Gamer fiction? Books based on games? Books that ARE games?

Cafe Society
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If you choose “Books that ARE games,” turn to PAGE 32.

Ahem. The recent fissioning off of the gaming forum from Cafe Society proper has prompted me to consider how many books I’ve read that straddle the line between fiction and game.

Yes, gamer fiction: that peculiar subgenre of fantasy/SF which exists primarily as a product tie-in to RPGs, and is mostly written by people named Weis, Hickman and Greenwood. I’ve heard it said that the Dragonlance series is best not revisited after age 14, and I haven’t chosen to test this assertion. Are there any such product tie-in novels that are generally regarded as good writing, compared with other fantasy/SF?

I still read gamer fiction on occasion-- not too long ago I picked up a series for the D&D 3rd Edition setting “Scarred Lands,” and it was pretty entertaining. I particularly enjoy the gymnastics that the author employs in order to avoid using setting-inappropriate terms like “teleportation” or “X-ray vision.” I’ve also enjoyed several of the “Ravenloft” books, even while recognizing how the works don’t really do their literary source material any favors.

Then there are the books based on RPGs that aren’t official tie-ins. Por ejemplo, Raymond E. Feist is a popular fantasy author whose first series was based on the D&D-type game he played in college. Starting back in the mid-1980s, George R. R. Martin edited a shared world-style series called “Wild Cards” based on his GURPS Supers campaign. (Apparently a new “Wild Cards” novel was published earlier this year! How about that?)

On the other hand are books that are themselves games: “Choose Your Own Adventure,” “Which Way Books,” etc. These are the series that I’m familiar with from my youth, anyway. “Warning! DO NOT read this book from beginning to end!..” I think that these series’ fantastic subject matter and nonlinear structure may well have laid the foundation for my ongoing mental illness in later life. “You are visiting your uncle’s ranch over the summer, when you discover a dinosaur egg. Suddenly a vampire leaps at you from the shadows!” There were also some D&D-themed books which had you roll up a character beforehand-- anyone remember those?

Obviously the “game/book” relationship isn’t limited to RPGs. Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass comes to mind, with its interwoven chess structure throughout. I’m not trying to hammer down the topic too tightly here. Feel free to ramble as needed.

If you attack the vampire with the egg, turn to PAGE 64.

If you ask the vampire about the egg, turn to page 3.

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Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes takes place in a futuristic D&D/RPG theme park.

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There was a series that was similar, but had significant differences, but I can’t remember the titles or the authors. In this one, the patrons actually entered a virtual reality world. Somehow, someone came out of the virtual reality sleep dead, and the original programmer of the game (which was medieval fantasy) had to go in and try to figure out what had happened. I remember that somehow the game program itself had developed into a primitive AI and had an avatar inside the virtual reality world. There was something about two Russian diplomats. There was somehow a “moose and squirrel” joke from the male diplomat…Boris Badenov style.

That’s all I really remember of it…haven’t been able to remember the identifying information in years…

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It gets even more complicated than that, because his books were so popular, they made two computer games set in his world, “Betrayal at Krondor” and “Return to Krondor”. Hee then wrote novelizations of those games.

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When I was younger, much younger, I used to read some books based on the AD&D Ravenloft setting. More recently I read Dan Abnett’s Traitor General which is set in the world of Game Workshop’s Warhammer 40k. Dan Abnett is recognized as being one of the best writers writing Warhammer stuff. I found this particular book to be boring and it’s kept me away from all other Warhammer 40k books.

I also read some Wildcards stuff when I was younger but I don’t know if I read the stuff GURPS based their game off of or stuff released after GURPS released their product.

I did find an old choose your own adventure book set in the Car Wars universe which I gave to a friend for Christmas a few years back. I don’t know if it was any good.

Marc

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Dream Park went on to spawn an actual gaming organization named after the one in the book–the International Fantasy Gaming Society, named with permission from Niven and Barnes. The group runs D&D-like combat LARP games for the most part, though it once had a ruleset for a spy game as well.

There was also a Dream Park Corporation at one point, which was created to try to realize some of the high-tech aspects of the games in the novel. The state-of-the-art just wasn’t stately enough to pull it off at the time (and still isn’t, although we seem to be getting closer).

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Mercedes Lackey wrote some pretty good novels based on the Bard’s Tale games. I rather liked her take on Dark Elves; instead of the standard ripoff of D&D with creepy art & architechture and spiders, they were more . . . empty. No art, no music, no ornaments of any kind. They had no style, and that actually made them come across as eviller. They didn’t come across as “cool”, but as hollow; interested in physical pleasure, power, cruelty and killing and nothing else.

David Weber and Steve White have written several books ( beginning chronologically with Crusade ) set in the Starfire game universe. Military sci-fi; I liked it, but then I’m a big Weber fan.

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Masquerade launched a string of armchair treasure hunt books in which clues contained in the images and text led to real hidden treasure.

Maze was a book in which each page represented a room, with numbered doors leading to other rooms/pages. The challenges were to use clues in the pictures and text to find the shortest route into the center of the house and back again, decipher the riddle in the center room, and find the answer, which was hidden along the shortest route. Although you can find the riddle and at least two possible answers on the Internet, I haven’t seen anyone explain how you’re supposed to find the shortest route, other than trial and error. The first edition of the book promised $10,000 to the person who solved it, although no one seems to have collected.

Who Killed the Robins Family? offered $10,000 to the reader who solved the book’s multiple murders.

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Steven Brust’s Dragaera series was based on his D&D campaign. I have a Choose Your Own Adventure book – Dzurlord- – based on his books. Kind of like the worm ate its own tail on that one.

