"(dwarfs is apparently correct though)"

I had to look deeper into this, and the history is considerably more complex than I thought. I thought it was only correct as a verb in the real world, but it turns out that the plural form of "dwarf" in fantasy can technically be either, but there has been a shift over time.

In the really old, pre-Tolkien times, it was in fact meant to be "dwarfs".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarfs_(1937_film)

But then, Tolkien used "dwarves" in The Hobbit and beyond.

https://scribd.com/document/104079699/THE-HOBBIT-by-J-R-R-Tolkien-Excerpt

It turns out he even had to fight with his editors to get that spelling!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarves_in_Middle-earth#Spelling

And now, I think dwarves is the far more accepted version. There is even a game on Steam with that title!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/403970/The_Dwarves/

(And it was apparently based on some fantasy book as well.)

YARD
Sun Aug 13 13:13:50 2023
Rise Of The Night Creatures
Star - optimum ending reached

A couple more things.

"231"

"in a loud course voice. " That, and I am sure

SPOILER

END SPOILER

Secondly, if

SPOILER

END SPOILER

then you are thrown back to reference 154 instead of 305.

YARD
Sun Aug 13 13:18:26 2023
Outsider!

OK, thanks for that explanation.

I also wonder how the thieves' cut for the Fiorentino job was calculated. They ask 300 GP from you, but your actual fee was 2550? Is it because they also want a cut of the profits from his saber's jewels?

It also seems like you always give them 300, regardless of whether you complete it or not. (And if you accept the bribe, it's also 300, and not 1000).

All of those numbers are completely meaningless in-game, of course, but it's an interesting observation.

YARD
Sun Aug 13 16:31:47 2023
General Chat

It still feels incredible to me that this project has been standing for over 20 years. I wonder what the regulars could tell me about its ups and downs over that time. I am particularly curious regarding this question: how does the overall activity during this "current period" (however you choose to define that) would compare to past periods in the project's history?

YARD
Mon Aug 14 12:21:21 2023
Rise Of The Night Creatures
Star - optimum ending reached

So, I have now gone through what should have been nearly all refs. Now that I now how many refs can be ignored outright, I can afford to throw away runs on the really obvious trap options. (Though still not going for the three "get yourself infected/cursed and then try to heal back from it" just yet, since there is literally no benefit at all to exposing yourself to those in the first place, yet a lot of steps involved afterwards.)

10
"Ths just won't do,"

69

"You will not go be going back out there again, that's for sure."

130

"You realise you might not be able to break out this house."

143
There doesn't seem to be any hidden doors or corridors to get to this other part of the house.

15
"and then it fades.Now you are certain"

16
Insane times calls for desperate measures

161
".. In its claw" (double period.)

189
"but can't see where's she is" (Also, ref 25 makes no sense after this.)

254
"looking at your befuddled." (There's also an unneeded paragraph break between "you're" and "not the one".)

I did find a use for the skeleton key now: however, it's again tied to the apparently useless letters. I see that the silver dagger is in fact a weapon too: the reason I was confused is because not only does the game not tell you how it'll affect your combat power (same as with the Butcher's Knife), but also because while Butcher's Knife gets auto-equipped when you pick it up, Silver Dagger doesn't - regardless of whether you wield that knife or are currently bare-handed. It's a strange mechanical inconsistency. Similarly

SPOILER

END SPOILER

I also now understand why the burgundy doors are always locked

SPOILER

END SPOILER

Though I still find this plotline to be serviceable at best, and find that this explanation could have been conveyed in a more apparent manner once you enter the final stretch in all pathways, not just some of them.

I still have no idea about the meaning of the Rolex Watch, besides the fact that

SPOILER

END SPOILER

I also have no idea if

SPOILER

END SPOILER

And I remain disappointed that

SPOILER

END SPOILER

At the same time, the final stretch is something I like more and more the more I play it. It does make for some nice contrast with the rest of the game when you can make almost any choice there and still win.

Thanks for the bug report, I've fixed them now apart for one or two that would need a bit more thought.

Gabe Fandango
Wed Aug 16 06:50:51 2023
Gamebooks

Hi, I realize that this hasn't been very active for a while, so I hope the site admin will see this...

I've recently finished writing my first gamebook. Well, technically, I wrote it many years ago, back in my student days, in handwritten manuscript. Of course, I had to go back and more or less edit every single section when I decided to turn it into a softcopy version, because the original draft was written by a kid (and who frankly wasn't very fluent in English - it wasn't my Mother Tongue). I can't really call it a rewrite - the content and design of the book pretty much remained as it was, but I basically reworded all the sentences and paragraph to make the English less broken, and added an extra line here or there to patch up some missing loopholes. The end result is something like what Terry Pratchett described his book "The Carpet People" to be: something that's not entirely written by young me or old me.

