Wednesday, November 30, 2016



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This is a recommendation of the iOS app CreativeWriter & a musing rolled in one

Link to app site here: http://ift.tt/1mfuIjw

============o===========

This will be my last session for SGAM2016 (though still may be able to sneak another one before December comes):

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It was an interesting session. Probably the most I've ever done while on mobile, other than the Human Oracle game  @Chris Stieha   and I played (how long ago?). I played in bits throughout the day and all through my train/bus rides (without missing my stops!). The combination of the prompting oracle + This CreativeWriter iOS app for GM output has turned out to be felicitous for me.

The app itself is even more  useful than I thought. It has a "talking robot" key that will create random sentences using the same predictive algorithm that picks words for the virtual keyboard. It's fun and a bit uncanny at times.

 A lot of the random sentences are misses, but if you throw enough of them out there, a lot of the time something comes that makes a sort of sense. It may take some minor editing, but the idea that the engine "wants" to get across is often there, like a diamond in the rough that needs your polishing. That's not even counting the way you could combine disparate sentence fragments to combine into new ideas. It's a bit time consuming, but I find it fun (I like the surprise).

If you read the developers website, they make reference to Dadaist art and automatic writing (e.g. Naked Lunch) as inspiration.

While I used  the prompting oracle, I ended up ignoring the prompts, so that essentially, the oracle was just rejecting or accepting stuff at random (since the output had no relation to the prompts). I'm fine with that, because the iOS app does so much to lead my input.

Why not follow the prompts? I'm not sure if the act of working to get coherent ideas from the CreativeWriter app distracted me from that, or what. It may be that consciously trying to tilt output towards what the prompt said felt like I was leading the iOS app instead of letting it lead me. After all if the top word choices or random sentences contradicted a prompt, why would I force the output to fit the prompt? That's how I feel anyway.

There are still many times (maybe most) where you have to take a bit of control (like when the context of a random sentence suggested the identity of someone), so following the prompt might be a fallback to the iOS app suggestions.

Definitely will be experimenting more. Maybe tying more random sentences until something fits with the prompt. 



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November 30, 2016 at 07:00PM

RIP Joe Dever

RIP Joe Dever

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Legendary gamebook author Joe Dever passed away on 29 November 2016 due to complications after surgery. Creator of the fantasy world of Magnamund and the Lone Wolf series, Dever’s many gamebooks, roleplaying games and computer games enthralled and entertained millions, earning him impressive worldwide sales and establishing his works as much loved fan favourites.

At the time of his death Dever was finishing book 30 in the Lone Wolf series, the second ‘new’ volume to be released after The Storms of Chai was published in 2015/16.

joe-dever_lone-wolf

Dever was best known for the ongoing adventures of the Kai Lords in Lone Wolf, however, he was also the creator of the two-player visual gamebook series Combat Heroes and the post-apocalyptic Freeway Warrior series: the latter was recently updated for publication by Swedish publisher Åskfågeln, and is scheduled for release from 2017.

GameBook News extends sincere condolences to Dever’s family, friends and acquaintances. He will always be remembered through his imaginative writing, which will continue to find passionate fans across the globe for many years to come.





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November 30, 2016 at 06:29PM

Legendary fantasy author, Chingford-born Joe Dever dies (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Legendary fantasy author, Chingford-born Joe Dever dies (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

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November 30, 2016 at 03:37PM

Vale, Joe Dever.

Vale, Joe Dever.

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cyikpuvuqaaxhb7

Many of my readers will be aware that Joe Dever has passed away.

There are a number of tributes and obituaries already online, and I’ll link to a few :

The Guardian (UK)

Lloyd of Gamebooks

His family’s Facebook announcement

Karavansara

I never met Mr Dever face-to-face, but can only say that the hours of quests in his imagined worlds, battling Helghasts, Vordaks, Giaks, Drakkarim and the like mean that I am forever in his debt.

Thank you, Mr Dever.

Image result for joe dever

 

 

 





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November 30, 2016 at 01:40PM

Joe Dever - 1956-2016

Joe Dever - 1956-2016

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I met Joe Dever, for the first time, at Dragonmeet three years ago.

Joe Dever at Dragonmeet 2013.

Today I discovered that he passed away yesterday morning, after battling with ill-health for a long time. He was 60 years old.

If you are reading this blog, then you probably already know that he was the creator and writer of the Lone Wolf series of adventure gamebooks, which were set in the incredibly well-developed world of Magnamund.

Although I only met Joe in 2013, I had been aware of his works since the 1980s. I owned a few Lone Wolf adventures, but I personally preferred the Fighting Fantasy range because they provided the reader with more choices. I felt that Lone Wolf books were more like solo RPGs that wanted to be novels. This is probably why I actually preferred reading the Legends of Lone Wolf (co-authored with John Grant).

However, as I grew older I began to appreciate all the more what an incredible, and richly detailed, creation of the world of Magnamund was. Where the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan was a fantasy realm created by a committee who never met, and who rarely seemed to even speak to one another, Magnamund, and Lone Wolf, was the vision of one man, developed over decades.

When I did finally meet Joe, I found him to be affable and encouraging, also willing to chat about all things gamebook-related and pose for a photograph.

Joe Dever at Dragonmeet 2015.

From then on I caught up with Joe once or twice a year - usually at Dragonmeet and the UK Games Expo - and he was always interested in what I was working on, and I'm pleased to say I was able to give him a copy of Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland on its launch day.

Joe Dever at the UK Games Expo 2016.

Dragonmeet will be a strange place without him this Saturday and he will be sadly missed by many, right around the world.

But although the man himself is lost to us, and there are still there uncompleted Lone Wolf adventures which he was still working on up until Monday night, his work endures, and that is quite some legacy.

Or, to put it in the words of another much missed author: “No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...” ~ Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man


For Sommerlund and the Kai - RIP Joe Dever.






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November 30, 2016 at 01:34PM

RIP Joe Dever

RIP Joe Dever

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It is with great sadness that I heard of Joe Dever's death today. Joe was the man behind the Lone Wolf series and the world of Magnamund, something that Joe treated with the utmost love and care to create a magnificent saga of the lowly Kai Lord who saves the world.

He also produced many other gamebooks and also generously gave his permission for all of them to be made free on Project Aon in pretty much any digital format you can get.

I had the pleasure of meeting Joe at the last two Dragonmeets. He complimented my beaten up copy of Lone Wolf book 5 and gave me and the other fans a lot of his time. I also listened to him talk about Lone Wolf and it was great to hear the love he had put into the series over the years, which never waned.

He will be sorely missed by many :(

Here is the Facebook announcement







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November 30, 2016 at 01:06PM

Emily Short: End of November Link Assortment

Emily Short: End of November Link Assortment

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Events

December 3 is the Bay Area IF Meetup.

December 14, the People’s Republic of IF meets at MIT to look at some of the remaining IF Comp winners and discuss future project plans.

December 30 is the Scouring of Scotia, a live-via-Twitter shared gamebook/IF experience.

The Oxford/London IF Meetup takes a holiday in December.

cover-teeth-and-ice-hannah-powell-smith.pngNew Releases

Quite a lot of good stuff has come out this month, even not counting the end of IF Comp and the ECTOCOMP games I reviewed previously.

Sub-Q brings us a new story from Hannah Powell-Smith, a Raconteur piece called Teeth and Ice. It’s the story of a selkie trying to retrieve her skin; I lost several times, but it is possible to succeed, if you manage your resources right.

Xalavier Nelson Jr. (author of the comp game SCREW YOU, BEAR DAD) has a new piece out called Mazurka – A Ghost in Italy, now available on itchi.io for $0.49. It is a short, reflective story about prejudice, race, mental health, and fitting in vs. not; like some of Nelson’s other work, it uses link clicks very extensively to pace reading, and I found that more than usually effective in this particular work.

Ibis, Fly is a poetic new piece from Mary Hamilton, about being a bird who befriends other birds. Clicking the text often cycles between human and bird perspectives, turning familiar words into less recognizable descriptions of the way a bird might perceive these items. (See also Hamilton’s previous work, Detritus.)

Laura Michet’s Brigand Story is a horror piece about a tale told and retold and retold around the campfire, and what goes wrong with the telling and the tale. The words break down, repeat, stumble on themselves and change. It’s definitely its own thing, but might appeal also to people who enjoy Michael Lutz‘s horror.

