Secure Immaturity

Hey everyone. ‘And now for something completely different’. Bet no one has used that before. Secure Immaturity is proud to introduce a new monthly columnist to the website: DREY!

Retrogasmic is a monthly column designed to educate you about all-but-forgotten geeky shit and why you should care about it today.

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He’s on his usual corner, propping up the tenement where the crumpled magazines live. My dealer. Fresh leather jacket, custom high tops. He turns from his lady friend as I approach, assesses my need quickly.

“Got you a number 7 right here,” he says, patting his jacket pocket.

“No, man, already been to Altair,” I say, worried. “I need the 8.” What if he’s out?

“Shit, you and everyone else on my chain. All gone.” He shakes his head sympathetically. “What’s in Deadwood anyway?”

“I don’t care. It’s what’s next!” This is bad. Altair was a good ride. Maybe I could hit it again.

His lady friend rolls her eyes at me. “Pfft. I’m already on 9.”

“9?! That’s not even out yet!” First they leave me twisting and now they’re going to mess with me?

“Keep up, son,” says my dealer. “This is a quality operation with exceptional connections. I hear this one’s a murder mystery. Show him, sweetness.”

And then there it was, in her hands, that rectangular white package. Crisp, pristine spine. Cool blue letters. Cover art I’d never seen. I could smell it. My exit strategy from the mundane world of bus rides and homework.

“Give it to me.”

That’s how it went down, more or less. Only my dealer didn’t stand outside a building. He was the building. Taylor Memorial Public Library. That’s where the addiction first took hold. That’s where I saw my first Choose Your Own Adventure Book.

Coleco Electronic Quarterback notwithstanding, these books were my grade school portable entertainment of choice. I recall sliding Journey Under the Sea out of the paperback turnstile in the children’s section. “Choose Your Own Adventure.” I could guess what that might mean, but I wasn’t ready to let my heart believe such a book could be real. Yet it was.

CYOA books are traditionally written in second person because you, the reader, are the main character. The stories ranged from alien encounters to searching for Atlantis to fighting vampires, no genre left unmined. All told from your point of view. But that’s not why these books were so entertaining or important. As the protagonist, you were offered choices that directly affected the narrative.

If you wish to investigate the mysterious scratching behind the door, turn to page 67.
If you think you should flee the cabin before the old man returns, turn to page 92.

I’m talking about reader agency. I’m talking about a new social contract between writer and reader. I’m talking about a non-linear narrative structure, a precursor to hypertext. Astonishing and unprecedented, this power was given to children. Pressed into 117 pages with wonderful illustrations and 42 possible endings, this gateway to wonder was hidden in the kid’s section of the library like a time bomb waiting to blow your mind. As it predates both text adventure games and role-playing games, any serious discourse about the heredity of interactive fiction must begin here with Choose Your Own Adventure books. We’ll talk about interactive fiction another time.

I read every one I could get my hands on. What’s that? Discover the secrets of the ancient Mayans? Fight Russian spies? Track down the Yeti? Yes, please! I’d sit on my bed, enraptured, anxiously waiting for that moment when I got to choose where the story would go. And I tried so hard to play it clean, to not peek at each possibility, trying to avoid the dreaded “The End” message. Because you died a lot in these books. Or, at the very least, were sold into slavery or turned into a frog or trapped in a mirror. At which point you could just start reading the book again from the beginning, making different choices and arriving at different outcomes, hopefully more favorable ones.

For a while, in the 80s, the CYOA-style books turned into a craze, spontaneously creating a new sub-genre of literature. Suddenly all manner of wannabe pick-a-plots appeared on the shelves. Horror-themed series, high fantasy stories, tales of romance (for the girls!). TSR (which you now know as Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast) even got in on the action, bringing the weight of the mighty Dungeons & Dragons franchise to bear in the form of the excellent Endless Quest series. This spawned, in turn, tie-ins with other popular IP. If Harry Potter had come out twenty years earlier, you can bet there’d be some Hogwarts High Jinks.

Content to ride this wave for as long as possible, the writers of these books did not tamper with the nonlinear, branching storyline formula. After all, the possibilities were literally infinite, right? As with many raw concepts born in America, the refined, elegant shit will get exported back to us from England.

Enter The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. While they weren’t busy founding what would become one of the most well-known game companies in the world, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone decided to change the game up a bit by writing the Fighting Fantasy series. And this is British, Games Workshop, Lionhead Studios Steve Jackson, kids, not Austinite, Car Wars, GURPS Steve Jackson. Okay? Let’s continue.

