Hello everyone. I hope you're having a wonderful time gaming, and I'm sorry to take a moment of your time for some housekeeping.
In recent months there has been a noticeable uptake in self-promotion posts.
Gamebooks are still an incredibly small entertainment niche, and as such we have allowed limited self promotion to foster a sense of shared community between creators and consumers. This will not change.
However, this requires a certain minimum effort at interaction from creators that increasingly appears absent. Too often the extent of interaction with the sub is to simply drop a link to YT, or a company website.
Whilst I appreciate that marketing any book (or channel) is a grind, this sort of non-interaction both diminishes the sub, and your own opportunity to actually engage with potential readers. Therefore, going forward, all cold link posts will be removed.
Finally, AI generative apps are not gamebooks. I appreciate that they can provide a semblance of the branching/interactive experience found in gamebooks or solo ttrpg oracles. But their place is not here. Advertisement for such apps will be removed.
Please feel free to discuss below. Your opinions are truly valuable. Thank you for your time, and have a wonderful day.
The House on Sentinel Hill by Graham Plowman is an investigative horror gamebook in the Cthulhu Mythos. Set in 1926 New England in the rural town of Durham (mostly in a haunted house!).
It's our September read for the 100 Endings Book Club. It's available in physical book format (hardback or softcover).
There's also a soundtrack for the House on Sentinel Hill! (The author is also a composer of horror music)
It'll be my first time playing it (had it for a while!) so I'm short on advice, but it's been recommended by several Book Club members (and folk on this subreddit)
Leave a comment here or join us on the Discord if you've got thoughts or questions.
Jonas is forty, which is old for a man born at the ragged edge of a kingdom that has never once thought about him. For a handful of cursed nights each year the wells open in the swamp and the wraiths pour out of them, and on every one of those nights he has stood in the front rank and gone through them alone, his companions there only in case he faltered, which he never has. His pole-sword is crusted with rot and the edge of it hardly matters; it's the witch's talisman bound at the crossing steel that does the real work. He calls the blade Farewell.
He survives this raid too. Then he comes home to find his son gone, taken by a royal mage into a kingdom coming apart over a prophecy.
181 sections, about 108,000 words, 274 choices. No dice, no combat table, so if rolling is what you're after this won't do it.
Free on Android. No ads, no timers, nothing to buy. IFID and an IFDB listing if that means anything to you.
Hi this is Joseph Daniels, creator of MAGMA Game books. I just thought I'd drop by to let you all know that my 12th game book, GRIM DICKENSIAN TALES, which is actually a spinoff from the original GRIM DICKENSIAN, is due for release this Friday. For more information about this exciting adventure, read on.
In 1899, an immortal being attempted to open an ancient box and unleash hell on Earth. On that fateful night, a band of heroes set out to prevent this, and may have succeeded or failed, depending on your previous choices. Now, it is time to return to that inevitable nexus of events. Only this time, you will relive the nightmare through the eyes of two unsung heroes, whose unique stories will rewrite everything you thought you knew.
Step into the shoes of Irene Adler: As she sets out on a mission of revenge to find the mastermind behind the Bolshoi Agenda job, whilst performing deadly tasks for iconic figures such as Fagin, Dorian Gray, and a bandage covered man known as Griffin, in his thrilling debut.
Master Persuasion & Interrogation to extract critical secrets.
Weave lethal disguises to slip past the enemy undetected.
Deploy a hidden poison ring to silence threats instantly.
Don the Stetson of Quincey P. Morris: as he fights to save Lucy Westenra from becoming the immortal bride of Dracula, whilst evading a mysterious shapeshifting assassin from his past.
Unleash Gunslinger abilities and fire six shots in a single action.
Exploit expert gambling skills to earn extra shillings.
Delve into a past long forgotten through a series of induced memories, to experience a bloody back story never told before.
Play through these stories individually or jump from one character to another between sections to guide the story as a whole.
I bought the LONER pulp adventure book on a whim. Has anyone got these? Thoughts?
Also, there seem to be 20+ books in this series. Are these expansions for a core system? if so, where do you start?
