Fighting Fantasy – Page 2

Stormslayer

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Have you ever slain a storm before? I hope so – you’re now the STORMSLAYER, dog!

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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The blurb on the back of the book is very non-specific, discussing there is a dark power, and that I’ll need to harness the power of elements, but not really telling me anything of great use. It’s all rather ominous, so I’m really in for a surprise here. I know that it’s one of the new-FF series published a few years ago, but aside from that, this book’s a mystery to me.

The combat mechanics seem the standard, and you begin with an enchanted sword called Wyrmbiter, which damages ghosts and elementals (and if you’ve played enough FF books as I have, you’ll know just how useful something like this can be!) and deals double damage to dragons. Nice!

You also begin with two other curious objects, chosen out of a total of four – I’ve elected a sun talisman, and for a giant tattoo of a red dragon that’s covering my back. I chose the sun tattoo in case I stumble across vampires on this adventure (see my hazy logic there?), and I chose to get this huge tattoo because I’m a total nutjob who’s likely to do this sort of thing in real life anyway.

Because this is one of the newer FF books, it gives you the option of choosing a pre-made character. Once again I reject this idea and come up with my own – I decide to honour my Scottish heritage and name my character Wee Fat Jimmy, the most dreaded ginger-haired madman in the known kingdoms. He reached infamy when he confronted the mighty dragon Ffafnir and slew the great beast, with a cry of “See you, mate, I’m pure gonna chib ya!”

Good fortune seems to be with my new set of dice today (I dug out some of my old pretty chessex dice from my D&D days) as I’ve rolled up 12 skill, 12 luck and 20 stamina. It is also Fireday. Yeah, the book asks me to take track of what day of the week it is, I presume because certain elemental powers are stronger on certain days, or some such.

Enough talk. Let’s rock.

I am an aged warrior, who has recently completed another of a long series of noble adventures. I sit in the local tavern, amusing the barmaid and a crew of merry folk with tales of my escapades. I must admit that if I were a real-life sword-wielding adventurer, this is what I’d do most of the time as well. As I tell the crowd my stories, an old rival of mine trudges into the bar. Varick Oathbreaker, he is the Belloq to my Indiana Jones. He swears revenge against me (it seems that I beat him to the treasure on my last adventure), and then slinks off into the shadows.

I hear the rumble of thunder, and a storm opens up above the town. Hailstones wrack the rooftop of the tavern, turning the previously sunny warm day to a deluge in under a minute. Now, here in England, this is perfectly normal weather. In fact, the exact same thing happened last week – which is why I caught a cold and got laid up in bed for a whole day! But still, rather than just shrugging and downing another pint, I decide to do the heroic thing and actually investigate. After all, the book tells me that there’s a travelling circus in town, so I wouldn’t want any of the animals or children to be seriously hurt.

As I get outside the tavern, it seems that the weather actually IS worse than it is in England. The lightning is striking the ground, hailstones the size of grapefruits are destroying the buildings… It’s a right mess. Being the heroic type, I rush to help as many people as I can into the tavern, where they can buy me more drinks be safe. As I do, I notice that the book tells me to test my skill, but to add 2 to my score if it’s Stormday – it seems I’m right about how the days work in this game. Neat.

I charge in to the rescue, and after saving as many people as possible, I notice that the lightning has seared the door loose from the cage of a travelling circus. The fantasy world’s version of an escaped lion is on the loose – a manticore! Thankfully, the owner has had the thing de-venomed, so I manage to chop it up without too much difficulty. Anyone who remembers The Shamutanti Hills will recall just how tricky a fully-fledged manticore can be if it’s got its venom ready to go. With that one down, I turned and headed into the heart of the storm.

In the heart of the storm, I find the entity that is causing the chaos – an ice elemental. It has some pretty nice attacks, but because I’m wearing a sun amulet and because it’s Fireday, the elemental is weakened and I’m able to make short work of it. Quite a stroke of good luck, there. That’s two monsters down already, phew. So sure enough, once the ice element’s knocked to pieces, the storm subsides, indicating that it was the elemental’s work after all.

I’m certainly enjoying the book so far, and my enjoyment is perked a bit more when I notice something floating in the sky following the storm – a large brass fish. How odd. I just can’t resist a brass fish, I decide that I absoloutely need to get one. Maybe I can ride around town on it. Be honest – if YOU had a brass fish, you’d ride it around town as well! This fish, though, is evidently the vessel of the person responsible for the elemental’s attack.

I head north, hoping that one of my old friends at the mage’s college will know more about this curious fish. That’s another reference to my character’s past, and I’m really enjoying them. It gives a lot of depth and flavour to this story. I travel north to a large city, the book telling me to be sure to mark two days have passed. That’s another point I quite like, as it serves to give the adventure a sense of scale. I also learn along the way that the storm was not an isolated incident – indeed, the weather seems to be out of whack in many parts of the land.

The mages refuse to help me. I suppose I’m too heroic to torture them for information, too. I storm out of the college, but as I leave, one of them catches up with me and tell me exactly what is going on. He explains that the other mages are simply too ashamed to help me out on this, because the person responsible for this mess was actually one of their own – The brass fish seems to belong to a mage by the name of Balthazar Sturm.

