Glad you liked this one, Yard. I'm quite pleased with it from a gameplay perspective, but I've really gone off the premise now - I think I was going through an 'atheist edgelord' phase during my early 20s when I wrote it and it makes me cringe to think of it these days! Maybe I could rewrite it into something less edgy and more respectful.

And yes, probably should have opted for 'grain' over 'corn'.

Kieran
Fri Sep 8 22:41:18 2023
Waiting For The Light

My inspiration for writing this was I was watching the movie Inland Empire and thinking 'I'm enjoying this without having the faintest clue what's going on' and figured I'd write a gamebook in this manner. My idea was that people could make their own interpretations of what it was all about even though I had a clear idea in my own head what it was about. But to be honest, I'm probably kidding myself that people thought it worth thinking about that deeply and it's more a case that people are just mystified why they have to take certain actions

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in order to win. While I left a couple of clues in the quiz show segment, they're probably too obtuse to be helpful.

For anyone who's curious about what it actually is all about:

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Kieran
Fri Sep 8 22:47:29 2023
A Strange Week For King Melchion The Despicable

Yikes, that's a lot of typos! Thanks for fixing those, Andy.

I mostly like this one and I'm glad you do too as the feedback I got at the time was mixed bordering on negative. I think one reviewer suggested it verged on transphobic which was the complete opposite of my intention so definitely my bad there. I also find the ending is a bit rushed but couldn't really find a way past it without cutting other content I liked.

Kieran
Fri Sep 8 22:54:28 2023
A Knight's Trial

Now if King Melchion got lukewarm reviews at the time, this one was pretty much universally panned! So glad to see you liked it. My idea was just to do a standard Livingstonian gamebook with some Arthurian window dressing but I panicked that it was too generic and so rehashed some ideas from Waiting For The Light as well as making some meta-comments about Livingstonian gamebooks in general. I am quite proud of how I structured the maze even if the rest of it wasn't wholly successful.

Kieran
Fri Sep 8 23:03:12 2023
A Princess Of Zamarra

Fair point regarding sparing Mawrogh from the skeletons. Can't remember now if I mistakenly didn't think it was possible for him to still be about or I just didn't think of him at all - a definite mistake either way.

My idea behind this one was to have a wide array of paths but still have a fairly strong story - it's an approach I also took with my earlier Songs of the Mystics and I think it fit well with writing a sequel to a Luke Sharp book since his books had unusually wide branches for FF.

Kieran
Fri Sep 8 23:08:11 2023
A Midwinter Carol

This was written for a competition for the official FF site. It had to be Christmas themed and 50 sections max. In the end I missed the deadline for the competition so I guess I could have expanded it, but hey, I'm lazy.

It has a number of references to both Deathmoor and Masks of Mayhem - the Word version carries a spoiler warning for both books. Admittedly these references are probably very confusing to those unfamiliar with either book!

Kieran
Fri Sep 8 23:11:10 2023
Hunger Of The Wolf

Not technically my first work as I'd submitted a number of 50 section gamebooks for various competitions prior to this, but definitely an earlyish work - a lot of the content was reused in my later Revenant Rising - for better or worse.

Kieran
Fri Sep 8 23:13:39 2023
A Princess Of Zamarra

And yes, I prefer 'dwarfs' - Tolkien be damned!

YARD
Sat Sep 9 07:46:47 2023
The Word Fell Silent

Hmm, I may not be religious myself, yet I have a lot more positive attitude towards non-extremist believers than those "New" Atheists who are, as you say, edgelord. For what it's worth, I didn't really consider the story edgy altogether - particularly not when this very place happens to host Hellfire, Outsider! + New Day Rising and Escape Neuburg Keep (and a few more undigitized works in their vein). There is also the earnest Christianity of basically all of Robert Douglas' works here, and while I don't consider this bad in and of itself, I appreciate the presence of The Word Fell Silent as the right counterbalance to that. I also find it very reminiscent of Agora, which I consider gravely underrated, so that is another point in its favour for me.

