A Slope of Pines: Review

[andrewwright]

A Slope of Pines by Per Jorner, winner of one of three Merit Awards in the 2023/2024 Lindenbaum Prize for short gamebook fiction.

Per Jorner is the gamebook writer’s gamebook writer. Author of the intricately deadly Mansion of Maleficence amateur adventure, serial and comprehensive reviewer of sundry gamebooks (including the best ever gamebook review for his take on Creature of Havoc by Steve Jackson), he won the second Windhammer Prize in 2009 with The Bone Dogs. A Slope of Pines marks his return to the gamebook circuit after a somewhat lengthy hiatus, and for which he picked up a Merit Award in the third iteration of Stuart Lloyd’s Lindenbaum Prize for short gamebook fiction. This review will take two parts, firstly, a playthrough of A Slope of Pines, and, secondly, an appraisal based on the rigorous criteria and feedback Per has provided on other entrants in this year’s edition of the Lindebaum Prize.

Part One: The Playthrough (SPOILER WARNINGS)

I’m a witch participating in a mushroom-hunting competition, with a truculent familiar, and a bunch of equipment I don’t have to write down, plus a basket with lots of compartments storing variable numbers of stuff.

[Aside: I love the concept. Victor Cheng once talked about doing a Windhammer Prize entry about searching the woods for obscure ingredients, and since writing The Titan Herbal I’ve become something of a connoisseur of fantasy RPG herbals, including the legendary Fungi of the Far Realms by the Melsonian Arts Council, so this adventure is right up my creek!]

Mushrooms (and other fungi) are presented in bold type, with two stats, number (as 1X, 2X etc.) and quality (as *, **, etc.), but with an added note emphasizing DIVERSITY. Plus I can carry other stuff in the basket. Finding mushrooms is dependent on a 2d6 roll, with higher numbers favoured and positive modifiers including your choice of Familiar, Charms and Luck. You can only use one modifier per roll, before you roll.

There are four charms, Find, Open, Run and Sneak, of which you can choose five, so I go with Find (x2), Open, Run and Sneak. Familiars boil down to four candidates: a fieldmouse, a toad, a nuthatch and a marten. Hey, it’s called Slope of Pines! I go with Paws the Marten. I call my witch Mog the Groggy.

Luck starts at 1, and you can use it to add +4 to one dice roll, or +6 if you spend 2 points, while Time starts at zero.

The Mushroom Hunt begins! I’m third in line, Tyra the Pike goes west, May Thistlebottom heads off east, and then it’s my turn! I can’t got east immediately after May, so have a choice of north, south or west (with the competition finish line being the village of Lime Ridge, somewhere to the north).

I head north, thinking maybe to eventually wander off eastwards into the forest. In a pasture I find some Red Cracking Boletes (1X*), and then decide to head east, immediately finding myself alongside a red cabin that belongs to one Mr. Brock (while finding a Horse Mushroom (1X**). The cabin door is open, dare I venture inside?

Hell yeah, let’s be sylvan burglars! Rolling what to nab from the cabin, I use one of my Find Charms, and pilfer a Green Key. Sweet (although it is obviously not fungi)! Unfortunately, Mr. Brock returns!

Mr. Brock turns out to be a giant badger in a “tobacco-smelling dressing gown”, but deploying my Stealth Charm, I easily evade his senses and depart the cabin, heading to parts north-east.

Here I disturb “a boulderbrute, a spirit of nature said to be born from lingering feelings of grief and injustice” but my familiar Paws helps me to escape, grabbing some Trumpet Chanterelles (1X**) but also look for other stuff of interest.

And there is! I find the remains of a contestant from a previous competition, old Anny Moss, and, using my last Find Charm, grab both her Fairy Torque and renew another Find Charm. I’m finding some interesting gear but bugger all fungi so far! The boulderbrute returns, so I hurriedly head northeast, upslope into dense forest.

Here, deep in the woods, there are no mushrooms, and I have to add my first Time point, but Paws the familiar helps me reach the top of a hill, where I “look down at a slope of pines.” An omen, surely!

And, yes it is. Paws helps me find a rich crop of Wood Hedgehogs (3X**), which is my best find so far! Following an old trail, I arrive at a small pond, in which a lone mallard drake swims and squawks forlornly. Ignoring the duck I find some more Trumpet Chanterelles (2X**) and head down a trail, hopefully westwards.

