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Post by kieran on May 7, 2024 11:17:52 GMT
particularly skill bonuses, which were already pretty ambiguously described in the rules I always thought it was pretty clear. Attack Strength = Skill + Dice Roll. Skill can't exceed your initial score unless this is specified in the text, there's no such limitation with Attack Strength. Yet it seems to be from Book 5 on, the authors, even the two who came up with these rules, seem to get very confused. Even the likes of Keith Martin who generally had a good head for rules comes up with unnecessarily complex stuff like 'This magic sword will allow you to increase your Skill by one, even if this exceeds your initial score, in combat situations only' rather than just saying 'It adds one to your Attack Strength'.
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Post by kieran on May 7, 2024 10:01:03 GMT
Series 1 and 2 lost episodes
I had kinda forgotten how these early episodes often had no sci-fi elements beyond the initial time travel. It's a pity there wasn't the odd story like these later on. Anyhoo...
Marco Polo (audio version) I felt pretty well disposed to this one mostly because I really like stories like this with journeys through various envronments to ancient and exotic places. It's like following those dotted lines in the Indiana Jones movies, there's just something oddly satisfying about it. I think the infrequent interludes of Marco's journal really bring this vibe home and I liked the performance from the guy playing Marco in general. It's a pity that the video for this one is lost so we never get to see these deserts, icy mountains, bamboo forests, caves filled with eyes, Chinese cities and opulent palaces. Then again, given this is 60s BBC, maybe it's better in the imagination. One thing I'd forgotten about these early stories is how secondary the Doctor can feel to his companions. Bar playing Kublai Khan at backgammon in quite an amusing sequence, he doesn't do much bar twiddle in his Tardis whenever Marco Polo isn't looking. I liked Ian's relationship with Polo, a mixture of respect and wariness. There was some good moments between Polo and Tegana too (sorry, The Warlord Tegana, as he calls himself a distracting amount of times). Sadly, the plot itself isn't all that strong. It's basically Tegana doing something suspicious, getting nearly rumbled by the companions, but managing to save face each time before the companions are caught trying to escape by Tegana/Polo. Polo gives them a stern telling off then the sequence repeats. But the plot is basically just there to keep them travelling around the Mongol Empire and at that it succeeds.
Reign of Terror There's a lot of fun moments for the Doctor in this one. He even gets to smack two different characters over the head though it was made clear that neither victim was killed. His confrontation with Robespierre was also good fun. I greatly enjoyed the beginning with Ian convincing the Doctor to come for a drink so he could be sure he and Barbara weren't about to be stranded in the wrong time zone (which they would have been!). Otherwise, I thought this was mostly just OK. There are some nice costumes and sets and it catches the atmosphere of the time well, but there's no real nuance to how it presents the revolutionary era - we're mostly in Scarlet Pimpernel territory here with noble nobles and bloodthirsty revolutionaries. There is one exception where Barbara defends the revolutionaries, but it's largely implied this is motivated by her having a crush on one of them and ultimately doesn't amount to anything. A bigger problem is that it feels very sterile. Ultimately our heroes have no real impact in proceedings because they can't change the past so the fall of Robespierre and rise of Napoleon feel very impersonal. Another problem is Susan - this story really does her no favours. She gets sick within about 8 seconds of being in prison, then Barbara decides to take her to a physician even though this is a big risk and Susan and Ian between them would likely have more medical knowledge than an 18th century quack. When this inevitably leads to capture, Susan's reduced to a hostage for the rest of proceedings and her illness disappears even more rapidly than it appeared. Ian's story is more interesting and has a fun little twist, but never really goes anywhere. It's a pity that with this much ambition in play, a more gripping plot couldn't have been developed. As an aside, the animated episodes have the Doctor looking like an anime characer while everyone else is drawn more realistically which is quite disconcerting.
