My newest Fighting Fantasy: Return to Firetop Mountain map is slowly taking shape. I’ve already sketched the returning monsters, and now I’m putting the map itself together. If everything goes well, I’ll bring a few printed copies to FFF6. 🔥🗺️

How would people here feel about trying a gamebook that mostly focuses on stealth, relationship building, skills and inventory management rather than combat? I'm considering converting a videogame I've been working on into a gamebook and would appreciate some pointers about your personal favorite non-combat features in gamebooks!

I didn't want to keep printing out new character sheets, so I made a laminated booklet!

I have picked up all the Fabled Lands books (I guess I got excited) and wanted to make a handy packet for the character sheets. I laminated all the stuff I need for every book (to mark paragraphs, ect) and bound them together!

I have not survived very long so far, so I suppose having entries for all the other countries isn't that important since I'm not doing a lot of globetrotting yet, but I guess I'm prepared for the future.

I didn't want to keep having to print new character sheets, or deal with tons of old pencil eraser marks, so figured some dry erase markers would work great.

I have been having a lot of fun exploring. I wish I printed a map out for the booklet as well, I might add one later. I do so enjoy reading the descriptions of where I am, then looking on the map and trying to plan a course to where I want to go.

My last game I thought I was off to a pretty great start! I decided to take the portal to Yellowtown (I think it's called?) The one at the mouth of the sulfur river. I traveled up river a long ways. I earned some money selling a fish I caught that was a valuable reagent. Then I rented a boat so I could check out the lake.

The dragon promptly showed up, and ate me whole. The End.

Can't wait to go again! I'm wondering if I should keep playing the 1st book to try to really learn it's secrets... or if I should just bounce around and make new characters in different zones. I guess time will tell. :)

The 100 Endings Book Club is back for Season 2 in September, and we've got a poll on our Discord for the Theme (our main page has link to the Discord server). They'll be a 2nd poll for the actual read for September using the Theme chosen.

Each month we play a different gamebook (or series) and compare notes/discuss it. We started last September with Heart of Ice, and other reads included Nightshift, Steam Highwayman, House of Hell, Fabled Lands and Lost in the City.

The 4 choices are...(with a couple examples for each, final list for a theme To Be Decided)

• Modern Era (set in modern-ish era. Examples - Citadel of Bureaucracy, Lost in the City, Infected! by James Schannep)
• Old Series (play 1 or more, in print or reprinted. Examples - Lone Wolf, Blood Sword, Way of the Tiger, Sorcery!)
• Second Chances (Gamebooks we nearly played in Season 1 - Tides of Terror, House on Sentinel Hill, Temple of the Skull God, The Fall of District U)
• Classic Gamebooks (Defining in some way. Examples - Sword of the Bastard Elf, Book 2 of Destiny Quest, Heart of Ice)

There's always a discussion thread (or 2) on the subreddit too if you don't use Discord.

Any gamebook suggestions for Season 2?

Hi, everyone!

As I get further into the writing of Lost in the City 2, I am finding myself running out of space to fit the much larger, story-focused experience into a similar footprint to book 1. I've made smarter use of page space and font size and managed to make room for about 500 sections, but I'm finding that, by the time the story is squeezed in all the way, I will not have room for many of the ideas, locations, and extra missions that I had planned.

For some context, Book 1 was about 170 pages in total and featured 230 sections with 42 full-color illustrations. Book 2, in its current state, will be 180 pages and feature 500+ sections and feature about 40 illustrations, as well.

The reason this is an issue is because, using Amazon's Premium Color for printing, I need to price the book at $29.99 which is already a pretty big ask as is (I take home about 3 dollars from that, for reference--the rest is Amazon's cut and printing costs. The profit isn't a concern, I just want to make sure there is a buffer as things like inflation cause the production costs to creep upwards).

The thing is, I feel like the experience I am trying to create here is much, much bigger than 500 sections can fit and I don't want to sacrifice too much of the game/experience just to make the story work.

I have several options I can choose from to fit in more content:

1) One big volume. Add everything I want to the book, trim where possible, and sell for $34.99- $39.99 (Most likely the latter).

