Apologies that this blog has been quiet for a few months. The next title I shall be playing here contains a controversial element, and the author has not handled criticism of it well in the past, which has been proving something of an obstacle to getting motivated to get back into it.
In the course of some decluttering at home I recently rediscovered an incomplete amateur gamebook that I wrote during my teens. Not sure exactly when, but in-jokey references to reading Trial of Champions suggest 1986. Looking back through the existing material (around a quarter of what was planned), I have to wonder how I ever came up with such nonsense. It involves a modern-day sorcerer investigating the actions of an individual (ultimately revealed to be named Elric Zaiphrex, and yes, on at least one route through the book it would have been necessary to convert his name into a number via the A=1, B=2 etc system) who's been transforming random bystanders into statues, before becoming involved in an attempt to establish a colony on another planet.
Incoherent as the narrative may sound, the material I wrote is even more muddled. Having chosen to write the sections in numerical order rather than following the sequence of events, and only having reached section 97 (of a planned 400) before getting permanently distracted from it, I have a scattershot selection of fragments of different set pieces, including random incidents of vigilantism, a meeting with the Prime Minister, and assorted perils encountered in an alien maze that I shoehorned in towards the end of the adventure to bring the section count up to the target number.
Mind you, the last of those did lead to what must be my favourite line in the whole text: a surprisingly bland description of the player character falling into a pool of acid and dying concludes with the statement, "Your last thought is that you should never have threatened the apes." The way things have been going of late, I needed a good laugh, and that phrase certainly provided one.
Did you have a plan for the whole 400 sections then ? You were certainly a lot more ambitious than me - I wrote a bunch of terrible 30 section adventures, each of which was heavily inspired by a specific FF book, as I recall.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's often amusing to look back at our youthful work. Incidentally the Scottish poet Norman McCaig was so disparaging of his first two books of poems that, in later life, he disowned them and pretended that they didn't exist.