Fighting Fantasy – Page 15

Seas of Blood

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Join the crew and hoist the rigging as we sail the Seas of Blood!

In 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, founders of Games Workshop, released the book ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’. Intended as an introduction to tabletop role-playing games of the era, the book’s choose-your-own-adventure format mixed with simple dice-based combat proved massively successful, giving rise to a full series of books – Fighting Fantasy. With over 65 books in the series by a legion of authors and illustrators, the series’ legacy continues to this day. Come along with us as Cybe and co play through each one – with no prior knowledge, no hints or walkthroughs and no cheating!

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Arrrr, shiver me timbers and swab the decks, and all that rubbish. You fight like a cow.

Before Armies of Death, there was Seas of Blood. A lot of the concepts are similar, in that you’re in command of a large number of people – namely a pirate crew. Thankfully this book does not require you to put together a set of stats for each member of your crew, though, unlike the mind-numbingly awful Starship Traveller,. Instead, it’s happy to let you roll up your crew as if they were one being, with a surrogate skill and stamina score. I want to point this out nice and early, because it’s damn good to see this progress in the series. Got to love it!

What the book gains in progress, it lacks in background and reason behind the story. You’re a pirate captain, and you have a rival pirate captain called Abdul the Butcher, and you have both decided to have a contest to see which of you is going to be King of the Pirates. I suppose that back in the old days, pirates didn’t have much to do with their time, so this was a good way to spend a quiet evening. That, and having sea battles with vikings. Hmm, who would win in a battle between ghost pirates and werewolf vikings…. Answers in the comments, please.

I name my character Seamus the Unwashed, and the contest begins. Abdul and his ship sail off out of view, and I order my ship (The Banshee) to head towards the local trading city of Lakash. We sail right into two warships, which proceed to beat the living snot out of my crew, and I quickly realise that this is going to be one of those ‘roll some dice and hope you don’t die too badly’ books. Eventually we’re able to take down the warships, who had a couple of gold coins between them (you’d think that massive ships of war would have more than just sixty gold coins) and decide to go somewhere less dangerous.

So I set course for the Rivers of the Dead. That doesn’t sound dangerous.

This turns out to be a pretty good idea, because by the time I get there and decide to explore some of the gullies we find for loot, it’s given the goblin hordes of the area enough time to launch a surprise attack on us. During the battle, Seamus is separated from his crew and falls into a hole in the ground, where he lands in a dungeon. Oh good, it wouldn’t be a Fighting Fantasy book without a dungeon to get lost in!

Almost immediately I find a large door, which is sealed shut. There’s a statue beside it, which I need to push in order to unlock the door. Doing so causes the statue to squirt poison at me, which causes me to repeat my catchphrase of “Why would anyone build something like that?” This is the Fighting Fantasy equivalent of having a front door that kicks you in the nuts when you knock on it.

I get into the next room, which has a large number of stones in the middle of the chamber. As I look closer at the stones, one of them comes to life and sprays acid on me. I sigh, roll my eyes and chop the little shit into pieces. Realising that I’m stuck in the depths of one of Gary Gygax’s most nightmarish concoctions, I decide to just get out of the room as soon as possible.

I yank on the handle for the door, and it leads into a room with a large sarcophagus, inside of which I find a rather shiny helmet (I refuse to make any jokes this obvious) and about a hundred gold coins. I yank on another handle in the chamber to find a secret passage leading back up to the surface, where I reunite with the crew and head back to the ship. Where I will tell my crew all about the things I’ve tugged, all the secret passages I’ve explored, and all the helmets I’ve shined. Pirates need their hobbies, after all.

We then return to the heart of the book, which consists of deciding where you’d like to sail and then rolling dice to get there. I patrol the seas for a while looking for a merchant ship, but without any luck. We do find some wreckage, which contains some fine booze for the crew. We later encounter a rather nasty storm, and as we sail around to avoid it, we notice a merchant vessel at last. The crew charge on-board, which causes the captain to panic, sink his ship, and jump into the sea with all his gold. So much for the direct route.

