Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 14)

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.

Supplement Supplemental! (Static Solo Scares, Old-School Architecture, and Freshened-Up Cats)

Time for another entry in my occasional series offering brief mini-reviews on RPG supplements interesting enough to pass comment on but not quite spurring enough thoughts for a full article. This time around, it’s various items from the Basic Roleplaying family of systems.

Alone Against the Static (Call of Cthulhu)

South Dakota, the 1990s: Alex and Charlie are a couple whose relationship is not doing great. Charlie’s brother, Mark, has offered them the use of his cabin in the woods, which should give them a chance to have a nice getaway to have some fun, talk things over, and patch things up. As Alex and Charlie settle in for their first night, they decide to watch a movie – but the broadcast reception out here is lousy and the vast majority of Mark’s videos are horror movies, which they’re not in the mood for.

Eventually, they hit on a tape which they hope contains something different, and it certainly does – because it proves to be camcorder footage of the cabin from the last time Mark and his wife visited, filmed by an unseen figure a la Lost Highway, cutting off partway through and playing this hideous white noise static. Then the power to the cabin cuts off. The next day, one of the couple wakes up to find that the other has taken the car to town to try and get help fixing the power. A day alone in the cabin – or walking in the surrounding woods – can’t be that bad, right? (Oh yes it could…)

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 13)

I’m back again on my Fighting Fantasy nonsense! And why not – after all, as I said in the previous article we’ve hit a real peak of the line in our slow progress through the series. It’s a good while now since Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were writing for the series directly, entrusting the authorship of new gamebooks to a coterie of new authors largely associated with Games Workshop in some capacity or other.

This era may have seen a pivot from quantity to quality – after all, with a fairly extensive back catalogue to sell Puffin needn’t worry about competing lines crowding Fighting Fantasy out on bookshop and library shelves any time soon at this point in time. 1990 had seen only three books published, and 1991 would be similarly sparse. 1992, however, would see the release schedule picking up, as the series surged to hit its 50 book landmark in time for the 10th anniversary of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. In this article, we’ll cover two of the three releases of 1991 (since we already covered the first one last time), and the first two releases of 1992.

Spectral Stalkers

Scenario

You’re a down on your luck adventurer traipsing around the land of Khul, when one day at a Midsummer Fair you get your fortune told by a half-elf fortune teller. What they have to say astounds you: they claim you are due to undertake a journey which will take you beyond the bounds of this world entirely, all the way carrying a dangerous burden and hunted by perilous enemies. Surely that’s all flim-flam and charlatanry, right? But then why do they seem so insistent about bundling you out of their tent…?

This was the final Fighting Fantasy book by Peter Darvill-Evans, who in 1991 was about to begin an exciting new chapter in his life – helming the New Adventures series of all-original Doctor Who novels for Virgin Books, which provided a welcome extension to the Seventh Doctor’s saga, became the first majorly successful bit of tie-in media during Doctor Who‘s wilderness years, paved the way for the BBC Books series and the Big Finish audio dramas which would carry the torch for the second, post-TV movie period of the wilderness years, and saw the honing of new talent who would go on to make major contributions to the revived show. (It also produced, as a by-product, the Time Lord RPG, which Darvill-Evans co-authored.)

Before he went off to do that, he offered up this parting shot. His previous two Fighting Fantasy efforts – Beneath Nightmare Castle and Portal of Evil – were pretty solid, and it looks like this one is going to lean into the world-hopping aspects of the latter fairly hard. Let’s see how this goes…

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 12)

Time for another entry in my slow, gradual journey through the Fighting Fantasy series. In my previous article, I started to get into the era of the series which I’ve been looking forward to covering ever since I started these reviews way back in the Ferretbrain days: the era when the series started to go in a sustained darker direction, offering a compelling fantasy-horror hybrid. I also reviewed some pretty good gamebooks! After a period when the series seemed to go for quantity over quality, the priorities reversed, resulting in 1989’s Fighting Fantasy releases being a pretty good crop.

For this article, we’re going to enter the 1990s – in fact, our pace of getting through the timeline is picking up. Just as 1989 saw Puffin scaling back the pace of releases, with only 4 books released, 1990 only saw three books released in the mainline series – less than any year since 1982 (when only one book, the original Warlock of Firetop Mountain itself, came out). With a fairly extensive range by this point, it seems like a decision was made to focus on quality over quantity – which is all very well so long as quality actually gets delivered.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there was a span back there when Fighting Fantasy ran into a bit of a succession problem – Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone, and other writers who’d contributed to the early series had all rather drifted away from actively writing gamebooks before they could cultivate a new generation of “regulars” who could relaibly provide decent-quality contributions to the series.