Anyway, the book is actually meant to be part of a "series" of sorts. It's an idea similar to the "companion adventures" of the Lone Wolf series published under Mongoose (although kid me thought of the idea before Mongoose did it), with the PC of each mini-adventure being a minor character of the main series. The book I've recently "finished" features a minor character from "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" as the PC - namely, the bearded prisoner rescued by the Hero from his cell and now trying to escape from Firetop Mountain (the title of the mini-adventure is called "Escape from Firetop Mountain).

Anyway, I understand that you may not have the time (or think it's good enough) to ever make this book available for online play on this site, but I'm hoping you can at least still put it on the downloads section if I send you soft copy.

Can I just check if I can still send the softcopy to this address in the contact link to be hosted in the download section: <info@ffproject.com>?

Many thanks.

Yes, definitely.

bcyy
Wed Aug 16 09:53:45 2023
General Chat

@Robert:

Indeed, I wouldn't say that video/computer games are in the same category as gamebooks. That relation is similar to that between novels and movies. You can always make a movie out of a novel, and vice versa, and the same can be said of gamebooks and games, but it is not the same.

I also agree that FF would be left behind as an estate/legal entity. Unless, of course, the heirs of the original authors choose not to inherit the franchise for some reason.

@Tammy

Not to be pedantic, I think you meant to say that copyright for the current FF gamebooks will be free to the public, right? The original version of Mickey Mouse is free to the public, but the newer versions of the same mouse aren't, and neither is Walt Disney.

@ YARD

By "this project", do you mean FF, or do you mean this website?

Gabe Fandango
Wed Aug 16 14:50:07 2023
Gamebooks

Thank you. I've sent the soft copy to the above address. :)

ffproject
Wed Aug 16 18:19:15 2023
News

Escape From Firetop Mountain

I've added Gabe Fandango's gamebook Escape From Firetop Mountain to the downloads page. In this one you are the prisoner freed by the hero in The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain. Download it here.

YARD
Wed Aug 16 23:56:38 2023
General Chat

The website in particular, yes. I know that FF in general has a much longer history.

YARD
Sat Aug 19 15:46:38 2023
Gem Runner
Star - optimum ending reached

So, it seems like even on this website, I'm the first one who has actually bothered to complete it?

Either way, I'll agree with all the preceding comments that it's quite a disappointment. The premise is really promising, but not a whole lot is done with it, and the random encounters the rift is used to justify are nowhere near as meaningful as they could be. If anything, the narrative ends up going in one of the less interesting directions possible for this.

I'll admit that the unusual decision to make most combat encounters deal 3 damage makes you think a little harder about your decisions, and it is something more gamebooks might benefit from. However, going through the maze, with its clearly arbitrary geography, is very much trial-and-error (I ultimately resorted to typing up notes, which I have not done for any other adventure here yet), as is eventually understanding which gem to use when, which screws up what should have been a fun process.

Oh, and that completely arbitrary choice of direction at the end, which either leads you to an ending or an instakill, and with seemingly no foreshadowing, is not fun. Neither is guessing the path out of five a point a little before that, or some of those instakill skill checks.

Altogether, it reminds me quite a lot of Golem Gauntlet (another adventure with fixed stats and a somewhat similar structure) but that one is just so much better-written, it's hardly a contest.

Lastly, some typos.

19
"lifelessly off you left"

48
"clothed entirely in black robes, which also covers its face"

53
"You cautiously walk down the dark passage, feeling your wall along the wall."

105
"GIANT AMEOBA" (wrong spelling).

21
"You materialize... and instantly de-materalize!"

86

"You reason the dimensional accident has obviously effected"

YARD
Sat Aug 19 15:51:07 2023
Gem Runner

And this actually makes me think of something: could we have

a) the ability to sort playable works in additional ways? I.e. by the number of comments, or perhaps the number of "completed" comments. While there are clearly not going to be dedicated reviews, that should be an interesting alternative.

b) failing that, at least some clarification that the playable gamebooks in the sidebar are sorted by submission date, and not anything more important than that? Someone new to this can easily assume that the order refers to perceived quality.

YARD
Sun Aug 20 10:25:44 2023
Any Port In A Storm
Star - optimum ending reached

So, are there only 100 entries in this story? Are all the triple-digit ones (i.e. 118) online additions for the sake of gameplay?

