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Battleblade Warrior

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now let’s arm up and get ready to fight, for we are the Battleblade Warrior!

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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This post’s entry is on Battleblade Warrior, a book that I did own as a kid and don’t remember anything about. I remember the cover easily enough, but none of the content. Also, my spellcheck seems to believe that Battleblade isn’t a word. I suspect it may be right. Right, let’s have a look. Battleblade Warrior has a picture of a lizardman on a giant flying pterodactyl on the front, and the system works with the basic Fighting Fantasy system, no additional stats added.

The background section tells the tale of your homeland under siege by the lizardmen, who are invading because that’s the kind of things that lizardmen do. Possibly they are using pterodactyls, it doesn’t outright say at this point. But we can always hope! As prince of the kingdom, you’re soon charged with going on a big ol’ quest to find a special weapon, etc. We’ve heard it all before, but what really shines here is Marc’s writing, giving little details here and there that make the intro feel genuinely unique and involving. Huge points there.

My father has long since died in the siege and my mother, the queen, is leading the war effort. One morning, after a long night of helping out with the wounded, I am met by a glowing mysterious figure dressed in glistening armour, who may or may not by my nation’s patron diety, who tells me to go and pick up a powerful weapon with which we can repel the invading army. “Oh, sure thing” I say, having nothing better to do. “Couldn’t you maybe just go and bring it here instead, being all powerful and everything?” I ask. The mysterious glowing figure laughs and walks off.

So the queen allows me to take a few items along, I grab my dad’s bow and arrow set and a crystal orb full of swirling mist. I’ve no idea what it is, but it’s swirly and pretty. Maybe it’s a snowglobe. I bid goodbye to the queen (“See you later mum”) and head out on my quest. I’m given the choice of fighting my way through the siege, sneaking out, or swiping a boat and sailing out, so I choose the sneaky option, because my skill score is a mere 9.

Evidently my plan to sneak out was overseen by my mother, who decided to send an entire squadron of soldiers off on a suicide mission to distract the lizardman army, purely so that I can sneak out through a tunnel. With an amazing tactical mind like that, it’s no surprise we’re losing the war. “Don’t worry son, I’ll send wave after wave of soldiers against the enemy until they have killed so many of us that they are all very tired. Then in their exhausted state we’ll be able to defeat them easily!”

I shuffle through a trench for a while, clambering over dead bodies and mud, until I hear a sound above the edge of the trench. I look up and see a lizardman riding on a triceratops. “Roar” it says, and whaps me over the head with its javelin. I promptly kill the thing, and wonder about the idea of a lizardman riding on top of a giant lizard. Would this be like a man riding a gorilla to work in the morning? I keep thinking this, mainly to distract myself from the knowledge that I’m walking over a bunch of dead bodies, until I stumble across another lizardman standing atop the edge of the trench, laughing at his luck at finding me. I grab his leg and pull him into the trench with me, during which he falls on his sword and dies. What a shame.

By now I’ve snuck all the way to the enemy camp. I’m ready to head off, when I see a large set of catapults launching a variety of fiery bales at my home. I decide that this is a good time to use one of my dad’s three magic arrows, and fire it at the barrel of pitch nearby. The barrel promptly explodes, somehow. I don’t know how, but eh, it works. With the catapults reduced to smouldering ruins, I press onwards.

I slip through some tents in the camp, hiding behind some barrels from patrols, until I arrive at the stables. I promptly steal one of the riding lizard mounts, and charge off into the sunset. The lizardmen, of course, notice me and give chase. The chase sequence is actually pretty tense, with arrows flying and lots of tension, until I near a copse of trees. My mount is promptly shot by a man in the trees, who I confront angrily. He apologises, and makes it up to me by shooting two of the pursuing lizardmen with arrows. I’m given the option of helping open fire with my own bow at this point, but as I only have two arrows and the stranger’s pet saber-toothed tiger (!) scares the rest off, I leave them be.

