Do you know if this forum still exists?
It does indeed, or at least there is still
a forum. I've been part of at least 3 different ones over the years. The very first one will be long-gone, since it was pretty much abandoned even before that particular forum host vanished. I'm not sure what happened to the second one, but it's gone as well. The current one is Fighting Fantazine. It isn't as active as it used to be, but it's still there, and new posts have been made recent-ish. At least one of the fan-written adventures is also posted on YT. I'll hunt up the links to these.
I've adapted one of the gamebooks to novel form for NaNoWriMo. Back in 2016 I realized that my NaNo efforts were going exactly nowhere with trying to write Star Trek stories, so I decided that it was time to try the idea that I had as long ago as the 1990s - to turn a gamebook into an actual novel.
So
Caverns of the Snow Witch became a 60,000-word novel (novella, by modern standards), but of course I can't publish it. I've started several others, with varying degrees of progress:
Scorpion Swamp,
Forest of Doom,
The Shamutanti Hills,
House of Hell, and I have the beginning of plans for a spinoff from CotSW - there's more to say about Redswift's brother, Ash, and their family, so I decided to put that on the to-do list for some future project.
I should mention that my take on the Fighting Fantasy setting is nothing like the official chronology. I took my bare stats and turned them into actual characters, and ended up with a multi-generation, multi-branch family and network of friends (and frenemies) who are the main characters in these stories. I set
Warlock of Firetop Mountain approximately 20 years after
Caverns of the Snow Witch, and really don't care how out of step that is with the official chronology. I'm not writing about archmages and such - I'm writing about my own interpretation of these characters, whether they were created by Jackson and Livingstone, or if they began as my SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK scores.
There's a group on FB as well (I'm one of the co-admins). I've been realizing how utterly
spoiled the UK-based fans are. Good grief, you've got books, magazines, action figures, sculptures, and a whole pile of other goodies that either never made it to North America, or at least never made it past the large cities at a reasonable price. And you even get FF conventions and other fan events! (you have no idea how JEALOUS I am!
)
For those who either can't find the gamebooks in physical format or prefer playing online, there are quite a number of them on Steam. I've tried playing that way and found that I prefer pencil, paper, and real dice, thankyouverymuch.
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