Review: Fighting Fantasy, Book 2: The Citadel of Chaos

For a review of the previous book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, including an explanation of what a Fighting Fantasy is, click that hyperlink.

Following on from the stunning success of Warlock, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone split their party and each wrote their own follow-ups. This is Jackson’s, published in 1983.

Put bluntly, it’s a rehash of Warlock. You’re a hero breaking into the home of a sorcerer to kill him and steal his stuff. However, this time around, there’s a motivation other than crime: Balthus Dire poses a direct threat to your home region, the Vale of Willow. There’s also a more interesting ‘dungeon’; rather than just being a series of tunnels and rooms, it’s the titular citadel, also known as the Black Tower, on a hill called Craggen Rock. Unlike Zagor, there’s a bit more to Dire himself than just being a wizard who does bad things. Basically, most of the criticisms I had of Warlock have been remedied here.

As before, I’m bullet-pointing my thoughts as I read through the book. There may be contradictions as I change my mind about things. It’s like live-blogging a film while you watch it, but on a single blog post rather than a series of Facebook comments or tweets. I call this a ‘live-ish blog’. The term hasn’t caught on.

– First up, the mechanical stuff. This book uses the usual Skill/Stamina/Luck system, but also adds a Magic stat. Oh yes, you’re a wizard, Harry. The description of the protagonist’s equipment is interestingly not traditionally wizard-like though: sword, lantern, backpack, leather armour.

– You’re the star pupil of the Grand Wizard of Yore, who sounds like someone senior in the Ku Klux Klan, but that says more about the Klan than it does about him. Oh, he’s described as a ‘white sorcerer of great power’. Awkward. Anyway, you’ve been his apprentice for years, but appear to have forgotten his name, since it’s not mentioned anywhere. Maybe you misheard it on day one and by this point in your training it’s become too embarrassing to ask.

– The local king has a name. It’s Salamon. I get the impression the Vale of Willow is a pretty small place, so he’s probably not that important on an Allansian geopolitical level. However, his name is very similar to Salamonis. Probably just a coincidence, since the city-state of Salamonis doesn’t exist in the setting yet, but I like to think there’s some meaning or shared linguistic root behind it.

– Spells are one-use only, and you get as many of them as you have Magic points (so two dice plus six, for 8-18, or an average of 13). Mechanically, they’re quite varied, although most can only be activated when the text gives you that option. The exceptions are ones that restore Skill, Stamina or Luck, and since you don’t get potions or provisions in the way you did in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, it might be worth taking a few of the latter, particularly Stamina.

– Something I’m going to look out for is gender assumptions in the text as it relates to the protagonist. The target audience of Fighting Fantasy was boys of about 10+ years of age, but the books very rarely, if ever, include even the protagonist’s outstretched hand in illustrations. Compare that to Choose Your Own Adventure, where you often appear in illustrations, usually as a member of the same demographic.

– Generally, your CYOA avatar is white as well, unless the setting of the story makes that implausible. Fighting Fantasy is usually set in a medieval pseudo-European environment, and seems to assume a white ethnicity as well; at least, the other human characters tend to be white. Exceptions probably exist, and I’ll keep an eye out for those as well. How well does the series stand up to modern attitudes towards race and diversity?

– The word ‘Chaotic’ is used as a noun to describe the creatures being recruited by Balthus Dire for the army he’s amassing to conquer the Vale of Willow. I’m not sure this term’s used elsewhere, although ‘Chaos’ as a concept does show up in a few other books. I think it’s Creature of Havoc where you fight a few Chaos Warriors, and Master of Chaos has a load of chaos mutants. Obviously, the concept of Chaos was nicked from Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories, but this book was released in the same year that Jackson & Livingstone’s little RPG distribution company released a game called Warhammer (the name sounds familiar, but I can’t think where I’ve heard it…), in which Chaos is also an umbrella term for evil nastiness, so maybe there’s a bit of cross-pollination going on there.

– Splitting hairs now, considering that one of my main criticisms of Warlock was that there was literally no motivation for the hero except aggravated burglary, but why is Balthus Dire so keen to conquer the Vale of Willow? It’s nearby, and he’s implied to be generally keen on conquest, but it’d be nice for once if an evil villain had an actual motivation for conquest. Even stealing some valuable magical item from… whatsisname, you know, pointy hat, beard… the Grand Wizard of Yore would do. I don’t expect grand, sweeping explanations of the geopolitical situation, trade routes and utilisation of natural resources in the region in order to understand a conquerer’s motivations.

– I don’t expect it, but I’d quite like to know anyway.

– I guess that’s what prompted them to write Titan, the background book for the setting.

– Is it ‘I’ or ‘you’ when I refer to the protagonist of a game book? I’m playing it, as me, but if you’re reading it, it’s you that’s the protagonist. I’m sure I’ll settle on one or other convention at some point.

