Spectral Stalkers! Ziggurat World! Lovely Mantirs!

 This book should be a Fighting Fantasy classic. It's so well-written. It makes such good use of the format. It's brimming with crazy ideas.

A bug-eyed but strangely endearing angel creature hands you the Aleph, asking you to protect it. It's not quite clear from whom or what you should do with it, but it IS quite clear that you should avoid the spectral stalkers, scary long-legged phantom creatures that arrive in short order to investigate the dead bug-eyed angel, at all cost.

The Aleph takes you on a random ride through dimensions, each of them a mini game world. You start at the library in limbo, have a talk with the dragon lady at the counter, grab some intel, and then it goes on: In short order, I ended up as a sacrifice for some cult of the undead, a literal pawn in the game of two god-like creatures in the sky, a customer on a pottery market recruited to save a master potter from his own golem, a specimen liberator aboard a space station, an unwelcome guest in a god's dream of a hunt, and several other things. I also had a memorable conversation with a scientist who tried to convince me that there's no such thing as magic.

Just as all of this starts to feel just a little bit to random, poof, I end up on the Ziggurat World, ruled over by the wizard Globus who may or may not be the big bad. I meet the mantir, very nice insect people who herd grazing insect bulls, the vaskind, lovely monstrous amphibians, and the significantly less lovely winged black shadows and ophidians and elegant and deadly silicate snakes.

Will YOU join them at the fire ...?

It's night. Next to a crackling fire, a human and an orc are talking chatting idly, holding on to their mugs of ale. two kobolds nuzzle each other, cackling. A read eye glints in the darkness as they look in you direction, teeth grin ... will you join them at the fire?

You can stumble across some such scene in the second Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson. A small, atmospheric moment that smells of warm, cozy danger and that encapsulates so much of what is good about these books. Yes, orcs and kobolds are usually simplistically evil in these books. But also yes, the moment really makes you want to join them, feel the fire's heat on your face, listen to their drawling talk, to their rising laughter, and laugh along. And however evil these kobolds may be, you feel that not only to they desire warmth and companionship, they deserve it, the same as everyone deserves it.