As a kid, I was one of the quarter of Americans who have played gamebooks. I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books, then Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, then the Sorcery! series.
But I never tried to write any, until I stumbled across a Solitaire PnP Content on BGG back in 2018. To keep it simple, I limited myself to a 99-block story, heavily inspired by the Sorcery! series: Under the Blood-Red Mountain. The innovation I was most proud of was my FVTALK runes, as a way of tracking which items you possess.
The second gamebook I wrote was meant to provide an interactive example for how to play Dungeon World, loosely inspired by the interactive adventure in Basic Dungeons & Dragons (the Mentzer edition). This was Suddenly an Ogre, later adapted into a Nintendo Switch game! And Matysiak Mateusz adapted it into a browser game in both English and Polish! (Yay for the Creative Commons!)
For my third gamebook, A New Life in Auspele, I just wanted to develop an homage to Choose Your Own Adventure books—no stats, no possessions, no combat. But as I refamiliarized myself with those classics, I realized that I wanted to minimize sudden deaths and cut back on the surreality; I wanted choices to lead to more plausible paths. The book’s right on length, but has more paths than typical and fewer endings. My hope was that as a Twine game rather than just a PDF, it would prove more popular than my other gamebooks, but that hasn’t been the case. Eventually I hope to convert it into a PDF.
Photo by Kate Branch on Unsplash.