Burnt Matches from Pippin Barr is concrete poetry…

Screen Shot 2016-11-30 at 12.37.56 AM.png

…in which each screen is a textual space to be traversed. Many of the interactions are subtly witty: long walks that head off the edge of the screen, words that ripple as your cursor passes over them. The whole doesn’t really yield to simple literal explanation (or it doesn’t for me), but it describes a journey that feels at least tonally consistent. There are echoes out of The Waste Land, lilacs and tarot cards and full fathom deep. But then also flickering screens of chess moves and alphabets I don’t read, which often must be manipulated (without understanding) in order to open the transition to the next screen: a content-free form of hacking that reminds me of 90s cyberpunk novels. And then just cold, frost and chill rooms and water, everything guttering until the world-text disintegrates into a field of simulated Twine errors. (Like, but also completely unlike, B Minus Seven’s use of Twine errors in Inward Narrow Crooked Lanes.)

Then also, new from Porpentine, Miss Clemory and the Wall of Fire:

Screen Shot 2016-11-29 at 1.04.06 PM.png

Its sole IFDB review at the moment describes it as good writing draped over not much story, but I disagree with that assessment. Yes, there’s a lot of metaphorical language in this piece, but the choice of metaphorical content is itself extremely revealing: the protagonist is very self-conscious about being a narrator, and the narration tells you quite a bit about who she is as a person. Meanwhile, the core of the story is about the distance between siblings, and the relationship between creative people, and the way we use language to manage and control and keep someone away. It has a short-story-shaped plot rather than a big bold adventure plot, but that suits this particular work.

antiochlogo.pngUpcoming

At AdventureX I got a chance to try Antioch: Scarlet Bay, which is a two-player choice-based interactive fiction where you and the other protagonist are trying to solve a murder. A lot of the interaction is about how your relationship develops with the other main character, though you’re also trying to push the investigation forward by noticing clues. It’s not in full release yet, and I didn’t get to play all the way through to the end, but I found it intriguing and I continue to wonder about the possibilities for minorly multiplayer IF, so I’m looking forward to this coming out.

Reviews and Articles

IF Comp ended! You can visit the complete results, but the top three placers were Detectiveland by Robin Johnson; Color the Truth by Brian Rushton; and Cactus Blue Motel by Astrid Dalmady.

The Short Game podcast covers the games that won IF Comp and offers some impressions of the competition as a whole.

A number of authors have also shared postmortems of their work, including

Elsewhere, I wrote about Steph Cherrywell’s work for Rock Paper Shotgun.

Procedural Generation Things

November was the month for PROCJAM and NaNoGenMo, so lots of interesting generation going on.

Chris Martens offers an assessment of story generators that might be suitable for NaNoGenMo (constructing a 50K-word novel). There’s less in that space than one might hope, but the overview document is quite interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

Lea Albaugh ran a recurrent neural network on a bunch of Inform 7 code, producing some entertaining new procedurally generated stuff, like so:

The description of the player is "It is stone."

The printed name is "smoke" as the probably property.

The secretary is a fluid container.

*

Rogue Process talks about Tanya Short’s procedural work in Moon Hunters:

Each time you play Moon Hunters you’re not playing the same game in a similar place as different people – you’re playing the exact same events in the exact same place as the exact same people. Every playthrough of Moon Hunters is about the same people, the same places, and the same events. What changes is the person telling it – each playthrough is the mythology being handed down to a new generation, and its variations and differences are the misremembering, embellishment, confusion and flourishes of a new storyteller.

*

sunlessskies1

And Failbetter Games has been blogging about their plans for Sunless Skies, the forthcoming sequel to Sunless Sea, with some followup commentary then also appearing on Rock Paper Shotgun.

 






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November 30, 2016 at 11:28AM

RPG – Sword Noir

RPG – Sword Noir

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I like Sword Noir – it is a combination of sword and sorcery and film noir (hence the name).  It is a system
where characters are good at what they do, but they cannot do everything and they do not become super human like high level DnD characters.  Characters have attributes and the game makes tests against them.  A character’s background, faculties and flaws gives bonuses and penalties to those tests.  All characters must have a background, some faculties and a flaw.  They can choose what these are and call them what they like, allowing some extra individuality to to characters.

Magic is present, but it carries a huge cost and will almost lead to madness and demonic possession (PCs might end up being NPCs).  This all fits in with the setting creed, which is broken down and explained in detail to show how Sword Noir adventures should work.  It shows that the system and setting of an adventure can be entwined to enhance the whole experience.  Magic is not just a set of tools, but something dangerous and corrupting, in keeping with the nihilistic nature of this world.  Characters are not ultra competent at everything, increasing the sense of danger.

  • Characters can be made up of more than just attributes 
  • It is better when the system and the setting are entwined.





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November 30, 2016 at 09:57AM

In loving memory of Joe Dever

In loving memory of Joe Dever

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I have just been informed that my friend and respected author of the Lone Wolf gamebooks, Joe Dever, has passed away. 



This is a deeply sad moment. I have enjoyed his work since childhood and I have been deeply honoured that my work in my adult life brought such a talented individual into my circle. 



You meant a lot to me, and your enthusiasm and imagination will be deeply missed.





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November 30, 2016 at 08:11AM

RPG - Sword Noir

RPG - Sword Noir

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I like Sword Noir - it is a combination of sword and sorcery and film noir (hence the name).  It is a system
where characters are good at what they do, but they cannot do everything and they do not become super human like high level DnD characters.  Characters have attributes and the game makes tests against them.  A character's background, faculties and flaws gives bonuses and penalties to those tests.  All characters must have a background, some faculties and a flaw.  They can choose what these are and call them what they like, allowing some extra individuality to to characters.

Magic is present, but it carries a huge cost and will almost lead to madness and demonic possession (PCs might end up being NPCs).  This all fits in with the setting creed, which is broken down and explained in detail to show how Sword Noir adventures should work.  It shows that the system and setting of an adventure can be entwined to enhance the whole experience.  Magic is not just a set of tools, but something dangerous and corrupting, in keeping with the nihilistic nature of this world.  Characters are not ultra competent at everything, increasing the sense of danger.


  • Characters can be made up of more than just attributes 
  • It is better when the system and the setting are entwined.




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November 30, 2016 at 07:48AM

Christmas Explained: A is for Saint Andrew

Christmas Explained: A is for Saint Andrew

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What does Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, have to with preparations for Christmas? Buy Christmas Explained: Robins, King and Brussel Sprouts to find out!






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November 30, 2016 at 02:46AM

The Chasm of Doom – Attempt 1, Part 10

The Chasm of Doom – Attempt 1, Part 10

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After the death by arrow of the enemy commander, Captain D’Val shows his mettle by rallying men to his side, and then forming a shielded wedge of troops which successfully penetrates the enemy flank.

See that sentence, and how it made it sound like I actually had an idea about combat strategy?

In real life, not so much.

Our charging troops manage to cause enough carnage to the enemy cavalry that they retreat, promptly trampling their own infantry (!!)

Project Aon link – enemy army in retreat

As we send our best wishes to the retreating enemy (along with a volley of arrows) the nerve of the infantry also collapses, and the retreat become a panicked rout.

Our war-cry of “For Sommerlund!” follows them from the battlefield.

Aside : You want the most blood-pumping fight song ever?  Here you go :

Thank me later, when you play this just before your next sporting event.

Captain D’Val comes to me in the aftermath, generously stating that “We” have prevailed!

63874106

As the wounded and dead are tended to, I receive a Laumspur treatment, which restores 6 Endurance.

Then we get to the crux of the situation.  While our armed forces have won a ‘temporary’ victory, in three days, when the moon is full, Barraka plans to sacrifice the Baron’s daughter at Maaken.  If successful, this rite will unleash the ‘evil dead’, and transform the Maakengorge into [drum roll]

THE CHASM OF DOOM.

Title drop!

This must obviously be prevented at all costs.

Aside : I have a sneaking suspicion that initially Barraka was just angry at the Baron because he was sick of the Baron always getting named juuuuust ahead of him in every alphabetical roll-call.  That can really sting after a while.

As everyone turns their expectant gazes towards me, I’m starting to get the feeling that its common ground among all my compadres that I’m the only one who can save the world (again!).

daryl4

The ruined city of Maaken is 50 miles away, and the countryside over that distance is nominally enemy-held territory.  Luckily, it is fair to consider that the bulk of the enemy army is in disorder and confusion after our recent difficulty.  Still, this should be tough.

I do get a chance to replenish my supplies.  I dump the Shovel, and take another Meal and some Rope.  I also get a reserve weapon in case of MEGASWORD-related difficulties.

I embark solo.  There is no mention of whether D’Val offers to accompany me, but it is safe to assume that he has done more than enough for one afternoon.

giphy4

The direct highway south is still choked with enemy troops.  They aren’t at their peak, what with being demoralised, injured and scared of me, but I don’t like the odds.  The sneaky route through the forest appears my best bet.

There’s a simple left/right choice, and I go left, mainly because I’m left-handed.

As night covers my travel, I manage to evade the bulk of the soldiers.  I then spy a small log cabin, with a single candle burning in the window.

