It’s time for another entry in my slow trawl through the Fighting Fantasy back catalogue. In my previous article, I mentioned that we’d been travelling through a bit of a golden age for the series. We’ve now made it up to 1992, the ten year anniversary of the series, and plans are afoot at Puffin Books to evergreen the series – get the thing to 50 books, call it a day, and then coast on long tail sales of the back catalogue. That, however, is not what will come to pass..
Siege of Sardath
Scenario
You are the heroic protector of the settlement of Grimmund, a small community in the depths of the Forest of Night. With sword, bow, and lore learned from valued allies, you do what you can to keep the place safe, and have been honoured for your efforts with a place on the Grimmund Council. One day, you are awoken from strange and troubling dreams and called to an emergency meeting of the Council. Matters have been troubled of late: monsters stalk the woods and the elf-paths have closed, cutting Grimmund off from their dwarven allies at Sardath. An adventurer, one Morn Preeler, has just arrived with news – hence the hastily-assembled Council meeting. Preeler declares that the Forest itself is making war on Grimmund, and the startled Councillors begin making plans to take the fight to the forest.
You, however, are not so sure. You’ve always been acutely aware that the Forest has its perils – but also that the Forest is the basis of the livelihoods the folk of Grimmund eke out in its shadow. Its dangers must be resisted, but to burn out the forest would be to weaken the town gravely – possibly fatally. On top of that, your unquiet dreams have left you convinced that some other dark force is at work. When you express your doubts, Morn offers to take you to one side to better explain his discoveries to you and talk you around. Once you two are in private, Morn swiftly declares that he is not Morn – but an impostor who has stolen his form, and who now intends to slay and replace you!
Siege of Sardath is the sole Fighting Fantasy book by the mysterious Keith P. Phillips, who so far as I can tell never wrote any other gamebook material and seems to have been a complete unknown. This puts you in the position of not really knowing what to expect – though goodness knows that siege narratives and “track down the big bad” stories are a well-worn default in the series. Indeed, the return to Allansia and more classic fantasy tropes after a run of weird, outlandish, and horror-tinged gamebooks gives this something of a back-to-basics air. Let’s see how that shakes out.
System
Broadly speaking this is as normal. Provisions are replaced with bundles of healing herbs but work more or less identically – the reskin largely existing to get across the idea that you’ve got expert herbal knowledge as part of your work as a forest guardian. There’s a time limit on your mission, so you need to keep track of what day of the week it is. So far, so simple.
The major addition is a procedure for using your bow in combat – essentially you roll 2D6 and try and get less than or equal to your Skill, and if you do then you hit your target. Apparently, where ranged combat is an option I’ll get a limited number of chances to shoot some arrows before my opponent closes in to initiate hand-to-hand combat, so I guess the trade-off here is between spending arrows and risking hand-to-hand damage.
Gear
You get your sword (and a warning that if you lose it you’ll be at -2 on attack rolls until you get another weapon),, 5 Bundles of Herbs, 15 gold pieces, a bow, a quiver which can only hold six arrows (presently full), leather armour, backpack, and your council signet ring.
First Run
Skill: 8
Stamina: 19
Luck: 10
I beat the book this time around, but I’m going to make a confession: I cheated a lot. I think the reason I did that is that very often the book will throw an abrupt defeat because you made a single wrong choice, and I felt that in a repeat playthrough I’d have just made the same choices all the way to that point and then take the alternative route.
The book also ends up having a fairly steep difficulty curve. Early on, you get reasonably well-telegraphed clues and it’s not too hard to work out what you need to be doing if you’ve paid attention. Later, the riddles get trickier, and the environments get harder to navigate; figuring out where to go in the Dark Elf city towards the end is its own headache. It also has more instances where you can die for not having the correct item and be left unsure as to when and where you were supposed to be able to obtain it.
Still, despite its trickiness, this is a fairly nicely-written book. It’s a bit bland – dark elves led by an evil wizard are trying to destroy all that is good and noble, what a shocker – but it’s a pleasant enough execution of that blandness. And in the wake of a run of books which were experimenting with a darker style of fantasy or dabbling in wuxia, it feels nice to go back to basics to this extent.