At about this point, I’m given the chance to pop along to one of the small islands. We dock in a small inlet, and because we’re getting rather hungry, decide to steal some cattle in order to make some burgers (opting for burgers made of cow, rather than the fashionable trend of horse burgers that are all the fashion here in the UK). While we steal some cattle, a battalion of riders run over the hill towards us, and order us to bugger off the island, on the warning of the King of the Four Winds.

As we all sheepishly leave the island, the King of the Four Winds kicks up a massive storm which lasts for an entire week, causing our ship to be thrown around and stuck in the docks. We’re unable to sail anywhere, because the King of the Four Winds guards his cows very jealously. For some reason. I kinda picture this King as a giant elemental being of air and mysticism, but we didn’t get a chance to meet him. Instead, we’re just left with no avenue to complete the challenge with Abdul the Butcher, so we quietly give up and spend the rest of our time lazing around in a local pub.

So yeah, a bit of a let-down here. It could really have done with some more violence and morally dubious actions, something to put the blood into Seas Of Blood. I’m not saying that it was a bad book, it just never came across as particularly pirate-ey, and I found myself wanting to spend my Saturday beating up elves instead.

Cause of death: Abandon our quest as per the King of the Four Winds

The Rings of Kether

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Join a sci-fi police drug bust beyond the stars and through The Rings of Kether!

If you’re a long time reader of this site, you’ll know how I feel about the Fighting Fantasy series’ occasional venture into the sci-fi genre, which means that this adventure is almost certainly going to be bleak and painful. Urrgh. Rings of Kether is apparently one of the better ones in the sci-fi books though, which is kinda like saying that being kicked in one tooth is better than being kicked in a different tooth. Okay, sorry, I promise that I’m going to be very, very positive with this playthrough, though. Not going to say a single negative thing. Positivity is the name of the game today. So, let’s get this adventure under way.

The intergalactic police have decided to send the player off on his own to break a space drug ring, all by himself. Without backup. Even Judge Dredd has backup. So I’m just going to assume that I’ve pissed off my department manager and he wants to see me be thrown into a space-river. Boy, that positivity didn’t last long. Anyway, the character Ie rolled up is pretty decent with high stamina and middle-of-the-line skill, and I start out with two ‘Smart Missiles’ for ship to ship combat, the usual sci-fi ‘blaster’ type of gun, and a handful of Pep Pills, because nothing says ‘Law enforcer on the move to take down drug rings and narcotic smugglers’ than someone chomping down on fistfuls of pills.

The adventure starts with my shuttle arriving at Kether, the planet that I’ve been told that is flooding the sector with drugs. Immediately I’m asked where I want to start searching for the drugs ring, and I’m given three choices, with no clues or hints as to which may be correct. Picking one of them at complete random, I opt to go and visit the moon. I spend about five days searching around the moon, looking under rocks and lumps of space cheese, but find no drug rings at all. This is a great start to the adventure, literally giving the player a choice to make which is an utter dead end. Yeesh.

When we eventually head down to the main planet again, customs take away my ‘Spy Ray’. I don’t even know what a Spy Ray is, the book didn’t tell me what it is or that I even had it. It may as well have told me that my Samoflange had been taken away from me. My best guess is that the Spy Ray is an object that I’m meant to find in one of the other paths. And again, this is meant to be the ‘better’ of the sci-fi adventures! But anyway, I decide to head down to the local police station to see if anyone there can clue me in to the investigation.

Upon arriving at the police headquarters, I meet Mr Samuel, who is rather like Commissioner Gordon but without the epic ‘tash. When I ask him what’s going on, he makes a show of looking over his office for listening devices, and then hands me a note telling me to meet him later. Oooh, conspiratorial! He meets me later in a seedy cafe, looking about as inconspicuous as a man in a false beard can be. He tells me that the police are corrupt and that he can point me towards his contact, a freighter captain. The captain in turn directs me towards a poker game going down in a local pub, where we meet our primary suspect, Zera Gross. Zera is described as a hideous, belching woman which describes most of the inhabitants of Essex.

