter was my favourite. It became the whole basis for a rpg world I later used, inspired by the map and whole game design.

All of them are free to download on that Project Aon page too, btw

me me, i recognise the Demons of the Deep cover! i'd forgotten about these fuckers, but my local library had a shitload of them.

I would like to remind that this projectaon.org/en/Main/Books exists.

Marvel's having a 2000AD writer make one!

I played the shit out of these books, always with a finger in the book in case my choice was an instakill. I remember some of them were a lot harder than others - some of them, if you missed out a single item or chose wrong at the start, would fuck you up later when you least suspected it.

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city of thieves was best, crimsom tide was excellent too.
tunnels & trolls gamebooks were pretty good too

Are Lone Wolf books still available to purchase without a mountain of Gold Crowns?

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Ha, ha, combat roll.
I think this comes out in May.

I recently went through Creature of Havoc with a guide and translation paragraphs. OMG such an amazing story.

I think fairly, the only ones I ever completed were City of Thieves, Deathtrap Dungeon, Seas of Blood, Night Dragon, and the portal with the dinosaurs. Still can't complete House of Hell.

My legit first entry in the world of fantasy games were the translated releases of the first six Fighting Fantasy books, and the Lone Wolf series (which I had most of). This was my gateway drug, and for a few warm summers I had one of these books with me on vacations or trips and they were really good at stimulating my imagination. I'm still very fond of both FF and Lone Wolf to this day.

Not FF, but Lone Wolf was my gate to fantasy back when I was, what? 9 or 10? Started with Chasm of Doom.

>actual Heroquest minis on the table
Damn, this thread has now given me a whole extra helping of nostalgia

>skipping number 11

Ah man, both were great, i didnt have many lone wolf sadly... shit was nice

I suspect Paul Mason was the best when it came to the actual writing, or at least creating weird shit. His stuff sticks in my head much more than most of it did.

city of thieves was the best

>starting after the Sommerswerd
Absolute masochism

I remember this weird gamebook series called 'Choose Your Own Nightmare' or something, but all the endings were more-or-less horrific. Some of them were weird as hell, like having one of the characters state that you and the whole scenario was a dream.

Then that character wakes up, annihilating everyone involved.

Anyone ever play Moonrunner? IIRC that one has a weird tweeeest bit near the end where it suddenly reveals out of nowhere that the player character has a personal connection to the villain- but with absolutely no reason for that information to have been withheld. Weird stuff.

Moonrunner is one of the really gothic FFs, along with Dead of Night and Legend of the Shadow Warriors, which are set in Gallantaria
They owe a lot to Hammer Horror movies, along with Victorian pulp horror

Yeah, City of Thieves was a classic- really nice city setting with good pictures. IIRC the ending was a bit rushed though.

Would have been fascinating to see a Scorpion Swamp-style free-roaming version of City of Thieves- one that allows you to retrace your steps, revisit areas, get lost.

Wasn't that setting also called The Old World? Not sure how directly it was linked to Warhammer, but there were definite similarities.

Heard great things about Shadow Warriors. Might have to pick one up. Loved Moon Runner, especially the plague village at the end. Not so sure on Jason Vorhees though.....

"To kill the enemy you need to get a tattoo of a unicorn on your forehead"

"Fuck off. I ain't getting mistaken for a Brony in Blacksand."

...somebody also made an open-ended, modular gamebook series, where you can move between books. Never read them so I'm not sure how well that worked, but if nothing else it's a bold idea.

The second AFF book, Blacksand!, detailed the whole city in depth, and Livingstone's latest book Port of Peril is like a "20 years later" revisit of the place

All this stuff comes from the same spring originally, Jackson&Livingstone were of course the founders of Games Workshop so lots of ideas floated around in those days
The Old World in FF was originally the setting of Sorcery! and the Tasks of Tantalon, and sort of served as Steve Jackson's own sandbox outside of the Allansia setting

Speaking of Horror. Was Beneath Nightmare Castle in Gallantaria? Holy fuck that was some dark, Cthulu tier nightmare fuel.

