Review: Fighting Fantasy 7: Island of the Lizard King

[EDIT: Before I start, I’d like to take the opportunity to invite my faithful readership (who are all very good-looking and intelligent) to click on this link and vote for Xenos Rampant, co-authored by myself with Daniel Mersey, in the Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Wargame category in this year’s Charles S. Roberts Awards for Excellence in Conflict Simulation. Just click here; we’re at the bottom of the second page, I think. It’s the final day for voting today. Thank you for your consideration.]


Time for another Ian Livingstone book, this one introducing the lizard men to Fighting Fantasy canon. If you ever need a thoroughly evil culture of slave-taking racial supremacists with a sideline in alchemy and genetic modification, the lizard men are the villains for you.

– As is common with Livingstone books of this era, there are no special rules in Island of the Lizard King. I roll reasonably well for stats: Skill 11, Stamina 16, Luck 11. That low initial Stamina could be a problem, so I take a potion of strength to supplement my provisions in restoring lost Stamina.

– Oyster Bay is an isolated fishing village 60 miles from Port Blacksand. For reasons not specified, I’m travelling south from Fang (I’m not carrying 10,000 gold pieces, so I’m clearly either not the protagonist of Deathtrap Dungeon, or I’m just really bad at financial management) and decide to stop off at Oyster Bay for a rest. Nothing ever happens in Oyster Bay, which is why my old adventuring friend Mungo retired there.

– Nuts. That was unexpected. Turns out adventure is happening in Oyster Bay. The lizard men of Fire Island have launched a couple of raids on the village and taken a bunch of young men prisoner, presumably to slave in the gold mines on Fire Island.

– They left the women though. Turns out the lizard men are misogynists, as well as racists.

– There’s a passing reference to a ‘Prince Olaf’ in the introduction, who paid this tribe of lizard men to guard a prison colony he set up on Fire Island, but criminals were so numerous in his lands that it would have made more sense to leave them on the mainland and just move the lawful folk to the island instead. The colony was eventually abandoned.

– So, who is Prince Olaf? He was a pirate who took over Port Blacksand, before being murdered by the next in a series of mostly-short-lived pirates who seized the city, before Azzur took over half a century later. None of this is explained in the introduction to Island of the Lizard King. At this stage, Olaf is just a name. His background comes later in the series, I presume as part of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy series.

– Mungo comes out of retirement to go and kill the Lizard King of Fire Island and rescue the slaves. I volunteer to tag along. The remaining men of Oyster Bay rejoice and provide us with a feast of lobster; they don’t have to go along to make sure Mungo doesn’t get himself killed.

– This book is Alan Langford’s debut as a Fighting Fantasy illustrator. His style is nice and detailed, with clean lines. I like it. The first passage of the book is taken up almost entirely by characterisation of Mungo, so it makes sense to open the book with an illustration of the man himself, pointing to Fire Island as your boat approaches it.

– Incidentally, Fire Island is so-called because it has a volcano. I don’t think that’s been mentioned previously, but there it is, smouldering away at the back of the picture.

– Mungo’s dad died in Deathtrap Dungeon. Ian Livingstone really likes weaving the various strands of the Allansian setting together into something coherent. Unfortunately, at this point in the series, the world is still quite small, so a surprising number of people visit Fang and Port Blacksand.

– Characterisation. Oh dear. Alas, poor Mungo; I knew him.

– While trying to land on the island, we spot six pirates lugging a treasure chest. We could attack them, but we’re outnumbered three to one and there’s nothing to be gained by it in terms of completing our mission, so instead we go the other way and… Mungo gets killed by a giant crab. Serves him right for having a backstory.

– Bloody hell. Skill 10, Stamina 11, for a shellfish with delusions of grandeur. I should probably have taken on the pirates, though I guess they’re less tasty if I defeat them.

– I find a note from someone called Baskin, who fled the island for the mainland after the lizard men took over. It’s odd that a person whose sole involvement in the story is to leave a note in his abandoned hut gets a name. I wonder if they’ll show up, or has shown up, in one of the other Livingstone books.

– Maybe Baskin gets a book in which, having escaped from the Lizard King, they get into a conflict with the Tiger King instead.

– Do I want to rest under a particularly large tree? Sure, that sounds completely risk-free. Oh no. I am in peril, for this tree is trying to strangle me with a prehensile vine. I did not expect that turn of events. Test your Luck – fail and you die, killed by a carnivorous tree. This sounds familiar – Ian Livingstone throwing interesting insta-kills at me. Fortunately, I pass the test.

