『Christian Talks Game Books as RPGs and Recent Half-Price-Books Finds』のカバーアート

Christian Talks Game Books as RPGs and Recent Half-Price-Books Finds

Christian Talks Game Books as RPGs and Recent Half-Price-Books Finds

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Another week and another live chat. I wasn’t able to run the live chat on Sunday, so I rambled on about recent finds at Half-Price-Books as well as my hopes of running a series of articles that transform the loose rules contained in gamebooks into complete role playing games. While many of the classic gamebook series have stood the test of time and remain in publication (I’m looking at you Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf), there are a number of interesting and innovative gamebooks that have faded from the market and memory. As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t have a regular gaming group when I was in middle school and early high school, so a lot of my “role playing” was done on computer or using gamebooks. To this day, I own a lot of the gamebooks I played as a child and I am constantly surprised by the unique mechanics or ideas that many of these books contain. Back in 2024 (ironically on March 11 of 2024 and thus exactly 2 years before last night’s live video), I wrote an article examining whether the rules in the Gary Gygax and Flint Dille book Sagard The Barbarian: #1 The Ice Dragon were complete enough to form the foundation of a role playing game. I had hoped to do a full series on game book mechanics that attempts to make complete role playing games based on their rules, and I think it’s time that I followed up on that idea. I’ll be including the full text of that older article below, so that we’ll have a frame of reference for when I design a full role playing game based on the rules in this book next week.Before I get to that though, I do want to say that what I am writing here is not a description of the video above. That live video has some interesting moments…I think…and it was great to see Mark Finn stop by. It made it less lonely and his questions helped inspire me for some future articles, articles that will require a bit more reading. So please check out the video and please forgive the awkwardness. I am also in the process of scheduling some interviews/formal discussions that I hope to share with all of you in the future.And now…on to Sagard.Barbarians at the GatesBack in May of 2023 J.Q. Graziano wrote a post about Flint Dille and Gary Gygax’s Sagard the Barbarian series of fantasy gamebooks. I came across the article today when J.Q. shared the item on his Facebook page and since I’d missed the article the first time around, I hopped right on over and read it. It’s a fairly good review of the book and series and highlights an often overlooked Gamebook series. It’s a shame that the series is overlooked because not only do they feature excellent Richard Corben covers, they were written by Gary Gygax and Flint Dille.I interviewed Dille and David Marconi regarding their Agent 13 character back in 2013 and during that conversation there were a couple of asides that mentioned Dille’s relationship with Gygax, including a mention of the Sagard books series.It seems natural that Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, would dive into the adventure gamebook craze and he did so in 1985 with the Sagard the Barbarian series of gamebooks. Players of Dungeons & Dragons might notice where the books are set because this series of four interactive novels took place in Gary Gygax’s signature World of Greyhawk campaign setting.Sagard’s adventures in The Ice Dragon begin in a mountain range called The Rakers which make up the border of Ratik and the Theocracy of the Pale. Because Sagard’s adventures are set in the World of Greyhawk, there’s a ton of published setting material a GM can use, even if they chose to use the gamebook mechanics instead of D&D.Gygax co-wrote the Sagard series with Flint Dille. Dille’s other works have included the Transformers and GI Joe TV series, as well The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay video game. Gygax met Dille while he was in Hollywood working on the Dungeons & Dragons animated series, and his relationship with Dille led to Gygax asking Dille’s sister Lorraine Williams to help save a floundering TSR in 1984. The Williams saga is its own story, one which has left Lorraine’s name an epithet in some gaming circles. That story is ably covered by Ben Riggs in his book Slaying the Dragon.Needless to say, by the end of 1985, the same year that The Ice Dragon was published, Gygax sold his stock in TSR to Williams and ended his relationship with the company.All of this leaves one to wonder what Gygax thought of Dille and whether the Williams affair is one of the reasons why the Sagard saga is limited to the four existing volumes. Based on the interview I had with Dille, I think their relationship remained strong as Dille describes the years he got to hang out with Gygax as some of the best years of his life.The Ice Dragon is an engaging gamebook, but is its game system sufficient to support game play outside of the game book environment?Let’s have a look at the rules.Game ...
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