No that was in Khul - if Allansia is "America" and the Old World is "Europe", then Khul is "Africa+Asia on acid"
It's the setting for all the Asian samurai/ninja stuff, plus the oddball fantasy ones that didn't fit elsewhere
You're fucking right about Beneath Nightmare Castle, it's unironically pure Lovecraft and scared the shit out of me as a kid

The most literally nightmarish one was the one with the elf who slips between the real world and the dreamworld. Phantoms of Fear, maybe?

If we're talking disturbing F&F, I think it's hard to top the goblin kids in Citadel of Chaos. Gah.

any books you anons recommend avoiding? As a kid I remember really disliking Battleblade Warrior once you escaped the siege.

>Phantoms of Fear
A particularly weird and inventive one with some literal nightmare sequences (and again, set on Khul). The Ian Miller art really made it too.

>I think it's hard to top the goblin kids in Citadel of Chaos. Gah.

I've never felt clean since

My personal hates: Chasms of Malice, Daggers of Darkness, Crypt of the Sorcerer - generally whenever Livingstone was at his worst with fetch quests and riddles
The "30s" are the weakest 'decade' overall but still have some favorites of mine

Yeah... I remember dying to a vampire thing in a crypt without it.

It wasn't mine, my friend borrowed it to me. It was, IIRC, my fantasy book ever. I found other parts of the series in a public library later, but haven't played them in order until much later, when I was adult.I was a bookworm as a kid, but that was mostly children stories, various encyclopedias and western/adventure novels from my parents (Karl May's Winnetou and similar). Post-communist country, not much choice here back then.

Still, it started my love of fantasy that eventually led me to RPGs and Veeky Forums, so I'll always remember that.

Personally when I had a nostalgic go at a few a while back I wasn't impressed with Shadow Warriors- the setting seemed kind of thin and half-assed (for a FF book- I obviously don't expect Tolkien). That's judging it as a book rather than as a game, though.

>but out of the FF series I always loved Caverns of the Snow Witch
What did you like about it? I was bugged by so much of the adventure being after you defeat the snow witch.

>so much of the adventure being after you defeat the snow witch.
To be honest it was exactly that, I liked the epic nature of it

it gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance. I recall liking the idea that she's got some batman gambit means of fucking you all in the end game, but I (going off of 20 years ago of memory) recall it being a very arbitrary luck based finale.

Huh, why did that make it feel epic? Like there was a second quest on top of defeating her? Or a third, since the yeti was the first quest and she was the second.

I collect greenspines.
It's becoming harder and harder to find them because most charity shops either pulp them because they don't know their rarity. Or in the past few years they've been pricing them realistically, like they've Googled the price.
Accidentally stole a copy of Magehunter from my old primary school before leaving it.

Black Vein Prophecy is my fave

Picked up a greenspine Forest of Fear this week at the local charity. Not often I see them over here.

I'd like to have the first editions with the multicolored backs in English as well as Swedish but I only picked up Firetop and Citadel so far. Work in progress.

* Forest of Doom

Early Steve books were very unforgiving.
>you're at a crossroads
>do you go left or right?
>you go left, rocks fall

>Black Vein Prophecy is my fave
Good eye, user.

>greenspines
This makes them sound really like a cult item.

My favorite gamebook artist was Russ Nicholson. His art was always gnarly, gonzo and weirdass.

...and I posted a tribute pic to him instead by accident, lol.

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Seas of Blood my nigga.
I want to run a Sinbad/Pirates game someday.

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In some Lone Wolf books did that too, worse that it took multiple "chapters" to get to the game over.

Fire on the Water was infamous with this, if you didn't took specific ability and did a good deed (or just were careful about not messing with suspicious item), the only available path was unwinnable.

Admit it, you had to look up the solution to this.

Which book is this art from?

Sorry, I don't know. I was just collecting the art.

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Fuck yeah. I've got the whole series minus a couple of the novels and the Cretan Chronicles.. Looking forward to Gates of Death, but hope that they use a better artist this time, because the Port of Peril guy didn't hold a candle to Martin McKenna and the rest of the old crew.

Chasms of Malice is pure ass. Spellbound is literally impossible, and Curse of the Mummy might as well be, but the last two are at least fun reads.

Dare you enter ... THE HOUSE OF HELL?

Don't mind me, just a robot punching some motherfucking dinosaurs over here.

