You are the Hero 9781909679382, 9781909679368, 1909679380

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You Are The Hero

A History of Fighting FantasyTM Gamebooks

By JONATHAN GREEN

YOU ARE THE HERO A History of Fighting FantasyTM Gamebooks

By JONATHAN GREEN

To my mother, who bought me my first Fighting Fantasy gamebook. YOU ARE THE HERO – A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks copyright © Jonathan Green Jonathan Green asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. First Edition

Proudly published in 2014 by Snowbooks Ltd. Chiltern House  Thame Road  Haddenham  Bucks  HP17 8BY www.snowbooks.com Hardback ISBN: 978-1-909679-38-2 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-909679-36-8

Fighting Fantasy Gamebook Concept copyright © Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, 1982. Fighting Fantasy is a trademark owned by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, all rights reserved. The Fighting Fantasy logo is used with permission. Official FIGHTING FANTASY website: www.fightingfantasy.com Judge Dredd® Judge Dredd is a registered trademark, © Rebellion A/S, all right reserved. Used with permission. Cover illustration copyright © 2014 Martin McKenna Internal illustrations and photographs © copyright Alan Craddock, Alan Langford, Andi Ewington, Brett Schofield, Chris Achilleos, Christopher Bird, Dave Allsop, Dave Andrews, David Gallagher, Duncan Smith, Edward Crosby, Emerson Tung, Gary Mayes, Gary Ward, Gothic Manor Ltd, Iain McCaig, Ian Livingstone, Inkle Studios, Jim Burns, John Blanche, John Sibbick, Jonathan Green, Kate Copestake, Leo Hartas, Les Edwards, Lew Stringer, Maggie Kneen, Malcolm Barter, Martin McKenna, Nicholas Halliday, Pat Robinson, Pete Knifton, Rebellion A/S, Rodney Matthews, Russ Nicholson, Scriptarium, Sean Riley, Stephen Player, Steve Jackson, Steve Luxton, Tin Man Games Pty. Ltd., Terry Oakes, Tony Hough Copy edit: Tony Riseley Layout and production: Emma Barnes No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents Tales from the Black Lobster Tavern

6 Background

7 How to negotiate this history of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks

8

YOU ARE THE HERO 10 Acknowledgements

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Tales from the Black Lobster Tavern Little did we know that when The Warlock of Firetop Mountain quietly appeared on the shelves of UK bookshops on 27th August 1982, a mighty tome dedicated to the history of Fighting Fantasy would be written 32 years later. And little did we know that during that time more than 17 million Fighting Fantasy books would have been sold worldwide in over 30 languages. And little did we know the effect that Fighting Fantasy would have on a generation of children of the 1980s and early 1990s, or the fondness that has endured ever since for our books. Yet the very existence of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was a result of its own attributes of SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK. We would like to claim some SKILL in writing what started life as The Magic Quest in 1981. We certainly needed a lot of STAMINA to meet the demands of our publishers who were suddenly eager to publish more and more books in what became the Fighting Fantasy series, but there was a lot of LUCK involved beforehand in meeting the brilliant Geraldine Cooke of Penguin Books who eventually persuaded her employers to publish The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. So here we are in 2014. Fighting Fantasy is very much alive and kicking in book form and now also in digital formats. For us, Fighting Fantasy is like a child. We have seen it start out in life without any knowledge of where it might go. We have seen it grow up and have influence far beyond anything we could have imagined. Like parents, we are immensely proud of Fighting Fantasy.

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When Jon Green first mooted the idea for writing a book about the legacy of Fighting Fantasy we were surprised, flattered and delighted. The fact that he wanted to chronicle the history of Fighting Fantasy was just brilliant! There were so many stories and anecdotes to tell, and so many people who needed to be thanked for helping make Fighting Fantasy what it is today. And we couldn’t think of a better person to take on the challenge of telling the story. Jon started out as a huge Fighting Fantasy fan in his youth and grew up to become a respected Fighting Fantasy author in his own right. And now he is probably the ultimate authority on Fighting Fantasy! In writing You Are The Hero, he has been relentless in his research and dedication to the task. The result is a fantastic achievement and a wonderful celebration of our life’s work for which we are very grateful. You Are The Hero. It’s been quite an adventure.

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone London, 2014

Background ‘At last your two-day hike is over. You unsheathe your sword, lay it on the ground and sigh with relief as you lower yourself down on to the mossy rocks to sit for a moment’s rest. You stretch, rub your eyes and finally look up at Firetop Mountain.’ And so began my love affair with Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I remember the day quite clearly. It was bright and sunny, and I had been dragged into town to go shopping with my mother. The torment was lessened by the promise of a visit to a bookshop. As I walked through the doors, I was hit by the smell of dusty carpets and freshly-printed books – a smell I still savour today. And there, on a small display in the middle of the shop, was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. At the time I had no idea who the two authors were, but the image of the mysterious wizard summoning a dragon from his crystal ball had me gripped. Then I opened the book… It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It soon became apparent that this was not a book you simply read from cover to cover; you made decisions and turned to different paragraphs, directly influencing the course of the narrative. Then there were the monsters, fabulous creatures of legend sat alongside the unfamiliar denizens of a new and terrible fantasy world. Not only that, but you fought them as well, rolling dice to determine the outcome of your battles with these horrors. And then there were Russ Nicholson’s magical illustrations. I had read books with pen and ink illustrations before, but nothing like this; graphicallyrealised images of horrific beasts, partially-eaten human remains and sinister sorcerers were a revelation! I bought the book there and then – or rather, I persuaded my mother to buy the book for me – took it home and devoured it. The reading experience would never be the same again. I was ten years old. Mention Fighting Fantasy, or The Warlock of Firetop Mountain to adults of a certain age and they will either go misty-eyed or become a little over-excited, as they recall their own battles with monsters like the Bloodbeast and the Ganjees, or such despicable villains as Balthus Dire and Zanbar Bone. Fighting Fantasy had a profound impact on a generation of children in the 1980s and early 1990s. As a result, people’s interactions with the books, and their recollections of the hours spent poring over the adventures held within their pages, are now inextricably linked with that vital stage of their development into literate adults.

To say that I was obsessed with Fighting Fantasy in my youth would be an understatement. I collected the books religiously. I started writing my own. In time I was forced to stop buying every new publication because it was considered to be a craze I should grow out of. In my teens, my grandmother once asked me when I was going to “grow out of monsters”, as she put it. It was always about the monsters for me, and I wasn’t the only one. “There were loads of different types of monsters and encounters,” says Black Library editor turned author Nick Kyme, “one of the aspects of FF I always loved.” Or, as Jamie Fry, current keeper of the official Fighting Fantasy website puts it, “it wasn’t often you went on a dungeon romp, experiencing otherworldly finds and monsters only the wildest imagination could conjure.” A couple of dice rolls of years later, my grandmother was the first member of my family to read my first published book, Spellbreaker. Twenty years after that momentous occasion in my life, and now aged 42, it doesn’t look any more likely that I’m going to “grow out of monsters” now than it did when I was a teenager. No one book has had a greater impact on my life than The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. If it had not been for that book, I would not have had my first Fighting Fantasy gamebook published, which would have meant I would not have become a freelance writer, and I would not have written the book you are now holding in your hands. Writing a book such as this was always going to be a highly personal experience, but then its content taps into what was a highly personal experience for young readers and role-players the world over. So, just as writing this book has been a highly personal experience, I am sure that reading it will be too. Those first Fighting Fantasy adventures made such a massive and vital impact on their readers that today many of the movers and shakers in the games and genre industries cite Fighting Fantasy as a major influence. But in the early days of FF, such a glorious future was far from certain. So how did what started out as a book that was originally considered to be no more than a risky oneoff experiment, as far as its publishers were concerned, become the worldwide, multi-million selling phenomenon it is remembered as so fondly, and by so many, today? Well, there’s only one way to find out…

NOW TURN OVER ◉ 7

How to negotiate this history of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks A number of abbreviations are used throughout this book. Fighting Fantasy is frequently shortened to FF, while AFF is the abbreviated form of Advanced Fighting Fantasy. A capital letter S, accompanied by a number, refers to one of the titles in Steve Jackson’s legendary Sorcery! series. It is worth mentioning here how the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks have been numbered in YOU ARE THE HERO. Puffin Books published adventures 1-59, but when Wizard Books took over publication they published the original adventures in a different order (not once, but twice) and started numbering the books from 1 again (both times). For the purposes of this book, individual solo adventure gamebooks are numbered as they would have been had Puffin continued publishing the series. So, Eye of the Dragon, the first brand new title published by Wizard Books, becomes FF60, Bloodbones FF61 and so on, up to the most recently published adventure, Blood of the Zombies, FF65. There are exceptions to

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this rule, namely the Sorcery! adventures, which are numbered S1 to S4, the Clash of the Princes duology and the Adventures of Goldhawk. The terms ‘paragraphs’ and ‘references’ are used interchangeably throughout and refer to the numbered sections found in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Also, while it is accepted that the hero of the FF adventures rarely had a specified gender, partly in acknowledgement of the fact that most of the series’ readership was male (and partly for sanity’s sake), for the purposes of this book the eponymous hero of the title is referred to as ‘he’. The terms Fighting Fantasy and the images associated with the books are used throughout by kind permission of the copyright and trademark owners, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and the creators of those original artworks. May the luck of the gods go with you on the adventure ahead.

Right: Dragon, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1982 and 2014)

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Chapter One

The Origins of Firetop Mountain A Fateful Meeting

W

hen The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published on Friday 27 August 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone could not have predicted that the world’s first true gamebook would go on to spawn an entire series that in turn would inspire a generation of children and gamers like never before. Nor could they have guessed at the impact this publishing phenomenon would have on the culture, society, learning and economy of not just Thatcher’s Britain, but the whole world over and for decades to come. But the premier adventure gamebook series that was to become the Fighting Fantasy phenomenon did not begin in 1982. It did not even begin in 1980 when Penguin Books commissioning editor Geraldine Cooke met Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone for the first time. In fact, it actually all began thirteen years before that.

The Warlocks of Firetop Mountain Ian Livingstone was born in Prestbury, Cheshire, in England, in December 1949, although he is a true Manchester boy at heart. His parents lived in a Coronation Street-style terraced house in Rusholme, which is where Livingstone first grew up. (The only reason he was born in Prestbury was because the local Manchester hospital was full when the crucial moment came.) The Livingstone family moved to Altrincham in 1960. Games have always been in Livingstone’s blood. He met Steve Jackson while at Altrincham Grammar School where they discovered their common interest in playing board games. Livingstone captained the chess team and played Monopoly incessantly. It was his playing of Monopoly that earned him his school nickname ‘Feed’ because he did not bother to collect the small rents from his opponents as he considered them to be nothing more than ‘chicken 10 ◉

feed’. Livingstone became accustomed to winning at Monopoly at school, and years later narrowly missed out on winning the 1975 British Monopoly Championships by virtually the last roll of the dice. He came second, just missing out on qualifying for the World Championships in the USA. At Altrincham Grammar he also discovered Diplomacy. In the early 1970s he produced covers for Albion, one of the first magazines that supported correspondence play of the board game Diplomacy, edited by the late Don Turnbull who also lived in Altrincham. Livingstone and Turnbull remained in contact after Livingstone moved to London, with Livingstone later commissioning Turnbull to write for White Dwarf. Issue 1 featured Turnbull’s legendary Monstermark System, and Turnbull went on to edit The Fiend Factory in White Dwarf for Livingstone. It was Livingstone who suggested to Gary Gygax to allow Games Workshop to take the best monsters from The Fiend Factory to produce an AD&D compendium entitled The Fiend Folio. Livingstone tasked Turnbull as its editor, and it included sixteen of Livingstone’s creatures including the infamous Hook Horror. “I was very proud that Workshop had put the whole thing together, from getting Don Turnbull on board as editor, using White Dwarf Fiend Factory monsters, commissioning the artwork and the cover which I’ve still got today, and seeing the Fiend Folio on sale as an official AD&D manual,’ Livingstone recalls. (Gary Gygax later asked Turnbull to set up TSR UK after merger talks between TSR and Games Workshop broke down). Steve Jackson was born in Manchester, in May 1951. His family moved to Canada when he was 4, only to return again when he was 11. At school Jackson was in a special year which did ‘O’ Levels at 15 instead of 16 and so he went to university when he was 17 years old, rather than at 18 which was the norm. Both gaming enthusiasts, Jackson and Livingstone met at Altrincham

Right: Out of the Pit, by Chris Achilleos. (© Chris Achilleos, 1985 and 2014)

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Fighting Fantasy Fact

1

Steve Jackson still owns a rare, white box second edition of Dungeons & Dragons, signed by the game’s creators, the late Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. However, Ian Livingstone has all the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books signed to him by Gary Gygax, as well as owning the original cover artwork for the Fiend Folio. Steve’s signed copy of Dungeons & Dragons. (© Steve Jackson, 2014) Ian’s signed Dungeons & Dragons books. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014)

Grammar School during the 1960s and became great friends, and still are today nearly 50 years later. After leaving school with only one A Level, in Geography, Livingstone studied at Stockport College of Technology and gained an HND in Business Studies and a Diploma in Marketing before setting off for the bright lights of London, where he ended up working as a Marketing Assistant for an American oil company. Jackson, on the other hand, went on to study at the University of Keele, graduating in 1972 with a 2.2 in Biology and Psychology. “My finals project for Psychology was a game designed to teach players the meaning of road signs,” says Jackson. “But more significantly, in 1970/71 I started the Keele University Games Society. As far as I am aware it was the first ever board games society at a British university. We received copies of games from Waddingtons to start us off. I still have the membership card which guarantees me Life Membership if the society is still in existence!” Following a gap-year-type trip to the US in 1973, Jackson returned to the UK with boxes of Avalon Hill games, which he played with Ian. “Stalingrad, Baseball Strategy and Acquire were favourites,” recalls Jackson. From Altrincham, Jackson moved to Oxford to work in Oxford University’s Biochemistry Department, cutting 12 ◉

up rats for a living. Jackson remembers it as the worst job he ever had. “I really wanted to get into Nature Conservancy and got a job in 1974 with the Dorset Naturalists’ Trust as a Nature Warden looking after the colony of Little Terns (Britain’s rarest breeding seabird) on Chesil Beach, near Weymouth. But the solitary life of a Nature Warden was not for me. I wanted to move to London where my mates were.” Jackson followed Livingstone south to the capital, the two of them sharing a flat in Shepherd’s Bush with another friend from Altrincham Grammar School, John Peake. Jackson: “I got a job as a model maker, building a miniature model of the new Department of the Environment building in Petty France. In 1974 I got a second job as a freelance writer for Games & Puzzles magazine, writing games reviews and drawing up crossword grids.” The three flatmates would spend their evenings playing board games as a way of escaping the drudgery of their uninspiring day jobs. And then, in 1974, the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons was published and their lives changed for ever.

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone with the game that would change everything. (© Ian Livingstone, 1976 and 2014)

Dicing with Dragons The three young men had heard about D&D through fanzines such as Europa and News from Bree, although they did not actually get hold of a copy of their own until 1975. Jackson once described the arrival of D&D as “manna from heaven”. He and Livingstone enjoyed playing military-inspired strategy games such as Diplomacy and Warlord but had been brought up on a diet of science fiction novels, fantasy classics such as The Hobbit, and Marvel comics. Dungeons & Dragons was the game they had been waiting for. For the last month he spent working for someone else, outside of the games industry – a company called Gallenkamp that sold scientific instruments – Jackson says, “I had a sheet of graph paper on my knee under the desk on which I was designing my dungeon. And I spent all day staring out the window dreaming up monsters and traps. Many of these appeared later as encounters in the Fighting Fantasy and Sorcery! books.”

The Birth of a Monster Overwhelmed by the possibilities such role-playing games offered imaginative individuals, Jackson,

Livingstone and Peake decided to start their own business. In February 1975 Games Workshop was established. Later that year they secured the exclusive European distribution rights for Dungeons & Dragons. Games Workshop started slowly but became a huge success over time, expanding from a bedroom mailorder company to become a major retailer and publisher of wargames and RPGs in its own right. Games Workshop’s first ever order (© Steve Jackson, 2014) But not everyone was delighted by the fact that Games Workshop’s mail order company continued to go from strength to strength – namely Jackson and Livingstone’s landlord. The young entrepreneurs were running the company out of the top floor flat at 15 Bolingbroke Road, London. All of the flats in the building shared one payphone located in the ground floor entrance hall. Whenever the phone rang it became a race to see who could get to it first – Games Workshop or the landlord. ◉ 13

If it was the latter, when asked by callers if they had got through to Games Workshop, he would reply with an emphatic ‘No!’ and slam the phone down. It was only a matter of time before the three friends would be asked to leave. Not being a fan of D&D, John Peake departed the company in early 1976, leaving Jackson and Livingstone to continue the business without him. Having been turfed out of their flat in Shepherd’s Bush, they found themselves an office, round the back of an estate agents, at 97 Uxbridge Road in Shepherd’s Bush. With only a tiny office and nowhere to live, Steve Jackson parked the beat up old blue van he owned (affectionately known as ‘Morrison’) in the street outside, and he and Livingstone camped out in that. In order that they might have somewhere to shower in the mornings, they joined the local squash club. A side effect of this was that they became rather good at that particular game too! Jackson: “We would regularly get visits from customers who thought we were a proper shop. This office was also our stockroom but it wasn’t big enough for more than two people, so when customers arrived, Ian and I would have to go outside into the courtyard so they could do their shopping! Sometimes it rained and we had to shelter in amongst the rubbish bins! When we started getting lots of customers arriving, the estate agents got fed up and asked us to leave. We had nowhere else to go so we told them: ‘You’re Estate Agents. So find us another office and we’ll leave.’” Clearly a proper retail outlet was required, and so in April 1978 Jackson and Livingstone opened Games

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Workshop’s first retail shop at 1 Dalling Road, Hammersmith, at the premises the estate agents had found for them. When Fighting Fantasy celebrated its 30th anniversary in August 2012, there were more than 400 Games Workshop stores worldwide.

The Sorceress of Firetop Mountain Meanwhile, a young editor at Penguin Books was finding her feet, having been given the ailing science fiction, fantasy and horror list to look after. That editor was Geraldine Cooke. “Nobody cared about it,” she says, speaking of the state of the Penguin SF list when she took it over. “It did have some wonderful authors and my predecessor Paul Sidey had commissioned stunning new covers, and he handed me the torch when he left. I brought some back into print as early Penguin Classics, like Olaf Stapleton’s The Last and First Men in a larger B format and tried to think of ways to inject new life into the list. That is how I came to approach Steve and Ian… I was the Games editor as well as the SF editor.” Cooke’s best friend Geoff John, an avid Dungeons & Dragons player of several years standing, told her all about Games Workshop. “He told me to ring these guys, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and see if they could turn the game or something like it into a book with a similar playing experience built in. ‘If you can get them to do that,’ Geoff said, ‘you’ll be onto a winner.’”

The queue outside the first Games Workshop store on its opening day. (© Ian Livingstone, 1978 and 2014)

So Cooke set out upon a fateful journey to deepest, darkest Hammersmith. “I well remember walking down the road in Hammersmith looking for Games Workshop. They had been very friendly on the phone and pleased to take the call with the approach from a Penguin editor. They couldn’t have been more welcoming and friendly.” As a direct result of Cooke’s interest in Games Workshop, Penguin Books took a stand at Games Day 1980 (Games Day being the annual retail and gaming event established by Jackson and Livingstone in the same year they co-founded Games Workshop) ostensibly to promote a new book called Playing Politics. Fired by a combination of entrepreneurial bravado and youthful enthusiasm, Jackson and Livingstone tried to persuade Cooke to publish a book on the growing Fantasy Role-Playing hobby and so she invited them to send in a synopsis. “We had a wonderful chat,” says Cooke, “and they agreed to work up a proposal and outline for a gamebook... and that was the beginning...” The book was intended to be a ‘How to’ manual of role-playing, but the synopsis that the two of them submitted was for a simple solo role-playing game presented within the pages of a book. And so the concept of The Magic Quest was born. When Cooke received the synopsis, she suspected she had something special in her hands, but she found it hard to convince anyone else this was the case. “The idea was thrown out on its ear at the Penguin editorial meeting,” explains Cooke. “Senior Penguin management roared with laughter at the idea, one laughing so much at the crazy idea of a game without a board and with all sorts of imaginary figures involved [Dungeons & Dragons] that he lay his head on the table and howled with laughter. I managed to keep the idea on the agenda for months and kept on batting away at it. In end I was so angry that I withdrew the idea and went off to my room to brood. This all took about a year.” So how did Cooke eventually manage to persuade the powers that be to commission the book? “One day, inspiration struck: I phoned up Patrick Hardy who was Head of Children’s Publishing and told him about Warlock. He agreed to take a look and came down to my floor. That was unusual as Children’s Publishing and Adult were entirely separate and it was completely unusual for a Penguin editor to take an idea to the Children’s side. He had the proposal in his

hand and of course I thought he was going to reject it but he said, ‘We’d like to take this on for Puffin’. I was overjoyed; at last someone who got it! The rest, as they say, is history.” The editor given the task of making the manuscript publishable was Philippa Dickinson, then a junior editor at Puffin Books and now Consultant Children’s Publisher at Penguin Random House UK, and Sir Terry Pratchett’s editor. “I do remember Geraldine being very excited about it,” says Dickinson, “and me looking at it and being able to articulate to my bosses what it was, because I have two younger brothers who had been utterly boring about Dungeons & Dragons. So at least I understood the concept, even though I’d never seen a Choose Your Own Adventure book beforehand. I absolutely knew all about Games Workshop, and White Dwarf and D&D because I had to sit through my younger brothers being, as I say, terminally boring about being seventeenth level wizards, or whatever it was. I mean I was a very arrogant teenage girl, and my brothers were these annoying beings in our household and this was one of their more annoying aspects… I had no interest in it at all, at that point, but at least when it came to being able to articulate what it was, what these guys were and what this world was… I found that I had that language. “The thing is now of course, everybody thinks, oh, it’s entirely obvious, but at the time it wasn’t. This really was small boy geekdom – small boy and a certain kind of slightly older boy geekdom – and about as far away from what Puffin was doing as it was possible to be at that point. But at the same time we were also very attentive to what was going on in the playground, so around that same time we did the BMX Handbook, You Can Do The Cube… There was something about playground crazes. “D&D wasn’t really a playground craze. The remarkable thing about Fighting Fantasy was that by publishing the books it became a playground craze. It came out of that role-playing game niche.” With the decision to publish made at last, Jackson and Livingstone set to work. It took the pair six months to complete the first draft, running Games Workshop during office hours and working on the book during evenings and weekends. Livingstone wrote the first half of the adventure, setting it in a dungeon under Firetop Mountain. Jackson wrote the second half, having the hero face off against the evil warlock Zagor at the end. And so The Magic Quest became The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. ◉ 15

Chapter Two

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain The Magic Quest begins

T

he concept of the gamebook is that the reader participates in the events of the story, making choices that ultimately influence the course of the narrative. In many such examples of interactive fiction, such as the Fighting Fantasy series, the reader is cast as the hero of the adventure (which is related in the second person present tense), being forced to turn backwards and forwards through the book to different numbered, jumbled paragraphs. Although interactive fiction had existed before the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, having been toyed with as far back as the 1940s, there had never been such a thing as a gamebook before. In the USA, the Tunnels and Trolls role-playing system, designed by Ken St Andre, published solitaire adventures beginning with Buffalo Castle, written by Rick Loomis, in 1976, but these were solo RPG supplements rather than actual books. Edward Packard and R A Montgomery’s Choose Your Own Adventure titles appeared around the same time, and although they were books, they did not feature any game rules. It was Fighting Fantasy that created the gamebook genre, going on to popularise the genre in the UK and Commonwealth, and its success was certainly responsible for the glut of imitations (many of them horribly inferior in quality) that other publishers rushed out after seeing the level of success Puffin Books were enjoying with the format. One of the things that many of these rival publishers failed to realise was the importance of the artwork, commissioning immature, picture book-style illustrations or barely any illustrations at all, which automatically helped to put the FF series head and shoulders above the rest. FF artist Pete Knifton: “Other gamebooks just weren’t as good! FF had the best writers and some of the best artists.” Two rival series that got it right were the Way of 16 ◉

the Tiger books, by Fighting Fantasy alumni Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, and Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf adventures, illustrated by Gary Chalk. Both series imitated Fighting Fantasy’s gamebook structure, and it can be no coincidence that those involved in their creation had all been employees of Jackson and Livingstone at Games Workshop, at one stage or another.

The Not-So Endless Quest In June 1982 the first four titles of TSR’s Endless Quest books saw print in the USA, one month before the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in the UK. A total of 36 books were released between 1982 and 1987, with another thirteen titles being added from 1994 to 1996 (not to mention the various spin-off series that were published in between). Despite being produced by TSR, the guardians of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise at the time, the Endless Quest books were not gamebooks. They were modelled on the Choose Your Own Adventure series and involved the reader making simple choices to progress the story, but without any actual gaming mechanics being involved, as there were in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. There wasn’t even very much in the way of actual narrative branching either. The series was briefly revived by Wizards of the Coast’s publishing division Mirrorstone in 2008, with a revised reprint of the 34th Endless Quest adventure Claw of the Dragon. Where in the original the reader’s character was given a gender and a backstory, the new version followed the FF practice of making the character gender neutral.

May your STAMINA never fail What made The Warlock of Firetop Mountain different from other mass market paperbacks that had been published up until that point was the inclusion of simple dice-rolling game mechanics, reminiscent of such classic role-playing games as the landmark, not to say legendary, Dungeons & Dragons.

Right: Zagor the Warlock, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 2014)

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“When Ian and I first decided how to split the Warlock writing duties, we agreed to site a river in the middle of the adventure and force all readers to cross the river at the same place,” explains Jackson. “Ian would write the adventure up to the river, and I would do the river and beyond, including the maze and the treasure chest puzzle. So we both started writing. After a month or so we realised we were both using very different combat systems. We’d discuss this, and both realised it needed sorting out. But there was nothing between them; there was no reason why we shouldn’t use Ian’s ‘Strength’ instead of ‘Stamina’. I think Ian’s combat was simultaneous rather than turnbased.” Ian Livingstone’s original plan for the first half of the Warlock’s dungeon. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014) The three characteristics, or attributes, the reader had to keep track of were SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK. To enable them to do so with ease, the now familiar Adventure Sheet was created. “There is often a virtue in simplicity in games design,” says games designer and author Alan Bligh, “and ‘S-S-L’ has it; it’s intuitive enough and simple enough in expression for novices to grasp and has enough depth in its application to provide a breadth of possibilities and scenarios to play around with as a writer. It’s a great system for the level of interaction involved in a gamebook – just enough to make a reader feel that the character they are playing/reading about is both active and at risk without getting bogged down in minutiae and too much book keeping. It’s been unashamedly copied and imitated since, and the reason for that is simple; it works!” Jamie Fry, currently the Warlock’s envoy to this Earthly Plane, is another advocate of the SKILL, STAMINA, LUCK system. “Its simplicity allows you to replay the book and try different strategies, but you are beholden to the randomness of the dice roll, each time giving a different experience.” However, the genesis of the Fighting Fantasy rules system wasn’t as straightforward as it might now appear.

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“My job was to make sure it worked, really, ‘cos normally you edit in a fairly linear fashion, but this you couldn’t edit because you needed to follow every strand through and I needed to make sure they’d covered all the options and make sure there weren’t dead-ends and that if you’d dropped this sword there or that sword there that you didn’t suddenly find that by going that way round the options that you still had it… It was a really interesting logical puzzle to make it work. “The bit that was unusual was having to do the checking that all the steps worked, and so I had these huge, long bits of paper with maps, and the first one, I remember, I actually did it with maps and tunnels, and eventually, after a few books, I realised that I didn’t need that, I just needed lines, cos I didn’t need to draw it… So I was actually drawing corridors and tunnels and caves the first one, or possibly two, but certainly had it in the first one… Later on I just needed to map the options with lines, like some absolutely crazy mindmap, I suppose, just to make sure that all the loops came back. That there weren’t dead-ends or if there were that you ended up dead.”

Ian Livingstone’s draft Adventure Sheet and the opening sections of the first draft of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014) “It was a joint decision to keep the combat as simple as possible,” clarifies Livingstone, “so as not to interrupt the flow of the adventure. Adding Luck was a later decision. The final terminology was Steve’s; Skill, Stamina and Luck over my Combat, Strength and Luck.” Jackson: “To sort it out, someone had to back down and agree to use the other’s system. We’d meet at Ian’s to discuss all this but end up playing pool and drinking beer. No decision was made. In the end, when we handed our two halves of the book in to Philippa, the difference in writing styles was obvious.” Philippa Dickinson started to go through the completed manuscript and immediately made some crucial observations. “When confronted with this thing I thought how do you edit something like this? And the way I did it was I got large sheets of paper – wallpaper lining paper – and just started mapping all the different choices and options. So I actually tried to make a graphical representation, I tried to make a map of what they were doing.