The man, Lecarte, tells me of his own quest to find his father and I try to look as if I care. Sorry dude, but you shot my really cool giant lizard mount, your personal quest is your own business! He tells me that we should go to Capra, which I assume is being over-run by Cylons. Lecarte then explains that I’m thinking of Caprica, not Capra, and shakes his head in despair. Finally, to make up for killing my cool lizard-horse thing, he decides to set a trap for the lizardman.

That night, twelve lizardmen return to the trees and try to hunt us out. By that point we’ve set up a trap involving gunpowder that Lecarte got from Sardarth (ah, continuity, don’t you love it?) which explodes in a giant fireball, roasting the screaming lizardmen alive, their flesh charring and blistering… y’know, they just don’t make kids books like this any more.

We arrive in Capra, to find that nobody there is any help whatsoever. I take my leave of Lecarte, who suggests I wear a disguise for the next part of my journey, so he stands on the other side of the room and throws handfuls of mud at me. “Honest, this’ll make you look like an orc” he explains. I am pretty sure that this is not how disguises work. Sure enough, about a day’s travel north of Capra, I stumble across an orc encampment. Good thing I was in costume, I suppose.

I slip into the orc camp, where they are having a funeral for one of their dead elders. I pay my respects to the elder in the traditional orc way, which is to take a huge bite out of the dead man’s body. Following this, one of the elders realises that I’m not actually an orc after all, and whacks me over the head with a stick until I run away.

On my flight from the orc camp, I run into a messenger called Katya, who is on her own personal quest type of a thing. I’m thus far very impressed with this book’s use of additional characters, so I recruit Katya to my party. She has a rather sickly horse, having ridden it all the way from her own besieged homelands without a break. When we make camp for the night, the horse sadly dies. I say sadly, because we don’t get a heartbreaking scene of the horse sinking into the swamp of sadness. OH GOD ARTAX WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DIE?

So the next morning we NO ARTAX PLEASE DON’T LET THE SADNESS OF THE SWAMPS GET TO YOU PLEASE GO ON ARTAX NO DON’T DIE!! ahem, sorry, can’t help myself sometimes. Yeah anyway, the next morning we continue our expedition, only to encounter yet more fantasy tropes. As we enter a desert region, we can hear a rider approaching on the road in front of us. We attempt to hide from it, but this ersatz nazgul catches us. It chains us to Conan’s tree of woe, where we bake in the sun for a few days.

Like the typical Fighting Fantasy companion, Katya dies almost immediately. I’m lucky enough to be rescued by a travelling trader, who brings me to his camp in the middle of the desert. He offers to tell me some information on my next lead, if I give him a special item. But lacking any such item, he simply says “Well, nice to meet you” and kicks me out of his camp. I trudge through the blistering desert for a while under the hot sun, until the ground starts to get very wet and damp, and I realise I’ve hit swamp-lands. OH GOD ARTAX NO ahem sorry. I promptly run into a giant swamp mutant lizard godzilla thing, which almost bites my head clean off.

Having killed the thing, I decide to climb up a nearby tree to sleep. The following day, I climb higher in order to see my route through the swamp, and catch sight of some mountains in the distance. I also manage to find some rope ladders and vine swings, which quickly alerts me to a small village set into the treetops. My luck starts to turn, however, when I find a preserved body of one of these treetop inhabitants mummified among the leaves.

The dead guy’s friends then turn up and attempt to kill me, forcing me to take a leap from the treetops and flee, leaving all of my possessions behind. I trudge blindly through the swamp, until a lizardman riding a flying pterodactyl swings down from the sky and tries to poke me with its pointed stick. After a few turns of hitting me, it gets bored and flies away. By this point I’m pretty low on stamina, and I’m hoping to find a place to rest soon. Before I do so, though, I am confronted with an illusion of a gigantic tiger traipsing through the sky, which nearly frightens me to death. Having convinced myself that the gigantic tiger is just the illusion of the local jungle gods (they like to dick around with us mortals for a laugh), me and my three remaining health points stumble into a camp.

“Are you the old man I’m looking for?” I ask the man who lives in the camp. He nods. “Good” I say, and pass out.