The book asks how I want to confront Zera, and I opt to be rather direct with her. Showing the subtlety of a highly regarded space cop investigative detective with a speciality in handling vice cases, my character walks up to Zera and say “So m’love, how’s the drug trade going?” I wake up the next morning in a gutter nursing a severe concussion. I am truly the best there is at what I do. With that uneventful experience now behind me I need to find another lead, and and decide that I’ll try doing my work in the local library instead. Hey, it works in Call of Cthulhu! Evidently the local library contains all kinds of useful information, because I’m able to pull up some info on a court case some years ago, involving Miss Gross and her good friend ‘Blasty’ Blasterson, who I’m guessing has some kind of gun fetish. The court records, which are evidently available to any member of the public who has an interest to look at them, confirms that they are (or at least, were) involved in drug running. I’m also able to pull up a copy of Blasty’s home address, which is apparently in the public domain as well. And I thought Facebook was bad at keeping hold of personal information!

When I reach Blasty’s address, it turns out that it isn’t a suburban semi-detached house at all, but is an old warehouse. I mean, I guess that gangsters live in warehouses, I suppose. I’m not sure that you can register them as your actual address, though. Anyway, I sneak in through the back and over-hear a conversation between two people who I don’t know. The book then asks if I want to go to their meeting and listen in on it, but I choose not to because I don’t have any idea as to if or why it’s relevant to the case. Instead I stick around to snoop through the warehouse some more. As I do so, I hear someone behind me say “Freeze!” I assume it’s Blasty. Naturally, I have no fear, and I fully suspect that I won’t take too much damage. After all, being beaten up by Gross and her buddies cost me only a mere 2 stamina points, so I decide to take the risk and get into a fight with Blasty. Sadly, it turns out that in this one eventuality, phaser fire is utterly lethal, and I’m turned into swiss cheese.

Well, the downside of this adventure is that it’s still a sci-fi Fighting Fantasy. But on a more positive note, it’s possibly the least awful one that I’ve read thus far. I can’t say that it was a work of art or anything, but I was genuinely surprised. At no point did I feel that I was just exploring a dungeon that was disguised as a spaceship a la Space Assassin. I never groaned at the stupidity of having to fight off rampaging bands of guards who are simply ‘called guards because you have to be on your guard around them’ a la Starship Traveller. And I certainly didn’t feel the urge to beat myself to death with a copy of the book, as I did throughout every living moment of Sky Lord.

In fact, this book wasn’t bad at all. It’s pacing is a little stringy, throwing you around from location to encounters at speed that’s a little too disconnecting at times, and it doesn’t really give you any sense of your own identity at times (you don’t even have any real inventory, much less a background). But when the investigation gets going, you feel that you’re actually playing the part. The setting is actually quite nice this time around, slightly dystopia but not over-the-top post apocalyptic a la Freeway Fighter. It’s entirely possible that I didn’t hate this book. Be shocked! Be amazed! Be sure to tune in next time when I play something with swords in!

Cause of death: Laser blasts of many holes.

Temple of Terror

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Grab your evil monk robes for a trek into the Temple of Terror!

Temple of Terror is one of the FF books I didn’t pick up when I was a kid. Not because I didn’t have the chance to, I had caught sight of it sitting on shelves of second-hand bookshops or in boxes at car boot sales that my grandparents would drag me along to many times, but it’s just simply that it never interested me. I think that’s probably down to the generic look of it. The cover doesn’t really offer much to the imagination, and the title feels very bland. It prescribes very closely to the standard FF title scheme of “(location) of (scary word)”.

I’ve managed to dig up a copy of it, and from first glance the only difference between this book and any other Fighting Fantasy gamebook is that this one includes a box for spells. We don’t seem to start off with any spells though, so I suppose we’ll pick up them up along the way! Our adventure in the dwarven village of Stonebridge, not far from Darkwood Forest where you’ve been having a recent adventure in the book ‘Forest of Doom’. As I’m downing my third pint of ale of the evening, our old friend, the wizard Yazdromo, barges in and tells me that the world is doomed. Huh, it must be Tuesday. It seems that the evil warlock Malbordus (whose name sounds like a cheap knock-off brand of cigarettes) is plotting to recover five ancient dragon statues and bring them to life, so that he can raise an army and generally cause a whole lot of mischief – This is the kind of thing that evil warlocks do, you see. Makes you wonder where they get these urges from. Maybe he was spanked too much as a kid or something, I don’t know. Either way, I need to go and destroy the dragon statues and stop him from being a bloody nuisance. Why me? Well, because I have the most well-rounded stats of anyone in the entire village of Stonebridge, with a skill and luck of 10 and stamina of 17.