A few of the teething problems the book went through included the fact that choices were not presented in one uniform style, there was both a Wolfman and a Werewolf at different points in the adventure, and a copyright-protected song even appeared in the first draft. Dickinson: “What I absolutely remember is sitting them down and saying you’ve written two different books here because they had very different writing styles… Ian’s was quite analytical and Steve’s was full of exclamation marks… You cross the river and it’s a completely different voice. So one of the things that I asked them to do was to even it up… “I can easily imagine that one of them would have had lots of options and multiple whatevers, and the other one did something completely different. Part of my job was to point this out to them, to say, actually you need to meld this so that it is actually all one adventure. “I understand that sometimes the things that the editor says are very annoying, and Steve and Ian were very tolerant of the annoying things I came up with, and they would mostly listen to what I had to say. Somebody once described the skill of an editor as being to help an author not muck up a book. It’s always got to be the author’s book and what you have to do is to find a way of communicating what you’re saying, and you must to be able to flex your editing style to work with an author… It’s a very satisfying process when it works.” ◉ 19

But other than struggling to agree on the initial game mechanics, how did Jackson and Livingstone find the process of writing what was to become the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook? Livingstone: “Writing gamebooks is a lot harder than people might imagine. The first job is to come up with a good plot, then the ‘boss’ adversary has to be created and all the creatures to be encountered along the way. Next is the map and devising imaginative ways of luring people down passageways to their ‘death’. That was a lot of fun and used to make me laugh to myself as I wrote the paragraphs. People assume that we use some sort of template and fill in the boxes. It is anything but that. I always constructed the flowcharts by hand, crossing off the 400 references as I wrote. Then the manuscript, which I wrote by hand, had to be checked for accuracy, difficulty, balance, numbers and consistency. It was, and still is, very challenging to write a gamebook, but at the same time very rewarding when it’s done. Looking back, I suppose it was a bit like writing code. I recently read online somebody describing the writing of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain as writing ‘analogue hypertext.’ Another described it as the first example of ‘gamification of literature.’ It’s funny how some things become described over time.”

Philippa Dickinson’s ‘Notes for discussion’, prepared after reading the first draft of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014) The biggest problem was the obvious change in writing styles that occurred halfway through the adventure. Jackson: “In the end Muggins here volunteered to rewrite Ian’s section so as to keep the styles consistent.” (As word processors had yet to be invented, this meant retyping huge sections of the manuscript.) “And that also sorted out the combat system. I was doing the rewrite, so I stuck with my combat.”

Steve Jackson’s handwritten notes regarding the familiar Fighting Fantasy rules for combat. (© Steve Jackson, 2014)

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Jackson: “Writing The Magic Quest (as Warlock was called originally), was an exciting time. All the techniques of numbering the references, making sure you didn’t get into endless loops, how to make sure readers couldn’t cheat their way through the adventure… We were developing the libraries and tools for the gamebook program! Warlock was signed up as a one-off adventure. But we did realise that if it did well, there was the possibility of a series. I really enjoyed developing new game mechanics which hadn’t been done before in gamebooks, like the keys and the Warlock’s chest.”

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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In 1982, Livingstone wrote the how-to guide that The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was meant to be, but for Routledge & Kegan Paul rather than Puffin. “Dicing with Dragons was the book about the role-playing games hobby that Geraldine Cooke originally suggested we write until Steve and I convinced her that a role-playing gamebook which you could actually play would be much better,” says Livingstone. “We were right. The Fighting Fantasy series sold over 17 million copies and Dicing with Dragons sold a few thousand copies. It proves that playing games is much more fun than reading about them!”

Illustrating the Magic Quest With The Magic Quest having found a home at Puffin Books, and editor Philippa Dickinson busy going through the text with a fine-toothed comb to make sure the adventure actually worked, the next thing that needed sorting out was the artwork. Russ Nicholson was the artist who was finally entrusted with producing the black and white interior illustrations. “My work just happened to marry well with FF,” he says, with disarming dismissiveness. It was Nicholson who came up with the Warlock’s distinctive look, including the strange snake-like creature wrapped around Zagor’s head. “My thought was that it was an elemental familiar, part lamprey, part snake, and part living scarf, which had its own properties and was very protective of the wizard.”

But while PAJ had two attempts to get the cover right, another artist had already tried three different concepts and had them all rejected, for one reason or another. “I had trouble with the cover as the editors kept changing every time I submitted an idea,” says Nicholson. “After three, and the deadline for the black and whites looming, I gave up. The last editor used his favourite SF artist.” Which, of course, turned out to be Peter Andrew Jones.

Peter Andrew Jones’ first take on the cover for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain wasn’t the iconic image fans remember most clearly. It was actually his second take on the subject (in which his portrayal of Zagor matches Russ Nicholson’s portrait of the spell-caster inside the book), but it’s one that fans of the series who picked up the first book the first time around in 1982 will never forget. But how does it feel to have been the artist who produced such an iconic cover for such a legendary book, one that is still much loved and admired today? “I have to be honest and say I enjoy enormously the e-mails I get every week from fans of all generations from around the globe who like my work, whether it be Fighting Fantasy or otherwise,” says Jones.

Dragon, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1982 and 2014) ◉ 21

Turn to 400 It just so happened that by the time Jackson and Livingstone finished writing The Magic Quest it came to 399 numbered references. With a nice round number like 400 just around the next turn in the Maze of Zagor, as it were, it was decided to add a false reference part way through the adventure to achieve that magic total. Paragraph 192 just asks you to turn to 169, without adding anything to the adventure in terms of plot or bonuses, or even penalties, for the hero.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain So, with the manuscript now written in a uniform style and the artwork completed, finally, in August 1982, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published by Puffin Books. Announced with little fanfare, sales were nothing exceptional until word started to spread around schools and colleges, as well as within the gaming community, thanks in part to advertisements run in Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine.

Steve and Ian, and then we played the first book on the phones, during the course of a programme, where you had kids ringing in and doing it.” This gamingpublicity experiment made an enormous impact. “They actually invited us back to do it again. In my memory, that was one of the biggest turning moments. The books really started taking off when we had that Radio One publicity. “It became a complete playground craze, and in those days that was the tipping point. Word of mouth and peer group pressure… We were very heavily supported by WHSmith, so it was in those mass outlets in terms of books. That was pre-Waterstones days, so the support of someone like Smiths was huge. But, as I say, the Radio One thing sticks in the mind as being a big publicity breakthrough for us.”

Advertisement for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain that appeared in issue 34 of White Dwarf magazine. Barry Cunningham, now Managing Director of Chicken House publishing, was the marketing director at Puffin at the time. “We didn’t have huge budgets in Children’s Books in those days but we did a lot of work with the Puffin Club,” recalls Cunningham. “I know that Steve and Ian used to complain in the early days that we weren’t spending enough money on the covers and we weren’t putting much direct advertising behind it… The boys, of course, were not millionaires at that time and we did a lot of trucking around the country, at various events and so on. “We got a slot on Radio One, on a Saturday morning show, with 22 ◉

Promotional poster for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014)

“I think The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is always going to be my favourite,” says Dickinson, remembering the series with obvious fondness. “I think it’s partly because of the enormous amount of fun it was to edit, and probably the long, long hours that I put into it, because it was a voyage of discovery… Not so much the characters or what happened in it, but actually that journey of how to get that, the manuscript they presented, into a book which then turned out to be a massive bestseller. That’s very satisfying.”

Within the first three months Warlock was reprinted three times. Within the first year it had been reprinted twenty times! With sales that strong, Puffin Books soon came knocking, looking for a sequel, and more.

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, in 1982, with the first edition of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. (© Ian Livingstone & , 1982 and 2014)

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Over the years, many people have doubtless wondered about the origin of the name Zagor (pronounced so that the ‘Za’ rhymes with ‘bay’, rather than with ‘baa’). It was Livingstone who came up with the name having been inspired by the moniker attributed to the crossword compiler whose work appeared in Owl & Weasel, Games Workshop’s original gaming fanzine, Zailin. But who was Zailin? Who else, other than Ian Livingstone? Livingstone devised the puzzles while his then girlfriend was the one who actually typed them up. Zailin was an anagram of their first names, Ian and Liz! The Owl & Weasel fanzine issue 6. (© Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone, 2014)

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Chapter Three

The Phenomenon of Firetop Mountain Fighting Fantasy outsells Roald Dahl

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teve Jackson: “After Warlock had done so well, Puffin wanted to know if we could turn this into a series. And yes, we could. At a meeting in Philippa Dickinson’s office, she wanted to know what we should call this series. Ian came up with ‘Fighting Fantasy’. I think at the time it was just expected to be a working title. But it never got changed!” Work started immediately on another two titles. Any differences in writing styles would no longer be an issue since the authors were now working on one new book each. To have a clearer idea of how big a success Fighting Fantasy was in those early days, just compare the average print run for a typical children’s book at the time with that of a new FF title. “I have a memory of, in its heyday, printing around 80,000 copies as a first printing,” says Dickinson. “In those days, with children’s books, it could be 3,000. It was huge, a huge bestseller.”

The Citadel of Chaos Jackson did not stray that far from the familiar format of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (FF1). Although it was set within a castle, The Citadel of Chaos (FF2) was effectively another dungeon bash, but with the addition of rules for using magic. “I wanted to name my second book in such a way as it served

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to promote GW’s brand, i.e. Citadel Miniatures,” explains Jackson. “So the adventure had to be set in a Citadel. And some of the illustrations of the Citadel were reminiscent of the Citadel Miniatures logo. It was, if you like, a promotional in-joke.” Atop his sinister Black Tower, the dread sorcerer Balthus Dire is making plans of conquest. The hero of the adventure is a student of the Grand Wizard of Yore, charged by King Salamon with penetrating the stronghold of the fell magic-user, and stopping the fiend before he can unleash his army upon the peaceful Vale of Willow. Before beginning the adventure, the hero has to determine his MAGIC score and then choose a corresponding number of spells from a pool of twelve that includes such enchantments as Creature Copy, Fool’s Gold and Levitation. But where did the inspiration for Balthus Dire and the lethal Ganjees come from? Jackson: “Creating names for new characters monsters and places was always a brainstorming exercise. I’d write lots of contenders on a sheet of paper and eventually pick one which to my mind sounded evocative... ‘Balthus’ was the name of a French painter. At the time I was constantly on the lookout for inspiration for names for characters, places and creatures. I came across Balthus the artist – his name, not his art, which I have never seen! I thought: ‘Yes. That’s a cool name. Sounds kind of demonic, or like a dark religious pontiff.’ I used to use a thesaurus a lot for inspiration. ‘Dire’ sounded particularly bad. And thus Balthus Dire became the boss of the adventure.” Internal art was by Russ Nicholson again, while the cover was produced by the enigmatically-named Emmanuel.

Right: The Forest of Doom, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1983 and 2014)

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Magda Knight, author of speculative and YA fiction. “The castle itself was a pretty surreal and trippy place to hang out in, and there were hints that the Ganjees were tough motherfluffers, and they did not disappoint.”

The Forest of Doom While Jackson was struggling with adding a workable magic system to the nascent Fighting Fantasy system, Livingstone set to work on his first solo FF outing, The Forest of Doom (FF3). His tale had the hero braving the perils of Darkwood Forest in order to recover the pieces of the stolen Hammer of Stonebridge, fashioned by the Dwarfs to protect their village from the predations of Hill Trolls. Gark, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1983 and 2014)

“The only art I really didn’t like was the cover of the original Citadel of Chaos,” reveals Jackson. “As this was the second book in the series, it could have been interpreted as a significant statement of art intent. But it was followed by Iain McCaig’s cover of The Forest of Doom which set a new standard. I asked Penguin many times to have the Citadel cover recommissioned. Eventually they gave in and Ian Miller did a fine job.” “I remember taking The Citadel of Chaos on a school trip to France and having it confiscated because I refused to stop reading it,” admits FF fan Damian Butt. “I remember slavishly copying the illustrations because I thought they were so cool.” “I really liked the Ganjees in The Citadel of Chaos,” says 26 ◉

“I’d thought about writing another dungeon crawl,” says Livingstone, “but coming out just months after Warlock, I decided to set the adventure above ground. But where? I had two ideas in mind. One had a working title of  Blackhill Manor and the other was called Doom in Darkwood Forest. I finally decided on the forest adventure. Blackhill Manor would have to wait. Thirty years on and Blackhill Manor is still not written, but the synopsis was influential in part for City of Thieves and Caverns of the Snow Witch. “For the book title, I had a shortlist of three; Doom in Darkwood Forest, The War Hammer of Darkwood Forest and the third – The Forest of Doom.”

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Jackson once named his favourite character from the Fighting Fantasy books as being Balthus Dire, the villain from The Citadel of Chaos, while his favourite monster is the Jib-Jib, which first appeared in the final instalment of his Sorcery! series, The Crown of Kings.

Doom or Darkwood Forest. The creature on the front cover of the book I named the Shape Changer as that was exactly what it was when it metamorphosed from a goblin into a flesh-ripping reptilian man-eater! I also came up with names that had something to do with my own world. The grand wizard Yaztromo is a good example of this. Ridiculous as it may seem now, the name was made up by combining the nickname of a baseball player and a spaceship!

Ian Livingstone’s original notes for The Forest of Doom. (© Ian Livingstone, 1983 and 2014) The book introduced several characters and locations that would reappear later throughout Livingstone’s contributions to the FF series, including the village of Stonebridge, Darkwood Forest of course, and the wizard Gereth Yaztromo. Livingstone: “When writing Fighting Fantasy books, I like to create names and places that are both descriptive and evocative. Readers would know what to expect when they read the words The Forest of

“Unusually for a Brit, I used to follow baseball. I saw my first game in 1976 at Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox’s hero at that time was Carl Yastrzemski, a power hitter whose nickname was ‘Yaz’. I watched in awe as the fans went crazy when Yaz launched one of his mighty home runs into the right field bleachers. So I became a fan too. A few years later I saw Ridley Scott’s Alien for the first time. The atmosphere and suspense he created on board the Nostromo was powerful and it became my favourite science fiction film. So it was a simple matter of adding ‘Yaz’ to ‘tromo’ to give my grumpy old wizard his name!” Yaztromo was the most commonly recurring character in the Fighting Fantasy series, appearing in numerous gamebooks and novels, even out-doing Zagor the Warlock in terms of the number of guest appearances he made. ◉ 27

But what of the book’s seminal cover?

Ian Livingstone’s handwritten first draft of The Forest of Doom. (© Ian Livingstone, 1983 and 2014) Illustrated by Malcolm Barter, The Forest of Doom was the last Fighting Fantasy gamebook to have every fullpage illustration accompanied by a caption that gave the number of the paragraph depicted alongside a short extract from the text.

Livingstone: “When I finally finished writing the adventure, I wanted to make sure that the art reflected my own vision of the creatures of Darkwood Forest. It was at that time when I was lucky enough to meet a young artist called Iain McCaig who visited us at Games Workshop looking for a commission. I looked at his portfolio and asked Iain if he would like to illustrate the book cover, and was very happy indeed when he said yes. We talked about the cover a lot and settled on the Shape Changer as the central character. It is still one of my favourite Fighting Fantasy covers, beautifully painted, full of threat and atmosphere. I purchased the original painting from Iain – an amazing water colour – and today it hangs proudly in my home with my other Fighting Fantasy book covers.”

“The commission came via my then agent John Craddock,” says Barter. “I remember, along with a couple of other illustrators I was asked to submit a sample picture, as the original artist Penguin had intended to use was unavailable… I was fortunate enough to get it.  “My favourite illustration would have been the sample I drew to get the job! It wasn’t used in the book and that pissed me off. I don’t think they could find it at the time.”

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Ian Livingstone has stated that his favourite character from the Fighting Fantasy range is Gereth Yaztromo, who first appeared in The Forest of Doom, as did the Shape Changer. And it is the Shape Changer that vies with the Bloodbeast from Deathtrap Dungeon for the honour of being recognised as Livingstone’s favourite monster from the series.

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Illustrator Malcolm Barter’s try-out piece for The Forest of Doom. (© Malcolm Barter, 1983 and 2014)

Yaztromo’s Tower, Fishman and Wyvern, by Malcolm Barter. (©Malcolm Barter, 1983 and 2014, colours by John-Paul Bove) “We were hugely chuffed to be writing for such a wellknown publisher,” says Jackson. “But after three or four titles, we were asking ourselves: “Why didn’t we do this through GW instead?” But by now the series had been established as a Penguin brand. To suddenly switch to Games Workshop would have been very confusing and unprofessional. So we decided GW would have to publish its own solo RPG series. Joe Dever, who ran the GW mail order department, volunteered to create the series and drafted in Gary Chalk, a GW staff artist. They set to work on creating GW’s solo RPG. But when they finally finished, they announced that they’d signed a deal with a third party publisher who had commissioned  more books and they were leaving GW. It seemed to us like a major double-cross.” The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom were published together, and in March 1983 the first three titles in what was fast becoming the Fighting Fantasy series topped The Sunday Times bestseller charts. “Puffin’s ‘star author’ was Roald Dahl, whose books always topped the Children’s Bestseller charts,” explains Jackson. “In March 1983, Warlock, Citadel and Forest topped the Children’s Charts in the Sunday Times... Roald Dahl had finally been out-sold…” “You absolutely know you’ve got something when children are paying their own money to buy the books,” adds Philippa Dickinson. “I remember going to work one day and watching a boy walking along the road to school with his nose in this book and thinking, that is extraordinary. Because here were books that children were voluntarily buying with their own

money. And not just children, this was boys, who were extraordinarily difficult to reach.” However, not everyone was as impressed by their achievements as Jackson and Livingstone and their publishers were. When Livingstone appeared on the popular children’s TV show Saturday Superstore, despite the first three FF titles being at numbers one, two and three on the Sunday Times bestseller lists, veteran children’s news reporter John Craven still had the gall to ask him, “When are you going to write a proper book?” But Jackson and Livingstone were unphased by his comments. After all, by then they were already hard at work on the next two titles in the series, Starship Traveller (FF4) and City of Thieves (FF5).

Map of Darkwood Forest sent to Ian Livingstone by a fan. ◉ 29

Chapter Four

The Art of Firetop Mountain The Monster Makers

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ne of the things that fans regard most favourably about Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and which gets new young readers enthused about the books today, is the art. People love the monsters, and never more so that when there’s an image of one rendered in black and white there on the page before them – or, even better, in full colour, whether it be in the digital medium or traditional acrylic or oil paint, on the cover! Who can fail to remember the myriad-eyed Bloodbeast, staring hungrily from the cover of Deathtrap Dungeon, its pustule-scarred tongue licking the bloody juices of its most recent victim from its fangs? What fan doesn’t feel a frisson of excitement at witnessing the Shape Changer’s transformation on the cover of The Forest of Doom? And who can fail to be excited by the prospect of an undead horror smashing through the door on the cover of Blood of the Zombies? In total, forty-three artists have contributed to the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks series alone – providing cover art, internal illustrations, and glorious maps – with the majority of them illustrating the fantastical world of Titan itself. The list of artists is an impressive roster of legends of British fantasy art, including the likes of Rodney Matthews, Brian Bolland, Les Edwards, Chris Achilleos and John Sibbick. However, there are two artists in particular who, as far as fans of the original run are concerned at least, really defined what many people came to think of as the ‘look’ of Fighting Fantasy – Russ Nicholson and Iain McCaig.

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Russ Nicholson For many young readers who picked up The Warlock of Firetop Mountain when it first came out back in 1982, it was the first time they had been exposed to such gritty, detailed and twisting pen and ink linework in a children’s book. The mature style of the art was something that Jackson and Livingstone had to fight hard for. They had been running Games Workshop for several years by this point – and even been interviewed on television by Ben Elton at one point, for a piece about Dungeons & Dragons – and had built up a network of talented artists who really understood the genre, and for whom creating dark fantasy, gothic, threatening, intimidating and (within reason) realistic monsters, came as second nature. In their negotiations with Puffin, Jackson and Livingstone insisted that they be allowed to choose the artists. According to Livingstone, “Puffin wanted to commission gentle covers, with nice fluffy creatures in the woodlands and hopping bunnies on the front, because they didn’t want to upset any children. We wanted hideous creatures with drooling fangs that threatened to bite the reader’s face off !” The two creators were adamant that their books should have powerful covers, backed up by powerful internal art, because, as they rightly surmised, children are not scared by this sort of thing. Rather, they are excited by it, as time and their fans’ fond memories have proved, vindicating their management of those original negotiations. “Russ Nicholson’s drawings were the first I encountered in the world of Fighting Fantasy (as I read through part 1 of Warlock of Firetop Mountain in Warlock magazine),” says FF fan Steve Brown, “and they really captured for me the essence of the whole Fighting Fantasy world.”

Right: City of Thieves, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1983 and 2014)

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Fighting Fantasy Fact

The Fighting Fantasy Quest Pack and contents.

It was also Russ Nicholson’s art that appeared on various promotional items, including the Fighting Fantasy Quest Pack and the iron-on dragon transfer that came as part of the set. Released by Puffin Books in 1984, and marketed as ‘A Game Kit for all Fighting Fantasy Players!’, as well as the transfer the pack contained a Puffin GamesMaster badge (featuring the FF logo), two Fighting Fantasy pencils with erasers, a pad of Adventure Sheets (as found in the front of every gamebook) and a pair of dice. So whose idea was the adventurer’s pack? “Steve and I suggested the idea to Puffin as we knew that readers wanted more Fighting Fantasy merchandise to supplement the books,” says Livingstone. “I can’t say that Puffin had the same view since their business was book publishing. Hence there was not much merchandise ever released.” “Little did they realise what a collectors’ item they were creating,” adds Jackson.

After illustrating The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Nicholson went on to provide more internal art for Fighting Fantasy books than any other illustrator, including seven solo gamebooks, Out of the Pit and Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World, two out of the three books in the Advanced Fighting Fantasy series, all four of The Adventures of Goldhawk, and the first three Fighting Fantasy novels, The Trolltooth Wars, Demonstealer and Shadowmaster. (He has even contributed a brand new illustration of Zagor the Warlock for this history of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.) Ghoul, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1982 and 2014) 32 ◉

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“Looking back, the flaws in drawing or design become painfully clear,” says McCaig. The YOU ARE THE HERO commission, “was a welcome attempt to put some of those errors right, though I’m sure in ten years’ time I’ll want to do them again!” The artist’s first professional commission was with Games Workshop, “back when my drawing board was a piece of wood propped up on bricks borrowed from a local building site,” explains McCaig. “They [actually Ian Livingstone] commissioned me to design their carrier bag” – which became the shop logo – “which led to assignments for White Dwarf, which eventually led to the Fighting Fantasy books.” He might have only provided the internal pen and ink illustrations for two solo gamebooks – City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon – but they were two of the most popular ever published, with Deathtrap Dungeon selling over 350,000 copies in its first year alone.

Zagor the Warlock, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 2014)

Iain McCaig The number of gamebooks he contributed art to may have been fewer, but Iain McCaig’s art was no less important in helping to create the look of the Fighting Fantasy universe. Now known as the man who designed Darth Maul for George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, McCaig took time out from working on Star Wars Episode 7 to produce not one but two brand new pieces of art for this very book, updating the look of two iconic Fighting Fantasy creations – Zanbar Bone the Night Prince and the infamous Bloodbeast.

McCaig: “I seem to recall that the two projects flowed nicely one after the other... Deathtrap Dungeon is my favourite. Ian kindly allowed me to chip in ideas as he was writing, making it more the kind of collaboration you experience on a feature film. “There was a bit of a rush at the end of Deathtrap Dungeon, though, and I finished the last illustration (the one of Ian Livingstone as the prisoner with his hand chopped off) in one of the offices at Penguin Books, only to find they’d all gone home and locked me inside the building.” But it wasn’t only Deathtrap Dungeon that made Iain McCaig a household name, among FF fans at least. While Nicholson did not produce any covers for the series, McCaig painted four and then went on to work with Livingstone on the lavishly-illustrated Puzzle Quest Book Casket of Souls. Overleaf: Zanbar Bone the Night Prince and the Bloodbeast, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1983, 1984 and 2014)

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Casket of Souls, by Iain McCaig (© Iain McCaig 1987, 2014) McCaig is Livingstone’s favourite fantasy artist, and has been ever since the author set eyes on his artwork for the first time. “I looked at his portfolio and immediately loved his gritty, realistic fantasy art style,” says Livingstone. “There was so much detail, mood and movement in his work. His creatures leaped off the paper at you.” It was McCaig’s art that inspired Livingstone to write Casket of Souls in the first place: “The covers he did for The Forest of Doom, Deathtrap Dungeon, City of Thieves and Island of the Lizard King were nothing short of amazing. Working with Iain was brilliant. He was full of ideas and energy, always excited by possibilities. His art captured moments frozen in time even though those moments never actually happened. There is so much 38 ◉

drama and movement in his work, it’s genius. I wanted to collaborate with him on a large format puzzle book which would be full of his incredible art. He painted Casket of Souls in water colour which was ridiculously difficult when you see the incredible detail he produced in each painting. It was such a challenging job but he nailed it. The paintings deserve to be on display in a public gallery.” McCaig is a celebrated figure among Fighting Fantasy fandom as well. As Lin Liren from Taiwan puts it, McCaig’s illustrations, “are not so much drawn as they are shot, such is their sheer cinematic and photographically realistic nature. Every ‘speaking part’ has a unique personality, and there is a sense of perpetual motion in the action sequences in spite of

them being captured as still images; they always make you feel like you are there, as a part of the action rather than just a passive observer.” “It was his artwork that sold me the books originally,” adds FF fan Matthew Smith. “This man has produced timeless classics again and again. A lot of his work from the mid ‘80s does not look out of place even now. Just compare that to some of the other fantasy and scifi art that was around then and even in the ‘90s; most of it generally doesn’t stand up to the test of time.” McCaig is also film-maker Sean Riley’s choice for favourite FF artist: “Iain, has to be – the iconic covers say it all. There’s not a massive amount in it though, I respect all the fantasy artists, God knows they don’t get the recognition they deserve in the wider art arena.” “He’s such a brilliant draughtsman,” says fellow FF artist Duncan Smith, “and the fantasy world just flows from his pencil onto the page, and he makes it all so believable.” “The amount of detail that Iain McCaig pours into his work is staggering,” says comics writer Andi Ewington, “and the bar he sets is almost insurmountable. Just look at the projects he’s been involved in, he is a living legend.”

City of Thieves For his second gamebook with sole writing credit, Ian Livingstone plumped for a city-based adventure. City of Thieves (FF5) sends the hero to Port Blacksand for the first time, searching for the means to save the prosperous town of Silverton from the evil Night

Prince Zanbar Bone and his bloodthirsty Moon Dogs. This was the first occasion on which Iain McCaig produced not just the internal illustrations but also, what has since become a classic cover. “I’ve always been fascinated by graveside sculptures of the Grim Reaper,” says McCaig. “I eventually designed one for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Zanbar Bone is an early attempt to bring one to life.” Jackson and Livingstone originally asked McCaig to work on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain but at the time he was busy painting a Jethro Tull album cover and had to turn them down. “Fortunately, the timing worked out better for Ian’s first solo book, The Forest of Doom,” explains McCaig, “for which I did the cover, and both his follow-up books, City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon, for which I did both the interior and cover art. I don’t think I ever enjoyed such a close working relationship with any other author, before or since,” says Iain.

Deathtrap Dungeon The follow-up to City of Thieves is, after The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, probably the most well-known Fighting Fantasy gamebook – Deathtrap Dungeon (FF6)!

Ian Livingstone’s handwritten first draft of City of Thieves, in which it can clearly be seen that Port Blacksand was to have been called Port Blackstone. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014)

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As Steve Jackson puts it, “Surely the best ever name for a gamebook!” Inspired by a holiday Livingstone had taken to Thailand the year before, the plot of the adventure saw the hero taking up the challenge of the Trial of Champions, devised by the devilish mind of Baron Sukumvit, entering the eponymous dungeon, braving the labyrinth’s fiendish traps and monstrous denizens, in the pursuit of fame and fortune. Ian Livingstone’s rough map of Deathtrap Dungeon. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014)

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“I went trekking in Northern Thailand in 1981,” explains Livingstone. “I passed through Fang and crossed the River Kok on my way to the jungle near the Burmese border. I took lots of photos of villagers and scenery on the trek. It was an incredible adventure, and one not without drama. Our guide was constantly fretting about armed bandits coming over the border to rob us! The trek made a big impression on me, enough for me to want to reference the people and places in Deathtrap Dungeon which I began writing in late 1983. But the dungeon plot itself was a product of the dungeons I’d designed during the years I’d been playing D&D. When Penguin Books told us they wanted a sequel to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, I thought I’d write a classic dungeon-bash next, but I put it on hold and wrote The Forest of Doom and City of Thieves before Deathtrap Dungeon.”

