The Sword and Laser discussion

As a child and teen I loved Choose Your Own Adventure Style books, like Fighting Fantasy by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever or the "solo adventures" of German Fantasy RPG "The Dark Eye". In fact, those books is what got me into Roleplaying Games.

And I was wondering what books in this "genre" you can recommend. Modern ones and older ones that still hold up. I would love to reenter that space...

The only game books I've read are Star Trek: Voyage to Adventure by Michael J. Dodge and Star Trek: Phaser Fight by Barbara Siegel. The first book has 46 endings and the second has 28 endings. Both books have terrific cover art. I guess I was a little underwhelmed by the stories which are similar. Michael Dodge is a pseudonym of John M. Ford who has written some terrific science fiction and fantasy novels, including a couple of very entertaining Star Trek novels.

If you start digging into interactive books, you can explore this site

https://jeremydouglass.github.io/tran...

which maps story paths, and in some cases, assesses the outcomes.

For reviews and descriptions of game books, there is this site

https://gamebooks.org/

Can't recommend The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha highly enough

Oh, man, I had so many of those bright orange and lime green spines on my shelf as a pre-teen in the early 90s.
Freeway Fighter was just so awesome. I didn't know it was a Mad max ripoff then, of course.

I remember having Super Mario, Knightmare and Asterix ones too.

I found the developer https://www.inklestudios.com/ when I was looking into text adventures a while back. They specialise in narrative text games, which with a bit of mental gymnastics, could be considered e-adventure game books, right?
They've adapted Steve Jackson's Sorcery! and I can reccommend Around the World in 80 Days and Overboard (although both are definitely text driven games rather than books.)

There are also Fighting Fantasy adaptations on Steam.

This is maybe not what you're looking for but ... (I quite liked it.)

Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography

Ryan North wrote Shakespeare Chooseable-Path Adventures.

Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable-Path Adventure

To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure
was turned into a computer game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/32...

Are the Ryan North ones comic books? They sound delightful!

I also see there's an Oregon Trail series that has really good ratings here on Goodsreads: https://www.goodreads.com/series/2502...

And "heart of Ice" also seems to getr very high ratings!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

I didn't know there were so many Choose Your Own Adventure Style books! Or that there are books like "Suburban Sex Kitten Adventure"... :eek:

Jan wrote: "Are the Ryan North ones comic books? They sound delightful!"

Mostly text. A few pictures. And they are delightful!

I think I will try out the Macbeth one!

Jan wrote: "I also see there's an Oregon Trail series that has really good ratings here on Goodsreads: "

It is probably popular because of the nostalgia factor.

The game was popular a few decades ago. It would be the sort of game that would convert easily. It was an adventure game where you made choices about what to do next.

Every path in the Oregon Trail Choose Your Own Adventure probably ends with “You died of dysentery.”

I can support the Ryan North MacBeth one - you can even play as the ghost of his father, if you like. Awesome stuff.

My wife is reading Cinder's Adventure: Get Me To the Wedding! and says it's quite entertaining.

As with most hobbies, there’s quite a rabbit hole to go down with gamebooks in particular (as opposed to interactive fiction). Like Mark, I’d say check out gamebooks.org. Here are some series to start your search, which are what I think are the highlights.

Classics
- Fighting Fantasy (I know you already mentioned it but can’t have a list without it on). In particular the Sorcery! sub-series is good
- Lone Wolf (as above)
- Legends of Lone Wolf (Grey Star)
- Freeway Warrior
- Way of the Tiger
- Blood Sword
- Fabled Lands
- Critical IF
- Cretan Chronicles

More recent
- Destiny Quest
- Steam Highwayman
- Graphic Novel Adventures
- Rider of the Black Sun
- Legendary Kingdoms
- ACE gamebooks
- Grim Dickensian / The Ghosts of Craven Manor

Worth noting that there are reprints of some of the “classic” series which are probably a better bet if you aren’t a collector (cheaper to buy usually and often have bug fixes). There’s also a bunch of gamebooks translates to apps which can be a fun way to do things. In a similar vein, all the Joe Dever books (eg Lone Wolf) are legally available for free at projectaon.org, so that’s a good place to go if you want to get into it a bit without spending money

A friend wrote an excellent 'choose your own adventure' story called 'I, Cyborg'. Choice of Games is the publisher of a large number of CYOA computer games, available through Steam etc.

I got "To be or not to be - a choosable path adventure by Ryan North" and I feel I am missing everything because I never read the Scottish Play... 😆

And thank you, Tim, for that extensive list! Very cool!

Jan wrote: "I got "To be or not to be - a choosable path adventure by Ryan North" and I feel I am missing everything because I never read the Scottish Play... 😆"

I thought the only time you needed to refer to it by that, was when you were part of a performance involving it. Not just in general, but maybe I don't know my curses well enough. Or maybe it was all but a dream.

I’ve talked about Life's Lottery by Kim Newman before but I’ll include it here for completeness. It’s a choose your own adventure story set in 20th century England, with plenty of popular culture references. Most of the story paths are “normal” fiction, but there is a science fiction element as well.

Jan wrote: "I got "To be or not to be - a choosable path adventure by Ryan North" and I feel I am missing everything because I never read the Scottish Play... 😆"

By the Scottish play I assume you mean "Macbeth" 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Diva...

I... I had a moment of lack of judgement. I blame it on "How to train your dragon" and their Scandinavians with Scottish accents...

Yah, while I don't know/ remember the Macbeth lineage, but I guess in a way you could think of Scott's as being of Danish heritage. Although I don't think many would appreciate you doing that. I say that as an American with a majority of Danish ancestry, back a few generations, and none from Scotland, as far as I know.

And a better line may have been "Something was rotten in the statement of your original post." ;-)

Someone helpfully made a Goodreads list.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7...

The nostalgia for Fighting Fantasy has created an itch so I've ordered Infected to scratch it.


There's some niche of a niche titles on that list though:
- Sextrap Dungeon
(If it was just a list of FF porn pun titles I'd probably buy it)
- Ocean of Lard (Choose Your Own Mind-F**k Fest, #17)
- Killing Hitler With Praise And Fire: Choose Your Own Horrible History
- Become the Woman of Your Dreams! 2 (Interactive Gender Transformation Feminization Erotica)