Yaztromo leads me back to his tower, bragging all the way about how amazingly well-respected his magic is and generally being a right royal pain. He then tells me that he’s going to teach me a few spells, for which I should be honoured. I’m strongly suspecting that Yaz is simply making up this entire quest because he’s bored and wants to troll me. Nevertheless he teaches me the spell of understanding any language, creating water, leaping great distances, and making monsters fall asleep. He also gives me some gold, possibly the same gold that I (or any other adventurer) already gave him back in ‘Forest of Doom’ in order to buy his nostril filters, and he sends his crow to guide me to my next destination – Port Blacksand. It’s nice to see references to previous locations here, it really brings the Fighting Fantasy universe together. I manage to barter my way on-board a ship to Port Blacksand, which is still a hive of scum and villainy even after my recent adventures there.

Upon arrival in the city, I head to the local bar where I meet the first mate of a ship that is due to head south to where old Malbordus is getting up to his wicked shenanigans, and for a ridiculously expensive sum of money he arranges passage for me. I then, for little more reason than to add to the distinctive colour of Port Blacksand, start a bar fight with a local drunkard – You can do this sort of thing when you’re an adventurer, you see. I manage to knock out one of the local pirates during the fight. Nobody in the tavern so much as bats an eyelid while I loot his body, which is no surprise at all. Pocketing a pearl that the dead pirate was carrying, I leave his stinking body for the bartender to clean up and go to my room. I sleep restlessly and get bitten by a wide variety of bedbugs. No, really. In the morning, I head to the ship that I have booked, only to find that it is in fact a pirate vessel. The first mate tells me that one of their crewmen died in a tavern brawl the night before (Gasp!) and that I will now need to take his place by manning the cannons. Which, in a lovely little twist, I am required to do almost immediately as the ship is attacked by a war vessel only a few minutes after we leave port. Ah, the joys of living an interesting life…

The pirate ship is destroyed, leaving me to float away on the wreckage. My stamina plummets to a mere 10 as a result of the attack, leaving me to nom on some of my remaining provisions until I finally drift ashore. Following a successful luck roll, the book tells me that some of my provisions have been waterlogged in the conflict (may have wanted to tell me that before I started eating them), but I was lucky enough to find a coconut in order to help me regain my stamina. This new land is full of palm trees and sand, so I assume that I am on the right track. I head south for a while, until I find a collection of shells on the beach which causes me to imagine that I might run into a terrifying shell monster of some sort if I keep going in that direction, and decide instead to head inland, where I am then attacked by giant flying insects instead. Doh. I dispatch them easily enough with only a few scratches as a result. Continuing inland, I soon stumble across a dead old man laying in the sand, and heartlessly take the gold key that the man’s corpse was clutching because I happen to know that gold keys are the most valuable thing in any Fighting Fantasy book aside from silver swords.

It isn’t long before I meet a friendly chap on a camel who offers to sell me some water in exchange for the pearl I recovered from the pirate I killed back in Port Blacksand. I’m tempted to take this offer, until I remember that Yazzy has given me the power to create water from thin air. I expect this will be a rather useful spell, so I bid farewell to the traveller and continue onwards. In the depths of the desert, I encounter the most dangerous of all desert-dwelling entities… a sandstorm! I’m lucky enough to get through it without too much damage, and whilst stumbling around in the dunes I am somehow able to find a brass bell while I’m stumbling around. Ooh, lucky. Even more lucky when I next get to put my create water spell into practice. Now all I need are some friends who can summon fire, water, wind and heart, and we can call upon Allansia’s greatest champion, Captain Planet… sorry. I find my way into a nomad’s tent, and he offers to sell me a whole load of otherwise useless rubbish. Eager to fill my backpack with complete tat, I choose to buy a silver mirror, an onyx egg and a bone flute. Why? Whyever not! Why, an onyx egg has a million uses! If it throw it into the fire, a dragon might hatch out of it, maybe. But probably not.

