Quote from: David Johansen on July 08, 2024, 11:18:24 PMThere were some Middle Earth ones by ICE that eventually led to their demise as Tolkien Enterprises considered them as fiction rather than games.  They're supposed to be pretty good.

I had one of those Middle earth books, and it was indeed good.  Came with its own miniature color hex map.

I got warlock of firetop mountain when I was in 4th grade and I was obsessed with it. I never did get past the maze though. Also my first monster manual for dnd was the fighting fantasy one.

Fabled Lands was a good series. There were supposed to be 12 books, initially only 6 got published, and a 7th came out many years later. Each book covered a region of the series setting, so if you went too far in one direction in one book it would tell you to go to section xxx in a different book. No real overarching plot, but a bunch of interesting adventures you could get into. Pretty sandboxy.

I will also say that, out of all gamebooks I have played (and I've played a lot), this is one of the easiest to port the system directly to actual tabletop play as is.

Edit: little brag, my wife just got me books 1-12 of the most recent Lone Wolf reprints for Christmas. Super excited about these, as LW was one of three entry points for me into TTRPG gaming (the other two being WEG Star Wars D6 and the Ultima pc games)