Anyone else remember those? Written by Jamie Thompson and Dave Morris, they were a series of gamebooks called Fabled Lands in the UK, Quest in the US. It was great - each book was a different country in a much larger world and players chose a character in their starting book and could travel around at will. You could hop between countries by taking your persistent character to a new book and you could make these really big changes in the game world by toppling governments and so on. There were 12 books total - 10 countries, 1 for the ocean and 1 for the Underworld - but they only ever published the first 6. Anyway, I just found an online version which runs using Java. That's my weekend gone, but I thought I'd share it with you guys first. http://au.geocities.com/jemann75/
Ahh I remember them, think I still have a copy of The Plains of Howling Darkness. I never really got into them because you just couldn't find them in the shops. I always did prefer the Fighting Fantasy game books http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy the best ofwhich IMO was "City of Thieves". Most fun any kid could have reading a book...