As well as the River Kok and Fang, the names of several other places Livingstone visited on that fortuitous trip made it into the book, including Chiang Mai. Baron Sukumvit himself was named after Sukumvit Road in Bangkok. The marriage of both eastern and western influences in the adventure created something entirely new, helping to give the world of Fighting Fantasy a truly unique flavour.

One of Iain McCaig’s illustration roughs for Deathtrap Dungeon alongside Ian Livingstone’s handwritten first draft. (© Iain McCaig and Ian Livingstone, 2014) Deathtrap Dungeon was a huge success, selling over 350,000 copies in its first year alone. It was the bestselling children’s book in April 1984 and was ranked 8th out of all books sold that month, coming just behind Dick Francis in 7th place and ahead of Stephen King’s Christine in 9th. (Three of the top one hundred books sold that year were Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.) Deathtrap Dungeon was so successful that Livingstone’s eighth gamebook was a sequel, Trial of Champions (FF21, published in 1986). It even spawned a video game.

“Deathtrap Dungeon has a fantastic, totally immersive setting and it’s really tricksy; I probably had up to six fingers nestled in the pages as bookmarks at one point,” says author and FF fan Magda Knight. “Some may argue that the original books were less richly plotted than their successors, but I loved the setup of the Trial of Champions, the original Hunger Games. It appealed to my competitive nature. The illustrations flash up in my memory to this day, and the concept of an underground maze full of traps worked so well with

the nature of the books. I also loved how Fang was placed so near to Port Blacksand, which meant that I was beginning to build up a picture of a world through these adventures.” Like City of Thieves before it, Deathtrap Dungeon was illustrated inside and out by Ian Livingstone’s favourite FF artist, Iain McCaig. “My favourite black and white illustration is the image of the inscrutable Trialmaster on his dragon-hide throne from Deathtrap Dungeon,” muses McCaig. “It was the height of my love affair with croquill pens, and the quintessential riddle picture that would lead to Casket of Souls.” ◉ 41

Deathtrap on Legs Deathtrap Dungeon’s enduring popularity resulted in various sequels and reinventions, but the first of these was Deathtrap on Legs, a multiplayer role-playing game module written by Paul Mason and Steve Williams, the men behind The Riddling Reaver. It was published in issue #7 of Warlock magazine with illustrations by Simon Ecob.

Dwarf Trialmaster, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1984 and 2014)

A Wider World Growing in confidence with how he portrayed his and Jackson’s creation, and the ever-increasing popularity of the series, City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon – along with the subsequent Island of the Lizard King (FF7) – were the first time that Livingstone really tried to build a cohesive fantasy world. Although it is not explicitly stated anywhere, it is implied, via the Background sections of the three books, that the hero of Deathtrap Dungeon is also the hero of City of Thieves, who later journeys from Fang to Oyster Bay and from there to the deadly Island of the Lizard King.

Ian Livingstone in Sydney on a Fighting Fantasy PR trip in 1984, just after Lizard King was published, happy to see lots of FF books on display in a shop window. (© Ian Livingstone, 1984 and 2014) 42 ◉

Island of the Lizard King The third title in this trilogy of sorts, Island of the Lizard King (FF7) had the hero fighting to free the young men of Oyster Bay from the tyranny of the insane Lizard King who ruled his island domain through a combination of black magic, voodoo and sheer force of arms. McCaig’s cover bears the intimidating image of the Lizard King holding back his deadly pet, a Black Lion.

Lizardman riding a Styracosaurus, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1984 and 2014, colours by Joshua Wright)

The typed draft of the Background section of Island of the Lizard King. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014)

Fighting Fantasy Fact

7

One of the characters in City of Thieves is a Troll guard called Sourbelly. In Deathtrap Dungeon it is possible for the hero to encounter a female Troll called ‘Poison’ Ivy. It turns out that Sourbelly is Ivy’s brother of whom she is very proud since he has risen to the rank of city guard of  Port Blacksand.

If Nicholson’s style encapsulated the untamed wilds of Allansia, and McCaig’s art captured the look of the cities, and both defined the look of the myriad deadly dungeons dotted about the Fighting Fantasy world, then Alan Langford was the go-to guy for dinosaurs. Having rendered the Lizardmen of Fire Island in all their terrible glory, after a brief sojourn realising the denizens of Hachiman for Sword of the Samurai (FF20) and the monsters of Creature of Havoc (FF24), he would go back to drawing myriad lizardine horrors for Battleblade Warrior (FF31) and the prehistoric reptilian beasts of Portal of Evil (FF37), before making his final contribution to the Fighting Fantasy series illustrating Spellbreaker (FF53). “Zdeněk Burian, Ray Harryhausen and Frank Frazetta – they were my influences as far as dinosaur art went,” says Langford. “The illustration I enjoyed doing most of all, the one that sticks in my mind, was the Cyclops bearing the axe. I had compliments from lots of kids from that.”

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The art of Fighting Fantasy was celebrated in 1990 when The Fighting Fantasy Poster Book was published by Fantail Publishing (an imprint of  Penguin Books specialising in titles that showcase artwork). The large format book contained poster prints of fifteen paintings by eight different artists. Peter Andrew Jones’ artwork featured twice, in the covers for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Talisman of Death. Ian Miller was also featured twice, with his covers of House of Hell and Creature of Havoc, as was David Gallagher, with Stealer of Souls and Fangs of Fury. Brian Bolland, Les Edwards and John Sibbick all appeared once each, with the covers for Appointment with F.E.A.R., Daggers of Darkness and Dungeoneer respectively. Iain McCaig had his art appear three times – The Forest of Doom, City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon – while Chris Achilleos was featured an unprecedented four times, with his covers for Temple of Terror, Armies of Death and Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World, and his original artwork for Out of the Pit being reused on the cover. Cyclops, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1984 and 2014, colours by Joshua Wright)

The Fighting Fantasy Poster Book

“I like Peter Jones’ work,” says fellow FF artist Alan Craddock, whose painting of Fog Devils featured in 1985’s Out of the Pit, “although I prefer his SF stuff.”

Fog Devils, by Alan Craddock. (© Alan Craddock, 1990 and 2014) 44 ◉

John Blanche Another artist whose legendary status far outweighs his physical contribution to the FF series in terms of numbers of gamebooks illustrated, is the force of nature that is John Blanche, currently Games Workshop’s art director and the man responsible for coming up with the look of the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. “Warhammer and 40K fill my mind completely and utterly… It’s a bit like method acting – it’s where I live 24/7 – so individual books or any product will often go past without me even noticing. A big part of this is the time gap between producing illustrations and the final book hitting the shelves. I’m currently working a good two and a half years ahead of release.” So what is the reason for Blanche’s legendary status, as far as Fighting Fantasy fans are concerned? Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! epic, of course. Living Corpse, by John Blanche. (© John Blanche, 1984 and 2014) Birdman, by John Blanche. (© John Blanche, 1985 and 2014)

Martin McKenna If there is one artist who encapsulates the way the art of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks has developed over the years, in terms of tone as well as subject matter, it has to be Martin McKenna. McKenna doesn’t attribute his success to one big break: “It was probably more like a lot of little breaks.  Really early stuff like meeting Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in ‘86 was helpful.  They liked the fanzine work which had included a Fighting Fantasy spoof, and they recommended a submission to Warlock magazine. Coincidentally Marc Gascoigne had seen my fanzine stuff and liked it, and he was then editor of Warlock.  Most importantly, an invitation came from John Blanche, then art director at Games Workshop, to produce work for him. John’s initial contact came as a result of me entering an art competition featured in the Citadel Journal. Instead of the hoped-for prize of a two quid postal order, I got a letter from John expressing interest in my stuff. This led to my very first paying commission: illustrations for an Out of the Pit article in Warlock. So a bunch of things came together in the very ◉ 45

beginning.  And one way or another they’ve continued to do so ever since.”

same sort of stuff ! Occasional goblins and things with spikes.”

Caricature of Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson drawn when Martin McKenna was only 14. (© Martin McKenna, 2014) His fine pen and ink work is now produced digitally, allowing him to draw fine white lines on black, as well as vice versa. “Yeah, drawing in a pen and ink style digitally is a bit like doing a scraperboard thing, which I enjoy.  I still prefer doing things in black and white... I really should do more.”  That, coupled with modern printing techniques, means that his more modern illustrations are some of the most detailed ever to appear in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Thanks to the resurgence of interest in the gamebook genre and Wizard Books reprinting the series, McKenna has now illustrated twelve FF gamebooks in total. And although he only really got to produce one cover for the series when it was published by Puffin Books – the last of the initial run, Curse of the Mummy (FF59) – he has now produced a total of eighteen covers for seventeen books, producing different artwork for different editions of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. McKenna: “Fighting Fantasy got me started working in the gaming industry and helped direct me into the field of fantasy art generally. So I owe it a lot, especially for helping to get me established and find early success in my career. These days I’m doing a lot of much the 46 ◉

Werewolf, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1989 and 2014) McKenna’s influence has partly been down to his frequent collaborations with writers like Stephen Hand and Jonathan Green. “I love Martin’s artwork on both Fighting Fantasy and his other works,” says Jamie Wallis, who worked with McKenna on Myriador’s D20 FF conversions. “The new versions of the covers gave the FF gamebook rereleases in early 2000 a contemporary look.” “I like the fear and terror he brings to his illustrations, in particular his early work such as Vault of the Vampire and Dead of Night,” says FF fan James Aukett. “They had a lifelike menace to them which particularly struck me as I was reading those books.” It’s not only the fans who appreciate the contributions these artists made to the Fighting Fantasy series either. Ian Livingstone: “If I had to pick a second favourite artist after Iain McCaig, it would have to be Martin McKenna. He was fantastic to work with on the Legend

Cameos For those who are sharp of eye, there’s a great deal to take from the myriad illustrations that appear in the Fighting Fantasy books. Take Iain McCaig, for example: “I left both clues and red herrings in the drawings, little things that the astute puzzle-hunter would pick up on. Occasionally, I also snuck things in just to see if anyone would notice, like the image of the howling prisoner with the severed hand in Deathtrap Dungeon, which is actually a portrait of Ian Livingstone.” Following McCaig’s lead, other artists began to put Jackson and Livingstone into their pictures. Deathtrap Prisoner, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1984 and 2014) Steve Jackson, by Stephen Lavis. (© Stephen Lavis, 1985 and 2014) Beast Man Champion, by Tony Hough. (© Tony Hough, 1994 and 2014)

of Zagor game and his attention to detail is amazing. And for SF art, Jim Burns.” “I particularly admire the work of Martin McKenna and Iain McCaig,” says Gary Mayes, Fighting Fantasy’s most prolific SF interior artist. “Both make images that work so well in the medium of black and white. They both create genuine characters and compose great images for books of this nature which are limited in size and by monochrome.” As well as the wretched former competitor in Deathtrap Dungeon, Ian Livingstone also appears in Caverns of the Snow Witch (as one of the masks on the wall of the Healer’s cave), Armies of Death (as Obigee the landlord), Return to Firetop Mountain (as the Inquisitor

who guards the way to Zagor’s inner sanctum), Legend of Zagor (as the merchant known as Three-Eyes Haag, and even appeared on one of the cards in the board game version), Eye of the Dragon (as another friendly merchant), and in Blood of the Zombies (in the form of a bust on display in Goraya Castle). Steve Jackson’s smiling face can be seen in the artistic surround of the map that accompanied the hardback edition of The Tasks of Tantalon, while both Jackson and Livingstone appear in portraits on the wall of a room in the Archmage’s stronghold in The Crown of Kings (S4), and among the bottled dinner guests at a feast in The Riddling Reaver, not to mention among the heads tied to a Beastman’s belt in Knights of Doom!

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Chapter Five

The Archmage of Firetop Mountain Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!

W

ith Fighting Fantasy a certifiable hit for Puffin Books, one person who had been so instrumental in bringing the FF phenomenon to the masses was feeling rather left out. And that was Penguin Books commissioning editor Geraldine Cooke. Jackson promised Cooke that he would write a more advanced series for the Penguin imprint. What he came up with was the legendary Sorcery! series, set within the deadly and unruly land of Kakhabad. As Penguin’s own advertisement put it, “Well, why should kids have all the fun…?”

“The land of Kakhabad – more specifically the Kakhabad Sea – was directly inspired by the name of a fellow pupil at Altrincham Grammar School,” says 48 ◉

Jackson. “A lad called Kakhabadse... I think he was a prefect. I remember him as tall and a bit nerdy with unkempt black greasy hair. He wasn’t a friend; I didn’t know him at all. But for some reason his name popped into my mind when I thought of the body of water to the south of Analand. It was a Sea. A Kakhabad Sea. So the land above would then be… Kakhabad! Job done!”

The Shamutanti Hills The first book in the Sorcery! series, aimed squarely at adult gamers, was released in late 1983. The Shamutanti Hills (S1), which bore the dedication ‘To Ian Livingstone’, saw the commencement of an epic quest to recover the Crown of Kings from the evil Archmage of Kakhabad. In the adventure, the hero has to make his way through the hills of the title, “alive with evil creatures, lawless wanderers and bloodthirsty monsters, the land is riddled with tricks and traps waiting for the unwary traveller.” Despite being for adults, the game still used the usual Fighting Fantasy gaming mechanics, the cover proudly stating the mantra familiar to Fighting Fantasy fans that, “Two dice, a pencil and an eraser are all you need for this adventure – YOU decide which paths to take, which dangers to risk and which monsters to fight.” The big difference came from what gave the series its name. As well as being a mighty warrior, the hero of the Sorcery! series could also be played as a powerful magic-user.

Right: The Shamutanti Hills, by John Blanche. (©John Blanche, 1983 and 2014)

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The ‘simple’ version of the adventure involved the use of no magic whatsoever, as with most FF adventures up until this point (with the notable exception of The Citadel of Chaos). However, there was also the option whereby the reader could opt for the ‘advanced’ version of the game, which relied heavily on magic, with the hero being able to cast a wide range of spells. Each spell cost between 1 and 4 STAMINA points to cast, and each was denoted by a three letter word (following the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant), and often required very specific ingredients to be cast successfully at all. There was also the option to call on Libra, the goddess of justice, once during the course of the adventure, either to enable the hero to escape a tricky battle, to be cleansed of curses or diseases, or to have his starting attributes restored to their Initial level.

The Sorcery Spell Book The Sorcery Spell Book was, to begin with, just that – a separate book, detailing the spells used in the Sorcery! series, that came packaged with The Shamutanti Hills in a special slipcase edition. It featured a number of illustrations, which were cut when the Spell Book was later incorporated into the Sorcery! gamebooks themselves, when they were republished under the Adventure Gamebooks banner. Original slipcase editions of The Shamutanti Hills and The Sorcery Spell Book are now veritable collector’s items!

There was another illustrator involved in the creation of the Sorcery Spell Book, one Maggie Kneen. “I distinctly remember receiving a phone call from Ian Livingstone. I can’t remember how they found me; I didn’t join an illustration agency until 1987. It may have been through my art college, the Central School in London, where I had recently finished an MA in graphic design. Or it might be because I had recently designed a product called ‘Psycards’ which had just been published.” It was Kneen who produced the cover of the Sorcery Spell Book. “I really enjoyed the job because painting leather, gold and garnets, and designing lettering was right up my street… The internal illustrations were by John Blanche, who was given copyright on those images, and my name was not mentioned. So it looks as if he did that cover too!” Despite this, Kneen still has fond memories of her brief involvement with the Sorcery! series. “I’m still proud of the work that I did for FF and feel glad to have been a part of it. It helped me to strengthen the medieval/gothic sort of character in both my illustration and lettering, at an impressionable time in my career.”

“An epic adventure awaits YOU in the dark land of Kakhabad!” By far the easiest of the Sorcery! series to complete – and the shortest, despite having 456 references in total, numerous paragraphs being given over to spell-casting rather than plot development – The Shamutanti Hills concludes with the hero battling the Manticore that has appeared on the cover of every edition of the book ever published.

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Steve Jackson conceived the Sorcery! epic after holidaying in Nepal. Several of the settlements that appear in The Shamutanti Hills are named after actual villages Jackson came across on a five day trek he undertook from the city of Pokhara. 50 ◉

The second book in the series Kharé – Cityport of Traps (S2), came out the following year, with the reference count rising to 511! It charts the hero’s challenging journey through the titular city to the spelllocked Northern Gate, through which he has to pass to continue the quest for the Crown of Kings.

The Seven Serpents (S3), the third book in the series, takes the hero across the inhospitable Baklands – a treacherous wilderness of deserts, forests, and swamps – and a vast lake, as he attempts to hunt down and do away with the Archmage’s assassin-agents of the title, seven deadly and magical serpents. It had a total reference count of 498 and was the first of the Sorcery! books to be published under the Puffin banner. Strangely, in the United States the book was published under the Penguin Books banner, but featuring the same cover art. The conclusion of the Sorcery! series saw the hero climb through the Xamen Peaks to the Mampang Fortress, and then battle his way through the Archmage’s lair. The Crown of Kings (S4) – published in 1985 and coming in at a whopping 800 references (a record yet to be broken by any other Fighting Fantasy gamebook) – was as epic an adventure as any Sorcery! fan could hope for and featured one of the most memorable (and clever) denouements of any adventure ever published, not to mention encounters with a god-headed Hydra and entire societies of birdmen and she-satyrs. When Jackson talks about the Sorcery! series, he does so, understandably, with great fondness. When pressed on the subject of which of the gamebooks he has written are his favourites, he cites two: “Warlock because it was

the first. And Sorcery! because it was the most complex. Creating a four-part adventure in which your actions in Book 2 might affect your choices in Book 4 was a real challenge. Also making sure they were all good adventures in their own right; you didn’t need to have completed Sorcery 1 to play Sorcery 2. I was very proud of Sorcery!” The Sorcery! series was a high point for FF author Graeme Davis as well, the second book in particular: “Kharé – Cityport of Traps… because I love city adventures, but also because of the way Steve was working to expand the system by adding magic. On the whole, although I respected Ian’s inimitable skill at creating challenging dungeon adventures, Steve’s work never failed to intrigue me for the way he was always pushing the envelope in terms of rules and settings.”

The Dark Art of John Blanche Of course, Jackson’s writing and game design are not the only reason why the Sorcery! books remain such firm favourites for so many people. A series that was intended – originally, at least – to appeal to adults required a more mature art style. And whilst it was clearly from the same stable as Fighting Fantasy – albeit a stable in which you were likely to find demonic steeds and fully-barded warhorses – the art in the Sorcery! books needed to have its own distinct look. To give the series a cohesive feel, it was decided that the job of illustrating the quartet – producing both the fully-painted artwork for the covers as well as the black and white internal illustrations – should be the responsibility of one artist. To find that artist Jackson once again looked to the pool of artists employed by Games Workshop at the time – a roster that now reads like an honour roll of legends of the fantasy art world – and picked John Blanche. “Working with Steve Jackson came about because I was producing work for White Dwarf [magazine] and Games Workshop… so I was there talking to them on a regular basis,” says Blanche. ◉ 51

Below: God-Headed Hydra, by John Blanche. (© John Blanche, 1985 and 2014)

Right: Kharé – Cityport of Traps, by John Blanche. (© John Blanche, 1986 and 2014)

“We love the artwork,” says Jon Ingold of Inkle Studios, the team that is currently redeveloping the Sorcery! series for the iPad. “It captures the style and sensibility of the world so well. It’s a weird world – not comic, but always out to subvert expectations and surprise you; always teasing and mischievous, but often quite dark; warped and bent and patchwork. One look at one of Blanche’s illustrations and you see all of that come through.” So how does Blanche explain the success of Fighting Fantasy and the Sorcery! books? “The FF books were the early thoughts about fantasy needing to be dark and grim that became more fully developed in the worlds of Warhammer – and it is still happening today. The punk thing is a tribal street visual that pervades all history as far back as you wish – it’s a hint of shamanism, tribalism, barbarism, etc. People relate to that in a very enthusiastic manner. Fantasy is not about fairies and golden knights but about guys with shaved heads and zombies and a multitude of macabre horrific nastiness.

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“John arrived one day at our little office on the Uxbridge Road,” explains Jackson. “He was clad headto-toe in black leather, very skinny, with winklepicker boots. When he showed us his portfolio we were really impressed – unique style – so impressed in fact that he was commissioned to create the first ever colour cover for White Dwarf – number 7 I think. When it came to choosing an artist for Sorcery!, I wanted someone who could do the whole series, not a number of artists like we used in the main FF series. John was my first choice. And I have never regretted the decision. He did a fantastic job with Sorcery!, giving it its own distinctive artistic character.”

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Fighting Fantasy Fact

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In the run up to Christmas 1983 one small boy had an unexpected encounter whilst out shopping. “I went with my dad to the Games Workshop in the Arndale Centre in Manchester. I spotted the new Sorcery! box-set – The Shamutanti Hills and the Spell Book – and had enough pocket money saved up to buy it. The person serving us at the till told us that the author was out back and my dad, being my dad, asked if I could meet him and have him sign my book, which Steve did. Who’d have thought that eighteen years later I’d be contacting Steve and negotiating bringing the series back into print!” That young boy was Simon Flynn, who in 2001 was Publishing Manager at Icon Books, the company responsible for relaunching the Fighting Fantasy series in 2002.

are better at doing than adults anyway) and a couple of pictures of topless lady satyrs, the Sorcery! series never really lived up to its ‘adult’ tag and was eventually rebranded as part of the FF series, with Analand, Kakhabad and the Old World being subsumed into the wider Fighting Fantasy world of Titan.

Big Boots to Fill When the Sorcery! series was fully integrated into the Fighting Fantasy range when Wizard Books started reprinting the gamebooks, to keep the look of the books fresh new artwork was commissioned. The man tasked with filling the shoes of the mighty John Blanche was artist Mel Grant.

But the books still made a huge impact on readers and gamers, adults and children alike, and are fondly remembered to this day, so fondly that fans still ask if there will ever be a follow up to the Sorcery! epic.

“I’ve been called the art director at Games Workshop for a number of years, which has meant building up an art department coming up with art solutions and graphic schemes and mainly developing the imagery of the Warhammer universes. The embryo of this was in the Sorcery! books; I’ve just changed my role, concentrating on creating and extending imagery for models, which is where I live in my head because these are the denizens who populate the Warhammer worlds. These connections I have with the punk/ history/dark/dystopian view of fantasy are shared by many. It’s linked to our past and the internal fears that are common to us all, like the dark, death, thunderstorms… The list is huge.” Apart from its increased level of difficulty, the idea that you should memorise the magic system (which children 54 ◉

“I absolutely loved the Sorcery! series,” enthuses FF enthusiast Steve Brown. “The idea of carrying your character from one book to the next was awesome. Also, the spell system was something entirely new and added a new dimension to the books – trying to find ingredients to cast spells. My favourite two were The Shamutanti Hills and The Seven Serpents. Trying to find the Seven Serpents was great fun and the illustrations were fantastic in all the books.” “Sorcery! is an incredible achievement,” says FF fan Andy Jones. “To have the vision and the ability to create such a cohesive and brilliantly epic quest, and spread it over four books, as well as invent a comprehensive magic system, is just mind-boggling. Steve deserves all the credit in the world for Sorcery! and it still holds up well today.” But would Jackson ever contemplate taking on such a challenge again? “Wow! That’s a big ask. If I’m suitably inspired by a new idea, then perhaps. But probably not as a standalone book series. I’d want to do something more contemporary. More… digital.”

The Sorcery Spell Book, by Maggie Kneen. (© Maggie Kneen, 1983 and 2014)

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Chapter Six

The Expansion of Firetop Mountain From Scorpion Swamp to The Riddling Reaver

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n March 1983, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom topped The Sunday Times bestseller charts. Two more titles, Starship Traveller and City of Thieves, appeared later that same year. Having seen how successful the series was, other publishers began jumping on the bandwagon, rushing out competing gamebook series of their own. But Puffin Books, fully aware at last that they had a certifiable hit on their hands, were keen to maintain their position at the head of the game. “Puffin decided our best battle strategy would be to publish a new FF book every month,” says Jackson. “There was no way Ian and I could write a book a month, so we decided to commission other authors… and called it the ‘Jackson & Livingstone Present’ series.” To begin with, Jackson and Livingstone appointed the ‘Presents’ series authors. “Jamie Thomson, Paul Mason, Steve Williams, Mark Gascoigne, Peter DarvillEvans were all Games Workshop staff. So it was easy to keep a check on their FF books.” The impact Jackson and Livingstone’s involvement in Fighting Fantasy had on Games Workshop at the time was considerable. Peter Darvill-Evans, a GW employee at the time, has this to say on the subject. “I remember… driving a van to a hobbies trade fair with Ian Livingstone in the passenger seat, a pad on his knees and a pen in his hand, writing his next FF book.” “We simply could not keep up with the demand for Fighting Fantasy,” adds Livingstone. “It’s funny, really, that when The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was first published, Puffin were not very enthusiastic about it. Within a year they wanted to publish a new book every two months! We needed help and got it.” Jackson again: “As it happens, our first ‘Presents’ series author was Steve Jackson – the American one, designer of GURPS – who had come over to the UK to talk 56 ◉

business with Games Workshop. So the book was: Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone Present: Scorpion Swamp… by Steve Jackson. Very confusing!” “I was visiting London,” explains US Steve, who was already known to the UK Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone since Games Workshop was distributing his games on this side of the Pond. “They described their travails in creating FF books, and the difficulty of flow-charting. I sat down and wrote the first third of Scorpion Swamp, and they liked it.” There are still people to this day who do not realise that the Steve Jackson who wrote Scorpion Swamp, Demons of the Deep and Robot Commando, and the Steve Jackson who wrote such classics as The Citadel of Chaos, House of Hell and Creature of Havoc are two completely different people. “Occasionally I am presented with a copy of one of UK Steve’s books to sign,” says US Steve. “I always explain, and if they really want me to, I will sign it ‘The wrong Steve Jackson’.”

Scorpion Swamp Published in 1984, with cover and internal art by Duncan Smith, Scorpion Swamp (FF8) sent the hero into the foetid fens of the title with nothing but his sword to defend himself, and a magic Brass Ring that detected evil as well as letting the hero know which way was north.

Right: Dragon Spell, by Chris Achilleos. (© Chris Achilleos, 1986 and 2014)

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Unlike other Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, Scorpion Swamp allowed the player to choose one of three quests, from a selection of patrons who are Good, Evil and Neutral. The gameplay was non-linear in design, enabling the hero to revisit locations and explore the swamp as he so desired, and a direct consequence of US Steve’s background in RPGs. But how did Duncan Smith come to join the esteemed ranks of Fighting Fantasy illustrators? “My mate Iain McCaig had been doing some for Puffin and suggested me to the art director as they were looking for artists for another few books,” explains Smith. “Our styles were quite similar and so they liked my work and that’s how it came about.” The artist cites the illustrations of Poomchukker and the Giant as being his favourites from the book. “I actually like Scorpion Swamp,” he says, referring to the work he did on the title, “though I’d do it very differently now.”

Caverns of the Snow Witch The ninth title in the FF series was another contribution by Ian Livingstone, and one that had first seen print in Warlock, the Fighting Fantasy magazine. Caverns of the Snow Witch (FF9) sent the hero into the freezing depths of the Icefinger Mountains. Having initially been hired to hunt down and slay the Yeti that has been attacking trade caravans in northern Allansia, the hero hears from a dying trapper of the great riches to be found in the Crystal Caves, home of the evil enchantress the Snow Witch. And so he sets off to make his fortune, but in time he learns the true cost of his greed. “I’d written FF books set in dungeons, forests and islands,” says Livingstone, “and decided it was time for some freezing mountain snow for adventurers to survive. I thought about the irony of Caverns of the Snow Witch during a charity climb of Kilimanjaro years later. It had been snowing the whole day. At such altitude it was miserable.” The fact that the adventure was first published in a shortened 190-paragraph form in Warlock magazine goes some way to explain the adventure’s unusual structure. Having defeated the vampiric Snow Witch, the hero escapes the Crystal Caves in the company of Redswift the Elf and Stubb the Dwarf, only for the three companions to discover that the witch has cast a Death Spell upon them. The adventure then turns into a race against time as the hero struggles to find a way of counteracting the effects of the spell. Having been illustrated by Duncan Smith for the Warlock version, for the extended paperback edition, two artists, Gary Ward and Edward Crosby, worked together to provide the interior illustrations, the only time this has happened in the entire history of Fighting Fantasy.

Giant, by Duncan Smith, www.duncansmithstudio.com. (© Duncan Smith, 1984 and 2014)

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“We worked out roughs for each illustration, had someone pose for photo reference (that locked the overall pose and angle of the figures in place), then Edward and I worked on the agreed illustrations at

separate locations,” explains Ward. “Edward then delivered the final pencil drawings once a week or so. I tended to work on the more human characters. Edward’s style suited the goblins and monsters more. I inked them all to keep a constant style.”