– To be fair, this isn’t one of those Ian Livingstone surprise insta-kills. The introduction to this book specifically states that the Lizard King has been messing around with voodoo and black magic, as well as genetic experiments to create a master race of lizard men, which resulted in all kinds of toxic magical chemicals entering the ecosystem of Fire Island and creating monsters and carnivorous plants. It’s an encounter that tells you to be on your guard.

– What exactly is the geography of this region? Port Blacksand is about 60 miles from Oyster Bay, and Fire Island was a prison colony for a previous ruler of Port Blacksand. It took a number of hours for Mungo and myself to sail from Oyster Bay to Fire Island. Port Blacksand is a Western European-style medieval city (but scummier). The distance between France (Europe, was medieval once) and Morocco (Africa, but no jungles) is about 1000 miles.

– Where am I going with this? Well, I just met three black guys on Fire Island. They’re headhunters wearing loincloths and carrying stone-tipped weapons. (At least they’re taller than the pygmies in Forest of Doom and City of Thieves…) Once I kill them, it turns out they have bananas and coconuts in their possession. Are they just really lost, or are the climate and demographics of western Allansia really weird?

– Also, it needs mentioning – the only canonically black people I’ve encountered in seven Fighting Fantasy books so far are primitive savages. Sure, this book was published in 1984, but A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin, was published in 1968, and had a mostly non-white cast of characters. I may be being unfair here, but I’m struggling to remember any positive portrayals of people of colour in the classic Fighting Fantasy series, aside from the east Asian-inspired cultures in Sword of the Samurai, Black Vein Prophecy and Crimson Tide.

– I guess some of the books set in the real world, such as Appointment with F.E.A.R. or Freeway Fighter, both set in North America, might have more sympathetic portrayals of minorities.

– I go to investigate the headhunter village. Oh, great, more of the same. There’s even an illustration, and these guys are grotesque, almost orc-like caricatures, with ugly faces and in at least one case, teeth filed sharp. Actually, the female headhunter who is offering a bone knife to their chief is kind of cute, though that might be because she, like the men, is pretty much naked, aside from a skirt and what may be some sort of nipple-covering (she’s drawn from a tasteful side-boob angle, and it’s not clear).

– I burn down several of the headhunters’ huts. Not just for shits and giggles, I hasten to point out, but because I’m trying to distract them from decapitating a tied-up man with that bone knife.

– A spear gets hurled at us during our escape. Roll a die. On a 1-2, it hits me, and the freed captive dies helping me escape. On a 3-4, it hits him, and he dies. On 5-6 (I rolled a 5), it misses us both, we escape, and he gives me a cool little amulet. My Luck can now never fall below 7. That’s pretty damn powerful, giving me a minimum of around 60% chance of passing any Luck tests.

– I just encountered an interesting little creature called a Marsh Hopper. The text explains to me that it’s effectively a reptilian will o’ the wisp, luring prey into the lairs of predators and then eating whatever’s left over. However, they also know their way around swamps better than I do. It seems to be trying to get me to follow it. Do I want to follow it, or press on by myself?

– You already know my answer to this, don’t you?

– Anyway, after I nearly get eaten by a hydra (insert complaint about the rules for fighting opponents simultaneously – each head is a separate opponent – being part of the text, rather than being put in the rules section, where they belong) and then a giant water snake (screw you, Marsh Hopper), I plug the wounds on my Stamina 1 body with three lots of provisions.

– I’m more cheese now, than man…

– Out of the marshes, and onto the hills along the edge of a gorge. Whoops, landslide, but I grab onto a bush and, oh, there’s a little hollow in the ground, too dark to see inside, but I can put my hand in. No. No, I won’t do that, because it’s stupid to randomly put your hand into an animal burrow.

– See, half an hour ago I followed a creature known for luring travellers into traps into a trap, and now I’m not putting my hand into the burrows of… checks the alternative pages… rattlesnakes, as it turns out. I’m growing as a person.

– But maybe not by that much, as I’ve just discovered the signs of a struggle, including the grooves left by the feet of the person dragged away by two others. One of the participants dropped a snuffbox. I open it.

– And don’t die. It contains a gold nugget and a note with directions to some mud huts near the Lizard King’s slave mines, left behind by a slave who failed to escape. Handy.

– A few more encounters with hazardous wildlife, and I discover another discarded box, this time at the bottom of a pool of water. It’s a good box, as I need to pry it open with my sword and the contents are apparently dry.

– Note to self: don’t drink potions found in boxes at the bottom of pools of water. You don’t know how long they’ve been there, or if they’ll give you a 1 in 6 chance of losing the first round of every single combat you’re in for the rest of the adventure, due to you clumsily dropping your sword. Idiot.