With a name like Sturm, he was destined to either be a Bond villain or an evil weather mage – and sure enough, he’s an evil weather mage! After being chucked out of the college, he’s sworn revenge on the world and plans to use the power of the elements to do so. Which is just lovely. Titan does seem to breed quite the large number of insane megalomaniacs, doesn’t it? You’d think that with the number of evil warlocks, power-hungry kings and sinister necromancers that prowl the lands, a college of mages would be a bit more strict on their entry requirements!

Being possibly the only helpful mage in the city who’s going to help out, the chap who’s told me all of the above then offers to help me against one element. But only one. Oh gee, thanks – I guess that if I get eaten by an earth elemental because you didn’t give me more than one useful item, you won’t shed any tears, eh? Bloody mages! Well, reasoning that the dragon tattoo will help me against either fire or air, I choose water, and the mage gives me a potion that’ll let me breath underwater.

I have four possible places to go, one for each element. In each area, there is an artifact that will let me defeat one of the elementals that are within Sturm’s grip. First up, I head to the local market and grab a few useful items, namely a wyrskin cloak and a grappling rope. I have the choice of going to the deep sea, into a volcano, beneath a mountain, or to the windy plains. With my happy potion of non-drowning in my backpack, I decide to head off to face down to the port and see if I can find a ship to take me out to sea for a while.

I manage to book passage on a boat with a rather fetching lady captain, as she’s the only person who will venture out into the sea due to the recent weather chaos. Although I’m an adventuring swordsman and she’s a pirate lady in leather britches, I don’t ever have the option to ask her if she’d like to walk my plank. So instead we sail for a while before the ship is beset by a chilly fog. But not just a regular fog – a fog elemental, who has been causing much of the recent problems. Is fog an element? Who cares – like the ice elemental earlier, I make short work of him.

The ship comes to a halt, and our captain informs me that somewhere far in the depth below us are the ruins of the Temple of Hydrana. I chug down the underwater potion as if it were pepsi, then dive into the ocean. Sinking all the way to the ocean floor, I then realise that actually finding the temple is a bit more difficult than I’d hoped. Yeah, you’d be amazed how difficult it can be to navigate when you’re at the bottom of the ocean. It can be difficult to navigate in such a dark and three-dimensional area. Where was I to go?

I make for a nearby cave. Clearing out the rabble of sea life which decided to try to attack me, I figure that this seemed a good bet. The spongy, tongue-like floor under my feet is ominous, as are the giant pointy teeth-like rocks. Those are never good signs. Sure enough, I’ve strolled right into the mouth of a leviathan. If Ian Livingstone were writing this, I’d be looking at insta-death right now – but in this book, I’m given the chance to roll to escape, and I manage to escape before the giant sea monster noms me for lunch.

In the rotting carcass of a nearby whale, I find a rather nice dragon shield, which I’m hoping will be of use in later realms. I press on, and soon enough I do indeed catch sight of the temple. My goal is in sight – but the temple is not unguarded. I first need to hack my way through one of the most ancient foul entities in the FF books – the Abyssal Horror. The description for this creature is just fantastic, and really makes this fight sequence feel epic. Once again, the monster’s given a load of special attacks to use on me, so this could be a pretty tough fight.

No problem. Not for an adventurer like me. I knock it down without breaking a sweat. Damn, a skill of 12 is pretty useful here.

Having slain the ancient one, I find my way into the temple. Standing before the great statue of Hydrana, I am asked to choose which item I should take in order to harness the element of water. The statue holds a gold trident, surely the item that would harness the element of water? No, don’t be silly – the item I want is the little seashell that’s sitting at the bottom of the statue’s plinth. Yeah, I’m not so easily fooled – if it’s made of gold, just leave it where it is.

I grab the shell, and as I try to slip it into my pockets, the water forms into three maidens. It seems that the Abyssal Horror was not the only guardian of the relic. The three Naiads ask me why I want to take the item. I calmly explain to the Naiads why I need to raid their temple of useful items, and because I’m such a lucky chap, they give me their blessings, as opposed to killing me for defiling their holy ground or anything. Phew, a good luck roll can really make all the difference.

I head back to the ship… hey, remember that giant monster from earlier? The one who almost swallowed me? Well, guess who’s back for another round! This monster is a leviathan, and it certainly is going to live up to its name. This combat is pretty tough, it has a mammoth 20 stamina, and it’s only because I lucked out on my skill roll that I’m able to eventually drag its stamina down to a manageable level. It didn’t have any special attacks, thankfully, resting on its huge stamina score to be the real cause of trouble.

Phew, two giant sea-dwelling horrors in one day. Not bad, eh? Sadly the ship captain wasn’t too happy that I hadn’t brought her back any treasure. Sorry m’dear, but my main goal was the relic, and I’ve got it. We head back to port. All seems well for now, but I’ve three more elements to go! And if we don’t stop Sturm, he’ll capture all of the other elements and defeat Titan’s greatest champion, Captain Planet!