The Crusade (audio version) This suffers from a lot of the problems typical of these historical stories - the main characters feel like bystanders witnessing (greatly simplified) historical events. The Doctor has some fun moments regarding stolen clothing and he gets to lecture Richard I about women's rights. But ultimately he doesn't do a whole lot of substance - his interference regarding the peace deal doesn't actually change anything. Vicki gets passed off as a boy then revealed as a girl which creates a bit of animosity but nothing too serious. Poor old Barbara gets kidnapped three times, but never has any real agency - her plan to amuse Saladin with Shakespeare and the like was quite clever, but never ends up being enacted. Ian is largely absent except to do a bit of fighting at the start and end. Still, I think the historical characters themselves come off very well and there's a lot more nuance depicted than in Reign of Terror. Neither Richard nor Saladin is shown as wholly good or bad and both act nobly and ignobly at times. Both would prefer peace but neither will risk their political standing by pushing it too far. Most interesting is the moral quagmire around Princess Joanna. Richard wanting to marry her off to Saladin's brother against her will is obviously pretty rough on her as the Doctor points out. But it will also save countless lives. It's also interesting that Joanna isn't played particularly sympathetically here - it's not so much being married off she takes issue with (at any rate, she probably would have been happy to be married to a European noble), it's that it's to an infidel and, what's more, the marriage will mean the end of a war she consider righteous. All good stuff, but sadly our heroes are barely involved. In the meantime, there's various scheming secondary players plotting against the royals, the heroes and one another who basically serve to add some peril without providing much else of interest. The escape in the the Tardis was a pretty amusing end to these proceedings however. All in all, interesting but a bit sterile.
Updated Series 1 ranking: 1. The Aztecs 2. An Unearthly Child 3. Marco Polo 4. The Daleks 5. The Edge of Destruction 6. Reign of Terror 7. The Keys of Marinus 8. The Sensorites
Updated Series 2 ranking 1. The Time Meddler 2. The Chase 3. Planet of Giants 4. The Romans 5. The Rescue 6. The Dalek Invasion of Earth 7. The Crusade 8. The Space Museum 9. The Web Planet
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Post by kieran on May 6, 2024 9:21:07 GMT
Strewth!
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Post by kieran on Apr 30, 2024 16:04:24 GMT
So you finish on 35 Stamina about once in every 120 sextillion attempts with Initial Stamina 32. Well, there you go - I was being unfair to Ian when I have previously called this book impossible then. It's possible in the sense that winning the national lottery is possible. Personally, I think I'd prefer if the Gods of Fate were to smile on me when it comes to the lottery rather than Blood of the Zombies though.
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Post by kieran on Apr 30, 2024 13:32:52 GMT
(other than Starship Travelle and Blood Of The Zombies, unless that is someone actually wants to extrapolate just how low completion odds are for Blood Of The Zombies). Hold my beer, that sounds like fun. 😉🍺 0.000000605% is the pre-roll average for Blood of the Zombies. (Assuming my calculations are correct.)I'm surprised it's actually even possible. Even if you use the best weapons and roll a 6 every time, you must still lose a lot of Stamina.
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Post by kieran on Apr 29, 2024 16:00:23 GMT
Are you a good guy in Daggers of Darkness or just someone who is one of the select? Not all the select are going to be good people. Perhaps not all of the Select, but I would say YOU at least are because good guy Astragal likes you and wants you to succeed. I doubt he'd do that for an evil person, even if they were being denied their rights as a member of the Select.
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Post by kieran on Apr 29, 2024 15:57:43 GMT
More easily, an adventure in which you start as an amoral person but become a better one (although isn't that sort of what The Crimson Tide is about?)
I don't think The Crimson Tide is about morals as such, more about letting go of revenge for your own sake.
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Post by kieran on Apr 24, 2024 15:54:40 GMT
08c Scorpion Swamp - Grimslade (5 Amulets Quest): 27.6% (Increase of 0.2%)
What's the chance if you only go for the minimal 3 amulets?
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Post by kieran on Apr 23, 2024 9:16:05 GMT
Yeah, people who dismiss modern technology because it's not perfect forget it's worse now than it'll ever be. Absolutely, it's definitely a forlorn hope that it won't improve. I did read something which argued it might actually get worse for a while before it gets better as more bad AI art floods reference points and the programme starts copying these pics of people with three arms, but I imagine that's a kink that will eventually be overcome. Really the only ways I can see preventing it replacing artists (including painters, writers, musicians, photographers, models, actors etc) is if it could be untied from profit making (and thereby kept to just a bit of fun as Paperexplorer uses it) is either through a successful boycott of any AI-generated products or making it illegal to sell AI-generated art or any products that contain it. Although the chances of either are probably very remote too. Of course, one could argue that it's still art, only the artists are now programmers and developers rather than painters etc. However, since AI works by using existing art as reference points, and doesn't actually create per se, I don't really buy that.