– Who brews that kind of potion anyway? Look, if you’re an alchemist, make Potions of Strength or Luck or Skill, or that confer magical abilities. If you want to harm someone, just poison them. Don’t waste time and resources making something that just stands the chance of inconveniencing someone you don’t like, so long as you can trick them into drinking it. Bloody fantasy worlds.

– A Pouch of Unlimited Contents? Nice. I can store anything in this pouch, as it’s actually a portable portal to another dimension. A clutter dimension, perhaps, filled with old furniture and things that you swore eight years ago would come in handy at some point in future, so you’ll just keep hold of it.

– A cursed Ring of Confusion. I didn’t need those two points of Skill anyway. Or did I?

– I’ve come to the conclusion that the creators of magical items are arseholes.

– Or maybe there’s a kind of principle of equilibrium to the universe. Every positive magical item you create affects the balance of the universe, so you need to create a cursed item of equal potency to maintain the stability of reality. Oh my god. I’ve got to use that idea in something at some point.

– A pair of boots. They are just, apparently, a nice pair of boots. This makes a change from all the other pairs of boots that Ian Livingstone leaves lying around in his books, in that they’re the one thing in this randomly-discarded box not to be enchanted. I guess this is Livingstone subverting expectations while also throwing an in-joke at the reader.

– I find a raft mentioned in the note in the snuffbox and start punting my way upstream. Oh look, a crocodile. Do I have an iron bar? You know, I’m pretty sure I did pick one up at some point, but if I did, I didn’t write it on my adventure sheet. Oh well, I guess I won’t be able to just wedge its mouth open. Time to make a new suitcase.

– I’ve been killing a lot of random wildlife on this island. I hope none of them are endangered. I mean, if they were, they’re even more special now, so it’s not all bad.

– Oh, that’s a nice nod to realism. After I win the fight against the crocodile, the book notes that if I’ve got a spear and axe that I may at some point have picked up (I haven’t), then they rolled off the raft during the fight (in which I was using my sword). In a nod to common sense, if I’ve been storing them in my Pouch of Unlimited Contents, then it’s fine, they’re still in there.

– And I find the village I’ve been looking for. Finally, I meet my first lizard men. Alan Langford’s drawn an illustration of the pair of them, and my god, they’re ugly. By which I mean that it’s an excellent illustration of two particularly hideous monsters. Of all the humanoid races encountered in Fighting Fantasy, I’m pretty sure lizard men are the ones most universally depicted as awful people to meet at a dinner party. (Well, maybe them and the Caarth snake people, but they show up less, due to being desert-bound.)

– I ambush the lizard men, and kill one of them before they can react. (This is a nice use of a Luck test, incidentally, with success removing a major threat and failure leaving me in a simultaneous combat against two pretty tough opponents.)

– After getting into the gold mine, I spot a lizard man and try and follow him stealthily. Did I drink a Potion of Clumsiness, the book asks. Why yes, I am indeed an idiot.

– I drop my sword, but luckily the lizard man ‘must be almost deaf’ as he doesn’t hear it. I bludgeon him to death with a rock instead.

– It’s at this stage that I realise that I haven’t been rolling to see if I drop my sword at the start of each fight. Oops.

– Up ahead, I hear singing. It must be the slaves, hard at work. The book doesn’t tell me what they’re singing, but it becomes obvious the moment you enter the cavern and see a lizard man overseeing six dwarves. Sleepy must have been murdered for shirking.

– The lizard man discovers the hard way what happens when you give mining equipment to slaves and they suddenly realise that they might be able to escape.

– Side note: Are there female lizard ‘men’? If they’re actually reptilian, then they presumably reproduce by laying eggs, but I’m not sure if we ever actually meet any females of the species. Personally, I think that yes, there are, but the protagonists, all being of a mammalian background, don’t notice. As reptiles, lizard (wo)men don’t lactate, so Elder Scrolls-style Argonian-boobs don’t exist. Sexual dimorphism might not really be a thing in what humans call ‘lizard men’, and so they just assume that all the examples of the species they encounter are male, because patriarchy.

– The Lizard King might actually be the Lizard Queen. Who knows?

– Someone’s probably about to point out that in paragraph X of Battleblade Warrior, you meet a lizard woman who attacks you for threatening her eggs, or something. I guess I’ll find out if that’s the case in 24 books time.

– Anyway, I and the dwarves sneak through the mines (apparently, wearing a cloak, I’m indistinguishable from a bipedal reptile with a tail, snout and, according to Langford’s illustrations, back spines and horns) until we kill a couple of orcs and free a group of humans and elves. One of the humans is from Oyster Bay, and is sad to hear about Mungo’s death.

