Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop and the guy behind the Tomb Raider games, tweeted this some time ago:
I got jealous, and remembered that I had also attempted to build up a decent collection of Fighting Fantasy game books. I read them avidly as a child, but never actually owned them (god bless public libraries), due to a combination of the expense of buying books and my parents’ objections to me being exposed to too much violent imagery.
Neither of these were problems for Kim, though since he’s grown up to allegedly use anti-aircraft guns, nerve agents and starving dogs (not all at the same time) to murder people he doesn’t like, maybe my parents had a point…
I’ve recently got back into collecting Fighting Fantasy books, filling out the gaps in my shelf from an abortive attempt I made about a decade ago, and figured I’d document my thoughts on each book. Why? Because this is a blog for things from my brain, that’s why.
So what is Fighting Fantasy? For those with a similarly 1980’s frame of reference, it’s like the Choose Your Own Adventure series. So, what’s Choose Your Own Adventure, for those born this century? It’s a book where the action stops every few pages to ask you, the reader, to make a decision as to what happens next. In many ways it’s akin to a text-based adventure computer game, of the sort that were also popular in the 1970’s to the early 1990’s before decent graphics were invented. Most recently, online streaming television has dabbled with the CYOA format, most notably Netflix with the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode ‘Kimmy vs the Reverend’ and the Black Mirror episode ‘Bandersnatch’, which were nominated for and won Emmy awards, respectively.
Where Fighting Fantasy differed from Choose Your Own Adventure was that it took cues from Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games and incorporated an RPG-style combat and challenge resolution system. The system was simple and required only a pencil, eraser, and two six-sided dice, plus stats for Skill (how good you are at stuff), Stamina (how much punishment you can take before dying) and Luck (what it says on the tin, but mainly used for determining the outcome of external events or for modifying damage given or taken during combat). Fighting Fantasy also had several attempts at creating a D&D-style roleplaying game, expanding the Skill/Stamina/Luck mechanics into something deeper and more detailed, though how successful that was is a matter of debate.
As an indication of how big Fighting Fantasy was, the series sold over 20 million books in the 80’s and 90’s. Imitators were inevitable, most notably Joe Dever’s excellent Lone Wolf series, but the television series Knightmare and the board game Hero Quest also spawned a number of game books.
There are some reveals in the following post, but any serious spoilers are flagged or just avoided. I’m going to do these articles as a ‘live-ish blog’, so expect sarcastic bullet-pointing.
I have managed to resist the urge to jumble these bullet-points up, and number them. This time.
Introduction over, here we go:
– So yes, book one was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, written by the aforementioned Ian Livingstone, in a 50:50 collaboration with Steve Jackson, and published in 1982. It’s a fantasy adventure story in which you break into the home of an old man and murder him for his money.
Okay, so Zagor is allegedly evil, but there’s nothing in the introduction of the story to suggest this, or that he poses any threat to the surrounding area. The plot for this dungeon-crawl appears to be as flimsy as the stereotypical ‘see dungeon, loot dungeon’ approach to Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk, which is pretty appropriate for something from the era.
Plot and, occasionally, actual characterisation is something that clearly came later in Fighting Fantasy.
– The villagers who appear quite taken with your unnamed murder-hobo in the introductory passage know quite a lot about the security procedures of this creepy old guy who lives down the street from them. Turns out there are two keys that are needed to unlock his treasure chest. Quite how they found this out, I don’t know, since they can’t decide if he gets his magical powers from his gloves or his Top Trumps cards.
– The Fighting Fantasy game engine is a solid system even by this very first book, and the basic rules have barely changed over 60+ books, but how it’s utilised is still quite embryonic. It seems to be a tradition that good deeds replenish your Luck score, while particularly villainous deeds might cause you to lose Luck points. However, in one of the earliest encounters in Warlock, you steal a box from a sleeping guard (or dead, if you accidentally wake it up). It contains a single gold piece (the basic currency unit in the series) and the guard’s pet mouse. You release the mouse and get a whopping 2 Luck points reward. I’m happy for the mouse, but was letting it escape really worth 2 Luck points?
– I’m a few corridors into this, and so far I’ve been a good little burglar, opening doors and stealing boxes. In the third room, this bites me because this box doesn’t have a cute little mouse, but a snake.