There’s also some clever design ideas here and there – for instance, if you take a polymorph potion, you get told that if a particular phrase comes up in the narration you should shift the number of the paragraph you are on by a set amount to account for your different form. This isn’t absolutely novel – Steve Jackson uses it in Appointment With F.E.A.R. to implement some of the superpowers in that – but it is a neat use of the concept.
Siege of Sardath isn’t a gamebook anyone’s going to be overly excited about or shoot to the top of anyone’s best-of list, but it’s pleasant enough fare and rather engagingly written. It’s a real shame that Phillips didn’t write more gamebooks, because this is a highly credible first attempt.
Return To Firetop Mountain
Scenario
Ten years ago, someone ventured to the heart of Firetop Mountain and killed Zagor, its dark overlord. However, Zagor had made plans for this eventuality, having cast a spell on himself which would bring about his reconstitution after a suitable passage of time.
Now strange rumours are afoot in the region of livestock sickening and people disappearing; it is said that Zagor is abducting innocents to use in constructing a new body for himself. You are travelling in the region when, stopping at a local inn, you hear these dark tales and are persuaded to get involved. You are warned that before you head to Firetop Mountain itself, you ought to go see the wizard Yaztromo, who can tell you how to slay Zagor for good…
This fiftieth anniversary special is the first time since Armies of Death that Ian Livingstone wrote a Fighting Fantasy book himself. Other hands had tackled the run of thirteen books between then and here, and this happened to be a golden age for the product line. Will Ian mess up the streak of pretty decent books by reviving old bad habits and creaky old design principles the line had been evolving beyond, or will he deliver a sequel which takes into account the evolution in the format whilst still honouring the classic atmosphere of the original book?
System
Absolutely 100% bog standard vanilla Fighting Fantasy, which is exactly what you want with a book with this concept.
Gear
Sword, travel clothes, backpack, lantern. Simple.
First Run
Skill: 12
Stamina: 19
Luck: 11
I cheated again this time, for five reasons. The first is that Ian has openly declared he designs gamebooks assuming people are going to cheat. I’ve said over and over again during this article series that I dislike this design philosophy – if a game is more fun to play by cheating than to play fairly, that’s a design failure in my eyes. Nonetheless, if this is how he expects you to play, I’m going to play it that way.
The second reason is that, as with Siege of Sardath, there are a bunch of situations where on dying I’d think “Oh, well clearly on a replay I’d take exactly the same route to that point but then take the other choice/win the fight/whatever” and I decided to save myself time (especially given that I wasn’t likely to roll better stats).
The third reason is that although the book plays reasonably fair early on in terms of giving you substantial information to use to base your decisions on, later on there’s at least one Deathtrap Dungeon-style T-junction where you can turn left or turn right, you are given absolutely no information to guide your choice, and if you pick wrong then you will inevitably die. Frankly, fuck that. It was a deeply irritating game design approach when Ian did it in Deathtrap Dungeon and it’s still infuriating when he does it here.
The fourth reason is that Ian once again decides to just throw unavoidable high-Skill enemies at you as a “fuck you” to anyone who rolled a low Skill. To make this worse, there’s unavoidable fights even on the ideal route which include rules like “If this foe wins a combat round, you must roll two dice and if you roll doubles you instantly die. If you win a combat round, you don’t do any damage, you must roll doubles on two dice to insta-kill it otherwise the fight continues”, and since that’s a Skill 9 foe this means that Skill 12 characters are in a non-zero amount of danger from it. That fight happens early enough on the ideal route to be annoying – you must take that route to beat the book, if you are playing fair you can end up with a stack of playthroughs which end frustratingly early, before you even had a chance to at least try some alternative routes and garner a bit more information.
The fifth reason is that by the end, I got annoyed because of the way the gamebook lies to you.