I leave the tent and.. A giant sandworm suddenly attacks. I’m rather confused as to how a giant sandworm with 20 stamina points can launch a surprise attack, much less do anything by surprise, given that it’s the size of one of King Kong’s droppings, but I’ve no choice to fight it. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to harvest some spice from it. I barely survive this insanely difficult encounter. From my full stamina score, the sandworm knocks me down to only 5. We are pretty much even throughout the battle, as we both have a skill rating of 10, and right until the very end our stamina scores stay pretty much even, but I’m able to scrape through. It looks like this is the player-killer combat encounter of the book, because that was just nasty! Either way, I was able to recover a tooth from it – which surely must have been the biggest tooth in the known universe! I wolf down three meals over the course of the next three segments, all the while surviving the cold of the desert’s night. I then catch sight of a small group of trees, with birds circling overhead. In a wonderful display of good luck, I find a cool refreshing oasis full of lovely delicious water. Which I swallow eagerly.

The water is poisoned, and I die.

Not the most of noble deaths, and it’s sad to know that the world will now be assailed by the villainy of Malbordus and his dragons. I think I got fairly far in this book, although that could be an illusion as the book’s narrative covered a lot of land. Starting from the forest of doom and heading to Port Blacksand, over the seas and into the desert, it’s a long way to travel and really captures the ‘long epic quest’ feel that a lot of the later Fighting Fantasy books capture. I much prefer those books to the dungeon crawl variety, even though the only difference is aesthetics.

It’s a shame to have died by that point, because all logic dictated that the oasis should have been a safe haven to rest up after the sandworm attack. I guess that’s the lesson in a lot of FF books, not to take things at face value. Overalll it’s a shame I didn’t play this book when I was a kid, because it had a lot of things that I’d have rather enjoyed. I’ll group this as a ‘quite a bit of good fun’ category and would encourage people who’ve dismissed it in the past to give it another shot. Although the title is definitely a real weak point, ‘Temple of Terror’ simply doesn’t evoke the feel of the book at all. There was, for a start, no temple. At least none that I could find. Maybe ‘Desert of Giant Killer Sandworms’ would have been better.

Cause of death: Poisoned desert water.

Freeway Fighter

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Rev up your engines and get ready to hit the road with Freeway Fighter!

Cast your mind back to a time when Mel Gibson wasn’t someone that a movie producer would avoid like leprosy. Seems difficult to imagine, doesn’t it? We’re talking 1985, a mere 4 years after ‘Mad Max 2’ hit cinemas. A post-apocalyptic world which didn’t involve zombies? Sure, it happened. What it did involve, though, were biker gangs and juiced-up cars. This book never appealed to me. It still doesn’t. Nothing about this type of sci-fi appeals to me, it’s just not my bag. I didn’t bother with this as a kid, and under other circumstances I wouldn’t bother with it now. But I’ve been wrong about first impressions before, so I’m going to give it a damn good shot.

According to the backstory of this book, a mysterious virus killed off most of the world’s population, leaving those who remained to struggle for survival… which you’d kinda expect, given how few people there are, would be kinda abundant. Apparently people would kill over a tin of beans, which is just strange if there’s only 15% of the population left trying to acquire all the tins of beans in the planet, there’d surely be plenty to go around… why am I over-thinking this? There’s worse things to worry about. Like the way that this virus is meant to happen in the far-off future year of 2022!!

Scared yet? You should be, because I’m one of the survivors, and I’ve been asked to drive across the country to pick up some petrol (or ‘gas’) from another settlement of survivors. And to help in my travels, I’ve been given a Dodge Interceptor car. With mounted machine guns. And rocket launchers. Why does the car need rocket launchers? Isn’t that a bit excessive? Anyway, I’m going also name my character, I will not call him ‘Mad Max’ though. Instead in a truly inspired creative move, I will call him ‘Slightly peeved-off Kevin’. Slightly Peeved-Off Kevin has a nice skill of 12, a luck of 9, and a stamina of 30. Yes, 30. The book tells me to add 24 to his stamina roll. My guess is that Kevin has bullet-resistant skin. On the other hand, this could mean that there’s going to be a LOT of combat in this game. Oh boy… My car also has its own stats, with an 8 in firepower an a 32 in arour plating. And rockets, did I mention those? Yeah… Right, let’s drive.

