4 ms·

What rekindled my love of CYOA was the Fabled Lands series of books (unfortunately unfinished currently). Rather than linear progression, it used a hub and spok

What rekindled my love of CYOA was the Fabled Lands series of books (unfortunately unfinished currently). Rather than linear progression, it used a hub and spoke style to make essentially an open world RPG. Each book extended the world and you could travel from one book to the other. Plenty of tasks to complete. This page shows the difference in layout vs a typical CYOA: http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=204 http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=204 And here's the main page: http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/p/fabled-lands-gamebooks.html?m=1 http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/p/fabled-lands-gamebooks.htm... which also has links to extras to play (even an app). I recommend anyone interested in CYOA check them out.

simonh 8y ago
Fabled lands is great, a real masterclass in building a freely traversable world with persistent state using very minimal notation. I love how they wrote little adventures that are triggered in one location in one book, require you to go to a location in another book, complete some task and the return to the starting point, all tacked with a few simple check boxes. Great stuff. One of the authors has a great gaming blog. http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/ http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/
- arcticfox 8y ago
  > require you to go to a location in another book, That's some very powerful and clever up-selling, but was it not enraging in practice?
  - ironcan 8y ago
    Well, if they haven't included any connection to other books, people could complain that it's too self-contained, there is no way to win.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Not really, these were mainly side-quests. You could do well over 95% of each book stand alone.
chias 8y ago
It's funny this should come up, I've spent the last year developing a framework for the construction of CYOA-style adventures on a website I run. It's a creative-writing / creative-expression heavy community, so the hope is that this will go over very well. We're scheduled for our grand release later this month :) It's got a number of elements inspired by D&D 5e, as well as from Game Books I used to enjoy as a child. Interestingly, it has analogues for many of the conceps in the Squidi post you link to. For example, it's got "encounters" which perform essentially the same thing as GOSUB routines, and has "Expressions" which are calculations that can rely on adventure state and can be used to conditionally hide or unhide particular actions that an adventurer can take. In case anyone's interested, the reference documentation where you can see our structure and how things work is here: https://www.mycenacave.com/kb/adventure https://www.mycenacave.com/kb/adventure I'm extremely proud of it.

simonh 8y ago

Fabled lands is great, a real masterclass in building a freely traversable world with persistent state using very minimal notation. I love how they wrote little adventures that are triggered in one location in one book, require you to go to a location in another book, complete some task and the return to the starting point, all tacked with a few simple check boxes. Great stuff. One of the authors has a great gaming blog. http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/ http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/

arcticfox 8y ago
> require you to go to a location in another book, That's some very powerful and clever up-selling, but was it not enraging in practice?
- ironcan 8y ago
  Well, if they haven't included any connection to other books, people could complain that it's too self-contained, there is no way to win.
- simonh 8y ago
  Not really, these were mainly side-quests. You could do well over 95% of each book stand alone.

chias 8y ago

It's funny this should come up, I've spent the last year developing a framework for the construction of CYOA-style adventures on a website I run. It's a creative-writing / creative-expression heavy community, so the hope is that this will go over very well. We're scheduled for our grand release later this month :) It's got a number of elements inspired by D&D 5e, as well as from Game Books I used to enjoy as a child. Interestingly, it has analogues for many of the conceps in the Squidi post you link to. For example, it's got "encounters" which perform essentially the same thing as GOSUB routines, and has "Expressions" which are calculations that can rely on adventure state and can be used to conditionally hide or unhide particular actions that an adventurer can take. In case anyone's interested, the reference documentation where you can see our structure and how things work is here: https://www.mycenacave.com/kb/adventure https://www.mycenacave.com/kb/adventure I'm extremely proud of it.