The old man, Laskar, wakes me up in the morning to tell me to head off into a horrible dungeon of death and suffering. “But I’ve only got three stamina points left”, I explain, “My arm is hanging off by a thread.” “Walk it off” says the old man, and before I know it I’m sitting at the mouth of the dungeon, snarfing my face with provisions in the hopes that I can recover enough hit points in order to survive the next few sections of the book.

Stumbling through the first few tunnels of the dungeon, I am soon met by a pair of stone guardians who do the whole “None shall pass” schtick. I make short work of reducing them to pieces of flint, but at the cost of most of the stamina that my provisions have regained. I slip into the chamber that they were guarding, only to find that it is inhabited by a giant slug.

“I know, I’ll sneak past it” says I.

“No you won’t” says the giant slug, and it eats my head. Thus endeth the journey.

I genuinely enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would. I was worried that it would be one of those bland, tedious books without much character of its own, but Mark’s writing really helps elevate it above any risk of that. You’ve got a huge sense of landscape and travel here, and the many characters you encounter definitely bring the adventure to life. Take note, this is a very standard Fighting Fantasy adventure that boils down to ‘go get weapon and kill enemy’, but the way it’s written sets it as one of the examples of the series doing it at its best. So yeah, this book gets a very shiny and positive review from me, and I’m thrilled to have rediscovered it.

Cause of death: Slug head-eating.

Chasms of Malice

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now let’s venture down deep into the Chasms of Malice!

Never played this adventure before, so let’s dive right in. Are you ready?

One little trick when you’re writing fantasy – throw letters together and hope for the best.

Fer instance, Chasms of Malice takes place in the lands of Hgsetegs (or something similar). The evil Guiegew has stolen the powerful Shield of Tsgseggt, and as the Heir of Fgjrgnsgs you need to go and save the world by slaying the seven demons of Iseghsurw. But fear not, for the Goddess Igseugsejiise watches over you and guides your path, as you confront the foul minions of Cjrnhjisdih, Jvrguiwe and Rvnjsrnhso.

Make sensible names for things, damn it!!

Right, so this adventure starts off with you as a third-assistant rabbit skinner in the king’s kitchen. One morning, you’re yanked by the ear to the throne room, where the King tells you that some nasty buggers tunneled into his vaults and his magic shield has been nicked. So now you need to go save the universe. He gives you a pointy stick and has you shoved into the tunnel.

I kinda wish I was exaggerating there. In fact, I am. He gives you a cat, too. I’m not sure why, maybe the dark lord is allergic to kittens. Throughout the adventure, it serves to occasionally meow at me, claw at my coat, sometimes go off and catch fish, and generally be the object of my prayers.

I stumble through the tunnel for a while until I find a dead rabbit and some bits of wood. Eventually I come to a small bridge over a chasm, which is guarded by an especially unpleasant elf. I kill it, set up camp for lunch, and am soon attacked by a ground-hawk. Which is like a hawk, except it digs through the ground. I don’t know what that is, or why such a thing even has wings in the first place, but I’m sure it will be featuring in a pokemon game at some point.

Soon, we find our way into a large cavern which contains a ‘famous’ tavern. Famous, no doubt, for being the only tavern set into the wall of a large cavern. A figure stumbles out of the door and falls over, I try to help him, but he tries to kill me instead so I have no option but to chop his arms and legs off. The tavern is full of orcs and trolls, but the barmaid asks me to go upstairs to meet her dad, who tells me that the Dark Lord knows of my quest and that the tunnels are full of his servants. He tells me that if I want to get out intact, I should meet one of his friends in the nearby caves.

I slip out a side entrance to the tavern and head down some tunnels, dodging falling stalactites as I go. After saving some weird tunnel-dwelling git from a giant spider, I eventually find what I presume to be the barmaid’s friend. He’s in a small hovel full of books, and he tells me that there are many coded signs that have been left throughout the dungeon. I note down the code for the glyphs that he’s kind enough to explain to me, and he also tells me that I’ll need to find the ancient place of Gusegsghfewu so that I can temper my magic sword and so on.