White Dragon, by Gary Ward and Edward Crosby. (©Gary Ward and Edward Crosby, 1984 and 2014) This was scaled down and traced off at college using a machine called a Grant Enlarger. Those were the days before scanners and Photoshop.” Yeti, by Gary Ward and Edward Crosby. (©Gary Ward and Edward Crosby, 1984 and 2014) “Gary Ward brought me onto the project,” says Crosby. “We were both doing an Art and Design diploma at Goldsmiths College, London and had a mutual interest in fantasy art. During 1983/84, Gary was doing illustrations for White Dwarf magazine which I helped out with. This work led to him meeting Ian Livingstone and he was offered Caverns. Once Gary accepted the job he asked me to join him as coillustrator. “We had to create thirty-two full-page illustrations and four fillers to a pretty tight deadline. I pencilled about fifteen and Gary did the rest. We worked on them separately at home but would meet up at college and discuss ideas. Every week, I would hand over two or three finished pencils ready for inking. Gary inked all of them and his confident bold style really gave them a unified look. All the originals were at A3 size though some of my preliminary drawings were much larger. I remember drawing the centaurs at almost A1 size.

Ward: “The deadline was tight and having just finished Art College both of us lacked experience at producing artwork under a schedule like that. To hit the deadline we had to have a drawing started and finished each day. At one point I was inking them at the rate of four a day and there was no room for mistakes! That’s not enough time when you are trying to design elaborate armour or monsters etc. We tried to vary the compositions as much as possible.

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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When the US Steve Jackson visited Games Workshop, the plan was that UK Steve and Ian Livingstone would show him the sights of London. However, having been persuaded to write a Fighting Fantasy book for them that was what he did – right then and there in their office! The planned tour of London never happened, but ever since many thousands of readers have enjoyed exploring Scorpion Swamp instead.

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“For some reason a lot of the other FF illustrations tend to feature full length figures. We used a lot more half figures or close ups (the witch’s face or Crystal Warrior half in panel) to create a more claustrophobic feel or an impact. Illustrating FF books is different from most children’s books or stories. The structure is very jumpy and disjointed with few characters and locations repeating in the illustrations. It’s also very first person. Unlike say the story of Robin Hood where you would be seeing the hero and the same characters again and again in the artwork.” Both Ward and Crosby cite the White Dragon as being among their favourite illustrations from the book, but what fans remember most about their work was its woodcut-like nature. So what led them to develop this unique look? “An attempt to make the illustrations look like a cross between comic book and old illuminations from books,” says Ward, “plus it seems to suit the limitations of b&w inking and the subject matter.” “For the White Dwarf illustrations, Gary was using a medium tipped felt pen that gave a nice bold line,” elaborates Crosby. “When it came to Caverns this style developed naturally into a more ‘wood block print’ look which seemed entirely appropriate for the subject matter, as if Caverns was an ancient manuscript. Also the artwork in the preceding books was quite naturalistic with plenty of fine line work and we wanted to go in a different, more graphic design direction.” The original cover of the book was designed and illustrated by Les Edwards. When the book was republished by Wizard Books almost twenty years later, Edwards produced a brand new cover painting of Shareella the Snow Witch. “I enjoyed doing them,” Edwards says, when asked about how his work for Fighting Fantasy differed from other illustration jobs. “I always liked using that kind of material as it wasn’t anywhere as commonplace as it is now. We seem to have Fantasy-like material wherever you look now.”

House of Hell For almost thirty years following its initial release back in 1984, House of Hell (FF10) remained unique; it was the only FF adventure to have a wholly ‘contemporary’ setting. It was not a futuristic, superhero sci-fi yarn, or a post-apocalyptic adventure, but was Fighting Fantasy’s one and only specifically horror-themed adventure. That was until Blood of the Zombies was published in 2012. There have been other FF adventures that play with familiar horror tropes – notably books like Vault of the Vampire, Moonrunner and Howl of the Werewolf – but all of these are primarily fantasy adventures with a good dose of horror thrown in. House of Hell, on the other hand, is the sort of nightmare you could imagine yourself ending up in if your car broke down on a lonely country road in a thunderstorm only for you to discover that you were in a mobile phone dead spot. Other than the fact that there’s no mention of mobile phones, the plot of the book hasn’t dated in the intervening decades. As a result of the aforementioned breakdown and thunderstorm, the hero takes refuge in an old house, but it’s a decision that turns out to be the worst mistake of his life, since the house is home to a cult of devil-worshippers and their demonic Master. House of Hell also first appeared in a shortened form (only 185 references this time) in Warlock magazine. A significant numbers of references were modified for the paperback version, with rooms being moved around and secret passageways added. The book is a favourite of professional writer and games designer Alan Bligh. “Speaking as a kid who stayed up late to watch old Hammer movies, which I loved, I was absolutely there in my imagination, and that strange Ian Miller cover? Fantastic.” Although his artwork later appeared on the cover for The Citadel of Chaos (FF2), House of Hell was Ian Miller’s first work for the Fighting Fantasy series. “I got the job through the art agency Young Artists, which is now known as Arena,” Miller told Alex

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Ballingall when he was interviewed for the Fighting Fantazine in 2012. “I did a series of roughs, four I think, and Steve chose the version he liked best. It was an easy process. “When I did cover work (I’m not often asked these days), I worked maybe one or two up on the published book size. The image would be pencilled in, then inked and coloured. I used Illustration board for the most part… I always read the books I did covers for. It made sense in my opinion… I think the first, House of Hell, was the best of the bunch.” Steve Jackson was so impressed by Miller’s work on House of Hell that he purchased the original painting. The book was illustrated internally by Tim Sell. However, one of his illustrations was removed from subsequent printings after a number of complaints were received by Puffin Books. The illustration in question accompanied paragraph 264 and depicted a naked woman on an altar dripping with blood (although her modesty was protected by a convenient cultist’s sleeve). The result of the removal of the illustration was that paragraphs 255 through to 263 had to be moved about and spaced out with additional filler pictures. “That did give us a problem,” recalls editor Philippa Dickinson. “We had a lot of complaints. The media suddenly got hold of, ‘was this suitable for children?’ We had various, no doubt very well-meaning people, claiming that we were encouraging children to believe in Satan and Satanism. “There was a woman who was really very distressed on television about the fact that her child had become so obsessed by these books, because of course by that time they had become quite successful. And all of a sudden we were fielding media requests. We probably did take that illustration out in the end because it was borderline okay, and it was going to go on causing problems so we might as well take it out. “But we had a lot of very bonkers letters. Some were genuinely concerned about whether this was suitable and you could be respectful of their views, and we had a few who quoted Revelations at us. “There was a moment where there seemed to be a lot of this, and I think we had somebody threaten to chain themselves to the railings outside the building” – actually an Anglican vicar – “not that there were any railings outside the building, insisting that we withdraw these books. So there was a lot of that kind of over-

heated response… and that illustration, I think I was asked, internally, whether I really thought that was a suitable illustration for a book, or for that age group. I said, well, in context – ‘cos everything you have to take in context – it’s fine, but actually this is going to damage the book. We would never have taken the illustration out without consulting the authors… “At one point I remember consulting my uncle, who was then quite a senior cleric, and I said, ‘Can you tell me, have I done something really bad here?’ And he said no, because in his experience people who quote Revelations are usually on that end of the spectrum… It was something to do with corrupting children, and if you corrupted children you’d be thrown into the fiery pits… I don’t remember what the exact quote was but there seemed to be rather a lot of them, and they were all arriving on my desk, and I thought, ‘Maybe I have done something wrong.’ “I do remember one of the people who was interviewed for television said that her child had come out with the mark of the Devil on his body and when she threw the book into the fire the marks on his body disappeared. “It was of that time, and it was because the books were so successful, and boys were getting so obsessed, so what were we doing? They were being obsessed by something, so this can’t be healthy, because they’re obsessed. But they’re reading! What are you complaining about? “At that time our office in New York was at 666 Fifth Avenue… Every so often, they’d get people saying that the company was clearly run by an agent of evil because we operated out of the offices at 666 Fifth Avenue.” It was clearly a difficult time for the young editor. “That was surprising, because that was the first time I really had to deal with really a lot of major complaints, and also because I was the only person who really knew what the content was. “So internally, when our chairman and managing director got complaints from people, essentially it comes back down to the editor to say, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ To which the short answer is, ‘Yup!’ and then that’s fine. Nobody could really complain. We were printing huge quantities, and then it was, could we do more? “In the middle of all of this craze, and all of the people saying that we were corrupting children, we also had ◉ 61

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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The dedication written by Steve Jackson for the Wizard Books edition of House of Hell reads: Games Night — to Clive, Ian, Mark, Peter and Skye. May their Dinner Winnerships be few. But always more than mine... The list of names are the members of an exclusive gaming group that’s been running since the mid-1990s, and which includes Peter Molyneux of Populous and Lionhead fame (and more recently with 22 Cans and Godus) among its membership. Games Night is still a regular event, and at the end of each season a cup is awarded.

as many, if not more people saying, ‘Thank God! My son is finally reading.’ Because the boys were reading because they saw it as a game, not a book. They were reading because everybody else was doing it.” This wasn’t the only time that Fighting Fantasy courted controversy. The FF series has had its fair share of vehemently outspoken enemies in the UK. “The Evangelical Alliance published an eight page warning guide about the potential danger of reading Fighting Fantasy leading to devil worship!” says a clearly stunned Livingstone. “And a worried housewife in deepest suburbia reportedly said on radio that after having read one of my books, her son levitated. Kids thought, ‘Great – for £1.25 I can fly!’ This was all wonderful PR for Fighting Fantasy.”

Talisman of Death The eleventh book in the Fighting Fantasy series was a collaboration between Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, although it could be argued that Talisman of Death (FF11) was, in fact, the first of the Way of the Tiger adventures, a series of six gamebooks in which the hero is a young ninja, created and written by the same team, and illustrated by Bob Harvey. The plot of the adventure has dark forces threatening to unleash the awesome might of the Evil One into a 62 ◉

once peaceful world. However, their nefarious plans cannot be completed without the legendary Talisman of Death, which is in the possession of the hero. He is tasked with destroying the talisman before the dark lord’s minions can reach him, but time – as always – is running out… Talisman of Death wasn’t set on the world of Titan (not that any such place had been referenced in the gamebooks up to this point) but on the fantasy world of Orb instead. “I have often been told that one of the reasons Talisman of Death is such a favourite is because of my world setting,” says Smith. Long-time FF fan Damian Butt agrees: “It seemed to have so much more scale than its predecessors – a real adventure epic.” “I was working for Ian and Steve at Games Workshop as an editor on White Dwarf magazine,” explains Thomson, when asked how he came to write for the Fighting Fantasy range. “They really needed new FF titles, so I was there and available, talking to Ian every

day. That’s how I got my first FF gig.” Quite simply, he was in the next room! So how did Smith and Thomson go about writing their masterpiece in the making? “I remember Talisman of Death being written entirely in long hand, and then being typed up with an old-fashioned typewriter. Subsequent books were done on computers and word processors. Some of these would have like 2 meg of RAM, and that was really high in those days. Yes, 2 meg. And a 30 meg hard drive. Now 5 gigs is quite low. Also, you actually handed in a 400 page paper manuscript. Nowadays, hardly any paper is involved in the process at all, other than the contract!” Nonetheless, Smith and Thomson had lofty ambitions for their contribution to the gamebook series. “I had read all of the FF books that had been published to date to make sure Jamie and I could outshine them all – we were very determined on that score,” explains Smith. Talisman of Death was the first of four FF gamebooks to feature the black and white line art by Bob Harvey, while Peter Andrew Jones returned to paint the cover. It was also the book that introduced Jamie Fry, current keeper of the official Fighting Fantasy website, to the wonders of interactive fiction. “Talisman of Death… was the only Fighting Fantasy adventure in my local newsagent at the time when I first discovered the series!” says Fry. “I liked it enough to look for more and the green spines and numbering helped with that. It was frustrating to see all those books lined up in a bookshop and only being able to buy one now and again, so I resorted to borrowing from the library as often as I could.”

Fighting Fantasy – The Introductory RolePlaying Game With other authors now writing for the main FF line, the original creators found themselves with more time to expand the Fighting Fantasy world, as well as the FF brand, in new directions. Steve Jackson, set himself the challenge of turning Fighting

Fantasy into a more conventional role-playing game, such as those that had inspired The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in the first place. “I wanted to see how simple I could make a roleplaying game based on FF,” he says. “So instead of the GamesMaster describing the room you’d just walked into, the illustration was in the book. You’d just say: “The door opens and you see… THIS!” and show the players the room. I had no intention of creating a new Dungeons & Dragons or anything like that. It was just supposed to tie FF in as a multi-player game as well as a solo RPG.” The truth is, of course, that FF already was a new type of RPG and Fighting Fantasy the book was just another iteration of this, and would go on to inspire Gascoigne and Tamlyn’s Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG a few years later. As well as the usual FF rules, modified for the multiplayer experience, Fighting Fantasy came complete with two ready-made adventures, the introductory The Wishing Well and the significantly longer and more challenging Shaggradd’s Hives of Peril. Jackson: “FF the RPG was supposed to be the simplest possible format for a RPG; minimum work involved for the GM. So instead of the GM having to keep referring to a GM’s map, there was a map offered at every location... Having been used to full-blown RPGs which got more and more complex, this was, as it said, an introductory rulebook. Excellent art by Duncan Smith, don’t you think?” Duncan Smith produced all of the book’s internal art, including maps, as well as the dramatic cover which showed an angry Weretiger bursting out of a huge dice. “I think the deadlines were very tight,” Smith says, recalling the time he spent working on the cover, “and I remember they wanted everything in it including the kitchen sink. Dwarfs, dragons, dice, monsters , etc. I just had to come up with an idea to have all the elements on the cover, and make it look good. I wanted to do a more traditional painting but they liked this, so...”

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Fighting Fantasy Heroes In 1985 Citadel Miniatures produced a range of plastic Fighting Fantasy miniatures, which, along with the Fighting Fantasy Paint Set and the Fighting Fantasy Battlegame rules set formed the Fighting Fantasy Heroes range. The range consisted of 27 different figures, divided into Heroes (Wizards, Barbarians, Knights, Dwarfs and the like) and Monsters (which included Skeletons, Goblins, Orcs and Ogres). The figures came with interchangeable heads, helmets, weapons and shields. “I was involved in the technical aspects of manufacturing them,” says Bryan Ansell, who had founded Citadel Miniatures along with Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in 1979. The Fighting Fantasy Paint Set (also referred to as the Fighting Fantasy Paint and Painting Guide) was described as “the best way to begin the hobby of painting the miniatures.” It contained ten water-based colours, which came in small sampler pots, and the ‘How to Paint your Models’ guide written by none other than one-time FF map illustrator Dave Andrews. The Fighting Fantasy Battlegame was also known as the Fighting Fantasy Battlegame Rules and Dice. Although early adverts boasted that the final game would include a large, three-dimensional dungeon, made out of polystyrene pieces with movable walls, in the end only a limited number of dungeons were actually produced and sold through Games Workshop stores. The Fighting Fantasy Battlegame Rules and Dice set was the product that was made available more widely. However, as far as your typical Fighting Fantasy consumer was concerned, tabletop games and plastic miniatures, it seemed, did not have the broad appeal that the gamebooks did at the time. “I have memories of them not selling terribly well,” says Ansell. “We found out a lot of interesting things by making them though, and the experience led to us selling vast quantities of much smaller plastic models for Warhammer. Before our FF experiment we made only metal models. Games Workshop now sells only plastic and resin. I suppose that the FF plastics were the first step on that path. “We had a gaming group visiting our factory, and one of them brought one of the FF plastics along that he was using as a Giant.”

Out of the Pit For many, the most memorable aspect of the FF gamebooks, are the myriad monsters the hero met during the course of his various adventures. The burgeoning fan scene was made up of plenty of eager amateurs who wanted to create their own Fighting Fantasy adventures. As a means to aiding them with this, Jackson and Livingstone convinced Puffin to publish a large format bestiary of Fighting Fantasy monsters, such as had been available to players of Dungeons & Dragons and the like for some time. The fathers of Fighting Fantasy wanted to build their gaming world just as TSR had built up that of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system. In the book, named Out of the Pit by Ian Livingstone, Marc Gascoigne (a youthful Games Workshop employee at the time) set about collecting into one 64 ◉

tome various monsters from the Titan-set Fighting Fantasy books, as well as creating a host of new enemies with which to vex adventurers. It has to be said that some of these were simply FF versions of beasties familiar to players of other established RPG settings. Every monster profile was illustrated, with familiar FF artists brought in to draw portraits of those monsters that did not already have one thanks to appearing in a previously published adventure. Chris Achilleos produced a striking cover for the book, realised in shades of red and orange. “I called it ‘Scary Monsters and Super Creeps’,” says Achilleos, “because that’s what it reminded me of. I used to love David Bowie in the ‘80s, and before, and I thought it was a great title for a picture as well as a song. I pinched it from him.” One of the highlights of the book as far as fans were concerned, were the full colour, full page portraits that appeared in the middle of the book, that included Alan Craddock’s take on the mysterious Fog Devils. Out of the Pit also featured maps of Allansia and Kakhabad, drawn by Dave Andrews. Right: Brain Slayer, by Terry Oakes. (©Terry Oakes, 1985 and 2014)

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Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World

from The Hobbit) and the Forest of Night, both used by Keith P Phillips in Siege of Sardath (FF49).

With Out of the Pit having proved that there was a market for FF background material, and not just more gamebooks, Jackson and Livingstone were able to convince Puffin to do for the Fighting Fantasy world what Out of the Pit had done for its monstrous denizens.

Chris Achilleos also contributed the cover for the book, and although the image is often referred to as ‘Titan’ or ‘Titan the Dragon’, its actual name is ‘Dragon Spell’.

Also written by Gascoigne, Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World was a guide to the continents, cultures, and clashes of the FF world, containing everything from information about the various religions of the peoples and creatures of Titan, to the price of a horseshoe in the Baddu-Bak plains. “Out of the Pit, the FF monster book, had showed that I was a safe pair of hands in creating new detail for the FF world,” Gascoigne explains. “As we started planning Titan, it became clear… that it needed to be a fully rounded world, so many more gamebooks could be set there.” Within the pages of book was the first time complete maps of the three continents and various adjoining islands had been revealed, drawn by cartographer Steve Luxton, who even contributed a detailed plan of the streets of that notorious city of thieves, Port Blacksand. Luxton: “I have been drawing real-world maps as part of my day job since 1974, so technically it wasn’t a challenge. Making them look interesting required a completely different approach and a lot of experimentation. I started with the maps in The Lord of the Rings and worked in some ideas from real-world cartographer Chris Saxton.” Despite being provided with a master map of Titan by Ian Livingstone, Gascoigne still had to reconcile all the settings created for the fantasy FF gamebooks published up until that point (apart from those that appeared in Talisman of Death). All the places that did not yet have a cohesive geographical home were placed within Titan’s third continent, Khul. Hence Scorpion Swamp (from the book of the same name), Arion and Pikestaff Plain (from Masks of Mayhem) and the Inland Sea (from Seas of Blood) all appeared somewhere within the Dark Continent, as Khul was also called. Gascoigne added a host of other names and places, that would later go on to inspire the settings for future books, such as the ruined city of Kabesh, that appears in Keith Martin’s Master of Chaos (FF41), the Arrowhead Islands that are the focus of The Keep of the Lich-Lord (FF43) by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson, and Sardath (a Fighting Fantasy version of Lake Town 66 ◉

“With that Ian said, ‘Just draw a dragon picture, Chris’ and then left it to me,” recalls Achilleos. “So I had to consider first of all that it’s a double spread… and then come up with something. When you don’t get a manuscript or a story that already describes what you need to do, when you’re left to yourself, you tend to go round in circles with many ideas and not focussing on one, not knowing quite what to do. Time flies and you’re still wondering which way to go. “In this case, this was what was going on. I felt like, I’ve got to stop here; it’s not working. So I made up a story in my head about a shape-shifting wizard, who is attacking this city, in the form of this giant dragon, being held back. He’s destroyed the army that you can see… The drawbridge is down, he’s holding onto one of the chains – the other one’s already been broken – and the rest of the bridge is broken and down… The best of the knights have been killed. In desperation the baron comes out with his magicians, or druids or priests, to do magic with the dragon – not to hold him, not to destroy him, but to turn him back into human form and conquer him. “The clue I put in there that the dragon is not just an animal – it’s a shape-shifting being, a super-being if you like, a magician – is that I put earrings and bracelets on him. That’s what that’s saying. That’s also why it’s called ‘Dragon Spell’. They’re putting a spell on him and trying and revert him back to a human being so they can defeat him. The question in that picture is, will he turn back to human or will he just snap out of it and literally bite the heads off them? That’s what the picture’s saying. People either see that consciously or unconsciously.” Both Out of the Pit and Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World would later, retrospectively, become part of the

Advanced Fighting Fantasy series, helping form a complete set of FF RPG manuals. “I never really saw these books as books to be played,” admits FF fan Steve Brown. “I saw them more as reference books but I had all of them. I loved Out of the Pit and Titan as the info on the monsters and illustrations were just like the D&D Monster Compendiums and allowed me to make up my own adventures.”

The Riddling Reaver In 1986 a spin-off of Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy – The Introductory Role-Playing Game was published. The Riddling Reaver was an extended campaign made up of four interlinked multi-player adventures, written by Paul Mason and Steve Williams, who both worked for Games Workshop at the time. The interior illustrations were by Brian Williams while the cover was another painting by Peter Andrew Jones. The book also featured a number of maps by Leo Hartas. “Steve Jackson wanted a book of adventures to back up the original FF RPG,” explains Mason. “He came into the Warlock office [at Games Workshop], presumably knowing that we were role-players, since Steve W and I had written an FF RPG scenario for that mag. He asked us to pitch him an adventure for inclusion in the book. We rapidly pitched the whole book, and he accepted.” Set in southern Allansia, a band of heroes find themselves in a battle of both wits and brawn pitted against the Riddling Reaver, an inscrutable servant of Logaan the Trickster, who is determined to upset the balance between Order and Chaos so that Chance and Luck might rule supreme. This was to be Paul Mason’s first foray into the realms of Fighting Fantasy, but it certainly wasn’t his last. Both the Riddling Reaver and Lady Carolina, who also appears in the adventure, and the city of Kallamehr itself would feature in Slaves of the Abyss (FF32), written by Mason and Williams and published in 1988. The Reaver would later make another appearance in Mason’s solo gamebook Magehunter (FF57). A prequel to The Riddling Reaver exists in the form of The Dreaming Sands. This was a mini multi-player adventure that appeared in issue #13 of Warlock magazine, and which featured, once again, the Riddling Reaver himself.

the other interfered and made suggestions,” Mason recalls. “Basically, much of that book was genuinely co-written. For later parts, and for chunks of later books, we would parcel off  certain sections, and one of us would do some prewriting (in pencil, of  course), but we still shared the writing very equally. I would guess that a scholar of style would recognise a big difference between my solo books and the ones co-authored with Steve, and conclude that Steve wrote most of  the coauthored ones. In fact, the difference in style of the co-authored books is down to that interaction as we put the words together.” However, the authors did not appreciate Steve Jackson changing the design of the book’s cover at the time. Mason: “He certainly knows more about what kind of cover will sell a book, but we were annoyed at having our main character changed (the Riddling Reaver was never a lizard man). And I think we wanted a cover that had a different visual logic to the usual ‘central figure in action pose’ approach.”

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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It was Ian Livingstone who drew the first map of Titan, which Marc Gascoigne later expanded upon. And the reason why there were three major continents on the fantasy world was a very simple one; Allansia was meant to have been ring-fenced for Jackson and Livingstone to set their adventures in, the Old World was for the Sorcery! books, and Khul was supposed to be where the ‘Presents’ authors could set their stories. Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of the later Fighting Fantasy titles can see how well that plan worked out.

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Chapter Seven

The Cartogr aphers of Firetop Mountain Mapping the Fighting Fantasy World

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ike all the best fantasy worlds, Titan, its continents, Allansia, the Old World and Khul, and its many islands, have been illustrated in map form over and over again by everyone from keen fans (with an obsession bordering on the compulsive) to the author of this book. But four names in particular spring to mind when considering maps of the Fighting Fantasy world – John Blanche, Dave Andrews, Steve Luxton and Leo Hartas.

originally drawn by Ian Livingstone, it was realised in black and white by illustrator Maggie Kneen and focused on places mentioned in the first six books, which were the only ones in print at the time.

That said, the first map of Allansia appeared in issue #1 of Warlock magazine in 1984. Based on a sketch

Allansia, by Maggie Kneen. (© Maggie Kneen, 1984 and 2014)

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Livingstone: “I tried to position the towns and places from the original books as accurately as possible before adding new places, towns and villages. I really enjoyed designing and building the world.”

Right: Demons of the Deep, by Les Edwards. (© Les Edwards, 1986 and 2014)

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Kakhabad, by John Blanche. (© John Blanche, 1983 and 2014)

John Blanche John Blanche was the artist who created the first map of Kakhabad for Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series. He produced both the black and white version that appeared in the books themselves, as well as a full-

colour map that formed the exterior art for the Sorcery! box set, and which also appeared on the back of issue #5 of Warlock magazine.

Dave Andrews The maps of both Allansia and Kakhabad were redrawn by Dave Andrews for Out of the Pit. Andrews is now better known for the terrain and scenery he

Allansia, by Dave Andrews. (© Dave Andrews, 1985 and 2014)

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makes in his role as Lead Hobby Designer at Games Workshop, so how did he find the process of mapping the FF world as it was then? “I remember it being very last minute and rushed. I think I only had a couple of evenings to produce the maps.”

“I’d done a couple of maps for GW at the time,” explains Andrews, when asked how his contribution to FF came about. “John Blanche was my boss and Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were frequent visitors to the GW studio. I guess it was inevitable.”

Andrews went on to produce his only painted maps of Arion and Pikestaff Plain in Khul, and the area surrounding the village of Coven in Allansia, for Robin Waterfield’s Masks of Mayhem (FF23), and Steve Jackson’s Creature of Havoc (FF24) respectively. He also illustrated the map that appeared in the Clash of the Princes books.

One of the more mysterious elements of Andrews’ map was the addition of the name Vatos in brackets, a reference to the lost city that was the focus of Ian Livingstone’s seventh FF gamebook as solo author.

Temple of Terror The majority of Ian Livingstone’s Temple of Terror (FF14) takes place in the waterless wastes of the ominously-named Desert of Skulls. The book begins with the wizard Yaztromo (who first appeared in The Forest of Doom) hiring the hero to thwart the plans of the sorcerer Malbordus, the socalled ‘Storm Child’. The evil sorcerer’s power is reaching its zenith, and all he needs to lead his army of conquest across Allansia are five Dragon artefacts which lie hidden within the lost city of Vatos. Vatos was named after a small beach resort in Corfu where Livingstone had holidayed more than once, hence it being used as the name of a lost city swallowed by sand. As well as its desert setting, the book is particularly memorable for its introduction of the lethal Messenger of Death. As far as games designer and novelist Alan Bligh is concerned, a near contender for favourite Fighting Fantasy gamebook would be Temple of Terror, “which I remember getting for Christmas as a surprise present and pretty much spent all that Boxing Day buried in.”

Gundobad and its envrions, by Dave Andrews. (© Dave Andrews, 1986 and 2014)

FF fan Lin Liren also holds the adventure in high esteem. “By the time you finally succeed, having mapped every nook and cranny of the dungeon and collected every piece of Dragon Artefact, and saved the world from Malbordus, you can honestly take a look at yourself in the mirror and sigh, ‘I earned it.’” ◉ 71

Temple of Terror was the only FF gamebook to be illustrated by Bill Houston. The cover was painted by ‘80s fantasy art legend Chris Achilleos, the second time he contributed a cover to the main series.

The adventure is unusual because it allowed for combat between vessels, and between the Banshee and seas monsters, utilising both crew strike and crew strength scores.

“I was dealing with Ian,” Achilleos recalls, “and he called me and said, ‘I’m going to leave it to you to design me the creature for this new book I’m writing. I’m going to tell you the scene and you come up with the creature, because you probably don’t need guidance on this from someone like me.’ And I said, ‘That sounds great, yeah. Then you can describe it from my painting.’

Seas of Blood was illustrated by Bob Harvey (his second of four contributions in the gamebook series) and bore a cover by the legendary album cover artist Rodney Matthews.

“It was a guardian of this gate and it was a desert scene – a city half buried under sand – so I designed this creature that lies in wait, buried under the sand... It was something I’d seen in a wildlife programme, these desert snakes that hide in the sand and just have their eyes out and then they pounce on you. So I imagined the same creature sort of lying in wait for someone to try and pass the gate. I drew that and he was delighted with it. In fact he bought the original from me.”

Seas of Blood Andrew Chapman’s third (and final) contribution to the FF series, Seas of Blood (FF16) saw the hero take on the role of captain of the pirate ship Banshee, who undertakes a contest with rival buccaneer Abdul the Butcher. Whichever one reaches the island of Nippur within fifty days, and with the most gold, will be declared King of Pirates.