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Post by kieran on Apr 22, 2024 20:33:55 GMT
I hope reputable professional companies are not yet sacking artists to replace their work with art that lacks accuracy and displays folk with weird fingers, animals with too many legs, etc. I hope we never get to the stage where AI gets good enough that genuine artists get replaced. Long may pictures depicting twelve fingered people continue to be the norm.
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Post by kieran on Apr 22, 2024 20:27:59 GMT
[Interestingly there seemed to be a slight anomaly in the table, with odds for a Skill 11 adventurer totalling 1,744.9 possible % successes and a Skill 12 adventurer totalling 1,744.8 possible % successes (I did check). Yeah, I think Champskees' acknowledged this happens sometimes in the thread for another book. His algorithm runs the book thousands of times with each group of stats and records the number of wins. In cases where higher stats don't make much of an improvement to chance of success, it's possible a weaker character may by luck win more often than a stronger one. In this book's case, a Skill 11 character already has such a strong chance of success that an extra Skill point has a negligible advantage. If you ran the numbers thousands more times, the law of averages means Skill 12 would probably have a slightly higher win rate than Skill 11, but with a smaller sample, it's not that strange that Skill 11 does better.
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Post by kieran on Apr 20, 2024 22:36:19 GMT
He possibly yielded, declared you to be the champion, and you were satisfied with that and spared him. My only problem with that is that the reason you challenge him is to avenge those who died at the arena and it doesn't seem like letting Carnuss scarper back to Blood Island really addresses that.
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Post by kieran on Apr 19, 2024 8:59:14 GMT
This version of the dwarf vs scorpion looks like it wouldn't go down quite the same way.
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Post by kieran on Apr 19, 2024 8:27:22 GMT
If this new adventure is set before DD, I suppose that means victory for any contestant in The Walk is totally doomed from the get go But then if this is Carnuss' off-brand Lidl version of The Walk, maybe it was beaten before the official version.
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Post by kieran on Apr 18, 2024 14:15:21 GMT
,However, since he's not evil, Are we assuming he's not evil just because he's got a good-looking priestess who calls people "gallant saviour"? Can you think of a better way of assessing the evilness of giant bugs?
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Post by kieran on Apr 18, 2024 9:40:03 GMT
I assume Mark Smith and/or Jamie Thomson wanted the pun of calling a giant fly 'Lord of the Flies'. However, since he's not evil, calling him Beezelbub probably didn't make much sense so they opted for another ancient Middle Eastern name.
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Post by kieran on Apr 17, 2024 8:36:01 GMT
Thanks, I'll check it out one of these days. Currently going through the lost stories from the first 6 series before tackling the 1996 movie. Hi kieran obviously we would look forward to a review of the 1996 movie but if you've any thoughts on the lost episodes (e.g. that they are 'misunderstood' in some way) that would be appreciated, too. Yep, will share my thoughts. Feels quite nice to be back with Ian, Barbara and the First Doctor again. And Susan's there too I guess.
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Post by kieran on Apr 16, 2024 15:10:11 GMT
Just the 4-part. Didn't know there was a movie version. Is it better? I watched the movie version on DVD a few years ago and just checked some Wiki page to refresh my memory. It has slightly better special effects* and 12 minutes of unbroadcast material (you know those annoying bits cut out of shows and films that make the narrative more coherent and logical? Yes, some of those bits). It'd add half a star out of five to a Whovian's opinion of the story, but if you weren't a fan before seeing the original, you won't be one after seeing the ordinary rework.
Thanks, I'll check it out one of these days. Currently going through the lost stories from the first 6 series before tackling the 1996 movie.
