The books work like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, but you have dice and character stat sheets and the whole thing plays more like Role-Playing Game, in the Dungeons & Dragons number-crunching sense.Nerd that I was, I was obsessed with these things. Had nearly all of them, and I don't know what became of them. There was a point when I was 11 that I wrote my own, based on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Mapped out a dungeon and worked out all the page numbers and things to turn to, wrote all the descriptions:
You are in a dark tunnel, facing west. There is a heavy oak door to the North. Faint scratching noises can be heard from behind the door. The passage continues to the west as far as you can see.Yep, I was that sort of child.
Open the Door, Page 42
Continue West, Page 129
And a Special Public Service Announcement:
Mogwai are playing The Corner on Tuesday July 25! I am ridiculously over-excited about their wall of sound ambient post-rock action.
Mogwai are one of my favourite bands ever and in my top 5 all-time greatest live shows I've ever seen. For the record, the others are Faithless, The Cure, Nine Inch Nails and Labradford. I think. I am sure I am missing something.
8 comments:
Oh my god, I loved those books.
I also loved the text-based computer games where you entered a mine and a dwarf threw a sword at you. Pressing 'enter' has never been so thrilling.
"deathtrap dungeon" was, i think, the apotheosis of the genre. pity it was no. 4 in a series of dozens. city of thieves? was pretty good too...
Those books were my favourite. You could read them 20 times and come up with different storylines each time. This from someone who reads books with the SAME ending multiple times!
City of Thieves was awesome and I always like Armies of Darkness ... in that one you had a whole army which was rad. But Warlock of Firetop Mountain is still my favourite ... I think I only actually finished that one once, it was fucking hard.
And those computer games were always wicked.
Remind me to tell the story of the time I was almost expelled in Grade 8 for writing a text adventure game set in a brothel.
Toby i'm reminding you to tell us about the time you were almost expelled in Grade 8... you know which time, right? Or were there more? Do i need to specify which time?
By popular demand, I wrote the tale just for you, Tam.
Aww shucks.
Oh how I love tales from Catholic boys boarding schools...
tobytoby, I'm starting to think we had similar childhoods!
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