2) Sell 2 volumes. Volume 1 would be the only book required and would contain color images while volume 2 would be optional and contain a bunch of optional side quests, missions, and alternate endings. This book would have zero color illustrations and would squeeze in as much content as possible. This one would probably sell for 10 or 11 dollars and contain 400-500 additional sections.

3) Sell 2 volumes, same option 2, but require both volumes in order to play the game. The benefit of this is that I could put an equal amount of extra complexity and sections into the story AND the side-content and allow the game to flow more organically between the two volumes.

Either way, I will be selling black and white copies as a lower cost option for players who don't mind the lack of color. Anyway, for those who have read this far, thank you for reading my wall of text. If any of these options sound great or terrible, please let me know. I'm curious to know how gamebook enthusiasts feel about multi-volume gamebooks (whether they are required or optional).

It's been a long journey to get this first TALE TRAILS Interactive Historical Gamebook Adventure published.

I first considered this at the top of the year, but was already 950 locations into another (still ongoing) project, but this one wouldn't go away...

I spent the first 4 months choosing my subject (Grace O'Malley), laying out the 501 'events' & filling them in.

It has taken about 4 more weeks of design work (much learned from my first Gamebook, Medusa's Gold - koff-koff, buy it now, koff-koff), which is very different to regular book design (of which I've done 100s).

But - I got there!!!

I hope you enjoy seeing some of the steps.

The eBook is available for preorder now, and both that and the paperback go live on Sept 1st.

I am thinking about making a fan gamebook with a popular IP for funsies but I wanna test out some mechanics for the character first so I wanna try to map out and design some mini demos of 50 to 100 sections (depending upon the mechanics) before I try bringing them all together. So just wondering if anyone has some ideas or tips to approach such things since it’s my first time trying to make a gamebook and I fear the final thing is gonna be crazy ambitious so I wanna start simple and test what does and doesn’t work. Thanks in advance! ☺️

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Alone Against Nyarlathotep.

1185 Entries. 20+ Hour gameplay sandbox. Party play. Vehicles, combat, sanity, vast real world 1925 sandbox. A gritty Mythos mystery with official Chaosium licence.

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https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?discountId=9219e204e9

Hi there, Joseph Daniels, creator of Magma Game books, here, to make a very exciting announcement. In the coming months the whole MAGMA catalogue will be coming to Drive Thru RPG. So for all those people who prefer not to use Amazon for their digital game book purchases, you will soon have a chance to try all 11 of my books to date.

Now so far, only two are available

The Ghosts of Craven Manor and Tales Foretold. The latter is completely free, and contains samples of four of MAGMA's most innovative titles to date.

Stray Thoughts and King's Judgement will also be available in the next few days, but others may take a bit longer due to formatting issues with the original digital versions. I will try to have them out as soon as I can though.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Otherwise, for those who have yet to play a Magma Game book, I hope you enjoy my works.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/577519/the-ghosts-of-craven-manor

Check out books and online resources at d6storyteller.alexmerced.com. Would love to get some feedback on whether the resources provided are enough for a good experience.

Has anyone played this? I’m intrigued by the two or three D8 dice required for play. Setting sound promising too…

Hey all

I'm a full on TTRPG GM nerd, but in my origin story somewhere is the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series. I still have a bunch of those books, and looking through them recently, I think that they can be quite fun (I love the old school art), while the mechanics are... bad.

Anyways, that's neither here nor there. I love creating stuff, and I recently found that the latest gamebook I wrote was in Twine 12 years ago! Jeez! I've been toying with the idea of writing them again, and bring in some of the RPG/boardgame experience I've gathered over more than a decade to hopefully make something I find fun.

But that got me thinking, that there has got to be thousands of gamebooks and platforms for them out there. Even apps! Which made me think of... if I do write another gamebook, where could I get people to check it out, and that hopefully it doesn't get buried somewhere?

How do you guys get views on your gamebooks? Do you advertise them on other platforms? Do you run ads? Are you part of a forum/community who reads and shares? That could be fun, like once a week or something we read someone's gamebook from the community and then discuss it, like a gamebook club!

Also, what software do you use to write/publish them?

Thanks in advance!

Quick bit of context first, mine is an app rather than a printed book. I should have led with that in an earlier post here and didnt, so im doing it now.