Review for the new gamebook "Dorothy and Alice - Under the Rainbow" posted about here;
I received my free review copy of the book today thanks to the author.
Physical - The book was well packed and arrived in great shape. Its about 180 pages and well illustrated, hardback, all glossy with silver edges and appears well bound. Autographed and signed to me personally. Besides the Adventure book he sent a few extras as well - a softback copy of the original "Wizard of Oz", annotated by himself, a card with a QR code for a bonus story, a paper bookmark, and a nice golden metal bookmark with some charms on it relating to the adventure - hand made by his wife. A nice package over all.
Issues for me so far are is that the sections are usually a whole page instead of by paragraph number - each page has a different amount of text on it so the font size will vary on each page to get all the text in. More concerning is that there are different colored backgrounds on the pages, and a few pages are black with black or dark blue text on them making them very hard to read.
Story - the story seems well written and the author seems to have a good general writing skill. I've seen no spelling errors due to proofreading or any other reason. I've had a couple of instances of "loopback" taking me back to a page I've been to before, which makes my choice the second time around easier since I already know where the other path goes. My first path ended quickly when what I thought was a good choice that took me to an end.
The two MC's are Dorothy from "Wizard of Oz" and Alice from "Alice in Wonderland". The characters have been aged up a few years and while Dorothy is still basically sweet and innocent, Alice is a bit more "worldly" in her mid 20's. There's a warning up front that the books are meant for age 14 and up and its not suited for kids. I think this might have been a lost opportunity to get kids involved but that's just my view.
Dorothy starts alone, trying to recover her friends from the original book that she lost very quickly at the start of the adventure. During the story, she teams up with Alice and the two travel together. Choices on what page to go to may have more than the standard two - each girl has their own personality shown in your choices, as well as some of the items in Alice's inventory.
The plot seems good overall. I think the part of the story where they give a speech to a girl they meet about being their own person and not being there just for a man seemed a bit off. A good message but I think out of place for the story.
Reaching the end of the main plotline, you're given 5 different good or bad endings. There's still a few threads hanging open that I assume will get closed up in the sequels. One ending might offend some readers for not being a standard level of "correctness"
For myself, I would give the story an overall "B" and would have preferred the standard younger versions of the characters and have it for all ages. Length is good and not too short for a full run. Besides the standard multiple bad endings it looks theres multiple good endings as well.
Thanks to the author for sending me the book to check out. Nice to see such care and enthusiasm for a game book, and a quality product all around.
For the newly released gamebook that I went thru and reviewed, just for fun I made 3D models of the two MCs. They're rigged but I still need to add the weapons.
Both characters were created in the Sims 3 and then imported into Blender. The outfits for both were created by combining two existing outfits from the game to make a new one. Dorothy will get an axe and Alice a sword when finished.
I had thought to do the rest of the cover characters as well but I think they might be a bit difficult to do without using a lot of pre-existing models
So, first, thanks everyone for the criticism and comments on my first post about this book. I genuinely appreciate it and took most of it into consideration. I've spent some time reading and rewriting to fix some of the obvious errors. I also looked into the cost of having a human being give it a rewrite. Given my fairly limited budget right now, I don't think I'm going to be able to go that route initially.
Having said all that, here's a new sample page with the updates.
Last month, I corresponded with Demian Katz to ask about getting a book added to his database at gamebooks.org. He mentioned that he'd written a gamebook of his own: The Groom of the Tomb; or, Lancelot Darling's Decisions. I grabbed a copy, and finally got around to playing it a few days ago. I'm curious if anyone else has checked it out, and in particular, whether you went in blind (i.e. without reading the novel it's adapted from). I read the novel first, so I'm interested in how it seemed to someone who played the gamebook first.
For context, Katz adapted his gamebook from an 1883 novel: The Bride of the Tomb; or, Lancelot Darling's Betrothed, by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller. Without going into plot spoilers, the novel and gamebook both open with the suicide of Lily Lawrence, a beautiful heiress, on the day before her wedding (that part isn't a spoiler; it's the first line in both versions of the story). From there, the novel's omniscient narration follows various characters around, and there's no real mystery from your perspective as the reader. It's less Agatha Christie and more like an episode of Columbo, where the fun is in seeing how the detective will unravel things, and what will become of the various characters along the way, within the context of an over-the-top, somewhat ridiculous melodrama ("somewhat ridiculous" in the deliberate way a present-era soap opera might be, but in a fictionalised depiction of 19th century upper-class New York society).
