#Fabled lands book reviews series#

Some paragraphs became location paragraphs, like a city. вЂњ We deliberately used codewords as if they were flags in computer games, like Might and Magic and stuffвЂ¦We really wanted to make the world of your book feel like it changed according to the things you did. The codeword system especially, where youвЂ™d tick off the codeword вЂEntropyвЂ™ if youвЂ™d fallen victim to the HangmanвЂ™s Curse, for example, was something that co-author Jamie Thompson said also came from computer games.

#Fabled lands book reviews series#

Even the structure, with each book in the series representing a country you could visit, is similar to the process of buying expansion packs. Mechanically, a lot of ideas were borrowed from computer games too. Everything you can do in a regular RPG really.вЂќ вЂњ We liked the idea of being able to freely roam around a game world, not having to run on the rails of one single storyline like in most gamebooksвЂ¦ you can get involved in multiple quests, travelling back and forth between cities, trading, having random encounters. вЂњ Might & Magic would definitely be one inspiration,вЂќ says Dave Morris. There were 12 Fabled Lands books originally planned, each A4-sized and illustrated, with a fold-out map I made the decision to start at the very beginning, with the original gamebooks, mainly because I wanted to know about it personally вЂ“ but it turned out that even the origins of the books were closely tied to the topic of computer games. Almost, but not quite.ДЄs a long time fan of the series, I set out to find why the Fabled Lands series spent most of early 2000s buried in development hell, and what problems stopped authors Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson from turning their gamebook series into the UKвЂ™s answer to Final Fantasy. Specifically, itвЂ™s about the Fabled Lands series of gamebooks (called Quest in the US), which at one point almost managed to drop the вЂbookвЂ™ suffix and go on to digital greatness as an MMO. If anything this is the opposite old games journalism from back in the day when all the best stories were bound together with glue and stitching gamebooks, basically. This isnвЂ™t a story from a computer game re-spun with a dash of new games journalism.

I'd been planning the trip for weeks and now everything depended on the role of a die, literally. I wanted to believe otherwise, but my survival now rested only in the hands of Lady Luck.

The crew were a motley bunch, mostly useless in the chaos and I wasnвЂ™t convinced the ship could take the strain. Fabled Lands: The MMO that Never WasIn 1995 I was on a boat, drifting carefree across a violet ocean on my way to an island, when a massive storm formed around me and began tossing my barge about like a bit of candlewax in a Jacuzzi.