– Anyway, time to start reading: The guards at the gates of the Black Tower are a dog with the head of an ape and an ape with the head of a dog. You know, like what they did with Sarah Jessica Parker and that chihuahua in Mars Attacks!. Interestingly, of the three options you have of getting past them, none of them is ‘Draw your sword and attack them’. They’re all variations of bluff. Nice touch.

– My bluff doesn’t work and instead I cast Levitate to fly over the castle walls. The book warns me that the alarm is going to be raised though. You know what, I bet it’s just as raised as if I bluffed my way in.

– An arrow just hit the ground in front of me, and someone shouts for me to stand still. Doing exactly that is not one of the three options available. On one of the bad choices, you get shot in the shoulder and lose 5 Stamina points. That’s quite excessive. It’s like two-and-a-half stab wounds. In fact, I think amputating your own leg in Sword of the Samurai might have only cost that many Stamina points. (Though now I think about it, the katana surgery might have caused 7 points of damage.)

– A random tentacle thrusts its way out of the ground of the citadel’s courtyard. Okay, that’s definitely chaotic, but it’s also implying something very bad about the structural integrity of this fortress if weird tentacular creatures are burrowing their way around beneath it.

– You know I mentioned I was going to keep an eye on the series’ attitude to race and diversity? I’ve just met O’Seamus the Leprechaun.

– Great. I ask him for advice and he replies with a riddle about which of three doors I need to open: “I would not take the door two doors to the left of the copper-handled one, nor the one to the right of the bronze-handled one.” That’s a perfectly reasonable logic problem, except that I’m stood right in front of these three doors. See the problem?

– The answer to this riddle, seeing as how I’m in the same room as O’Seamus and these three doors, is: “That one there. I’ll go through that door, because you just warned me not to go through that one and that one.”

– [SPOILER] Sonofabitch… O’Seamus has already played a series of pranks on you by the time you get this riddle. I should have expected him to be winding me up with the door nonsense. All three doors lead to the same next encounter. There’s a certain type of genius to that, and the best thing is that you only know you’ve been had if you cheat and check the outcome of going through each door.

– But, in the end, it turns out he’s not completely awful. It feels odd though that the book tells you (me? I really need to work out these pronouns) that you’re laughing because his pranks are hilarious. Let me decide, particularly since, a few minutes earlier, O’Seamus put me through agony and made me think I was dying. So funny.

– Still, at least I made a friend. How often in Fighting Fantasy do you make a friend who doesn’t get killed or eaten a few scenes later?

– The ESP spell lets you, obviously enough, read people’s minds. You know how Zagor was apparently no more or less evil than a typical medieval lord? Well, thanks to ESP, I know exactly how Balthus Dire murdered his washerwoman and her children when she failed to launder his robes in time for an important meeting.

– Note to self: If I ever become a megalomaniacal sorcerer who likes to keep the shades of his victims hanging around for years after their death, make sure they’re unable to give would-be assassins tips on how to kill me back.

– The creatures seem tougher in this book than in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Some of the previous book’s monsters were simply a case of rolling dice until they fell over and being surprised when I rolled badly enough that they stung me. Some of these fights are genuinely challenging.

– I’ve never been entirely sure how rock elementals, golems etc, can get hurt by a protagonist armed with a sword. Try striking stone with edged steel and you’ll do massively more damage to the blade than you will the target.

– There’s a ‘beautiful, sylph-like woman with long dark hair and deep piercing eyes’. I’ve just woken her up, so she immediately shoots firebolts from her eyes without even getting out of bed to do so. I tell her I have a special gift for her, and she decides not to murder me. Material gifts, dear 1980’s boy in his formative years, are how you stop women from killing you in irrational fits of rage. The options for gifts are a silver mirror, a hairbrush, and a jar containing a spider-man (not the Spider-Man, but a little humanoid-spider hybrid). One of these things is not like the other, and also not a bit… misogynistic. She doesn’t like it either. Fortunately, the correct gift so enraptures this vain, beautiful, unattainable creature that you can steal the fleece blanket off her bed without her noticing.

– Is it a plus or minus for the book’s gender representation that, given the kill-and-loot attitude of many Fighting Fantasy books, you’re not offered the option of murdering her and taking her stuff? I mean, by blasting firebolts at you from her eyes, she’s clearly more hostile towards you than poor, innocent Zagor of Firetop Mountain.

– Who was she, anyway? Balthus Dire’s wife? His daughter? His mistress? Her room was certainly well-appointed, and she’s one of the only people I’ve encountered in this citadel who was actually in bed at the time (the story occurs over the course of a single night), suggesting she’s got a normal sleeping pattern. (EDIT: While leafing through the pages, it turns out she’s his wife, and she’s very vain. I just stole her fleece duvet, so yeah, she’s very easily distracted by her own beauty. Hurray for gender stereotypes.)