– Oh yeah, my friend Mungo. I’ll grieve for him at some point. I’m just a bit busy right now, starting a slave insurrection.

– I have sixty-three freed slaves in my army. Not bad, but oddly specific.

– One of the elves takes me aside and hurls a plot twist at me. It turns out that the parasitic crab-spider-nightmare creature clinging to the Lizard King’s head on the cover of the book is, wait for it, a parasitic crab-spider-nightmare creature. Turns out the Lizard King has willingly let a Gonchong meld with his brain, making him unkillable until the Gonchong itself is destroyed, and giving him the ability to telepathically control his army.

– Don’t think too hard about the ‘how the hell does that work’ of that situation. It’s magic, okay?

– I now need to locate the island’s shaman, I announce to the assembled ex-slaves, after the elf explains that only he will be able to tell me how to kill a spindly spider thing that’s stuck to a guy’s head. (Really? An axe would probably do the trick.) Although the elf has been on the island for four years and never seen him, I confidently announce that I’ll find the shaman and be back with them in about a day or two.

– I just caught an angry water elemental in my Pouch of Unlimited Contents. Unfortunately, rather than risk letting it out, I decide to bury the pouch and hope no one ever finds it again. In six hundred years time, when the Allansian version of Time Team come to search Fire Island for signs of the old slave camps, Allansian-Tony Robinson is in for a big surprise…

– The sun sets, looking like a big red balloon as it settles on the sea. I live in a medieval fantasy world. Up until relatively recently in the real world, balloons weren’t made of rubber or foil. They were animal bladders. The sun looks like an inflamed and inflated pig’s bladder as it settles on the sea.

– Raquel Welch has just run out from her cave, thrown a spear at me and then proceeded to throw herself on my sword. That was completely unnecessary. I guess she was a bit territorial.

– She has a bowl of red powder in her cave, which I try to eat. (Did that Potion of Clumsiness not teach me anything?) When I stop retching, I dab it on my face. I’m now immune to mind control, thanks to a detailed bit of backstory that I, as the protagonist, have no way of actually knowing. Maybe if this encounter with the cave woman had been less violent, I could have learned about the benefits and origins of this powder without out-of-character knowledge being dropped on me.

– Well, here’s the shaman. I suppose his illustration would count as a positive portrayal of a person of colour, if it weren’t for the shrunken skulls hanging from his earlobes. He’s a headhunter, I guess, but at least he’s friendly.

– That Ring of Confusion has a positive effect after all. It allows me to see through illusions, and with that, plus a Luck test and a Skill test (not that the latter is called that yet), I’ve passed three of the Shaman’s tests.

– Lizard men, it turns out, are deathly afraid of monkeys. No reason. It’s just a phobia.

– I wonder if I’ll find a monkey anywhere on the island?

– I meet a hobgoblin guarding a bridge. “What is the password?” he asks. “What?” I reply.

– It only bloody well works…

– Who set that hobgoblin guarding the bridge? Is he one of the Lizard King’s warriors, or just some randomer who found a bridge and decided to challenge people crossing it?

– An unavoidable fight with a mutant lizard man riding a Styracosaurus. The dinosaur is Skill 11, Stamina 10, and then the rider is Skill 9, Stamina 9. The difficulty level of combats has definitely increased over the last few books.

– Personally, I’d have made that fight avoidable, or at least provided some way of tilting the odds in the protagonist’s favour. Skill 11 is higher than most players, and five rounds of combat (give or take Luck rolls for damage) is a long time to hold out when the Fighting Fantasy combat system is basically attritional. Then, when all that’s done, you’ve got the chance to plug your wounds with cheese before fighting another above-average opponent. (Weirdly, there’s no rules for how many portions of Provisions you can eat at a given time, and you can eat at any time, so I can kill the dinosaur and then eat an entire backpack of cheese sandwiches, so long as I’ve not turned to the next paragraph and entered another battle.)

– Also, how the hell do I know what a Styracosaurus is? What am I: a palaeontologist?

– Oh, I’ve just found a monkey on a lead that’s gripped in the hands of a dead sailor. I take him with me, and I’ve made a new friend. I think I’ll call him Mungo.

– The monkey. I take the monkey with me, not the dead sailor. And it’s the monkey I’m calling Mungo, not the dead sailor. Jesus. Too soon.

– I’ve just met the second Raquel Welch cavewoman in this book. Fortunately, on this occasion, I don’t end up killing her and we just go our separate ways, her taking her pet sabretooth tiger with her.

