Hmm...

I ran across this group today. It has 150 members listed, but seems
to have died out in 2001 or so. I guess the way to perhaps kindle a
little bit of activity is to post myself.

For actual _playing_, I would say the role-playing books I used the
most were the _Sorcery_ series. Very re-playable, well balanced, and
a well written epic quest.

However, the books that over the years I've enjoyed _reading_ the most
has been by far the GrailQuest series by J. H. Brennan (who seems to
go by "Herbie" Brennan now as an author). I found them terribly
interesting and funny in a way that I've seen very few authors
achieve.

As far as gameplay, unfortunately I think that the series got way to
hard as it went along. The first couple of books were reasonably well
balanced, and I think that they had a decent chance to be played
through successfully on the first try. However, starting with
GrailQuest 4, I think that unfortunately you'd have to play through
the books several times and know where the "make this choice and die
instantly" pages are and know to avoid them. Back when I was
originally reading the books in jr. high, I played through the first
couple all the way through for real, but I never played through the
6th one at all. The way the astral plane bit is set up, you'd have to
have a huge amount of fore-knowledge to get through to the end at all,
and hit some of the things in the correct order.

Having read those books, and had them on my bookshelves for years
since then, I'm happy to say that my life has come full circle
recently. I'm proud to say that Friday, August 13, 2004, I hiked to
the top of Glastonbury Tor (and visited Stonehenge and other cool
stuff). My hard drive in my machine at work died around that same
time, but I deny any causal connection between the two events.

So--Any GrailQuest fans out there who actually played all the way
through the 6 books (I think volumes 7 and 8 were UK only)? Did you
actually make it all the way through without dying once? Once you
died once with the Luckstone from CoD, did you "keep" it to give you
an advantage?

Sincerely,

Craig Steffen

--
craig@...
public key available at http://www.craigsteffen.net/GPG/
current goal: use a CueCat scanner to inventory my books
career goal: be the first Vorlon Time Lord