A faerie contest

Talking the other week about Mark Smith's Virtual Reality gamebooks reminded me that I was also called in to do some editorial work on the first one, Green Blood. In the original version, your only chance of dealing with the elves was if you'd picked SWORDPLAY, SPELLS or UNARMED COMBAT at the start of the book. Given that you create a character by picking four out of a list of twelve skills, that means that more than one in four randomly chosen characters wouldn't be able to complete the adventure.

Mark's argument was that a player would be crazy not to start with at least one of those skills, but I was more used to roleplaying games like RuneQuest, and there the whole point is to customize the character by picking skills. It's never a given that you have to be a fighter or a wizard, as in D&D. Even one of the pregen characters in Green Blood (the thief) couldn't have finished the adventure.

It's really no fun to learn halfway through a gamebook that you never had a chance, so the publishers asked me to create some other contests you can use to best the elves using FOLKLORE, CUNNING or ARCHERY. You can play that sequence of the book here -- start at 21, and if you don't use any of the options I added then you'll eventually be sent to 18, which was the entirety of the original contest. 

You can also read the whole book here or try Stuart Lloyd's version Ravages of Hate, which weaves Green Blood into the material of Coils of Hate.