Some newcomers only provided one or two new books, but then drifted away again; in some cases this was a shame (it’s a real shame Graeme Davis didn’t write more for the series after Midnight Rogue, and Marc Gascoigne’s Battleblade Warrior showed promise), in other cases this was for the best (Martin Allen’s Sky Lord may be the worst ever Fighting Fantasy gamebook.) From the mid-20s to late-30s, it seems like Luke Sharp was being groomed as a new “regular”, having put out four entries in the series, but by my reckoning only one of them is particularly good; the other three are mediocre at best, with one – Chasms of Malice – perhaps being the only competition for Sky Lord for the title of “worst ever”.

However, new writers did emerge, and the four gamebooks I will cover this time can be argued to be the work of a generation of “new regulars”. Six authors contributed to these books (since two of them are co-authored pieces); five of the six have previous Fighting Fantasy credits, and the newcomer is paired up with one of them, so all the books are written by people for whom this is not their first rodeo. At the same time, none of the authors made their Fighting Fantasy debut prior to 1986 – and three of the four books don’t have any contributing authors who debuted prior to 1988, so they are all designers who joined the series after it was well-established, rather than being from that early crop. Three of the authors in question will make further contributions to the series before it wraps up for good.

Master of Chaos

Scenario

A legendary artifact, the Staff of Rulership, has been stolen by the dark wizard Shanzikuul – perhaps the very same one who once allied with the Dark Elves centuries ago and was believed dead since the failure of that scheme. With the Staff in hand, Shanzikuul may be able to unite myriad different bickering evil and chaotic factions under one banner and become a threat to the whole world.

You have been persuaded to venture forth to Khul, the Chaos-haunted continent, to deal with this problem. Only an experienced warrior like you can hope to get close – Shanzikuul’s magical senses would detect a fellow magician with ease – but at the same time, a well-supplied warrior travelling to Khul would also attract unwanted attention. Thus a plan has been formed – you will deliberately get yourself press-ganged as a galley slave on the Diablo, endure the Diablo‘s ocean voyage to the city of Ashkyos, and then escape the ship, find a way to secure equipment and supplies, and travel upriver into the wastes of Chaos, making for the ruined city of Kabesh. It is a desperate plan – but that is what will be needed to stop the Master of Chaos…

This is another Keith Martin gamebook – Keith Martin being the pseudonym used by veteran WFRP author Carl Sargent for his Fighting Fantasy books. As we’ve seen so far, Sargent proved an adept hand at writing gamebooks, with his previous efforts, Stealer of Souls and Vault of the Vampire, being excellent contributions to the series. He’s set a high bar for himself here – let’s see if he clears it.

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 11)

In the previous episode of my Fighting Fantasy review series, I finished off the Fighting Fantasy releases of 1988 – an era when it seems like quantity was prioritised over quality, with some absolute clunkers slipping out (including Sky Lord, far and away the worst gamebook I have covered yet). There were some signs of hope – the best of the four books I covered in that article, Stealer of Souls, was really very good, perhaps the best Fighting Fantasy book I’d yet tackled in the series not written by Steve Jackson. On the other hand, a tepid contribution by Ian Livingstone – Armies of Death, most charitably described as an experiment which doesn’t quite work – highlighted how the scaled-back involvement of the series’ creators was causing issues.

Remember, Steve Jackson wrote his last gamebook for the Puffin series way back with Creature of Chaos, and Ian Livingstone’s contributions have become more and more sparse; in fact, we’ll only see one more gamebook by him in the remainder of the Puffin series. (He’d be credited with two solo works, but one of them was ghostwritten by Carl Sargent.) This time around, we have another clutch of gamebooks written by other parties, under the “Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone presents” banner. This has historically had mixed results; some of these gamebooks have been very good, some of them have been outright terrible, and of course you have the recurring issue where whenever you have a new person beginning to contribute to the series, they always seem to have a period of growing pains as they feel out best practice.

The four books in this review cover all the main Puffin-series releases for 1989 – that’s right, after this we’re out of the 1980s and coming into an era when increasingly sophisticated videogames become serious competitors with gamebooks when it comes to solo fun. That means Fighting Fantasy really needs to pull up its socks now if it’s going to keep up. Does the series manage this? Let’s see…

Portal of Evil

Scenario

For ages the dense forests at the foot of the Cloudhigh Mountains of Khul have been considered totally inhospitable to humans, occupied as they are by dangerous monsters and hordes of goblins. However, a while back an expedition from the frontier town of Kleinkastel went exploring the forest. The survivors came back with important news – there’s gold in them thar woods! The region has now become the hub of a gold rush, with Kleinkastel becoming a boom town and the centre of mining activities for the region.

