The Serpent King's Domain: Volume 7 (Fabled Lands) Paperback – 4 Feb. 2018

The latest episode in re-launch of the Fabled Lands series - an almost unique run of old school game books from the same bloke behind the Blood Sword Books and the Dragon Warriors RPG. Unique because unlike most of their kind - which tend to be a bit linear - these are about as open world as the format allows, allowing the player to roam freely from book to book around the word. Just be aware that the series is not finished and there are therefore places that remain impossible to reach.

A formidable addition to a series with a formidable pedigree. The writing continues to carry the series, with Gresty in strong form as he takes the torch from Morris and Thomson.The book is substantially longer than previous entries in the series, and uses its length entirely appropriately. It would be very welcome for future instalments to take this approach, which makes the world feel both denser and more expansive than ever. Perhaps we'll see more writers joining the project in due time to help complete the series? No matter what, this book offers the reader warm assurance that the series is in safe and capable hands.

A late but great landmark in the history of gamebooks, the Fabled Lands series, is here revived and continued in triumph with 1200 paragraphs of finely crafted high adventure that demand the attention of the dice-rolling interactive-fiction connoisseur.

At about twice the length of the previous books, this was worth the wait. Here's hoping the series gets completed.

Despite being bigger, this book's world is smaller. You are restricted from trading if you don't have a certain item.Therefore, there are less opportunities. This book is about double the size of a previous FL book, yet previous FL books gave more to do. Until I get that item, I'm not going anywhere.I hope that the next book is better. Since this book was written by a new author, I have to wonder if that's why it seems less consistent.

This series is fantastic, a non linear choose-your-own-adventure, each linking to the others, set in a world conjured through a style of writing laced with poetic whimsy - search for parrot fungus, uncanny salts and verdigris keys, travel from Wishport to Smogmaw via the Unnumbered Isles and treat with Oliphardes the Wizardly and Kaschuf the Deathless - you will only regret that you didn't do so sooner.

The only thing this fantastic 'open- world' adventure book doesn't have compared with a computer RPG such as Skyrim is a built in soundtrack; put some Jeremy Soule albums on in the background, get out the dice, and get playing ! (And your imagination, ably assisted by Russ Nicholson's artistic wizardry, is way better than computer graphics anyway)

Towards the end of the heyday of adventure gamebooks, the Fabled Lands series was a fantastic concept that reimagined the gamebook. Prior to their publication adventure gamebooks had revolved around a particular quest or mission of some nature (the most popular being the ‘hunt down and defeat the bad guy in his lair’ scenario). Adopting a less linear approach, Fabled Lands offered an open world environment in which the reader could explore and participate at their leisure. Rather than one focussed full adventure they provided a variety of sub-quests.The world of Fabled lands was divided into twelve geographical regions, with one book to be set in each. However, only the first six were published. Thus, large swathes of the world map were tantalisingly left as unable to be explored.Over two decades later the seventh book has finally emerged. The previous six all possessed a theme loosely inspired by a historical period and/or geographical location. ‘The Serpent King’s Domain’ covers the territory of Ankon-Konu, the massive southern continent extensively covered in jungle, and is heavily influenced by a mix of Meso-american cultures.After such a long wait, though, ‘The Serpent King’s Domain’ is, unfortunately, a little disappointing. Maybe expectations were a little too high. However, whereas I was utterly engrossed in the worlds of the previous six books, I just didn’t find this one particularly engaging. Partially this is due to it not embracing its ‘theme’ as much as I personally would have liked. I was hoping for a lot more temple complexes or ruins to find and explore.The main drawback, though, is that despite its enormous size at 1200 referenced sections, there just isn’t that much to do. A lot of the gameplay seems to involve wandering around a little aimlessly. There aren’t anywhere near the amount of mini-quests or side-missions as the previous books. This one is more a series of encounters rather than quests.This is, perhaps, a result of there being one considerably large mission, that of facing the God King Namagal. This is an exceptionally complex task that isn’t readily apparent. A lot of little encounters and discoveries revolving heavily around codewords will eventually lead you there after extensive persistence. It is all a bit tedious and repetitive and succeeding is somewhat underwhelming and unsatisfying. It is, therefore, a shame that this ‘quest’ takes up so much of the content.This extensive mission is more akin to that of a traditional gamebook rather than the Fabled Lands approach. Unfortunately, ‘The Serpent King’s Domain’ treads the path of both methods without getting either quite right.It also fails to interact enough, if at all, with the other Fabled Lands gamebooks. Unluckily it is a victim of circumstance, caught between the cancellation of the series and its revival.Hopefully, if the series continues, future books will be less individual and there would be some form of overall plan for those remaining. Planning out five books in advance would obviously be a considerable commitment, but future books would certainly benefit.