Final Fantasy was easier for me to find than D&D. Lot of love for it, even if some of the books were really batshit.

Portal of Evil was better.

>tfw YOU are the hero

>even if some of the books were really batshit
But those were the best ones!

>Who else grew up on Fighting Fantasy?
By his own admission, this guy.

I remember really enjoying Freeway Fighter in particular, because I'm a big Mad Max fan and I was a little tired of the standard fantasy setting. Can't find a PDF or even a physical copy anywhere, though.

Heart of Ice was my favorite choose-your-own-adventure book. Loved the art, the choices were intelligent and not lolrandomyoudie and it has some cool post-apoc technology and ideas.

Creature of Havoc
An unskippable die roll early on decides whether the game is winnable in the last ~10 refs.
You're given a one-use weapon that can be used to instawin a combat, fairly early on. Very useful, as there are plenty of weapon-losing points and hard combats throughout. very missable information: if you don't save it for the end boss, you can't win the book

FUCK this book.

Fuck, I remember this ball-ache of a book now. Wasn't there some sort of labyrinth fairly early on where you just keep going in circles until you die from combat? Livingstone did that shit in the first Firetop Mountain too and it's a pain in the ass.

You forgot the best part: there's a mistake in the numbering. Cheating is quite literally the only way to win.

Don't forget having to use a "deduct _ from the current paragraph whatever happens" on a paragraph where doesn't happen. You literally need to cheat.

>An unskippable die roll early on decides whether the game is winnable in the last ~10 refs.
Just cheat the early roll.

Jackson did Creature of Havoc and iirc the maze in Firetop Mountain too.

This book was cool as shit but I could never, EVER beat it. It's a classic Jackson nightmare.

Sen's Fortress was a pretty blatant homage to Deathtrap Dungeon.

Still easier than learning GURPS

>Steve Jackson and Steve Jackson

Sick reference, bro.

As one of the early ones, it had a bazillion printed, so it should be no problem to track a copy down. Just checked ebay and there's a bunch of them right now at low prices.

I'll just drop this here and walk away whistling:

mega.nz

/#F!ellRxKKb!698hqbj0xhUIPuP-F9aWvQ

>Wasn't there some sort of labyrinth fairly early on where you just keep going in circles until you die from combat?
The book tiself is a death march, but there are not one but TWO instances of 10 GOTO 20 20 GOTO 10 death loops. Both are intentional fuck-you deaths.

These books introduced me both to fantasy and to traditional games. I was into Stephen King as a kid, so my mum bought me Deathtrap Dungeon because the cover looked scary and she thought it was a horror novel. I had an absolute blast playing through it, not least of all because I didn't have a PC back then. Then I introduced my school friends to these books, and my first gaming group evolved from the people who played them. We actually used the roleplaying system from FF for our first adventures.

At one point I even wrote one. It was pretty stupid, all things considered, but it had a few ideas that I think are good to this day: about as many ways to win as there are to lose (not counting dying in combat), several different possible paths through the game, and the ability to legally save through magic menhirs. One true path approach, so beloved by Games Workshop, incentivises cheating, while multiple paths increase replayability.

fun book, with 2 awesome endings

Slaves of the Abyss had a loop like that where you're trapped in a forest and slowly lose HP.

111
>you lose 1 HP from the heat. Go to 112
112
>you lose 1 HP from exhaustion. Go to 111

Creature of Havoc is the ultimate definition of great in theory, abysmal in execution.... well Creature of Havoc and Communism.

Nice to see my old folder still being linked
The problem with these old scans is that they were done years ago, and a few of them are damn-nigh unreadable
Some decent person needs to dive in and redo them all

Did you know American Steve actually wrote some FFs? Makes it really confusing when separating him from British Steve
For the record, American Steve wrote:
>Scorpion Swamp
>Demons of the Deep
>Robot Commando
and the other titles are British Steve

>Makes it really confusing when separating him from British Steve
The difference in book styles really stands out though.

GURPS Steve liked to experiment, GW Steve was just an asshole.

But a cool asshole, who gave you an adventure! Not like "did you collect the first object? great, did you get the second? no? oh well, you die in the last 5 paragraphs" Crypt of the Sorcerer.