from Dicing With Dragons, 1982, Ian Livingstone
This gamebook is a 134-section adventure in the front of Ian Livingstone's (yes, THAT Ian Livingstone) book Dicing With Dragons, which is an introduction to role-playing games. I won't comment on the main part of the book, except to say that anyone reading the book will find the RPG market vastly different today than it was 18 years ago.
Ian Livingstone designed a special system for this adventure, which he titled the Fantasy Quest system. I do not know of any other place where this system has been used. Your character has 4 attributes, or FACTORS, in the system's lingo. Your COMBAT FACTOR is found by rolling 3D6. This reflects how easy or hard it is for opponents to hit you in combat. Your STRENGTH FACTOR is found by rolling 3D6, also. It gives you your hit points. Your WOUND FACTOR begins at 1D6, and is the amount of damage you do when you hit an opponent in combat. Your FORTUNE FACTOR is also found by rolling 3D6. This is your level of luck. You also start with 3D6 gold pieces and six rations, which heal your STRENGTH FACTOR by 2 if you eat one.
As you can likely imagine with a system like this, you can get a wide range of factor scores by rolling 3D6. I do not find this acceptable in a gamebook. A below-average COMBAT FACTOR or STRENGTH FACTOR is a sure death penalty in this adventure, though you can overcome a poor FORTUNE FACTOR.
The adventure itself is a joke. You go on a quest to find the Golden Dragon. That is OK, standard fantasy treasure quest stuff. So you enter the underground labyrinth, and you find lots of stupid stuff. You may find a man painting pictures. In a dungeon? Then there's a guy running a pawn shop. A pawn shop! In an underground maze with evil creatures in it? That's stupid! There seems to be almost no logical connection among any of the events that occur in the labyrinth complex. This worked in the book Deathtrap Dungeon that the author wrote, but there was a somewhat reasonable story behind it. This one just comes out of nowhere. And Deathtrap Dungeon didn't have no stinkin' pawn shop. A pawn shop! Sheesh.
The adventure is also decidedly deadly. Combat requires some good luck and/or good factor scores to survive. And there are a LOT of "you enter the room, and you die" paragraphs. I fail to see how this is supposed to encourage people to play RPGs, unless they are supposed to think, "Man, these solo gamebooks are stupid. I should play a REAL role-playing game." I don't get it. And don't even get me started on the writing, which was very dry and terse. I've said enough negative things already.
Do yourself a favor and don't waste any time with this thing. The book itself is a novelty for RPG fans like me, but the solo adventure is a joke.
from HeroQuest: The Fellowship of Four, 1991, Dave Morris
It turns out to be a combination of a short gamebook (135 sections) and a short novella. The story part really has nothing to do with the solo adventure, and it doesn't have much to do with the boardgame itself, either. Yeah, there's a wizard, a barbarian, a dwarf, and an elf. The elf has 3 spells from the boardgame, and the wizard has nine. That's about it. The gamebook adventure is also only loosely related to the boardgame. It is intriguing, though, in that you get to run all four characters, rather than the standard setup where you have one hero and that's it. This lends some interesting strategy, as you have to worry about "marching order," and stuff like that.
The game itself takes a lot from the boardgame. Each character has four attributes: BODY (hit points), MIND (mental stamina), COMBAT (how easy it is to hit your opponent), and SPEED (how fast you can move). These attributes are set for each character at the beginning of the game. Each character also has set starting equipment. The barbarian and dwarf are your main combat machines. The elf is adequate at everything and excels at nothing. The elf has 3 magic spells that are pretty useful. The wizard is weakest at combat, but has 9 spells, most of which are pretty good. All of the spells are translated from the board game. Without pulling out my copy of the boardgame to verify, it looks like everything is in step with the original boardgame rules, which is interesting; I'd never thought of using HeroQuest as the basis for a gamebook.
The adventure itself is only average. The story is somewhat weak, and consists of rescuing a young milkmaid who is kidnapped by an evil undead baron. Your four heroes have to venture across the moors to the old baron's mansion and rescue her. At only 135 sections, the adventure is pretty short, and I got through two attempts in around 30 minutes. For the most part, your characters are much tougher than any opponents you will face. One-on-one this might not be the case, but when 3 or 4 heroes get in the fight, you should win pretty quick. When you have the right items, this one's pretty easy. I wouldn't recommend hunting this one down for the story, but it does make a fascinating addition to a gamebook collection.