I decide to head to the Howling Plains, hoping to be able to tackle the ‘air’ section of the game. The trip south takes two days. On the way, I’m reminded of another useful thing that the system of days does here – it allows me to regenerate health at a level of one point per day. I was six health points below my initial stamina, so by snacking on one meal and counting on both days’ travel time, I was able to get my health back up to full pelt. Very useful.

On my way, a village asks me for help. The chaotic weather has lead to flooding, and as a result their local dam is now filled to dangerous levels. Without my help to relieve the pressure on their dam, it may break. Helping them out requires a pair of skill and luck tests, which I manage to pass, although I’d have personally liked the chance to flood the village entirely, simply for a bit of a laugh. I’m a rather evil man at heart, I think. For my help, the villagers give me a quantity of food and gold, and the feeling that I’ve done a good service. A nice feeling, but in the whole I’d rather have drowned the whole lot of them. That would teach them for being unable to work their own damn dam!

The Howling Plains are aptly named. The book describes them as a desolate, wind-swept region. I pass through them, and soon encounter yet another elemental to bar my way – a sand elemental. I manage to dispatch it, and in doing so I rescue a man who tells me of a great drought in his homeland, caused by the rampaging elements. I am rather envious of this man, because he rides around on a hot air balloon. This seems a lot of fun, but no matter how much I plead, he won’t let me ride in it.

The air element section is not easy. It is straightforward though. The book requires me to navigate a ravine, choosing which pathways through chasms I travel. Each decision I made brought me into a fight sequence with another monster – first a dust devil, then a pack of vultures, and finally a birdman. By now my stamina was running rather low, so I had to dig in to my reserves of food in order to survive. I think this is what you’d call ‘running a gauntlet’. Maybe I just chose my directions poorly.

Eventually I manage to make my way to the tallest peak in the ravine. Clambering to the top, I find an old man, a sagely keeper of great wisdom. I ask him for his aid, and like most old sages, he responds with a riddle. It’s one of those awful type of lateral thinking maths riddles which I’m notoriously awful at, the kind where he asks me “x amount of people each have x amount of friends, who in turn have x amount of friends, how many people are there altogether?” and I try to count. Given that the answer I arrive at is 400, it’s a safe bet I was miles off!

In my hopes that he’ll respect my honesty, I humbly tell him that I do not know the answer. I mention this because the book also gives me the option of attacking him with my sword, but I choose not to do this. I probably should have, because for my lack of ability to solve maths puzzles, the keeper banishes me from his sight, hurtling me out of the ravine. I will have to hope that this game can be solved without the artifact of air.

I’m pretty nervous about that. I mean, in most FF books, if you’re missing the special items that means you’re pretty much dead. I’m given the option of heading right to Sturm’s fish (damn, I love the idea of flying around in a giant fish) right now. But I instead decide to press on with more of the elemental realms. My logic here is that if I can recover at least most of the items, then the ones I’m missing may take care of itself – a la The Seven Serpents. It’s a long shot, I admit, but I’m going to take it.

I head off into the drought-assailed lands, where the sun beats down relentlessly, hoping to recover the artefact of fire. People are leaving the lands in huge numbers, as they are unable to grow their crops. The book gives me the option of joining the exodus, essentially a ‘do you want to back out now’ chance, but I am not to be moved from my path!

The fleeing people are suddenly thrown into attack as a monster attacks – a giant tunnelling worm. Not the kind of giant worm I fought during Temple of Terror though, I imagine this one as being more like the beasties in Tremors. The first of those movies were good, but the sequels… urgh… and the tv series, even worse… Still, better than the Highlander tv series by a long shot. Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent here.

The landscape here is worth note – the hot rock from the volcano (oh yeah, I’m going to a volcano – it’s a fire elemental landscape, what do you expect?) mixes with the local river, and creates a landscape dotted with crystals. That’s so much more exciting than the ravines of the previous locale, and I’m very impressed. I manage to book passage on a raft to take me right to the volcano, but fate may be against me on this – by the time I arrive, it is now Fireday. Oh dear.

Once I get into the volcano itself, it’s a little disappointing. The general structure is the same as the ravines, with choices between going left or right to get to your goal, and monsters interspersed therein. There description is very nice though, with the heat causing a deduction of your skill (unless you have a dragon tattoo, which I have) and the prose is suitably lavish, describing the flames licking through cracks in the walls and so on. I manage to slay one blisterwing (a fiery kind of bat) and check out its nest, only to be pecked on the face by its offspring.

I manage to put my grapple hook to good use in scrambling over a chasm, and find a rather curious fire crystal. I pocket it, and press on deeper into the suitably-named fire caves, which grow hotter and hotter as I progress. I come across a couple of rather neat monsters – Bone Fires, the reanimated skeletal remains of previous adventurers which have been consumed by fire. Very neat, and made more difficult due to the buff they get from the day of the week, but I hack them apart and press on.