Matthews’ art medium of choice is pigmented acrylic ink. “I do it with those inks because they’re transparent, or at least translucent, and you can build up the colour gradually,” says the artist. “That’s why I use them, so you don’t overstate something, you can build it up and keep in control of things.” But while the cover implies a Classical theme, the adventure itself (as FF fans will know already) has a more strongly Arabian feel to it. And the reason for this mix-up? According to Matthews, it was down to a junior editor at Puffin misleading the artist when he was given the cover brief. Despite this mix-up, Matthews is still proud of his involvement with Fighting Fantasy, however fleeting it might have been: “I

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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As with a number of locations from the other early Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, when FF editor Marc Gascoigne set about compiling Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World the lands surrounding the Inland Sea, where Seas of Blood is set, were slotted into the newly-created continent of Khul. However, the book’s author, Andrew Chapman, had already developed a more extensive geography and history for the lands of the Inland Sea which he would later go on to use in two more books – one of which, Ashkar the Magnificent, features the same map as appeared in Seas of Blood – as well as the unpublished FF adventure Deathlord.

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enjoyed doing the cover. I think it probably enhanced the book, but a bit inaccurately.”

Demons of the Deep Another nautical adventure (after a fashion) Demons of the Deep (FF19) was the second Fighting Fantasy gamebook to be written by American games designer Steve Jackson (as opposed to the British games designer and co-creator of the FF series Steve Jackson). In it the hero becomes the first mate of the merchant ship Sunfish. Right at the start of the book, the Sunfish is attacked by the pirate ship Troll, a vessel under the command of Captain Bloodaxe, the terror of these seas. The only survivor of the attack, the hero is forced to walk the plank, but as he sinks to the bottom of the ocean, mysterious magic takes over, enabling him to breathe underwater. Saved from drowning, the hero sets about discovering the means by which he might be revenged upon the murderous Bloodaxe. Like Fighting Fantasy’s previous sea-based adventure

Seas of Blood, Demons of the Deep was illustrated by Bob Harvey. However, this time its cover was painted by fantasy and FF art veteran Les Edwards, and depicts the Bone Demon, from the book, rising from its cave beneath the sunken ruins of Atlantis. “I always enjoy making up monsters,” says Edwards, “although sometimes what works in the written word doesn’t necessarily work visually.” Demons of the Deep is also notable for including the marine-dwelling Deep Ones, which appear to have been inspired by the creatures of the same name from H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Much of the action takes place in the sunken ruins of Atlantis, meaning that when Marc Gascoigne came to write Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World, he had to shoehorn the legend of Atlantis into the history of Fighting Fantasy’s made-up world. Atlantis, now located on a vast antediluvian island, lying in the shadow of the massive volcano Atlan’s Beacon, appeared on a map in Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World, which, like the other maps in that particular book, was created by Steve Luxton.

Steve Luxton When Puffin came to publish Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World, the continents of both Allansia and the Old World (where Analand, Mauristatia and Kakhabad could be found), had grown considerably in terms of both size and detail. New, more

Titan, by Steve Luxton. (© Steve Luxton, 2014)

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comprehensive maps were needed, including a new global map that would include the newly-created continent of Khul. In stepped Steve Luxton. “All the FF work was produced by me as a fan and not related to my career. Most of my earlier training was in poster advertising and exhibition work,” explains Luxton. “My day job at that time involved cartography and technical illustration on civil engineering projects. After that I worked in town planning and architectural conservation. I applied professional standards as well as I could, but I think it is fair to say that FF had very little influence on my career in those days.” So how did his involvement with FF come about? “I had read six or seven gamebooks before working on Midnight Rogue. Before that I had produced maps for a few RPG scenarios in White Dwarf, and the FF work was developed from those.” As with a number of creators involved in the Fighting Fantasy series, Luxton says, “After almost twenty years away from FF I am now back in the game and producing maps for Arion Games.” 74 ◉

Allansia, by Steve Luxton. (© Steve Luxton, 2014)

Leo Hartas There is one man who has done more for the cartography of the various Fighting Fantasy worlds than anyone else, and that is illustrator Leo Hartas. His first map was for Ian Livingstone’s Crypt of the Sorcerer (FF26), centred upon the Moonstone Hills of central Allansia. But his often beautifully painted, almost isometric maps, also appeared in the gamebooks Battleblade Warrior (FF31), Stealer of Souls (FF34), Daggers of Darkness (FF35), Armies of Death (FF36), Portal of Evil (FF37), Dead of Night (FF40), Master of Chaos (FF41), Black Vein Prophecy (FF42), The Keep of the Lich-Lord (FF43), Legend of the Shadow Warriors (FF44), and Tower of Destruction (FF46), the FF RPG campaign The Riddling Reaver, and the first Fighting Fantasy novel The Trolltooth Wars. Hartas also produced art for the frontispieces of both Slaves of the Abyss (FF32) and Spectral Stalkers (FF45), although neither of these were maps (at least not in the topographical sense).

Tower of Destruction was the last book to feature such inside cover art. Hartas did go on to produce black and white maps, however, for the gamebooks Moonrunner (FF48), Siege of Sardath (FF49), and Return to Firetop Mountain (FF50), the four novels of The Zagor Chronicles series – Firestorm, Darkthrone, Skullcrag and Demonlord – and two out of the three books of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy game system – Dungeoneer and Allansia. His wonderfully illustrated maps are rightly regarded as works of art in their own right, and when many think of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks they think of his fully painted cartography accompanying them. “I loved the process of drawing the maps,” Hartas says, “because the editor always gave me a completely free hand. He would initially send me a poor photocopy of a scribble by the author with the very basic information of locations etc., and I could go off and embellish to my heart’s content.” The veritable atlas of maps Hartas produced for the Fighting Fantasy series is quite some legacy, and one that means he can proudly claim to have contributed to more individual FF books than any other creator in the series

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– other than Jackson and Livingstone, the series’ originators, of course – outdoing even modern cover artist extraordinaire Martin McKenna. One of the most up to date maps of Allansia in existence has been produced by French RPG publisher Scriptarium, which incorporates elements of Jonathan Green’s unpublished Saga of the Stormchaser, effectively making the place names he came up with for the islands of the Giant’s Teeth chain canon.

The Titan Atlas, by Leo Hartas. (© Leo Hartas, 2014) Allansia, by Jidus. (© Scriptarium, 2014)

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Chapter Eight

Firetop Mountain in Space! Fighting Fantasy Boldly Goes from Starship Traveller to Sky Lord

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part from a few notable exceptions, Fighting Fantasy’s various forays into the realms of science fiction were never the most successful gamebooks Puffin ever produced, but the company still published nine of them over the course of half a decade.

Starship Traveller Having only written one fantasy gamebook by himself, why was it that Jackson abandoned an alternative Tolkienesque past for a gleaming, rocket-fuelled future? “I liked to try new things out,” says Jackson. “Sorcery! had a new magic system, Starship Traveller was the first SF adventure.” Set in the distant future, Starship Traveller (FF4) had the hero become the commander of the eponymous starship and its crew. After his interstellar vessel is sucked through a black hole into an unknown quadrant of space, the hero has to search the local star systems for the coordinates to another black hole and the way home. As well as keeping a track of his own attributes, the reader had to keep a note of the attributes of his officers. Starship Traveller also added the stats WEAPONS STRENGTH and SHIELDS so that the reader could re-enact battles between spacecraft. Jackson: “I was a big Star Trek fan. Always preferred it to Doctor Who. Mr Spock was my hero. I liked

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the episodes where Kirk & Co landed on a planet where they encountered alien races and philosophies. Never liked the deep space battle episodes. Starship Traveller was unashamedly based on Star Trek. And the long dedication was a listing of the entire Games Workshop staff as it was at the time. Some of the GW department heads appeared in the adventure too. ‘Bran-Sell’ was a reference to Bryan Ansell, who ran the Citadel division and later became GW Managing Director. There was a race called the Dar-Villians; a reference to GW’s Sales Manager Peter Darvill-Evans. Fioral was Albie Fiore, who ran the Production Dept. And lots more.” Both the cover artwork and the internal illustrations were by Peter Andrew Jones, a first and last for the Fighting Fantasy series. But would Jones have liked to do more internal illustrations? Jones: “The budget was so tight on that job I’d have done more if asked but it would have been difficult.” “I’d love to give an honourable mention to Starship Traveller as a great FF gamebook,” says author Magda Knight. “When I first picked it up I was terribly sniffy about it. ‘What’s this? Science fiction? What are you chatting about, chaps? It’s called Fighting Fantasy for a REASON.’ However, the illustrations were so enchanting, so full of character, and the book had such fantastic world-building and throwaway genius ideas, like the alien race that grows backwards so it’s the kids you need to speak to. Genius. I was a bit sad to win and make it home in the end.”

Space Assassin In 1985 Puffin Books published only the third Fighting Fantasy gamebook not written by Jackson or Livingstone, and only the second to be given a futuristic science fiction setting. What Jackson had

Right: Rebel Planet, by Alan Craddock. (© Alan Craddock, 1985 and 2014)

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started with Starship Traveller eight books previously, Andrew Chapman continued with Space Assassin (FF12). Chapman started work on Assassin (without the ‘Space’) as soon as he saw The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in his native Australia, deciding that as Jackson and Livingstone had cornered the fantasy end of the gamebook market he would write something to appeal to science fiction fans. At the time he did not know his book would later become a part of the FF canon and so created his own combat rules for the adventure. The final manuscript was 360 paragraphs long and it was this that he sent off to Penguin Australia. In due course a rejection letter arrived, but one suggesting that he send Assassin to the UK branch of Penguin instead. This he did and whilst waiting for a response, set to work on the book that would become The Rings of Kether. After much to-ing and fro-ing of missives and manuscripts, Chapman received a letter from Geraldine Cooke herself:

11 October 1983 I am writing to you again about your manuscript ASSASSIN. If you have still got the manuscript, and have not sent it out to another publisher, I would be most interested to look at it again as our policy has slightly changed in this area. I am now trying to broaden the scope of our Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. If I am able to consider your manuscript, it is possible that we could talk about other ideas. I look forward to hearing from you and hope that you do not find this change of heart too extraordinary. Yours sincerely, Geraldine Cooke

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Five months later Cooke wrote to Chapman again, who by this time had also submitted The Rings of Kether for consideration. Buried within the letter was the immortal phrase, “We have now decided to set up a series of STEVE AND IAN PRESENTS.... I am writing to ask whether you would wish your manuscripts to be included in this series.” Space Assassin was illustrated by Geoffrey Senior, a stalwart of the British comic book scene back in the 1980s – working predominantly for Marvel UK and probably best remembered for his work on the Transformers series – and featured cover art by Chris Achilleos (credited as Christos Achilleos on the back cover). The hero was the assassin of the title, his mission: to stop the crazed scientist Cyrus from unleashing a gruesome mutation experiment upon his homeworld from the vast hulk of the starship Vandervecken in orbit above it. The book introduced ARMOUR as an attribute, which worked much in the same way as Testing Your Luck did in more traditional Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and instead of Provisions, the hero used Pep Pills to boost his STAMINA levels.

Freeway Fighter For his sixth solo contribution to the FF range, Ian Livingstone ventured into the realms of near-future, postapocalyptic dystopian science fiction. Clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies, set in 2022, Freeway Fighter (FF13) had the hero crossing the wilderness in his heavily-armed (and armoured) Dodge Interceptor, to reach the distant oil-refinery of San Anglo so that he might return with vital supplies for the inhabitants of the peaceful town of New Hope. But success is anything but certain, since the wilds that lie between the scattered, fortified towns are the territory of lawless bandits and brigands. Vehicular combat was a feature of this particular adventure with the Dodge Interceptor having both a FIREPOWER and an ARMOUR score to represent

Kevin Bulmer’s illustrations for Freeway Fighter. (© Kate Copestake, 2014) its offensive and defensive capabilities.

be. However, we have an idea of how the book might have looked since McCaig did start work on an image for the book.

Like Starship Traveller (Jackson’s one and only foray into hard sci-fi Fighting Fantasy), Freeway Fighter has fewer than the standard 400 references, coming in at only 380 paragraphs. How come? “Because 400 references was a guide,” explains Livingstone, “not an absolute requirement.” The cover was by the sci-fi artist Jim Burns. When the book was republished by Wizard, the cover was reworked by Jim Burns. However, this is not an original piece of artwork for the range, the illustration having already been used as far back as 1984 to illustrate the Games Workshop RPG Battlecars. The interior art was by Kevin Bulmer. It was completed in only nine days, as a favour for Ian Livingstone after the original illustrations that had been commissioned were rejected at the last moment. As well as being an illustrator for White Dwarf, Bulmer went on to create some of the early computer games in the same genre, including Legends of Valour, Chronicles of the Sword, and Druid. Aged just 47, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and sadly passed away two years later in 2011. One of the early contenders for internal artist on Freeway Fighter was actually FF legend Iain McCaig, but other commitments meant that it simply wasn’t to

Proposed Freeway Fighter illustration by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1985 and 2014) ◉ 83

The Rings of Kether As has already been hinted at, Andrew Chapman’s second Fighting Fantasy title was another foray into science fiction. Although published as the fifteenth gamebook in the main FF line, The Rings of Kether (FF15) was originally advertised in both the first edition of  The Seven Serpents and issue #3 of  Warlock magazine as book 12, the slot actually filled by Space Assassin. The Rings of Kether was much more meticulously planned compared to its predecessor Space Assassin. The plot revolved around the hero (a narcotics officer) attempting to break up a drug ring on the planet Kether. Unusually, the hero is given some degree of freedom in regards to where he can travel between various locations on the planet’s surface, and in orbit as well, which in turn means that there are multiple paths leading to the final confrontation with the leaders of the drug cartel. Battles in the book take the form of hand-to-hand combat, projectile weapons fire and ship-to-ship combat. The Rings of Kether boasted the first FF cover by artist Terry Oakes who would go on to become one of the series’ most prolific cover contributors. Nik Spender provided the internal illustrations. His favourite illustration is, “Probably the little robotic insect” whereas the greatest challenge he faced with the commission was, “The sheer volume of drawings! Trying to come up with something fresh and unusual based on the supplied descriptions.”

Appointment with F.E.A.R. Steve Jackson had not written a Titan-set FF adventure since The Citadel of Chaos and his fifth title in the series continued this trend. Appointment with F.E.A.R. (FF17) took as its inspiration the comic books Jackson had so loved as a child and involved more problem-solving as opposed to the item collection ‘shopping list’ approach of some gamebooks. The action takes place in the suspiciously familiar sounding Titan City with the hero assuming the role 84 ◉

of Jean Lafayette and his alter ego, the crime-fighting Silver Crusader. The Silver Crusader does battle with such colourful characters as the Scarlet Prankster, the Serpent and the Alchemists, as he struggles to discover the time and location of the next meeting of F.E.A.R. – the Federation of Euro-American Rebels – an evil organisation led by Vladimir Utoshski, a.k.a. the Titanium Cyborg who is the subject of the book’s cover art. The book was illustrated by Declan Considine, who made his artwork look like panels from the pages of a comic book. The adventure begins with the reader choosing one of four superpowers for the Silver Crusader from Super Strength, PsiPowers, Enhanced Technological Skill (or ETS), and Energy Blast. Appointment with F.E.A.R. also made use of a new HERO POINTS attribute. These points are awarded for every villain the Silver Crusader captures and every potential disaster he manages to avert. (Although it doesn’t necessarily affect the outcome of the game, it does allow players to compare performances from one read-through to the next.) Rather like Batman, the Silver Crusader is not permitted to kill his enemies, and any such deaths that may occur result in the loss of  precious HERO POINTS. In one-on-one combat, when an enemy’s STAMINA score drops to 2 STAMINA points, the enemy simply surrenders. It could be argued that Appointment with F.E.A.R. is only a science fiction adventure in as much as Spider-Man or Superman comics are science fiction stories. It is, in truth, a comic book superhero gamebook; nothing more, nothing less. If that fact was ever in any doubt, just consider who it was that produced the book’s memorable, and ageless, cover image – only Brian Bolland, the legendary comic book artist famous for drawing such iconic comic book characters as Batman and Judge Dredd! “I reserved my writer/artist fangirl love for comics, specifically 2000AD,” admits Magda Knight, author of speculative and YA fiction. “So when I read Appointment with F.E.A.R. Bolland’s art blew me away, as it always does.”

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Appointment with F.E.A.R. proved so popular that a short sequel was published in issue #12 of Warlock magazine. Deadline to Destruction was written by Gavin Shute, and featured such villains as the Cuttlefish, Elastic Eddie and the Dynamo.

Rebel Planet was adapted to become one of a select group of FF computer games, available for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. The cover was provided by artist and colourist Alan Craddock with Gary Mayes producing the internal black and white illustrations, just as he would for the next two SF FF titles.

Rebel Planet The fifth Fighting Fantasy sci-fi title, Rebel Planet (FF18) was Robin Waterfield’s first contribution to the gamebook line as writer, having already edited a number of titles in the series. “I was working in the Penguin/Puffin copyeditorial department when the series began. My desk was free to edit one of the books, and after that I became the default copy-editor for them all, having got the hang of them. Later, after leaving Penguin, I became the series editor from 1986-1988, when I handed over to Marc Gascoigne. “By the time I wrote my first one, I had edited quite a few, and was already involved in reading (and rejecting) the countless submissions from hopeful kids. So I knew how the games worked, and I’ve been a lifelong gamesplayer (though I was not involved at all in the RPG world). So I didn’t find them too difficult to write. The first one I wrote was non-Titan (Rebel Planet), but that was because Philippa specifically asked me to do an SF one.” In the adventure, the leaders of SAROS (a secret Earth organization) are fighting to overthrow the alien Arcadian Empire. Having gathered together their last few resources, they send the hero on one last daring, and foolhardy, mission to strike at the heart of the Arcadian homeworld.

Alan Craddock’s cover rough for Rebel Planet, which at the time went by the title Emperor of Arcadion. (© Alan Craddock, 1985 and 2014) “If I remember correctly, the opportunity arose through the Games Workshop magazine, White Dwarf, and I think my name was put forward to the publishers Puffin, as a likely candidate,” says Mayes, recalling how he came to contribute to the Fighting Fantasy series. “In many ways it was a breath of fresh air to illustrate a whole book and particularly to work in black and white, something I had wanted to do for quite a while. My work at that time was varied and came from a number of different sources and this [Rebel Planet] gave me an opportunity to work within the fantasy/science fiction genre, which I had wanted to do since I had started drawing as a child. “The opportunity to work on the illustrations was something that I had been looking to do for a number of years. My early influences were illustrators like Frank Bellamy, Frank Kelly Freas, and numerous others that I had pored over as a teenager and inspired me ◉ 85

to think about work of that nature. The FF books were a significant step along the way and provided an opportunity to develop my skill and method of working with a subject I loved.”

FF gamebook it would also prove to be his last. “It was inspired by the mecha genre,” explains US Steve, “of which Transformers was the first big-deal popularization in English.” The hero of Robot Commando is a dinosaur rancher in the country of Thalos, on a distant planet, who finds himself in the middle of an attack by the militaristic Karosseans. An unknown weapon is activated which causes everyone, save the protagonist, to fall into a deep sleep, leaving Thalos free to be invaded. During the course of the book the hero uses a number of different giant robots to battle both the dinosaurs and the Karosseans while searching for a way to wake his fellow countrymen.

Robot, by Gary Mayes. (© Gary Mayes, 1985 and 2014) But what of Craddock? Did he have a background in RPGs? “I had played Waddington’s Risk board game for many hours with my friends,” says Craddock. “During the sixth form school holidays we would play games which would last days at a time. So I knew the pleasure a good board game could provide. And when I had finished reading Tolkien I wanted more, and obviously a role-playing game could be a way of achieving that. But painting was my particular outlet. Once I became a professional artist in 1979 and got married soon after, those long balmy summer days of playing Risk for days on end were gone. I wanted to be the best artist I could be; no time for playing games. I also had to decorate and wash dishes!”

Robot Commando Wrapped inside a powerful Transformers meets Jurassic Park cover by David Martin, with internal illustrations by Gary Mayes, Robot Commando (FF22) was written by the other Steve Jackson (the US author behind Scorpion Swamp and Demons of the Deep). As well as being his third 86 ◉

Triceratops Attack, by Gary Mayes. (© Gary Mayes, 1986 and 2014)

“I always liked Robot Commando because it was the first time I ever came across the idea of having vehicles which varied immensely in their usefulness and changed the game dynamics,” says FF enthusiast Matthew Smith. “It makes me wonder, how far can you push the complexity of the book without losing that easy pick up and play that made them so popular?” Robot Commando was one of only a few entries in the Fighting Fantasy series to feature multiple successful endings. Paragraph 400 was not one of them.

Star Strider The next sci-fi FF title came out over a year later. Illustrated once again by Gary Mayes (who had clearly become the FF sci-fi artist of choice) and wrapped inside another Alan Craddock cover, inspired by the movies Blade Runner and Escape From New York, Star Strider (FF27) is notable for being the first of what would become four FF titles by Luke Sharp.

than their fantasy counterparts. “Even if you are in a different part of Titan, you still feel like you are part of the same big story. Much like when Terry Pratchett publishes a non-Discworld book. Undoubtedly a superb story, written by a master of the art, but still somehow not the same.” Sharp, however, is a fan of the SF titles. “I like the nonTitan books but I think the world created by the Titan authors is very strong and grows on you and becomes all enveloping.” Luke Sharp is actually a pen-name of Alkis Alkiviades. But why use a pen-name at all? “With a name like Alkis Alkiviades in the good old days it was tough to convince people you could speak English let alone write. I chose the name from a George Formby film “... come into the parlour George and look sharp about it.” I thought it was snappy but was always a joke name.”

“I have to confess that I didn’t read FF before I started writing for FF. Well I did read Rebel Planet by Robin Waterfield before I submitted a proposal for what I called Rogue Tracer which eventually became Star Strider. That’s why my first book is SF. It was pure luck that I got a commission. I was working with Dave Robins a well-known writer who had books published by Penguin Books and I had helped him with a book he had written on movies. His agent suggested he submit a proposal for FF because there was little work around at the time and Puffin needed writers for FF. It was Dave who suggested I put in a proposal in the envelope along with his. I got the gig and he didn’t.” Star Strider featured Earth again, as Rebel Planet had, but a very different Earth. And maybe this was part of the problem with the SF titles; there was no single coherent setting for them all to take place in as there was for the majority of FF’s fantasy titles. Graham Bottley (current guardian of the AFF franchise) certainly believes that this lack of continuity is why the non-Titan adventures were less well-received

Dragon vs Helicopter, by Gary Mayes. (© Gary Mayes, 1987 and 2014) ◉ 87

Sky Lord

removed from Titan, FF becomes just a game system rather than a rich fantasy adventure.” The thirty-third FF adventure, and the ninth science fiction title, was the first and only solo gamebook written by Martin Allen, who had already co-written the Clash of the Princes double-header with Andrew Chapman.

In Sky Lord (FF33) the hero is Jang Mistral, a four-armed soldier from the planet Ensulina. His mission is to travel to a lawless artificial planet and capture a scientist named L’Bastin, who has created a species of  dog-headed humanoids (called the Prefectas) to be the ultimate warriors in the universe. The gamebook features a RATING attribute, which determines Jang’s skill at piloting a variety of combat vehicles. Once again, the interior illustrations were provided by Gary Mayes, while Les Edwards painted the cover, his fifth for the series at the time. “Sky Lord is one of my favourite Fighting Fantasy covers,” admits Edwards, “because it has a certain amount of humour in it.” With the sci-fi titles never selling as well as the Titanset fantasy adventures, and lacking consistency in terms of both style and game design, Sky Lord remains, to date, the last FF science fiction title. “The problem was that the non-Titan books diluted the FF brand somewhat,” says freelance writer and FF fan Andy Jones. “For many fans, FF is synonymous with Titan so when a book appears that is quite far

“I think they were less well-received because they were one shots,” says Portuguese fan Tiago Sequeira. “If they were all set in the same world they would be better received.” “I think not all members of the original target group were into sci-fi, while sci-fi fans were not so attached to FF in the first place,” adds Zsolt Matyusz, another FF aficionado. “These stories were also not embedded in a broader context, they were stand-alone adventures, hence they could not refer to previous books or Titan.” Phil Williams, Art Manager at Egmont Creative Center, agrees: “Anything which stepped out of the Titan universe didn’t feel right to me.” “It interrupted the ‘drive’ of the series,” opines children’s writer David Lee Stone. Thomas Nielsen encapsulates the views of many FF fans when he says, “I think part of it is because what people want from Fighting Fantasy is fantasy. It’s like if you were to unwrap a chocolate bar, and found a biscuit inside. It isn’t bad, just not what you were in the mood for. However, I also think that many of these books were just genuinely not that good.” But not everyone is of the same opinion. “I was partial to Starship Traveller, and Appointment with F.E.A.R. is one that sticks in my memory too,” says fantasy and science fiction author Gav Thorpe. “I was getting a bit of a fantasy fix from D&D so I suppose the non-fantasy titles appealed more at the time.” “I prefer the non-Titan stuff,” adds gamebook author extraordinaire Dave Morris, “and when I’m writing my own books I generally like to create a new world for each book.”

Right: Battlecars, by Jim Burns. (© Jim Burns, 1984 and 2014) 88 ◉

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Chapter Nine

The Magazine of Firetop Mountain Warlock Magazine

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he Warlock of Firetop Mountain had only launched the summer before, but by mid-1983 the first issue of Warlock: The Fighting Fantasy Magazine was already available from newsstands around the world. Initially published by Penguin Books, from issue #6 onwards it was published by Games Workshop. “Steve and I knew how important White Dwarf had been to us as a platform and focal point for role-playing games,” says Livingstone. “We wanted Warlock to be the same sort of platform for Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.”

Peter Darvill-Evans took over for just one issue, issue #6, with Steve Williams and Paul Mason working jointly on the magazine for issues #7 to #9. The last four issues, #10 to #13, were edited by Marc Gascoigne. Mason might seem a strange choice to edit the Fighting Fantasy magazine when you bear in mind what he thought of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks when he first came across them.

With Jackson and Livingstone installed as the magazine’s editors-in-chief, other editors were actually responsible for putting the individual issues together. This job was undertaken by Philippa Dickinson for the first five issues, with Tony Lacey’s help for the first four. “I think I was involved in the very first edition of that,” recollects Dickinson. “One of the things I find so weird is that on Wikipedia it says that I edited it and I have this sort of… It doesn’t resonate with me in quite the same way that the books do, but clearly I did. I just don’t remember it as being one of the most important things I did. “I must have been involved in the first one, I do have a memory of that, but I don’t know what happened after that. Given that actually the books were the most important thing, probably that’s what I was focusing on.”

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Warlock cover roughs by Alan Craddock. (© Alan Craddock, 1983 and 2014) “I had read a couple, including The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. But I didn’t like them,” Mason confesses. “I was a student, and a hard core pursuer of the dizzy heights of role-gaming excellence, and gamebooks were just exploitation of the kiddies... or so I thought. I judged them solely on whether or not they were the role-playing I knew and wanted, and of course they weren’t, so I dismissed them. Actually FF didn’t feel the full force of my wrath so much as Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf. He was kind enough to send me a sample review copy; in my review I tore it to shreds. “Editing Warlock was a lot of fun, and probably the

Right: Warlock #1, by Alan Craddock. (© Alan Craddock, 1983 and 2014)

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Fighting Fantasy Fact

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The Warlock himself was a manifest character who appeared in Warlock magazine. He was most often referenced through the features, which created the illusion that he was the cruel, tyrannical overlord of the magazine that bore his name. This idea was revived long after Warlock magazine ended when Jackson and Livingstone hired Dave Holt to set up the official Fighting Fantasy website, www.fightingfantasy.com. The current Warlock is Jamie Fry, the man behind www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk. So what is it like being the Warlock’s earthly representative? “I am humbled by it and immensely proud,” says Fry. “To be recorded as part of the history of Fighting Fantasy I feel is an achievement I never thought would come true. I am one lucky person and the biggest thing for me is the direct open contact I enjoy with Steve and Ian. I still feel a little awkward when people address me as ‘The Warlock’ as I feel I should be in some sort of garb fit for a Warlock and get into character, but it feels good. I have also met some great people who have been involved with FF over the years. I try not to take it for granted and remember my place in all this. I do get delusions of grandeur on occasions but they are the true Warlock personified. My hard work as a collector has paid off as I have added to my collection beyond what I could have done without the connections.”

thing which turned my attitude to FF round more than anything else. It was a bit odd, as Steve and I were also editing the abortive Good Games Guide, and I was having to flit over into the White Dwarf offices. And we had the knell of doom hanging over us for much of the time as Bryan Ansell had decided to close us down. “The magazine’s strength was its atmosphere. I think Marc Gascoigne really nailed this, after the move to Nottingham, but me and Steve did our best. In the age before online forums, magazines could offer a sort of  community, and that’s what we tried to do. Not too in-jokey, but with enough that readers felt they were part of something.” Readers quickly became familiar with the layout 92 ◉

of the magazine, which focused mainly on fantasy adventures and with the emphasis on the Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks in particular. ‘The Warlock’s Quill’ featured letters from Fighting Fantasy fans. ‘Omens and Auguries’ informed readers of what was new in the world of gamebooks. The ‘Arcane Archive’ was the name given to the reviews feature, while the ‘Out of the Pit’ monster profiles proved so popular that a book of the same name was published in 1985. “I used to borrow it from a mate,” says long-time FF fan Phil Williams. “I remember it was very funny, and it felt like being part of an exclusive gang – lots of injokes and stuff.” Every issue of the magazine featured a mini Fighting Fantasy adventure and it was here that readers first encountered Shareella the Snow Witch and discovered the horrors of the House of Hell. There were even tutorials in how to paint Citadel fantasy miniatures written by Dave Andrews and other luminaries of Games Workshop games design such as Rick Priestley.