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Post by kieran on Apr 16, 2024 6:38:13 GMT
Did you watch the 4-part or movie-length “Special Edition” of The Curse of Fenric? Just the 4-part. Didn't know there was a movie version. Is it better?
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Post by kieran on Apr 15, 2024 16:31:20 GMT
Interesting your ranking puts each successive Doctor lower than the last Not quite - Colin Baker and Peter Davison are swapped. Still, it is odd that my preferences mostly follow that pattern. I would say there are some quite wide gaps though. It would probably go something like: 1. Hartnell 2. Troughton 3. Pertwee 4. T. Baker 5. C. Baker 6. Davison 7. McCoy So plenty of space for future Doctors to slot in. When it comes to the quality of the stories, I would say the Pertwee era was probably the strongest.
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Post by kieran on Apr 15, 2024 15:15:02 GMT
Series 26 was very variable with one great story, one poor one, one distinctly average and one plain bonkers. It was though a very good series for Ace who really came into her own here.
Battlefield If you'd told me when I started watching Doctor Who that there's a story with semi-futuristic Arthurian knights, the Doctor taking the role as Merlin and Jean Marsh playing Morgaine, I'd probably have been dying with anticipation. Just as well I came into it blind as I was disappointed enough with this as it was. The big problem is the performances are mostly awful. McCoy is at his most irritating, doing silly voices and overpronouncing words. The guy who plays Mordred is absolutely dire and Ancelyn is barely better. Even Marsh is weak, doing a sort of phoned-in rehash of Bavmorda though, in fairness to her, her character is all over the place so it was probably hard to know how to play her. The action scenes are pretty bad too, the Brigadier getting blasted through a wall is beyond goofy. It's not totally without merit though, it was great to see the aforementioned Brigadier back and I also liked the new Brigadier and the not-long-for-this-world Lavel. It was also nice to see Bessie again. I thought the amateur archaeologist had a few good moments and the Destroyer was quite cool even if he was dispatched far too easily. I think that's another problem with this story, the villains just feel too weak. They may have handguns and grenades, but I can't imagine Mordred's knights would pose too much of an issue for the regular army. As for the climax where Morgaine decides to set off a nuclear weapon and the Doctor convinces her that's not such a good idea, it's pretty limp. Morgaine also gets a bit teary about Arthur, but as we know nothing really about this universe's Arthur and his relationship with Morgaine, I can't really say I cared. What a letdown of a story.
Ghost Light I don't think there's been a story yet where I've been so uncertain about how to review it. The closest has been Warriors' Gate from way back in Series 18 which I said bordered on incoherent. Well, there's no bordering here, this is just plain baffling. What starts off as an intriguing horror mystery gets stranger and stranger as it goes along. I didn't grasp most of the characters' motivations and by the time a personification of Light appears, it's gone completely off the rails. However, much like Warrior's Gate, I found myself mostly enjoying it, just for how surreal it was. The imagery, music, performances are all spot on and it's genuinely pretty creepy in places - especially everytime those things in the basement show up. But when it comes to story-telling, it's just too muddled and unfocused - it's not helped by the music drowning out the dialogue at times. I also didn't like the way the Doctor treated Ace throughout, tricking her into confronting a deeply held fear and even grabbing her face at one point - felt borderline abusive. Josiah Smith was an engaging perfomance and I liked the twist of Fenn-Cooper looking for himself, although I feel this storyline becoming a 'let's kill Queen Victoria' plot was a bit left-field and unimaginative. Gwendoline was a good character, I liked the way she could flip from sympathetic waif to quite intimidating and back again almost instantly. The neanderthal manservant was also interesting as was the sceptical reverend who gets turned into an ape. Some of the other characters didn't work so well for me, I couldn't follow who the heck Control was or what her motivations were and Ace giving her elocution lessons was random. Light was a disappointing villain and the way he was defeated was a variation on that hated trope of 'computer can't handle bad logic'. Maybe this story would have been been better if it stuck to a mad professor in a haunted house story rather than tossing in quite so many sci-fi components. As it is, it's definitely memorable at least.