Now, however, miners have been disappearing from their camps and villages within the forest. The mining leaders suspect that something is up; you’d previously passed on an offer to come to Kleinkastel and work as a caravan guard, but this sounds like a more serious matter, so as the adventure begins you are travelling into the outskirts of the forest, intent on reaching Kleinkastel and discovering what the problem is…

Portal of Evil is the second Fighting Fantasy book by Peter Darvill-Evans. His first one was Beneath Nightmare Castle, which I generally enjoyed, but knocked down a few marks for a slightly thoughtless recycling of racist tropes. Here Darvill-Evans looks like he is potentially getting into dodgy territory again. Having a gold rush naturally nudges the reader to think of the US one, so the gold being found in lands previously held by inhuman goblins is a little troubling. That said, the introduction does suggest that Darvill-Evans is entirely aware of the colonialist impulses associated with gold rushes, so maybe this will be handled better than expected.

Love Is Real For Faces and Heels

You’re sick of your dead-end job at the drive-through chocolate milk stand in Billings, Montana. Why, here you are stuck working for a boss who doesn’t remotely respect you, whilst tonight at the Grand Billings Arena Riled In the Ring, the biggest event on the Buckaroo Championship Wrestling calendar, is unfolding. As your shift ends a chance encounter with Andy the Mammoth, legendary wrestler, inspires you to quit your job and head to the BCW tryouts. You’re determined not to miss next year’s Riled In the Ring – and you plan to be there not as a fan, but as a competitor! Before you get to that dream Riled In the Ring moment, however, you’ve decisions to make and challenges to overcome. Will you be a face or a heel? Will you prevail in the ring and justify a championship shot? And what of the plans of the owner of BCW, the notorious scoundrel Vinny Cobbler?

Chuck Tingle’s Select Your Own Timeline series of Choose Your Own Adventure-styled gamebooks continues with Decisions To Wrestle With. This is an apt choice of subject matter; one of the things which made Choose Your Own Adventure stand out back when I was younger was the way they touched on a broader range of concepts than a lot of gamebook series, and “You’re a (insert sport here) star” was one of the concepts they sometimes ran with. Chuck is likely also writing about what he knows here; he’s eased off on it lately, but there was a time a while back when he worked a pretty shrewd wrestling .gif game on his social media accounts, and the book suggests a level of knowledge of the field a bit deeper than “I used to be a casual fan but drifted away”.

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 10)

At the end of my previous Fighting Fantasy article, I’d covered the first couple of Fighting Fantasy books released in 1988. It was evident that some attempt was being made to find new writers to contribute to the sequence, as a result of Jackson, Livingstone, and other stalwarts of the early series dialling back their contributions. In other words, the Fighting Fantasy crew were trying to counter the succession problem I’d identified at the end of part 8; for this part of the article, we’ll see that process continue, with two of the four books I’m covering this time coming from people who hadn’t written a mainline entry in the series at all. One of them will be of crucial importance to the later phases of the series’ tenure at Puffin; the other one… well, we’ll get to that.

The other two gamebook authors making a return this time are Luke Sharp and Ian Livingstone. Luke Sharp had put out two previous Fighting Fantasy books, both bad; Ian Livingstone had co-founded the series, but his subsequent gamebooks had been a bit hit-and-miss. Who’ll come out on top here – the old hand whose creative well might have begun to run dry through overuse, or the apprentice whose previous efforts were at best mediocre, at worst a flagrant waste of paper?

Sky Lord

Scenario

You are a solar trooper and secret agent named Sky Lord Jang Mistral, member of a four-armed humanoid warrior of the sixteenth aeon. As a member of the Ensulvar race, you serve mighty King Vaax. Recently, Vaax fell out with his former major-domo L’Bastin, who had been embezzling from the royal household to fund his cloning hobby and replacing household staff with mind-controlled clones to cover for this. Now L’Bastin has apparently established a weaponised clone laboratory and is churning out Prefectas, dog-headed super-warriors. You must board your starship, the Starspray, and root out this menace!

There’s no two ways about it: Sky Lord is weird. This is the sole Fighting Fantasy book in the mainline series to have been penned by Martin Allen, who had previously co-authored the Clash of Princes two-player gamebook with Andrew Chapman. After this, at least according to the database at gamebooks.org, he never wrote another gamebook, and it’s entirely possible that the bizarre nature of Sky Lord contributed to this.