What's interesting with Katz's gamebook adaptation is that the mystery actually gets preserved. You play the role of Lancelot Darling, the man who was due to marry Lily Lawrence on the day following her suicide. Everything's from your perspective. So, although the prose itself is often directly ported over from the novel (just flipped to the second-person present tense you'd expect from a gamebook), you don't see things like villains chatting or monologuing about their nefarious schemes. You'll only discover the solution to the mystery and who the villains actually are if your choices lead you there.
As per the above photo of the rules page, the gamebook makes extensive use of a keyword system to track what you know or don't know within the context of the mystery, giving it a decent feel of investigation -- which can often be hard to do in a regular gamebook versus other forms of interactive fiction, especially this kind of book which is a fairly slim paperback and has to create its branching investigations within fewer than 300 passages (most of which are only around half a page to a page of text, of the font size and spacing you can see above).
I had fun both reading the novel and playing the gamebook. It was clearly a labour of love on Katz's part. He's credited on the novel's Gutenberg page for making The Bride of the Tomb available there, and in the afterword to the gamebook he talks about how he fell in love with Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller's novels and their over-the-top 19th century melodrama. I can always respect a niche interest and the passion projects that arise from it (the gamebook's £5 on Amazon UK, and based on my own experiences using Amazon's print-on-demand self-publishing systems, that's basically selling it at-cost, purely for the love of getting the book out into the world).
But as mentioned at the start of the post, I'm not sure how well it'd work for someone who hadn't read the novel. Like I said, going in blind would preserve a sense of mystery that I didn't get, because I'd read the novel first. But at the same time, because of the gamebook's narrower perspective, you miss a lot of the story content that makes the novel's implausible plot and circumstances fun, such as getting to spend time with the villains. So, I'm not sure how satisfying it'd be if you went for the gamebook first.
If anyone did indeed do that, and played the gamebook before or without ever reading the novel, I'd love to hear your perspective on it.
Stormwing is a passion project of mine. It's the first of a series (we currently have two books out) where you play through the book, but then get the tools to make your own adventures afterward. There's guidance on how to turn the adventure you played into your own gamebook to share with friends.
I can describe it best as The Mandalorian meets Lone Wolf. You've got a mysterious hero in armor. You've got a mystical baby. You've got a lot of bounties to hunt, and danger in which to find yourself.
After a year of work I have finally finished and published my first ever book, my take on the pick-a-path/choose-your-own adventure genre. It does not make use of dice or character sheets in favour of a more stripped down, narrative approach.
The story takes place in a rustic and comfy world of talking animals, akin Redwall or The Tale of Despereaux and follows Pippen, a young mouse boy as he goes on an adventure to the eponymous Twilight Isle to find a stolen crystal. On the island he’ll encounter forbidding terrain, hostile creatures and other, more mysterious, obstacles.
The Twilight Isle is intended for a broader age range, from younger teens to adults that would enjoy a nice little adventure. The book is currently on Amazon as both a digital edition with built-in links or as a physical softcover for that classic back-and-forth flippability that all pick-a-path books need.
I'm currently working on a second book in the same series and would be happy to receive constructive feedback on this first book from anyone who decides to give it a try.
I suppose this question comes up all the time, so feel free to link me somewhere else if this has been answered already, but essentially it is, what are your top 10 (or 12, 15, 20) gamebooks ever, and what makes them stand above the rest (if in doubt, give your list some variety, they don't have to be 10 Steve Jackson titles, for example). Maybe we'll help each other discover one we've missed and we'd enjoy. Many thanks.
Have any good game books been turned into an app? It would be cool to have on my phone like an ebook where I can make my choices and it auto go to that page and it store my character sheet too for any made with one. Or is there a universal app where I can load in a epub or pdf of a book and it do this? Then I can whip it out when ever I have a few moments of free time.