Those glyphs in turn tell me the safe direction to travel in the next tunnel, so after a quick rest for dinner I encounter a group of dwarves. Their leader casts a sleeping spell on me, and I wake up in their hovel sometime later. The dwarf gives me my sword back, tells me that they are my friends. Thanks for the sleeping spell, friend. Anyway, he doesn’t linger on the subject because immediately afterwards their home is attacked by orcs. I fight off three of them, one of which is hit by one of the dwarves poison spray arrows (the book doesn’t indicate what the result of this happens to be, though, so I assume it just dies).

I follow the dwarf captain, a lady called Aspra, as she and her group flee into the tunnels. It starts to get hotter and soon we encounter a river of lava, requiring us to jump from stone to stone in order to cross. I’m pretty sure that if you’re close enough to lava to be able to jump across it like this, you’re probably already dying from sulphurous fumes and the heat, but I’m a hearty and powerful adventurer so… oh wait, no, kitchen hand. Right. Nevermind. Later we set up camp near a river (of water, not lava) and Aspra tries to bore me to death by telling me her life story. I get so bored that I decide to go fishing. I don’t have a fishing rod, so I try to catch one by hand, resulting in my thumb being bitten off by a fish. If I survive this, I’ll tell people I lost it in battle with a rock troll.

Aspra decides to raid one of the dark lord’s provision caravans. I decide that it’s a good time to pray to the goddess Etuegtasg to regain my luck points, which are quite low at this point. I’m glad of this, because during the raid I leap onto a caravan and am almost chopped up by an elf. Barely surviving, we return to camp and I decide that it’s time to venture into the dark lord’s lands via hiding in a cart full of foul-smelling leather skins. By a process of sheer luck, I manage to only get stabbed by the dark lord’s guards once while they check the cart, instead of a full possible three times. What.

Given that I’ve spent my whole life skinning rabbits in the kitchen, I decide that I really don’t want to sneak into the orc’s kitchen, and instead work my way through some tunnels until I get to a room full of orcs who are having fun torturing a dwarf that’s chained to a table. I free the dwarf. By a process of sheer luck, I manage to only get stabbed by the orcs seven times while I fight them off, instead of dying horribly right there and… this isn’t so lucky after all, I realise. I hope that the dwarf I’ve rescued will be of some use, but he instead opts to sit in a corner and not move.

I stumble through a nearby set of tunnels for a while until I find a bottomless pit, which I attempt to jump over. By a process of sheer luck, I manage to only tumble and fall into the bottomless pit… Fine, fine, whatever.

This book is largely forgettable. I didn’t play it as a kid, so I don’t have any fond memories associated with it, and it’s not left a huge impression on me as an adult. It’s alright, there’s nothing bad about it, but there’s nothing that really stands out about it. You spend most of your time moving through tunnels and tunnels, and more tunnels, and a few more tunnels. If it wants to give you a really big surprise with some new landscape, it might give you a cavern.

Cause of death: Falling into a bottomless pit. Wait, so if I don’t hit the bottom, does that actually kill me? I guess I don’t die at all then.

Midnight Rogue

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now let’s get up to a bit of thievery as we become the Midnight Rogue!

Ah, nostalgia time. Let me talk about how I remember this book. I don’t think I played Midnight Rogue more than once or twice after I first found a copy of it in an indoor market in Blackpool one summer holiday. I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and to this day Midnight Rogue still reminds me of that summer.

The task is simple enough. You are a trainee in the Thieve’s Guild in the city of Blacksand, and in order to earn your stripes and become a fully-fledged thief, you are asked to find a large gem called the Eye of the Basilisk. Easy enough, right? Course not! I actually really like this – the series at this point was still keen to experiment with new things, and being a rogue-type of character was a pretty big twist. Sadly this would have died out by the time the series got up to book 40 and 50 or so, but at this point it’s still lovely!

The gameplay in this adventure works the same as most FF books, with skills and stamina and no new stats. I rolled up decent enough stats, although my luck was rather low at 8. But you’re given the opportunity to select from a variety of thief skills as well, from which I have selected pickpocketing, sneaking, and the ever useful spot hidden (which no game of Call of Cthulhu would be complete without).