I emerge into a gravelpit of sorts, and see a feline face on a trail to the northwest. Being risk-averse at this point, I head west instead, and find myself in a mosquito-infested mire. Grabbing some more Trumpet Chanterelles (1X**) I also find a trail heading northeast up a hilltop.

Following this trail leads me, after a lengthy climb (Time=2), to the top of a plateau, where, deploying my only Find Charm, I find some Chanterelles (1X**) and a curious door in the rock!
Obviously, the Green Key I picked up at Mr. Brock’s cabin works a treat, and the door opens to reveal a tunnel into the hillside. Entering, because why not, I find a Cavernous Glittergill (1X****), which is clearly, pretty special. There are loads of further choices in this subterranean netherworld, but I ignore them all and head back to the surface, being ultimately quite cowardly.

This takes me to the outskirts of Lime Ridge, the finish line for the Mushroom Hunt. As my Time is 2, I can explore one further area for fungi – I chose the orchards, and find some Giant Puffballs (2X*), which I can carry instead of stuffing into my wicker fungi basket.

Heading into Lime Ridge, I’m given the choice to kick Mr Dogg, but, yeah, naw, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. I get to the finish line, and have 24 points, minus 1 for Time of 2 or more, so 23 guarantees me victory! Mog the Groggy is the champion of the Mushroom Hunt. Or is she? Looking at a list of ‘chaos options’ I see only two that apply to me (burglaring Mr. Brock’s Cabin and disturbing the boulderbrute), so have a quiet victory instead of an exciting one. Still, that will do for Mog the Groggy and Paws the Marten! Success at attempt one! 

(Part Two will feature an overall breakdown of this unique and entertaining adventure)

[Per]

May 18, 2024 14:53:37 GMT andrewwright said:

This review will take two parts, firstly, a playthrough of A Slope of Pines, and, secondly, an appraisal based on the rigorous criteria and feedback Per has provided on other entrants in this year’s edition of the Lindebaum Prize.

Woo, playthrough + review 2x combo. Wait, how did your thread get more views in a few hours than my feedback thread got in a week.

You can only use one modifier per roll, before you roll.

Just in case, this isn't strictly accurate: the rule is "You can apply any number of different available modifiers, but only
once each for any one roll." So you couldn't apply two of the same type of charm or apply two different Luck modifiers, but you can get the bonus for familiar, one or two different charms, and Luck, all in the same roll. It seems you were lucky enough with the rolls if you played it differently, though.

Here, deep in the woods, there are no mushrooms, and I have to add my first Time point, but Paws the familiar helps me reach the top of a hill, where I “look down at a slope of pines.” An omen, surely!

Fun fact: "A Slope of Pines" was at first the title of the book in the cabin, then when I couldn't think of a good title for the adventure, I stole it from the book. My belief is that "A Slope of Pines" and "The Southern Beeches" are actually two books by the same author, who may be Mr Brock! They're about country life and the slow turn of the seasons, or something. Plus murder no

There are loads of further choices in this subterranean netherworld, but I ignore them all and head back to the surface, being ultimately quite cowardly.

SPOILER: Click to show

You are wise. One of the things I most regretted not having another section for is having a dedicated one for immediately turning back, so it wouldn't be spoiled by using the same section as if you hadn't entered in the first place. Actually, in the earliest concept stages, going deeper into the hill was an instant death, and loitering in any way meant needing two Open charms and/or special familiar help to get out (this was before I even came up with the roll mechanism).

Heading into Lime Ridge, I’m given the choice to kick Mr Dogg, but, yeah, naw, that doesn’t sound like a good idea.

WHY

I get to the finish line, and have 24 points, minus 1 for Time of 2 or more, so 23 guarantees me victory! Mog the Groggy is the champion of the Mushroom Hunt. Or is she? Looking at a list of ‘chaos options’ I see only two that apply to me (burglaring Mr. Brock’s Cabin and disturbing the boulderbrute), so have a quiet victory instead of an exciting one. Still, that will do for Mog the Groggy and Paws the Marten! Success at attempt one!

What! Well done, it seems you took basically every correct turn for that general path, in a way that actually made sense, and got a bad roll only in the very first spot. (Getting the forest lambs on the piny slope would also combo very well with the mushroom guide from the cabin. You didn't mention taking anything but the key, so was it unclear that you could also take other stuff?)