Project Aon link – candle

A typical Dever-esque choice – do I want to check out the interesting thing?

Heck yes!

Just as I enter the door, a Wounded Bandit decides to make himself a nuisance!

Lone Wolf – CS : 29, E : 26

Wounded Bandit – CS : 13, E : 16

Unsurprisingly, I cleave him in two without suffering a scratch in response.

I snaffle 3 Gold Crowns from the Bandit, and ponder the cabin. There is a trapdoor which leads to a cellar, but there is nothing else of interest.

Aside : This is one of the few places I clearly remember from this book.  Going down to the cellar is a (in my opinion) completely unfair insta-death.  Basically the trapdoor gets shut from above and you are trapped in the cellar long enough that the hands which eventually open the door are “bony and fleshless”.

Brrrrr!

giphy5

So, long story short, I leave the hut without further incident.

And with that, I’m off to watch Melbourne City play in the final of the FFA Cup!

 

Base Stats : CS : 17, E : 20, GC 41

Modified Stats : CS : 29, E : 26

Weapons : Sommerswerd (+8 CS), Sword

Backpack : 2 Meals, Laumspur potion (+4E), Holy Water, Brass Key, Tinderbox, 1 Torch, Rope.

Special Items : Map, Crystal Star, Shield (+2 CS), Sommerswerd, Padded Waistcoat (+2 E), Chainmail Waistcoat (+4 E) Blue Stone Triangle Pendant, Diamond, Ornate Silver Key, Scroll with Verse (para 84 of tCoD)

Kai Rank : Journeyman

Kai Disciplines : Camouflage, Animal Kinship, Tracking, Hunting, Sixth Sense, Healing, Mind Over Matter, Mindblast (+2CS)

Final Paragraph : 258





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November 30, 2016 at 01:01AM

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The sword of the bastard elf gamebook on kickstarter

The sword of the bastard elf gamebook on kickstarter

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November 29, 2016 at 08:14PM

6Quest – The Choice Is Yours

6Quest – The Choice Is Yours

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Hungarian developer Hexahedron Games has now released an Android app featuring their gamebook collection of tales from the shattered world of Felorian.

What would you do if you were the hero of a story? If you could choose the direction it takes and make all the important decisions? If you could decide whether to save the princess or befriend the dragon? If it was your choice to throw the Ring into the fire or to keep it?

6Quest – The Choice Is Yours is a choose-your-own-adventure type of fantasy game where you, as the main character, make all the important decisions about the way the stories will unfold.

Featuring branching paths, timed challenges, character development, moral choice systems, resource management and multiple endings, 6Quest – The Choice Is Yours provides the player with a unique reading experience, ensuring that your choices actually matter and that you can personally shape the story with your own decisions.

6quest_screens

The game currently features two complete quests: Awakenings, the introductory 6Quest gamebook (available for free) and Just Another Day, a story about the misadventures of a city watchman in a fantasy metropolis (purchasable with a free demo). The app also features a playable demo of Shipwrecked, a tale about solving the mystery of a deserted island.

You’ll also be able to collect achievements and codexes (interesting lore about this fantasy world) allowing you to explore and immerse yourself in a land full of adventure, intrigue and mystery!

6quest_title

6Quest – The Choice Is Yours is now available to download from the Google Play Store. A PC version should be available before the end of the year and an iOS release is scheduled for early 2017.





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November 29, 2016 at 03:49PM

Choice of Games: Author Interview: Kyle Marquis – “Empyrean”

Choice of Games: Author Interview: Kyle Marquis – “Empyrean”

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Choice of Games’ latest release will be Empyrean, a flying ace adventure set in a fantastic world. I sat down with the author, Kyle Marquis, who has written novels, graphic novels, RPGs and now interactive fiction. Look for Empyrean later this week, releasing on Thursday, December 1st.

Tell me about what influenced your world creation for Empyrean. What kind of a world is this set in?

I love cities–real and fictional–and most of Empyrean takes place in Actorius, a city inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Actorius is full of skyscrapers, airplanes, colossal and sometimes-unfathomable machines; also deranged inventors, downtrodden laborers, scheming plutocrats. Despite Empyrean being a text-based game, most of my influences are visual. I pulled from film (The City of Lost Children), comics (Akira), cartoons (Batman: The Animated Series), and even games (Megaman). Then I tried to imagine describing those cityscapes to people who had never seen them. The result was Actorius.

The Deep Tech–the mechanical wilderness beneath the city–derives from my longstanding fascination with artificial life. When I was a little kid, I had a Commodore 64 programming book that contained coding instructions for the Game of Life. Life uses a few simple rules to simulate an evolving population of “cells” on the computer screen. Which start conditions would result, after enough iterations, in extinction? In a pattern eternally repeating? In true complexity–an ever-changing, unpredictable configuration of cells? The Deep Tech is like that, and also like a jungle full of robot dinosaurs.

What are some of the social issues you had in mind as you were writing the game?

While Empyrean can be played as a straightforward pulp adventure, it’s hard to tell a story about flying aces in an Art Deco city and not talk about fascism. And it’s hard to talk about cities without talking about labor. Empyrean is about who owns what, and why. The city of Actorius thrives based on an accident of geography–it was built over the Deep Tech–and by its willingness to exploit both those resources and its own citizenry. You, the player, are the beneficiary of that plundered wealth. Empyrean is about how you react to that.

The characters are incredibly well-drawn in this game. In particular, Mogra and Wesh stood out to me as favorites. Which did you enjoy spending time writing?

Writing Wesh was fun because she’s a concept that’s been rattling around in my head forever. I love grabbing characters from one genre or setting and dropping them in another to see if they’re viable. Pulps were full of Tarzan-like characters, but moving one from the jungle to a machine wilderness let me re-energize a stale concept. I also enjoyed Dominicar (the character’s father, and one of the game’s “villains”) for his fundamental shallowness, despite his intelligence and ambition. Here’s a man who has discovered and mapped a mechanical wilderness, and what does he do with it? Not wonder where it came from, or how it works. He starts stealing whatever he can to reverse-engineering radios and fighter planes.

I also enjoyed writing characters like Mogra, Lectini, and the nameless pilot of the mole machine aero, who hint at a world larger and stranger than the struggle between two cities for control of the Deep Tech. I worked hard to strip Empyrean of needless complexity, but I didn’t want the game to feel like it took place in a snowglobe. The murky origins of characters like Mogra and Lectini let me hint at a sprawling and complex world without muddying the central narrative.

What were some of the challenges for you writing in ChoiceScript, and what were the joys? You’re a very prolific writer–Empyrean clocks in at over 300,000 words, which is fantastic, and makes it one of our longest Choice of Games titles.

Writing in ChoiceScript has a wonderful rhythm that helped me avoid the tyranny of the blank page. Organizing everything around choices means the writer always has a structure to fall back on: you look at your stat list, you use your stats to come up with 3-5 choices, and you try to make it clear to the player what’s going on. That last part is the trickiest: you need to imply the mechanics that underlie each choice without just coming out and saying it. If the writing is too mechanical, the game becomes an exercise in stat-calculation for the player; if the writing is too florid, the nature of the choices becomes confusing and, eventually, frustrating.

You’ve also written some RPGs, novels, and comics, yes? Tell me about those.

Before Empyrean I spent several years writing a fantasy webcomic called The Water Phoenix King, and I created a fan game for the World of Darkness tabletop RPG setting called Genius: The Transgression, about mad scientists. I’ve also written several fantasy novels that I’m currently shopping around to agents and publishers. I actually think of myself as a high fantasy writer, but everything I do that’s successful involves airships and robots. Weird.

What are you working on for your next game?

I had so much fun in the Deep Tech that I wanted to spend more time doing a “jungle adventure” game. My next game is a Lost World-style story full of dinosaurs and savage adventure! Expect time-traveling angels, Byzantine imperialists, people turned into ambulatory wasp nests, were-pterodactyls…you know, the usual stuff.

Proust-style Questionnaire questions:

What profession other than writing would you like to attempt?

I would like to be able to make and/or fix something: cars, houses, tiny decorative jars. My family always discouraged me from anything not strictly academic, but sometimes I want to work on something concrete, rather than tapping away all day.

Which would you never like to try?

You mean, never like to try again? Menial service work. I’d rather trap squirrels in 17th century Russia than go back to re-folding novelty t-shirts while tourists explain to me their political opinions and try to guess my ethnic makeup.

Favorite word?

“Conflation,” unfortunately. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

What do you do to reward yourself after a long day of writing?

I cook food, and then I eat it! Mostly Italian food–I’ve spent several years trying to rebuild the meals my grandmother would make when I was a kid.

Ketchup or catsup?

I believe the ketchup people and the catsup people aren’t so different, and should be able to work together to stop the people who say “I could care less.”





