Last year I wrote about Joe Dever's Combat Heroes, the wild apogee of the 1980s gamebook boom. Whereas Choose Your Own Adventure offered branching paths and Fighting Fantasy introduced role-playing elements, Combat Heroes implemented grid-based free-movement dungeon crawlers. In books! For two players! A full-page illustration for every possible orientation and position of you and your adversary. It was dependent on an elegant but intimidating spreadsheet, on each page, to calculate which entry to turn to. And they are long out of print.
Enter Project Aon, making them legally available for download, along with Dever's other classics, including the more successful (and playable!) Lone Wolf series and another gamebook world I enjoyed, the postapocalyptic Freeway Warrior. There are even some exclusives from the archives. And maps and paths for each…
Dever himself died in 2016, but, along with many collaborators, released his works under a permissive license in the 1990s.
Joe Dever has most generously offered to allow some of his books to be published on the internet thereafter to be downloaded free-of-charge. Rob Adams, Paul Bonner, Gary Chalk, Melvyn Grant, Richard Hook, Peter Andrew Jones, Cyril Julien, Peter Lyon, Peter Parr, Graham Round, and Brian Williams have also generously offered similar permission for their contributions to the world of Magnamund. Project Aon is a volunteer group of fans dedicated to publishing these works.
The downloads are offered as ebooks, offline HTML, plain text, and so on. Note that many of them are back in print; gamebooks are cool again.
If you wish to use your Kai Discipline of Sixth Sense, turn to Project Aon [projectaon.org]