Torque comment:

SPOILER: Click to show

It seems you must have dropped this when you picked up the cavern mushroom at the latest, as otherwise it takes up an inventory slot which would have cost you 2 points. You could actually have used it to help get another special mushroom, although due to some side effects of changing the effects of Time at the last minute, it would have been a worse deal (which is something I will adjust to some degree in a potential update).

[andrewwright]

A Slope of Pines by Per Jorner, winner of one of three Merit Awards in the 2023/2024 Lindenbaum Prize for short gamebook fiction.

[As Per had kindly reviewed all the Lindenbaum entries this year except for his own, yesterday I went down to the print shop (actually an excuse to grab a few cans of IPA during the Thai government-mandated alcohol selling times of 11am-2pm) to render A Slope of Pines into paper copy (tip: regular stapler just about nails all the pages) for perusal, playthrough and review. Having totally fluked a win on my first attempt, with no cheating other than some rules misunderstandings (I BLAME THE AUTHOR), I then cracked open several more tasty cans of IPA (acquired at the local 7-11 after another sweaty trek during the second Thai government-mandated alcohol selling times of 5pm-12am), stuck an Autechre playlist on the ear-based isolation devices, wrote up my playthrough and mapped out the rest of this sprawling BOSKY odyssey through edible fungi collection.]

Part Two: The Review (SPOILER WARNINGS)

Premise and set-up
* Low-key fantasy adventure set in a pastoral, semi-forested countryside called the Little Lands. BOSKY!
* YOU are a witch, about to embark on the annual witches’ mushroom hunt competition.
* As a witch, you have an unreliable Familiar and some magical Charms!
* Obligatory Way of the Tiger-style ‘DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS!’ warning, a.k.a. SAY NO TO EDIBLE FUNGI, KIDS!
* 100 sections.

System and mechanics
* Bunch of gear you start to write down, but then are told not to bother. GOTCHA!
* Actual mechanics are small but intriguing, as Vortense Pogue would say.
* Mushrooms are defined by two stats: amount to be picked (1X, 2X, 3X, etc.), and quality (rated in stars, such as *, ** and ***)
* You have a wicker basket (obscure Sean Loftiss reference?), with four compartments that store 3 sets of one type of mushrooms each, and two compartments that store 1 set of mushrooms each. Plus other items.
* Some mushrooms can be combined in a compartment, some can’t.
* Mushroom scavenging rules are a player-facing 2d6 roll, with higher rolls yielded generally better results (for mushrooms, other items, and even new entry options), with your Familiar, Charms, Items and Luck acting as added buffers on this roll. You can use whatever buffers you want but no more of 1 of each type.
* You can choose 5 magic Charms from a list of four: Find, Open, Run, Sneak.
* You can choose 1 of 4 terrain-based Familiars from Boris the Fieldmouse (fields and pastures), Clay the Toad (lakes, streams, bogs), Mindy the Nuthatch (mixed forest and woodland pastures), and Paws the Marten (deep forest, no, not the band).
* Luck is an added buffer; you start with 1 point.
* Time starts at zero and you want to minimize this if possible.

Style and presentation
* Text is entertainingly readable and well-edited generally for layout and space, although the occasional empty white fields at the bottom of some pages made the print-shop lady happy at the amount of paper her printer was churning through.
* Tone is appropriately BOSKY; you feel like you are out there, in the countryside, man, looking at all the trees and living things, like wow, and tangentially, you also start to wonder how much time the AUTHOR themselves spends out in the woods, hunting random clumps of edible fungi in real life. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
* Actually it’s probably one of the best wilderness-style gamebook romps I’ve read, possibly edging out Kwaidan Forest from Fabled Lands 6: Lords of the Rising Sun in the depiction of creepy woodland. (And obviously craps all over Forest of Doom.)
* At least two skeletons and a boulderbrute. No BONE CLONES, penguins, seawater or sanguine waves. Bonus points for the fritillary, green metal key and Y-shaped stick.

