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Half Price Books: A love/hate relationship
Apparently Tuesdays are buy-one-get-two on paperbacks at the used bookstore (which should really be usedbook store) five minutes from my apartment.
After walking away with every Gamebook in the place for $6, I decided that wasn't enough money so I went back and grabbed some old AD&D books (A PH, a DMG, and an MM) for $6 apiece.
Gamebooks are something I had forgotten I liked. They were very popular in the 1980s and then quickly died off as people became stupider and stopped reading anything longer than the ad copy on the back of a DVD. Essentially, it's a book crossed with a roleplaying game. You read a page, and at the bottom is a choice, like "if you run from the troll, turn to page 272; if you fight the troll, turn to page 180." Most of them were fantasy, some of them had a whole character system with a combat system and such, for example: "If you fight the troll, turn to page 285 for its stats. If you win go to 134, if you lose go to 146".
Obviously this is something I must have. It combines the features of "interactive solitaire thing" with "found in used bookstores for under $5".
After walking away with every Gamebook in the place for $6, I decided that wasn't enough money so I went back and grabbed some old AD&D books (A PH, a DMG, and an MM) for $6 apiece.
Gamebooks are something I had forgotten I liked. They were very popular in the 1980s and then quickly died off as people became stupider and stopped reading anything longer than the ad copy on the back of a DVD. Essentially, it's a book crossed with a roleplaying game. You read a page, and at the bottom is a choice, like "if you run from the troll, turn to page 272; if you fight the troll, turn to page 180." Most of them were fantasy, some of them had a whole character system with a combat system and such, for example: "If you fight the troll, turn to page 285 for its stats. If you win go to 134, if you lose go to 146".
Obviously this is something I must have. It combines the features of "interactive solitaire thing" with "found in used bookstores for under $5".
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Yeah, you can carry the character over the 20-some books of the series. They even hearken back to earlier books: some of the places you go or things you do in earlier books will give you more information or choices in encounters that happens ten books later.
Dever published a four-part series in the same universe/mechanic, but set many years earlier, way way south of the Lone Wolf books. I've got that set, too, but you don't grow nearly as much as the Lone Wolf books.