So many game books, so few blog posts

It’s been a chaotic few months, since I last posted in… January? We’ve played a few game books since then, but I’ve forgotten to post about them.

Some highlights…

A friend liked the undersea theme of Demons of the Deep, so we played it a couple of times. Immediately after landing in the plaza, she fought a statue and won a jade dolphin crown. She loved it, and updated her her stick figure portrait to have the crown. Doesn’t that seem very Kingdom of Loathing, a stick figure character portrait? She then got sucked into a trapdoor, was lost in the darkness without a glowfish, and eventually the magic wore off and she drowned. It was brief yet exciting.

On her second play, she again won the crown but then steered clear of the trapdoor. She met a dolphin being menaced by a shark, and since she could talk to the dolphin (yay, crown) she helped to fight off the shark. Isn’t that sweet? Well, no, not if you’re the shark. Anyway, the dolphin advised her to seek out the Sea Dragon who is very wise but also vicious and hungry. I thought to myself that the Sea Dragon probably pays the dolphin for sending food their way, but she thought oh well, a lead is a lead. She made her way to the Sea Dragon, then was given a choice of ways to sweet-talk it into giving help instead of provoking its appetite. She must have picked wrongly, because the Sea Dragon attacks her, and she died.

We also opened up Decisions to Wrestle With for the first time. She’s a (presumably human) fast-food worker, who quit her job to become a professional wrestler. I don’t recall all the ins and outs of her path, but the ending was pretty brutal. She pinned down a living block of ice, but held on for too long and froze solid herself. One-two-three she won… but then she shattered into pieces. Ouch. That’s an inglorious ending to a very short wrestling career.

And, I’ve been playing Alone Against the Frost, which is a single-player adventure using the Call of Cthulhu RPG system. I’m really enjoying it. I don’t believe one can really succeed at it and get one of the good endings, but the narrative truly branches significantly into scores of different endings, most of them wonderfully gruesome. I blogged my first two playthroughs already, where I was deboditated and put in a jar, and where I became a cryptid. My later ones haven’t been quite as exciting, and usually just end with finding my way back to civilization and a prison cell and/or wrecked career for my reckless endangerment of students. I’ll be interested to try the other Alone Against titles.