Twists and trials
* The lack of a combat system or health stat, which otherwise would imply a lower stakes lesser inherent danger approach, is belied by some of the inherent BOSKY eeriness.
* Conversely, this encourages somewhat reckless exploration of odd phenomena, as you know you won’t be fighting anything.
* However, possible GOTCHA! moments are ever-so-slightly signposted (likely due to gamebook length restrictions), by the presence of backdoor-returns (a.k.a. reverse ferrets) to previous paragraph numbers, avoiding some of the AUTHOR-hungry GOTCHA! paragraphs that may lie in wait.
* It initially appears open-world and non-linear, however, in a pleasingly similar manner to the oft-overlooked gem of Demons of the Deep, you are gradually funneled north to the mushroom hunt competition finish line of the town of Lime Ridge with only minimal hand-waving.
* The 2d6 scavenging rolls are relatively forgiving in that even if you roll low with no available buffers, you may still pick up a Luck point here and there. Also, because the results of the roll are player-facing, it is easy to calculate when you need to deploy any buffers you might have to obtain optimal desired results.
* Both normal and special victory conditions are attainable and reasonable; whether you want the normal victory or the special victory is really just a matter of taste.

Bugs and problems
* On my initial playthrough and subsequent systematic explorations, I didn’t encounter any major issues with the adventure, including spelling and grammatical mistakes, broken links, or misnumbered references. What follows then are very minor quibbles:
* Although the rules are simple, they could be clearer, being written in a similar style to the rest of the adventure. Or maybe this reviewer had consumed too many IPAs by this time.
* There’s a slight fudge where you can use 2 Luck points to obtain a +6 modifier (instead of using 1 Luck point to get a +4 modifier), which feels like it goes against the rule saying you can only use one of each buffer to modify a scavenging roll, although really you’re not.
* At the start there are chances to consult the “wisdom” of whatever Familiar you have selected, but these are buried down different paths and may be accidently missed entirely (thereafter, your choice of Familiar may add a buffer or not to scavenging rolls, dependent on current inhabited terrain). It may have been better to have these “wisdom” entries all located at the start, so dependent on Familiar-choice, you have a slightly clearer mental map of the lay of the land, so to speak.
* The lack of a mushroom trader or pedlar feels like a missed opportunity.
* Ditto the lack of an adventurous excursion featuring the use of psilocybins or more locally realistic psychedelic fungi. Think of the COMEDY!
* Although competition in the hunt appears fierce, there are relatively few fellow witch-competitors to encounter. There are some quite weird and strange events that may befall you, but not really that many. Oddly, this scarcity or sparseness of encounters made things more eerie for me.
* A Slope of Pines features regular forest creatures, your magically enhanced Familiar creature, and creatures as actual people, such as Mr Brock or Mr Dogg (although, again there are not many of these). If your witch is human (maybe?), we have the classic uncanny valley effect of inconsistent animal anthropomorphization, best exemplified classically by the D*sney triumvirate of Pluto, “no-pants” Donald, and Goofy, but also other notables such as Beatrix Potter, Wind in the Willows, and the Spellsinger sequence of Allan Dean Foster. If animals are people, who will take the animals’ place in the forest? Other animals? Why? Maybe I’m overthinking it, or maybe the dreaded 5% IPA has struck again. Still, this could be a fruitful theme for future gamebook research, featuring no recognizable IP characters of course.

Final thoughts
This is a great adventure and well worth your time. It feels balanced and well-paced, with a nice blend of risk, danger, and reward. Whisper it, but it’s also educational – I learned a lot about mushrooms, even if all of the ones in A Slope of Pines may or may not prove fictional.

Why didn’t it win the Lindenbaum Prize then? Perhaps it was a bit too niche, or perhaps the judges were mesmerized by a free-ranging collection of fantasy adventures by some talentless hack whose title cunningly co-opted and rearranged the catchphrase of a once popular series of fantasy gamebooks and the title of three coffee-table books by Jonathan Green documenting the history of said fantasy gamebook series. YOU be the judge!

Regardless, A Slope of Pines is a fine example of gamebook adventures done with a thoughtful eye on good planning, stylish writing, and an eerie undercurrent of suspense and unease. I eagerly look forward to whatever gamebook adventure Per Jorner concocts next in his fiendish laboratory deep within the BOSKY Swedish woods, whether it be some bright new project or another entry in the next iteration of the Lindebaum Prize. Recommended! :-)

[Per]

May 19, 2024 12:26:42 GMT andrewwright said:

an Autechre playlist

Let's discuss ideal Autechre playlists also.

* Text is entertainingly readable and well-edited generally for layout and space, although the occasional empty white fields at the bottom of some pages made the print-shop lady happy at the amount of paper her printer was churning through.