The Curse of Fenric Wow, they went all out with this one. From the title and the early stages, I was expecting some sort of low key horror, but it quickly went into more apocalyptic territory with raging storms, hordes of vampire, shootouts and a mutant from the future all playing their part. While it verges on unwieldy at times, it just about manages to get all these disparate elements working together to create something very effective. It takes a while to work out what the Soviet soldiers are at, or what is going on with the Navy commander who sits surrounded by Nazi paraphernalia. The former end up being very sympathetic while there is an interesting complexity to the latter. Has he gone too far into trying to grasp the mindset of a Nazi that he has unwittingly made himself a Nazi? Another good character was a vicar who has lost his faith at the horrors of collateral damage being afflicted by the Allies. His story ends quite sadly; he almost finds his faith again, but just can't quite get over his misgivings and ultimately suffers a brutal death as a result. Interestingly, he fares better than his god-bothering parishioner, perhaps implying she had no real faith behind her sermonising. The character with the most faith turns out to be a Soviet captain who is devoted to the idea of the revolution - maybe just as well he dies considering what's coming in a few years! He also has a bit of a flat romance with Ace which I thought might shape into another weak exit storyline, but thankfully not. Ace gets some solid moments otherwise, unwittingly saving her mother and ensuring her own birth, and standing up to the Doctor for always keeping her in the dark - disastrously in this case. The Doctor does seem to have a bit of a new respect for her at the end. Unfortunately McCoy's acting is excruciating in places and the Fenric-possessed Judson isn't much better. Thankfully Fenric shifts over to the Soviet captain who gives a much more menacing performance. Ace blurting out the chess solution to him felt a little bit of a stretch, but the story as a whole is solid enough that I'll allow it. I'm going to really miss stories like this once I reach the rapidly approaching end.
Survival Well, here we are at what was for several years looking like the last ever Doctor Who TV story. Would it finish with a bang or a whimper? Well, neither really. I thought the first episode was good fun with Ace returning to her boring hometown which is perhaps not quite as boring as when she left (although how boring could a town with a haunted mansion on its outskirts really be?). There's some good comedy with the banter between the two shop assistants and Ace's charity collecting friend. The self-defence teacher is also pretty entertaining. I'm not sure about the evil cat that looks distractingly like Harry Hill's Stouffer though I thought the cheetah-person riding a horse across an abandoned playground was pretty cool. I liked the cheetah people in general, and the attention paid in making their behavior catlike. Their formidability seems pretty variable though. I didn't really get why the Master, if he was turning into a cheetah-person, couldn't teleport like Ace and Midge could though. Maybe I missed something. I thought the last episode wasn't very good, the self-defence teacher gets killed off rather unceremoniously and that motorbike crash was ludicrous. The Master didn't really have any terribly interesting scheme bar stirring unrest for the sake of it. I did however like Karra coming back to save Ace and Ace deciding to take up the Doctor's hat and umbrella. As usual, I found McCoy's performance pretty shaky - he's at his best in the gentle comedy of the first episode, but he doesn't convince at all in the more dramatic moments. Not a bad story all in all, but if I were a BBC exec ready to pull the plug on things, I don't think this would have convinced me not to do so.
Series 26 ranking: 1. The Curse of Fenric 2. Ghost Light 3. Survival 4. Battlefield
Since my vague memory of the 1996 movie is McCoy is reduced to a cameo where he steps out of the Tardis to get gunned down by random gangsters, I'll add him to my rankings and sadly, he goes firmly at the bottom. Occasionally he was funny, but he could also annoy in equal measure and I didn't find him convincing at all when things got serious. I felt his character was pretty vague too - sometimes he seems more warm and friendly than the other doctors, but then he'll just switch to cold and calculating on a dime.
1. William Hartnell 2. Patrick Troughton 3. Jon Pertwee 4. Tom Baker 5. Colin Baker 6. Peter Davison 7. Sylvester McCoy
Ace however fares better. Her Grange Hill schtick was annoying but it gradually faded and, especially in this last series, she showed herself as capable and deep with a capacity to stand up to the Doctor when needed. She gets a top 10 position, just behind Romana.