Rannik, the head of the thieve’s guild, tells me that the gem belongs to a merchant. He tells me that this particular merchant’s symbol is the coin, which I’m sure would be valuable information, if it weren’t for the creeping feeling that this is probably the same symbol that every merchant in the entire world would use. I mean… you’re a merchant. What ELSE would you use for your personal symbol? Anyway, I head out into Port Blacksand.

I decide to start my investigation at the merchant’s guild. I head out there and, on my travel, see a rustling near a patch of trees. I investigate, and am quickly attacked by a ghoul. I wonder why there’s a flesh-eating ghoul just lounging around the city streets of Port Blacksand, but then I remember that I’m in Port Blacksand, a place which makes Ankh-Morpork seem cultured and polite. The ghoul is probably a citizen.

After beating the ghoul to a pulp, I work my way into an alleyway beside the merchant’s guild offices and high-tail it up a drainpipe. At the top of the drainpipe, one of the building’s gargoyles comes to life and tries to kill me. My sword has no effect on it, and the book asks if I’d like to try something else. Naturally I take this option, and it leads to a segment which asks if I have a grapple, a cloak, or a heavy chain. I have neither, but there is no option to choose ‘none of the above’.

By the rules of this blog (no cheating, no turning back to previous segments, etc), I need to choose one of these items which I don’t have. I settle for the cloak. Magically, a cloak appears on my character. He throws the cloak over the gargoyle, catching it and sending it crashing to the street below. Good to know that it wasn’t just Revenge of the Vampire that suffered from lack of editing, eh?

I slip into the guild via the skylight, and manage to find a door with a coin symbol on it. But I can’t get into the merchant’s office, because it’s locked. So I’m told that I can’t do anything else here, and should go to the merchant’s house instead. Feh.

The merchant lives in the rich part of town. And like all rich parts of towns, there are more police in that area, because the wealthy are the biggest thieves and crooks in the world. One group of city guards notices me, and I’m not given the option of bluffing an excuse to them as to why I’m here. Instead, I’m only given the options to trying to run, attacking them, or bribing them. I try bribing them. They aren’t happy. Obviously I didn’t give them enough money. They threaten to take me in, so I do what any sensible person would do in this situation – leg it.

After I lose the guards in the maze of city streets, I eventually manage to find the merchant’s house. The front door is locked, so I climb up yet another gutter pipe in order to get through the window. But there are bars on all of the windows. The only way in is via the door, and I can’t pick the lock.

Are you seeing a recurring theme here? Long story short – take the freakin’ lockpicking ability, otherwise you’re screwed. You’re given the option of selecting three skills from a list, but without lockpicking as one of them, you simply can’t proceed in the adventure. The book is only giving you the ILLUSION of a choice, and I suspect that this is one of those puzzles in which you need to pick the ‘correct’ skills to be able to complete the game, rather than the skills being different options to unlock new avenues on how you may complete the game. Failing to choose the ‘correct’ skill results in… what’s about to happen…

The only option I have now is to try to pick, at random, a location where I think the gem is hidden. The book gives me four choices, and it’s clear that one of them is the correct one. I’m not given an option to choose ‘no bloody idea where it is’, so I pick one, barrow hill, because it’s the name of an adventure game I played on the PC a few years back. The others are either dull-sounding (a bridge or a street) or insanely dangerous (Lord Azzur’s Palace), so even if this is barking totally up the wrong tree, at very least I’ll be going somewhere vaguely interesting.

The book then outright TELLS me that this was the correct choice, and that although I know it’s located in Barrow Hill (I don’t know, I just chose at random!), I don’t know WHERE in Barrow Hill it is, and sends me back to paragraph 1 to start all over again. That’s what happens if you don’t select lockpicking as a skill, you eventually get to a point where you’re just told ‘Start again’. Oh boy. I’m already starting to notice a lot of problems with this book, in case you didn’t notice…

So, I tear up my character sheet and make a new one, this time with a specialist skills in Sneaking, Picking Locks and Pickpocketing. My stamina is a bit lower this time, but at very least I stand a better chance of actually being a vaguely useful thief. We start all over again, this time opting to go to a seedy area called the Noose in order to see if I can get some clues first.