Crude PDF layouting was a hurried endeavour where I just avoided breaking up sections, except for 77. So I may be in some way responsible for your Southeast Asian metropolis cyberpunk street scene, but I think we can all agree to assume that the print-shop lady (with her strange hair buns, holographic cyber-visor and cigarette holder that probably conceals a deadly weapon) deserves every baht she managed to leech out of you.

* Tone is appropriately BOSKY; you feel like you are out there, in the countryside, man, looking at all the trees and living things, like wow, and tangentially, you also start to wonder how much time the AUTHOR themselves spends out in the woods, hunting random clumps of edible fungi in real life. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Well, spread out over four plus decades... While most places in the adventure (and their mushrooms and wildlife) are lifted from a variety of real-life locations, some of them no longer exist in the state described, it's very wabi-sabi in a way.

* Actually it’s probably one of the best wilderness-style gamebook romps I’ve read, possibly edging out Kwaidan Forest from Fabled Lands 6: Lords of the Rising Sun in the depiction of creepy woodland. (And obviously craps all over Forest of Doom.)

I've been saying forever gamebook forests ought to be more bosky, and this is meant to demonstrate one way in which they can be, although depending on your objectives, it may well be more effective to paint properties of things that may not be true than to rattle off things that are but may have little to no meaning to the modern reader (yes I blame those greater metropolitan areas).

I haven't read Fabled Lands, but notably Green Blood is one of those books that reasonably could be pretty bosky but actually isn't at all.

* The 2d6 scavenging rolls are relatively forgiving in that even if you roll low with no available buffers, you may still pick up a Luck point here and there. Also, because the results of the roll are player-facing, it is easy to calculate when you need to deploy any buffers you might have to obtain optimal desired results.

Also, though it may not be super clear, charms can be used after rolling, since they're included in the general roll-then-add mechanism, while Luck is explicitly said to be activated before rolling. Although the risk of losing charms for no gain probably wouldn't greatly affect things in most cases, and might well lead to more meaningful decisions. (A little section for choosing difficulty level by altering the points target and Luck modifiers was intended for the appendix, and so was never included, since I didn't want to clutter the rules any further.)

* On my initial playthrough and subsequent systematic explorations, I didn’t encounter any major issues with the adventure, including spelling and grammatical mistakes, broken links, or misnumbered references.

There's one case of a missing digit in a table, although it should be easy enough to extrapolate. Other than that there are a number of small textual edits and minor mechanical adjustments I would make in a director's cut, but I think no significant errors.

* The lack of a mushroom trader or pedlar feels like a missed opportunity.

Contest rules did not allow for the insertion of an Ian Livingstone likeness. Tangentially, if you see someone selling mushrooms at a Swedish market, chances are good they're Thai or Burmese.

* Ditto the lack of an adventurous excursion featuring the use of psilocybins or more locally realistic psychedelic fungi. Think of the COMEDY!

The liberty caps mentioned in one section do contain psilocybin, though you decline to take any, being a super responsible witch in a family-friendly gamebook adventure. You could simulate comedy by choosing options using the roll of a die from that point onwards, although it may well be that psilocybin extraction is actually somewhat more intricate than just chewing up the mushrooms.

* Although competition in the hunt appears fierce, there are relatively few fellow witch-competitors to encounter. There are some quite weird and strange events that may befall you, but not really that many. Oddly, this scarcity or sparseness of encounters made things more eerie for me.

Not counting poor Anny Moss, there are five places where you can encounter or otherwise interact with other witches, though these interactions are a bit brief just like everything else because of constraints.

* A Slope of Pines features regular forest creatures, your magically enhanced Familiar creature, and creatures as actual people, such as Mr Brock or Mr Dogg (although, again there are not many of these). If your witch is human (maybe?), we have the classic uncanny valley effect of inconsistent animal anthropomorphization, best exemplified classically by the D*sney triumvirate of Pluto, “no-pants” Donald, and Goofy, but also other notables such as Beatrix Potter, Wind in the Willows, and the Spellsinger sequence of Allan Dean Foster.

... And the Richard Scarry book where the animals visit the zoo to look at other animals. Who comes up with these things

eerie undercurrent of suspense and unease.

Is the forest really that scary, though? I'd have thought that if I wanted to do a creepy fantasy forest instead, I'd go overboard with interlocking branches overhead, tendrils of curling mist, orchid stems which sway without wind, spiders that constantly nibble on your neck etc., but perhaps reality is the spookiest of all.