1. Jo 2. Leela 3. Ian 4. Sarah-Jane 5. Barbara 6. Romana 7. Ace 8. Ben 9. K-9 10. Liz 11. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart 12. Peri 13. Vikki 14. Steven 15. Tegan 16. Victoria 17. Nyssa 18. Harry 19. Zoe 20. Turlough 21. Adric 22. Jamie 23. Polly 24. Mel 25. Susan 26. Dodo
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Post by kieran on Apr 11, 2024 16:29:30 GMT
Funny, I never feel RtFM feels as tough as it is. Maybe it's because it has a few sparse tough rolls you have to pass, but most of the book isn't too bad whereas the likes of Crypt and Trial feel more relentlessly difficult.
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Post by kieran on Apr 10, 2024 10:21:11 GMT
A welcome announcement - Ian Livingstone, Iain McCaig, Marc Gascoigne, Paul Mason, Malcolm Barter, Tony Hough named so far for FFF5. Presumably we can infer Jon Green too, though not yet named. Since it was Jon Green who invited me, I strongly suspect he'll be there! This sounds like the start of a horror story. Envisioning a lot of confused gamebook authors trapped in a stately home, wondering when their mysterious host will arrive.
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Post by kieran on Apr 6, 2024 17:30:27 GMT
I missed Popeye Doyle out of my Narc character list above, and this car chase is reminiscent, in its length, of the chase in the French Connection. Chapman actually based it on one of the chases from the first Mad Max film. To be honest, it feels more French Connection-y to me too.
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Post by kieran on Apr 4, 2024 14:14:53 GMT
I'm pretty sure it's also the plot of the much later Star Trek: Voyager series It's similar, but not quite the same. It's not a black hole in Voyager. An extremely powerful alien pulls the ship across the galaxy and Janeway has to destroy the means of returning, leaving them stranded. The crew also know exactly where they are and how to get home, it will just take them a very long time unless they can find a few shortcuts.
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Post by kieran on Apr 1, 2024 19:32:23 GMT
Has anyone here played any of them? They've released 4 so far so they must be selling well. I own one of them, but haven't quite got round to trying it yet. It looks very good from a quick flick through.
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Post by kieran on Apr 1, 2024 16:02:20 GMT
As a grown-up, I did not have it in me to read through the whole thing to explore every different narrative, but I browsed through it and read all the ending references, and I appreciate that the concept is more about telling a story than about "winning". I like this about the series. Quite often your decisions shape the narrative to the extent it can go off in completely different directions. Whereas in FF the narrative is essentially fixed with your decisions being limited to what corridor you want to explore or how you want to bypass the five-headed ogre. The series that I think best represents a nice combination of the more gameplay-heavy aspects of FF with the ability to actually impact the story with your decisions to a significant degree is the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons gamebook series.
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Post by kieran on Apr 1, 2024 15:55:29 GMT
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Post by kieran on Mar 29, 2024 8:23:12 GMT
On February 16th, Ian announced that he began writing a new Fighting Fantasy book and then announced on March 28th that he has written The Dungeon on Blood Island. How plausible do you think it is that the book he referred to on February 16th is NOT The Dungeon on Blood Island? Feb 16 to March 28 strikes me as a super fast completion time for a 400 section adventure. Barely over a month. If he locked himself away and worked at it many hours a day with hardcore concentration then maybe a short period of writing time like this would be possible. Your thoughts? Either way, exciting news though! If he'd already done all the planning and mapping before 16 Feb and assuming there's still further refining and playtesting to be done, it would be hard work but doable.
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Post by kieran on Mar 28, 2024 19:09:26 GMT
Wow! Here is the synopsis from Amazon: Book overview Are YOU brave enough to enter the Dungeon of Despair? Jealous of the fame and fortune that Baron Sukumvit's Deathtrap Dungeon has brought him, his brother Lord Carnuss spends five years using an army of slaves to build the ultimate dungeon challenge on Blood Island. Offering a prize of the Golden Orb of Fang, he challenges all-comers to risk their lives to find the Golden Orb and escape with it alive. Filled with deadly creatures, lethal traps, and horrific surprises, danger lurks at every turn. So before he tried to embarrass his brother by finding someone to beat his Dungeon, Carnuss first made his own I Can't Believe It's Not Deathtrap Dungeon?
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