– Incidentally, and flicking back a few pages, one of the other rooms that you can enter instead of the room with the woman in it is the Toddler Room. This encounter’s notorious, because, well:

“You listen at the door and can hear squeaky voices laughing and squabbling. You try the handle and the door opens. Inside is a brightly coloured room. A few small beds are in one corner, and strewn around the floor are small mannequins of various brutish creatures. Along the right-hand wall is a large box and just beyond that is a door. In the centre of the floor, and looking up at you quizzically, are three small creatures. They are human-like, but have green skin, pointed ears and slit-like eyes.”

– Just to hammer it home, there’s an illustration of said room. These are baby orcs, or goblins maybe. Species be damned, they’re clearly surrounded by dolls and have a triple bunk bed in the corner.

A trio of brutal monsters, surrounded by the bodies of their defeated victims.

– And one of the three options in this room is ‘Draw your sword and prepare to fight them.’

“The little creatures squeal and huddle together as you approach. You run them all through with your sword, but they put up no resistance! You feel a little wary at such an easy battle and make for the door at the far end of the room.”

– Wary. You feel wary. You just Anakin Skywalkered a room full of younglings, without even the loss of a single Luck point as a punishment, and all you feel is wary that it was such an easy ‘battle’. There are zero consequences for murdering these children. WTAF, Steve Jackson?

– Still stunned by this.

– I wonder if they were Balthus Dire’s kids. That woman who is probably his wife is asleep in one of the neighbouring rooms, so they’re unlikely to be the offspring of some random orc couple.

– In this book, you get to murder the bad guy’s defenceless children…

– Balthus Dire is more or less human. His wife is apparently human. Maybe he adopted those baby orcs.

– And a hydra. Zagor had a dragon. Dire has a hydra. Good job I stole his wife’s bedding.

– I’m not sure that’s how fleeces and hydras inter-relate, if I’m remembering Jason and the Argonauts correctly, but clearly this hydra also hasn’t remembered its Greek mythology correctly either and has jerkily stop-motion animationed its way into the corner of the room, letting me past.

– Oh look, a combination lock. Did I encounter any mysterious three digit numbers anywhere in this citadel? I don’t think I did. Time to flee the Citadel of Chaos and come back tomorrow for another remarkably similar go.

– No, wait, I’ll just do what all good Fighting Fantasy players do, and cheat. Time to start flicking through the book, looking for the correct passage.

– Or I could Google it. Oh my god. The secret combination to the Black Tower’s inner sanctum was published in a book in the citadel library called… ‘Secrets of the Black Tower’. Really? Really.

– It’s 217. I mentioned this in my review of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, but I hate the chance-based element of so many Fighting Fantasy books where (in this case) opening a particular book out of several options in a non-compulsory room, or not, makes the difference between success or failure. Sure, make it harder to succeed if I don’t find the password, but don’t make it impossible.

– A trident just flew out at me. It’s implied to be magic, but, to be honest, I think Balthus Dire, evil sorcerer extreme, just threw it at me. I like that. A wizard just threw a trident at me with pretty decent accuracy.

– Obviously, I don’t like that, as it just cost me 5 Stamina points, but I like that a wizard is doing something physical.

– Of course, this is Balthus Dire we’re talking about: “well over two metres in height, built like an ox, with broad shoulders and muscular arms. In his battle tunic of leather with wide, studded wristbands, he looks more a soldier than the demi-sorcerer he really is.” Judging by the table behind him, he’s also got one hell of a Warhammer collection.

You can tell he’s really powerful and dangerous, because no one’s dared tell him the truth about that topknot.

– What follows is a great climactic encounter where you and Balthus Dire fire off spells at each other. And they’re not just fireballs and lightning bolts either. This is a spell-and-counterspell duel, which potentially culminates in what is probably one of the hardest fights in Fighting Fantasy; Balthus Dire has Skill 12, Stamina 19. There are, however, various ways to weaken him or enhance your own abilities, depending on what you’ve come across over the course of your adventure, one way of killing him without having to face him in battle, as well as about half a dozen ‘game over’ endings you can stumble into if you make poor choices.

– This scene is imaginative, exciting and exactly how Fighting Fantasy books should end. No immersion-breaking combination locks, just decision-making based on rapidly-changing circumstances, the sensible utilisation of items and information you’ve gathered over the course of your adventure, and (in the case of this book) your resource management of magic spells. It’s a tough, cinematic fight, which is exactly what you want in a finale.

– Once you’ve killed Balthus Dire, you add insult to injury and burn his wargaming table. That collection of well-painted models was left to his adopted orc-babies in his will. Of course, this is the 1980’s so if you haven’t already murdered his children, chances are they’ll die of lead poisoning after they chew them.

– They’re probably Citadel Miniatures, hehe.

Next up, Fighting Fantasy goes outside to the Forest of Doom! In the meantime, have a couple of AI-generated cover for Citadel of Chaos, courtesy of StarryAI. (Maybe I should start adding the title to these.)

I guess the first one is a modern reimagining of Balthus Dire, while the rest could well be the protagonist. (Prompts: The Citadel of Chaos, dark fantasy, brooding, horror)