That last one sounds harsh, so I better contextualise it. If you do the sensible thing and go visit Yaztromo before you head to Firetop Mountain, he explains that Zagor will be summoning Chaos Elementals to fight you, and you’ll need to summon Elementals of your own to counter them. Fortunately, there’s a catch in the spell Zagor used to resurrect itself: the price of being raised from the dead is that the means of destroying you again must be seeded in your vicinity. In the dungeon are golden dragon’s teeth, and if you collect the teeth, discover the magic word which activates them, and learn which Elemental you need to use to counter each of the Chaos Elementals that Zagor summons, Zagor will have to fight you mano a mano.
All well and good. But Yaztromo also tells you explicitly that you need at least two teeth, but more can’t hurt. As it stands, I found all the pages of the book which tells you which tooth to use against which Elemental, and the command word but not all the teeth. I had one which was definitely a correct tooth, with a number on the back and everything, a blank tooth, and a tooth with a heart in a circle of flame stencilled on it instead of a number.
However, the version of the book I was using has a misprint in it! It’s the original Puffin printing and apparently the tooth with the heart symbol on it was also meant to have a number associated – perhaps the symbol was an artifact of an earlier draft – but they goofed. The later Wizard Books reprint fixed this. Cool, fine, if the blank tooth is not usable in the final conflict then at least I have two of the “correct” teeth, and if the blank tooth is fine to use (perhaps as a “wildcard” – after all, you get the numbers off the pages of the book, so you could in theory just throw a tooth without a number on it and still know which number to turn to), then I’m going in with a surplus. Right?
Wrong.
You need all four of the Elemental-summoning gold teeth (it is far from clear whether the blank teeth are usable in this respect or not) to beat the game. Two teeth is not enough, Yaztromo was flat-out wrong. Maybe in-character Yaztromo has every reason to be mistaken and was trying to be honest – but you as a player have no way to discover that (without getting to the final conflict and discovering he’s wrong, thus requiring you to use knowledge a dead character gained in your replays). And fundamentally, if someone who is presented and understood as being a largely reliable advice-giving NPC gives you advice in a game, and you have no basis to mistrust it, then it’s unfair and cheap to have the advice be wrong – effectively a form of the narration itself lying to the player. A referee in a tabletop RPG can absolutely fool a player by simply being selective with what they narrate and there’s no honour or glory in doing so, and it’s the same when you are writing a gamebook.
Also, the Elemental fight section tells you to turn to the number for the Elemental you want to summon, based on the pages of the book you find – fine. But there’s no checks at the paragraph in question to make sure you’ve chosen the correct Elemental to fight the Elemental you want to dismiss! So it’s completely possible to win the game by cheating, picking the “wrong” tooth to skip straight to the end of the Elemental sequence.
This means that the Elemental sequence:
- Is much easier if you cheat.
- Lies to you about what is required before you go into it.
- In the original version of the book, is impossible if you don’t cheat.
It’s proof positive that Sir Ian’s knighthood is more for his contributions to the British games industry than it is to his innovations in game design.
I could throw in more information; the “right” solution to the book requires you to fall for a trap, entering a torture chamber to steal a gold ring from a corpse when blatantly a prisoner who died on the rack would have been stripped of valuables. So the gamebook punishes you for correctly smelling a rat. But that would belabour the point. It’s a real shame, because this book is flavourfully written at the very least – something Livingstone was always good at – and the way the early sections of the Firetop Mountain dungeon (ie, the outermost section which you’d expect Zagor to have had the least opportunity to fix up) is very clearly a dilapidated version of the early sections of the original gamebook is neat. (You can even find the skeletons of foes encountered in that book, some resting in peace, some more animated.)
But yet again, Ian’s philosophy of Fighting Fantasy gamebook design is so alien to my own tastes that it’s just ruined. It’s certainly more pleasant to read than the sparsely-narrated Deathtrap Dungeon, but it’s still not a book which covers Ian in glory. The best thing I can say about it is that apparently it sold unexpectedly well; Puffin had been considering shuttering the line after this capstone, but instead greenlit a range of new books. The first of which was…
Island of the Undead
Scenario
You are a simple fisherman, your village being located on the coast of the Strait of Knives. A while ago, a group of reclusive wizards took up residence on Solani Island, a nearby locale inhabited only by some insular monks. In return for providing them with supplies and otherwise leaving them alone, the wizards have built a lighthouse to protect shipping, and have used their magic to ensure calm weather and placid seas year-round – and your village has made a fortune as a result.