Right: Warlock #4, by Alan Craddock. (© Alan Craddock, 1985 and 2014)

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Warlock magazine was published in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand and ran for thirteen issues from mid-1983 until December 1986. Despite its relatively short run, many Fighting Fantasy fans have fond memories of Warlock magazine. As one fan, Steven Dean, says, “it was a great stop gap between books to have those mini adventures.”

Bigger in Japan Warlock magazine was put out in Japan by publishers Shakaishisou Sha under the same name, which in Japanese is written asウォーロック. Established in the December of 1986, it continued until March 1992 during which time 63 issues were published! Starting out as simply a direct translation of the original English language magazine it inevitably ended up developing its own original material which went far beyond articles solely about Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

Derek the Troll Derek the Troll was a comic strip created, written and illustrated by Lew Stringer, whose work has appeared in such publications as The Beano, The Dandy and Viz. First appearing in issue #7 of Warlock, Derek fast became a fan-favourite, making regular appearances right up until the end of the publication’s run. “I entered a talent competition they ran, back in 1984,” explains Stringer. “I can’t remember how I found out they were running it, as Warlock wasn’t a mag I’d normally pick up. Anyway, at the time my career was still in its early days so I was looking for opportunities

Lew Stringer’s pencils for Derek the Troll. (© Lew Stringer, 2014)

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to have my work published. I submitted the first Derek the Troll strip (“It’s Tough to be a Troll”) and they liked it so much they gave me a regular spot in the mag… I was quite a novice then, so it was very uplifting to have work accepted by Warlock magazine.” Derek even managed to escape the confines of his strip to review books and comment on other sections of the magazine. Stringer: “I was quite flattered that they thought the character was strong enough to be used like that, as a kind of mascot for the magazine. I didn’t write those reviews by the way, but I supplied all the illustrations.” In issue #13, the Derek the Troll strip was turned into a mini sixteen panel version of a gamebook. Entitled Derek the Troll’s ’Orrible Troll-Playing Game, readers had to keep Derek safe from the malevolent undead entity that was Trev the Vampire. “I liked the Troll-Playing Game as it allowed me to be experimental, and with its alternate endings, hopefully it provided more laughs.” Given the character’s enduring popularity, did Stringer ever consider experimenting to see if Derek could have a life beyond Warlock magazine? “I always intended to bring him back but became busy on other strips so he became forgotten and neglected. I did draw a Derek the Troll mini-strip for a ‘dummy’ issue of a proposed comic years ago but the comic didn’t get the go ahead.”

Derek the Troll’s ‘Orrible Troll-Playing Game, by Lew Stringer. (© Lew Stringer, 1986 and 2014)

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But now, at long last, Derek is back in his first brand new strip in almost thirty years, written by Stringer especially for YOU ARE THE HERO! So how did it feel to draw him again? Stringer: “Fantastic! I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed drawing the spotty little urchin. I’ll have to do another, when I have time. For a while now I’ve been intending to collect all the Derek strips into one comic and self-publish it. Perhaps I’ll do it in 2014 for his 30th anniversary.”

Derek the Troll, by Lew Stringer. (© Lew Stringer, 2014)

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Chapter Ten

Beyond Firetop Mountain Branching Out

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s well as seeing the solo gamebook series continue to go from strength to strength, the period from 1985 to 1987 saw the Fighting Fantasy brand and its co-creators branching out in a number of different ways, Puffin Books was also branching out by introducing other gamebook series to the world, including Starlight Adventures (aimed at girls) and the Cretan Chronicles trilogy (aimed at classical scholars, perhaps).

The Tasks of Tantalon 1985 saw Steve Jackson experimenting with a different type of puzzle book. The finished product was a hardback, lavishly illustrated throughout by Stephen Lavis, called The Tasks of Tantalon.

Stephen Lavis: “It was a great opportunity for me to illustrate The Tasks of Tantalon which took me a solid year to complete. I can remember my first meeting with Steve Jackson and David Fickling in a pub and, as a young illustrator, was greatly impressed when Steve Jackson arrived in his Porsche, already successful on the back of the FF books. This was very different from previous illustration work where I had made a name for myself as a book cover artist... There was some professional friction between Steve and myself over the level of blood and gore. Steve wanted to make The Tasks of Tantalon more like an FF book whereas I wanted the book to be more beautiful, along the lines of Masquerade.”

Jackson: “We’d been approached by David Fickling at Oxford University Press. David was interested in publishing an FF book in colour, concentrating on puzzles instead of quests. This was going to be something like Kit Williams’ Masquerade – the treasure hunt puzzle book where you had to discover the location of a buried silver hare. Only with The Tasks of Tantalon there wasn’t a prize. But David had a great gimmick; printing text at a size that made it look like a straight line, but under a magnifying glass you could read the sentence. It meant you could design quite an elaborate puzzle, which appealed to me. On a memorable train journey coming down from Edinburgh with Ian, I came up with ten of  the twelve puzzles.” It might not have taken Jackson long to conceive the book but its execution was something else. 98 ◉

Hornhelm’s Crown, by Stephen Lavis. (© Stephen Lavis, 1985 and 2014) Right: Casket of Souls, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1987 and 2014)

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“The Tasks of Tantalon looks gorgeous but I could never get anywhere with it!” admits FF fan Andy Jones. “It was only when I met Steve Jackson recently that he revealed the secrets of the book, so I’m really grateful to him for that!” “I loved it,” enthuses another long-time FF fan, Phil Williams, “the artwork is beautiful, although I couldn’t for the life of me solve the puzzles.  I only recently found out that a magnifying glass may help.” The solution to the puzzle contained within the book has vexed many an adventurer over the years, so what is the secret to solving Tantalon’s tasks? Jackson: “I self-published a small booklet which gave the entire solution to The Tasks of Tantalon. I actually dug out a copy of Tantalon recently, and found two letters from readers who claimed to have solved it (before the Solution Booklet). I admit, it was extremely hard to solve.”

Casket of Souls There has always been an element of healthy rivalry to Jackson and Livingstone’s relationship, rather like that shared between siblings. Not to be outdone by Jackson, in 1987 Livingstone published his own puzzle quest book. However, the two authors had actually been signed up by David Fickling at the same time; Casket of Souls only came out so much later than The Tasks of Tantalon because of the time it took Iain McCaig to complete the intricate artwork for the book. Casket of Souls took as its setting the world of  Amarillia, which was further explored and linked to the world of  Titan in the gamebook Legend of Zagor (FF54) and the novels The Zagor Chronicles. Like The Tasks of Tantalon, it contained puzzles that were hidden in both the text and the pictures, and, like Jackson’s book, it was renowned for its difficulty. When asked what the inspiration was behind Casket of Souls, Livingstone replies, “Iain McCaig was the inspiration. The covers he did for The Forest of Doom, 100 ◉

Deathtrap Dungeon, City of Thieves and Island of the Lizard King were both outstanding and inspirational. The painstaking effort and the detail he went into were unbelievable. Iain would never compromise on his art. He went way beyond the call of duty in his work. But there was a price to pay. The delays were endless and the publishing date kept getting pushed back much to the frustration of the publisher. Oxford University Press were going mad but I didn’t really care as the book was going to look amazing.” “After Deathtrap Dungeon, Ian offered to let me come up with a story for a Masquerade-style book that I would illustrate and he would write,” explains McCaig. “We were lucky enough to have the amazing David Fickling as our editor, and I besieged them both with ideas and images for the project – everything from a Weird World of grown-up babies and belly racers to a story about a future King Arthur returning to save humanity from a post-apocalyptic world. In the end, Ian chose my premise of a soul-stealing demon from the land of Chaos invading a peaceful land of Order, and spun it into a puzzle-laden tale. I, meanwhile, dove into the paintings like Ahab going after Moby Dick, driving nearly everyone mad in the process.  Buckets of blood, sweat and tears later, Casket of Souls was born.”

At last — a thrilling TWO-PLAYER, twobook Fighting Fantasy adventure! The perilous Trial of Kingship awaits you! In the golden city of Gundobad, you are twin princes – one a Warrior-Prince and one a Warlock-Prince – each with your own particular skills and strengths. It is time for one of you to succeed to the throne, and you must face the Trial of Kingship. But only one of you can win through. Which brother will it be? Beware! Vile monsters and deadly dangers lie in wait. Two dice, a pencil, an eraser – and a friend! – are all you need.

Illustrations from Casket of Souls, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1987 and 2014)

Livingstone is disarmingly honest when it comes to talking about the complexity of the book today: “Yes, it was virtually impossible to solve! That was largely my fault.” “Like everything in the book, the puzzles were a collaboration,” says McCaig “I came up with the visual trickery while Ian wrote the riddles. The publisher worried that the puzzles might be too difficult to solve, but I seem to recall we had many mailbags of correct entries, from which an eleven-year old boy won the gold-plated replica of the Casket of Souls.”

Clash of the Princes In 1986 the first two-player Fighting Fantasy gamebook experience, Clash of the Princes, was published. “I remember one of the Penguin editors saying they’d had a submission from Australia which was a twoplayer FF game,” Jackson recalls. “We agreed it should be in the FF series.” Clash of the Princes was actually written by Andrew Chapman (author of Space Assassin, The Rings of Kether and Seas of Blood) and Martin Allen (who would go on to write Sky Lord). As to what Clash of the Princes was all about, the blurb on the back of the book said it all:

The two books that made up Clash of the Princes – The Warrior’s Way and The Warlock’s Way – were released as a boxed set. They could be still be played as standard solo Fighting Fantasy gamebooks but of course they could also be combined to create a unique twoplayer role-playing experience. Two new attributes were used in the two-player version, ACTION and STATUS. These allowed the two players to synchronize their individual gaming experiences. The Warrior’s Way cast the hero as Clovis, Warrior-Prince of the golden city of Gundobad. The Warlock’s Way, made the hero Lothar, the Warlock-Prince, Clovis’s twin brother and rival. In the books, both set out upon the somewhat draconian Trial of Kingship to see which of them will succeed to the throne of Gundobad. The two books were both illustrated by John Blanche, inside and out. “I think Clash of the Princes came about because Geoff Taylor recommended me to the publishers,” reckons Blanche. ◉ 101

Minotaur and Warthog Guard, by John Blanche. (© John Blanche, 1986 and 2014)

Both books have a total of  500 references each, making a grand total of 1,000 altogether. Chapman would later remark on how frustratingly hard and time-consuming the project was to get right. Unsurprisingly, it took a great deal of work to make sure the mechanics worked properly. Chapman and Allen envisaged the books as being released separately but simultaneously. Puffin, however, made the decision to release them as a boxed set. There are a couple of notable peculiarities about Clash of the Princes, beyond the usual errors in game design that crept in to so many FF books. The colour map by Dave Andrews, other than showing two cities called Gundobad and Kalamdar, does not mesh with large sections of the adventure. Features mentioned during the course of the adventure either do not appear or are not named, while Dragon Hove, which is named on the map, is not presented in the story itself. How could such a slip up have occurred? “I don’t have a clue,” says Andrews. “I was usually given a rough sketch with the key names and places and left to redraw it as a finished map.”

“I can appreciate that an attempt was being made to do something new with FF through the two-player idea,” says long-time FF fan Andy Jones, “but I think they would have worked better as a two-part solo adventure like a mini Sorcery!” “I loved Clash of Princes and played it with my best friend from school,” counters another FF fan, Steve Brown. “We had great fun playing the books and because we enjoyed Clash of Princes so much, we tried the DuelMaster series that came out separately but didn’t quite get the same experience with them – maybe because it was an unfamiliar system.”

There are also inconsistencies in some of the stats of the monsters Lothar and Clovis can meet during the course of the adventure, even though they are the same monsters. Despite Puffin being keen to push Clash of the Princes as a two-player FF experience, they were not keen to repeat the experiment. The Warrior’s Way and The Warlock’s Way were the first Fighting Fantasy titles to drop out of print as retailers at the time were not fans of boxed sets, and so Clash of the Princes was not only the first two-player FF gamebook experience, it was also the last.

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Right: Casket of Souls, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1987 and 2014)

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Chapter Eleven

Tales of Firetop Mountain (Part 1) From Sword of the Samurai to Vault of the Vampire

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ith new writers on board and word of the Fighting Fantasy phenomenon spreading rapidly in Australia, Canada and the United States, as well as the UK, Puffin Books had been publishing a new Fighting Fantasy title every two months. The series had really found its feet, enabling authors to try out alternative settings from those presented in the almost exclusively Allansia-based fantasy adventures to date.

compared to cinema and even games like Monopoly and stuff, but a big niche. We had early ideas about Way of the Tiger as well, but at the end of the day, we were really just into Samurai and Ninjas at the time.” Sword of the Samurai was only the second time that Alan Langford had appeared on internal art duties, while Peter Andrew Jones contributed his first cover since Talisman of Death (the other Smith and Thomson collaboration).

Sword of the Samurai The twentieth book in the series presented readers with the Fighting Fantasy version of Japan, in the form of the mystical land of Hachiman and Sword of the Samurai (FF20). The adventure was written by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, back on writing duties after premiering with their original non-Titan set adventure Talisman of Death. The hero of the adventure is a young Samurai, Kensei. He is tasked with recovering the Dai-Katana, the Shogun’s great sword, which has been stolen by Ikiru, the Master of Shadows, who dwells deep in the Pit of Demons. “At the time, the whole Samurai/Ninja thing was big and breaking out of the niche world it was in, into the bigger niche of gamebooks and RPGs, which had become substantially more popular than they had been for a long time,” says Thomson. “Still a niche, 104 ◉

Tatsu, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1986 and 2014)

Right: Creature of Havoc, by Les Edwards. (© Les Edwards, 2002 and 2014)

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Way of the Tiger Smith and Thomson are probably better known today as the creators and authors of the Way of the Tiger series of adventure gamebooks. The books are set within the fantasy world of Orb, the setting used for the FF adventure Talisman of Death but with the reader taking on the role of Avenger, a young ninja out for revenge. So what prompted the dynamic duo’s decision to break away from Fighting Fantasy and write their own series of gamebooks? “It was an easy decision once Talisman of Death became the second bestselling children’s book of the year, only beaten by Roald Dahl, which is interesting because last year Jamie Thomson won the Roald Dahl prize and this year he is judging it,” said Smith in 2013. “I was able to get all of the biggest publishers (leaving out Penguin of course, who published FF) to compete in a month long auction for Way of the Tiger, and in a separate similar auction for our Falcon time travel gamebook series.” “There we were, Min [Mark Smith] with his entire world background, me with publishing contacts and ‘pulse on the finger of gaming in the UK’ through working on White Dwarf magazine,” explains Thomson, “so it was a logical fit. At the time, ninjas were new and exciting and everybody loved them (this was in the early ‘80s) whereas nowadays they are all over the place and everyone knows what they are etc. So, back then it made sense. So, basically ninjas meets Lord of the Rings was what we ended up with and it turned into a hugely successful game book series.” Mark Smith: “We were absolutely committed to writing the best series but our dreams didn’t really run that far – we did, however, hope and plan to go beyond six books. Our publishers Hodder and Stoughton originally had signed for seven books but they cancelled the last in a fit of pique, which is why Inferno! ends so unsatisfactorily – they re-wrote the end themselves to kill the series. “The story here is that the then CEO of Hodder, Eddie Bell, left to become CEO of Harper Collins (a bigger publisher, same scale as Penguin). He took us with him so that we could write the DuelMaster series for Harper Collins and Hodder revoked the contract for Book #7 in revenge. They said it was for commercial reasons, but the series was still successful and reprinting.” In the summer of 2013, Megara Entertainment ran a successful Kickstarter project to publish re-edited hardback collector’s editions of the Way of the Tiger gamebooks, adding a prequel – Ninja! written by David Walters – and with the original authors returning to write the long missing Book #7, Redeemer! In December 2013, it was announced that Tin Man Games would release the original six books of the series on digital platforms.

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“I’ve been fascinated with the East ever since I read a book called The Earth is the Lord’s by Taylor Caldwell,” says Langford. “It’s about the early life of Genghis Khan – Temujin – and that fired up my interest. The other source is Kubla Khan, and that was illustrated by Frank Fazetta. So Sword of the Samurai was quite an interesting job for me to do.”

Trial of Champions Number twenty-one in the series was a follow up to the fantastically successful Deathtrap Dungeon, published only two years earlier. Trial of Champions (FF21) wasn’t a direct sequel, but in the game world it is set a year after the hero of Deathtrap Dungeon has beaten Baron Sukumvit’s deadly labyrinth. All the familiar Deathtrap Dungeon tropes are there to be enjoyed, including a host of deadly monsters and deathly traps, other competitors who are encountered as the hero takes ‘The Walk’ through the dungeon, and the massive cash prize for anyone who actually makes it through to the other end alive. However, the story adds an element of sibling rivalry to the tale, with the hero having been taken captive by the Baron’s jealous brother Lord Carnuss and sent to Fang specifically to beat the dungeon and shame Sukumvit. Author and creator of the Illmoor Chronicles, David Lee Stone, cites Trial of Champions as being one of his favourite gamebooks. “House of Hell or Trial of Champions: both are absolutely brilliant fun, and classic examples of two authors completely focused on creating an atmosphere for the games they’re constructing. I couldn’t choose between them.” Trial of Champions was the only time Brian Williams illustrated an actual FF gamebook, providing the striking cover art as well as the internal black and white illustrations (although he also illustrated The Riddling Reaver, published the same year). His clean line art and representations of the human form were exquisite. Sadly, Williams passed away unexpectedly at his home on 4 October 2010.

Masks of Mayhem Following the alliterative title pattern of many a previous FF adventure gamebook, Masks of Mayhem (FF23) was Robin Waterfield’s second contribution to the series, but the first set within a fantasy setting. “Of those I wrote,” says Waterfield, “I think Masks of Mayhem is the best.” The hero of Masks of Mayhem is the ruler of the kingdom of  Arion. He is sent by his court wizard to slay the evil sorceress Morgana before she can unleash her twelve dreaded Golems upon Arion. Despite the fact that the villain of the piece is Morgana the Sorceress, Waterfield’s inspiration for the adventure wasn’t consciously Arthurian. “In general I’m not in tune with British paganism,” the author points out. “But when it comes to metaphysics and astrology, it’s another matter entirely. If you divide a circle into six equal arcs you now have six equidistant points around the outside of the circle. Now join the dots without taking the pencil off the paper. Of course, there are many different orientations of the shapes you can make, but there are, oddly, only twelve shapes that emerge. Some of them are used in Masks. Some friends of mine and I thought they were interesting, and possibly of metaphysical and astrological importance.” The ever reliable Nicholson came up with the goods once again in terms of internal black and white illustrations, while the book featured a fantastic cover by renowned painter of all things prehistoric John Sibbick: “I think Puffin saw some of my mythology books with monsters and magic effects and they gave me a trial with the Masks of Mayhem cover.” The book is dedicated to Philippa Dickinson, the editor who worked on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and for many years an “Unsung hero of  Titan”.

Morgana the Sorceress, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1986 and 2014)

Creature of Havoc Written by Steve Jackson, the twenty-fourth book in the series has quite rightly gone on to achieve legendary status and remains a firm favourite with many FF fans today, despite the fact that it is so complex and challenging. Utilizing a device that has been imitated in numerous gamebooks many times since (and not just Fighting Fantasy ones), the story begins with the hero waking up with no memory of where he is, how he came to be there, who he is or even what he is. The hero is the havoc-creating Creature of the title. The book even goes so far as to initially give the beast no concept of language or reason. The hero attempts to make ◉ 107

choices but is often thwarted, in the early stages of the adventure, when the beast all too often resorts to acting on instinct alone. Slowly, however, the greater plot unfolds as the hero begins to discover what exactly has happened to him and who is responsible. Featuring a flying ship, an undead Half-Elf and Zharradan Marr, an evil witch-born sorcerer, it is a truly memorable adventure with some wonderful set pieces. And no doubt many readers raised a snigger when they discovered that the Creature’s snack food of choice is Hobbits. The book took Steve Jackson five months to write and contains the longest background section of any FF adventure (running to nineteen pages and containing information on everything from Elven birthing practices to the sorcerer Volgera Darkstorm). Jackson: “With Sorcery! I’d written each adventure longer than the previous one. I didn’t have the same 400-reference limit which had kind of become a standard like the main FF series. Always looking for new angles, I’d decided that Creature of Havoc would set the reader as a monster. That was a new feature. And that I wouldn’t be bound by the 400-reference adventure. I was particularly pleased with the reader having to learn a language. But how was Jackson able to include Hobbits in the book? “I can remember there being some debate at the time as to whether Hobbits were copyrighted or not. Someone somewhere came up with a reference to Hobbits in medieval literature.” The book featured another Ian Miller cover. The green-skinned figure that appears upon it was originally supposed to be Darramouss the undead Half-Elf. However, when Jackson saw the finished painting, he was so impressed he went back and changed the text so that the figure on the front became the Creature’s vile nemesis, the black-hearted, halfdemon sorcerer Zharradan Marr. “In truth I did not know this,” Miller told Alex Ballingall, when he was interviewed for the FF fanzine Fighting Fantazine, “but it’s nice to think the image resonated so. Maybe that comes of reading the book and meeting the author. Alan Langford produced the internal illustrations for the book, including such fondly-remembered monsters as the Clawbeast, the Toadmen, and the disturbing undead Master of Hellfire. “I enjoyed doing that one,” says Langford. “I didn’t like the murder of Hobbits though; I’m quite fond of them.” 108 ◉

Ophidiotaur, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1986 and 2014) So which is the artist’s favourite image from the book? “I think it’s one with the shadow of the monster in the foreground and a Dwarf cowering in the background. That one stays in my mind in particular, not because it was my favourite, because it… sort of turned the situation around in a visual way. You got that experience all the way through the written part that Steve did, but my illustration… that was the one that sort of brought it together. The rest could have been just an ordinary Fighting Fantasy book, but that’s the one that stays in my mind.”

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Vault of the Vampire had a blood-soaked sequel, Revenge of the Vampire. This was the only occasion when a direct sequel to a gamebook was written by an author other than the series’ co-creators Jackson and Livingstone.

pleasant town in Khul, which has become home to a host of vile monsters begotten of warped sorcery. The hero has to free his friend, Baron Tholdur, from this evil enchantment. “I was there when the first FF books were being written,” says Darvill-Evans, “so I had some idea of their contents and the FF system before the books were published.” However, to begin with, it is fair to say that DarvillEvans wasn’t the world’s biggest Fighting Fantasy fan. “Steve and Ian started to have meetings with executives from Puffin books in the boardroom at the GW head office. My loyalty was to Games Workshop, so my attitude to the proposed arrangement with Puffin changed according to whether I thought the books would be good for GW’s business. At first I thought only good could come of it: a range of books, published and distributed by the premier UK children’s book publisher, would provide invaluable publicity for Games Workshop and would introduce huge numbers of readers to the basics of role-playing games – there would be an army of new customers for our products.

Cowering Dwarf, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1986 and 2014) Creature of Havoc (FF24) was the last FF title to bear the green zigzag banner across the top of its cover and is also the last Fighting Fantasy gamebook Jackson ever wrote. The book remains a fan-favourite to this day. “It was full of great details and ingenious puzzles,” says Jon Ingold of Inkle Studios, the people behind the app versions of Jackson’s Sorcery! series, “and really pushed the boundaries of how these books could work.”

Beneath Nightmare Castle Where Creature of Havoc remains, to this day, one of the most famous Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, then Beneath Nightmare Castle (FF25) must surely be one of the most infamous, and not just because of its atmosphere of brooding menace and insidious madness. The first Peter Darvill-Evans scripted adventure, and the second to feature a cover by Terry Oakes, it is set in and around (as well as underneath) Neuberg, a once

“However it seemed to me that increasingly there were drawbacks. The books, it became apparent, would not publicise Games Workshop. Steve and Ian were required to write the first books within very tight deadlines, and were inevitably drawn away to some extent from hands-on management of the business. When it became clear that the success of the FF series demanded more books than Steve and Ian could write, several of the GW staff were recruited to write for the series; others took matters into their own hands and approached rival publishers with their own proposals for gamebook series. By 1985 it seemed that everyone in the place was writing gamebooks. It seems po-faced now, but at the time I didn’t approve of any of this. “The London-based manufacturing, publishing, importation, sales and distribution business that had grown so successful seemed to me to be under threat. And in short order so it proved: Steve and Ian handed management of the whole business to the head of the Nottingham miniatures factory, and not ◉ 109

surprisingly he wanted to consolidate the business in Nottingham, with the emphasis on Warhammer and figures sold through GW’s own shops rather than on manufacturing and importing a wide range of games for distribution to other distributors and retailers. “Soon the London head office and warehouse were empty apart from me, the magazine staff, and some warehouse staff packing up boxes for shipment to Nottingham: by this time we were publishing Warlock, the FF magazine started by Puffin, as well as White Dwarf. It was a situation that couldn’t last, and after I was made redundant I worked for a time as a selfemployed consultant to GW, supervising the clearing of the warehouse and the redundancies of the remaining staff. “Steve and Ian still came occasionally to the office, and in any case I had known them for years by now and we were friends, so we met occasionally outside work. Once I knew that there was no future for me in GW I felt free to offer to write a book for the FF series, and so once I had completely finished at GW I wrote Beneath Nightmare Castle. I had just enough time to finish it before taking up my next job: Marketing Director at Argus Press Sales & Distribution Ltd, the news trade distributors of White Dwarf (and many, many other magazines). “I’m not saying that FF gamebooks caused the massive changes at Games Workshop: there were other factors at work, and it might well have happened anyway. But the success of FF books certainly influenced when it happened, and in large part how it happened. I was disappointed at the time: I had spent six hugely enjoyable years at GW and I loved it. But without FF books I might well have had much more difficulty getting my words into print, and the whole of my subsequent career (and in particular the sheer joy of publishing Doctor Who books in the 1990s) might have been very different.” Beneath Nightmare Castle features some particularly disturbing failure references but quite possibly the reason why many remember the adventure now is because of something that did not appear in the book, as opposed to something that did. Dave Carson was a tried and tested fantasy illustrator before he was tasked with producing the art for Beneath Nightmare Castle. His sinister, and sometimes downright insane, images matched the tone of creeping dread and rising madness. However, his image of a woman with tentacles emerging from her mouth was deemed too much for Puffin editorial at the time. 110 ◉

“I wanted to write something different – something removed from the sub-Tolkien sword’n’sorcery world that so much fantasy role-play inhabits (or did then),” admits Darvill-Evans. “So I went for horror, and I thought readers would like Lovecraftian Cthulhoid monsters with tentacles and obscene appetites… I don’t think many artists could have done justice to Beneath Nightmare Castle in the way that Dave Carson did.” But how does the author feel about the offending image being removed from the book? “When you’re a previously unpublished author working on a book in a standardised series, you have no alternative but to obey the publisher. I did argue with Annie Winterbottom at Puffin, in fact – probably much more than I should have done. I was probably regarded as a nuisance. I took the view that children like to be scared (you just have to look at the gruesome deaths in fairy tales), and I thought FF readers would cope with a picture of a woman whose open mouth was sprouting tentacles. But when Puffin said no, Dave and I just lived with it.” The irony is that much more graphic images have appeared in later Fighting Fantasy adventures, particularly in the case of some of the newer titles published by Wizard Books. Take, for example, the illustrations in Howl of the Werewolf or Night of the Necromancer (a title which would not have passed muster back in the days when the Puffin ruled the roost).

Crypt of the Sorcerer Originally pitched as Crypt of the Necromancer (until someone at Puffin decided that you couldn’t have the word ‘Necromancer’ in the title of a book aimed at children), Ian Livingstone’s tenth Fighting Fantasy adventure saw the return of some familiar FF faces and places, whilst also introducing readers to a whole new region of Allansia and some new allies in the hero’s quest to defeat Razaak, the undead sorcerer of the title.So in Crypt of the Sorcerer (FF26) we have a return to Darkwood Forest and an

appearance by the Wizard Yaztromo (both originally from The Forest of Doom) whilst the hero is transported aboard a hot air balloon to not only the Moonstone Hills but also the baking Plain of Bronze. The adventure is incredibly hard, but full of wonderfully evocative encounters, backed up by the talented fossilreconstructor John Sibbick’s captivating artwork. Sibbick: “I found it quite easy to create a style for the interior drawings – more than I expected really… Although it could be pretty relentless churning out the drawings – and I had no time for any ‘rough’ sketches – now and again I look at the originals and am amazed at the work and detail involved.”

and white art by John Sibbick, Crypt of the Sorcerer is also notable for being the first book to feature a colour map by Leo Hartas.