I’m feeling pretty cocky so far, so when I come across a river of molten lava, I decide to be a jammy git and jump from rock to rock in order to cross it. As I do, I am attacked by lava beasts… holy crap, there’s a lot of combat in this book. I mean, this is very combat heavy. Maybe this is why it’s taking me so long to get through it. If you had a low skill score, I suspect this book would be damn impossible. Still, the variation in monsters is good. Although they are given the ability to push me into the lava, I manage to slay them and cross the river without too much trouble.

Delving deeper and deeper into the volcano, the heat is becoming quite deadly. I didn’t know it at the time, but it seems that I was built to resist the high temperature. Between my tattoo, the shield I found under the sea and the cape I bought at the market when I was back in town near the start of the adventure, I manage to survive the worst of the damage. Finally, when the heat is so blistering that I’m barely able to go on, I see my goal – an alter to the great fire elements. Unfortunately it’s right down in the heart of the volcano.

No problem, I’ll just use my trusty rope and grapple down. My rope hasn’t let me down before, surely it won’t let me down here. I mean, it’s not as if rope can catch fire or anything. I latch it in place and lower myself down over the ledge, into the pits of the lava.

Sizzle, says the rope. Oh crap, I say. Splash, says the lava as I fall into it.

And thus ends my adventure.

With a variety of locations and a non-linear path through them, I’d have loved this book when I was a kid. It is, however, very combat-heavy. I fought a manticore, an ice elemental, a fog elemental, reef monsters, a giant worm, an abyssal horror, a leviathan, a sand elemental, a dust devil, a pack of vultures, a birdman, a tunnelling worm, a blisterwing, two bone fires and two magma beasts. The legend of Wee Fat Jimmy will live on forever as one of the most prolific monster-killers of all time. Stitch that, lad!

The game also tends to steer clear of instant-death paragraphs, and I suspect the one I fell upon was one of the very few. It gives you a lot of chances to roll to avoid horrible fates. The day system works very nicely, buffing your enemies but also giving you limited health regeneration to balance out the challenge.

I’m extremely happy with this adventure, and would encourage other FF fans to give it a shot. It keeps a lot of the best things about Bloodbones and Howl of the Werewolf, almost as if they were written by the same author or something (heh heh). Just… try to roll a good skill score, okay?

Cause of death: Took a dive into the lava.

Howl of the Werewolf

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now let’s travel into the realm of gothic horror, in HOWL OF THE WEREWOLF!

First up, beware the War-Wilfs! “Howl of the Werewolf” is brutal!

How brutal is it? Well, you know how in some of the more difficult books, you start off with meals or healing potions to help you regain stamina? This book starts you off with TEN of them. You’re going to need them, too – I have never seen your stamina go up and down so rapidly in a Fighting Fantasy book before! You’re going to be rolling dice a LOT.

For this game, I decided to try out one of the pre-made characters from the back of the book. If you choose to roll your own, the way you do it is slightly different, with the skill score set so that it’s never below 8. This book is very combat-heavy, so the stats are structured to account for that.

The adventure opens with you blithely staggering through the woods, only to be leapt upon by a vicious black wolf. You are bitten by the creature, only to be rescued to a helpful woodsman. While recovering from the attack in the woodman’s cabin, he explains that the paw that he had chopped from the wolf has now transformed into a human hand – it was no wolf that bit you, but a werewolf!

Either way, I pocketed the hand’s signet ring, which belonged to Prince Garoul Wulfen, of the ruling house of Lupveria. I suppose this kind of thing must happen a lot in this part of the world. Either way, the woodsman leads me to the house of an old wise woman, who tells me that I will need to slay the count. There’s two things you need to know about the wise woman. The first is that she’s a woman. The second is that she’s wise.

While she’s bleeding some of the wolf venom out of my bloodstream, her hut is attacked by a pack of wolves. I manage to fend off five wolves, while the woodsman chops up two others, and granny bludgeons another with her frying pan. As old ladies tend to do.

One of the things about FF books is that if you ever have a companion, a follower or any other character who wants to help you out, chances are that they’ll die horribly at the earliest opportunity. The same fate befell out friendly woodsman, who got eaten by a werewolf as soon as we left the wise woman’s cabin. After stabbing the werewolf until it stopped moving, I went to try to help the woodsman – who promptly turned into a wereBEAR and tried to eat me as well. I suppose this does explain why he was so keen to help me find a cure for my own lycanthropy in the first place, but still, if he’s likely to turn into a monster then I guess it’s for the best that I chop his head off a little.

After buring my noble werebear companion, I head on into the local town. I’d already taken quite a lot of damage and had ran through a lot of my meals, so I was glad to stop at the inn and replenish my health. In gratitude, I decided to help this village, which was beset by attacks by something called The Howling. Cue movie reference any time now. I joined the village defence party, and found that the Howling was infact a pack of spectral ghost wolves formed from a particularly unpleasant and nasty mist that would roll into town every night. I slew the Spectral Wolf, and saved the entire village.