– First combat encounter and it’s a teeny, rubbish snake. It bites me. I kill it. That was an entirely optional bit of thieving and animal death, but it netted me a [SPOILER FOR SOMETHING QUITE IMPORTANT]. Gain 1 Luck point, which is less than what I got for rescuing an inconsequential mouse.
– Shortly afterwards, I interrupt two drunken orcs, and am left with the options of either attacking them with my sword, or running away. Hell, I’m planning to murder Zagor anyway, so what’s another couple of brutal stabbings? Something I’ve noticed in Warlock and the other early Fighting Fantasy books is how low the stats of the monsters are. They, like the player-character, have Skill and Stamina scores (representing their ability to hit you and their ability to not die, respectively), but the numbers are far, far lower than I remember them being. I’m sure I remember orcs and so on tending towards around Skill 8, Stamina 8. Alcohol notwithstanding, these guys are Skill 5, Stamina 4 or 5. This is either my memories lying to me or the threat level of later books increased drastically.
– I’ve discovered a spell book with a Dragonfire spell. This book represents the life’s work of the wizard Farrigo DiMaggio, who has come up with a wonderful spell that you cast just as a dragon is about to breathe fire on you. I wonder how many times he tested it.And what is the spell? Here goes:
Ekil Erif
Ekam Erif
Erif Erif
Did you spot it? The reminder that this book was written with a child audience in mind?
Like Fire
Make Fire
Fire Fire
‘DiMaggio’ feels like an unusual name for Allansia as well, which tends towards generic fantasy names rather than particular cultures, although since the continent hasn’t even been named yet, let’s chalk it up to Early Instalment Weirdness.
– Orcs have green blood that smells foul. This is a minor detail, but I’m going to try and bear it in mind in future books, to see if they stay consistent.
– Another encounter is with a man in a cell. He runs towards you, eyes wide, as soon as you open the door. Do you try and calm him down, or attack him? Choose the latter, and there isn’t even a combat. He accidentally impales himself on your sword and dies. Oops. Turns out that not randomly murdering someone was the better option here; sympathy towards this ill, traumatised prisoner nets you useful information.
There could be something to say here about how this sympathetic character is the first human you’ve met since entering Firetop Mountain, and that all the orcs have been universally evil, but that’d be a bit cheap. There’s probably going to be a lot of space to discuss problematic elements in future books. (There are pygmies in Forest of Doom.)
– Later, I find an armoury containing a crescent moon shield. Magic items are interesting in Fighting Fantasy; aside from ones that give you +1 to your Attack Strength (your skill plus the total of two dice, which is compared to other combatants’ own Attack Strengths), they tend to be plot artefacts that apply to particular situations. This shield though introduces a saving throw mechanic; each time you’re hit, instead of suffering the usual 2 Stamina points of damage, you roll a die, with a 6 reducing that damage to 1 Stamina point, or 0 if it would normally only cause 1 damage. Nice and simple, and not too overpowered either.
– Ooh, a dwarf. I’ve not seen dwarves before in Fighting Fanta… oh, and he’s dead. Still, once I’ve slaughtered the goblins who were torturing him, I can steal their piece of capital-C Cheese.
I suspect this Cheese will be important in a future encounter, probably involving giant rats or… will I get to meet the mouse again?
– I just found a pair of boots lying on the floor. They’re really nice boots, but unfortunately they’re cursed. (I mean, who does that?) Oh crap, here comes Shelob’s evil twin, and I can’t move my feet.
– Another human! This one’s a shopkeeper. He sells special candles at an exorbitant rate of 20 gold pieces per candle.
– It’s a scam. Just down the corridor, I need that candle for a room with some weird haunted murals. Seriously, he’s a scam artist. He probably put the murals there himself. I wonder if Zagor knows that he’s got someone like this living in his basement?
– It’s probably one of Zagor’s relatives or something. “Yes, that’s uncle Vilbert. The candles are quite good, actually, but don’t let him start talking to you about multi-level marketing or BitCoin.”
– It’s a water fountain, with a sign over it with some writing in the goblin tongue. I’m not very good at reading goblin, it turns out, and can’t understand the first word. But the rest of it says “…NOT DRINK”.