Gamebook blogs

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November 29, 2016 at 02:23PM

Author Interview: Kyle Marquis – “Empyrean”

Author Interview: Kyle Marquis – “Empyrean”

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Choice of Games’ latest release will be Empyrean, a flying ace adventure set in a fantastic world. I sat down with the author, Kyle Marquis, who has written novels, graphic novels, RPGs and now interactive fiction. Look for Empyrean later this week, releasing on Thursday, December 1st.

Tell me about what influenced your world creation for Empyrean. What kind of a world is this set in?

I love cities–real and fictional–and most of Empyrean takes place in Actorius, a city inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Actorius is full of skyscrapers, airplanes, colossal and sometimes-unfathomable machines; also deranged inventors, downtrodden laborers, scheming plutocrats. Despite Empyrean being a text-based game, most of my influences are visual. I pulled from film (The City of Lost Children), comics (Akira), cartoons (Batman: The Animated Series), and even games (Megaman). Then I tried to imagine describing those cityscapes to people who had never seen them. The result was Actorius.

The Deep Tech–the mechanical wilderness beneath the city–derives from my longstanding fascination with artificial life. When I was a little kid, I had a Commodore 64 programming book that contained coding instructions for the Game of Life. Life uses a few simple rules to simulate an evolving population of “cells” on the computer screen. Which start conditions would result, after enough iterations, in extinction? In a pattern eternally repeating? In true complexity–an ever-changing, unpredictable configuration of cells? The Deep Tech is like that, and also like a jungle full of robot dinosaurs.

What are some of the social issues you had in mind as you were writing the game?

While Empyrean can be played as a straightforward pulp adventure, it’s hard to tell a story about flying aces in an Art Deco city and not talk about fascism. And it’s hard to talk about cities without talking about labor. Empyrean is about who owns what, and why. The city of Actorius thrives based on an accident of geography–it was built over the Deep Tech–and by its willingness to exploit both those resources and its own citizenry. You, the player, are the beneficiary of that plundered wealth. Empyrean is about how you react to that.

The characters are incredibly well-drawn in this game. In particular, Mogra and Wesh stood out to me as favorites. Which did you enjoy spending time writing?

Writing Wesh was fun because she’s a concept that’s been rattling around in my head forever. I love grabbing characters from one genre or setting and dropping them in another to see if they’re viable. Pulps were full of Tarzan-like characters, but moving one from the jungle to a machine wilderness let me re-energize a stale concept. I also enjoyed Dominicar (the character’s father, and one of the game’s “villains”) for his fundamental shallowness, despite his intelligence and ambition. Here’s a man who has discovered and mapped a mechanical wilderness, and what does he do with it? Not wonder where it came from, or how it works. He starts stealing whatever he can to reverse-engineering radios and fighter planes.

I also enjoyed writing characters like Mogra, Lectini, and the nameless pilot of the mole machine aero, who hint at a world larger and stranger than the struggle between two cities for control of the Deep Tech. I worked hard to strip Empyrean of needless complexity, but I didn’t want the game to feel like it took place in a snowglobe. The murky origins of characters like Mogra and Lectini let me hint at a sprawling and complex world without muddying the central narrative.

What were some of the challenges for you writing in ChoiceScript, and what were the joys? You’re a very prolific writer–Empyrean clocks in at over 300,000 words, which is fantastic, and makes it one of our longest Choice of Games titles.

Writing in ChoiceScript has a wonderful rhythm that helped me avoid the tyranny of the blank page. Organizing everything around choices means the writer always has a structure to fall back on: you look at your stat list, you use your stats to come up with 3-5 choices, and you try to make it clear to the player what’s going on. That last part is the trickiest: you need to imply the mechanics that underlie each choice without just coming out and saying it. If the writing is too mechanical, the game becomes an exercise in stat-calculation for the player; if the writing is too florid, the nature of the choices becomes confusing and, eventually, frustrating.

You’ve also written some RPGs, novels, and comics, yes? Tell me about those.

Before Empyrean I spent several years writing a fantasy webcomic called The Water Phoenix King, and I created a fan game for the World of Darkness tabletop RPG setting called Genius: The Transgression, about mad scientists. I’ve also written several fantasy novels that I’m currently shopping around to agents and publishers. I actually think of myself as a high fantasy writer, but everything I do that’s successful involves airships and robots. Weird.

What are you working on for your next game?

I had so much fun in the Deep Tech that I wanted to spend more time doing a “jungle adventure” game. My next game is a Lost World-style story full of dinosaurs and savage adventure! Expect time-traveling angels, Byzantine imperialists, people turned into ambulatory wasp nests, were-pterodactyls…you know, the usual stuff.

Proust-style Questionnaire questions:

What profession other than writing would you like to attempt?

I would like to be able to make and/or fix something: cars, houses, tiny decorative jars. My family always discouraged me from anything not strictly academic, but sometimes I want to work on something concrete, rather than tapping away all day.

Which would you never like to try?

You mean, never like to try again? Menial service work. I’d rather trap squirrels in 17th century Russia than go back to re-folding novelty t-shirts while tourists explain to me their political opinions and try to guess my ethnic makeup.

Favorite word?

“Conflation,” unfortunately. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

What do you do to reward yourself after a long day of writing?

I cook food, and then I eat it! Mostly Italian food–I’ve spent several years trying to rebuild the meals my grandmother would make when I was a kid.

Ketchup or catsup?

I believe the ketchup people and the catsup people aren’t so different, and should be able to work together to stop the people who say “I could care less.”





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November 29, 2016 at 01:24PM

Choice of Games: End Game and Victory Design

Choice of Games: End Game and Victory Design

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As part of our support for the Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels, we will be posting an irregular series of blog posts discussing important design and writing criteria for games.  We hope that these can both provide guidance for people participating in the Contest and also help people understand how we think about questions of game design and some best practices.  These don’t modify the evaluation criteria for the Contest, and (except as noted) participants are not required to conform to our recommendations–but it’s probably a good idea to listen when judges tell you what they’re looking for.  In today’s entry, I’m going to be discussing our thoughts on how to design the end of a game in a way that makes choices meaningful and interesting.

If these topics interest you, be sure to sign up for our contest mailing list below! We’ll post more of our thoughts on game design leading up to the contest deadline on January 31, 2018.


When the Choice of Games staff looks at an interactive fiction game, we always focus some attention on the end of the game–what we sometimes talk about as the game’s victory design. What makes interactive fiction different from plain-old fiction–novels and short stories–is that the player makes choices that matter. Those choices should matter throughout the game, but they absolutely need to matter at the end of the game. If the game always ends the same way, then the choices along the way can’t be very meaningful.

We’ve identified two ways to design the end of a game that ensure that the choices along the way are meaningful and significant. The first is to create multiple, independent goals for the player, all of which are significant for the end of the game. The second is a structural design we refer to as the arm-and-fingers structure.

Multiple, Independent Goals

One of the pitfalls in interactive fiction design is to structure the whole game as an answer to the question, “does the player win?” For example, imagine that a game is about leading a heroic rebellion against an evil empire, and that it has two endings: either the player wins and overthrows the evil empire, or the player loses and the empire continues to oppress people. As soon as the game designer adopts that structure, the choices in the game become much less meaningful. They can still be tactically difficult and interesting–which of choices A, B, and C has the best chance of producing a winning outcome?–but fundamentally, the game can tell only two stories.

A variant on this problematic design is to have multiple different goals, but to make the goals overlap so they are not independent. Continuing with our rebellion example, perhaps the heroic rebel has several goals: recruiting the allies you need to overthrow the empire; developing the military strength to fight off the empire’s troops; and becoming a hero who’s remembered in legend after the victory. At first glance, this seems to solve the problem of only having a single goal, but in reality, the problem persists. If you overthrow the empire, you either necessarily or likely become a hero who’s remembered in legend. And if you fail to recruit needed allies, you can’t overthrow the empire. There might be a little differentiation–maybe it’s possible to win without allies, just difficult–but the basic problem remains: the player either wins or loses.

The solution to this problem is to make the different goals independent and indeed often in tension with each other. My partner Jason Hill uses the example of the different goals a student might have in college. A college student’s goals might include: getting good grades and graduating with honors; lining up a good job after college; winning the big game in their sport against the rival school; keeping their student job and earning enough money to pay tuition and other expenses; going to parties and having a fun time; building friendships that will last; and having a satisfying relationship with a significant other. That’s a mix of different goals, all of which could be interesting in an interactive fiction game about attending college.