– The big epic battle begins. A battalion of lizard men, hobgoblins, goblins and so on pour out of the prison colony, ready to face my… Oh. I’ve got sixty-three half-starved ex-slaves at my back. We get mullered, and its only me killing the cyclops leading the army that carries the field for us.

– I can’t help but notice, as with Zagor and Balthus Dire, that the villainous Lizard King is a great equal opportunities employer. And that gets me thinking: why bother with the slaves at all? Why not just hire the elves, dwarves and men to work in the mine? Or use this completely unnecessary army of hobgoblins as slaves instead? After all, the Lizard men rule Fire Island almost unopposed, and no one threatens them. Port Blacksand doesn’t seem to want the island back (and doesn’t really have an army beyond its city guard, though I guess Lord Azzur could gather a decent force of privateers from the ships that dock at Blacksand). The Lizard King doesn’t need an army; he needs employees. He could then trade with the outside world for all that lovely gold he has.

– Evil contains the seeds of its own undoing, I guess. The Lizard King wants slaves because he’s an arsehole. He wants an army because he’s an arsehole. Ultimately, he stuck a giant spider into his head for ridiculous magical abilities because he’s an arsehole. If he wasn’t an evil arsehole, there wouldn’t be a plot. Island of the Lizard King would be a tourist brochure rather than an adventure story.

– Incidentally, on several occasions throughout this story, the narrative has asked if I have a particular item. Having it usually solves a problem, while not having it usually results in some sort of impediment, but very rarely death. That makes a pleasant change from some previous books. For example, my side is doomed to struggle in this battle, but I can rally them either by blowing the Horn of Valhalla (I have no idea where I was meant to have picked that up) or by winning a tough battle against the cyclops.

– That damn Ring of Confusion proves its worth again. Not only does the Lizard King keeps his fire swords disguised behind an illusion, but his sentry is also a shape shifter. The ring allows me to see through both, and the sword negates the penalty imposed by putting the ring on in the first place.

– Let me think… I’ve drunk a thing that prevents mind control, I have a fire sword, I have a monkey with which to scare the Lizard King, and I know to kill the Gonchong the moment it looks at me funny. I think I’m ready.

– Here’s the Lizard King, and… damn it. He only brought a black lion along as a pet. No one warned me he was a cat lover.

– I don’t love this cat: It’s Skill 11, Stamina 11. Seriously, what is it with this book and double-figure Skill scores?

– You know, I started this series complaining about how low the stats of monsters were in the early books. Now I’m complaining that they’re too high.

– As if to compensate, Mungo the Monkey scares the Lizard King so much that his Skill is halved to a paltry 6. He dies pretty easily, as does the Gonchong when I slice off its stabby-brain-skewer and chuck it off the battlements.

– The final sentence of the story: “Mungo would have been proud.” Aww.

– Island of the Lizard King was actually a damn good adventure story. The island never felt like a dungeon crawl, even if it is as confined as any other gamebook by the limitations of multiple choice page-turning. Like Craggen Rock (aka The Citadel of Chaos), the effort put into characterising the setting, in this case that of a tropical island with distinct geographic variation, made Fire Island seem like a place you were exploring, rather than a series of encounters. Add in that the actual plot of the story was split into several distinct acts (the journey through the jungle, the river raft sequence, the gold mine, searching for the shaman, and then the final battle) and you actually felt like you were doing something, rather than just exploring. Compare it with Darkwood Forest or Firetop Mountain, which were just a series of rooms and corridors (even if they were presented, in Forest of Doom, as clearings and paths).

– Ideally, Mungo would be more of a companion figure, perhaps relaying interesting facts about Oyster Bay and Fire Island, offering advice and so on, before dying about quarter of the way into the story. It would give more time to subtly characterise him before his inevitable demise. Possibly have him killed in such a way as to make his death meaningful, such as at the hands of a mob of lizard men. As it is, his two potential deaths at the pincers of a giant crab or stabbed through the chest by a random pirate are irrelevant to plot. With a more meaningful life and death, that final line of the story would carry more weight.

Next up: Scorpion Swamp, aka the one where the recommendation by the authors to draw a map of your adventure is taken to its logical extreme.

It turns out that StarryAI can be trained to generate some interesting looking lizard men, ranging from green-skinned, scaled humans, to some truly bestial creatures (hint: specify that it needs to have a long snout). The Gonchong was a bit more difficult, as you’ll see from the strange structures growing on some of these lizard men’s heads. The surreal final images, the two with the piled up reptiles, are what happen when you simply type the title of the book into an AI art generator. One image, not pictured, was from a batch of three others stat are featured below, but was more of a very attractive (if green) female Lizard Queen with more flesh on show than that female head hunter.