Now, however, things seem to be going awry. A boat was sunk lately – leading to the first deaths on a fishing expedition for years – and rumour has it that one of the bodies that washed ashore got up and kept moving, attacking bystanders before it was put down. Just last night, a freak wave sank two more boats. The leaders of the village are convinced something is up; nobody is blaming the wizards, given that they’ve been entirely benign so far, but it does seem worrying that dark forces are afoot and the wizards don’t seem to have been able to stop them.
You were part of an armed party sent forth to sail to Solani Island, to check in on the wizards and see what can be learned. However, more hostile weather caused your boat to capsize, and the others were all lost. You have just about survived and have woken up, stranded and soaking wet, on a beach on the western coast of Solani Island. It looks like it’s down to you to investigate solo…
This is another gamebook from Keith Martin – AKA Carl Sargent. Sargent’s past works – especially Vault of the Vampire – can perhaps be credited with sparking off the run of horror-focused Fighting Fantasy books I’ve been covering in recent articles in this series. This concept looks like it can go either way – maybe it’ll be spooky, or maybe it’ll go in a more traditional direction. Only one way to find out…
System
Sargent talks about the concept of Testing Your Skill – this is the age-old mechanic of “roll two dice and try and get equal to or less than your Skill score”, as has been used in innumerable adventures prior to this, but it’s given a formalised name here, and about time.
Sargent also adds a new stat: Presence. This is rolled on 1D3+4 and represents force of personality; high scores make it easier for you to inspire the trust of well-meaning people and creatures you encounter, low scores help you evade the notice of malefactors. We’ll see how that pans out.
You start this adventure without a sword or shield, and rules are given for what that means: essentially, until you acquire one when you roll damage in combat you have a 2 in 3 chance of only doing 1 Stamina point of damage to your foe, and if you have no shield you have a -1 Skill penalty in combat. Rules are also given for what happens if you’re told you need to eat provisions due to the passage of time – you get no Stamina benefit, and if you have no provisions to eat you lose 2hp, which is a concept which has been used in other Fighting Fantasy adventures prior to this.
Lastly, potions work a little different this time – in that once you have drunk one, you have the option of keeping the empty bottle in case it is handy later. Thanks for teaching the kids to recycle, Carl!
Gear
You get a generous 12 total Provisions in this one, along with a knife, waterskin, and clothes.
First Run
Skill: 8
Stamina: 20
Luck: 10
Presence: 5
I don’t know whether or not I’d have beat the book on this run; I did cheat a little, given that one of the essential fights is against a Skill 9 ghoul which insta-kills you if it hits you three times (and on checking walkthroughs I see you need to beat the ghoul to complete the game – it’s the way you get a shield, for one thing, without which you have a -1 Skill penalty in combat weighing you down). I also cheated a bit to solve a riddle involving an inscription on a door, but in my defence the riddle is infamously unfair; the coded message in question has an error in it, the code in question was only ever explained in Vault of the Vampire rather than having its guiding principles explained here, and the logical jumps you have to make from solving the coded message to figuring out the paragraph you need to turn to are flat out absurd.
However, my decision to give up partway through this run stemmed not from the extent to which I found myself cheating per se, but from the sheer slog this gamebook becomes. On the one hand, Sargent deserves props for presenting an “open world” scenario where there are many different orders in which you can visit key sites, and where many of the locales have a fairly involved set of things to do there. On the other hand, Sargent seems to be trying to cram too much material into here, trying to pack a setting and storyline into the gamebook which are both somewhat too involved to elegantly fit into a 400 paragraph Fighting Fantasy gamebook without some inelegant kludges.
