Trying to find the time to work my way through these Fighting Fantasy books I found in a charity shop. Spectral Stalkers was fun. I must make more effort.
I never had - or remember seeing - any of these titles back in the day.
I wanted to support the KS but the shipping costs to Singapore are simply astronomical. The listing finally appeared on Amazon with "free" shipping. I originally bought The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain with my pocket money back in the early 80s.. and mapped it out on a notepad. I had experienced the CYOA books previously but this set me off on a lifelong RPG journey! Happy to have them on my bookshelf again!
Some rambling about how FF was my gateway to RPGs and how the gamebooks' basic ruleset can be used on tabletop.
Got home from work to find these lovely things waiting for me! They look so good!
I just got done with this. I loved the return to south-east Allansia, or should I say south-east Old Allansia. It's essentially a sequel (or rather prequel) to Citadel of Chaos and Creature of Havoc. After 40 years of Salamonis being this important city of learning and riches, we finally got to see it.
Steve likes his books to be experimental, to require meta playing. There's always secret options or turning words into numbers, and this is no exception. And I think in some cases it was poorly executed.
The days system in my opinion is hopelessly broken. It's confusing because there are so many times when it will say the day has changed, but then not officially tell you to change the day. But then other times, it will tell you to change the day. So you wind up with this kind of half-baked system where the day only changes sometimes and not other times, even though the text says you've gone to bed and woken up.
It's just a lot of faffing about for basically one event. That eventually if the text will ask if it's Seaday and when it's Seaday the Shrieker Attack gets triggered to trigger the main quest. Or there's a dream that triggers on Friday but the dream is a waste of time. But I just think this should've been cleaner and less confusing.
For example there's a bit where you spend six months in the tower and you're not told to move the days. But then you spend two weeks escorting the caravan and you move the days two weeks.
I suppose you don't change the days in what is essentially the training section, but in the real-world the days would be moving all the same so it's just confusing. Also so many times it will say to move the day 15 days and that really means move it 1 day doesn't it. Just say move it one day. Because the actual passage of time doesn't matter in the slightest, you're allowed to spend six months in a library and it doesn't seem to affect the Shivering Man quest in the slightest. You're just waiting for it to be Seaday when you get asked.
It annoyed me how the Spelling skill assigns random numbers to the letters, but there's still other codes that work based off the alphabet order. It's inconsistent, why not just have them both work on the same system.
And it annoyed me that the answer to the Shivering Man location was KING SALAMON'S MINE and we have to work that out as a numerical code when the answer could just be MINE. And I'm sure there's another part where the answer is SILVER MINE. It shouldn't be a test of maths or "guess what I'm thinking", if this was really happening then we wouldn't be working out codes we'd just be saying "he's in the mine".
I "cheated" by doing all the training because it annoyed me that the book set arbitrary restrictions on much training you can do before the book tells you you feel ready to start questing. I don't like gamebooks making choices for us to set us off on pre-determined paths, the point is we're supposed to be choosing. I can't remember if this was actually cheating because the book expects us to turn to a lot of paragraphs on our own that we wrote down so I just did that.
I thought the dream-sequences were a big waste of time. Especially having to Test Your Luck in a dream sequence, why am I losing a luck point in a dream?
Is the leprechaun the same one from Citadel of Chaos?
What happened to our backpack, why did it just get handed into the Adventurer's Guild with everything still in it? Who was the person we were chasing with it? Felt like a loose end.
The Lucky skill confers a presumably unintended hack which is that it never says you can't use it in combat. So if you're lucky all the time, then that includes combat, which means you always inflict double damage on opponents and opponents always inflict half damage to you! You become near invincible in combat with Lucky skill.
Bought a job lot of Legend of Zagor board game parts and one of the items was a badly painted two-part Zagor (the warlock of Firetop Mountain) which I’ve just finished stripping in an ultrasonic tub with isopropyl. He now lives on my Fighting Fantasy shelf, guarding my books 1 to 3 slipcase!
Back in early September we told you about Fighting Fantasy: The Audio Odyssey, our officially licensed audio adaptation of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. We hit some problems with the launch and chose to delay rather than rush it. The new date is October 23.
It's not an audiobook or a simple digital port. It's the gamebook rebuilt for your ears, an interactive audio adventure for iOS and Android where you make every choice, roll for every fight, and find your way to Zagor, if you survive.
We're Sound Realms, a small Swedish team behind the revival of Steve Jackson's F.I.S.T., Lone Wolf: The Fortress of Death (with Holmgard Press) and Call of Cthulhu: Alone Against the Tide.
Follow the pre-launch page to get notified the moment we go live. Early backers make a huge difference in the first hours:
https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/sound-realms/fighting-fantasy-the-audio-odyssey/pre-launch
I'm Oscar, the producer, and I'll be around for questions.
Just discovered this sub-Reddit when I thought FF's adventure had ended here back in the '90s. Bought these pretty much as they came out, and have owned ever since. The real holes in my collection are the sci-fi ones (was never interested in them) and some of the latest of the OG Puffin series.
Just went for another playthrough of Sorcery! as a Wizard, and got to the infamous DEATHWRAITH chokepoint.........only for the dice to deliver consecutive failures as I died in the crypt without landing a single blow. I've picked this book apart and I'm super confident I know the best path, but just in case.........is there any better path for a Wizard than hoping for 2 attack round wins plus a successful Test Your Luck, then calling on Libra? Even if you survive, you're likely weakened for the Harpy encounter with the beggar, which is obviously crucial for the third book. It always seemed like the crypt-beggar sequence was uncharacteristically down to luck
Keen to hear others' opinions on this. The "Lortag Loop" involves encountering Lortag twice in Khare, so you can first pick the worst rune and receive the Lucky Talisman, before going back to pick the one which rewards you with the spell line for the North Gate.
The reason the Talisman is useful is to automatically succeed the Test Your Luck roll for the Water Serpent in book 3, which is a notorious instafail chokepoint. To trigger the Lortag Loop, you need to visit Lortag once, get the Talisman, then recognise Flanker at the fair and he leads you to Lortag again. Undoubtedly it's a bit cheesy, but then so is having the entire series compress to a single Luck roll. Does anyone else do this?
We have just launched a Kickstarter for two new Advanced Fighting Fantasy books.
One was inspired by Appointment with F.E.A.R and brings the superhero genre to AFF, and the other is a collection of SciFi monsters/aliens/robots/enemies from the various SciFi gamebooks. I am using original gamebook art where possible, but any new art is very much in the classic style!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2036759092/aliens-and-heroes