#Fabled lands gamebooks online code
#Fabled lands gamebooks online series

In that respect, I don't think these books are much different than earlier gamebooks, but, given the vast palette of options available, I didn't mind at all. The writing of the books themselves is straightforward and solid, more conversational in tone than novelistic, with regular forays into gaming jargon. Again, it's a simple yet clever way to create a sandbox-like environment without the need for a referee. For example, an entry might note 'If you have codeword X, go to entry number such-and-such now it not, keep reading.' In this way, your past deeds, as represented, by the codewords, can have consequences, for good or for ill, later on. They're noted on your character sheet and then, later, as you go to other places, they may come into play.

#Fabled lands gamebooks online code

Similarly, Fabled Lands introduces the concept of 'code words.' Code words are acquired as your character adventures and achieves certain objectives. Though perhaps paltry compared to a 'true' RPG, it still provides a remarkable scope for individual action, far more than any other gamebook I've read (and far more than even some computer RPGs). Even so, the Fabled Lands books do offer a large number of options, as there are between 600 and 700 separate entries in each book on average. Note that I said 'sandbox-like.' Inevitably, there are limits to how many options can be offered through the printed word. It's a very clever set-up and one that I find all the more intriguing nowadays than I probably would have in my youth. Each gamebook describes a different region of the Fable Lands setting and the books are set up in such a way as to facilitate travel from region to region and book to book. Instead, in sandbox-like fashion, you get to travel across the titular Fabled Lands, going wherever you wish and taking up whatever activities you desire from among the many, many opportunities presented to you.

That is, there's no overarching, epic quest, no grand narrative to provide structure to your characters wanderings. What makes the Fabled Lands books so fascinating to me, though, is that, unlike other books of this kind, they're completely open-ended. This random element is part of what made gamebooks so much more attractive over simple choose-your-own-adventure books, at least for me, since, while randomness did introduce a greater number of ways to fail, it also held out the possibility that one might somehow beat the odds and achieve an unexpected - and possibly undeserved - victory. Unlike straight choose-your-own-adventure books, gamebooks included random elements, such as combat, that were adjudicated through the use of dice, so it was possible, for example, for a character to die from having been slain in battle or having fallen prey to a trap, in addition to other choices whose dire consequences you can read about on the page.

#Fabled lands gamebooks online series

In all of them, you created a character not unlike that used in a tabletop RPG and kept track of his statistics and possessions as you navigated a series of numbered pages/paragraphs based on the choices you, the reader, make in response to the situations you're reading about in the gamebook. In many ways, the four available Fabled Lands gamebooks are quite similar to earlier series like Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf. With a pedigree like that, I was quite intrigued when I learned about the re-release of Fabled Lands. I was, however, familiar with the name of Dave Morris from Tékumel fandom, where he was an editor and regular contributor to the excellent fanzine, The Eye of All-Seeing Wonder in addition to having designed the Tirikélurules for playing in Professor Barker's alien world. As I said, I hadn't paid any attention to the world of gamebooks since the late '80s, so I was completely unaware of Fabled Lands when it debuted. Now, Fabled Lands is again available, with the first four books already in print and with plans for the rest to follow. These six books were only the first half of the twelve gamebooks Morris and Thomson originally planned, but the series was canceled before the remaining volumes could be published.

How wrong I was!Īs it turns out, between 19, Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson released six gamebooks as part of a series entitled Fabled Lands. Consequently, I had assumed that, like the larger roleplaying hobby out of which they sprang, gamebooks had mostly died out by the 1990s, never mind were alive and well today. I read a lot of them during the mid to late '80s, but I largely stopped paying attention to them after I graduated from high school in 1987. I've talked about gamebooks before and I even did a retrospective on one of the most famous of them. I don't think anyone involved in the hobby back in the 1980s is unfamiliar with 'gamebooks,' a hybrid between choose-your-own-adventure books and traditional tabletop roleplaying.