Thank you! I’ve added The Saga of Oedipus Rex. I haven’t yet played A Midsummer Night’s Choice either (although I definitely want to!), but based on the description it seems to be more a pastiche/homage than an adaptation, so I’m leaving it off the list for now.
(Now I’m actually tempted to make another list for homages and pastiches. 
)
…This explains why I had no clue WTF was going on in those games. I think the author expects you to know something about the Craft Sequence.
That’s how I feel about the Vampire the Masquerade adaptations. I wanted to get into them but it feels like being dropped in the middle of a very busy world with no map and everyone bumping into you on the sidewalk 
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t his intention. You certainly wouldn’t have to be familiar with any characters or specific events, since at the time Choice of the Deathless was published, it took place earlier in the in-world chronology than any of the novels yet written, and The City’s Thirst takes place before any of the novels.
I didn’t know Choice of the Deathless was part of an existing series when I first read it, and I was able to follow what was going on. But Max Gladstone’s approach to narrative is notably less straightforward than that of any previous CoG writer (or the vast majority since), and since he is bringing in much more than the average amount of worldbuilding, it can certainly feel a bit unwieldy.
See, it doesn’t feel to me like he’s bringing in much of any worldbuilding. I’m sure he has done a lot. But most of it doesn’t seem to be in the games at all.
Though, maybe that’s the problem. He’s trying not to overwhelm us, which for me just means I feel like I’m missing something.
Maybe authors in general do this?? They just don’t provide info if they want the reader to supply it? I never try to supply anything from my own imagination to someone else’s setting, so for me that just ends up with massive holes in the setting.
Funnily enough, I had more of an issue with the Vampire Game Jam games that were trying to pretend they were about VtM but really weren’t. I found myself inserting VtM lore where there wasn’t any.
This might be a good idea. why, I think a certain @Schliemannsghost would know a thing or two about those. As for a Midsummer’s Night’s Choice, I think it’s in a gray area… I think it is primarily a pastiche, but given that there’s pretty liberal quoting of Shakespeare himself and that a lot of the plotlines follow the original story, there’s an argument to be made.
Two others I can think of:
The Road to Canterbury, set in the world of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
NE By NW OZ, set in Baum’s Oz
Fair enough. Any adaptation of a non-interactive work is necessarily going to be a loose one, so I can see fit to broaden my scope slightly here.
Good catch, thank you!
I had no idea there were books related to the Deathless games?? I’m so excited! Choice of the Deathless is one of my favorites.
Oh yes! There are six novels in the Craft Sequence. And you just might see a character from Choice of the Deathless in one of them. Enjoy!
(This is why I created this list! Well, that and I’m a weirdsmobile who makes lists for fun.)
Which one? I know that there’s a few from Deathless: The City’s Thirst who show up in the books, those being Temoc and the Red King, but I don’t remember any from Choice of the Deathless.
Ashleigh Wakefield makes a cameo in Four Roads Cross.
I haven’t read the books yet, but Gladstone has stated that he was very careful not to mention the character’s gender in the book, since in the game their gender is determined by the player’s choices.
And as I recall, Ashleigh is delightfully badass in that cameo. There’s even an offhand reference to someone on their team who’s busy on another project and thus not present in the book, who is (I think) the player character. It’s a really elegant way of making that story clearly canonical for the setting, without contradicting any choices the player made within it.
(I’m staring a little wistfully at this whole list, because there was a license I wanted to write for and wasn’t able to because the rights holder had already given exclusive rights for IF-like use of that property elsewhere. But it’s also a good reminder that there are a lot of options out there.)
Or you can just go on creating new worlds of your own … 
Ha, I do that a lot, and I do enjoy it!
But gosh I really wanted the In Nomine (SJG version, not French version) license, because I love that setting, and it’s already designed to be flexible for a lot of different play styles.
To drag myself back to the topic at hand somewhat, it’s interesting to me to think about adaptations of out-of-copyright/ancient/folklore stories in the same category as tie-ins. In my head, “I’ve done a new version of Beauty & The Beast” isn’t quite the same as “I’m writing a Star Trek novel” isn’t quite the same as “I’m pastiching Shakespeare comedies” (and none are quite the same as historical fiction), but they do live in a very similar space of–category? Genre? Literary approach?
Anyway, I enjoy seeing the wide variety of games already listed here. Especially some that sound right up my alley that I haven’t seen before.
I mean, it’s not just you? Those ARE different things. B&B is an established story, Star Trek is a setting, and the third is a genre (sort of).
And only one of those will get you sued, so there’s that. 
I put nothing past people who buy an author’s contract and then go to court to claim they only acquired the right to publish the books but not the duty to pay royalties.
Unless Disney have somehow copyrighted fairy tales. At this point, I wouldn’t put it past the fuckers.
Oh, sure, but they’re all the sorts of things that go in the list for this thread! And there’s an interesting argument to be made that historical fiction could go into the same broad category that would include all three of those things. (Which I will not make, because then I end up in the weird zone where I talk about the ways Greek myth is exactly like and entirely unlike both fanfic and superhero comics.) I am distinguishing the genre/category thing from the “Could you be sued over this?” aspect, though; a property entering the public domain can radically change the legal situation around making a derivative work from it without changing the nature of the work itself as a particular type of narrative.
I might have to insist you make this argument, because (as the creator of the list) I can’t imagine adding historical fiction to this list unless it was based directly on specific written source material. (Simply drawing on historical narratives of a particular event for purposes of research and interpretation wouldn’t be enough.)
(Please note that pastiche doesn’t belong on this list either, unless it draws so heavily upon a particular work as to constitute a sort of adaptation rather than just drawing upon the motifs and tropes of an author or genre. Otherwise Tally Ho, Jolly Good, and Choice of Broadsides would all have to be there.)
See, that’s part of when it becomes fuzzy! If I write a game based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, that’s clearly an adaptation, right? But if I write a game set in ancient Mesopotamia that’s not an adaptation. But if I write a game set in ancient Mesopotamia that’s drawing a lot of its cultural/style/premise details from that epic, it gets into a weird middle space. I think it mostly gets into weird corner cases in places where ‘pastiche’ and ‘in the style of texts from that time’ and ‘most of what we know about from that time is based on a few texts’ start overlapping.
…but then at that point I start muttering about how people tend to conflate Ovid’s take on myth with actual Greece-originating Greek myth and they should be more clear about their sources, and how in the modern world we distinguish ‘history’ and ‘myth’ more aggressively than is appropriate for some ancient sources and their aims. So it’s really only fuzzy, as lines go, in that there are places where historical fiction CAN overlap a lot with adaptation, depending on the sources for ‘history’ used, rather than any claim about historical fiction being generally in the same category as adaptation. If that makes sense?