Informed by Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games, Jackson and Watson introduced character creation and combat mechanics into the equation. Now it wasn’t just about you choosing what door to open. The stakes were higher because now there might be an orc behind the door which could kill you. And not kill you as in “You chose poorly. The End.” but kill you because you made a bad roll and his axe took out your last three hit points. Yeah, you’re rolling dice and keeping track of stats in these books. Coupled with elegant prose, wonderful characters, and a more serious tone, Mssrs. Jackson and Watson lobbed a book across the pond that made Choose Your Own Adventures read like Family Circus.

With the addition of a stateful character record and the element of chance, these books were approaching the equivalent to a GM-less, self-contained, handheld role-playing game. But apparently the Fighting Fantasy books were just a proof of concept, a dry run, because Steve Jackson had yet to unleash his masterwork, the Sorcery! series.

In Sorcery!, you took on the role of a brave Analander who must journey across the lands of Kakhabad, infiltrate the Mampang Fortress and retrieve the stolen Crown of Kings from the clutches of the evil Archmage. This epic tale could not be contained in a single volume. No. Sorcery! was told across four increasingly difficult (and increasingly thick) books, filled with literally hundreds of narrative branches. Continuity! Your actions in one book, the alliances your forged, the enemies you made, the equipment you picked up, all had impact on the next book. For example, you might find a key in the first book that you didn’t use until book two. Didn’t pick it up in the first book? Too bad.

Before the adventure began, you could choose to be a warrior or a wizard. Here’s the insane thing about the magic system: You had to buy a separate, fifth volume, the spell book. In it were forty-eight spells you could cast during your adventure. They were each identified with a three-letter word, which you had to memorize. Like a real wizard. Once you started one of the books, you could not consult the spell book. You had to remember what each spell did. When you had an opportunity to cast a spell, the book gave you five spell names. Some of them were real spells, some of them fakes to weed out the hedge wizards. You had to know your shit if you wanted to wield the arcane power.

To this day I have not completed the final book, The Crown of Kings. I have come face to face with the Archmage in his vile sanctum, oh yes. But I have always been struck down before I could ever lay hold of that precious crown and return victorious to my countrymen.

Sorcery! is on par with the greatest gaming experiences of my geeky life. One might think that, after this fantastic survey of the gamebook genre, we had reached the end. We could enter the inn and rest by the fire, content in knowing we had witnessed something spectacular. But it would be a journey cut short. For I have saved the best for last.

Everything that came before laid the groundwork for Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf series. Jackson’s Sorcery! had a richly detailed world, but nothing approaching Dever’s sprawling Magnamund. This was worldbuilding on a scale reserved for David Eddings and D&D supplements. History, culture, politics, magic and adventure were layered together like a delicious cake I could eat every day.

In Lone Wolf, you play the titular character, the last surviving member of the Kai Lords (think Jedi in an epic fantasy setting), who were massacred by the Darklords. You must reach Holmgard and warn the king of the coming doom. But like all great adventure stories, that is just the beginning, and your journey will lead you all over Magnamund as you take an increasingly larger role on the world stage.

Like the other gamebooks, you create your character. As one of the Kai, you have access to a few of their disciplines (think Force powers, but… you get the idea). As you complete each book, you will gain a new power, moving up through ranks of mastery until, in later books, you wield fearsome psychic abilities.

What sets Lone Wolf apart from the rest besides its excellent writing and fully realized world, is the scope of the saga. The series has thirty-two books. Thirty-two! That’s not including the spin-off series, the novels, or the role-playing game. That’s the core adventure. Imagine a beloved long-running fantasy series, one that makes your heart leap at its name. And now imagine that you helped form the main character from his earliest moments and directly guided his steps into the annals of legend. There is no experience like it.

I hope that I have piqued your interest in this form of literature. Reading these books is rewarding in a way that “normal” books or video games cannot emulate. While the Choose Your Own Adventure books are of historical interest, I would encourage you to investigate the meatier offerings of the Fighting Fantasy, Sorcery! and, of course, Lone Wolf series. Fortunately there has been a recent resurgence in their popularity and they have all enjoyed reprints within the past few years.

Resources

Fighting Fantasy – Many available at Amazon.

Sorcery! – Used copies are still available at Amazon.

Lone Wolf – Mongoose is currently reprinting this series in wonderful hardcover editions with revised and expanded stories. I miss Gary Chalk’s distinctive art from the original paperbacks, though.

Demian’s Gamebook Web Page – A comprehensive database of every gamebook series ever published. A wonderful resource.

I wanted to stay focused on the traditional narrative-based gamebooks for this article, but there is a whole class of “gamier” game books that I’d like to call your attention to.

Lost Worlds – This is what we did before World of Warcraft!

Maze – “This is not really a book. This is a building in the shape of a book…a maze.” I could write a whole article about this single book and its profound influence on me. It is an interactive art/story/puzzle/thing, unique and beautiful.

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