The Noose is a grimy, nasty part of town and I manage to waste some time playing games in the local pub. You know the game, it’s the one where you try to stab a knife between your fingers and quickly wish that you’d chose a better game to play. Either way it earns me some gold, which I use to pay one of the local beggers for some info. He has no info, but gives me a grappling hook instead. That’s… kinda like asking someone to go get you a bottle of milk, and they come back with a hammer.

The adventure then takes a rather odd turn, as I venture onto a dark desert highway. I feel cool wind in my hair and smell colitas rising up through the air. Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light, and soon I had to stop for the night. I see a woman standing in a doorway of a hotel, and while I heard a mission bell ringing in the background, she lit up a candle and she showed me the way inside. As we walk through the chambers, the woman shows me a lot of pretty, pretty boys she calls friends who dance in the courtyard, it’s all quite strange. When I finally get to my room, I called up the Captain, and asked him to please bring me my wine. He said, “We haven’t had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine”. I confront the woman about this, all very confused, and she said “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device”.

I tried to explain to her that I really had no idea what she was talking about and just wanted to leave, but instead she invited me to the master’s chamber to enjoy a feast with the other guests. The feast was a bit weird though, because when the gathered guests stab it with their steely knives they just couldn’t kill the beast. I’d had enough of this silliness at this point, and the last thing I remember, I was running for the door. While scrambling to find it, I bump into the night porter, who tells me that although I can check-out any time you like, I can never leave. So I stick my sword through him, kick down the door and flee back into the city. Feh. Stupid hotel. I really don’t know why this was even part of the adventure, to be honest with you, it’s all quite odd.

In desperation I go to see a psychic, Madame Star. She tells me that I am on a big quest to find something, and that I will need to go to somewhere of sleep and somewhere of work. So, the merchant’s home and office… oh gosh, thank you. Her prediction was then followed by a heavy thumping sound, caused by my head hitting my table very hard. At some point, I need to stop basing my important life decisions on information I’ve bought from Mystic Meg’s Psychic Charlatan Store!

So, let’s make this nice and short. I go to office. Now that I have grappling hook, I hit gargoyle with it and therefore manage not to lose my precious non-existent cloak. I slip through the skylight again, but without my spot hidden skill, I manage to accidentally step on a hidden switch which opens a secret panel in the wall. Inside the panel lurks a small creature, a Jib-Jib. Essentially a Tribble with feet, the Jib-Jib threatens to scream the entire place down with its cries that can be heard for miles around. Kinda like an alarm system that you need to feed. I stick my sword in it before it can scream.

Thankfully I’m now able to get into the merchant’s office, and raid his desk drawer for information. It tells me that yes, the gem is hidden in Barrow Hill. Astonishing. He has a few coins and a key hidden in the drawer, but the office also has a heavy steel door that may lead to a more interesting treasure. Naturally, I want to get it. So I pick the lock and head into the other room.

Once inside, I find a large treasure chest. It tries to eat me. Great, I’ve stumbled across Rincewind’s Luggage. Why is this even here? Does the merchant routinely lock monsters in the spare office rooms? I start to get worried about the merchant’s guild. Their alarm system is a living creature, their treasure chests are made of Sapient Pearwood, I’m half expecting that the heavy iron door to come to life and – oh crap, the door’s swinging shut.
There’s a small mark on the wall which, if I can read secret signs, may have told me how to escape from this room. But I don’t have that skill. As a result, I am locked in the spare office room with a dead treasure chest monster, and there I am to stay until the merchant opens up the door the next morning and I get dragged out of the place by angry city guards. Yeah, suffice to say I’m not going to finish this one.

Ah, but the game doesn’t end there. You see, there’s a twist in the tale. Naturally, this means that the next point is a spoiler. It’s also recalled entirely from memory. I did say that I had strong memory about this book, didn’t I?