Either way, I didn't check the author at first, but I could tell that this story had the same writing style as Nye's Song. I guess the intersection of undeath and religion with modernity and militarism is also a shared element in both stories. I liked Nye's Song a lot more though. Partly because it had a much better balance between narrative and interactivity, one where you could really feel the tension throughout. Yes, there was that infamously drawn-out sequence in the middle that often randomly cut runs short, but it was still mostly a good idea, and altogether, the work was far more engaging than "investigate every "side branch" out there until you win". (Yes, some other stories on here can go overboard with trap options, but this swings too far in the other direction. While the competition limits make that understandable, no-one has ruled out post-competition edits either, have they?)

The other reason is because I found the premise there a lot more interesting. Alternate history, hard or soft, has a practically indefinite range of narrative possibilities, and the premise of Indians resorting to occult powers to turn the tables on their colonizers and succeeding beyond their wildest dreams is no "WW2 with stronger Nazis" or even alt-US-Civil War, that's for sure. Yeah, pushing all the way back into their invader's homeland and raising this many undead was a bit of an overkill, but the conflict is still ambiguous, at least to me.

Here, I suppose I have to admit the story does do a little bait-and-switch in pretending to be pure Lovecraft only to reveal that it pulls from much more ancient mythos instead. Still, I don't really like the traditional "deal with the devil" stories, since it all begs the question - if making a deal this extensive is that easy, why haven't we seen much more of it? I brought up Berserk when discussing Outsider! the other week, since while that story certainly shares in both the "author started writing as a dissatisfied teenager disease" (if you read even a little of it, you'll see what I mean) and "GRRM disease" (author starts writing with a clear ending in mind, than realizes he and the fans got so invested into the story the obvious conclusion would be anticlimactic, and desperately spins his wheels trying to reach an alternate, grander path that may not exist), one thing which really sets it apart is how it really shows a low-fantasy medieval world where nearly anybody could essentially do a deal with the devil and actually reap enormous rewards from it.

I also find it funny that at 74, we can take a walkman, but not an axe, but considering how little combat there is, particularly on the intended path, it is at least not truly annoying like the similar omissions in Rise of the Night Creatures (or A Princess of Zamarra, before I pointed it out.)

I'll give the writing credit for being well proof-read, though - the only typo I spotted while going through it was "This whole place, it's people, seem unnaturally evil." at 58.

P.S. An earlier comment mentioned a "near-miss" ending. Would that be triggered if

SPOILER

END SPOILER

Regarding references above 100, yes, that's exactly it. Typically it is necessary when the text offers options without corresponding references to turn to, such as 'take object X if you like' or 'you can drink this potion later and Y will happen'.

YARD
Sun Aug 20 10:38:49 2023
Nye's Song

Heh, it's funny that this story by Robert Douglas has practically the same number of comments as another, slightly newer one, Any Port in a Storm. I have already commented on its page that I prefer this story a lot more, and the reasons why. I suppose I'll add just a couple more thoughts:

1) In multiple comments, the author says that the way to make The Sequence easier is to go through the church first. The thing is, not only are there still considerable odds of failing even then, but doesn't that also

SPOILER

END SPOILER

2) I'm not sure if the title image was picked by the author or FFProject, but it's rather misleading, since it shows a Mark tank, yet from the description, the Dreadnought is actually a wheeled APC? Well, more like a wheeled IFV which somehow fits three turrets with 40mm guns yet can still only shoot down one ghost at a time (this in spite of 40mm being a relatively small caliber best known for being used in the legendary anti-air Bofors autocannons all the way back during WW2!) but I think you get my point.

Either way, this is actually one of those stories on FFP where I would like to see more set in its world.

I found the image. It's more effort than you realise to track down images without any details contradicted in some way by the text, so you shouldn't be too surprised.

YARD
Sun Aug 20 12:39:10 2023
A Day In The Life
Star - optimum ending reached

I have beaten this one before, a couple of weeks ago, but now I decided to try again while actually having the music from bands mentioned in the text whenever they come, and it's certainly more fun that way! (Speaking as someone who is only mildly connected to scene, having never been to any concert and whose favourite band is Nightwish, having heard little from any of the 5...6...? bands mentioned in the gamebook.) I wonder what it would take for FFP to include support for embedded audio in addition to (occasionally) embedded pictures?

Out of the three Gavin's gamebooks I have played on here (this one, Outsider! and New Day Rising) it's actually this one which I consider the "best", in the sense of being the easiest to recommend. Yes, an epic like Outsider! is absolutely a landmark, yet it is one of great highs and great lows alike, and the path it follows is not as well-trodden as some others in the genre, but still at times (overly) familiar. This is just an unashamedly fun work, with a premise an average person would never think of, full of lived experience (forgive me if that term has become ironically lifeless in the recent years) and that is perfectly scoped to achieve all its aims.