In order for this approach to work, the goals need to be independent. Getting good grades has nothing to do with winning the big game–a player could achieve one goal and not the other, achieve the other goal, achieve both, or not achieve either, and that variety of outcomes means that choices along the way have room and scope to be meaningful. The player’s choices can tell different stories, whether that’s the story of a jock who wins big but fails out of school or of a student-athlete who leaves the team entirely to concentrate on their studies. And precisely because of those tensions, the victory design sets up interesting choices along the way: should the player character head to the gym for more practice, study up for the test, spend time with their S.O., or concentrate on an internship that might lead to a good job? There isn’t enough time in the day to pursue every goal fully, and the player has to decide which goals to prioritize and how.

The goals don’t have to be completely independent in order for this design to work well. For example, earning good grades can help to get a good job offer, and being a star athlete can result in invitations to exclusive parties and impress some other students. And some underlying characteristics and approaches can help with multiple goals: a smart character will do better at both schoolwork and jobs, and a charismatic character will find it easier to get job offers as well as easier to make friends. But the player will still need to decide what goals to prioritize and how. When your S.O. has a problem the night before a big exam, which wins out: studying or helping your S.O.? When your coach wants you to practice and your boss wants you to meet your work schedule and there’s homework to be done, how do you spend your scarce time? If you try to burn the candle at both ends and just cut back on sleep, will you cause everything to fall apart? These choices are conflicting–you can’t pursue all of the goals fully–yet combinable so that the player can choose to pursue any two of them.

By designing goals that are independent, a game designer gives the player’s choices space to be meaningful.

Arm-and-fingers structure

An important technique for ensuring that player choices have a major impact on the conclusion of an interactive novel is to have a major branch point late in the game with several different possible final chapters–what we refer to as an “arm-and-fingers” structure. To understand why that structure is valuable and how it works, it’s easiest to start by considering the problem that it solves.

One of the traditional tensions in interactive fiction design is between introducing branches and forcing the storyline to largely progress in a fixed way. Some of the earliest examples of interactive fiction relied heavily on branching, which cause player choice to have a larger effect on the game but also require much more writing and shorten the length of each playthrough. If every choice produces another branch point, than a game that has 10 choices each with 3 options ends up with 3^10 different branches–nearly 60,000 branches! As a result, some of the old “choose a path” books were a hundred or two hundred pages long, but with average playthrough lengths of 5 or 6 pages. The other extreme from branching on every choice is to make the game design linear, with each choice leading to the next in lock-step, which makes the game design and writing process manageable and feasible but can make multiple playthroughs feel repetitious.

Choice of Games recommends in general designing games as a stack of bushes. Each scene has branches, but the branches merge back together at the end of a scene. Then, variables and delayed branching can be used to make choices remain meaningful beyond a given scene. A stack-of-bushes with delayed branching is a good basic technique, but it can still feel frustrating when every playthrough of a game ends with the same climax.

An arm-and-fingers structure is a game with several different final chapters where the player’s decisions determine which final chapter they experience on a given playthrough. Most of the game is the arm, with chapter leading to chapter more or less automatically, but the structure of the end of a game is like a hand, with entirely distinct and separate fingers branching off in each direction. Kevin Gold pioneered this structure in Choice of Robots to great effect, and Lynnea Glasser also used it well in The Sea Eternal. It can maintain a manageable structure that does not require writing thousands of different branches, while still creating the feeling that the end of the game depends on the player’s choices, not just in determining a final outcome, but in determining the entire feeling and plot of the game’s climax.

By introducing a major branch point before the last chapter, the arm-and-fingers structure underscores the importance of the players’ choices. Not only does the outcome of the final conflicts of the game change, the nature of the climactic conflict changes as well. As an example, imagine a fantasy game in which the player plays the heir-apparent to a monarchy. Depending on the player’s choices, the final chapter could be one of four entirely different choices. If the player built a strong base of support in their court and among the nobles of their country, the final chapter could be a conflict with a neighboring kingdom that could be resolved through warfare or through diplomacy. If the player focused on the study of wizardry, the main character could renounce the throne altogether and pursue true mystic power on a personal quest. If the player fostered new ideas about politics and rights, the last chapter could be about fostering a new more democratic regime and breaking the power of the high nobles. And if the player lost control of their country, the last chapter could be a story of a monarch in exile fighting a civil war to retake power. Every one of those chapters is a satisfying, dramatic conclusion to the story, but replays offer wide variation and the player’s choices have meaningful impact by determining which branch the story goes down (and of course how that branch resolves).

At the same time, the amount of additional writing required is manageable: instead of a 10 chapter game with each chapter following linearly, the last chapter might be replaced by one of 4 possible end chapters, requiring writing 13 chapters total. That’s not a trivial increase in work compared to writing 10 chapters, but it is a far cry from an exponential explosion of different branches. And the pay-off is very substantial, making each playthrough of the game feel very different and making the player’s choices drive the outcome of the game. The arm of the game should be a traditional stack of bushes, and the introduction of a set of separate branches at the end–each with multiple choices and telling a satisfying climactic story–will make all the difference in making the choices feel meaningful and different.

—-
As you think about outlining a ChoiceScript game–and as you think about how to maximize your game’s score on the “conflicting goals with satisfying endings” criterion in the Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels–we urge you to design a game with multiple independent goals and to implement an overall arm-and-fingers structure. Neither is strictly required, but if you implement both your game will be miles ahead of a game that has a linear structure with a “do you win?” goal design and maybe a separately tracked measure of romance success. So think about how to make a compelling set of goals, each independent from the others, and then think about how those goals and player choices can drive the game to one of several different climactic chapters.





Gamebook blogs

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via Planet Interactive Fiction http://planet-if.com/

November 29, 2016 at 01:23PM

End Game and Victory Design

End Game and Victory Design

http://ift.tt/2gGltfd

As part of our support for the Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels, we will be posting an irregular series of blog posts discussing important design and writing criteria for games.  We hope that these can both provide guidance for people participating in the Contest and also help people understand how we think about questions of game design and some best practices.  These don’t modify the evaluation criteria for the Contest, and (except as noted) participants are not required to conform to our recommendations–but it’s probably a good idea to listen when judges tell you what they’re looking for.  In today’s entry, I’m going to be discussing our thoughts on how to design the end of a game in a way that makes choices meaningful and interesting.

If these topics interest you, be sure to sign up for our contest mailing list below! We’ll post more of our thoughts on game design leading up to the contest deadline on January 31, 2018.


When the Choice of Games staff looks at an interactive fiction game, we always focus some attention on the end of the game–what we sometimes talk about as the game’s victory design. What makes interactive fiction different from plain-old fiction–novels and short stories–is that the player makes choices that matter. Those choices should matter throughout the game, but they absolutely need to matter at the end of the game. If the game always ends the same way, then the choices along the way can’t be very meaningful.

We’ve identified two ways to design the end of a game that ensure that the choices along the way are meaningful and significant. The first is to create multiple, independent goals for the player, all of which are significant for the end of the game. The second is a structural design we refer to as the arm-and-fingers structure.

Multiple, Independent Goals

One of the pitfalls in interactive fiction design is to structure the whole game as an answer to the question, “does the player win?” For example, imagine that a game is about leading a heroic rebellion against an evil empire, and that it has two endings: either the player wins and overthrows the evil empire, or the player loses and the empire continues to oppress people. As soon as the game designer adopts that structure, the choices in the game become much less meaningful. They can still be tactically difficult and interesting–which of choices A, B, and C has the best chance of producing a winning outcome?–but fundamentally, the game can tell only two stories.

A variant on this problematic design is to have multiple different goals, but to make the goals overlap so they are not independent. Continuing with our rebellion example, perhaps the heroic rebel has several goals: recruiting the allies you need to overthrow the empire; developing the military strength to fight off the empire’s troops; and becoming a hero who’s remembered in legend after the victory. At first glance, this seems to solve the problem of only having a single goal, but in reality, the problem persists. If you overthrow the empire, you either necessarily or likely become a hero who’s remembered in legend. And if you fail to recruit needed allies, you can’t overthrow the empire. There might be a little differentiation–maybe it’s possible to win without allies, just difficult–but the basic problem remains: the player either wins or loses.

The solution to this problem is to make the different goals independent and indeed often in tension with each other. My partner Jason Hill uses the example of the different goals a student might have in college. A college student’s goals might include: getting good grades and graduating with honors; lining up a good job after college; winning the big game in their sport against the rival school; keeping their student job and earning enough money to pay tuition and other expenses; going to parties and having a fun time; building friendships that will last; and having a satisfying relationship with a significant other. That’s a mix of different goals, all of which could be interesting in an interactive fiction game about attending college.