You see, when I was a kid, I’d cheated my way through all of these books, naturally. At the ending of this story, you do indeed uncover the gem. But it’s a fake. In fact, the entire adventure was a fake, orchestrated by the Thieve’s Guild. Every step of the way has been planned, plotted, and constructed. Which makes it one of the most lethal ‘tests’ possible. All of your guildmates turn the lights on and celebrate your accomplishments with a big party. It’s a real twist in the story, and made the book memorable as a kid. But thinking about it now, as an adult… I hate that. I mean, what if I’d have got eaten by the ghoul? “Oh, I’m sorry,” Rannik the Thieve’s Guild Master would say, “But you failed the test by getting your limbs ripped off by our pet ghoul. No guild membership for you.” I mean… if it’s a test to see if you’d make a decent member of the club, maybe it’d be an idea not to have the entry exam be lethal!

Let me tell you a story. When I was a little older, I had a copy of Ultima 7. I loved this game. As part of the game’s quest, you need to infiltrate a sinister religious organisation called the Fellowship. The head of the Fellowship, L. Ron Hubbard (named Batlin in the game, but we know who he really is!) asks you, as a new recruit, to head to an abandoned dungeon and pick up some gold they’d stored there. Abandoned dungeon. And he assures you that it’s totally harmless and that there’s nothing dangerous at all. Once you get to the dungeon, you find that it is full of DRAGONS. One of the most dangerous enemies in the game. Just one of them can kill you, and there are whole swarms of the buggers here. If you return to Batlin with the stuff he asked for and complain that he, like the Thieve’s Guild Master, had sent you off to die in a lethal death-trap of fiery and tooth-filled doom, he just says “Woops, I must have been mistaken. Oh well. Would you like a cup of tea or something?” Ffffffffff…….

Overall, this book has some lovely ideas. It’s got a great premise, and looks at the Fighting Fantasy genres in a whole different light. But if you want to enjoy it, well, cheat. Hey, don’t look at me like that – you’re playing a rogue after all!

Cause of death: Port Blacksand’s criminal justice system.

Phantoms of Fear

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now it’s time for us to go face-to-face with the Phantoms of Fear!

The cover of this book is certainly noteworthy, because it shows a very vivid picture of my ex. No, seriously, I always thought that this was what the titular monsters in Spectral Stalkers should look like. This book is quite unlike Spectral Stalkers though, in that your playable character is an elf. As an elf, you have a Power stat, which you can use to cast a few spells. You also can tap into a special living realm when you dream, which basically turns the entire adventure into a drug-fuelled haze while your character sleeps on a tree branch for a while. Good thing to do while there’s an evil death-god planning to destroy the world, right?

Oh yeah, and that’s your quest. Go and stop the evil death-god. Somehow, I quickly come to suspect that the key to solving this adventure lies in the dreams that the character has, because the very first thing you’re doing in the game is sleeping. You dream of your home forest being twisted and destroyed, and a statue of an old powerful and possibly goddess-type thing beckons you on, offering you puppies and swords. Yes, really. No, it doesn’t make much sense to me either.

The dream continues until I attempt to cast a fire spell at an especially unpleasant piece of shrubbery, only to be informed that I cannot cast spells while I’m asleep, and am roughly propelled into the waking world, promptly losing two power points as I do so. From the dream, I have learned that the evil death-god has made a giant pit of nastiness in the middle of the forest, which presumably means we’re going to have to find a dungeon and get some dungeon-crawling on.

You’re informed that, as a wood elf, you are confident that you don’t need to take any food with you on your journey, and toddle off into the forest with only a pointed stick for safety. Ten minutes later you’re starving to death and struggling to scavenge enough berries to survive. I’m so impressed with the skill of the wood elves so far. I manage to direct him into a small bush, where he gathers some berries, eats them, and promptly falls asleep. My sleep is then interrupted on account of being attacked by a giant hawk which is attempting to peck my eyes out.

Having killed the giant hawk, the character decides to actually do something sensible and go gather enough food to continue his journey. In the process of which, he is attacked by a bear. I can only picture the image there, a little wood elf digging through a bush, collecting berries, and finding a giant twelve-foot tall grizzly bear instead. Anyway, no sooner have I collected some food, than the character trips on some poisoned plants and infects two meals worth of food with some kind of toxic tree venom.

