Buy Dragon Warriors Before It's Too Late

At the end of March, the Dragon Warriors role playing game license currently held by Magnum Opus Press will expire. This means that one of the best fantasy role playing games to hit the market in decades will -- temporarily at least -- be unavailable.

Dragon Warrriors is a reprinting/reworking of the classic 1980s fantasy role playing game of the same name originally published as a series of standard sized paperback rule books. James Wallis, and his crew at Magnum Opus, did a wonderful job creating an aesthetically appealing set of rule books that contained easy to read text and presented robust game mechanics. The game was originally written by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson, and some of the products feature work by the famous Undercover Economist Tim Harford, in an attempt to better capture the feel of Sword & Sorcery tales in a role playing system.

The game features an interesting setting and some of the best adventures written for any role playing game.

You can currently -- through tomorrow -- buy the printed rule books from Mongoose Publishing and the pdf versions at RPG Now. The rights will be returning to the Morris and Johnson, which is a good thing, but there are no immediate plans for a republication of the game. Morris and Johnson are currently promoting products related to Morris' -- also highly recommended -- Fabled Lands line of products. Sadly, Dragon Warriors has been overlooked by the larger fantasy role playing game community who have possibly been spending so much time with edition wars -- and have been missing out on some gems because of it.

Morris and Johnson are talented game designers and storytellers, and James Wallis has yet to make a bad product. Do your self a favor and pick these up now.

Author of Fabled Lands Gamebooks Offers Free e-Gamebook

I mentioned in an earlier post that Dave Morris' excellent, and hard to find, Fabled Lands game book series was available in a new edition. I recently purchased the four available books and eagerly await further volumes in the series. One of the intriguing things about the Fabled Lands series is that choices in one book can lead you to paragraphs in other volumes. It makes for a robust experience, and demonstrates the strengths of design in the series.

Morris is making available -- for a very limited time -- an electronic copy of a relatively hard to find Gamebook. The original printing of the gamebook is easier to find if you live in the UK, but for us in the states this is a wonderful opportunity to play an engaging gamebook. It is also a good starter gamebook for those who have never played one before. It uses a simple role playing resolution system and explains the rules clearly.

If you are interested in playing a rare adventure, or interested in finding out what this game book thing is all about, head on over to Dave's Fabled Land blog and download it while you can. It should be noted that the file is in xps format. The format reads well in Explorer, and not so well in Firefox which redownloads the file every time I try to open it, and can be easily converted into a pdf if you have a full version of Acrobat.

You only have until New-Year's Eve to download the book. Do it...NOW!

Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson's Fabled Lands Adventure Gamebooks Return

In the mid-90s during the dwindling days of the vibrant Fantasy Adventure Gamebook phenomenon, Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson released their Fabled Lands series. It was a "mythical" and much talked about series among gamebook fans, but one that wasn't often seen in the United States. Dave Morris was one of the authors responsible for the Dragon Warriors role playing game (one of the most narratively driven role playing games of its time) and the books featured artwork from Fighting Fantasy artist Russ Nicholson, so the difficulty in finding the books was frustrating to many gamebook fans. I personally wondered if I would ever be able to find copies of the books, and thankfully my wait is over. Fabled Lands Publishing has recently published the first four books in the Fabled Lands series and has eight more listed on their publication schedule.

The adventure gamebook was a genre created by Ian Livingstone and Steven Jackson in 1982, with the publication of the classic Warlock of Firetop Mountain adventure. The genre combined the gaming experience of role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons with the narrative choice pathing of the Choose Your Own Adventure series. For over a decade publishers released a wide variety of these gamebooks.

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, being the first, set the standard for the industry. The vast majority of the Fighting Fantasy series were entertaining and inventive, but they didn't contain epic narratives that used the same character that traveled from book to book. The majority of the Fighting Fantasy series were episodic, and they failed to capture the feel of a role playing game campaign. The first series to truly capture the campaign feeling was Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series, where a player could use the same character for over 20 books as that character changed and grew and faced increasingly challenging foes.

Like the Dever books, the Fabled Lands series contains innovations that separate them from the typical gamebook. In Fabled Lands players have a wider array of character choices to play from than are typically offered. In your standard gamebook, players are typically limited to one "character class." There are books that allow you to play fighters, wizards, superheroes, kai disciples, and more, but each volume typically offers only one archetype. Steve Jackson's Sorcery is one exception, as are the Fabled Lands books. In Fabled Lands, players can choose from one of six professions which cover the majority of fantasy archetypes a player might find interesting. Additionally, Morris and Thomson included a "keyword" mechanic where players acquire keywords as they progress through the series. Possessing these keywords will affect future encounters and shape the playing experience. For ease of play, all keywords within a particular volume begin with the same letter. In The War-Torn Kingdom all keywords begin with A and the progression continues in later volumes. Fabled Lands uses a quick and effective combat system that allows for more variety in results than the Fighting Fantasy series without the use of a chart like in Lone Wolf.

My books came in the mail today, and I am eagerly anticipating my first foray into Sokara and the rest of the Fabled Lands