Phantoms of Fear By the time Robin Waterfield came to write Phantoms of Fear (FF28), he had already given up his job as desk editor at Puffin and was now working as a freelance writer. “I was wanting to try to make a living as a writer. After I had copy-edited a few of the books, Philippa Dickinson (the in-house commissioning editor of the books at the time) asked if I’d like to write one. This enabled me to leave office work and make a start as a writer. Despite a couple of hiccups, I haven’t stopped yet!” The hero for this adventure takes on the role of a Wood Elf prince who is chosen by the gods to bring down the Demon Prince Ishtra and his gathering army of evil, chaotic creatures. What makes Phantoms of Fear remarkable – other than for the fact that it is the only Fighting Fantasy gamebook to have been illustrated inside and out by Ian Miller – is the way in which the Elven hero is able to switch between the real world and an alternative nightmarish dream world. There are, in fact, two ways to successfully complete the quest. One involves collecting magical items to defeat Ishtra in the physical world, while the other involves combating Ishtra in the dream world.

Demonspawn, by John Sibbick. (© John Sibbick, 1987 and 2014) “My favourite artist is John Sibbick,” says FF enthusiast Thomas Nielsen. “I think his illustrations hit a nice balance between being realistic, stylised and dirty, and he knows how to make a monstrous creature really monstrous.” Crypt of the Sorcerer was the third FF adventure to feature an original Les Edwards cover, showing the deformed Razaak preparing to cast a spell upon the hero. As well as being the first gamebook to feature internal black

Phantoms of Fear made a big impact on FF fan Andy Jones. “I definitely flicked through most of the first ten books several times when I used to visit my local library, but the first one I ever bought for myself and read/played properly was Phantoms of Fear – I probably picked it up because of the cover! I got it from my local Woolworths and played it until I felt I’d covered every inch of Affen Forest! I also thought the ability to swap between the dream world and the real world was exceptionally cool.”

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Midnight Rogue Midnight Rogue (FF29) was written by Graeme Davis, who, like many of the other FF writers at the time, was an employee of Games Workshop. It remains the one and only occasion he wrote a full length FF gamebook, although he had previously written a short 200 paragraph adventure called Rogue Mage that appeared in Warlock magazine the year before. “I forget how many books I’d read, plus Warlock magazine,” says Davis, “but it was after the multiplayer game came out that I started sending articles to Warlock: the first was published in issue 4, and I wrote a few other pieces aimed at the RPG. Midnight Rogue was my first attempt at creating a numberedparagraph adventure for FF, although I had written some rules-free fantasy gamebooks before that.” Midnight Rogue casts the hero in the role of an aspiring member of the Thieves’ Guild of Port Blacksand, at the commencement of the aspirant’s final test to prove his worthiness. The first half is a city-based adventure, while the second half takes the form of a more traditional dungeon bash. Davis: “I have loved city adventures ever since the first time I played in the Thieves’ World setting using the multi-system Sanctuary source pack. Even before I came up with the story I knew I wanted to revisit Port Blacksand.” The book once again featured the artwork of John Sibbick. “Midnight Rogue had a different approach,” explains Sibbick. “The reader became the thief character and their hands were seen manipulating locks and purses. I enjoyed doing this story as they were claustrophobic – more shadowy and closed in. I felt I inhabited this world while drawing [the black and white illustrations].”

Chest Creature, by John Sibbick. (© John Sibbick, 1987 and 2014) Unlike many of the FF adventures up to this point, Sibbick’s cover illustration does not illustrate a particular scene from the book. Unusually, it also shows the hero himself – the rogue, or thief, of the title – one of the monster encounters – the gargoyles – and the ultimate object of the hero’s quest, the massive jewel known as the Eye of the Basilisk. Sibbick would continue to contribute more covers, this time for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy series and the novel Shadowmaster, but what of Davis, the book’s author? How come he never penned another FF adventure? “I did start another book a few years later,” admits Davis. “It was a desert-themed adventure... I got as far as writing the outline and the standard 100 sample entries, but nothing came of it. This was at a time when Puffin wasn’t commissioning so many new FF titles, and I had the impression (wrongly, as it turned out) that they were winding the series down.” Right: Midnight Rogue, by John Sibbick. (© John Sibbick, 1987 and 2014)

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Chasms of Malice Luke Sharp’s second Fighting Fantasy title, Chasms of Malice (FF30) featured a striking, orange-hued Les Edwards’ cover and more fluid pen and ink illustrations by Russ Nicholson. Sharp: “I like Russ Nicholson – his style suited what I wanted for ‘in text’ illustrations. For cover art I really wanted Les Edwards. I was very keen on getting the cover art right and designed all the elements for the artist. I chose a deliberate over the top style.”

In the book, the hero begins the adventure as a simple assistant in the underkitchens of Gorak Keep. However, he also happens to be a direct descendant of Tancred the Magnificent, and so with the Shining Sword in his hand, and the feline Tabasha the Bazouk at his side, he sets off into the aforementioned Chasms of Malice to seek out and destroy the evil Orghuz. Chasms of Malice was the first of three fantasy titles by Luke Sharp. Just like the other adventures that would follow it, Chasms of Malice is set in the minor kingdom of Gorak in south-west Khul, an area that Sharp, along with Peter Darvill-Evans, was to develop in some significant detail. And Sharp’s reason for using this region? “I did not want to tread on any toes so I chose the least frequented section of the map.” Tabasha the Bazouk, the hero’s companion during the adventure, is unusual as the moggy is in fact one of a long line of cat goddesses. In game terms she behaves in a not dissimilar way to Libra, goddess of justice, in the Sorcery! books, restoring the hero’s attributes during the game, or alternatively adding to a player’s food supplies as well as performing other tasks as required during the course of the adventure. Chasms of Malice remains Sharp’s favourite title of the four he contributed to the FF series. “Infuriatingly difficult to complete but great fun to write and packed with incidents and impossible to map logically, it’s a brainstorm of a gamebook, unpopular in forums, but I still love that subterranean world.” Among FF fans Sharp remains a controversial figure, due to the extreme difficulty of his gamebooks. “I am often left frustrated by Chasms of Malice due to its many abrupt and unpredictable instant deaths,” says FF aficionado Thomas Nielsen.

Battleblade Warrior

Cavern, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1987 and 2014)

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Interestingly, Battleblade Warrior (FF31) is Marc Gascoigne’s only FF gamebook. Why interestingly? Because Gascoigne was consultant editor on the range towards the end of Fighting Fantasy’s run with Puffin, the man responsible for subbing every FF manuscript that was due to go to print as well as having to

field unsolicited proposals from all manner of aspiring writers. In the book, Gascoigne took a number of plot hooks that he had created for Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World – the city-state of Vymorna, a Lizardman empire, a merchant and his pet sabre-toothed tigers – and ran with them, developing them into an exciting narrative set against the backdrop of a city under siege, with forays into jungle swamplands as well as the ruins of a forgotten city. Battleblade Warrior was the first book to feature a cover painted by David Gallagher, another Games Workshop artist. “Battleblade was the first cover I did for Puffin,” says Gallagher. “I was freelancing and this was Puffin’s response to my initial approach for work.” The internal illustrations were by Alan Langford, matching the style of those he produced for Island of the Lizard King, a style that he would continue with later for Portal of Evil.

Slaves of the Abyss Slaves of the Abyss (FF32) marked the first entry for another new writing team for the Fighting Fantasy range, that of Paul Mason and Steve Williams, although they had already written the quartet of FF RPG adventures that were contained within The Riddling Reaver. The lion’s share of the adventure takes place in and around the city of  Kallamehr in southern Allansia. The hero is one of a number of famous adventurers summoned by Lady Carolina to defend the city against a mysterious threat, which leaves whole villages deserted. The hero investigates and runs into the extra-dimensional warlord Bythos. And that’s only the start. Mason: “Where the planning of The Riddling Reaver had been quite free-form and wild, with Slaves we had to get to grips with this whole idea of a fractured narrative. I don’t think either of us really approached the planning with the mathematical rigour that we should have: we just flew by the seat of our pants. In my biased opinion, this not only accounts for many of the weaknesses of the book, but also for its quirky charms. We didn’t really ‘know the rules’ most of  the time.” Mason and Williams had to fight to get the cover they wanted for the book, but had to compromise when it came to the ending. Originally the book ended with the hero sacrificing himself, remaining in the Abyss in order to free the prisoners. Mason claims that this did not go down well with Steve Jackson who thought that the hero should walk away from the adventure with lots of money and treasure at the end, so Mason changed it, providing the hero with godlike powers instead. Mason: “The book is weird. I feel it myself, and would suggest that it’s something about the chemistry of me and Steve Williams… Slaves was the product of an almighty, but very peaceful, battle between Steve and my ideas of what an FF book could be. You can also see this on Black Vein Prophecy, where my concept of the Isles of the Dawn as very Chinese runs into Steve’s peculiar Renaissance courtier sort of vision.”

The Siege of Vymorna, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1988 and 2014)

Slaves of the Abyss was the first adventure set in and around the city of Kallamehr, which has a very familiar Arabian Nights vibe to it, after Mason and Williams developed the setting in Act One of the multi-player adventure The Riddling Reaver. In fact, a number of names are taken from the tales ◉ 115

of  One Thousand and One Nights, including Albudur, Dunyazad, Ikhtiyan and Yunan.

adventure, the hero becomes some kind of fantastical medallion man, collecting medallions to prove his right to rule the kingdom.

Stealer of Souls

Daggers of Darkness is notable for being the first book to feature illustrations by a young Martin McKenna. “I started doing some illustration work for Games Workshop while I was still at school,” McKenna recalls, “and John Blanche recommended I send some samples in to Puffin which resulted in me being commissioned to illustrate Daggers of Darkness when I was seventeen.”

Stealer of Souls (FF34) was the first title by Keith Martin, an author who would go on to become one of the most prolific FF writers, contributing seven titles to the series overall. Keith Martin is the pen-name of Carl Sargent, another games designer who was working for Games Workshop at the time, but the only one with a PhD in psychology and experimental parapsychology. In this particular book, the hero accepts a quest from Vanestin of  Pollua, a mage who wants him to rescue the wizard Alsander. To do this the player must travel to the Isle of Despair, a small island off the eastern coast of the Island of Scars, which itself is located somewhat to the east of Allansia. Stealer of Souls was the fifth Fighting Fantasy gamebook to be illustrated by Russ Nicholson and the second to feature a cover by David Gallagher. One FF fan has particularly fond, if bizarre, memories associated with the adventure. “I once read Stealer of Souls in the European Parliament,” relates Thomas Nielsen. “My parents had dragged me in there on a vacation, to hear a four-hour political debate on European farming politics, so I read it to stay awake. It certainly felt like my soul was being stolen.”

Daggers of Darkness With its unforgettable Les Edwards cover painting of a leather jockstrap-wearing warrior riding two Fangtigers – not just one, but two! – Daggers of Darkness (FF35) was Luke Sharp’s third addition to the series and his second set in the south-west corner of Khul. Time is running out – dark forces are massing in the ancient land of Kazan and unless the hero can reach the Great Throne in time, the murderous vizier Chingiz will take power. During the course of the 116 ◉

Gnarled Oak, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1988 and 2014)

Right: Stealer of Souls, by David Gallagher. (© David Gallagher, 1988 and 2014)

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But how did the young artist cope with the pressure of illustrating what had, by then, become a national institution?

The inside cover of the original edition of the book also featured another fully-painted map by Leo Hartas.

“Illustrating Daggers of Darkness when I was so very young was a terrifying experience! I barely coped with the burden of the job and the pressure I felt working for Puffin, which for me at that age felt like the big time! I struggled through it and thought I’d done a terrible job, and was truly amazed when they asked me to illustrate another one... For some reason I wasn’t deterred and accepted the commission and, maybe because I’d gained some confidence having one book under my belt and the editors’ praise, my second book Vault of the Vampire was much more enjoyable to do.”

Armies of Death A follow-up to Trial of Champions (FF21), of sorts, Ian Livingstone’s Armies of Death (FF36) begins by continuing the tale of the champion of Deathtrap Dungeon, explaining how he came to spend his prize money on a castle and set about hiring a force of two hundred and twenty veteran fighters. However, when the hero learns that Agglax the Shadow Demon is amassing an army of undead warriors to conquer Allansia, he journeys east with his troops in tow to meet the enemy head on. The book features a cover by Chris Achilleos, his first since Livingstone’s Temple of Terror (FF14) and Nik Williams’ only contribution as illustrator. As befitting a book with the name Armies of Death, it was the first FF gamebook to contain rules for skirmish battles between opposing forces. When Livingstone started writing the book it went by the working title Shadowmaster.

Portal of Evil

Tusker Mammoth, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1988 and 2014) Sharp, the book’s author, was pleased with McKenna’s contribution too. “My editor Annie Eaton warned me Martin was young and keen and I pretty much mapped out each illustration, but he came up with the goods and did a first class job. Obviously not as experienced an illustrator as Russ Nicholson but I liked his clear style and he followed the brief very well.” 118 ◉

Peter Darvill-Evans returned to the area surrounding the city of Neuberg with his second FF title Portal of Evil (FF37). The story of magical portals and a dinosaur invasion of Khul featured illustrations by Alan Langford (back on dino duties following Battleblade Warrior), all wrapped up inside a David Gallagher cover.

“Again, I wanted to write something different,” says Darvill-Evans, “so a portal to another world of dinosaurs seemed appropriate. And everyone likes dinosaurs.”

Fantasy version of Transylvania, realised within the mountainous Old World realm of Mauristatia, with the obligatory wolves howling at the moon, creepy forests, headless coachmen, and bat-haunted castle. And the plot is what you would expect from such a story too, involving the rescue of a damsel in distress from a bloodthirsty vampire count. The book introduced a FAITH score, an attribute that would later be used by Jonathan Green in Knights of Doom (FF56). Les Edwards painted the cover for the book, his seventh for Fighting Fantasy. “Vault of the Vampire turned out to be one of those classic images. I can’t say why exactly. It’s just one of those cases where everything works the way that was intended. It’s a pretty traditional Vampire but maybe that’s part of its strength. It’s a simple and dramatic image and very direct. It was a big influence on Vampire paintings that I did subsequently. I remember that the publishers asked me to make the girl’s breasts smaller, which I did reluctantly. I suppose this was in the days before silicone was so all-pervasive.” Martin McKenna, who was still only eighteen at the time, turned his hand to producing some very Hammer horror-esque images for the book’s internal illustrations that have stood up very well to the test of time.

Wizard, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1988 and 2014)

Vault of the Vampire Number thirty-eight in the series saw publication of another Fighting Fantasy classic. Incredibly, despite blood-suckers appearing on a regular basis throughout the previous thirtyseven titles, up until this point not one of the princes of the night had ever taken centre stage and become the Big Bad to be dealt with at the climax of an adventure. Keith Martin rectified that with Vault of the Vampire (FF38), transporting the reader to a Fighting

Giant Raven, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1989 and 2014) ◉ 119

rushed so I was never really happy with those… Pretty much all the colour work was in gouache; black and white was in ink.”

Sentinel, by David Gallagher. (© David Gallagher, 1989 and 2014) Tigerskin Rug, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1989 and 2014)

Sharp: “I like my wizard Astragal The Mage, the Cat Goddess Tabasha the Bazouk, Aspra Smoothcheek and of course my alter ego Alkis Fearslicer.”

Fangs of Fury Fangs of Fury (FF39) saw Luke Sharp return to south-west Khul once again. Six massive stone dragons guard the tiny kingdom of Zamarra but the fire they breathe has been extinguished. With the kingdom under siege by Ostragoth the Grim and his swarming hordes, the hero is tasked with restoring the Sentinels’ fire, which involves visiting an active volcano! The adventure was illustrated inside and out by David Gallagher, the first time this had happened despite the artist having already produced three previous covers for other gamebooks in the series. But why had he not contributed interior black and white illustrations before? Gallagher: “I was never asked until then… The covers were always very tight deadlines and some of them were a bit rushed. The internals were even more 120 ◉

This book features an appearance from Astragal, a recurring character in Sharp’s books.

The adventure also shares a number of similarities with his previous book, Daggers of Darkness in terms of game design. Interestingly, the copyright page identifies the author by his real name, Alkis Alkiviades, rather than by his pseudonym. Fangs of Fury would turn out to be Sharp’s final contribution to the series. Sharp: “If you study my three [fantasy] FF books they are based around the elements Fire, Earth and Air. The fourth, based on Water, was to be an adventure through the four hundred islands just off the coast of south-west Khul. I put in a proposal as usual for this book just when my two editors left Puffin and, as so often happens, the new editor Marc Gascoigne did not like my style. Instead of the two-page proposal I usually sent in he asked me to write 100 paragraphs (a quarter of the book) and then rejected my proposal. It’s 28 years ago and I’m still peeved.”

Right: Battleblade Warrior, by David Gallagher. (© David Gallagher, 1989 and 2014)

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Chapter Twelve

The Chronicles of Firetop Mountain From The Trolltooth Wars to The Zagor Chronicles

aving published thirty-eight Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks as well as various background books, multi-player adventures and the like, in April 1989, Puffin did something they had not done so far, in all the years since The Warlock of Firetop Mountain had first taken the world by storm. They published a Fighting Fantasy novel.

H

When asked how the first Fighting Fantasy novel came to be, Steve Jackson has this to say: “As you might have noticed from my list of books, I liked to try new things out. Sorcery! had a new magic system, Starship Traveller was the first SF adventure, House of Hell (Horror), Appointment with F.E.A.R. (Superheroes), Fighting Fantasy Role-Playing (RPG rulebook)… I’d always fancied having a go at writing a straight novel. So I did.”

The Trolltooth Wars

As with previous FF titles, despite being a novel, The Trolltooth Wars was heavily illustrated throughout, and by none other than Fighting Fantasy stalwart Russ Nicholson. The suitably grim FF-style cover, showing an orc removing the head of an undead creature using its blunted cleaver, was produced by Chris Achilleos.

Written by Steve Jackson, The Trolltooth Wars told an alternative tale of the rivalry between three of the most notorious villains in FF history, the so called Demonic Three – Zagor the Warlock (from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain), Balthus Dire (from The Citadel of Chaos), and Zharradan Marr (from Creature of Havoc). But a tale featuring not one but three villains needed a hero, and so Chadda Darkmane was cast in the role that, up until this point, had always been played by the reader in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. The story starts with an ambush, when Balthus Dire’s Goblins mount a raid on a Strongarm caravan carrying a mystical herb destined for Zharradan Marr himself, an action which leads to all-out war between the two rivals. As the war escalates, the city of Salamonis comes under threat and Darkmane is tasked with turning the war to the kingdom’s advantage and prevent the Vale of Willow from being invaded.

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“I was given the outline of the story and it was left up to me,” says Achilleos. “I quite liked the concept of an orc fighting off a disgusting skeleton.” But of course writing a novel is a markedly different discipline compared to writing a gamebook. So how did Jackson find the process, having only written FF adventures and what were effectively rules manuals up until this point? “I have to say, I found it much more difficult than writing a gamebook! The gamebook is basically a puzzle to solve. But a novel…? You have to develop characters, end paragraphs with dramatic effect… It took me a year. And when I finally handed it in, I was anxious to hear how Puffin would be launching FF’s first novel. How would they make sure FF fans knew it existed? Would they at least be placing adverts in games magazines? But I couldn’t get anyone to tell me. In the end, Liz Attenborough told it to me straight: ‘It wasn’t Puffin’s policy to advertise individual books.’ So after all that work, they wouldn’t put a penny behind promoting the book. They’d just run it through their distribution system and hope the fans found out about it by word of mouth. It was the last FF book I wrote…”

Right: Shadowmaster, by John Sibbick. (© John Sibbick, 1992 and 2014)

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Fighting Fantasy Fact

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When Jackson wrote The Trolltooth Wars, his plan was to send Darkmane through the Firetop Mountain dungeon in such a way that the reader could work out the solution to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by following Darkmane’s travels. “Having read through it, our editor didn’t like this,” says Jackson, “mainly because it took up half the book! So it was edited down considerably. You can still work out the solution, though.”

This lack of any effective marketing wasn’t Jackson’s only regret regarding his first novel. Vast numbers of pages were cut from the book by Puffin to trim it for length as well as to excise some of its more bloodthirsty descriptions. A new concept introduced in the novels that never actually filtered through into the gamebooks themselves was Amonour, the measure of a hero’s fame and prestige. And yet it could be argued that Amonour is what the hero of the Fighting Fantasy books has been questing for since the very beginning!

Demonstealer Despite the complete lack of a marketing campaign for this new Fighting Fantasy venture, The Trolltooth Wars wasn’t the last FF novel. Fans loved it and, as it turned out, Jackson had created another offshoot of the Fighting Fantasy brand that fans were keen to see continued. And so, two years later, Demonstealer was published. Despite the ending of The Trolltooth Wars making the return of Chadda Darkmane seem highly unlikely, in Demonstealer he did return, this time pitted against enemies not yet 124 ◉

encountered in any Fighting Fantasy gamebook. The story begins with a burglary from the tower of Yaztromo the sorcerer, which sees the thief escape with an ancient scroll, the secrets contained within which, unsurprisingly, could spell doom and destruction for all Allansia. Darkmane sets off in pursuit, the trail leading him to the Pirate Coast and the town of Rimon, where he encounters the Skinless Ones, demons summoned by the thief to help him complete his nefarious quest. Once again, Demonstealer featured the familiar pen and ink illustrations of Russ Nicholson while Terry Oakes produced the cover. But how long did it take to produce a cover like the one for Demonstealer? “It all depended on the amount of detail demanded by any particular cover, of course,” says Oakes, “but as a general rule-of-thumb it took about five to seven days to complete. However, on occasions commissions could be ‘dropped in my lap’, as the saying goes, whereby everything became governed by the dreaded deadline – in which case I would put in an extra effort by working longer hours… Now and then I did manage to finish a piece in three to four days when required.”

Shadowmaster Having had one novel written by one of the creators of Fighting Fantasy, and one written by the consultant editor on the line at the time, in 1992 it was the turn of Ian Livingstone to contribute a story to the burgeoning fiction line.

Right: The Trolltooth Wars, by Chris Achilleos. (© Chris Achilleos, 1989 and 2014)

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The plot for the novel delved into the origins of the reptilian Shape Changers, a species that had first appeared in The Forest of Doom (and subsequently in the Livingstone penned adventures Island of the Lizard King and Armies of Death).

fantasy subjects you may  have multiple sources, flames, the moon, wizard’s magic light – also have a focal point in the action so that all the title graphics don’t overwhelm the drama. Some designs work better than others...”

However, Livingstone was busy with other things at the time and so turned to Gascoigne for help in turning his outline into a fully-fledged novel. But there was also another collaborator on the book, who is given credit in the novel’s dedication. “This book is for Bill King, the real Master of Shadows.”

The design for Shadowmaster worked very well indeed.

William ‘Bill’ King is now probably best known for his work for Black Library, and for creating the everpopular adventuring double-act of Gotrek and Felix. “He advised on some tricky passages later in the book,” explains Gascoigne. The book is notable for giving the Shape Changers distinct identities and personalities. There is also a thrilling battle scene during which the abilities of Shape Changers are properly explored for the first time, with one of the creatures changing shape as the battle progresses in order to defend itself as effectively as possible, growing new armour and sprouting lethal claws as required. Russ Nicholson illustrated Chadda Darkmane’s third adventure (making it three for three) while John Sibbick produced what was probably the most accomplished cover of the series. But how does an artist go about producing such an incredibly detailed painting? “The artwork for all the covers I worked on were naturally larger than repro,” says Sibbick. “I would have gone mad painting Shadowmaster so small otherwise. The initial pencil sketch with notes and remarks took two to three days, and I think the art took at least three weeks at 150% repro. “I work in designers gouache – a watercolour medium in small tubes – and I use the most permanent colours in the range. The technique is always the same; work out the light source and where it comes from – in 126 ◉

Spiderbones As it turned out, Shadowmaster was the last Chadda Darkmane novel to be published. However, around the time of Fighting Fantasy’s tenth anniversary, there was a fourth outing for the hero in the works that went by the working title of Spiderbones. The intended subject of the story was cunningly woven into the text of The Fighting Fantasy 10th Anniversary Yearbook. In Zagor the Warlock’s profile, mention is made of Fighting Fantasy’s greatest ever villain having a son and heir…

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated… Towards the end of Fighting Fantasy’s time with Puffin Books, Marc Gascoigne asked the FF authors to submit short stories set within the world of Titan. Keith P Phillips offered to write the whole collection, while Jonathan Green completed a story featuring the wizard Yaztromo. But before any of the stories could see print the project was shelved. But FF fiction was not done yet and Shadowmaster wasn’t the last Fighting Fantasy novel to be published, not by a long shot. After all, there was a certain warlock who refused to stay dead and kept coming back for more.

The Zagor Chronicles Between 1993 and 1994 four short novels were published under the banner The Zagor Chronicles. The books were a spin-off from Ian Livingstone’s Legend of Zagor board game (published by Parker Brothers in 1993), reusing characters and events from both the game and the Legend of Zagor gamebook released around the same time. But when asked how much of The Zagor Chronicles was his idea, Livingstone mischievously confesses, “The name!” The action passed between the magical world of Amarillia, first seen in Livingstone’s book Casket of Souls, and Allansia, with each of the four books reusing one of Iain McCaig’s paintings originally created for the Puzzle Quest book, which shared only a passing connection with the story contained within.

The series features the exploits of three heroes from Legend of Zagor, the exception being Sallazar the wizard who is already dead before the first adventure begins. His place is taken by his sister Jallarial. While the first two stories, Firestorm and Darkthrone, take place within Amarillia, for the third book in the series, Skullcrag, the action transfers to Allansia, with the heroes meeting the notorious ruler of Port Blacksand, Lord Azzur, before heading into the depths of Firetop Mountain and the Crystal Caves of the Snow Witch Shareella. Demonlord (the fourth book in the cycle) returns to Amarillia for an apocalyptic finale. Zagor has taken demon-form, and his power seems almost without limit. A cruel tyrant, he crushes all opposition to his regime of torment and death from the depths of his undeadinfested fortress Castle Argent. Having failed to destroy their enemy once on Amarillia itself, and again on Titan, the heroes risk all in a final, desperate struggle against their nightmarish opponent. FF fan Lin Liren found The Zagor Chronicles to be, “surprisingly grim, bleak and brutally violent for novels aimed at a 13-15 year-old audience, and the bittersweet ending is unforgettable.” Leo Hartas was once again tasked with producing the maps that appeared inside The Zagor Chronicles. All four books were written in haste and after 1994, there would never be another published Fighting Fantasy novel. FF fan Andy Jones echoes the sentiments of many when he says, “I loved the novels because I thought they were a natural progression from the gamebooks. They were a great opportunity to add further depth and background to familiar characters and locations. I wish there had been more of them.” Dragonback Attack, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 2014) ◉ 127

Chapter Thirteen

Leaving Firetop Mountain What Steve and Ian Did Next

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t is worth remembering, that while Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone are both games industry pioneers and entrepreneurs, having co-founded Games Workshop in 1975 to launch Dungeons & Dragons in Europe, they are also authors and games designers in their own right. They should be credited as having started the gamebook boom in the UK in 1982 following the publication by Penguin Books of their first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. They still indulge their passion for Fighting Fantasy today, although perhaps less so than they did in the past. But back in the mid-1980s they found it tough running the business of Games Workshop and managing the demands placed upon them by Penguin Books who wanted more and more Fighting Fantasy titles to publish.

of its creators and owners, Jackson and Livingstone would also have time to exercise their enthusiasm for gaming in new ways.

