Choice of the Petal Throne

There is a gamebook set in the Empire of the Petal Throne! It's called Choice of the Petal Throne and it is available here.

The reviews I've seen have been largely positive, most siting the density of Tekumel's setting, history and language as the only drawbacks.

Dungeoneer Your Own Fighting Fantasy films! Part 1

“Now you and your friends can create your own fantasy movies! Imagine that you are the director and your friends are the cast of heroes. Will you send them to battle with the evil wizard or recover the Dragon's hoard? The choice is yours, and Dungeoneer makes the exciting world of fantasy roleplaying accessible in a thoroughly user-friendly manner.

“You can start straight away and introduce more complex rules and scenarios as you and your friends gain experience as director and actors. So, are you ready? Then let the camera roll...”

Dungeoneer is an odd book, but a fun one. I’m not even really sure why it exists as there was already a rule book for turning the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook rules into a proper tabletop rpg. That original book seems to be almost impossible to find nowadays, but there was a reboot done in 2011 that I am keeping a very eager eye out for.

The Holy Grail of 1984

So what is Dungeoneer? It is about as an ‘introduction to roleplaying’ manual as you could find. It was intended as a manual for transitioning kids from gamebooks to full-on rpgs. The entire book is structured so that first time players and ‘directors’ can get a game up and running in the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan. It actually does this surprisingly well. The approach reads as a bit hokey, comparing running a game to ‘directing’ a movie, but this really isn’t a bad way for first time gamers to look at it. They set up scenes and learn to build tension, and plot while learning what to cut out. It also makes sense when you remember that this was published in 1989 and invoking images of Conan, Hawk the Slayer, Krull, Willow, Dark Crystal and other films of the time is surprisingly effective. I would have been around just the right age for this when it first came out, and I would have eaten this shit up like Dunkaroos.

I gotta stat these sugar-crack dealing Kangaroos at some point. 

After the standard 'what is role-playing' introduction (girls can play too!), it launches right into a generic adventure called, generically enough ‘The Tower of the Sorcerer’ . This is designed to get the group rolling without the tedious task of learning the rules.  This works well as Fighting Fantasy is relatively rules-lite, and it is always more fun to learn by playing than reading or listening to the GM explain everything.  The adventure itself is pretty bland (climb the tower to rescue the princess. There isn’t even a maze, just a long corridor with optional rooms) and would be a major turn off even for an introductory adventure, except for three things: 

1 It avoids the whole ‘you are approached in a tavern’, or the ‘starts with a battle’ stuff that has become an immediate turn off for me. Tower starts with your group being lead up towards the evil sorcerer's lair by the local garrison. After a quick explanation as to why you’re there to encourage some actual role-play, the adventure gets underway almost immediately.  

2 The art of John Sibbick. I love the art of the FF books, it evokes a real sense of place. Titan comes across as quite a classic fantasy gritty world, more in common with Thieves World than Tolkien, but with a lot more traps and haunted forests.  

3 The adventure end with the heroes stuck at the top of a goblin riddled tower, a new antagonist or two, no way home and the whole world of Titan to explore. There is also a sequel adventure, which you can launch into right away, or you can start playing in your sandbox. If the kid was already a Fighting Fantasy veteran, they would know that there is a whole wide world out there to explore (and adapt). 

Flea Market Find!

Got them all for $4 (Canadian!). 

I love Gamebooks. I'm terrible at them, but I love playing them. As a kid I hacked and cheated my way through most of the Way of the Tiger, some of the Lone Wolf books and a bunch of the classic Fighting Fantasy. I sold them all off at some point, and now like so many other middle aged men in the grips of terminal nostalgia, I am now trying to collect them again. 

Yesterday the Wife and I went to a local flea market and I found these four little beauties. I got them cheap because unfortunately most of them are in TERRIBLE condition. I bought them anyway because I didn't have any of the Sorcery series yet and because it was honest to glob Dungeoneer! 

Dungeoneer was the Fighty Fantasy RPG. Combined with Out of the Pit (the bestiary), you could run actual tabletop games with your friends in the FF world of Titan (I highly recommend Titan for any fantasy fan). I'm going to through the book and see how viable as an rpg it actually is. 

The Problem with Kickstarter

via Mightygodking.

Though he is talking about boardgames, I wonder how many of these problems carry over to RPGs? Certainly they raise money to get some wonderful projects off the ground, but how are they are generating sales after the project is released, or better yet, at generating NEW players?

Given that the bulk of players are in their thirties and forties, I see tabletop RPGs facing extinction in ten-to-twenty years, much sooner if D&DNext flops. Even now they are more of a cultural artifact than active concern. Getting back to Kickstarted I hear about campaigns mostly through other Blogs, which are only read by people already interested in the hobby.

Gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy are getting a semi-revival by moving into electronic devices and I'm frankly amazed that I haven't heard more from Hasbro about doing this with Dungeons and Dragons. There will always be people who want to hear the dice rattle across the table, I'm one of them, but I'm old enough to know that I'm old.

Gamebooks

*sigh*, who do they fuck with things? Blogger has changed its settings and I am now forced to deal with them. Not a good sign when it took me two minutes to find the NEW POST button. Nor can I actually seem to VIEW my own blog. Wonderful.

Nevetheless, this post is about Gamebooks. A few weeks ago I stumbled across an old copy of Steve Jackson's Island of Lizard King buried in the back of my bookself. When I was younger I had played through the Way of the Tiger series and some of the Lone Wolf books. I had a few other Steve Jackson gamebooks, but don't remember if I played them as much. I am now looking to change that and have already started peaking into ebay and dug into a few second hand shops.

I'm also very eager to get my hands on THIS.

Since I'm working on a solo-game meself, I started digging around to see what the status of Gamebooks are in the intraweb and I was pleasently surprised to see that its doing okay. Its also nice to see that many of these games are being reissued (some as apps, which is neat) or being put up as freeware, which means I now have a decent cache stored on my zip drive.

BLOGS and Stuff

Turn to 400
Adventure Cow - write your own!
Fabled Land
Llyod of Gamebooks

Free Stuff!

Abandonia-Gamebooks
Project Aon - all the Lone Wolf books, free!

Then last night I discovered Heart of Ice by David Morris, an post-apok setting gamebook available for FREE and loaded it onto my ereader. As fortune rolled, there was a mix up at my chemo this morning and I ended up waiting around for two hours while the pharmacy caught up. Since it doesn't need dice to play,  I loaded up Heart of Ice and ran a game. Poor Mike the Mutant, he was doing pretty well until he started exploring the Ancient Pyramid of Giza and accidentally triggered an ancient nuclear failsafe that caused the destruction of the pyramid and I am assuming, a few square miles of frozen Sahara. Hey, if you gotta go, at least it has style.

I'm thinking of finding a dice-app that will work on my cell phone so I can try out some of the other games in similar situations. No one comments if you're jotting notes in a pad, but dice weirds some people out.

I intend fo try HoI again, which as I said is great because it doesn't need dice. But up next, my happy find for the month, my own, slightly batterd second hand copy of Warlock of Fire Mountain!