In order for this approach to work, the goals need to be independent. Getting good grades has nothing to do with winning the big game–a player could achieve one goal and not the other, achieve the other goal, achieve both, or not achieve either, and that variety of outcomes means that choices along the way have room and scope to be meaningful. The player’s choices can tell different stories, whether that’s the story of a jock who wins big but fails out of school or of a student-athlete who leaves the team entirely to concentrate on their studies. And precisely because of those tensions, the victory design sets up interesting choices along the way: should the player character head to the gym for more practice, study up for the test, spend time with their S.O., or concentrate on an internship that might lead to a good job? There isn’t enough time in the day to pursue every goal fully, and the player has to decide which goals to prioritize and how.

The goals don’t have to be completely independent in order for this design to work well. For example, earning good grades can help to get a good job offer, and being a star athlete can result in invitations to exclusive parties and impress some other students. And some underlying characteristics and approaches can help with multiple goals: a smart character will do better at both schoolwork and jobs, and a charismatic character will find it easier to get job offers as well as easier to make friends. But the player will still need to decide what goals to prioritize and how. When your S.O. has a problem the night before a big exam, which wins out: studying or helping your S.O.? When your coach wants you to practice and your boss wants you to meet your work schedule and there’s homework to be done, how do you spend your scarce time? If you try to burn the candle at both ends and just cut back on sleep, will you cause everything to fall apart? These choices are conflicting–you can’t pursue all of the goals fully–yet combinable so that the player can choose to pursue any two of them.

By designing goals that are independent, a game designer gives the player’s choices space to be meaningful.

Arm-and-fingers structure

An important technique for ensuring that player choices have a major impact on the conclusion of an interactive novel is to have a major branch point late in the game with several different possible final chapters–what we refer to as an “arm-and-fingers” structure. To understand why that structure is valuable and how it works, it’s easiest to start by considering the problem that it solves.

One of the traditional tensions in interactive fiction design is between introducing branches and forcing the storyline to largely progress in a fixed way. Some of the earliest examples of interactive fiction relied heavily on branching, which cause player choice to have a larger effect on the game but also require much more writing and shorten the length of each playthrough. If every choice produces another branch point, than a game that has 10 choices each with 3 options ends up with 3^10 different branches–nearly 60,000 branches! As a result, some of the old “choose a path” books were a hundred or two hundred pages long, but with average playthrough lengths of 5 or 6 pages. The other extreme from branching on every choice is to make the game design linear, with each choice leading to the next in lock-step, which makes the game design and writing process manageable and feasible but can make multiple playthroughs feel repetitious.

Choice of Games recommends in general designing games as a stack of bushes. Each scene has branches, but the branches merge back together at the end of a scene. Then, variables and delayed branching can be used to make choices remain meaningful beyond a given scene. A stack-of-bushes with delayed branching is a good basic technique, but it can still feel frustrating when every playthrough of a game ends with the same climax.

An arm-and-fingers structure is a game with several different final chapters where the player’s decisions determine which final chapter they experience on a given playthrough. Most of the game is the arm, with chapter leading to chapter more or less automatically, but the structure of the end of a game is like a hand, with entirely distinct and separate fingers branching off in each direction. Kevin Gold pioneered this structure in Choice of Robots to great effect, and Lynnea Glasser also used it well in The Sea Eternal. It can maintain a manageable structure that does not require writing thousands of different branches, while still creating the feeling that the end of the game depends on the player’s choices, not just in determining a final outcome, but in determining the entire feeling and plot of the game’s climax.

By introducing a major branch point before the last chapter, the arm-and-fingers structure underscores the importance of the players’ choices. Not only does the outcome of the final conflicts of the game change, the nature of the climactic conflict changes as well. As an example, imagine a fantasy game in which the player plays the heir-apparent to a monarchy. Depending on the player’s choices, the final chapter could be one of four entirely different choices. If the player built a strong base of support in their court and among the nobles of their country, the final chapter could be a conflict with a neighboring kingdom that could be resolved through warfare or through diplomacy. If the player focused on the study of wizardry, the main character could renounce the throne altogether and pursue true mystic power on a personal quest. If the player fostered new ideas about politics and rights, the last chapter could be about fostering a new more democratic regime and breaking the power of the high nobles. And if the player lost control of their country, the last chapter could be a story of a monarch in exile fighting a civil war to retake power. Every one of those chapters is a satisfying, dramatic conclusion to the story, but replays offer wide variation and the player’s choices have meaningful impact by determining which branch the story goes down (and of course how that branch resolves).

At the same time, the amount of additional writing required is manageable: instead of a 10 chapter game with each chapter following linearly, the last chapter might be replaced by one of 4 possible end chapters, requiring writing 13 chapters total. That’s not a trivial increase in work compared to writing 10 chapters, but it is a far cry from an exponential explosion of different branches. And the pay-off is very substantial, making each playthrough of the game feel very different and making the player’s choices drive the outcome of the game. The arm of the game should be a traditional stack of bushes, and the introduction of a set of separate branches at the end–each with multiple choices and telling a satisfying climactic story–will make all the difference in making the choices feel meaningful and different.

—-
As you think about outlining a ChoiceScript game–and as you think about how to maximize your game’s score on the “conflicting goals with satisfying endings” criterion in the Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels–we urge you to design a game with multiple independent goals and to implement an overall arm-and-fingers structure. Neither is strictly required, but if you implement both your game will be miles ahead of a game that has a linear structure with a “do you win?” goal design and maybe a separately tracked measure of romance success. So think about how to make a compelling set of goals, each independent from the others, and then think about how those goals and player choices can drive the game to one of several different climactic chapters.





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via Choice of Games LLC » Feed http://ift.tt/1ikmub9

November 29, 2016 at 12:54PM

Monday, November 28, 2016

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

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There are threads here somewhere about how common magic is on Titan. In most of the gamebooks you didn't have spells so maybe not that common even for heroes. But in the end it comes down to what people want in their own game so it'll vary anyway.

Statistics: Posted by SkinnyOrc — Mon Nov 28, 2016 9:58 pm






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November 28, 2016 at 02:05PM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Ruffnut And Lorian's magic items based on gamebooks

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Ruffnut And Lorian's magic items based on gamebooks

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Not sure yet. Any reccomendatiins?

Statistics: Posted by Lorian — Mon Nov 28, 2016 7:40 pm






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November 28, 2016 at 12:05PM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

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You know, that was my initial thought too. But when I looked at the sample characters in the AFF rulebook, nearly half of them had a Magic score. Hmm.

Statistics: Posted by Laurence — Mon Nov 28, 2016 7:35 pm






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November 28, 2016 at 12:05PM

Dragonmeet 2016

Dragonmeet 2016

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I shall be attending Dragonmeet 2016 this Saturday, 3rd December 2016, at the Hammersmith Novotel, in London. You will find me on stand Q10, where I shall be selling copies of my adventure gamebook Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland, as well as a few of my Fighting Fantasy books.

You also have permission to quiz me about The Wicked Wizard of Oz - but no spoilers, okay?

I shall be joined during the day by Steve Jackson - creator of the Sorcery! series, author of the Fighting Fantasy novel The Trolltooth Wars, co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, co-founder of Game Workshop, and one of the godfathers of the UK gaming industry.


So if you're coming to Dragonmeet, please drop by stand Q10 and say hello. Online ticket sales close on Thursday night, so if you don't want to miss out on getting in a much shorter queue on Saturday morning, get your tickets in advance here!






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November 28, 2016 at 11:35AM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Ruffnut And Lorian's magic items based on gamebooks

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Ruffnut And Lorian's magic items based on gamebooks

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Nice job! What will be the next one? I forgot how the magic items were so cool, with different powers.

Statistics: Posted by dcpchamber — Mon Nov 28, 2016 6:25 pm






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November 28, 2016 at 10:34AM

The Chasm of Doom, Attempt 1, Part 9

The Chasm of Doom, Attempt 1, Part 9

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And we’re back, just as you may that you recall that you observed a successful example of SOCIALISM (turn away, you Yankee readers) as I gave Captain D’Val his sword back, since I already had two.

Luke 3 : 11, anyone?

Oh yeah, that’s right – John the Baptist was a downright COMMUNIST!

561460

Heh.

While my more right-wing readers recover, the more caring members of our little band of soldiers head out to the barricade to defend our comrades.

We note the enemy cavalry pouring from various sides and, more worryingly, cowardly foot soldiers are herding terrified Ruanese in front of them as human shields.

D’Val accurately, in response to these tactics, calls Barraka a ‘cur’, but, before we can more effectively condemn the enemy for declining to follow Marquis of Queensbury rules, a hidden catapult (concealed behind enemy lines) flings an explosive into our midst which sprays my allies with burning oil.  In the confusion, the enemy footsoldiers promptly cast aside their human shields and attack.

8l18e1

Juuuust when things ‘couldn’t get any worse’ (although I didn’t actually say that phrase, because that is REALLY tempting fate) D’Val calls from my assistance, as his cloak and tunic are ablaze.

