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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 9540485" data-attributes="member: 42856">Inspired by [USER=11760]@Whizbang Dustyboots[/USER], I am starting a read-through of an old gamebook series called Bloodsword, without copying the text of course but paraphrasing the adventure (so, you'll have to bear with my limited vocabulary -- I must confess that I have trouble distinguishing a glaive-guisarme from your regular lochaber axe). It's set in the campaign world of Dragon Warrior, an RPG published in the 80's and distributed in gamebook format. More information on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Warriors" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>. It had a first book with the basics of the system, and several supplemental books including new classes or rule points, two campaign and a game world that is reminiscent of 9th century Europe with numbers filed off, with a 11th century crusade ongoing, but the tone is much more Charlemagne's era than Richard the Lionheart's.A more traditional gamebook, Bloodsword, was published along the RPG. More traditional? Not really, once looked under the hood. It let the player guide a team of one to four heroes into the adventure. Much less personnification, but more choices and a more tactical approach to the game. The characters can be of one of four classes: warrior, trickster, enchanter and sage. I'll be hard pressed not to call them fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric going forward. Each (except the warrior, which is a fighting machine and has few other rules except that they lose experience when behaving dishonorably) has specific powers, both available in fights and outside. Since having a group is something original in the game, I prefer that we read through as a full team. It comes with a drawback, as the choice are balanced by level: a single characters starts at 8th level, sorry "rank", while a team of 4 comprises only 2nd rank newbies. But with four characters, some tactics are allowed notably to exploit the basic enemy tactics: they will, unless specified otherwise, run to the nearest character and attack to the death. So some fights will allow us to exploit chokepoints and things like that, which are less common in other game series. I'll get to the rules as we need them, but here is the starting cast, given that the statistics here aren't random. Rank determines Strength.Also, I am trying to complete the campaign. If our choices lead to a TPK, I am not against resuming at an earlier checkpoint. I seem to remember that the bookss were quite forgiving and the TPK were only if you made stupid choices, like setting fire to a powder storage on the boat you're in, in the middle of the ocean. It can turn out badly but it's kind of... expected, isn't it?The first book is called Battlepits of Krarth. [ATTACH=full]390307[/ATTACH]The cover and title evokes to me the most basic adventure possible, being certainly thrown into a pit like many other contemporary gamebooks. Don't despair yet, the campaign, if I remember correctly, will be interesting, provided we survive of course. There is an alternate cover from a later reprint:[ATTACH=full]390308[/ATTACH]It is not really giving us more information on what to expect.We're starting in Krarth. Knowledge from the campaign world reminds me that Krarth is a place with Russian-like climate, that was formerly rules by a group of powerful archmages who managed to destroy themselves by playing with magic too much, blowing up most of their country (five of them remains as stars visible over their former kingdom). Nowadays, the country is still ruled by archmages, but they are just regular mages pretending to hold immense magical power and trying to recover what their predecessors lost -- because no lesson is ever learnt, i guess. The former capital was Spyte, which is now a no-go zone. There is no "The story so far..." section, so apparently we'll start in medias res.</blockquote>

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