Sargent/Martin’s prose remains compelling on the level of individual paragraphs, but – despite a fairly developed plot – the atmosphere and worldbuilding don’t quite gel when you take a look at the big picture. Whilst his previous gamebooks tended to have much more coherently realised aesthetics, this feels like a mashup of more flavourful Martin concepts (like the undead-infested monastery and the feuds among the wizards) with more generic locales and monsters (the Lizard Men stuff felt tacked-on in particular). On the whole, this feels like a rare fumble for Sargent.
Night Dragon
Scenario
You are a veteran adventurer and have been called to Port Blacksand with the promise of a challenge worthy of your time. You are surprised when your rendezvous is with a Dark Elf – one who appears to be dying, at that. He explains that the Night Dragon – a vast Ancient Dragon of unthinkable cosmic antiquity – is on the verge of awakening from the Dreamtime in which it is bound. Its rousing from slumber would spell doom for basically everything less mighty than a Night Dragon. The Dark Elves have attempted to stop it, but failed, and the Dragons themselves are worried by their coming ancestor – a Conclave of Dragons of both Law and Chaos has been called to face this threat. The Dark Elf urges you to head to the village of Rentarn and seek lodging in the Rudderless Galley tavern, where a messenger will come to tell you how to reach the Conclave.
Night Dragon is the first Fighting Fantasy book of 1993, and the second release in a row by Keith Martin/Carl Sargent – which is unusual outside of the early years when the pool of authors was shallow. (The last time the series published two books by the same author in a row was 1985, when Andrew Chapman’s The Rings of Kether was followed by The Seas of Blood.) I wonder if this was due to Puffin’s unexpected extension of the series forcing the editors to scramble to get a usable gamebook out of someone who could reliably turn out material in a hurry; it may also explain why Island of the Undead felt a little off, if Sargent had to hurry to finish that one in order to tackle this.
System
Sargent/Martin throws in a lot of extra bells and whistles this time around. Firstly, your character is explicitly meant to be a veteran, so you get two advancement points to spend on your stats after you roll them. Each advancement point is worth 1 point of Skill or Luck or 2 points of Stamina, you can’t spend both your advancement points on the same stat, and you can’t use them to boost Skill or Luck above 12. This feels like a crafty way to stick to the underlying parameters of the system whilst at the same time buffering the player a tad against bad rolls – though an unfriendly game design with lots of fights against high-Skill opponents would tend to cancel out any benefit from this, so we’ll see how that goes.
We also see a continuation of the reputational mechanics from the previous book, but instead of a single Presence stat you now have Honour and Nemesis, both starting at 0 and tracked separately. Honour represents how benign you have been towards others, and can go negative if you act like an asshole; Nemesis represents how much the forces ranged against you know about your activities.
The rules for what happens if you’re told to eat provisions due to time passing also come up here, and there’s also a time score you have to keep count of to represent the passage of time, so this is evidently another race against time quest.
Gear
Sword, shield, leather armour, lantern, backpack, and 2D6+3 gold pieces. Mind you, you also get 10 gold pieces and a silver key in the opening narration, and that’s explicitly in addition to your starting stuff, so you may as well roll starting cash as 2D6+13.
First Run
Skill: 9, boosted to 10
Stamina: 20
Luck: 9, boosted to 10
As with Island of the Undead, I kind of bounced off this one. This seems to get fairly mixed reviews, and I can see why some people find it appealing; the additional little rules subsystems gives the sense that this is an advanced gamebook for hardcore players, whilst at the same time each feeling somewhat purposeful and being simple enough by themselves not to be needlessly fiddly. The sense that this is a hard-mode gamebook for cleverclogs is enhanced by design features like more maths puzzles (fortunately without bugs this time).
It’s also a book which rewards taking notes – occasionally you’ll be asked to work out a number based on the name of a person or place that has been mentioned to you previously and the paragraph you found out the crucial information in won’t necessarily have told you to note down that information, or the actual thing you need to do will be unnecessarily ambiguous. For instance, at one point you’re asked to do this with the name of a place called “Stormdrake Pass”, but if you do it with the entire name you’ll get to the wrong paragraph – you need to just work out the number based on “Stormdrake”, which means it’s possible that you might think you got the solution wrong when in fact you were using the correct information and are actually following the instructions as given, but you didn’t twig that you were meant to leave out “Pass”, despite “Pass” being part of the place’s name.