YARD
Sun Aug 20 13:31:37 2023
Waiting For The Light
Star - optimum ending reached

An interesting experiment, and I do not regret the experience, although I think it's a bit too "in your face" about its psychoanalytical nature. A larger work with more "layers of obfuscation" would probably be more impactful altogether. (Though I see some commenters were impressed as it was, but at least as many were just confused.)

I.e. most Silent Hill games since the second one have been about the protagonist's psyche, which was approached with varying levels of skill by different studios. When I just started, I thought it would present itself as more clearly recognizable horror throughout, like Silent Hill 2 itself. Instead, it's more like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories with how apparent it is about its ultimate purpose. If my point is not yet clear: Silent Hill 2 remains considered a classic, and a remake would have never been announced if there wasn't a lot of demand for it. Shattered Memories had a reasonably positive reception and you can still find its fans out there, yet it's largely forgotten by now.

Granted, I'll admit that I still had to resort to reading the comments here to win. Mostly because

SPOILER

END SPOILER

It's also interesting that this is apparently the first, and so far only, work on here to be almost entirely illustrated, thanks to AI image generation? (Almost - some "interstitial" game show and forest refs are still "bare".) I wonder if any others on here are slated for such treatment, or if the "dreamy" nature of this one would make it a one-off? In either case, I think the pictures might already influence narrative judgement.

SPOILER

END SPOILER

I think the only typo I saw was

6
"You answer before your opponents has a chance"

Lastly; I keep suggesting the addition of filters to the main page/sidebar, but I think being able to sort by the number of refs would be an excellent feature for when one is set on whether they want a short experiment like this, a somewhat longer trial, a standard-length adventure or a sweeping epic. It's not exactly easy to glimpse that information from the titles alone. In addition to sorting by author and by the number of comments, I think it could really be one of those changes helping to breathe more life into this hidden gem of the internet.

If I can get a better grip on AI image generation there could be some more extensive use of it here, as it stands it only really makes sense for the less 'real' scenarios. I've also put some in Escape The Asylum, for example.

There's a limited amount of filtering, realistically I'm not going to add any more.

http://www.ffproject.com/all.htm - shows all the gamebooks and the number of references.

If you click on an author's name, for example http://www.ffproject.com/gby23.htm, that author's gamebooks are shown.

If you click on a year, for example http://www.ffproject.com/year2014.htm, that year's gamebooks are shown (the year the online version was added, not when they were written).

YARD
Mon Aug 21 09:36:52 2023
Waiting For The Light

To ffproject: I see. Perhaps it would be a good idea to place a version of this answer in the FAQ?

I should also say that unless you explicitly decide to hover the author's name, there's really no way to tell that it is clickable - after all, it's written exactly the same as the rest of the heading, with the same font, same colour and no underline/italics/etc.

YARD
Mon Aug 21 10:08:34 2023
A Midwinter Carol
Star - optimum ending reached

So, as usual, I played to completion and then read the comments. From what I read, it appears that this story is a spin-off of a 1994 canon FF story, Deathmoor?

On its own, that's not an issue: the brilliant Princess of Zamarra, by the same author, is a sequel to a different canonical gamebook as well, after all, and it's no issue at all. In fact, I didn't really realize there was a whole completed story in the background (and not just detailed background lore) until after beating it and coming back to it. Unfortunately, here, it's very, very clear that you are missing something fundamental, and without the context of that other gamebook, it's hard to care about any named character. The references to Arachnos are particularly confusing, and the whole plan with the kidnapping feels far too abstract to care about. Not that there's any more context about the Baron's royal relatives, or the wizard. That episode with him is confusing in how abruptly the story moves on past it and we never learn what he was doing (and if it mattered to anyone else) and nor do we learn how the Baron became the Baron in spite of being third in line to the title? These shortcomings are felt really acutely here, because as an adaptation of a famous Dickens story, it is quite brief and sticks too closely to its source material to surprise.

Even if this story really was meant to have the other gamebook as required reading, surely there was no barrier to add a few more refs, and use them to fit some spark, some texture to all of those important characters, presumably with details additional to what you would have known from that other story? I won't mention how much better Zamarra was at this, since the two works are over a decade apart and it's clear Kieran has only gotten better with time to create what seems to be his magnum opus, but it appears that "Melchion's Week" was written around the same time, and that one is much better, both in general, and in allowing every character to leave an impression in only a few refs. (So are a lot of other gamebooks here, for that matter, like Bloodsworth Bayou, Golem Gauntlet, all of Gavin's works, the two short stories from Robert Douglas I have seen to date, etc.)

