Well I'm glad that age of ffable is an ongoing project, that's one I'll keep my eye on.

Gbf, if your including gamebook esque web games as links on your site, maybe you could put a link to Sryth the age of Igtheon?

In other news, I've just finished trial of Alaba's tomb, and I'm really impressed!

though it was a definite maze, I never found myself feeling lost due to the well written descriptions of even simple locations like tunnels, which stopped everything from looking the same. I also love the way the layout was indeed logical, with mostly long passages with rooms opening out from them. the author also plainly constructed the book very well, sinse I noticed that I wasn't able to walk around in circles, when I'd reached a point that required two routes to get there and had only taken one, the book would say something like:
"sinse you've been following a generally southerly direction you decide to continue south"

this very much stopped me from walking around in circles, as distinctly happen when I tried Curse of the Yeti.

I only died twice, which was lucky. the only real piece of complete luck I had was finding a certain vital key, that is only obtainable I believe from a correct choice of three alternatives, I think this is probably the only cryticism of the book I have reguarding that puzle, that it was only luck on my part that let me get that important item, and without it I believe I might have ended up dying nastily right at the end.

My success has now rekindled my hope that I might actually be able to complete some of the longer books ----- though I stil think I'll give hell fire a miss until I'm a good deal more experienced.

Gamebook Fanatic
Wed Jul 12 16:36:06 2006
General Chat

......Sorry, I'm getting a little confused here. Dark had addressed 2 of his posts at someone with the initials "Gbf", which also happens to be the initials for my username. But it's quite clear from his second post that he's talking to the host of this site. I hope he hasn't mistaken me for the site admin. If he had, I hope to clear up this misunderstanding. I may love gamebooks, but I know practically nothing about programming (which was why I didn't respond to his question about Age of Fable even though I thought he was addressing it at me). I'm just another fairly active user.

Of course, maybe our host here does in fact have a name/alias with the initials Gbf. I'd certainly like to know if it's true. I always felt that having to address someone as "site admin" or "site owner" when trying to address him in the second-person was just a little awkward at times.

Either way, congratulations to Dark for completing a fairly difficult book. Good luck to you in your further "conquests"! :)

dark
Wed Jul 12 20:42:45 2006
General Chat

Hello Gamebook Fanatic.

I'm afraid you are correct, and I did mistake you for the site administrator, and I'm sorry for the missunderstanding, you just seem to be the omniscient answerer of all questions around here, hence my mistake.

Trial was good fun, and as I said, I only suffered two deaths along the way, and I was definitely impressed with the book as a hole, though I did think that one item

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, was hidden in a too random way, if I'd happn to not choose the

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, I'd have been in serious trouble right at the end.

Gamebook Fanatics
Sat Jul 15 09:45:24 2006
General Chat

Hey, no apologies needed, I'm quite honored that someone actually thought I could run a site like this. But Me? "Omniscient answerer of all questions"? LOL, I'm far from that. In fact, if you happened to read Shadow Dragon's post above, I just supplied asgardian a wrong answer not long ago, and I'm glad SD is there to correct me.

Anyway, it looks like you just made the same mistake I made myself when I first came: you need to post your spoilers in between the two bracketed 'S's, not after them. Too bad we can't edit our own posts, since this is a guestbook, not a forum. We'll have to wait for our real host to pop in and correct that mistake.

dark
Sat Jul 15 23:32:08 2006
Isle Of The Cyclops

Ooopse, I have dropped in here a time or two, so I really should have remembered that.

The other night I completed Isle of the Cyclops, but I'm afraid I wasn't overly impressed with it as a whole. I liked the RPG-esque way it had a central town, and an area with various monsters that you could go between, but there really needed to be more to do in the game. I thought after you defeated the Cyclops there might be some more content, since he

SPOILER

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but I was obviously mistaken. Also, I didn't think the final cave was particularly impressive, just several tests of luck, which weren't really too bad since I started out with a high score.