Things were going well for me. I made a steady march onwards, across the moors, where I was attacked by a villainous highwayman who tried to run me down on his horse. The only curious thing about this? The highwayman HAD NO HEAD! Hey, I remember him, he used to drive the carriage for the Count in Vault of the Vampire! I fled from him and spent the night in a local inn on the moors. There, a sullen man told me that his sister had ran away with a creepy carnival, and the landlord’s daughter told me that a man she loved would come back from her even though he was dead. Life is good on the moors.

I was awakened during the night by the shaking and movement of furniture in the room. As I got out of bed, I was attacked by a table and chair. I hope the inn’s landlord has home contents insurance, because I promptly chopped the two into kindling. Slipping out of my room to investigate what was going on, I quickly found the innkeeper’s daughter was casting some foul dark magic using a human skull. I grabbed the skull, and was immediately attacked by the headless highwayman. I slew him and shattered the skull.

The book then informed me via exposition-dump that the daughter had been in love with the highwayman when he was alive, and now brought him back from the dead so as that they would never be seperated. Either way, I decided to quickly sneak out of the inn, because I didn’t really want to explain to the landlord that his daughter got sucked into a horrible hell-dimension by the dying ghost of her dead lover. That kinda thing can make a father kinda upset.

I realised around about this point that this book was going to consist of several mini-adventures until I arrived at the Prince’s castle. My next stop was a disturbing carnival filled with cackling dwarven ringmasters, bearded ladies, men with gills on their necks, siamese twins, snake ladies, and so on. The book occasionally gives you codewords, and will later ask you if you’ve got those codewords noted down, so that it recreates the idea of remembering information – so I remembered what the man at the inn told me about his sister running away with the carnival, and I decided to sneak into the tents under the cover of night.

This went very well, as I immediately stepped into a tent full of killer dolls and puppets. Dolls freak me out. No, they really creep me out. I dispatched them with relative ease, but was captured and brought before the ringmaster, who told me that his circus was a safe haven for freaks and that normals like me weren’t welcome snooping around backstage. They then stole all my gold and threw me out. Hm, I suppose this reduces me chance of buying a load of silver crossbow bolts, then.

Continuing along north, I seen a gypsie camp and decided to join in their dancing and celebrations. They shared their drink with me. I woke up the next morning, and although I expected that the book would pull the old “gypsies have stolen your money and pierced your sister’s ear and stole your kid’s bike and poo’d in your garden”, I was impressed to see that they had actually GIVEN me a few extra meals, and a bottle of very powerful vodka to boot!

Around about this time, my lycanthrope curse started to flare up. My initial stamina and skill would go up between every village or so, and my ‘change’ score started to get higher as well. I’ve not mentioned the change score, but it basically reflects how much of a werewolf you are – if you scare people with your wolfy nature, if you’re liable to go into a berserker frenzy, if you eat politely at the table or ‘wolf’ your food down (sorry, bad pun), that sort of thing. Until now my score was rather low, but it now starts to creep up. You also learn extra abilities, which can be very useful, as we’ll uncover soon.

The next town was relatively uneventful. They were beset by werewolves. I hoped to earn back some of my gold by helping them slay some of the beasts. I joined up with a group of them though, and because I stupidly got lost during the hunt, I was attacked by one of their hunting dogs. Thankfully I’d learned an ability called ‘Call of the Wild’ when my lycanthropy flared up last. I gave a fearsome howl, and the dog fled. Sadly we didn’t catch any werewolves, so I was still penniless.

On the way to my next village, my lycanthropy flared up again. Instead of a new ability, I was stricken with cursed blood, which gave me yet more change points and a whole bunch of damage. Oh joy. Also, around this point in the game, the book starts to refer more and more to my keen animal-like senses, meaning that you really start to feel the progression of the curse, and making you aware that you’re running out of time!

I was close. The castle was in sight. First I had to get through the village. The village was unoccupied, the doors boarded up, nobody prowled the streets. Well, nobody except the wolves, which began to chase me. An old begger told me “Come with me if you want to live”. Being a sucker for Terminator references, I went with him. He hid me in the sewers, and then revealed that he was a were-rat and wanted to claim my kill for his own. Why oh why oh why can’t I meet anyone nice and who’ll help me without them either being a were-rat, a were-bear or a were-swan? Okay, I’ve not met a wear-swan, but would it really surprise you if I didn’t run into one?

I was beset by a were-warg. I slew it without difficulty, because I had now grown to such impressive strength. I found my way into the kitchen of the castle, where I met an evil crone. At least, I didn’t think she was evil, until she threw a giant frog ‘the size of a pony’ at me. Hey, c’mon lady, that’s hardly playing fair. I killed both the frog and the crone, and now felt utterly undefeatable. Three combats, without a scratch.

Sadly my winning streak was soon to run out. I found my way into the castle’s library, which contained a book on the summoning of demons. Yeah, you remember how my adventures in House of Hell ended? I read an evil book and it killed me. So why on earth did I repeat the same mistake twice? This book brought forth Silent Death, and for all the might of my werewolf nature, I did not possess either a magical or silver weapon that would have allowed me to slay death. It’s a shame that the adventure had to end here, when I felt so close to victory.