Project Aon link – wounded soldier

Luckily, my advanced Kai rank of Warman [Warperson?] allows me to take charge. Ordering a couple of soldiers to aid D’Val, I jump on a convenient wagon and see that the enemy has reached the outer perimeter, being less than one hundred yards from our wall.

If only Captain America was here (@ 1:35 of the below clip).

As the Vassagonian (!?) bandits charge (where the heck is Vassagonia??) I order several volleys of arrows, which stop the first wave of attackers dead in their tracks.

Scattered attackers reach the barricade, and I am confronted by one particularly obstinate varmint.

Lone Wolf : CS : 29, E : 25

Vassagonian Warrior : CS : 18 E : 25

I defeat the upstart at a cost of 2 Endurance (down to 23, after Healing taken into account).

I don’t even get a chance to loot the body (!) before I am informed that D’Val has routed the other soldiers with the aid of friendly archers.  As the cries of victory echo from our lips, I am warned of a ‘new threat’.

giphy3

A ‘mantlet’, which is a fancy word for a wheeled wooden blockade, is pushed towards our barricade, and said mantlet appears temporarily impervious to our collective volleys of arrows.

Project Aon link – Mantlet

In act of bravery which goes unacknowledged by the text, an enemy mage steps out from behind the mantlet and, although cut down and killed by an arrow, lets off a fireball towards our barricade, killing and wounding many, while shattering our protection.

The enemy cavalry, in a disciplined display, choose this moment to charge, with one likely fellow pointing his lance directly at my chest.

I can stand and fight, or retreat to the watchtower.

Although it personally may have some danger, I am aware of the potentially serious effect on morale of a war leader such as myself refusing to face the danger sought by my soldiers.

it-is-better-to-stand-and-fight-if-you-run-youll-only-die-tired

That reason, too.

I am calmly told that we initially can only fight one round of combat.

Vassagonian Horseman : CS : 20, E : 28

Lone Wolf – CS : 29, E : 25

I lose 2 Endurance in the first round of combat, but manage to unhorse my opponent.  While smiling wickedly with his (British dental, presumably) blackened teeth, he charges at me with his broadswrd

Notwithstanding the previous combat check, I am informed of default new stats as follows :

Lone Wolf – CS 29, E : 24

Bandit Horsemen – CS : 17, E : 24

I luckily end the enemy’s wretched life in one blow, and now note (at a distance) the leader of the enemy troops, attempting to rally his men.

Project Aon link – Enemy leader

Grabbing a nearby bow, I take aim.

And, for the first time in four books, I actually regret not taking Weaponskill as a Kai discipline, as it would have helped with my aim in this situation.

Not to worry…..[gulp]….my R10 check is a…..4.

This is a middling result, which means my arrow pierces the enemy’s shoulder.

Aside : Seriously, how often in action movies / books is the ‘shoulder’ the go-to ‘wounded but not fatally’ option?  And seriously, do these people realise how incapacitating a shoulder wound actually is?

Project Aon link – enemy soldier

In any event, I see that the enemy leader is still attempting to rally his troops and, noticing that my quiver is empty, draft a Sommlending sargeant into temporary service and ask him to shoot this specific enemy, and he obliges, landing a shaft into the leader’s heart.

54cfcbab1f238_-_robin_hood_bow_0510-lg-4418710

Aside : Um, did he really need me to ask him to do this?  He’s obviously an expert archer, he has a clear shot on the enemy leader (who is wounded and therefore slow-moving) but this sargeant needed my directive to take the shot?  I’ve heard of disciplined, but this is ridiculous.

Anyway, enemy dead, let’s move on.

 

Base Stats : CS : 17, E : 20, GC 38

Modified Stats : CS : 29, E : 26

Weapons : Sommerswerd (+8 CS),

Backpack : 1 Meal, Laumspur potion (+4E), Holy Water, Brass Key, Tinderbox, 1 Torch, Shovel (2 slots).

Special Items : Map, Crystal Star, Shield (+2 CS), Sommerswerd, Padded Waistcoat (+2 E), Chainmail Waistcoat (+4 E) Blue Stone Triangle Pendant, Diamond, Ornate Silver Key, Scroll with Verse (para 84 of tCoD)

Kai Rank : Journeyman

Kai Disciplines : Camouflage, Animal Kinship, Tracking, Hunting, Sixth Sense, Healing, Mind Over Matter, Mindblast (+2CS)

Final Paragraph : 323





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November 28, 2016 at 04:01AM

Thought for the Day

Thought for the Day

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"If writing can be its own reward for you, it will survive whatever happens to you as a writer."





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November 28, 2016 at 01:00AM

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

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Something just occurred to me. You might not want almost half the characters you can get from this having magic. It sounds like it's been done so there's an even spread of which ability is high. But are characters strong in magic really equally common to characters good with a weapon?

Statistics: Posted by SkinnyOrc — Mon Nov 28, 2016 6:53 am






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November 27, 2016 at 11:20PM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Spellcasting in combat

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Spellcasting in combat

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I only allow the spellcaster to use the Dodge Skill in addition to the normal SKILL roll in this situations. I think that it gets too overpowered to allow a spellcaster to both use its magic and use its best weapong skill to avoid being hit.

Laurence wrote:
So what happens if we simplify it like this?:
Wizard rolls 2d6+MAGIC vs. goblin rolls 2d6+SKILL.


I already tried this a long time ago and it simply didn't function very well. It becomes frustrating for the wizard in a combat against an oponent of equivalent power of more powerful. I think that the base system works well, simply following the combat order tends to make things work out right. If the spellcaster ever finds itself being the target of attacks the penalties will make it extremely difficult for conjuring spells, as it should be. Some spells can be extremely powerful when used right in combat.

Also, in the Sorcery series most of the time you can only cast spells before entering a combat, and this could be interpreted as the high penalty to cast spells while in melee combat.

Statistics: Posted by dcpchamber — Sun Nov 27, 2016 10:50 pm






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November 27, 2016 at 03:17PM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Spellcasting in combat

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Spellcasting in combat

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So what happens if we simplify it like this?:

Wizard rolls 2d6+MAGIC vs. goblin rolls 2d6+SKILL.

If the wizard rolls higher, the spell hits the goblin, while the goblin misses.

If the goblin rolls higher, the spell misses and the goblin hits the wizard.

If we use this mechanic, we lose the possibility of both hitting or both missing. But that’s OK with me. Plus, it simplifies things to a single pair of die rolls.

What do you think?

Statistics: Posted by Laurence — Sun Nov 27, 2016 7:05 pm






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November 27, 2016 at 11:16AM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Ruffnut And Lorian's magic items based on gamebooks

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Ruffnut And Lorian's magic items based on gamebooks

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I have now completed sword of the samurai. I hope you like it.





P. S Ruffnuts Night Of The Necropuppy might take a bit longer as it is bigger.

Statistics: Posted by Lorian — Sun Nov 27, 2016 6:53 pm






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November 27, 2016 at 11:16AM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Random Hero Creation Table

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i like it for someone who doesn't know what they want to play, good work.
I mostly know what I want to play and so do many of my players, but new players (or old "I keep on dying" players) could find it useful

Statistics: Posted by Eddie — Sun Nov 27, 2016 6:05 pm






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November 27, 2016 at 10:16AM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Spellcasting in combat

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Spellcasting in combat

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the order of play in this question is:
cast spell, roll to see if it works, resolve spell.
if enemy survives they try to hit you, both roll Skill as normal and if they win you get injured, if you win nobody gets hurt.

example: wizard Skill 4 staff skill 1 casts a fire bolt at goblin
goblin gets to try and dodge it (2D6 roll equal to or under skill) if failed it takes 1D6 damage, if it dies all is well for the wizard.
if it dodges or is hit but doesn't die the goblin and wizard both roll for fight
if wizard wins he avoids damage, but doesn't whack the goblin as he wasn't trying to.
if goblin wins it stabs the wizard

you don't get to fight and cast a spell in the same round normally, although there is a sorcery spell that allows this (NIP I think?) for a limited time.

Statistics: Posted by Eddie — Sun Nov 27, 2016 6:00 pm






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November 27, 2016 at 10:16AM

Gamefic: Dynamic Entities and Subplots

Gamefic: Dynamic Entities and Subplots

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A while back I quietly introduced an improvement to dynamic entities. It's always been possible to generate entities at runtime, but for a long time they weren't compatible with snapshots. In other words, any entity created at runtime would be lost in an undo or restore. Gamefic 1.0 was the first release to handle dynamic entities properly in snapshots. The latest version extends this capability with a new feature called subplots. Read More




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November 27, 2016 at 06:11AM

Tower of Destruction playthrough

Tower of Destruction playthrough

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(You can follow Justin McCormack on Facebook and Twitter.
You can also support Justin on Patreon and receive exclusive content including an advanced preview of next week's Fighting Fantasy playthrough, "The Crimson Tide"!
Justin is the author of two bestselling novels, a collection of horror stories - "Hush!: A Horror Anthology", and the young adult coming-of-age comedy "Diary of a gay teenage zombie".
The first in his newest series of books, "Tales of Monsterotica" - a series of erotic comedies, is available now.)