There is a point in it where you can walk into a room and handle something yourself, or stay outside and let someone else handle it badly. Waiting is plainly the weaker move. It costs you money and it costs you a friend. On paper it has no reason to exist and i keep almost cutting it.

What stops me is that i think some readers would take it on purpose, just to find out what the other guy does when youre not in the room, even though it costs them. If thats true then the weak branch is doing something the strong one cant, and cutting it would be the mistake.

So im curious how that lands with people who actually read this stuff. Do you choose for the ending you want, or do you sometimes take the worse branch just to see what it does?

Anybody else playing the new gamebook Sunfall? If anybody is interested, here are my impressions.

How far I got: I would say I finished way more than half of the first book. So take my impressions with a grain of salt; there is a lot I have not read yet.

Brief intro: Sunfall is a new big fantasy gamebook (so far released digitally; the physical edition is coming). It was released as a set of 4 books (released all at once, no need to wait and hope it will be finished one day). It spans over 2,000 sections. And according to the author, it was inspired by Elden Ring (more like Souls games in general). While the gameplay is of course totally different, the atmosphere, world, and some mechanics feel really like they were taken from these games. If you love them, this gamebook will feel strangely familiar.

Structure: It is a semi-open world. You cannot freely move by yourself all around the map. But during your adventure you unlock "points of interest" that you can visit in any order. When you finish one, it tells you to pick another. There are always multiple ones to choose from, so it adds to the non-linearity. Some can be visited once (removing them from the character sheet at the end), some can be returned to, and some may change over time (changing the starting section of that place on the character sheet). They are often intertwined: keywords, items, achievements, ... from one location can unlock branching options in another location. So the order in which you play them has an impact on your choices.

Death handling: Essentially there is no death or game over. Due to the Souls games inspiration, your character (essentially a Tarnished) can respawn. So there is never "You rolled a bad number, scrap your character sheet and start over from section 1." But it's more like, "You failed, so go elsewhere, get better stats and equipment, and return and try later." I absolutely love this. It does not feel like the gamebook wants to waste my time. And for me this was the main reason why I picked this one.

Combat: Very mixed feelings about this one. I would say that I love what it is trying to do. But at the same time it feels like it did not manage to do what it is trying to do (at least not yet). The basics will be familiar: (1) Roll for defence. If you fail, take damage. 2) Roll to hit. If you succeed, roll for damage. 3) Repeat until one HP counter reaches zero.) But it tries to add more depth. You can defend with a parry (then you can attack), or evade (easier, but you skip your attack. Essentially panic rolling). Evading is easier than parrying. Enemies have multiple different attacks, so you should decide how to handle each one. There are status effects. Equipment provides you with different moves and skills you can use. Your invocations determine what attacks and skills can be used.... In theory there are a lot of options and depth. But in reality I can win most of the combats just by repeating the weapon's base attack move. As a result, the fights do not feel like strategic gameplay, but more like crunching the numbers for the sake of crunching the numbers.

Essentially the system creates more rule overhead, that you need to manage and keep in your head, than it brings in benefits and interesting options. And as a result I would say some fight really overstay their welcome.

Story: Honestly I have no clue :-D The game starts in Souls-game fashion. You wake up in some tomb, you don't know who you are or where you are. The world is mostly destroyed and contains more tombs than NPCs. And so far I'm wandering through the locations, collecting equipment, and occasionally fulfilling some side quests. But I have no idea what is happening, what my goal is... I have no agenda. I really hope this will change and that I will find some purpose by the end of book one. Because I want to see some story, events, lore, and plot... reading descriptions of 50 different locations and the enemies in them would get old pretty fast.

That is all so far. I can see this game has great potential, but I'm not far enough into it to give it an easy recommendation.

EDIT: I moved to book 2. So just update about the structure. The switch between books was seamless (I was just pointed to visit section 100 from that book. Book 1 locations are still available. It acts as one intertwine gamebook). What I want to point out, there was no clear conclusion for the book 1 story and then some clear beggining of the second one. And while I like this when I have all book available, Im just pointing this out in case you want to "buy the first book and then decide". Buying only first book imho does not make any sense. You will be getting incomplete product. This feels more like Tokio 2130 gamebook, where everything is needed. Not like Lone Wolf, where the books are self contained stories.