Without any real indication of where to go, I stumble cluelessly around the forest for a while, until I find a pathway leading to the west. Some distance along the pathway, I’m given a few chances to roll a test of luck, or the option to turn back. This is always a bit of a dead giveaway that there is some kind of horrible spiked trap tied to a tree or something, and no sooner have I confirmed that I want to press on in this direction am I confronted… with a horrible spiked trap tied to a tree. Because I’m not quite a total idiot, I avoid the trap, but I’m gradually losing faith in the character’s preternatural woodland survival skills.

My lack of faith is immediately confirmed when the character, a wood elf, falls out of a tree. The book tells me that the character assumes that this is due to the tree’s unnatural corruption, and a foreboding warning that he should sleep on the ground that night, but I am not even slightly convinced at that. My new theory is that the character is simply a very tall dwarf without a beard. I fully expect him to find a bow and arrow later on in this adventure, and accidentally shoot himself in the arse with it.

I hide under some leaves and have a dream about being beaten up by an ice monster. Upon killing it, I’m informed that I wake up feeling refreshed. The next paragraph tells me that I then rest for a while, which is confusing as I’d just finished sleeping. Now convinced that my inept beardless dwarf also has narcolepsy, I’m ready to pack up and continue on the journey when I am attacked by the strange mutated man-creature whose leaf-shelter I’ve slept in for the night. Slept in, I’ll remind you, because my character couldn’t climb a tree without falling out of it. I suspect that this is going to end up like one of those episodes of Star Trek, the kind in which the crew need to save themselves from their own stupidity.

The whole next day’s journey is uneventful, it seems. But the book does give me a luck point simply for making it this far. Words are failing me at this point. Normally in these books, you’re given a luck point if you kill an especially dangerous enemy or find a holy relic. In this one, I’m given a luck point simply for not tripping over my own shoelaces and hitting my head on a rock while moving from point A to point B. It’s getting late at that point, so we decide to risk setting up camp in a cave on one of the nearby hills.

I choose the cave which is littered with half-gnawed bones, because that seems the safest option. Look, don’t question my logic here. I have a refreshing sleep, dreaming of magic pools which remind me a lot of the first Narnia book, and when I wake the next morning I’m given the option of exploring the rest of the cave. Far in the back of the cave, we find a skeleton with its hand trapped under a boulder. When I move the boulder to one side, the skeleton springs to life and starts trying to kill me with its magic ring. I can only assume that this is not meant to be the skeleton of a long-dead Green Lantern, but after knocking the skeleton down and trapping its hand back under the boulder, it goes back to sleep.

I continue to crawl through the cave until I eventually emerge from the other side, feeling as if I somehow didn’t manage to acquire any of the hidden loot that I was sure would be hidden in a dark cave. In the distance I can see the weird twisted corruption of the evil dark-god thing, which has been tainting this region of the forest. As I approach, a strange gust of wind knocks me over. I’m assuming that it is actually meant to be some kind of radiating ageas of raw tainted evil, or something equally powerful enough to almost knock a heroic warrior of good from his feet. But frankly, at this stage in the adventure, I’m beginning to suspect that the elf just fell over from a strong breeze.

Despite getting closer to the heart of darkness itself, our illustrious hero decides that now would be a good time to fall asleep by a lake. He has a dream of little forest pixies, who he dances with and talks to plants with and assorted other nonsense. The pixies ask if I want to stay with them, and I have to roll a dice in order to possess the slightest scrap of common sense. I roll a six, which means that our illustrious hero decides to spend the rest of his days dancing with the pixies, chatting with plants, and generally not destroying the evil god-monster of death and chaos.

I can’t really dislike this book, despite the main character’s utter ineptitude. The descriptions are vivid, especially the dreams. The artwork is extremely good, bringing the imagery of the story to haunting life. It’s certainly not one of the poorer Fighting Fantasy books, but it doesn’t really do a whole lot to make itself stand out from the crowd. It reminds me a lot of Portal of Evil, in many ways, so if you enjoyed that one then I’d recommend giving this one a shot.I also genuinely love that it’s an adventure in which you play as a non-human adventurer for once – that’s a lovely change. I don’t think we see this kind of thing in the series again until Legend of Zagor, which had a dwarf as a playable character.

Cause of death: Abandoned my quest to dance with the fae folk.