Your oddest childhood creative efforts

[thealmightymudworm]

I've been thinking about having a thread like this for a while, to laugh at celebrate everyone's pre-adult efforts in writing gamebooks, roleplaying campaigns or just fantasy fiction.

Last night however I rescued an Adventure Sheet from the recycling written in my own unmistakeable style so it seems now is the time.

The sheet details four statistics for combat and other abilities likely to keep you alive through your intrepid adventures. There are also slots for a limited number of objects, and specific ones for currency, food and doses of a combat-enhancing substance. The last one suggests to me that this was influenced by the Asterix gamebooks as well as FF.

This is all pretty standard, even clichéd.

What is less standard is that you are a bee.

The stats include 'flying' and 'landing'. The currency is pollen. The food is nectar. The combat-enhancing substance is 'magic stinger' (with a not particularly helpful drawing).

My memory being what it is, with unusual priorities, I can distantly remember discussing this with someone in the playground aged maybe 9 or 10. I'm quite sure though that it didn't result in any actual adventures being written (or dreamed-up on the fly as was more common at school).

Still, it's nice to have preserved something from the brief period of time between asking "Wouldn't it be exciting to have an adventure based on trying to fly around collecting nectar and avoiding spiders?" and realising that the answer was probably "No."

I might post a pic later, but does anyone else want to contribute their own ancient efforts?

[vastariner]

Apr 28, 2021 14:59:05 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

Still, it's nice to have preserved something from the brief period of time between asking "Wouldn't it be exciting to have an adventure based on trying to fly around collecting nectar and avoiding spiders?" and realising that the answer was probably "No."

Funnily enough, there was a similar episode in one of the Falcon gamebooks, where you ended up on a planet of giant jungle plants.  One ending has you fly into a huge Venus fly-trap.

I don't have any efforts myself, although a friend tried out a Greek myth-based RPG (it was hideously imbalanced; you could end up "killing" Cerberus as a level 1 character, and then die of starvation in an impossible labyrinth).

[kieran]

When I was about 7 or 8, my older sister and I used to write Neighbours gamebooks - generally they involved navigating the Lassiter's Complex which had been taken over by someone thoroughly unsuitable: Brad Willis or Julie Martin perhaps. Maybe Mrs Mangel might appear to ask a riddle. I think mine were incoherent nonsense, but I remember my sister's being quite good - though, let's face it, they probably weren't.

[a moderator]

In the eighties I flowcharted a mini-adventure in which the viewpoint character was a pig trying to evade butchers.

I also wrote a 'humorous' one in which the objective was to survive a day at school. Threats included toxic school dinners, acid spillages in the chemistry lab, and an exploding gym, and the end boss was the deputy headmaster.

[thealmightymudworm]

As I said I'd post it, here is the Adventure Sheet.

Stats are: Sting, Flying, Landing (slightly tedious) and Vocal (?)

Really none of the drawings for 'magic sting', pollen or nectar is tremendously helpful or suggestive of artistic gifts.

No idea why the word 'butterfly' appears. Perhaps that was as close as I got to working out an encounter or plot point.

[CharlesX]

Inspired by Blacksand! and Midnight Rogue, I wrote a gamebook which was only about 20 paragraphs long, where you take on The Master Of The Thieves Guild. The description wasn't bad if I say so myself, and the gameplay was better than some published FF.
   Eye Of The Dragon compares to FF juvenilia on an average day. I agree with a 'harsh but fair' reviewer online who said it was a meritless piece of crap which would never have been green-lit if the author weren't Ian Livingstone.

[CharlesX]

Apr 29, 2021 12:45:41 GMT a moderator said:

In the eighties I flowcharted a mini-adventure in which the viewpoint character was a pig trying to evade butchers.

I also wrote a 'humorous' one in which the objective was to survive a day at school. Threats included toxic school dinners, acid spillages in the chemistry lab, and an exploding gym, and the end boss was the deputy headmaster.

I got as far as writing the outline of a school-based gamebook before losing interest. It wasn't particularly imaginative - yours sounds better - with threats like bullies, schoolteachers and angry caretakers 😴. We later tried adding vampires and zombies, but it never went anywhere.