Fabled Lands

Fabled Lands is the name of a series of fantasy gamebooks written by established gamebook authors Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson and published by Pan Books, a division of Macmillan in the mid 90s. Cover art was by Kevin Jenkins with Russ Nicholson and Arun Pottier providing maps and illustrations.

Originally planned as a twelve-book series, only six were released between 1995 and 1996 before the series was cancelled. The first two books were also printed under the name Quest in the U.S. by publishers Price Stern Sloan. Beginning in July 2015, the makers of Fabled Lands launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund completion of Book Seven; the Kickstarter campaign hit its base target within the first 45 minutes it was online.

The books are now back in print and available on Amazon as of December 2010.

Two iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch applications were developed by Megara Entertainment. The first app, based on The War-Torn Kingdom, included new colour art and original coloured in art from Russ Nicholson, and was released on January 20, 2011. The second app was released in June, 2011. Following Megara's decision to withdraw from app development in 2012, digital rights reverted to the authors and the apps were withdrawn from sale.

A Fabled Lands Role Playing Game and 12 source books based on the original game books are being written by Shane Garvey and Jamie Wallis of Greywood Publishing. The RPG rules are based on the original rules of the game books but have been expanded to accommodate an adventuring party rather than a solo player and a role playing experience rather than a game book. The twelve source books are each based on an area covered by the six published and the six unpublished game books from 1995. The first of these source books is titled Sokara - The War-Torn Kingdom. The RPG and first of the source books are due out in mid-2011.

The books deviated from other mainstream gamebooks (such as the Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf series) in a number of ways. The most notable of these was the open-ended, free roaming gameplay. Other gamebooks gave the character a set quest, with some leniency in how they went about accomplishing it; when they completed the quest, the gamebook ended. The Fabled Lands series gave the player an entire fantasy world to roam around in, doing whatever they wished with no limits or linearity; there was no set quest and there is no way to "finish" the series (unless the player dies). There are hundreds of quests in the six books that were published, of varying lengths. The player is free to pursue these at his leisure, or spend his time doing entirely different things - wandering, trading, exploring or building up his abilities.

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