That, and there are some narrative issues where I think even such background knowledge wouldn't have helped. I.e. there's the lack of ending variety, where you can make a lot of wrong choices in the dreams, but they all lead to the exact same bad ending (in contrast to not just Zamarra, but also "Melchion's Week" which had so many well-written and consistently amusing suboptimal endings)

Once you do get to the end, the

SPOILER

END SPOILER

which determines what ending you get feels like a total deus ex machina.

And I'll admit I'm not very pleased with the "best" ending

SPOILER

END SPOILER

P.S. Given that this story is also quite "dreamy", perhaps it could also be a good candidate for generated illustrations? Granted, the lack of illustrations is not even close to the main issue here, but at least it's the one thing which can be improved without involving Kieran.

YARD
Mon Aug 21 10:16:28 2023
Gem Runner

Wait, so this work and Golem Gauntlet are both by the same author, and this one was written years after Golem Gauntlet? How?!

...Come to think of it, I might have heard something of a supposed writer's curse where the writer who reaches a breakout success with the very first book is then likely to disappoint with the second, but I was hoping the gamebook world would be more insulated to this. Oh well, it is what it is.

YARD
Mon Aug 21 13:47:01 2023
A Strange Week For King Melchion The Despicable
Star - optimum ending reached

I have gotten the "CONGRATULATIONS" endings before, twice, and found this work great, but I decided to give it another look after a less positive experience with A Midwinter Carol, also written by Kieran around the same time, to see if I might now think worse of it.

I need not have worried! The writing of every ref is just as fun and inventive as I found it before - further, I have won relatively quickly back then, and so I missed a whole lot of truly inventive and consistently amusing ways to fail (as well as a third way to win in addition to the two I knew about) - ways to fail which nevertheless consistently feel fair in hindsight (none of the abritrary "with no visual cues, you turn north instead of south and immediately die/are incapacitated" of certain other gamebooks). Perhaps the only exception is the tapioca encounter, which might be a little less obvious than Kieran intended, since the ref does not really specify just how large it actually is. I was certain that contracting it would shrink it to something fist- or at most arm-sized and that certainly didn't happen.

Unfortunately, the one minor, yet detectable downside are the typos. I think this gamebook might have set a record for typo-density-per-ref out of the ones I have seen so far.

1 - a missing question mark in the sentence with "unusual".

4
"and a sickly yellowish fog surround everyone."

8

"This elicts no response."

11

"going through the whole spectrum of the emotion." (?)

12

"not only how your "cure" having worn off,"

14

High Priest's name is misspelled + "charge on (?) you" + "as one of the guard"

17

"the atrocitities of war"

24

"It is only as the monstrousity" + "shattering the place you were just standing"

26

"he says, indicating you wish a dismissive hand gesture."

+ "now (that?) they have had their memories jogged"

27

"A blast of air sends you flying into the air," (no other way to write this?)

32

"bedecked with (a?) carving" + "Zyterr" (rather than the other spelling).

41

"and, as you them in dismay,"

42

"and have heard tell (?) he lives in these parts."

54

"all writing tentacles"

56

"Upon the throne sits a bent figre" + "Similary bent and mishapen" (possibly two typos in that excerpt).

57

"You clamber through the sun-bleacked mountain"

58

"a tome entitled "The Sorcerous Eunch""

60
"near enough false to knock your teeth out."

61

"All him in shock."

63

"Suddenly the grounds gives way beneath your feet"

64

"in a pincer like grip" (probably misses a dash)

69

"From the shadows steps yours illusion" + " out of the building, which turn out to be"

71

"I have been learning magic form the wizard Davor"

72

"you hear the unmistakeable (?) sound of singing in the distance."

76

"He looks defiant(ly?) at you" + "Don't be afeared" (intentional, as I have seen that in another ref too?)

77
"such a magical construct need no brain for thought"

85

"Miss. Ronson" (is a period necessary here?) + "The colour swirl before your eyes" (an "s" is clearly missing somewhere.)

92

"eager to re Melchion and finally free him of his curse."

98

"Zyterr" again + "Melchior" (?) + (potentially) "as everyone else runs screaming.No spell affects the horrible monster."

99

"will allow you to fully recover.Cursing"

Lastly, I would suggest to proofread the illusion contoction recipe REALLY carefully. Firstly, there are there numerous missing plural forms. Secondly, I am not sure if this was intended by Kieran or not, but the recipe always fails if you try to follow it exactly as written, and you must assume there is a major typo to succeed.

SPOILER

END SPOILER

Thanks, fixed all of these now except for one or two which are not definitely wrong.

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