What was this "Trapped in an RPG" book?
January 28, 2014 12:49 PM   Subscribe

A book that I'm reading now gave me a flashback to something that I must have read around 1992-93, and now I want to find that book again, re-read it, and see if it ever became a series (ISTR a cliff-hanger-ish ending). Definitely not Joel Rosenberg's _Guardians of Flame_ series, but the same trope - group of modern-day RPG players find themselves trapped in the game they're playing. Sadly, the number of things I remember (of the paperback edition that I read) is pretty sparse. I remember: the blue cover, with a wizard riding in a Montgolfier brothers'-style hot air balloon in front of a computer; that the 'game world' the players found themselves in had very hexagonal terrain and that inhabitants of the game world knew how many hexes of different terrain they could travel in a given time period, and could not cross hex boundaries even if there was plenty of daylight left if they'd traveled that distance. I know it's a longshot, but, help?
posted by hanov3r to Media & Arts (7 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
The best I can come up with on this is Tad Williams's Otherland books, in which at least one of the game worlds had a chessboard terrain thing going, with movement restrictions, and the books do satisfy the cliffhanger ending/series criterion. But the RPG players in that are near-future, not modern, and the cover doesn't match.

I feel like I've read another one like this, though, but I'm having no luck searching.
posted by asperity at 2:02 PM on January 28, 2014


I've read this book and remember the cover, the hex movement, and even its location in my old library. But I can't remember the author. I'm pretty sure it's not Williams because it was not shelved in the Ws and I suspect that the title of the book was the same as the fictional game the main characters were playing.

This is going to bug me too, so I'll keep searching!
posted by robocop is bleeding at 2:23 PM on January 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


I feel like I may also have read this book (and if it's the one I'm thinking of it's bugged me for years). The hex thing really rings a bell. I remember it as a brown/orange book rather than a blue, though, so maybe it's something entirely different.

In my memory the RPG players were teenagers or college students and they fought some beast that was described as "chitinous," a word that I had to look up. Also, they had built the RPG themselves, and sculpted the beast they ended up having to kill out of clay or something.
posted by mskyle at 2:26 PM on January 28, 2014


Best answer: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1404035.Gamearth
Gamearth?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamearth_Trilogy
posted by Jacen at 2:30 PM on January 28, 2014




Yes! I remember the gems shaped like dice.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:32 PM on January 28, 2014


Response by poster: Yep, it's Gamearth. Thanks, folks!
posted by hanov3r at 5:14 PM on January 28, 2014


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