Re
member those choose your own adventure books from your childhood? Well imagine that gameplay with some RPG character development, an inventory system, dice-based skill checks and an entire world to explore and quest throughout — awesome! Well I’ve just described Fabled Lands, an excellent gamebook series, that provides as good a solo adventure as I’ve found in a book.
Only 6 books were published, between 1995 and 1996. Each of the books is played out within a different geographical area of the Fabled Lands world, but they are all connected by land borders, sea routes, and more arcane means. Your character can travel wherever he likes, pursuing quests he is offered, exploring the civilized world and the wilderness, trading by sea, fighting and more. The game can almost be as focused or as free-form as you are willing to make it.
The difficulty of the quests, skill challenges and such all increase with the book number, so books 1 and 2 are the easiest. You can start in any book, but your character’s starting level (“rank”) is adjusted higher to compensate. Wherever you start, you’re bound to die a couple of times before getting the hang of things, and then sometimes you’ll still die, but that doesn’t matter because you’ll learn from your mistake and start again all the wiser (or if you’re smart you’ll have resurrection arrangements in place at your friendly neighbourhood temple).
Unfortunately the books are no longer in print, which is a great shame. One of the authors expressed hope of reviving the series a few years back, but has apparently since given permission for the distribution of the books in PDF form. I can’t find any concrete source for this permission, so if you know anything (either way) post a comment.
A Yahoo group has been set up for fans to share, discuss and develop Fabled Lands material: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/fabled_lands/
All 6 books are available in PDFs there. You can of course leave a comment here or discuss the game in our forums as well. I’d love to know if you’ve played before, or how you find it after giving it a spin? Do you know another good gamebook series? Feel free to share.
Also of possible interest for those less inclined to flip though PDFs, there is a computer game version called FLapp: http://sourceforge.net/projects/flapp/
I’ve heard a decent review for it, but I haven’t tried it personally. I might review and compare it to the book/PDF experience in the future.
Happy adventuring! (and try not to cheat too much!)
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