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Well, this post is meant to remind, enlighten, and excite my readers that are also fans of a very niche genre!
So first let me tell you...why Dice Book? Well, do any of you remember reading choose your own adventure books growing up?
For those of you that said no, they were books that placed you...the reader...as the protagonist.
You go through the story making various choices, which you make by going to different pre-designated pages.
They were/are beat little games that grant a special level of immersion to the reader. Well, years ago I thought I had come up with a brand new idea that was going to take the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) genre by storm. I was going to add dice to them and create a solo RPG experience combining the best of CYOA and the role-playing aspect of popular tabletop RPGs together.
It was smart. It was fun. It had been done before.
Now when I first thought of the idea, I actually thought I had come up with the idea. But in fact, it had been a thing for the past twenty-plus years.
So while disappointed that it wasn't my brainchild, I was excited to try some of these preexisting gamebooks.
I started with Destiny Quest. Perhaps the most modern-looking gamebooks that I've seen since.
Destiny Quest was fun. It was immersive like I hoped it would be though that immersion would break from time to time either from me not understanding the rules ic how to navigate the book, or from legitimate disconnects.
The book taught me both what a great gamebook should look like, and also a few things to avoid so as not to complicate the experience.
Next, I picked up Fabled Lands: The War-Torn Kingdom.
...
This book blew my mind. This was originally meant to be a twelve-book series (though series is more of a misnomer). Each book was meant to encompass part of a larger world. You could begin your adventures in this world with any book and therefore at any place within this world. However, they only got four books in when the demand for gamebooks began to diminish. Thankfully due to a Kickstarter two more of the books have been brought to existence, though I doubt the full twelve will ever be realized.
Regardless this book (as I've written in my review of it) is like the original Elder Scrolls series, A game set in an open world, with an overarching quest but with no obligation for you to actually follow that quest if you don't want to. In fact, I wasn't entirely sure there was an overarching quest until my third attempt (having died in the first two).
Now, this isn't a post to detail each and every book that inspired my own line of gamebooks...though I will create a list of exactly that in the future so stay tuned! This post is more of an update letting all of you that have been waiting, and all of you that didn't know this was a plan in the first place that my pen has met the paper, and two iterations of these gamebooks, or Dice Books, as I've referred to them are now officially in production!
If you're interested in the list of books that ultimately helped shape these upcoming books, please feel free to email me at contact@dicebookpublishing.com
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