There’s a conscious attempt here to make this book as epic as possible, but I am not sure that this entirely pans out. Certainly, in terms of concepts for boss enemies the idea of an archetypal dragon from the dawn of time is a bit more original than “some powerful wizard who’s up to no good”, at least superficially, but when the book is building up to a fight against a Skill 17 foe (not as hard as it seems if you have suitable bonuses from the quest items you’ve been collecting over the course of the adventure) it still feels like a “Get to the end, beat the boss” book without really finding a new story structure. (If you swapped out the dragons in the book for wizards, very little would change.) And ultimately, much of this book involves the same sort of exploring and dungeoneering action of any other Fighting Fantasy book, bar for a dreamscape excursion which is in principle interesting but in practice is the sort of thing which previous books have regularly dipped into when they want to do something a bit out of the ordinary.
Most of all, this feels like an utter slog, with the journey to the Dragon Conclave, the Conclave itself, the dreamscape visit and searches for each individual plot item, and finally the bid to take out the Night Dragon being distinct phases of the gamebook. It feels like there’s slightly too many of these, something which Island of the Undead suffered from a little. In comparison with Vault of the Vampire – which largely takes place in a single castle which is very deeply developed – this feels like you’re visiting a lot of locales, but none of them are particularly distinctively developed.
I like this somewhat better than Island of the Undead, with the air of gathering apocalypse and the sense of having all these cultists running around seeking to raise the Night Dragon perhaps being the best aspect, though something which calls by the wayside a little in some of the dungeon exploration sections. Nonetheless, it feels like enough of a slog that I find I lack patience for it. This may be worth it if you want a fairly complicated gamebook to puzzle out on a long, rainy day, though to be honest that’s also true of Vault of the Vampire, which packs in much more atmosphere than this – by comparison it seems like Night Dragon is more focused on design gimmicks than on atmospherics.
The Canary Says
In the previous article, I talked about how the run of gamebooks from Portal of Evil through the 40s represented something of a late-period peak of the Puffin Fighting Fantasy range. Certainly, my recollection was that the 50s saw the series decline, and that seems to be a fairly common stance – not helped by the fact that there’s books incoming which have some really significant editing issues. Looking over these books – and finding that I can’t quite be assed to finish them – it’s a little surprising how sharp the tail-off is. Sure, I wasn’t incredibly enthusiastic about Siege of Sardath, but it was a decent enough first attempt and a nice first entry for a new writer – but then Return To Firetop Mountain hit and things seem to have gone south.
It’s not hard to infer why. The plan to draw a line under the series at 50 and retire it with honour might have left fans disappointed, had Puffin gone through with it, but there is a certain logic to it; there’s only so many books the market can sustain, and with literal dozens of books in the tank there was more than enough of a back catalogue that any reader coming to Fighting Fantasy at the age of, say, 8 or 9 or so would likely hit their teen years by the time they worked through the whole series, by which point they’d likely either graduate to tabletop RPGs or move on to other interests. And there comes a point when a series becomes so expansive that it becomes potentially daunting to navigate, and Fighting Fantasy had clearly passed it.
The decision to continue the series seems to have been taken fairly late in the day – and it seems likely that Puffin then had to scramble to avoid an unwanted gap in between Return To Firetop Mountain and book 51. Return To Firetop Mountain wasn’t to my taste, but that was only to be expected – it’s Ian Livingstone doing a back-to-basics adventure, which given my distaste for his more old-school gamebooks like Deathtrap Dungeon was always going to be a bit of a hard sell. What’s more of a surprise is Keith Martin putting out two weaker entries in a row, given the quality of his prior work, and it’s hard not to see this as the consequence of Martin being asked to knock out two books in a hurry.