This book’s a total mammoth to read through. It’s got loads of sections, and plenty of villages with their own little adventures. That has a downside though, because each village’s segments can feel rather isolated, so it doesn’t feel as connected together as it could – one moment you’re in an inn on the moors, the next you’re sneaking into an evil carnival. The codewords try their best to cover for this, but in the end it feels more like a string of disjointed adventures than one single journey.

That’s the bad points though. One of the good points is the way that the text grows to describe more and more of your werewolf curse, and the ‘change’ stat has a fairly decent arc (you don’t pick up too much too early, but it picks up the pace later on). This has been a rather nice book and it’s interesting to see how the series has changed over time with a ‘new’ book like this. The artwork is AMAZING. If the original FF series had finished with a book of this caliber (as opposed to Curse of the Mummy), it would have been a high-quality send-off to the series.

Cause of death: Shhh, hush, it’s a silent death….

Bloodbones

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Originally planned for the first series, this abandoned volume resurfaced under a new publisher – BLOODBONES!

BLOODBONES!! I just love that title.

I also love that the game’s introduction gives you a past. You were growing up in a nice happy little village, everything was peachy and charming, until the evil pirate Bloodbones came along. He murdered your family, and possibly burned down your village as well (as evil villains tend to do in fantasy games), and now you’re out for revenge.

I joke about that, but it actually does add a lot to the game. You feel that your character has a history. Which brings me to another thing I noticed… the book gives you the option of choosing from pre-made characters if you like. The description for these characters are pretty neat, and it does inspire you to think up a bit more about the character that you’re rolling up, though. For instance, my character was lucky enough to roll a high stamina score, so I decided that he would be called ‘El Cahote’, the greatest lover to ever grace Port Blacksand, with a cutless in hand and a rose in the other. He has slain a thousand enemies, but will he carve his way to his beloved’s heart?

I’d have liked to see the book make more reference to the character’s past at times though, because this really was a neat idea. A few little things like “the ale in this tavern tastes bad, even worse than the swill you drank in Khare, which you remember discovering was actually fermented from rats”, or “you finish the enemy with a vicious knee to the jaw, just like you used to dispatch the savage cannibal chieftain of the Baruga islands.” I mean, it’s silly I know, but if you’ve set up a history for the character, why not take full advantage of all that it can bring, and use it to show and tell some of his swashbuckling adventures?

Anyway, I quickly learn from an old drunk in a bar that the fiersome pirate Bloodbones has been brought back from the dead by powerful voodoo. He invites me to talk to him further outside, which I agree to do. The moment I step outside, though, I see that he has been attacked by three vicious pirates. Naturally, I charge into combat, shouting my battle-cry “How appropriate! You fight like a cow!” only to immediately discover that they’re to… fight both enemies at the same time? Wait, what?

I took them down readily enough. The third pirate had a special feature in his combat which let him do fancy tricks with his whip, which further cemented the idea that this game doesn’t mess around. I was already regretting not choosing the ‘run away like a little chicken’ option. But I eventually managed to drop this pirate, and got on with the adventure proper.

I immediately start off doing what all adventurers do – hitting the gambling pits, where I managed to totally fail to solve a simple number puzzle. I think the game took pity on me then, because I over-heard some pirates whispering some clues. The book instructed me to take note of a keyword. It seems that this book’s going to be quite involving, with a time score, keywords and the like. In general, keywords remind me of playing ‘Clash of the Princes’, Fighting Fantasy’s two-player books, when I was a kid. Specifically, it reminded me of one chapter that asked me to wait until the other player had found a keyword before I could advance – I waited for two hours, before deciding that I wanted to play Nintendo instead.

At the gambling pits, a woman gave me the key to her hotel room, which is a regular occurance for El Cahote. Eager for a night of loving, I hurried along to her room, only to find that the woman had left me a gift – not a rose or a box of chocolates, but a cursed skull. Well, not the most romantic gesture in the world. I was then attacked by voodoo cultists, which I easily killed, earning another keyword in the process.

The game then gave me a few more options of places I could explore, as well as telling me that it was now night-time. I had no idea where to go, so I decided to pick one of the new areas. The sewers and the graveyard were possible, but I tend to have a good idea of what those locations tend to involve in FF games – giant rats and zombie hordes, in that order. I chose the third option, the lighthouse.

The lighthouse was awesome. I explored a cave, which lead to a fight with a giant octopus (I got nothing from this except for the pride of saying that I killed a giant octopus, which is a shame given how difficult it was to get to the cave in the first place). After dispatching a few pirates, I found a letter that told me that the villain’s ship was listed under an assumed name, which gave me a third keyword. I felt I was making progress. I then opened a trap door, and was attacked by a cat. A trapdoor cat. I like to think that if the player is already low on stamina, this could have been an amazing way to end their adventure – death by being scratched by a cat.