A short way from my home base, I hear sounds of gunfire. I pull over to investigate, and I’m confronted with a man wielding a shotgun who insists that I recently shot his wife and kids. I try to explain to him that I didn’t, and wind up pointing my gun at him. If this was ‘The Walking Dead’, I’d expect things would end in a far more gruesome manner, but this time the man relents and apologises. I give the chap some directions back to my home base so that he can go and rest up for a while, and in exchange he tells me to avoid the petrol station further down the road as it is held by a gang of bandits. Naturally I take his advice, and when I later see the petrol station I drive right past it.

The book then tells me that I’m tearing down the road at several kilometres an hour… wait, kilometres? From the language of the title (Freeway, isn’t that an American word), I expected my car would be running on miles ubstead. I wonder for a while about the post-apocalyptic embrace of the metric system… oh wait, no time to think about it, a red chevy is shooting at me. The combat system for firearms in this book is just painful. It determines damage by dice roll, not a standard set amount, which means that in any one round you can do a massive amount of damage, or barely do any at all.

I manage to eventually blow up the chevy, but not without my own car’s armour rating plummeting down to a 3. A three. From a 32 down to a 3 in a single round of combat. Oh lovely. Y’know, I don’t want to be one of those “I hate everything, grrr angry” type of reviewers, but there’s really no way to hide the fact that I’ve not been enjoying this book so far, and that one single combat encounter shows pretty much why. I will now need to find somewhere to get my car fixed, before I accidentally crash into a stray sheep and die in the resulting fiery car explosion.

I get back into my car after surveying the wreckage, I get a radio message from home base telling me that they have been attacked by a gang of bikers and begging for assistance. Probably against my better judgement I decide against this quest, reasoning that heading back to home base will consume more petrol than I can spare. After a while I reach an area of the highway that is blocked with abandoned and wrecked cars, causing me to take a diversion which leads to a river. In order to cross a bridge – however the bridge is partly open so if I want to get over it I’ll have to get the car to jump the gap. That should be easy enough, given that my car has a ‘stamina’ of only 3 left and no way to heal it back up, which I take to mean that the only thing stopping the car from falling apart is the duct tape I’ve wrapped around it.

I manage to make the jump and avoid crashing into an overturned truck on the opposite side of the bridge, through the good fortune of having rolled a skill of 12. Before I can even start to celebrate, I see a biker waving for assistance, as it seems his bike’s been damaged. I stop the car and get out to help him, at which point he chucks a grenade at my face. Okay, people kill for tins of beans, but they have enough grenades to just throw at people willy-nilly? And gun ammo, too. Why don’t people ever think about how rare gun ammo would be in this type of situation? Seriously, next time you’re planning for a zombie holocaust, think about how tricky it’d be if you didn’t have easy access to vast amounts of ammo.

Eh, never mind that, the book decides to give me one of those ‘fight two enemies at the same time’ combat sequences I do so hate. In fact, I suspect this may be the first of those. I manage to kill both bikers without too much trouble, probably because I’m not in my car any more. I search through the abandoned vehicles of one of the recent car pile-ups, only to eventually stumble upon a crowbar. I hope to find some petrol cans somewhere among the abandoned cars, but the book tells me that I ‘suddenly feel’ paranoid about my car and asks if I should run back to it. Afraid that some sneaky bugger has made off with the last of its armour plating (I can’t think why, because the damn stuff is obviously made of tin foil), I hurry back to my car, only to find that it is quite fine.

I drive off, and am suitably punished for my paranoia only a few segments later when I do indeed run out of pertol right in the middle of the grasslands. And thus was the end of Slightly Peeved-Off Kevin. His gravestone will read “Rest in Peace Slightly Peeved-Off Kevin, too paranoid to step ten paces away from his broken car in case someone nicked the hubcaps, now eaten by a mutant kangaroo in a field somewhere.”

I just didn’t care for this book at all. The setting isn’t interesting, the combat feels far too random (entirely due to the ‘roll a dice to determine how much damage you do’ mechanic used, to the best of my knowledge, in this book only), the artwork is some of the poorest in the history of Fighting Fantasy, and you end up feeling as if you’re attached by the hip to the damn car. It’s just not much fun, I’m afraid.

Cause of death: Out of gas.