Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Ryujin]

Those are pretty good. They're all different, with little crossover unless you squint and decide, behind the scenes, that you're playing the same guy.

The best four series:

• TolkienQuest: The first three gamebooks produced by ICE under the license with the Saul Zaentz Company were written by John Ruemmler, who made each one a hexcrawl-in-a-gamebook. Night of the Nazgûl has you bringing a message to Hobbiton that there are dark figures in the night. The Legend of Weathertop has you searching for the ruins below Weathertop to retrieve an item said to lie below. Rescue in Mirkwood has you searching for a noble elf who disappeared within. Some people don't like them, but I absolutely love that each playthrough can be wildly different.
• Lone Wolf: This series was fairly standard in style, but had a really well-realized setting, and your character can develop all sorts of cool abilities; you get a new power after completing each book. It was popular enough to spawn a spin-off, The World of Lone Wolf, which had a different protagonist. All books published in the 80s are available online at Project Aon.
• Steve Jackson's Sorcery!: This was a spin-off of the Fighting Fantasy series. FF books were basically independent one-off stories you played through; instead of that, Sorcery! was four books with a series of linked adventures. And you could play a warrior or a wizard, which was cool! The magic system involved memorizing three-letter codes for spells in a separate book, and then trying to pick the right option in each encounter where you could use magic. A really good part of it was the excellent evocative art by John Blanche; in some of the encounters you had to notice a clue in the art that would only be obliquely referenced in the text. Really good. You can play this on Inkle as well.
• The Way of the Tiger: I had forgotten about this one. You play a ninja, and each book builds on the story of the previous one. It was disappointing that the publisher canceled the series one book before it would have ended, but it shared the feature of Lone Wolf that you could gain a skill after each book. It was another spinoff of Fighting Fantasy (sort of), but the setting was different from the rest of that series; it was originally seen in Talisman of Death (FF #11), but it's very different from that one.

It's worth checking the Fighting Fantasy books out, @Ryujin. Those were created by the future founders of Games Workshop, have classic artists who went on to do TSR UK and Games Workshop stuff, and is very authentically old school RPG goodness.

I would put Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Deathtrap Dungeon, City of Thieves and most of the Sorcery! series up against anything TSR did in the 1E era. City of Thieves in particular is quietly super-influential, as it builds on City-State of the Invincible Overlord by showing us what an evil city with urban goblins, orcs and so on would look like as a functional location. It's mostly concerned with the PC doing a fetch quest through the city, but it all feels very lived in.

The three books in the one I have are "The Forest of Doom" by Ian Livingston, "The Citadel of Chaos" by Steve Jackson, and "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" By both Jackson and Livingston.

 

[RealAlHazred]

The three books in the one I have are "The Forest of Doom" by Ian Livingston, "The Citadel of Chaos" by Steve Jackson, and "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" By both Jackson and Livingston.

I mean, "Warlock" started it off by being extremely successful. Give it a shot; if it doesn't suit you, know that there is probably one (or more) that ticks all of the boxes for you.

In college, I only got to game when I was on-campus. Over the summers, I played and replayed gamebooks a lot. Lone Wolf got me my fix, as there would be at least a new one or two in the book store, and it would be an excuse to replay the previous ones and try other choices. Man, those were good times, playing gamebooks by myself in my room all day.

 

[Ryujin]

I mean, "Warlock" started it off by being extremely successful. Give it a shot; if it doesn't suit you, know that there is probably one (or more) that ticks all of the boxes for you.

In college, I only got to game when I was on-campus. Over the summers, I played and replayed gamebooks a lot. Lone Wolf got me my fix, as there would be at least a new one or two in the book store, and it would be an excuse to replay the previous ones and try other choices. Man, those were good times, playing gamebooks by myself in my room all day.

Thanks for that.

A friend recently did a choose your adventure video on Youtube, called "Marla and the Macarons." Short and pretty trippy, in that West Coast (of Canada) way.

 

[Scribe]

--

I understand the goals and aims, but I think Daggerheart as released is putting a ton of weight on the GM, unless you already have the crew that could run a story first collaborative game.

I'm probably going to have to simplify or develop (background, setting, campaign frame, all that) quite a bit to take the load off the players who generally are not either into or capable of maintaining that kind of contribution.

Which is all good, as its enjoyable stuff for me, but even the character sheet just has too much going on that could be stripped out I think.

(Posted here as its not explicitly + and I dont care to start a new thread for random thoughts.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The three books in the one I have are "The Forest of Doom" by Ian Livingston, "The Citadel of Chaos" by Steve Jackson, and "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" By both Jackson and Livingston.

Forest of Doom has strong BD&D vibes. It could easily have been an early Dragon magazine adventure. It's not my favorite, but it's beloved. It's definitely the easiest of the three you've got, especially since you can go back to the beginning if you fail and keep going with your established character.

Citadel of Chaos was my first book, and the first that allows you to be a spellcaster. (It does not use the system that Sorcerry! later uses, where you had to know the magical words that cast spells, etc. It's a more traditional spellcasting system.) It really shows off the weirdness of the line, with a pair of guards -- one of whom is an ape with the head of a dog and one of whom is a dog with the head of an ape. Again, lots of old school vibes.

Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a big spawling dungeon (half written by Jackson, half written by Livingston, and you can definitely tell the spot they hand off design of the dungeon) with a bunch of iconic set-pieces.

 

[Ryujin]

Isn't this always the way...

• Need something at a local chain store.
• Check online and 1 in stock.
• Get to the store and find that item is in fact in stock, but in a locked cabinet.
• Search for employee, for 10 minutes, to open said cabinet.
• When cabinet is opened, find that someone has stripped most of the product out of the package.

Someone had to put that thing in the cabinet but didn't think to report it as spoilage, because it was more incomplete than complete?

 

[prabe]

Isn't this always the way...

• Need something at a local chain store.
• Check online and 1 in stock.
• Get to the store and find that item is in fact in stock, but in a locked cabinet.
• Search for employee, for 10 minutes, to open said cabinet.
• When cabinet is opened, find that someone has stripped most of the product out of the package.

Someone had to put that thing in the cabinet but didn't think to report it as spoilage, because it was more incomplete than complete?

The last time I worked retail, the store manager/s got in more trouble for inventory loss than for anything else--including inventory gain. They had no incentive to mark expensive things as gone.

EDIT: Also, anyone who's worked retail for any length of time knows that an inventory listing of 1 can be any number of errors/mistakes/problems; while an inventory of 2+ means they probably have at least the one they can find and sell to you.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Isn't this always the way...

No. What kind of hellscape are you shopping in?

 

[Gradine]

Man, the anecdote about the Nazi getting kicked out of the punk bar should not be this relevant this often.

And yet!

 

[Jahydin]

The last time I worked retail, the store manager/s got in more trouble for inventory loss than for anything else--including inventory gain. They had no incentive to mark expensive things as gone.

What I was thinking. At one time some honest employee reported something similar and got in trouble, so it now becomes a game of "Hot Potato" when it happens again.

I've worked for video game store that was under competent management that let us use our own common sense to run the store and handle customers and it was an absolute utopia. When it got sold to new management that rolled out all sorts of metrics, procedures, and standards that led to silly situations like the one above, the store didn't last long.