One in a while for the sake of completion, I have to make some of these posts, tracking back to an earlier period to fill in some D&D related items that got past me. This will be the case with the next three posts where I catch up on this 1 on 1 Adventure Gamebooks series that started coming out in 1985 but which I didn’t notice. Oh well.

So, the first of these comes from D&D legend James M. Ward, who unfortunately left us just last month and who was there from the start of D&D contributing work for the game as early as 1976, with the Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes supplement and also creating early TSR games such as Metamorphosis Alpha and co-creating Gamma World. Later on he would write the Pool series of Forgotten Realms novels as well as design Spellfire, the TSR CCG which showed up as TSR’s answer to Magic: The Gathering. More recently he went on to produce really cool stuff for Troll Lord Games. He will be missed.

Moving now to these books, these were an interesting concept, and although this volume doesn’t explicitly mention D&D, it was clearly inspired by that game, and later volumes will be openly using AD&D, Dragonlance and so forth logos. The idea here is a boxed set with two little books where you and a friend each take a book and assume a character who will compete with each other until one comes out the winner. An interesting twist on the gamebook concept as we will see!