I suppose you might be having second thoughts about including certain character who often ends up poisoning the player. To me, though, while the inclusion of him in particular came across as quite a bit of sensationalism at first, his perspective felt entirely plausible, as practically every major movement had at least one person present at the start who then thought it lost its way and became one of its greatest detractors. The way his presence allows you to carry out your task, though, needs a lot more detail to be remotely plausible.

As I said before, my main narrative issue was about how little of a plan you and any possible companions have once you actually get to the point of carrying out your mission. My main tonal issue was with Elena coming across as a plot device whose fate is completely insignificant once the task is done.

YARD
Sat Sep 9 08:04:12 2023
Waiting For The Light

Yeah, I read the comments after getting stumped on the military part, so I found someone laying out

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YARD
Sat Sep 9 08:10:00 2023
A Strange Week For King Melchion The Despicable

Well, to be fair, that dream sequence in Baba Yaga's hut might have been an experiment too far, and I wouldn't be surprised if that contributed a lot to those comments.

I would say my main disappointment with the ending(s) is that if you do succeed at the illusion recipe, it is still the same as in the other works, and you never find out if the Davor actually bothered to uncharm those two servants (the one turned to statue, and perhaps more pressingly, the one turned to squirrel), which does add some uncomfortable weight to those events.

YARD
Sat Sep 9 08:23:49 2023
A Midwinter Carol

Yeah, while on one hand, the ways in which the stories on here manage to work in the canon books are often really inventive, I do feel that multiple stories lean on those connections far too heavily, and unfortunately, this seems like one of them.

For the record, I have been checking out the archived canon FF book reviews recently, and the ones for Deathmoor are particularly epic. https://web.archive.org/web/20170905062914/http://user.tninet.se/~wcw454p/docs/ff55.txt Amongst all the other things it brings up, Leigh Loveday's review makes me wonder: was the Princess meant to have gotten married to that book's protagonist after the successful victory? If so, is this narrative then premised on the idea it falls apart due to her PTSD?

YARD
Sat Sep 9 08:37:12 2023
A Princess Of Zamarra

Hehe, not actually a huge fan of Tolkien myself, let alone some of the legacy he's left on the genre (which, to be fair, might include the plots of the most typical FF books.)

Now, I have to ask: Songs of the Mystics? Revenant Rising?! (Mentioned by you in another thread.) Other than the gamebooks already present on here (including To Catch A Thief , which is apparently the only one that still hasn't been digitized) how many more did you write, and is there a reason why they are apparently only available from elsewhere? It's certainly far more convenient for us, the readers when everything is in one place, at any rate.

Kieran
Sat Sep 9 14:22:57 2023
A Midwinter Carol

The hero of Deathmoor is promised half the kingdom but I decided that after rescuing the princess, the two of them become engaged. The hero is being hunted by the Pelagines (sort of fish-men) for stealing one of their scarlet pearls so I posited that they eventually caught up with him and killed him which was a contributing factor to the princess' mental health issues.

Kieran
Sat Sep 9 14:51:22 2023
A Princess Of Zamarra

I like Tolkien, just not how he spells dwarfs!

Revenant Rising and Songs of the Mystics were both written for the Gamebook Adventures app series so I don't own the rights for either one. I think the former can still be obtained as part of the Gamebook Adventures 4-6 compilation. The latter isn't available anywhere as far as I'm aware.

Apart from those, there are a few other 50 sectioner competition entries that I wrote between 18-20: Sanctuary of Souls, Feathers of the Phoenix and Treasures of the Briny Deep. There's also two other Windhammer entries - Behind the Throne (an 100 section Three Musketeers tribute written between Hunger of the Wolf and Waiting for the Light); and The Experiment which is, ultimately, probably best forgotten. I think they're all floating around the

I also wrote two gamebooks for the Fighting Fantazine - Prey of the Hunter (Issue 3) and Hand of Fate (Issue 10). You can download them from the fantazine website.