I wonder what the missing word is? Still, a drink of water can’t hurt, can it?
– Oh god, it hurts so much.
– SPOILER WARNING: Actually, no, it doesn’t. Turns out magical water that is cursed to harm evil goblins is healing water for good-aligned murder-hobos. Obviously.
– Randomly found a magic sword lying in a river. Does this mean I’m king? This sounds like a good basis for a system of government.
– Now we reach the underground river and its ferryman. If I recall, this is where one of the two authors stops writing and hands over to the other one, Jackson to Livingstone, or vice versa.
– There’s a cost of living crisis in Firetop Mountain. (Explains why those candles cost so bloody much.) It was suggested by the villagers in the introduction that the ferryman charges one gold piece. When you meet him, he tells you it costs 3 gold pieces to cross the river, and complains about inflation. Considering the vein of anti-Thatcher snark that ran through a lot of early Games Workshop stuff, is this satire in a book aimed at 10-year-olds?
– Oh look, I’ve found a crucifix. I wonder if there’s a vampire somewhere up ahead?
– Wait, why are Allansian vampires repelled by crucifixes?
– The very next room has a bunch of coffins on the floor. That didn’t take long…
– Later on, I find a ghoul. Four hits over the course of the battle and it paralyses you, so that you can feel it as it eats you, arse-first. This is a book for kids. (I’m pretty sure later books reduce the number of hits needed for paralysis to two.)
– Aw crap. It’s the Maze of Zagor. This is a series of very short paragraphs, where you’re confronted with a context-free ‘do you want to go this way, that way, or the other way’ options, until such a time as you want to throw the book at the wall. Since I’m reading this on book on the iPad Fighting Fantasy app, that’s not a great way of coping with frustration.
– The trick to getting through the Maze of Zagor is to make a list of each of the paragraph numbers you’ve been to, and just go to the ones you don’t have on that list. I hate it.
– I found one of the keys for Zagor’s chest, right back in that spoiler redaction earlier. I’m thinking now that I may have missed the other, unless it’s in the maze somewhere. I don’t like how some of the Fighting Fantasy books hang their entire plot on whether or not you visit one random little thing, or open one random little box, to find a random little clue or secret code that matters far later. The resolution of an adventure should rely on your decision-making abilities more than it does as to whether you went left instead of right about forty reading-minutes earlier. Expect me to grumble about this, and maybe point out exceptions, as I read future books.
– Oh look, a Minotaur in the Maze of Zagor. Original. Complete with the second key as a bonus for killing it.
– The monster stats in this book are definitely on the low side. I just killed a troll with Skill 8, Stamina 4. The Skill’s nothing to sneeze at, but that Stamina score is even lower than a goblin’s, and it only takes two hits to kill it.
– I hate this maze.
– Oh look, more of what might be dwarves, but aren’t explicitly described as such, for some reason (different author to the scene where I immediately identified a dwarf by his species, probably). These ones have just given me directions out of the maze. Maybe… They’re ‘a bit vague’.
– Turns out dwarves can’t navigate tunnels. Who knew?
– I hate this maze.
– Have I mentioned that I hate this maze? Apparently, it’s easier if you map it. However, this is what the maze looks like, complete with paragraph numbers:
(OBVIOUSLY, THIS IS A MASSIVE SPOILER, if it’s possible to spoil something that’s quite simply the worst part of the book.)
– Arguably, you could draw that map, based on the descriptions of tunnels within the Maze of Zagor. However, there are no specific distances mentioned in the text, and the existence of a hairpin bend is just plain unnecessary. Worse still is that most of the paragraphs for the Maze of Zagor are boring, literally consisting of the direction you’re walking and what your options are. No description of what’s on the walls, what the surface beneath your feet is (sand, flagstones, bare stone, gravel?), nothing.
Wandering monsters appear if you decide to look for secret passages, which keeps it interesting, until the fifth time you kill a giant rat, whereupon you start hoping you roll double-1’s for your Attack Strength, so that the mangy little bastard will rip your throat out and spare you another nondescript corridor.
– Scorpion Swamp, one of the later books, actually uses a grid pattern map, similar to that used by the text-based computer games of the era, and is quite simply one of my favourites.
