Legendary Kingdoms is an epic open-world fantasy adventure gamebook series from Spidermind Games, where you lead a party of adventurers (of your own design, or by choosing four of the six pre-generated characters) in a world that intelligently adapts to your actions. You can proceed to explore this enormous setting, which is divided into six books, in any order, increasing your party’s skill, wealth and renown, allowing them to then take on more challenging adventures, including a world-spanning final quest to thwart a terrible evil that could end all existence.
Each of the six Legendary Kingdoms gamebooks cover a distinct geographic area and feature their own main plot (which you can follow or ignore), dozens of adventure sites, and lots of cities, character-building moments and secret areas. Each book is also the home of a particular pre-generated character, and you can undertake their personal quest if you wish to complete that character’s arc to gain bonuses and special items.
Book 1: The Valley of Bones takes place in a desert wilderness where tyrant kings oppress the teeming masses in a land strewn with ancient artefacts and ruins. But their grip on power is fragile … and the citizenry are ripe for revolution. It is a land of blood and sand, where civilisation is rare and terrible beasts roam freely.
Book 2: Crown and Tower takes place in the high-medieval realm of Longport Bay, torn apart by the struggle for power between two noble families.
Book 3: Pirates of the Splintered Isles is set in a tropical paradise, where competition for spice has the great powers of the world vying for domination.
Book 4: The Gilded Throne covers the duchy of Pendrilor, seat of the corrupt king of Royce. Wealth drips from its ports, but it is blind to an encroaching threat, which could see it wiped from the globe!
Book 5: The Savage Lands is set in an untamed wilderness, unmapped by civilised realms. A terrible secret lurks in its forgotten grottos and sky-touching mountains.
Book 6: Drakehallow is a gas-powered hell of furnaces and sorcery. The population cram into over-packed, crumbling cities for fear of encountering the monstrous creations of their depraved industry.
This ambitious series includes full-party combat and a full spell-casting system. You can buy your own galleys and galleons and explore the oceans, fighting off pirates with the Naval Combat system. If you become a landowner, or are promoted to a general, you can also fight with entire armies using the mass-combat system. You’ll create new regiments by either mustering your own troops, or forming alliances with other kings and lords, and using their troops in battle. It is possible to transfer troop regiments between books (if you control enough costal cities), so the deadly warriors you train in one book can fight for you in another.
Legendary Kingdoms reflects, in gamebook form, the type of unpredictable events and circumstances present in a good D&D campaign. Your party doesn’t always travel together, with the game’s mechanics allowing you to do things as a team or as individuals. You can even abandon party members and leave them to their fate and hire a new adventurer. Ultimately, you can do as you wish. Do you become revolutionaries? Avoid politics and explore winding dungeons? Become obsessed with magic, and desire to find all of the spells and weird secret areas in each book? Or perhaps you want to romantically entangle your characters in a gloriously complex love-triangle?
The gamebooks feature glorious cover and internal artwork by renowned artists Claudio Pilia (background artist for Game of Thrones) and Robin Smith (2000AD: Judge Dredd, Slaine, etc), provoking the desire for exploration, which is at the heart of the series. Book 1: The Valley of Bones currently consists of 900+ references, which may be further increased if the upcoming Kickstarter campaign proves successful. The books are slightly oversized (think Fabled Lands large size) so that they can be spread open when you play.
A FREE sample pdf of 140 sections from Book 1: The Valley of Bones is currently available to download from the Legendary Kingdoms website. Spidermind Games aim to launch their Kickstarter campaign for this first book at the end of May. GBN will continue to closely follow this new and exciting six-book series, so try out the sample of The Valley of Bones and prepare yourself for extensive sandbox adventuring in the Legendary Kingdoms.
This sounds incredible! It’s great to see that writers are finally taking the ambitious nature of the Fabled Lands books from twenty years ago within the genre of these ‘open world game books’ and doing their own take on it, from the revived Fabled Lands to Steam Highwayman and now this! I never thought of a game book like this with an entire party of adventurers (plus stuff like character specific quests and romance) so I look forwards to getting involved in the Kickstarter! I also hope to see more of these open world game books in the future since I firmly believe there’s a real audience for them, especially if they tap into other genres like space sci-fi, western, horror, modern day spies, super heroes, time travel and more.
I agree, Derek – long may this ‘open world revival’ continue!
Steam Highwayman recently showed what can be done with this approach, and as you note, it would be great to see other genres represented with this type of game system. I’m keen to see how it all works in Legendary Kingdoms – let’s hope that it truly delivers an exciting gamebook experience.
Sounds like Fabled Lands to me. Think I’ll wait until all 6 books are published before buying them. I already own far too many incomplete gamebook series.
It’s certainly got a strong FL flavour – which is a good thing.
It’s “Judge Dredd” 😛
Looking forward to this Kickstarter though!
Oops! 🙂
900 references in clearly a lot, though how well does such an ambitious system work? I guess they are trying to go for a Fabled Lands approach (never played that, but, how does it compare?)
I don’t think that the system is overly ambitious, but the depth of the included content will be interesting to see. The Fabled Lands comparison probably only covers the similar open-world, multi-book structure, as I’m expecting Legendary Kingdoms to be quite a different experience in most other aspects. The addition of personal quests for the pre-gen characters, the group aspect and opportunities for mass combat are certainly new, and the ‘hidden’ final quest certainly sets this gamebook series apart from most others.
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