Keeping the Fire Going

Sometimes the inspiration for a post comes from out of left field*, and this certainly fits.

Zinn over in Jinxed Thoughts --yes, Zinn's back!-- had a post this evening about a Choose Your Own Adventure book series, called Dice Man:

From Jinxed Thoughts.

Zinn is a fan of Judge Dredd, and so that cover caught her eye. Only one of the stories covers ol' Dredd, but that's fine. That post she wrote jogged my memories about the Choose Your Own... style books that I'd bought back in the 80s while I was forbidden from playing RPGs, and I have no idea where they are now: Tolkien Quest/Middle Earth Quest series and the Lone Wolf series.

***

I had the top three books, but this is
a sampling of what was put out.
From u/aelphia on this Reddit thread.

Let's talk Tolkien first, shall we?

This was my gateway drug into the Middle-earth Roleplaying System by Iron Crown Enterprises, but I'd almost completely forgot that little factoid. Back in the 80s when I was banned from RPGs, the first book appeared at one of our local bookstores,** so I naturally snapped it up. 

Inside the book looked a lot like the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure books, only there were fights and skill checks involved, and for those checks you could either close your eyes and point a pencil at a page in the back with random numbers on it or you could get out some dice and ...you know... roll for it. There was even a miniature character sheet in the back, as I recall, and the story itself was well done.

I know now that the book, being produced by Iron Crown Enterprises, meant that the quality was bound to be high, but I had no idea what to expect. I mean, the old Choose Your Own Adventure books themselves suffered from uneven quality from book to book, so I had kind of steeled myself for a potential let-down.

But the best part? It looked like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so it passed whatever invisible inspection my parents' had, and besides it was the size of a paperback***, so I could easily toss it in a book bag or in the middle of some other books and nobody was the wiser.  After the third book I didn't see any more being published, but that was okay by me; by then I'd moved on to hiding the MERP RPG books themselves in my room.

Having done some short research, it appears that the series was restarted when I was away at college, which is why the actual number of Middle-earth Quest books is much larger than the three I remember.

***

There was also another reason why I was okay with the Middle-earth Quest series ending, and it was this series that I stumbled upon at that same bookstore:

From the Lone Wolf Fandom Wiki.

I knew from the moment I saw it that I was too old for the target audience, but I quickly snapped it up and skimmed the inside anyway. There was a similar system in place to that of the Middle-earth Quest books, so I acknowledged that it was more for elementary and middle-school kids and swallowed my pride and bought it. 

Looking back on those Lone Wolf books now, I can see the obvious kid-oriented plots, but I was still happy to feed my RPG habit with these supercharged Choose Your Own Adventure style books. The funny thing is, I tired of these more quickly than the Middle-earth Quest books, mainly because after the first story arc finished, the author Joe Dever went back and started another story arc with your character essentially starting all over again. In an echo of complaints about every MMO expac ever, I wasn't so thrilled to essentially toss out all of my old abilities and weapons just because. Still, I have some very fond memories of these books that kept the RPG flame alive for me in the 80s when things looked bleak for me.

#Blaugust2023

*A slang term referencing baseball. The outfield in baseball is the farthest away from home plate, so "out of left field" is slang for "from out of nowhere".

**It feels so weird saying 'bookstores' these days, but when I look back on it, the 70s and 80s were 38-48 years ago. We even had a bookstore at the local strip mall a short bike ride away from my home, and that's something my own kids would never ever comprehend. To them, going to a bookstore is a "pile into the car and drive for 20 minutes" event, especially since the Borders 10 minutes away closed back in 2011. And that was the summer before our oldest mini-Red began Seventh Grade; she'll be 25 this Fall. (!)

***And cost as little as one, too!