The only thing in the book that slightly confused me was the way that the

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asgardian Sun Jul 16 06:28:50 2006 Isle Of The Cyclops	Re: Isle of the Cyclops - the encounters are all random. Keep trekking around the inner area of the island and you'll find him. All in all not a bad game, but I felt the characters were too weak. None of them had the necessary SKILL and LUCK required. But, we've discussed that ad infinitum.
	I would say that regardless of your choice of character there is a better than even chance of getting through to the end.

Gamebook Fanatic
Sun Jul 16 07:42:44 2006
Isle Of The Cyclops

The Isle of Cyclops is not originally meant to be played under FF rules. It is based on the Fabled Lands gamebook series. The novelty of this series is that they are supposed to make up a complete realm of its own and each book contains a different land for the adventurer to explore. The fun part is that you can travel between the books on a neverending adventure using 1 item you find in 1 book in another, or starting a quest in 1 book and travelling to another book to complete it. (sometimes having to travel between multiple books to complete 1 quest, picking up different hints/encounters/items required).

That's why, on its own, the book doesn't look too impressive, and some parts of it may not make sense. Our host not only has to adopt it under FF rules, but because there are no other books in the series now for you to travel to, some parts of the book give you an abrupt ending because the host can't just connect it to another book for you to travel. And some of the seemingly useless items are probably meant to be useful in another book. Of course, it doesn't help that Isle of Cyclops is much shorter than the original FL series (each book in the original has about 700 paragraphs, which gives you a MUCH bigger place to explore). Unlike the FF books, each FL book doesn't give you a specific major quest to complete, but rather hundreds of minor possible quests as you exlore each individual location. You don't really have a 'good' ending to the series, as the only way you can really 'complete' the book is to explore every possible area and complete every quest you can find... which may well take years... hence it feels awkward under FF rules.

If you want to see what FL series is like, look at the original Isle of the Cyclops in the downloads page here. Or you can try to find the original series if you are lucky (sadly, I think they are not only long out of print, but the series itself was never quite completed. 12 books were planned, but only 6 were ever published).

dark ranger
Sun Jul 16 11:03:44 2006
Hellfire

SPOILER

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Hi.
i really like hellfire, but hell i just couldn't get past that river of acid, and after all that way! frown.
the first couple of times i tried i got done by the wall of hellfire, but still felt lousy killing the chaos guard.
trial of allibars was fun, again kept on getting to the end but dyed because of the fire.
i am now actually writing various game books myself, that when are finished possibly submit.
ranger.

ShadowDragon
Sun Jul 16 17:00:42 2006
General Chat

There's actually a newsgroup devoted to fabled lands where they're publishing all the books online. Sadly there's no aids like the FFbook program or the Statskeeper in Project Aon to help play them, so its really hard for visually impared people to get around in them, especially if you use a screen reader. They're all published in PDF format, so you not only have to find the page they're on, but also the section on that page, and it takes a while to skin through pages trying to guess at how far ahead you need to go to get to the next section. I've never liked keeping track of items, stats and such on my own to boot, but I could live with that if the books were published more like the lone wolf series with html links instead, grin. I'd like to see some kind of program built to play the FL books, but sadly I don't think that'll ever happen. Oh, and sorry for the very off-topic post.

Dark
Sun Jul 16 17:57:39 2006
General Chat

Keeping track of my own stats and roling my own dice is something I've never minded doing, ever sinse I used to play tabletop D&D with a laptop. The self voicing gma dice programme is extremely handy as well. The only thing that puts me off trying other Fighting fantasy books is the lack of Html links, sinse trying to find a correct page in a text or Pdf document is (as you say Shaddow dragon), both spoilersome and a strain.

This is a shame, sinse the fabled lands series really sounds like good fun, I love the idea of books where you can just wander around doing quests.

It's a shame actually that when people write gamebooks, they don't think to put in codes that you can find for each paragraph, so that you could use ctrl F (in word or whatever).