I eagerly look forward to whatever gamebook adventure Per Jorner concocts next in his fiendish laboratory deep within the BOSKY Swedish woods, whether it be some bright new project or another entry in the next iteration of the Lindebaum Prize. Recommended! :-)

I'd say to look out for snow-covered bosk in some future issue of the zine, but given its publication and feedback schedule we might be talking about 2030 if so.

[andrewwright]

Woo, playthrough + review 2x combo. Wait, how did your thread get more views in a few hours than my feedback thread got in a week.

Dunno, dumb internet luck!

Just in case, this isn't strictly accurate: the rule is "You can apply any number of different available modifiers, but only
once each for any one roll." So you couldn't apply two of the same type of charm or apply two different Luck modifiers, but you can get the bonus for familiar, one or two different charms, and Luck, all in the same roll. It seems you were lucky enough with the rolls if you played it differently, though.

Yeah, I didn't read the rules properly and just applied only one modifier. When the lowest gateway to the best roll is around 8 or so, you're generally going to hit that total with your roll and just one modifier on 2d6 unless you've BEEN CURSED BY THE LUCK GODS!

Fun fact: "A Slope of Pines" was at first the title of the book in the cabin, then when I couldn't think of a good title for the adventure, I stole it from the book. My belief is that "A Slope of Pines" and "The Southern Beeches" are actually two books by the same author, who may be Mr Brock! They're about country life and the slow turn of the seasons, or something. Plus murder no

So a sort of combo Thoreau/Ed Gein figure. Could make for an interesting sequel! Mr. Brock: the Hidden Truth!

SPOILER: Click to show

You are wise. One of the things I most regretted not having another section for is having a dedicated one for immediately turning back, so it wouldn't be spoiled by using the same section as if you hadn't entered in the first place. Actually, in the earliest concept stages, going deeper into the hill was an instant death, and loitering in any way meant needing two Open charms and/or special familiar help to get out (this was before I even came up with the roll mechanism).

Yeah, the reference number pointing straight back the way you came after nabbing the awesome fungi was a slight giveaway that the alternatives may prove sub-optimal.

WHY

Because sleeping dogs lie.

What! Well done, it seems you took basically every correct turn for that general path, in a way that actually made sense, and got a bad roll only in the very first spot. (Getting the forest lambs on the piny slope would also combo very well with the mushroom guide from the cabin. You didn't mention taking anything but the key, so was it unclear that you could also take other stuff?)

Possibly unclear...just took the key only.

Torque comment:

SPOILER: Click to show

It seems you must have dropped this when you picked up the cavern mushroom at the latest, as otherwise it takes up an inventory slot which would have cost you 2 points. You could actually have used it to help get another special mushroom, although due to some side effects of changing the effects of Time at the last minute, it would have been a worse deal (which is something I will adjust to some degree in a potential update).

I misread the rules on how to store stuff in your wicker basket.

[andrewwright]

Let's discuss ideal Autechre playlists also.

Haha, it will be a topic in the music subforum! (it's more of a random shuffle list surfing through their epic early stuff)

Crude PDF layouting was a hurried endeavour where I just avoided breaking up sections, except for 77. So I may be in some way responsible for your Southeast Asian metropolis cyberpunk street scene, but I think we can all agree to assume that the print-shop lady (with her strange hair buns, holographic cyber-visor and cigarette holder that probably conceals a deadly weapon) deserves every baht she managed to leech out of you.

Also her shop is next to a park full of large water monitor lizards, flying golden tree snakes, intelligent tree shrews, and giant freshwater catfish.

Well, spread out over four plus decades... While most places in the adventure (and their mushrooms and wildlife) are lifted from a variety of real-life locations, some of them no longer exist in the state described, it's very wabi-sabi in a way.

I really enjoyed it. I felt immersed and situated within the gamebook-created space.

I've been saying forever gamebook forests ought to be more bosky, and this is meant to demonstrate one way in which they can be, although depending on your objectives, it may well be more effective to paint properties of things that may not be true than to rattle off things that are but may have little to no meaning to the modern reader (yes I blame those greater metropolitan areas).

I haven't read Fabled Lands, but notably Green Blood is one of those books that reasonably could be pretty bosky but actually isn't at all.

I've walked through mangrove swamps on the shores of the Red Sea, and there's no handy paths and clearings like Scorpion Swamp. It's a sticky, muddy slog, with sharp coral and shells, blue swimmer crabs, upside down jellyfish, plentiful stingrays, coneshells, stonefish, baby barracudas, flies, mosquitoes, and few if any upsides other than crystal clear water (until muddied by your stomping feet), and azure sky.