The Eisenhorn omnibus is the one to start with. I’m currently working my way through the Gaunt’s Ghosts books, but Eisenhorn was the entry drug.

Eisenhorn was also a major inspiration on the new Dark Heresy RPG… which is a tabletop RPG inspired by books inspired by the Warhammer 40K tabletop wargame. Also getting kind of dizzy.

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Let me add “Books that inspired Dungeons and Dragons (and thus modern fantasy books and gaming)”. The star of this section is of course Lord of the Rings, with Hobbits, Ents, Rangers, the Mines of Moria, and so on, but there are some others. Especially obvious is a little book called “The Dying Earth,” which introduced the notion that mages forget their spells when they cast them.

Another “book based on RPG campaign” is The Deed of Paksenarrion by E. Moon; at least it reads that way to me.

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Run Dijkstra’s algorithm twice: first using room one as the source, and secondly using the center room as the source. That’ll give you the shortest path from room one to the center and the shortest path from the center to room one, and concatenating them gives the shortest path from room one to the center and back.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the book, it’s available online, although the scans of the pages are kinda small.

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This brings to mind another microgenre which I recall from the 1980s, back when D&D was still the Devil’s handiwork: stories in which the fantasy game setting magically turns out to be real.

There was the awkwardly-named “Gamearth” (Gam-Earth? A planet where legs evolved from man?!) by the omnipresent Kevin J. Anderson; and the “Guardians of the Flame” series by Joel Rosenberg (who I believe was a sometime associate of Raymond Feist), although the latter series wore out the premise after the first couple volumes.

Obviously there have been scads of books that depict crossover between a magical reality and the modern world; but these were specifically “fantasy game worlds.”

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The first Myst book, written by David Wingrove, was excellent. I never tried any of the sequels, so I’d actually be interested in knowing if they were of the same quality?

Vampire of the Mists by Christie Golden is a Ravenloft book. I’ve never played the game and know nothing about it (beyond that it presumably contains vampires), but the book was excellent. (Of course, I haven’t read it since I was 12.)

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I loved the choose your own adventure books when I was a youngster, I read all of the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone and also the Lone Wolf books by Joe Dever. They were fantastic, and the FF books were actually extremely good vocabulary builders as well.

The other books that sprang to mind immediately were the Warhammer 40K books which I’ve read a few of. I think they’re okay, more aimed at teenagers and those that never venture outside of the fantasy/sci-fi genres.

There were also, of course, the Myst books. Pretty obligatory for a game that was based on the concept of reading (and entering) books.

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This book lead me to write my first computer program! (I am now a professional computer programmer) I wrote what was essentially a breadth-first-search algorithm to search the maze and find the solution. I was unable to find a solution that matched the given parameters, leading me to believe there was a simple trick to the solution–I think there is a secret passage hidden in the pictures somewhere that I could not find.

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I was going to mention the Lone Wold Books, but I see illuminatiprimus beat me to it.

A friend of mine edited a not-for-profit book that was composed of “bad endings” of choose your own adventure stories. It was awesome, and I’m in it twice.

(proceeds go to Habitat for Humanity in the Gulf Coast region, pm me for details if interested)

I have tried a few times over the last decade or so to write up the game world in my head. I couldn’t get it all down correctly, for me, so I started writing a story set in it. I can see how Weis and Hickman et al would do soemthing of that sort, it really helped.

I have at home a “Combat Command” book, which appears to basically be a Choose Your Own Adventure type book set in RAH’s Starship Troopers world.

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I once read a paperback entitled Extreme Paranoia: Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Shot!, based on the RPG game Extreme Paranoia and (co-)written by one of the game’s (co-)creators.

Whatever else the two Amazon commentators say, I enjoyed the book and felt it did have somewhat of the flavor of an RPG session. While I had never played the XP game myself, I was aware/familiar with it and its premise before reading the book; I knew people who played it, and had skim-read through the rulebook in a gaming store.

I also read a paperback adaptation of the Infocom game Planetfall. That one was pretty bad; the style and tone of the writing was very different from what I remembered liking about the games.

Tying in to the other thread on what “gamer” means – has anybody ever written books on video games? Like some kind of backstory for Dirk from Dragon’s Lair, or Princess Zelda, or… The Planet of the Pac-Men? (shudder)

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I had a strange Choose Your Own Adventure book as a girl, it started out with a girl who was a ballerina (a student) and took all sorts of twists. There were several strange endings, like one where you are grabbed off the street by some big Russian guys who mistake you for some Russian ballerina and when they realize you aren’t her they put you back on the street and drive off. Or one ending where, after drinking some tea with a nice little old lady you fall asleep and find yourself locked in her room. There’s no way out and when you start to cry your tears turn into a puddle, which turns into an ocean and you floating in it when you are picked up by a bunch of people in a ballet slipper boat looking for their lost princess… who turns out to be you.

It was trying to draw the girls into the choose your own adventure type, and for me (the well read child) it was very surreal…

There are some novels based in the World of Darkness and printed by White Wolf, I have a couple of them and one I’ve read several times. Funny thing is, I’d bought them before I even knew about the World of Darkness.

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Quag Keep by Andre Norton, was based on a D&D 1st ed game she played in, very early in D&D.

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Gamearth was the very example I was thinking of when I opened this thread.

I can’t think of the title or author, but there was a novel about people in a mundane modern world getting simultaneously involved with both a medievel world of magic AND a high tech SF universe; both apparently under attack by different aspects of the same trans-reality menace.