I bought a bunch of those when I was 10 (about 13 years ago) and they are still sitting on my shelf.

Some of them are very different, my favorite is one where you command an Army and have to travel overland to fight another Army with lots of interesting things happening along the way.

I am also in Canada so if you need the hook up I could probably help. Though you are probably more likely to make Shawn or Rob do it for you.

I definitely recommend them.

Cool! I always wished there was something more involved than the old Choose your Own Adventure books, but never saw these! My fave geek books were the Micro Adventure series, where you had to actually input a program. Ah, the good ole days.

I loved these books to death as a kid. I was extremely excited when the Deathtrap Dungeon game came out on the PS a while back. Unfortunately, that sucker was crap-tastic, and totally screwed up the flavor of the books in favor of hoppity-jumpity-whackity-meh.

I remember there being a thread about it on here, but I couldn't find it, so: check out Project Aon for the Lone Wolf series online. Along the same lines, but there's the opportunity to have your character grow in skill and strength from book to book. Awesome stuff when I was a nerdlet.

Let's here some love for the "Lone Wolf" series, too! Dever did an amazing job creating a complex Tolkein-inspired fantasy world from scratch and carrying it through literally dozens of books. Even better, they are being reprinted, and are also available FREE with the author's blessing: http://www.projectaon.org/ (EDIT: I see Rubb Ed beat me to this link...)

I had several of these and books from some other series too. Among my favorites were the "Grailquest" books, which were kind of a parody of the genre (including breaking the fourth wall, with characters making references to rolling dice, and would have puzzles that involved folding up pages in certain ways), but which sadly few people are familiar with.

I loved, 'The Fantasy Trip', his first go at such things if I remember correctly. I bought the entire series as it came out. Then he had a science fiction one that was good, but I don't remember the name now. I bought allot of his early stuff when it first came out. It had a connection with a magazine, that again, I can't think of the title. (Meta Gaming? Or, gads, tip of my tongue for a bought a ton of them over the years.).

Note: Found the name of the magazine I was thinking about. Nice, very informative indie one called The Space Gamer. It was originally published my Metagaming. The magazine was bought by Steve Jackson from Metagaming.

Yeah, these books were amazing for their time. Much better, IMO, than the comparable CYOA books without any kind of state (stats, inventory).

The books I still have:
Talisman of Death
Sword of the Samurai
Demons of the Deep
All 4 Sorcery! books

You're an evil little man, rabbit. I just paid $15 for the 25th anniversary edition of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a character to roll.

Ooh, I remember doing that as well, and I lived in southern California at the time. Had to beg my folks to buy it for me for Christmas, because Mom was believing all the hype from the fire-and-brimstone folks who thought that rolling a D20 was a mortal sin.

These books were so great. I still have a number of the older ones (US print) with the white covers. Even now, I drag em out and read them from time to time.

I remember "playing" them as a one on one style D&D module with a friend. I'd read the book aloud, and he'd have a character sheet and dice. It was something to do when his sisters had taken over the TV, preventing us from playing Nintendo!

gosh - i remember this book well together with the lonewolf series.

Thanks for linking to that. As my 16 year old nephew says, awesome sauce.

It's when you are in the same age range as a likely presidential candidate that you really feel like you didn't do enough with your life.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely as well.

Grailquest was a great series. They're actually quite humorous and they feature excellent gameplay variety from book to book. I'd love to see a Project Aon style treatment but JH Brennan seems pretty stingy with the book rights.
Another interesting book series was the Way of the Tiger, which is probably even less well known than Grailquest.