Some of you might recall the Choose Your Own Adventure book series from the early 1980s. These were non-linear, second-person narratives in which you would read a page or two and then make a choice about what you as the protagonist would do next, and your choice would determine the next part of the book you would read. So you could navigate through a variety of narratives depending on which choices you made.
The second book shown here, from the World of Lone Wolf series a little later in the 80s, takes that a step further. It’s a single-player role-playing game book, in which you play a wizard of the Shianti, of the Shadakine Empire. Before reading the book, you create a character having unique magical abilities, and then as you read the book you encounter situations where you need to test those abilities against randomly generated numbers, which determines the next part of the book you read. You can acquire items throughout the book that help you in other parts of the book.
The third book shown here, The Book of Wizardry by Cornelius Rumstuckle, 2003, applies that sort of architecture to practical occultism. The first 22 chapters…
Hi HyperRitual,
excellent presentation so far. I think that the figure from Matthew Reinhart & Robert Sabuda’s Encyclopaedia Mythologica volume, Dragons & Monsters, is the Medusa and not the Sphinx. I’m not 100% certain about this, but I can deduct it from her snakey hair.
Keep up with the great work,
Plethon.
Hi, Nick. Thanks for taking time to check out my work. Look at the lower-right corner of the book; that is the transition I am referring to in the speech/text. :-)
Right, I get it now, thank you for pointing it out. I have finished watching the slide show and I find it brilliant. It does motivate to go out and start doing, creating, interacting… Please produce more work like this, we’re so thirsty for this kind of quality.
Cheers, man!