Dungeons, Dragons, and Buckaroos is the latest in Chuck Tingle’s Select Your Own Timeline gamebook series, which was inaugurated with Escape From the Billings Mall and continued with explorations of the glitzy film industry, the roving world of the long-distance trucker, and the chilly depths of the Frozen Lake. All the books in the series take place in the morass of interwoven timelines which is the Tingleverse, but so far have taken place in timelines which are fairly close to our own, bar for the statistically higher proportion of bigfeet, dinosaurs, intelligent objects and similar talkative handsome non-humans in the population.
Dungeons, Dragons, and Buckaroos departs from this, set not in the familiar environs of Billings, Montana but a fantasy kingdom which also happens to be called Billings. Ruled over by King Rolo, a sentient talking D20, Billings finds itself under threat from incursions of the Void. A prophecy predicts that a great role-player will arise in the kingdom that will save it from the Void in its hour of need; plucked from your friend’s cottage (in which you were playing a tabletop RPG in which you play people who live in a futuristic world where you have to contend with grumpy bosses and onerous office tasks), you are offered the call to adventure.

Chuck’s billed this as being his longest gamebook yet, and part of that length arises from the way he offers four distinct quests through the gamebook (though these paths do cross ways and intertwine at points, so you can start on one and finish up on another). The overtly-offered choices are those of the warrior, the wizard, and the true buckaroo; there’s also a “sneak” path (think thieves, complete with guilds), which in keeping with the covert nature of the profession is a secret route you can pick up partway through a runthrough.
Naturally, given how in the Tingleverse the “fourth wall” is not so much a wall as it is a revolving door, there’s a certain amount of metatextual playing with the gamebook concept here, but Chuck finds a different angle to take with it this time. In previous entries in the series this sort of thing has largely taken the form of directly addressing the fact that the player is playing a gamebook. This time, the recursion takes a different course, focusing instead on the fact that the main character in the story is a great role-player of the kingdom of Billings and leveraging that to reveal that they are in fact a role-player in the modern day. (Indeed, perhaps a modern day timeline closer to ours than we’ve seen before in Tingle’s work, since I didn’t notice any Tingle-esque characters like dinosaurs or living objects in the modern-day sections of the gamebook.)
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