#arnestarr

Heheh, I love Wraith with Sickle. There is something kind of delightful about the straightforward naming convention of these books. I also love that the wraith is mostly invisible except for his power drain hand.

Skeleton with Scimitar and Shield feels like the classic Lost Worlds monster book to me. I love it. It makes me immediately think of Harryhausen’s skeleton warriors. Monsters work like just human fighters, except, you know, cooler,

A couple other companies have lifted the mechanics of Lost Worlds for their own games. West End Games comes immediately to mind — they have a lightsaber dueling game and an X-Wing vs Tie Fighter game. I think there are some Game Workshop variants out there too.

Skeleton with Scimitar and Shield feels like the classic Lost Worlds monster book to me. I love it. It makes me immediately think of Harryhausen’s skeleton warriors. Monsters work like just human fighters, except, you know, cooler,

Lost Worlds is a novel little gamebook series created by Alfred Leonardi. They’ve been published by several company’s over the years, but Nova was the first in 1983. They’re a hand-to-hand combat variant of rules Leonardi created for the Ace of Aces dogfighting game in 1980 (which are super cool in their own right and I need to share them with y’all some time)

These are combat books and totally modular, so you can pick your favorite fighter in the line and square them off against any other fighter, or monster. You can even party up 2 or 3 on one for tough monsters. When you play, you hand your character book off to you opponent — the pages inside are their first person view of you character attacking. You choose maneuvers from a card and resolve them simultaneously. Sometimes they result in you scoring a hit or being hit, other times you’ll whiff or reposition. Most of the time, a given move you select and the move your opponent used restrict your options for the following turn — getting knocked down is going to make it hard to charge next round, for instance.

Fighter Mage with Magic Sword introduced spellcasting into the Lost Worlds combat gamebook series. Spells are handled with separate cards — I believe you got a random assortment and could supplement them with a standard set found in The Tome of Red Magic. Fighter Mage here also comes with a magic sword, also on a separate card (I guess you could lose it in a fight or give it to another character?) that does double damage to trolls.