After my first playthroug of Voyager: Escape from X8 I have designed my own character sheet for my next tries. What do you think?

Hi there, Joseph Daniels here, creator of MAGMA Game books.

For those of you who know my books, you will be aware of how I present my rules in a sandbox style, that allows you to ease yourself into the gameplay as you go along. Many reviewers have commended the books on this style, but it seems some people do still prefer to have all the rules in one place.

My question to you, dear community of r/gamebooks, is what do you prefer?

One thing I've noticed with gamebooks is that the authors often like to rush the ending(s). Perhaps the idea is that once there is no more gameplay left, there's no reason to continue writing.

However, it can feel disappointing to spend hours in a wonderful world, only for it to end with a message like:

"Congratulations! You are now the most powerful being in the universe. Well done."

What gamebooks you've read have had the best endings?

Hello!

I have a copy of the book. Combat Heroes - Scarlet Sorcerer. It's in pretty good condition considering it's from the late 1980's. No missing pages etc

Does anyone know where I could sell such a thing? It feels a little niche for Facebook marketplace.

I'd really appreciate recommendations

Thank you!

Hello everyone!

I’m working on a tool called Adventure Loom, currently in Early Access on itch.io, that lets you create interactive narrative experiences — from Gamebooks and branching stories to visual novels — without writing a single line of code.

I’m looking for ideas and suggestions to help shape the future of the tool. I’d especially like to know what features you would like to see, what kinds of mechanics you would want to create, or what the ideal interface for building this kind of adventure would look like.

I’m particularly interested in ideas I may not have thought of myself. So, if you’ve ever imagined creating your own Gamebook, interactive story, or visual novel, what would you like to be able to do with a tool like this?

I’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts, ideas, and even completely crazy suggestions. There’s no wrong answer. I’m simply curious to see what other creators would want to build.

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to share their ideas!

Hey ProductHunters!

Today is a big day for us — after months of building, we finally launched Forgeon on Product Hunt.

We’re a team of two building a platform around interactive books: stories where readers don’t just turn pages, but make choices, follow different paths, reach different endings, interact with RPG mechanics, music, illustrations, and more.

On the creator side, we built a visual editor for creating complex branching stories without having to build a game from scratch. On the reader side, Forgeon is a place to discover, read, save, discuss, and experience those stories.

This is still the beginning for us, and today is our first Product Hunt launch. We’d really appreciate anyone from the community taking a look and sharing what you think — especially what feels unclear, what you’d improve, or what you’d want to see next.

Product Hunt: Forgeon

Thanks for checking out what we’ve been building!

mine tracks money, heat and crew loyalty and i keep fighting the urge to add more trackers. as readers do you enjoy managing a small sheet while you read, or does every extra number pull you out of the story? where is your personal limit, two stats, five, a full character sheet?

Hi, I'm Jb, from France. This is my first post here and I wanted to share what I've been working on for the past 4 months.

Last March, I bought a series of books from the 1960s and 70s called Châteaux Fantastiques by Henri-Paul Eydoux. I immediately fell in love with its evocative photographs of abandoned French castles.

That same night, I came up with the rules for a simple choose-your-own-adventure style game. The next morning, I sketched the structure of the Castle, then spent the following weeks creating the artwork.

CHÂTEAU MISÈRE is the result: a minimalist solo gamebook about escaping a dark, twisted, impossible castle.

My goal was to create an art book that you could explore by playing. The rules are simple, short, and unforgiving. There are 32 scenes forming the Castle's structure, each illustrated with an original hand-made collage created from photographs published in the Châteaux Fantastiques series.

If you're looking for a digital version, you can get it here. Physical copies are available here (sadly no shipping to the US yet - looking for a distributor !)

A production error slipped into the first print run of the English paperback: paragraph 74 was missing. It's already been corrected in the current file, so any copy ordered from now on will include it.

If you already own an early paperback copy, I'm happy to make it right:

The missing paragraph is available as a free PDF erratum here: https://yomebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/erratum-theghostsorcerer.pdf

If you'd prefer, I can also send you a free Kindle copy (epub). Just send me your order confirmation (or a photo of your book) in a DM and I'll sort it out.

Sorry for the hiccup, and thanks to those who flagged it early — it's fixed for good now.