If when the book told you to go to page 24 and you could just type in "Pg24" and be instantly there, it would make the lives of visually impared players (like myself), much easier.

Oh well, we'll have to wait until someone developes a "Project fabled lands" site.

Endless Words...
Thu Aug 3 13:24:29 2006
General Chat

Webmaster...

I don't understand why you don't have a forum already.

It would be sooo worth it.

I hope you would be willing to consider the idea.

Comments could be divided into appropriate sections.

I strongly believe that traffic would be increased by using a forum rather than a guestbook. It would also prevent repetitions such as walkthroughs and so on.

I've read before that you had set your mind on not using a forum. I hope you will reconsider. I think it would be beneficial not only for this forum, but for the gamebooks in general.

E.

DARK
Tue Aug 29 19:26:32 2006
General Chat

Dark ranger, I believe the a previous post in the guest book concerned the river of acid in Hellfire, try the previous page.

As reguard's Alabar's tomb:

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For the attention of the webmaster, I would also love to see a forum on this site. It would not only be a very good platform for people to discuss the books hosted here, but also allow prospective authors (and we seem to have quite a few), to discuss their work, and maybe even post bits of it for cryticism and suggestion, thus creating better FF for everyone, pluss, judging by the crew who seem to use this guest book, I imagine there could be some pretty good intelligent discussion of the merrits of the genre.

Ps: if I can get the time during my Phd (in philosophy), which I'm starting next month, I'd love to write a paper on interactive fiction and fighting fantasy for the journal of aesthetics or some such.

I've only got a few ideas at the moment, and I'm obviously more taken up with my main thesis, but it's something I'd like to do in the next year or so, hence my desire for some reasonabley inteligent discussing.

I'm very sorry if that sounded pompus, it's just what I do.

Sealgirl
Mon Sep 4 20:20:51 2006
General Chat

Hi everyone,
Been in lurk-mode for a while, but I was intrigued by all this forum talk.
If anyone else here uses LiveJournal to blog in, you'll know that they have the facility for making communities - where like-minded people can all post and chat about whatever.
The only snag is you need an lj account - but they are free, and you don't have to blog in your own journal (I know some people who keep an account just to talk on the communities)
Just a thought.

*re-lurks, for fish*
Sealgirl (who is seal_girl in lj)

Andrew
Mon Sep 4 21:47:51 2006
General Chat

REALLY enjoyable website!

Tim
Wed Sep 6 11:54:10 2006
General Chat

A bunch of rubbish quite simply. It seems as though you haven't read any of the FF books at all, where have you been the past 20 years..

Dark
Wed Sep 6 21:29:00 2006
General Chat

Hmmmmm, a strange post, I'm not even sure whome the "You" is referring to.

I'm not sure about the Live Jernal forum thing, the hole blog business just isn't something I've looked into.

Infinte Words...! Thu Sep 14 14:25:47 2006 General Chat	So what about it, uh? I would love to share what I've done and get some criticism on a forum. Just do it, yeah? I.W.
	Sorry, but there isn't going to be a forum in the foreseeable future. But if you have written a gamebook, by all means email it to me and I will put it on the downloads page, I'm sure someone would give you some criticism then.

Lost in the Ruins
Tue Sep 26 01:01:36 2006
General Chat

Hi
Thanks for putting up this site, it is v enjoyable.
I'm just wondering if someone could give me some pointers for finishing Midnight Deep? I am stuck at the 3 doors in the ruins and I don't seem to have the correct items for any of them...
Thank you
I thought Outsider was well written but I died in the sewers...ug.

ashman
Fri Sep 29 18:53:53 2006
Bad Moon Rising

I like the bad moon rising book,just completed it
its funny toothe online ones are way harder,though

Ibrahim Tue Oct 3 08:50:37 2006 General Chat	Hi Folks. Any chance of a new game being added before Christmas? Quite a few to choose from at http://www.shadowvault.net/amateurgamebooks.htm to keep even the most ardent FF fan busy.
	It looks unlikely, I'm quite busy at the moment.

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