I have intended to tweak some of these for uploading here but never quite got round to it!

YARD
Sun Sep 10 14:59:14 2023
Riders Of The Storm
Star - optimum ending reached

Well, I didn't enjoy Hellfire much, but it did have SOME things going for it, like violence feeling more consequential than usual. And as much as I hated the shopping list for the boss itself, the feeling of things finally coming together at the end as you got to negate all the other enemies right before him if you approached things right actually was really satisfying.

This, on the other hand, was just incredibly bad.

OK, I'll acknowledge that there is one thing it does a lot better than the first, and very well altogether, and that is the location descriptions. That island really is beautiful and a great step-up from yet another cave of the original. Its vistas are inspiring, with the bodies of water like lakes and even fish ponds a particular highlight. I am not sure how I would rank them next to, say, Andrew Wright's descriptions, but frankly, both are good.

It is therefore most unfortunate that even as the locale descriptions soar to new heights, the dialogue plumbs new depths. I remember being surprised, to put it mildly, that Gavin Mitchell decided to directly follow up his initial, rather dark (and frankly edgy too) work, Outsider!, with New Day Rising, which had a far lighter tone and was filled with not just rather childish humour, but hugely distracting meta humour as well. For whatever reason, Phil Sadler decided that this story really needed those same elements too, but should also be more of an "epic". And so we get brilliant exchanges like "But why - Because it has been prophesised.", alongside pre-kindergarten-level jokes about tossing an obviously-suspicious anthropomorphized dice into nettles and cowpats.

Even worse is the way the protagonist is written now. Hellfire tended to be very economical with internal monologue and the like - and this turned out to be a blessing. It kept banging on and on about BrAvErY, and there was no way to complete it if you (and by extension, the character) did not, in fact, heed it. Yet, here, we keep on reading and reading how the slayer of Trinitour and plenty other beasts keeps getting cold sweats at the sight of monsters (including some that he* had already killed before anyway), how fear literally causes physical damage, or requires tests of stamina (some extremely intensive) to overcome. I could chalk it to PTSD from being banished to the void...except that the conversational dialogue shows no sight of that!

Instead, the dialogue has somehow ended up dumbing him down a lot. In refs like 353, it's so, somoronic that he is "blushing and looking up at the sky" after being told that the gods are justifiedly interested after everything he's done to beat Trinitour (not interested enough to help more than in one very specific and confusingly unavoidably encounter, but still) and after the Wizards have already called him "The Chosen One" and brought him back from the literal oblivion. The utterly enormous refs 347 and 268 are probably even worse. I will never understand why multiple authors here apparently thought that arbitrary, completely unbelievable skepticism makes characters more relatable rather than less (be it a werewolf disbelieving in vampires in Rise of the Night Creatures or the "Warrior" suddenly deciding that a fairly generic demon birth story was less plausible than, say, a ghost of a woman warrior dead for 50 years emerging from a painting to him* give a piece of tiger fur to morph into.)

(* as according to that bit of dialogue near the end, at any rate.)

As usual, I am running out of comment space again, so this is about to end here. Before I continue about more the story and process, I would like to note that having no way to know what each of the three potions offered at the start even does, whether before or even after selecting them, is NOT a good start. I am not sure why one should be expected to read the "self-interview" (not easily available if you click "CONTINUED" at the end of anyway) to know that your healing is now 1D6 and so are the other restorative potions.

YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:42:00 2023
Riders Of The Storm

Narratively, there is also the simple fact that canonically (since you cannot win in any other way), "the Warrior"''s first reaction upon seeing unarmed, chained-up, wounded woman begging for help was to slit her throat, alongside doing the same to Rhino Man begging for mercy, and pulling a sword on a frightened old man. Ergo, he cannot possibly be a very nice person - so it's mystifying to see him approach a living die with "can I be of some service?" and talking to that ridiculously suspicious die as a friend moments later. Same goes for his general demeanor in conversations with other suspicious entities, or suddenly talking to Trinitour as a friend, (mostly once you figure out in which puzzles he is meant to be invoked) which clashes badly with the seething hatred anyone who had actually staggered through Hellfire is likely to feel for him. Besides, the protagonist had also lived through some six weeks of "the dead came back, the seas boiled, reality turned upside-down and people disappeared all over the place", as the background cheerfully informs us.) The one "I'm truly sorry for the things I've done in the past ... there's no real ... excuse" is...belated, to put it mildly. Yet, the last two times Trinitour is in the narrative are even more WTF.

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Even the final, mostly triumphal stretches, where you finally get to (mostly) relax and reap your narrative rewards are surprisingly compromised by not just typos (more on them later) but similarly dissonant and illogical writing.

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Before I move on from the primary narrative, I should mention that this story's relationship with canon appears to be really questionable. To be fair, it's not the only one: Outsider! was very obviously written as urban fantasy with little regard to fitting with the rest of the setting, and the complete absence of, say, any Hashak's progeny, seems remarkable even for an Old World location. Here, though, everything to do with demons and religion owes far more to real-world Christianity than the rules of the setting. After Hellfire, I had to double-check that there ARE crucifixes in the setting, but at least they are meant to be a collective representation of all good deities. Here, there are numerous mentions of an obviously monotheistic God, Hell is described more monotheistically than like the Planes of the setting, and there is a mention of a single Devil, as opposed to the demonic pantheon. And one of the refs mentioning literal Christmas is about as inexcusable as the sudden outburst of atheism near the end of Outsider! that completely contradicts characters' own actions.

YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:43:21 2023
Riders Of The Storm

And as far as "gameplay" goes, I suppose I had to cheat here less than I did in Hellfire, which probably counts for something. I did not start looking at this comment section for hints until getting to Hell Demon, and I only started "right-clicking" around that point as well. There are only so many choices of direction in a row one can take when they typically come with zero indication of which would do what (a surprising devolution from Hellfire, which at least tended to leave more hints about its tunnel entrances), or which is the core and which is the branch (Hellfire at least kept pretty strongly to "north = leave area, try it last rule" and the sequel enjoys messing with it at all turns), which would let you backtrack and which won't and which would have unavoidable consequences as soon as you turn to that ref - even if in the narrative, IT WOULD SOMETIMES TAKE SEVERAL MILES OF WALKING before you get to the point that kills you or massively punishes you.

Another thing which makes the narrative here so annoying, and the protagonist so hard to relate to, is just how much the Warrior is now a total plaything of whatever enchantments happened to be around the place this time. Being randomly thrown around the first few exits is not too bad once you realize that there is nothing crucial to skip over that way, but even much later on, there are still those infuriating auto-choices where the character is suddenly "oVeRcOmE wItH eMoTiOn" and either has to deal with those fits of fear or grabs obvious traps in the form of food or gems. One might suspect that the thing which would separate "a Chosen One" from a merely skilled Warrior is being able to resist such influences, whether initially or learning to do so over the course of the trial. Yet, apparently being able to guess the path through unmarked trails (since "canonically", the Warrior would have had to have known which path to take the first time, every time) is a far more important skill to determine.

And of course, there's the similar design as in Hellfire, where you get a bunch of items that often sound cool, but are at best useful in one highly specific circumstance, and at worst are not useful at all. Here, it's arguably worse, since you do NOT need a particularly massive list by the end like in Hellfire, but the story is good at pretending that you do. Compared to the approach of Shrine of the Salamander or even A Princess of Zamarra, it just feels so impotent, especially when it results in the totally logical plotting like this:

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YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:52:17 2023
Riders Of The Storm

Now, here's a link to a ref where a really strange bug had occurred once:

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And typos - at least as many as are going to fit in this one comment.

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YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:59:02 2023
Riders Of The Storm

The first set of typos is apparently caught in the filter, so here's the next one (200-300), anyway.

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