9/19/2023 0 Comments Fabled lands character sheet![]() ![]() I sometimes think of making a print version of Frankenstein, but all that conditional text would be lost. That allowed me to build in hundreds of cases of conditional text that reflected earlier choices, just one of those being whether Victor refers to the Creature as he or it. I still remember my delight when I was writing Frankenstein using the Inkle system and I realized it automatically kept track of every section a player read. Good god, that would be too much like real life. And even in an open-world gamebook, where death might be the appropriate ending for a given character's story, it can't just be random and unavoidable. Every time the PC snuffs it in a book like that it's a failure on the writer's part. ![]() A single-story game ( Heart of Ice, say) shouldn't require trying-&-dying till you find an optimum path through. I'm being facetious, but the Don't Kill Me players are right. The worst you'll suffer is being sent to the naughty corner (aka Tartarus) for a brief spell. We're in different times now, and Jamie and I have taken that on board with our new Vulcanverse gamebooks, which should eventually consist of around a 4000-section adventure in which you cannot die permanently, not even if the Furies and Nemesis team up against you. But those were times when PCs in roleplaying games might get killed at the drop of a bascinet, and when we could reasonably expect Bucky to stay dead. It used to be that whatever happened to you was part of the story, even when that story ended in tragedy and/or horror. Somebody on Facebook recently was disgruntled because the skeleton pirates in Over the Blood-Dark Sea had carted them off to a life of undeadtured (sic) servitude with no hope of resurrection: That's a gripe about FL that we still hear. One obvious difference from old-style gamebooks is that in Alba your character can't die. Here's the author, Harley L Truslove, talking about the books. Think Telltale Games' The Walking Dead rather than The Witcher. The writing style is of higher quality than the purple prose of yore, and it looks as if the blocks of prose between choices are longer, making this more of a weighty novelistic experience than a CRPG in book form. (And to think players used to grumble about having to tick boxes in Fabled Lands books back in the day.) I haven't seen the book myself, but from the Kickstarter page it looks like it has a lot of legacy game elements such as stickers that mark items or locations on the map. But here's a new one called Alba with a post-apocalyptic setting, and it must be doing something right because in fund-raising terms it has far surpassed other print gamebooks (open world or linear) of recent times. Apart from the Steam Highwayman series (excellent and highly recommended btw) there haven't been a lot of open world gamebooks, in the sense of giving complete freedom to travel where you want, go back and forth without limit, and pick up whichever quests appeal to your character. Some gamebook news today, and here's one that ought to be of interest to Fabled Lands readers.
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