Remember my Chasms of Malice review? How I hated that book! If you recall, one of the first red flags was the bizarrely terse introductory blurb, which came across more like brief notes than a fully fleshed-out introduction. (“I swear I finished my homework, Mr. Livingstone! Here it is!”) Here, again, the introductory material provides its own red flag, but of a rather different nature. It’s certainly vividly detailed and imaginative, but it’s also a farrago of utter nonsense, a total fever-dream version of a setting writeup. Perhaps the intention is for the gamebook to be a very deadpan parody, but if it is the writing style doesn’t quite manage to pull this off; it just gives the impression of absurd, arbitrary things happening largely at random. (Spoiler: this continues into the main adventure.)

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 9)

Once again I’ve gone back to the coalface to dig out another episode in my ongoing series reviewing the Fighting Fantasy line of gamebooks. This time around, we have the last two books to be released in 1987 and the first couple from 1988. As we’ve seen previously, we’ve entered a phase in the series where, despite their names being on most of the covers, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone had rather stepped back their day-to-day involvement with the franchise; Jackson had produced his final contribution to the series way back in 1986 with Creature of Havoc, and whilst Ian Livingstone would write a few more, he’d do so very infrequently.

As I outlined at the end of the previous article, this also coincided with a lot of the other writers of the better Fighting Fantasy books also bowing out of the series, creating a bit of a succession problem. We’re now well into the part of the series when third-party authors would contribute the bulk of the work (all of the books in this article were by writers other than Jackson and Livingstone), and when the pool of writers was being expanded (three of the four books I cover here are by writers who hadn’t previously written a Fighting Fantasy gamebook).

Midnight Rogue

Scenario

You are an apprentice of the Thieves’ Guild in Port Blacksand – the City of Thieves from the gamebook of the same name – and tonight is the night of your big test. To prove you’re worthy of graduating from your apprenticeship and becoming an accepted guild member, you must undertake the perilous mission of stealing the Eye of the Basilisk, a priceless gem known to be in the possession of the merchant Brass.

1987’s Midnight Rogue is notable for being the sole Fighting Fantasy book written by Graeme Davis, who WFRP fans will know as a co-designer of the original edition of that game; the same year would also see the release of his acclaimed WFRP scenarios Shadows Over Bögenhafen and Death On the Reik. As well as his WFRP duties, Davis was a fairly prolific writer for other Games Workshop lines at this time – he was a regular White Dwarf contributor, and another 1987 credit for him would be as one of a large team of contributors to the Green and Pleasant Land sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu.

It makes sense, then, that Jackson and Livingstone would get Davis to contribute to the Fighting Fantasy line, and it’s encouraging to see him present a scenario which breaks out of the “go defeat the latest Big Bad who wants to make trouble” rut that the series had become stuck in.

The Terralon Diary, Part 4: Angry Cawing!

Time to check in again on my experience working through The Gates of Terralon, a linear RPG experience presented in the form of a desk calendar. Last time, I rescued some kids from a well, and the 1st February finds me getting to select a reward: either I go greedy and lose virtue in return for an amount of gold based on a die roll, or I go humble, get some virtue, and get to ride the wagon with the kids and their family to my destination, giving me a chunky die roll bonus for the upcoming trip. I chose the wagon.

On 2nd February we get to level up! This means we get better abilities, our hit points and other numbers go up, and we get to boost our stats. We only get 2 points of stat boosts and since stat rolls are on 1D20, this feels a little pointless – the range of variance is likely to be way beyond the magnitude of the penalties or bonuses we have on most of our stats. I blow my spend on cancelling my -2 penalty on Charisma starting out, since I figure the upcoming town visit is going to involve lots of social rolls.

One of my new spells allows me to spend a spell point to frighten people (via, I have to imagine, angry cawing), giving me a whopping +20 to Intimidation rolls. That’s basically auto-success, so why not call it that? I am beginning to not have confidence in the system design abilities of the designers here. Another new spell is sick good: I get to cast it, roll an extra D6 when rolling damage, and get those points back as health. Both of these seem way better than the “+2 to Defence” spell which is the sole one I get at level 1, which is weird because they don’t actually cost more spell points to cast and you would think that in terms of spell power, a 1 point spell should be roughly equivalent to other 1 point spells.

3rd February sees me enjoying the wagon ride to town, and on 4th February I intimidate the guards into letting me into town without shaking me down for money through the power of angry cawing. On the 5th/6th I get to look around the town a bit and see what’s on offer, and on the 7th I get to take a room at an inn and rest, which feels like a bit of a nothing day – these could have been combined into one sheet to get the story moving faster.