Sunday, March 23, 2014

Works from a nine year old me

Today, I present a collection of my first tentative steps that I made to create my own gamebook material when I was nine.  This was back in 1992 when I had not read many gamebooks, but I was still getting creative with what I knew.  


This first piece is a collection of monsters that I had drawn along with their skill and stamina
scores.  I also drew a human hero with a skill of 12, a stamina of 25 (because a stamina of 24
just isn't good enough) and a luck of 12.  He also had a sword which inflicted 3 stamina points
of damage, inspired by Cassandra's sword from Talisman of Death.  I remember my favourite
monster amongst this little gallery was the winged triceratops with a spiked tail.  It was basically
the coolest thing I could think of at the time.  

And this is the biggest, baddest monster I could think of.  Notice that I helpfully drew a normal human
to show the scale.  I also gave it a skill of 25 and a stamina of 600.  I think I did this because I was annoyed that big bad monsters in gamebooks were not given stats - you just had an auto kill.  

Here are some heroes whose stats have been based on the system from the
Heroquest books.  I think I was unhappy with the fact that they took a lot
of damage in combat and that there were few ways to heal it so I introduced
a defend score.  I have no idea how it used to work, but I think I made sure
that a high defend score reduced speed because armour drags you down.

This is a load of guys trying to take out what appears to be an ogre.  One of them looks a bit
worse for wear.   Also, one of them is standing on and watching while a wizard looks like
he's about to get splatted.  That's not very helpful.  

This is a character sheet that I had for Talisman of Death.  It looks like I
forgot to rub out the potion of fortune.  I also did not seem to like the fact
that my provisions were not described enough, so each provision is a
different type of food to add flavour (no pun intended).  Notice that one
of the provisions is pork and one is beef.  This is a reference to the two
occasions when you can offer creatures dried meat.  One of them is pork
because if you offer the hogmen dried meat, you accidently offend them
by offering pork.  

2 comments:

  1. I was ashamed of my nine year old drawings when I was a teenager, so I don't have any to share. My teenage drawings aren't much better.

    Thanks for sharing! Inspiration comes from all places and times.

    I look forward to sharing the A to Z Blogging Challenge with you.
    http://fmad.kairoscomputers.com/

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    Replies
    1. Many thanks for the comment, and for linking to me from your blog. I'm glad you like them. Looking forward to reading you April A to Z posts!

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