Also, though it may not be super clear, charms can be used after rolling, since they're included in the general roll-then-add mechanism, while Luck is explicitly said to be activated before rolling. Although the risk of losing charms for no gain probably wouldn't greatly affect things in most cases, and might well lead to more meaningful decisions. (A little section for choosing difficulty level by altering the points target and Luck modifiers was intended for the appendix, and so was never included, since I didn't want to clutter the rules any further.)

I misread the rules and applied charms before I rolled, which actually added nicely to the suspense.

There's one case of a missing digit in a table, although it should be easy enough to extrapolate. Other than that there are a number of small textual edits and minor mechanical adjustments I would make in a director's cut, but I think no significant errors.

Excellent work!

Contest rules did not allow for the insertion of an Ian Livingstone likeness. Tangentially, if you see someone selling mushrooms at a Swedish market, chances are good they're Thai or Burmese.

So you could have had a cameo by Baron Sukumvit hawking a bamboo tray of interesting truffles...

The liberty caps mentioned in one section do contain psilocybin, though you decline to take any, being a super responsible witch in a family-friendly gamebook adventure. You could simulate comedy by choosing options using the roll of a die from that point onwards, although it may well be that psilocybin extraction is actually somewhat more intricate than just chewing up the mushrooms.

I put a mushroom sequence in Lair of the Troglodytes. It just felt right.

Not counting poor Anny Moss, there are five places where you can encounter or otherwise interact with other witches, though these interactions are a bit brief just like everything else because of constraints.

It's surprisingly easy to fill up 100 refs quite quickly when planning.

... And the Richard Scarry book where the animals visit the zoo to look at other animals. Who comes up with these things?

Hmm, a Richard Scarry homage-gamebook...

Is the forest really that scary, though? I'd have thought that if I wanted to do a creepy fantasy forest instead, I'd go overboard with interlocking branches overhead, tendrils of curling mist, orchid stems which sway without wind, spiders that constantly nibble on your neck etc., but perhaps reality is the spookiest of all.

Less is always more, plus I'm still suffering PTSD from Mansion of Maleficence.

I'd say to look out for snow-covered bosk in some future issue of the zine, but given its publication and feedback schedule we might be talking about 2030 if so.

Sweet! :-)

[Per]

May 25, 2024 14:16:08 GMT andrewwright said:

Woo, playthrough + review 2x combo. Wait, how did your thread get more views in a few hours than my feedback thread got in a week.

Dunno, dumb internet luck!

I now have this theory of view counts: there are about 50 people browsing the forum through the new posts page, lurking or otherwise, so whenever a thread is posted or bumped, it will gain maybe 50-60 views within 24 hours or so as people habitually check out what the latest silliness might be. For any thread that only gets posted in occasionally, the view count will therefore be roughly a multiple of the number of posts, and depending on time and day, this plateau may seem to be reached faster or slower.

Important stuff!

So a sort of combo Thoreau/Ed Gein figure. Could make for an interesting sequel! Mr. Brock: the Hidden Truth!

I was maybe thinking more Thoreau/Christie, but that could be a dark alternative interpretation.

Fun fact: When I first thought of using this theme for a potential Windhammer entry back in the first half of the 2010s somewhere, the cabin/burrow (along with the lake/boat and cavern) were among the features I thought of putting in, and the inhabitant would have been either a nasty troll or a menacing Krampus-like goat-headed creature. There'd be multiple options for searching and then multiple options for hiding and then add intro and outcomes and suddenly you've used up 10% of the total allotment for a single encounter. (Which is not even about mushrooms.)

I've walked through mangrove swamps on the shores of the Red Sea, and there's no handy paths and clearings like Scorpion Swamp. It's a sticky, muddy slog, with sharp coral and shells, blue swimmer crabs, upside down jellyfish, plentiful stingrays, coneshells, stonefish, baby barracudas, flies, mosquitoes, and few if any upsides other than crystal clear water (until muddied by your stomping feet), and azure sky.

This is the kind of thing to put in a gamebook somewhere, I'd never have imagined that this configuration of stuff would be found at the Red Sea. Why are you there? Treasure hunt maybe! Is everything trying to kill you? Yes! SILT SKELETON