Martin/Sargent seems to have become the franchise’s go-to guy for producing work in a hurry. When the Legend of Zagor boardgame came out in 1993, the plan called for an Ian Livingstone-authored gamebook based on it to come out in the Fighting Fantasy series, but Livingstone was so caught up with the boardgame that he didn’t have time to do the gamebook as well – so in a pinch he got in touch with Carl Sargent and he ghostwrote the gamebook for Livingstone, using the lore and characters Livingstone had developed for the boardgame as its basis. That’s all very well, but it inevitably meant that Martin was being prized for speed over quality, giving him less time to add the polish which might turn a Night Dragon into a Master of Chaos or Stealer of Souls.
Why rely so heavily on Sargent? Well, it seems that at around this time that for whatever reason there was a shallowing-out of the pool of Fighting Fantasy authors. Of the nine books following Return To Firetop Mountain in the Puffin series, four would be penned by Sargent/Martin, three would be written by newcomer Jonathan Green, and there’d be one from Paul Mason and one from Robin Waterfield. Mason showing up isn’t that surprising -he’d contributed a book every couple of years for a while, and whilst the gap in his contributions from 1992 to 1995 was a bit longer than that, the difference isn’t enormous.
Waterfield showing up again, however, is a surprise – because he’d put out one Fighting Fantasy book per year from 1985 to 1987, and then there’d been nothing from him until suddenly in 1994 he pops up to contribute another book – Deathmoor. What happened there? Was it really a matter of him starting to submit ideas again after a long break? Did the pool of usable writers run dry, necessitating a scrabble to find previous authors still willing to write for the series? Did Deathmoor sit in the submissions hopper for years before Marc Gascoigne as editor finally decided to roll with it? It’s an intriguing question.
Whatever, the answer, the combination of a limited set of legacy authors still writing for the series and a heavy reliance on one single newcomer suggests trouble – and raises the question of where all the other authors went. We’ll see in the next article whether the shift in the author pool gives rise to further turbulence.
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Vault of the Vampire 😀 (Sheer delight)
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Legend of the Shadow Warriors |
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Appointment With F.E.A.R. |
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House of Hell |
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Dead of Night |
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Portal of Evil |
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Sorcery!* |
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Stealer of Souls |
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Midnight Rogue |
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The Warlock of Firetop Mountain |
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Spectral Stalkers |
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Master of Chaos |
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The Keep of the Lich-Lord |
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Robot Commando |
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The Rings of Kether |
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Island of the Lizard King |
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Moonrunner 🙂 (Recommended)
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Space Assassin |
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Battleblade Warrior |
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Beneath Nightmare Castle |
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City of Thieves |
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Seas of Blood |
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Daggers of Darkness |
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Talisman of Death |
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Freeway Fighter |
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Demons of the Deep |
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Siege of Sardath |
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Creature of Havoc |
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Tower of Destruction |
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The Crimson Tide :S (Collectors only)
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Forest of Doom |
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Phantoms of Fear |
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Armies of Death |
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Night Dragon |
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Temple of Terror |
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Citadel of Chaos |
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Island of the Undead |
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Slaves of the Abyss |
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Crypt of the Sorcerer |
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Sword of the Samurai |
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Rebel Planet |
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Return To Firetop Mountain 😦 (Downright bad)
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Caverns of the Snow Witch |
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Masks of Mayhem |
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Starship Traveller |
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Fangs of Fury |
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Deathtrap Dungeon 😡 (Pissed me off)
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Black Vein Prophecy |
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Trial of Champions |
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Star Strider |
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Scorpion Swamp D: (OH GOD WHY)
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Chasms of Malice |
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Sky Lord |
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* Assuming that you:
- play it as a wizard
- play the books in sequence
- and take then end of each book as a "save point".
Refereeing and Reflection 
Hmm, you still haven’t gotten to the book I remember that let you choose to play as one of four characters with different abilities. One was a dwarf, one was a wizard, I think the third was a barbarian and I can’t remember what the fourth choice was. I thought that book was Return to Firetop Mountain, but evidently it wasn’t. It was definitely Fighting Fantasy, not one of the competing gamebook lines.
That’s Legend of Zagor! The character selection was a feature of the boardgame so they worked it into the book.