Now that I had three keywords and a clue about the ship, I decided to check out the dock. Only a few moments after I arrived on the docks, a man threw an anchor at me. He THREW an ANCHOR at me!! Now, I live in a port town in real-life, and I happen to know that anchors tend to be pretty massive and solid things – they have to be in order to do their job. And this enemy had just picked one up and chucked it at me. Yeah, I was a wee bit worried now. I was fighting the Anchor Man, who was even scarier than the trapdoor cat! Seems he didn’t think this idea out too well, because I was able to chuck the anchor into the sea, dragging him along with it, and earning another keyword in the process.

I then decided to head to the graveyard, only to be intercepted by the two of Bloodbones’ mid-level bosses – the vile and sadistic Silas Gallows, and the deadly assassin Wu-Lin. I killed them both, but not without having to use the last of my provisions to recoup my lost health levels after the fight. Now without any means to recover further health, I was going to have to be even more careful with my next steps.

In the graveyard, I seen two suspicious looking chaps who I decided to follow. I was asked to test my luck, and I was lucky, so they didn’t spot me. I followed them into a tomb, where I was confronted by an ancient ghost who demanded a password. I didn’t have one, so the ghost attacked me. Yeah, I really felt ‘lucky’ at this point. Either way, I couldn’t hurt the ghost, but it could sure hurt me, and I quickly joined it on the other side of the afterlife.

So that was my adventure in Bloodbones. I suspect that, having finished with a time score of 11, I would have been already too late to catch the pirate ship, but there’s no way I can tell. This is a very varied and interesting book, it really seems to use all the tricks from past FF books (keywords, codes to determine which paragraph to turn to, additional scores) to the maximum, and a lot of the enemies have extra rules in combat to keep the action varied.

The environment doesn’t seem at all linear, giving you loads of places to explore. But you have so many options and so little clues as to what may be useful or not, it generally feels like you were stumbling around hoping for things to happen without any real idea of what you were looking for. Overall it’s a pretty fun ride, and with a little more work, could have been a classic.

Cause of death: Dragged down by a ghost!

Eye of the Dragon

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now let’s visit the series as it was reborn under a new publisher, in EYE OF THE DRAGON!

Eye of the Dragon seems a bit odd to me. I’m writing this intro before sitting down to play it, so consider these my initial thoughts.

It was published in 2005, and was the first Fighting Fantasy book in about a decade, following the conclusion of the original series. But it seems a fairly standard FF book. It doesn’t have any of the special rules or extra stats that we’ve seen in the other new-FF books. It has 407 paragraphs, which is an odd number, and I can’t really see any reason for it. In general it seems that an odd one to be the ‘big return to the franchise’ that we’d have imagined after a decade of nothing.

This book was evidently also owned by ‘Alec’ before me, and he had a skill of 10 when he began his adventure – I know this because he was nice enough to fill out the sheet in pen. Thanks, Alec! I hope you’re reading this right now, because if you are, I hope the titular ‘dragon’ in this book ate you.

My adventurer (with a skill of 10 and a stamina of 19) is on hard times, struggling to afford to eat – I guess I’ve already emptied most of the dungeons around. While kicking back in the town of Fang, presumably considering whether to enter the Deathtrap Dungeon contest or not, a particularly suspicious chap called Henry Delacour joins me and tells me about his adventures. The book makes a point of telling me that there’s something very dodgy about Henry. Please remember that.

Henry tells me the story of a golden dragon statue which is worth untold riches. He has found the dragon, but cannot pick it up unless the dragon’s ‘eyes’ (two emeralds) are returned to its sockets. If you touch it without both emeralds in place, you die. Somehow. He never explained how, if this is simply an ancient curse or if some stupid bugger painted the dragon in asbestos paint. Either way, Henry hands me over one of the dragon’s eyes, and tells me that if I can find the other one and bring him back the dragon, he’ll split the profit with me.

Then, to make sure I come back, he asks me to drink some poison. Without so much as questioning if it’s a good idea to drink some dodgy liquid offered to me from a dodgy man in a tavern, my character gulps down the poison. And yes, the character KNOWS it’s poison! Henry tells him so! The idea is that if I come back with the dragon, he’ll give me an antidote. My character isn’t tricked into drinking it, he volunteers! “Ooh, poison? Yummy, I’ll have a pint of that, barkeep!”

I’m only four pages into this book, and I’m already convinced that my character was dropped on his head as a child. I don’t mean just once, I mean repeatedly for an entire hour.

It immediately seems that most of this adventure is going to be a dungeon crawl. I’m sent off to the Forest of Doom (which I’ve still got to play at some point soon), and find the entrance to the dungeon via a woodcutter’s cabin. This strikes me as a rather odd entrance, because the dungeon is very busy – I wonder if anyone has noticed all the people going in and out of this woodcutter’s cabin in the middle of a forest. Still, I find an axe head in the cabin before I venture down…

In the dungeon itself, I soon come across a room in which I find an old painter. He seems to be creating quite a gallery, although I’ve no idea why he’s deciding to display his entire life’s works in a pit beneath a forest. He tries to sell me a painting of an owl, but I’m not interested and continue on my way. I head down the tunnel for a while, before I find a merchant’s store – why is this here? This surely can’t be a good place to get customers! Is this a dungeon, or a subterranean village?

