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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

Yah these were huge as a kid in the 1980s.

There were also these combination choose your own adventure/RPG books. It was an RPG where you rolled dice and fought monsters but the book acted as the DM so you could play by yourself.

Living out in a rural area having no one else to play D&D with those books were really cool. You had a limited # of plays on the book but more than one, and back then as a kid you didn't have the expectation of instant gratification & constant new stuff & content so it was fine.

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Re CYOA/RPG combo, I believe you're referring to the Fighting Fantasy series: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy

There's a fun confusing fact about that series, which is that Steve Jackson was one of the creators and frequent authors. "Oh, Steve Jackson, the creator of GURPS and Munchkin!" you're saying. Nope, different Steve Jackson. But wait! That Steve Jackson did come along later and author a few books in the series. So now a bunch of those books have "Steve Jackson" listed as the author, and there's no way of knowing which one it is without googling.

There is also Fabled Lands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands) which was pretty cool because you could make choices that could take you to another entire book if you owned it.

There were quite a few RPGs-in-book-form. I had a Middle-Earth one that involved delving solo into the Mines of Moria. But Fighting Fantasy seems to be the best-known, and may have been the first.

Some of the Fighting Fantasy [0] series has been digitized on Steam, if you want a dose of nostalgia or for anyone who missed them the first time.

There was also a similar series based on the Chronicles of Narnia that is available on the Internet Archive [1].

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/856880/Fighting_Fantasy_C...

[1] https://archive.org/search.php?query=narnia%20solo%20games

Yeah they were great! I had a reasonable collection of these, and I remember on subsequent playthroughs trying to "forget" what was the correct way forward and trying to play it as if it was the first time. Or trying all the possible combinations until I had read every page in the book!

Warlock of Fire Mountain had an interesting twist re: memorization in that there was an actual maze embedded in it.

I remember putting together a 'logic map' for a scripting language in order to generate CYOAs, but never went anywhere with it. I wanted to have things like dependent choices on starting items affecting page turns and so forth. With only 400 items as a 'limit' to gamebook memory it was an interesting challenge!

Man, other people played these books with way more discipline than I did.

I don’t think I ever made it all the way through a book playing “properly”. Oh, I died? Okay, let’s just assume I didn’t...

I just went and looked at the Fighting Fantasy books and I don't think I actually had any of those.

There must have been another series that was copying them. Try as I might I can't find them.

I'm fairly certain the ones I had were the "Grail Quest" books by J.H. Brennan.

Maybe Fabled Lands? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands

I remember those CYOA/RPG books well. Anyone know some of the titles or how to find them in print these days?

That sounds awesome. I could have spent a vacation as a kid doing this sort of stuff.

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