I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure games and I’d regularly either rent them out of the library or pick them up before going on holiday. Lately I’ve been thinking what a shame it is that the medium has pretty much died out and I’ve been fighting back against this by having a go on some of the later interpretations of the idea.įor those not in the know, CYOA books are essentially multiple-choice driven singleplayer RPGs. You create a character according to the rules established in the start of the book, turn to the first passage, read it and then decide what you would do next. Each option available to you would point you to another passage in the book, creating a rudimentary branching adventure. In the early ‘90s I remember them being all the rage and there were some long-lasting brands to come out of the short-lived fad, the most popular of which was the Fighting Fantasy series which included the likes of The Legend of Zagor and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. My personal favourites however were the long-running Lone Wolf books by Joe Dever, - which had a single adventure running across multiple books - and the Fabled Lands series.įabled Lands, which was known as Quest in the US, was definitely the one I spent the most time with. It was years ahead of it’s time in the way it created an utterly open sandbox across multiple books. Written by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson, the Fabled Lands themselves were a fictional world that mirrored parts of ancient history and each book contained an entire nation – though the series was cancelled before the world could be completed. Only six of the proposed twelve books were ever published – The Wartorn Kingdom, Cities of Gold and Glory, The Court of Hidden Faces, The Blood Dark Ocean, Lords of the Rising Sun and The Plains of Howling Darkness. Each novel contained a distinct part of the world for players to explore and you could travel between countries/books as much as you wanted just by hopping to the relevant passage in the next book. It was all very clever and likely a pain in the ass to organise. Fabled Lands - The original Fabled Lands gamebooks, written by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson, and beloved by many. Cover art was by Kevin Jenkins with Russ Nicholson and Arun Pottier providing maps and illustrations. The characters of the Fabled Lands are the basis of the players actual character class choice. The Fabled Lands series stood apart from other gamebooks in that there wasn’t a central plot either. Fabled Lands is a series of fantasy gamebooks written by established gamebook authors Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson and published by Pan Books, a division of Macmillan in the mid 1990s. ![]() You were just a character in a larger world, free to do what you wanted and be whoever you desired – something that encouraged lots of replaying. ![]() Fancy enrolling in the wizard schools of Dweomer? Sure. Want to try and find the Monastery of Molhern or assassinate the Faceless King of Aku? Again, fine. In The Blood Dark Sea you could even turn pirate or pirate-hunter, roaming the oceans as you pleased.
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