I want to ask the merchant why he didn’t just set up shop in the abandoned woodcutter’s hut, so that he could get a better location for his store. I want to ask the merchant why he looks like Ian Livingstone. Instead I just buy a silver dagger, because I know how these books work and know that silver weapons are the only things that can kill dungeon-dwelling spirit beasties.

I leave the store, activate a trap in the tunnel and am almost impaled by arrows. Why is this trap here? So far, the only people I’ve seen in this dungeon are old men who want to sell me things. The painter doesn’t seem the type to be dodging traps, and surely it doesn’t help the merchant if half of his customers are shot with arrows before they even get to the door of his store. What is going on with this place? God damn it book, MAKE SOME SENSE!!

I enter another room. This new room is almost entirely empty aside from a statue of a cat. I notice that it has jewel eyes, and thinking that this may be some sort of clue, I take a closer look. The statue then hypnotizes me, and I collapse. I wake up later, with 2 stamina points missing, a splitting headache, and the cat statue has turned to dust. I then leave the room. Could anyone explain to me the point of this? What was the statue doing there? Did I lose my stamina points by hitting my head on the floor? If not, how did I lose them? Who put this statue here? What is it doing here? Who does it belong to? The merchant? Why did it turn to dust? THIS MAKES NO SENSE!! BLAAARRGHLGGLGHG!!

catches breath Okay, okay, I’m calm, I’m calm. Let’s continue.

The next room I stumble across is a torture chamber. Okay, fine, that’s in keeping with the theme of the dungeon… But whose torture chamber is it? The merchants? Who does he torture? There aren’t any prisons or… agh, stop thinking about it! Just… just focus… okay, okay… there’s a treasure chest in the chamber. I open it, and find a silver box and a crystal dagger. Yay. Happy yay. Yay. YAY! YAY YAY YAY YAY!!. All is good in the world. Let’s not question it. Keep going. La la la. Yay.

Things seem to start to make more sense now, as I find a large chasm. Deciding not to cross it just yet, I climb down into the pit, and on the chasm floor I find a ghoul. Ghouls are nasty, as any FF player will remember – they can paralyse you if they get enough hits. Thankfully this one’s rather weak, so I manage to kill it and find a rather nicely polished shield. Good. Things are definitely back to normal now. I climb back up, head over the bridge, and continue down the tunnel.

In the wall of the tunnel, I find a large fountain. The face of the fountain is of an old crone, the water trickling from her mouth. The book asks if I want to drink this old woman’s spit-water. Because I’m feeling masochistic, I go for it. Curiously enough, it’s actually quite a refreshing drink, and heals some of the damage I took from the ghoul.

I come across an alcove in the wall, which contains a chair made from skulls. Hmm, I’ve always wanted to sit on a chair of skulls, preferably after I’ve taken over the world. I decide to try this one out for size. Expecting horrible things, the book instead tells me that this is a ‘chair of life’ and that I’ve regained some stamina… If it’s a chair of life, why is it made of skulls? Shouldn’t it be a chair of death, or at very least a chair of skulls? I.. but… it… no sense….

I press onwards, feeling more and more that this isn’t really an adventure. I figure that instead it’s actually an LSD trip that’s being caused by the poison I drank at the start of this silly series of events. I find a door which has rats nailed to it… I expect a rather unpleasant chap inside this room. Sure enough, I find a troll. Not just a regular troll – a two-headed troll. Due to a series of unlucky dice rolls, it nearly beats me to death, but I’m able to scrape through with 6 stamina points remaining. Most of its loot consists of silver, namely a silver arrowhead and a silver charm in the shape of a lion.

I feel I’m actually making some progress when I come across a river. By this point I’m having flashbacks of Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and decide to ride across the river in the raft. The book has other ideas – instead it gives me an instant-death segment in which the river tumbles into a series of horrible river rapids, from which I plummet down a waterfall to my death.

Or at least, that’s what the book tells me. Truth is, I suspect that my character simply passed out as a result of excessive poisoning caused by mind-altering chemicals he’d drank at the start of the adventure. He would awake later on to find himself chained to a table. Looking around, he would see Henry Delacour in the corner of the room. “Oh, foolish adventurer” Harry would say as he stepped closer, “I hope that you will enjoy the rest of your existence as part of one of my experimental humunculus!”

The adventurer would glance around, stricken with panic. Sure enough, the room would be lined with many other experiments. Half-pigeons half-sharks would fly through the air. Half-people half-books would cry in pain as they try to read what’s written on them, but just can’t manage to see. An orc centipede would stumble pass, far more family friendly than the human centipede variety. “Your fate will be similar” says Henry, “For I plan to take your brain out and replace it with the brain of someone who won’t just randomly drink any poison that strangers in the pub give to them!” Reaching up, Henry would remove his mask to reveal the true mastermind of the dungeon, the most sinister and evil of all of Titan’s creatures… THE MERCHANT!

Yes, Mr Livingstone, I’m on to your little secret!

Cause of death: Fall down a waterfall!