Book recommendation: Gathering Daisies in Black Latex Caves ►
◄ Project Zebra: Cats thrive on technomancy at the zoo
Some books that were quite influential for me growing up, adjacent to fantasy fiction like Dragonlance. There were of course lots of gamebook series, aka interactive fiction, such as Choose Your Own Adventure (1979 onwards), D&D Endless Quest (1982 onwards) and in the UK Fighting Fantasy (1982 onwards) in particular popularised reading for demographics that were otherwise hard to reach. This followed the original release of Dungeons & Dragons rules (1974), a revival of Tolkien, Conan films (1982/1984), etc, and continued through the 80s, spilling even more into popular culture. Masters of the Universe (1982) was a melting pot of fantasy and sci-fi, the D&D red box set (1983), Princess Bride (1987), Willow (1988) and HeroQuest (1989) had a year or two of being the "must have" board game. Fantasy was huge, and gaming was huge.
I'm missing a lot out there because I never got into series such as Earthsea, Shannara, Pern or Elric, all of which were well-established in the previous decade or so. I particularly gravitated towards how fictional worlds worked and their internal logic, finding the codification of things in rules and stats fascinating regardless of what rules system was used. Not unsurprisingly there's quite a strong correlation between gaming and ASD, being social interaction in a semi-structured format, but I think there's a more general appeal too: if you read D&D tie-in fiction, you understand that authors will bend or break rules, but there's a basic consistency to the spells, classes, etc. that's helpful to the audience.
Like the rest of this site, this is just some personally meaningful apocrypha.
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What Is Dungeons & Dragons? (1982)
With the popularity of RPGs came wider interest in the phenomena, and not just in the Satanic Panic moral hysteria sense but offering a way in for newcomers. A book from a major publisher like Penguin was just the ticket, which meant that I was just the right age to acquire a 1984 copy of this after it'd been in library circulation for a good few years. It was influential enough it has it's own Wikipedia article. Naturally it had been revised by the time this edition was published, as the iconic red Basic D&D box set was published a year earlier, and there's a section at the end debating the relative merits of moving to the Expert box set or Advanced D&D which was a different system.
Whilst it has sections on character generation, dungeon design, miniatures, fantasy fiction and even computer games, the most interesting thing is probably that there's a chapter walking through a section of an adventure, and Penguin's Puffin imprint taking the opportunity to includes pages of ads at the back for Fighting Fantasy books.
I had the red basic D&D set, although 2e AD&D (1989) was "my" edition because that's what was in libraries and 2nd edition officially lasted until 2000), crossing over with my introduction to Dragon Magazine with #195 in July 1993. I did get copies of the books at some point, but retrospectively. I played Basic D&D once or twice with the set, and a few other times because someone had the board game edition, and although the box is definitely gone I'm not sure if the books aren't still packed away somewhere. One of the problems with D&D is that the person with most interest invariably ends up having to be the DM, and even if they have any social skills preteens aren't naturally great at what's essentially shared storytelling with one person nominated to try to organise things.
What is D&D? isn't the most revolutionary book but it is an interesting pen portrait of how information was exchanged before the internet took off, when stray issues of magazines or a trip to the library for things like this were how geek culture was performed.
I'm not sure if this was the case in the 1980s but Penguin also owns Transworld, which Corgi is an imprint of. Publishing is a very incestuous business (e.g. Transworld also has the Bantam imprint, which reprinted and extended the Doc Savage pulps) and apparently Penguin Random House currently has 365 imprints in total.
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Dragon Warriors: Book 4, Out of the Shadows
Corgi published the rules to Dragon Warriors (1985 onwards) as six paperbacks, presumably to appeal to Fighting Fantasy readers and get them on the shelves of regular bookstores. Slightly less helpfully, it was written to require books 1-3 as the base system and to anyone who didn't have them it's basically a book of ideas with sections on assassins, stealth, special combat skills for other classes, a selection of monsters and three short adventures. This is something else I acquired as an ex-library copy back in the day. It's a relatively low-fantasy setting, with magic but closer ties to real-world history and feudalism than D&D hackfests. In a theme I didn't recognise when I was younger, this was written by Dave Morris.
With apologies to Dave, and Mongoose Games and Serpent King Games who've licenced it and republished and reformatted the rules, I'm still not interested in actually playing it. But the art and written content made it something I read repeatedly, like the handful of early White Dwarf magazines I had from the period when that publication still covered games from publishers other than Games Workshop. Pieces like below were evocative and instantly recognisable again.
The use of the Middle/Dark Ages for inspiration speaks to the fact that early RPGs spun out of historical miniatures wargaming with knights, etc, but it's also closely tied to British/Welsh and Arthurian storytelling.
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Knightmare Corgi game books
There were six Knightmare gamebooks, one a year from 1988 onwards, followed by a quiz book in 1994. I don't recall collecting further than book four, and they're long gone now although I've recently picked up the second. The books are very much tie-in media and secondary to what everyone remembers, which is the TV show's early CGI (or more precisely TV produced as composite imagery using hand-drawn art and camera techniques plus some computer tech) and which was incredibly immersive for 1987. They were regular purchases around summer holidays, and although they followed a bit of a downward curve of quality (as did the TV show) I recall getting the first four. When I say they're tie-in media the fiction doesn't necessarily directly connect with the show, making more play of referencing points of history such as the Normans and Richard the Lionheart, although the show did make use of castles of that era as filming locations.
The books follow a format of the first part being a text story and the second half adventure game told in short sections rather than whole pages. There are 170 sections in book two, for instance. The story part is what might labelled 'young adult' now, and some of the language and concepts may have been beyond a lot of viewers of the show (something I enjoyed). I won't spoil the ending but the way Dave Morris involves fae elves is in keeping with British/Irish traditions of myth and legend, and not entirely dissimilar to one of the adventures in Dragon Warriors Book Four.
There isn't much Knightmare memorabilia and the show is unlikely to ever come to DVD due to rights issues, but it gets repeats on UK cable TV and has a signifcant following. If you were a kid in the late 80s you wanted to be on it, and will remember Hugo Myatt as gamemaster Treguard and David Rowe's amazing art fondly. It's inspired a YouTube one-off revival and various documentaries, and the stage show Knightmare Live which I saw when it came to the Midlands sometime last decade.
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Bonus mention: HeroQuest Corgi game books
A fairly short series, consisting of The Fellowship of Four, The Screaming Spectre, The Tyrant's Tomb from 1991 onwards, which I moved onto as Knightmare waned in popularity and the HQ board game became a big thing. If the layouts (covers and the story/adventure split format) seem familiar, they were actually from the same publisher and also involved Dave Morris. The current version of the board game released in the 2020s has resulted in the price of these books skyrocketing, although as with most other things that are long out of print but people remember fondly they're floating around the internet including archive.org and similar places.
As well as producing many games as his Wikipedia entry suggests, Dave Morris also wrote tie-in fiction for series such as Turtles, The Bill, Transformers, Thunderbirds, and books about game creation. He was in his 20s/30s back then and is still writing and blogging and there are interviews with him on YouTube.
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