– On that note, I once wrote a Fighting Fantasy book based on one of many random maps that I drew in the style of Scorpion Swamp. I tried to get it published, but Penguin had stopped releasing new Fighting Fantasy books at the time, so I got a rejection letter. Instead, I turned the first part of it (a recently-sacked castle and the battlefield outside) into a text-based adventure game as part of my Computing A-Level. I used Turbo Pascal for Windows and even expanded the combat system so that it took into account which weapons you were using and provided a gruesome description of what each hit did to your opponent, rather than just knocking off a couple of Stamina points.
I hope, but doubt, that I still have a copy of that manuscript or the video game lying around somewhere.
– I feel no shame for cheating my way out of the maze. It’s awful. Really, mind-numbingly bad. In a book that lacks plot or even a decent motivation for the character other than heroically murdering a man for his money, it’s the Maze of Zagor that’s the worst thing about it. The series really comes along in later books.
– Once out of the maze, you encounter a dragon. Lucky I found that spell earlier, which helps you defeat dragons.
– If I ever write a Fighting Fantasy book, I’ll include garlic and crucifixes but no vampires, banishment spells for monsters that never appear, and a mirrored shield but no gorgon or basilisk.
– I’ll also throw a werewolf at the player and, in the next room, have them find a silver sword. It serves no purpose, has a penalty to Attack Strength because it’s bendy compared to a steel-bladed sword, but if you sell it it makes for a nice ornament and is worth a lot of gold pieces.
– Also, you will be playing a dwarf. I don’t think Fighting Fantasy has had a dwarf protagonist before.
– Anyway, here’s the warlock himself. He’s been expecting me. Probably because I’ve been murdering his friends and employees for the past few hours. He’s a pretty tough opponent, but there are several ways of weakening him, which is nice.
– I’ve deaded Zagor, but I’m still not entirely sure why this is a good thing. I mean, he has a diverse hiring policy. Who else employs orcs other than Port Blacksand crime lords or so-called ‘evil’ wizards? Still, I’ve found his treasure chest, so at least I get to… wait, there’s three locks? I only have two keys.
– “You do not possess the three keys you require. This is the end of your journey. You sit on the chest and you weep as you realise you will have to explore the mountain once more in order to find the keys. THE END.”
Yeah, if I had to go through the Maze of Zagor again, I’d weep too.
– Controversial, perhaps, but I really don’t like these ‘one true path’ requirements in some game books. Make it harder to get to the end if I don’t use logic and common sense to make the right decisions, visit the right places, speak to (or kill) the right people, but don’t make it impossible. If you’ve got the freedom to choose whether to explore the left-hand tunnel or the right-hand tunnel, and there’s nothing to say that one of those is the way you should be going, then neither option should be the wrong one.
– The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a classic only by virtue of being the first in the series. It was a phenomenon at the time but, as I’ve mentioned earlier, there’s no real plot and zero characterisation of the alleged villain. Your protagonist has no motivation other than rumours of a chest of gold. The final illustration of the book is literally Zagor’s open treasure chest, as if it’s a prize on a game show’s conveyor belt. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a dungeon-crawl in the most traditional sense, with no real rhyme or reason for its layout, and no sense that the dungeon is actually a place in which people live, rather than just waiting to be killed by random armed burglars.
– I think it’s fair to make those criticisms while still liking the book (except for the Maze of Zagor; the Maze of Zagor can burn in hell), since I suspect Jackson and Livingstone got similar feedback at the time. The next two books in the series are Citadel of Chaos (by Steve Jackson), which is essentially the same plot with a different evil sorcerer and a more interesting ‘dungeon’, and Forest of Doom (by Ian Livingstone), where you’re on a quest to locate a McGuffin for a good cause while also getting the fresh air.
– One final note: I hope that my faith in the later books being substantially better than The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is based on more than just foggy nostalgia. I definitely remember the Old World stories around Royal Lendle and its neighbouring kingdoms as being particularly engaging (one of them even ends with you rescuing the villain, rather than killing him), and the big reveal in Black Vein Prophecy was surprisingly emotional. They better not disappoint.
Next up, Citadel of Chaos…
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