Written by Keith Martin, artwork by Pete Knifton

So, Tower of Destruction. Must be honest, I've been looking forward to this one. I remember seeing it on a visit to a library once, when I was a kid, but never did get around to borrowing it. I'd rather grown tired of the selection in my local library, so I'd insisted that we use the library in a neighbouring part of town for a while, which tended to have a better selection.

In part, I think it was catching sight of Tower of Destruction there, during a school visit, that had convinced me to insist on making this journey each time I needed to rent out a library book. This is almost entirely down to the cover. Look at it. Seriously, that is epic. Not having actually read the book yet, I'm still convinced that the giant... thing... on the cover IS the titular Tower of Destruction, a flying tower that rains down destruction on innocent villagers. A flying tower. Freaking awesome, guys!

The game has a few extra stats, namely the often-annoying Time stat to keep track of (has this ever been anything but fiddly and unnecessary?) and an Honour stat, which brings to mind Sword of the Samurai. This, in turn, makes me think of oriental mythology, which in turn makes me remember the giant flying tower in Final Fantasy 9. See how my mind works? Terrifying, isn't it?

The story begins as I trudge through the snowy northern lands, to find that my home village has been destroyed. Which is all rather like Conan the Barbarian, with the slight difference of that James Earl Jones wasn't a giant flying tower. Leaving the village, and my family as smouldering ruins, I spend the evening helping the survivors patch their wounds and tending to their injuries. The next day, I'm sent off to follow the tower, because one man with a sharp sword is a perfect match for a flying death machine.

At about this point I realise that this adventure has nothing in common with Sword of the Samurai. I trudge off through the snowy northlands, until I stumble upon a small copse of trees. Among the trees, I find an owl. He tells me, in plain and simple language, that I should probably go and talk to the wise man who lives to the east. I don't question my newfound ability to talk to the animals, because in Fighting Fantasy games it's just more unusual to find animals who don't talk. It's kinda like Oz in that way. I toddle off to find the wise man's wooden hut some day's travel away, only to find that it's occupied by a Smoke Demon.

The Smoke Demon is a pretty tough fight for this early in the game, with a skill of 9. But because I was sneaking around the house and being all Stealthy McStealtherson, I managed to score a free first strike on him, which helped. To add to its general worrying nature, its accompanying illustration also shows the Smoke Demon is actually an entirely naked rotting zombie, with only a whisp of smoke covering its decomposing floppage. Either way, I find the old wise man, Tasrin, who babbles incoherantly and then dies. My working theory is that he summoned the Smoke Demon whilst drunk.

I steal the dead old man's ring and run off to get back into the trail of the tower, which the book is referring to as a sphere. Which is a little confusing, but maybe I'm just not doing it right. Along the way, I find a dead snow fox, and I'm given the chance to take it. Unable to resist carrying around a dead body, I pack the fox's corpse into my backpack, because fuck it why not? Before long I find a batch of footprints, which I decide to investigate, hoping to meet some new friends and show them my newfound lump of carrion.

The footprints belong to an injured barbarian called Torsten, who I nurse back to health. He tells me that he has been injured by Ice Ghosts, which are essentially White Walkers from Game of Thrones. He doesn't seem impressed by the dead fox that I've got crammed in my backpack, but he does offer me to come back to his place for some booze and entirely non-homoerotic night-time activities.

Torsten introduces me to his village's shaman, who tells me that the spirits have been chattering away about an evil wizard who has summoned the flying death sphere. The wizard is, apparantly, inside the sphere and yet at the same time not there, so perhaps he's a time lord, I dunno. Or the shaman is just faking, and trying to hedge his bets. Anyway, that evening a merchant shows up at the barbarian camp, and I have the option to sell him a 'Silver' Fox. I don't know if this is the same item as I found earlier, which was a Snow Fox. But the two are similar enough, I'm happy to call it the same thing. I sell him the dead animal and buy a crowbar, some food, and a bag of salt.

I'm getting worried about the time score on this. The game requires me to keep track of how many days pass, and by the time I leave the barbarian village, it's so late that I've lost two days worth of travel, bringing my total to four. I sleep for the fourth time in a cave, and upon emerging to continue my adventure, I manage to accidently attract the attention of a dragon which has been flying overhead. Rather than roasting me where I stand, the dragon instead lands and asks if I can convince him not to eat me. I'm somehow not only able to convince him not to eat me, but to let me ride him on to the next part of the journey!

Rather bewildered by this, I'm now close enough to the sphere to see that it is, indeed, a flying sphere about twelve meters across, and not a giant tower as I'd seen on the front cover. Not sure how to feel about that, to be honest. Everything I'd thought I've known was wrong! But yeah, there's an entrance into the sphere, and I step on inside, only to find a large tunnel. It's clearly bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. I rush to check the year that this book was published. Hmm, seems that Doctor Who was off the air during that year. Most curious, most curious indeed...

I travel down a long, long corridor until I wind up in the engine room. A large golem appears to be throwing round balls of super-heated... stuff... into holes in the wall, which I assume is somehow powering the sphere. I knock the golem down and stamp on it, it's somewhat less of a challenge than the naked zombie we met earlier. The book then offers me the chance to jump into the engine's furnace, which... yeah, doesn't quite appeal to me. I head out of the room, heading into the opposite direction, and meet yet another naked zombie. I'm now convinced that I've stumbled upon a British Nudist gathering.

Making short work of the zombie and its flapping bodily appendages, I find a secret panel in the room. The book then asks how many days I've been awake for, and I'm barely able to scrape through with four days. The cut-off period here is five, and I barely manage to pass. As a result, the secret room into which I step that is full of dead bodies is relatively safe. I assume that if I were too late, those dead bodies would be fully alive and strolling around.

I'm then promptly thrown into an especially deadly boss fight. The very next chamber contains a man-orc champion with a hefty sword, who has a fondness for thwapping me with it. It also contains a mage who likes to zap me with lightning bolts. I'm pretty sure that the mage is in charge of this freaky operation, so I beat up the man-orc for a while until I can get a good look at the mage. The mage then blasts me with lightning.

I can't get a good hit in at the mage, because of his tendency to blast me with lightning. Instead, I turn my attention towards the only other thing in the room, a giant statue of a demon. The statue of a demon then blasts me as well, just for good measure. But I'm able to determine that the eye of the statue is its weak spot, so I break the gem that's set into its eye socket. This seems to cause the mage to teleport out.

By this point, I've taken quite a bit of damage, and the man-orc still needs to be killed. I finish him off, and the book reliably informs me that this chamber is the control system of the sphere. It also tells me that there is a door opposite, behind which I can hear 'something'. I decide to try to play around with the controls, only being electrocuted for my effort. Grumbling and hemoraging stamina points like there's no tomorrow, I throw open the door and find a prisoner. Yay, I can be a hero and rescue this prisoner, although the sphere seems to be about to explode.

I hurry out of the sphere, prisoner in tow. The sphere promtly explodes, and I'm quite confident that I've managed to win this part of the adventure. But I'm then promptly struck on the head by a piece of exploding debris, which deals an enormous four hit points of damage. Combined with the five I'd suffered for daring to touch the controls of the sphere, and all of the ones I'd taken from the mage's blasts a few seconds before, all without any real chance to heal up. The bit of debris knocks my stamina down to zero, so although I've rescued the prisoner and saved the world from the evil flying death sphere, I nontheless die.

But I die a hero, right?

I actually rather like this one. The text isn't as descriptive as I'd like it to be, though, but the structure of it is very nice and delivered well. You're left feeling that the adventure is arduous and difficult, and I don't at any time feel that the death I suffered was unfair.

I'm going to count this as one of the 'Books I didn't play as a kid but I'm very glad I have now' from the series. Very nice, overall. Check it out if you get the chance.

More adventure (hopefully) this time next week! Hopefully with less naked zombies next time.


(You can follow Justin McCormack on Facebook and Twitter.
You can also support Justin on Patreon and receive exclusive content including an advanced preview of next week's Fighting Fantasy playthrough, "The Crimson Tide"!
Justin is the author of two bestselling novels, a collection of horror stories - "Hush!: A Horror Anthology", and the young adult coming-of-age comedy "Diary of a gay teenage zombie".
The first in his newest series of books, "Tales of Monsterotica" - a series of erotic comedies, is available now.)



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November 27, 2016 at 02:59AM