Steve Jackson F.I.S.T. In 1988, Computerdial got in touch with Steve Jackson, asking if he thought it would be possible to create any games along the lines of Fighting Fantasy but using the system the company had developed that could read the clicks of a rotary dial telephone. “Computerdial wanted to use this to create an FF-style audio adventure. ‘If you want to turn right, dial ONE; if you want to turn left, dial TWO’ etc.,” Jackson

“We were spending ten hours a day in the office, then going home and typing until midnight, and all weekend,” says Jackson. “My girlfriend at the time was not amused!” adds Livingstone. Their solution was to promote one of Games Workshop’s senior executives to a position whereby the operational side of the business could run without their daily input. Thus Bryan Ansell (with whom Jackson and Livingstone had founded Citadel Miniatures) was promoted to the role of Managing Director of Games Workshop. Ansell would, over time, buy a majority stake in the company, with Jackson and Livingstone retaining a minority stake.  It was all change again in 1991 when Tom Kirby became Managing Director of Games Workshop after a management buy-out, and two years later Games Workshop was floated on the London Stock Exchange to become a public limited company. With Games Workshop going from strength-to-strength independently, and Fighting Fantasy in the safe hands

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Right: War of Wizards, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 2014)

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explains. He likens their request to someone telling him they had just invented a pack of cards and asking him if he could think up any games to play with them. Clearly the system was a perfect fit for a Fighting Fantasy-style adventure. “F.I.S.T. was originally supposed to be a Fighting Fantasy adventure, based on a book to be published in six months’ time, so they could be cross-marketed. But when I looked at it in detail, it was obvious this wasn’t going to work. In a gamebook you can have a page and a half of background. But as an audio adventure on the phone, no one would listen to five minutes of background at 25p per minute. So I set about designing an original adventure, designed specifically for phone play.” The creative process was the closest Jackson ever came to programming a computer. He wrote two scenarios for F.I.S.T. (as it was called by then, an acronym of Fantasy Interactive Scenarios by Telephone). The first, Castle Mammon: Lair of the Demon Prince, was released in September 1988. The adventure saw the hero battling his way deep inside Castle Mammon in order to slay the Demon Prince Kaddis Ra. The player was bombarded by sound effects, while voiceovers described what was going on. Castle Mammon was followed by a direct sequel, The Rings of Allion, which came out in March 1989.

at the time. I was quite worried about this aspect as it would inevitably attract gold miners. Was the design robust enough to ensure that the gold score couldn’t be hacked? But I don’t think we had any trouble.” After placing an advert in The Mirror newspaper, Computerdial had 5,000 people phoning in every day to play. But when they put an ad on the back page of  The Sun, to use Jackson’s words, “it went ballistic.” “Initially I’d call up from my home phone,” reminisces FF fan Steve Brown. “It wasn’t a touch tone phone but one of those where you had a dial so selecting option four or higher was a real pain. I also remember the phone bill coming in and my mum and dad flipping out. After that, I tried to play from public phone boxes on those funny phone cards you used to be able to buy, but my £1 (10 credits) barely got me through the opening dialogue welcoming me to F.I.S.T. After that, I gave up on F.I.S.T as too expensive a hobby to pursue.” Despite the cost involved in playing the game, F.I.S.T. was still a colossal success. “It did incredibly well,” says Jackson, “spawning two further F.I.S.T. sequels and a couple of other games, notably, Gladiators of the Roman Empire (G.O.R.E.). Computerdial even launched F.I.S.T. in America and I was there for the moment the lines went live. Very exciting. The Computerdial adventures clocked up over 5 million telephone minutes. I think F.I.S.T. was the first ever play-by-phone game.”

BattleCards

Combat consisted of the player first listening to a description of what their opponent was doing, and then pushing a key combination to dictate their response, either a supposed physical action or the casting of a spell. The game also worked with touch tone phones and could be saved at any time. Although it was played as a solo game, those who phoned in could listen to the rankings of the high scores of other players, and actual cash prizes – in the form of physical gold coins – were awarded at the end of each month to the highest scorer. Jackson: “Every month the person who had emerged out of the F.I.S.T. dungeon with the highest score won an actual gold sovereign, probably worth around £100 130 ◉

In the early 1990s, Jackson developed a collectible card game that was released only a few months before Richard Garfield’s Magic: The Gathering. BattleCards (sometimes known as Steve Jackson’s BattleCards) came out in 1993, from Merlin Publishing. Although supposedly a separate entity from Fighting Fantasy, for fans of the genre there are some very obvious links. For example, Vangoria, the world in which the BattleCards game is set, is bounded to the east by The Eelsea, which is also the name of the body of water that lies to the west of the Old World in the Fighting Fantasy world of Titan. Secondly The Orb of Shantos is mentioned in The Tasks of Tantalon and Moonweed, referenced in The Cursewitch’s Quest BattleCard, appears in The Trolltooth Wars, as does the name Cursewitch. However, Jackson denies there is any link between the two at all. “I can’t remember why I decided not to locate BattleCards in Titan,” he confesses. “Other

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Steve Jackson may have been the first person to come up with the phrase ‘role-playing game’. In early 1976, he wrote a review of En Garde! for Owl & Weasel (Games Workshop’s original gaming news fanzine). This was a 3 Musketeers quest game which used a gamesmaster. Struggling to find an effective way to describe how the Dungeons & Dragons-style experience differed from other games, he described it as a “a role-playing game”.

’sideline’ projects like Tasks of Tantalon had been set in Titan, so why not BattleCards as well? I guess with F.I.S.T. and BattleCards I was thinking they would do better set in their own universes rather than having to keep checking whether these new projects were consistent with what was happening in Titan.” The aim of the game was to win the Emperor of Vangoria card (numbered #150) by collecting eight Treasure cards. These in turn were won by undertaking The Quests of Vangoria, or purchased using gold collected from winning battles with other cards, which involved scratching off foil-coated spots on each, hoping to find blood symbols beneath. Other features included spell battles and shield cards (in the UK version), which added a level of complexity to the game. A number of Fighting Fantasy artists contributed artwork for the game, including Peter Andrew Jones, Les Edwards, Iain McCaig, Alan Craddock, Terry Oakes and Martin McKenna. BattleCards was later released in the US, the major difference between the two editions being that Martin McKenna’s box art was replaced by a painting by Alan

Some of Martin McKenna’s BattleCards illustrations. (© Martin McKenna, 2014)

Craddock, who had produced the covers for the FF adventures Rebel Planet and Star Strider. Unfortunately, BattleCards was eclipsed by the success of Magic: The Gathering, and Jackson admits that the game was, “probably too complicated”. He also has no idea how many people actually completed it successfully.

Abandon Art Abandon Art was the world’s first gallery devoted entirely to Fantasy and Science Fiction art. It was founded by Jackson in 1993, in the London Borough of Richmond. Jackson: “Originally I bought 16 King Street as my office away from home, and as an investment property, set right in the town centre of Richmond, two minutes’ walk from the river. I had my office upstairs and opened up the shop as a SF/F art gallery; the first one in Europe. Maybe even the US too. I contacted all the artists I had met through FF, and a few, like Patrick Woodroffe, who I knew by reputation only.”

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The artists Abandon Art had on its books included the likes of John Blanche, Ian Miller, Chris Achilleos, Jim Burns, Les Edwards and Peter Andrew Jones. “Everyone was prepared to send me some of their works to offer for sale. Abandon Art even published its own range of signed Limited Edition prints. We had several customers who made pilgrimages to the gallery. But after four years my wife, a physiotherapist, persuaded me to let her use the shop for a physiotherapy surgery she was starting with a friend. And so it was that Abandon Art was replaced by Richmond Physiotherapy.”

off the page at her as her son was a fan of  Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. The very first Games Page appeared on 21 January 1995, and ran every Saturday for two and a half years. “The Games Page consisted of a games-related story, a video game review, a self-working magic trick (I like card magic), a couple of word/number puzzles and a Scrabble puzzle,” says Jackson. “Alan Simmons’ Scrabble Puzzle is still there after all these years. But the rest of the page has been replaced by a Giant General Knowledge crossword.”

The Games Page

Along with various logic puzzles and lateral thinking problems, the Games Page included an item called Pun Pix.

When he was still running Games Workshop, Jackson had written to The Times, in an attempt to persuade them to publish a weekly games page in the newspaper, but his suggestions fell on deaf ears. In 1994 he sent out another such proposal, only this time to The Daily Telegraph. It just so happened that one of the editor of the Saturday Weekend section, Bernice Davison, was looking to run a new feature and Jackson’s name leapt

Jackson: “I seem to have become known for excruciating puns – ask Ian. The plan with the Games Page was that, apart from the Scrabble puzzle, there would be two others – one a classic puzzle which readers might not have come across before – which had to be both interesting and solvable by the ordinary person. Previously the Telegraph had been running original maths puzzles as prize competitions which

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Steve Jackson with the other Directors of Lionhead celebrating after Microsoft bought the company in 2006. (© Steve Jackson, 2006 and 2014)

were impossible for the ordinary man in the street to fathom. They typically received only 4-5 entries each week. We couldn’t run the classic puzzles as prize comps as many people would have seen them before. So I set about coming up with a new puzzle. I wanted it to be a picture puzzle, to liven up the page. The result was Pun Pix. You had to identify photos of celebrities and that would lead to a song title. One of my favourites was Bjorn Borg, a Ninja Turtle, Hugh Grant, Herman Hess and a bale of Hay. So: Bjorn Ninja Hugh Hess Hay. Say it quickly and you get Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’.” During his time writing the Games Page, Jackson interviewed video game designer Peter Molyneux about the success of his company Bullfrog Productions and their (at the time) forthcoming game Dungeon Keeper. This led to the two men forming a firm friendship, the two of them sharing a passion for German board games. In fact, Jackson is such a fan of board games that in 1993 he won the title of Best Individual Player at the Intergame World Boardgame championships at Essen.

Lionhead Studios When Peter Molyneux set up Lionhead Studios in 1996, he asked Jackson to join the team in game design. However, Jackson’s lack of programming skills meant that he ended up working on the business side, bringing a wealth of experience to the company, earned during his days establishing and running Games Workshop twenty years before. In 1998 the company released Black & White, one of the god game genre, and went on to create such classics as the Fable series. Jackson: “Those were great years, working on Black & White and Fable. They were pretty hairy years too, but it was a big adventure, and it had a happy ending.” In 2006, Lionhead was taken over by Microsoft and Jackson’s involvement with the company came to a natural end.

Ian Livingstone Board Games In a career spanning almost forty years in the games industry, Ian Livingstone not only co-founded Games Workshop, co-created the Fighting Fantasy series and launched Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, he also designed a number of board games. “I’ve always had a passion for playing board games,” says Livingstone. “From Chess and Monopoly at school, to Diplomacy and Avalon Hill games played in my youth, to today’s strategy games that come under the banner of Euro games, I never tire of board games. For indoor entertainment value, it’s hard to beat getting friends around the table to play a great board game. Social interaction, negotiation, deals, alliances, back-stabbing, the bragging rights of victory! I have over 1,000 board games at home and would never dream of getting rid of them. “I’ve been Secretary of the Games Night Club since it formed in 1986. There are only six members - myself, Steve Jackson, Peter Molyneux, Mark Spangenthal, Skye Quin and Clive Robert. We score points for each game played and I publish the results in the Games Night Newsletter as well as ridiculing the members. I’ve just published, ironically, issue 400 for the loyal readership of six subscribers. At the end of the year, the winner gets to keep the Pagoda Cup for the year and has it engraved for posterity. I’m delighted to say I won the cup again in 2013. It’s all very tongue-incheek, but great fun. “Call me old-fashioned, but I really treasure the physical presence of my games, recounting great games played as I cast my eyes over the boxes lining the shelves. The production values these days are incredible. All the plastic and wooden bits to get excited about! I used to be worried that so few UK shops stocked good board games, but there are so many great online stores these days, it’s not a problem. Boardgamegeek.com tells you all you need to know, and now there’s Kickstarter.com enabling games to go into production which otherwise would never have been made. It’s all good!” Livingstone says he likes designing board games almost as much as playing them. His first published game was The Barbarian which was part of a ‘double pack’ for Task Force Games in 1981. This was followed by Judge Dredd, a fast-action game of crime fighting in MegaCity One published by Games Workshop in the same ◉ 133

year as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published in 1982. Battlecars was his next game published by Games Workshop in 1983, designed, ironically, with Gary Chalk who soon after left Games Workshop along with Joe Dever to write and illustrate Lone Wolf books. The big boxed dungeon exploration game Legend of Zagor for Parker Brothers was Livingstone’s most successful game, selling across Europe. Other games designed by Livingstone include Dragon Masters for Games Workshop in 1991 and Ali Baba for Abacus Spiele in 1993. Livingstone decided to publish two of his own designs as limited editions of 1,000 copies under the imprint of Livingstone Games. The first, Boom Town (1990), is described on Boardgamegeek.com as a ‘famous rare game’ which had players constructing a new English town set in the 1950s. This was done by laying tiles to represent residential areas, shops and factories. However, there are spoiler tiles as well, such as the rubbish dump, which reduce a player’s score. The game features a strong element of mutual caution which only lasts as long as nobody lays any bad tiles, and then all hell breaks loose.

various ways. For each $10,000 profit a player earns, their scoring marker is moved one space along the scoring track. Naturally, first round the track wins.

Card Games Legend of Zagor wasn’t the only FF-related game designed by Livingstone. When Deathtrap Dungeon was released as a video game in 1998, it was accompanied by a card game also inspired by the eponymous dungeon as well as by the ancient Chinese card game Zheng Shang Yu. The deck consists of 82 cards that depict characters from the computer game, including Imps, Alchemists, Skeletons, Orcs, Ratmen, Zombies, Snake Girls and Pit Fiends. There are even cards representing the video game’s infamous Exploding Pig, the Killing Machine, and the two heroes Red Lotus and Chaindog, which all have unique special properties. To play the game, the cards are shuffled and dealt. Whoever receives the Exploding Pig card starts by discarding the Pig along with one other card of their choice. Play proceeds clockwise from there on, with players putting down any number of cards of equal value, of increasingly higher values, until a player does not have a suitable combination of cards, or chooses to pass. Once every player has had a chance to put down their cards, whoever put down the cards of highest value gets to start the next hand. A hand may also be ended abruptly by the playing of the Killing Machine, which can be played at any time, and allows the person who played it to start the next hand. A round ends when only one player has any cards left, but the winner is whoever was first to go out.

Interactive Telephone Games Boom Town was followed in 1991 by Automania: The Game of The Motor Giants, which was again a limited edition of 1,000 copies. The game featured a board, wooden car-shaped playing pieces, and a numbered deck of 56 Market Cards which affect the game each round. In Automania players represent national car manufacturers who are trying to export cars to six other countries. Each market has an export limit that it can accept and the cars go for a fixed price in each market, so whoever spends more money on advertising gets to sell their cars first. But before revealing the spending, players play one of their Market Cards, which affect the Market in 134 ◉

Like Jackson, Livingstone also dabbled with interactive telephone games. War of Wizards was a phone-based spell battle as opposed to a role-playing game (like Steve Jackson’s F.I.S.T.) and did not prove to be as popular. However, the advertisements for the game did feature brand new artwork by Iain McCaig.

Video Games Back in the mid-1980s, Ian Livingstone was commissioned to carry out some design work for a

new computer game publisher Domark, as a direct result of the success he had had with his third solo gamebook, Deathtrap Dungeon. The game he designed for the company was called Eureka! Released in 1984, Eureka! was the launch game for the company and took the form of a text adventure with simple graphics for the Spectrum and Commodore 64. A prize of £25,000 was offered to the first person to solve the final puzzle. It was programmed in Budapest for secrecy so that the solution of how to win was not leaked. Livingstone recalls some interesting times during his visits to Communist Hungary back in the mid-1980s. The first person to solve the puzzle would discover a phone number to ring to claim the prize. Ian handed over the £25,000 cheque to the eventual winner on national TV. With Jackson and Livingstone having sold their remaining interest in Games Workshop as part of a management buy-out in 1991, Livingstone joined Domark (at the company’s invitation) in 1992, only this time not as an external game designer but as a major investor with a seat on the board of directors. Domark was focused on developing video games for 16-bit consoles and Livingstone had joined the company at a time when the market had started to go into decline. Livingstone was immediately tasked with helping to turn the company’s ailing fortunes around. In 1993 his favourite Domark title was Championship Manager, which he considered to be of significant value to the company because it was both a great game and Domark owned the intellectual property in the name. He advised the company to focus on PC games in the short term, rather than rushing into developing more expensive titles for the yet-to-be established 32-bit console market. He was well aware that the company needed much more working capital for that ambition. In late 1994 Domark began merger talks with Eidos Technologies, a research and development technology company which specialised in compression and decompression of video in software. Two more games companies were brought into the proposed merger, Simis and Big Red. The merger went ahead and the new company floated on the London Stock Exchange in October 1995. Charles Cornwall became CEO of the Eidos plc group of companies, and Livingstone was appointed Executive Chairman, a position he held until 2002. The flotation raised the much-needed additional working capital for the company to get back to console game development. In 1996 Eidos acquired Centregold (U.S. Gold), the only other publicly-quoted UK video games company

on the London Stock Market. Centregold brought with them an action/adventure game being developed by Core Design. The game in question was Tomb Raider. Livingstone discovered Tomb Raider during the due diligence period of the acquisition. For him it was ‘love at first sight’ when he first saw Lara Croft on screen when he visited Core Design which was managed by Jeremy Heath-Smith. Lara Croft was the creation of Toby Gard, a 2D artist at Core Design, who got the studio’s backing in having a female lead character in their tomb-raiding game. Following the successful launch of Tomb Raider which helped drive the success of Sony’s PlayStation, Eidos became the darling of the City of London. Revenues soared and the company quickly became a major developer and publisher of a portfolio of commercially successful and critically-acclaimed video games that included Hitman, Deus Ex, Thief and Championship Manager as well as the multi-million selling Tomb Raider franchise.

Ian Livingstone hands the Man of the Match Award to Danny Tiatto during the 2001-2002 season, when Manchester City won promotion back to the Premier League, as Liam Gallagher and Lara Croft look on. (© Ian Livingstone, 2002 and 2014) Livingstone: “Video games today have become mass market entertainment. From immersive, cinematic games played on consoles for the core gamer to bitesized chunks of fun available to casual gamers on their smart phones, there is now something for everybody. Single-player or multi-player, the immediacy of video games is very appealing. High-speed broadband means that players don’t have to be in the same room to play against each other. And with smart phones and tablets you can play anywhere, anytime with anyone you like for as long as you like. All the record-keeping is done for you, and for me that is a big plus. But (big admission time) if there was a fire in my house and I ◉ 135

only had time to escape with one game, it would be my favourite board game.” Despite the number ones and spectacular growth, Eidos suffered problems of its own when the 32-bit market went into decline. When Eidos was taken over by SCi in 2005, Livingstone was the only former member on the board asked to stay on. He convinced the new owners to retain the Eidos company name because of the equity in the brand. But in 2009, Eidos changed hands again. Japanese video game company Square Enix became the new owners. Livingstone’s long involvement with the company and his creative legacy were both recognised when he was given the title Life President of Eidos. He remained in that position until October 2013. After 20 years with Domark/Eidos/Square Enix it was time to say goodbye. He was gone but not forgotten.

Skills Champion It wasn’t only gamers who were aware of the expertise Livingstone had acquired over nearly forty years spent working in the games industry. In 2010, Ed Vaizey, the UK Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, invited Livingstone to act as the government’s Skills Champion and tasked him with producing a report to review the state of the UK video games industry at the time. The Next Gen review, which he co-authored with Alex Hope of computer visual effects company Double Negative, was published in 2011 by NESTA (www.nesta.org.uk). About the review, Livingstone said, “Next Gen highlighted the poor quality of ICT teaching in schools as one of our biggest obstacles to growth. Against all odds, ICT had managed to put children off digital creativity despite them running their lives through their mobile devices. ICT taught children how to consume technology but gave them no insight into how to create it. In effect it taught them how to read but not how to write. Learning 136 ◉

Word, PowerPoint and Excel is never going to get anybody a job in the games industry. We need more digital makers. And it’s not just about games. The world has become exponentially reliant on technology. We are totally dependent on computer programmers. Computing is no longer a marginal skill for experts and geeks – it’s essential knowledge.” The recommendations in the Next Gen review helped convince Michael Gove, The Secretary of State for Education, to disapply the current ICT curriculum, replacing it with a Computing curriculum for schools in England beginning in September 2014. Welcoming the announcement, Livingstone said, “Brilliant. Children will learn how to make games, not just play them.” And then in July 2014, Business Secretary Vince Cable appointed Livingstone as the Department for Businesses’ Creative Industries Champion. In his new position, Livingstone will play a key role in both the promotion and support of the creative sector and its skills base, helping to ensure that business and skills policies are well tailored to the creative industries.

Awards Like the hero from one of his gamebooks amassing a veritable shopping trolley’s worth of special items, Livingstone has acquired a number of awards in recognition of his work in the games industry. In 2000, the University of Abertay, Dundee, awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Technology, while in 2002 he won a BAFTA Special Award for his outstanding contribution to the computer games industry. Livingstone was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2006 New Year Honours List, for ‘Services to the Computer Games Industry’. In 2011 he received another honorary degree, this time an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Bournemouth University. Add to that a British Inspiration Award and the Develop Legend Award. In the Wired 100 list for 2012, he was ranked the 16th most influential person in the UK’s digital economy. Most recently, in 2013, he was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) again for ‘Services to the Computer Games Industry’. Having received so many awards how would Livingstone most like to be remembered?

Livingstone: “Hopefully for bringing a bit of fun into people’s lives. We are all playful by nature, but many of us don’t like to admit it. The media wrongly portrays games as being trivial or even bad for you. I hope I have helped to change the perception of games. As well as being great fun, games teach life skills such as problem-solving, intuitive learning, collaboration, communication, risk-taking, trial and error, and encourage creative thinking. For me, life is a game.”

No time like the present So what has Steve Jackson done since leaving Lionhead? Jackson: “These days I am Professor of Game Design at Brunel University, where I teach a class of Masterslevel students how to get into the industry. I’ve been doing this for six years [as of 2013] and the original MA course has expanded to undergraduate courses as well. I also involve myself in Fighting Fantasy licensing. Over the last few years we’ve licensed FF as iOS, DS and Kindle games, plus Advanced Fighting Fantasy: The Role-Playing Game and two Chinese versions of the original FF series.”

The Livingstone Foundation On 30 September 2013 it was reported that Livingstone was leaving Eidos after twenty years with the company, to focus on projects outside of Square Enix. A statement released by the company read, “All of us at Square Enix do want to take this opportunity to publicly thank Ian for his unparalleled tenure and contribution to this business and the UK games industry. And we wish him every success with his future projects and new ventures.” These new ventures included setting up The Livingstone Foundation to open Free Schools and Academies based on the ethos of creativity, collaboration, coding, communication and problem-solving skills for a curriculum where games would be used contextually as learning tools.

development. Judging by the photo, should it ever go into production, it’s destined to become a very important collector’s item.

And what of Ian Livingstone? How does he fill his days now? Livingstone: “I seem to be busier than ever these days. I’m working on a new book and a game idea. I’ve invested in several indie games companies and am helping to grow their businesses. I’m Chairman of Playdemic Ltd, Chairman of Midoki Ltd and Chairman of PlayMob Ltd. On the advisory side, I chair Skillset’s Video Games Council, chair Next Gen Skills Committee, and am Vice Chair of UKIE. I’m a Member of the Creative Industries Council, Trustee of GamesAid and an Adviser to the British Council. I also do quite a bit of public speaking around the world. Last but not least, I’m applying to open a Free School.” If things work out as he would like, his school ambition could well be a long-lasting legacy that Livingstone will be remembered for in years to come. What’s noticeable is that in spite of everything else Jackson and Livingstone have achieved in the fields of big business, gaming, publishing and education, Fighting Fantasy remains very important to both of them. “It’s like our child has grown up!” says Jackson. Livingstone teased the Dragonmeet 2013 audience, at which he and Jackson spoke, with a photo of a Bloodbeast model, implying that a Fighting Fantasy board game with highly detailed figures might be in

The Shapechanger and the Bloodbeast, sculpted by Damien Sparkes. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014) ◉ 137

Chapter Fourteen

Tales of Firetop Mountain (Part 2) From Dead of Night to Siege of Sardath

I

n 1989, seven years after The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was first published, the Fighting Fantasy series entered middle age, with the publication of its fortieth title occurring before the year was out. FF40 also introduced a new creative team to the series. The names Jim Bambra and Stephen Hand might have been new to the majority of Fighting Fantasy’s youthful readership but they were already well-known to gamers, having written for such RPGs as Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and both were former employees of Games Workshop as well.

Dead of Night Dead of Night (FF40, story copyright Jim Bambra and Stephen Hand) took as its setting the kingdom of Gallantaria (the adventure taking place after the events related in The Tasks of Tantalon) and helped complete the integration of the Old World into the wider Fighting Fantasy milieu, being the first solo gamebook to be set there since The Crown of Kings concluded the Sorcery! series back in 1985.

be a grimly realistic place, a slice of a horrific medieval world in which politics would play its part too (as can be seen more clearly in Hand’s later, solo titles). In Dead of Night, the hero is a Demon-Stalker, who has dedicated his life to waging war against the creatures of Chaos. Having thwarted the evil schemes of the Demon Prince Myurr on more than one occasion, the hero’s nemesis exacts his revenge, striking directly against the Demon-Stalker’s family. On top of that, Myurr’s powers are growing and he will soon be able to transport his demonic hordes to the Earthly Plane. The Demon Lord must be stopped! The gamebook was illustrated by Martin McKenna, with a cover by Terry Oakes.

Working together – rather like Jackson and Livingstone had in the beginning – Bambra tackled the task with his standard approach to writing fantasy scenarios, whereas Hand was keen to push the limits of what was possible in a gamebook. Hand was also hugely inspired by pulp horror, such as the kind produced by Hammer studios in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Funeral Procession, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1989 and 2014)

They agreed that their version of the Old World would

Dead of Night remains both the first and last time that

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Right: Master of Chaos, by Les Edwards. (© Les Edwards, 1990 and 2014)

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Bambra contributed an adventure to the FF series, but what a memorable entry it was! Hand, on the other hand, would go on to contribute two more Gallantariaset adventures before quitting the series.

Master of Chaos Master of Chaos (FF41) was Keith Martin’s third entry into the FF series. Set upon Khul, the Dark Continent, it has the hero tracking down a Staff of Power stolen by the eponymous Master of Chaos. Warped by centuries of evil, this madman plans to unite the forces of Evil and Chaos and plunge Titan into a new Dark Age. Illustrated internally by David Gallagher, the book also featured another fully-painted Les Edwards cover (as had Keith’s previous entry in the series, Vault of the Vampire) consisting of a conjured two-headed crocodile – actually the Zoalinth, a mutant creation and chief servant of Shanzikuul, the Master of Chaos.

Black Vein Prophecy The forty-second book in the series saw another departure from the norm. By now the addition of new attributes was the norm, rather than the exception, but no attributes? And not even any rules? That was how Black Vein Prophecy (FF42) began. There wasn’t even a Background section and so, with no explanation whatsoever of what was going on, the reader was thrown straight in at paragraph #1, apparently waking up inside his own tomb. The usual stats and combat rules were introduced later as the adventure developed, but what a great way to start an adventure, with echoes of Steve Jackson’s 140 ◉

Creature of Havoc, only minus the encyclopaedia’s worth of information that came with it at the start! “We had the chance to write another book so had to put some ideas together,” says Mason. “Steve Williams came up with the ‘twins’ theme, and probably the terracotta warrior lift as well. I had enjoyed the fauxArabian bits of Riddling Reaver, but my main interest was China, especially The Water Margin TV series and book, so that was what was driving me. And I think Sorcery! suggested we could do a little something with magic. After that it was just Steve and I brainstorming, much of it in front of the computer with drink in hand.” Black Vein Prophecy was illustrated inside and out by Terry Oakes.

The Keep of the Lich-Lord Where Bambra and Hand had collaborated on the creation of Dead of Night throughout the design process and on into the writing stages, the forty-third FF title was written in much the same way as the first, as Dave Morris, one of its co-authors, explains: “We split the work right down the middle: Jamie wrote 200 sections to get to the keep, then I took over and did everything from that point.” In The Keep of the Lich-Lord (FF43), freed from his crypt, the undead Lord Mortis seizes Bloodrise Keep on Stayng Island. It’s up to the hero to assassinate the Lich-Lord before his zombie hordes overrun the Arrowhead Islands. Morris has mixed feelings about his one and only contribution to the FF series: “I submitted several story proposals (along with Jamie Thomson, my co-author) and that was the one they liked. I don’t think it was the strongest one. I’d have rather done Keeper of the Seven Keys.” He wasn’t the only one. “The manuscript got sent back by Marc Gascoigne because there were too many cut and paste sections – including about fifty paragraphs spent searching a cemetery. I agreed with Marc; those

bits were tedious. I rewrote a big chunk of the book and I’m happy to have my name on the finished version.” Both the cover and internal art were by David Gallagher, who was becoming known for really putting the black into black and white illustrations.

the problem, it’s the number of ideas and encounters. A normal book might have two or three central plot arcs that drive the whole story. A gamebook will have those, but also another twenty little encounters, each of which could be an entire novel on their own, if you wanted them to be. So having two brains bouncing ideas off each other really helps with that sort of product. It’s also a hell of a lot more fun. Plus I think you can get more books out in a given time with two of you, than you could on your own, i.e. the sum is greater than the whole.”

Legend of the Shadow Warriors Legend of the Shadow Warriors (FF44, story copyright Stephen Hand) was a new entry in the series put together by threequarters of the creative team behind Dead of Night. Set in Gallantaria once again, it cast the hero as a veteran of the War of the Four Kingdoms who sets out to discover whether the five ghostly figures that are putting entire villages to the sword are really the Shadow Warriors of legend.

Lord Mortis, by David Gallagher. (© David Gallagher, 1990 and 2014) The book includes a reference to one of Jamie Thomson’s earlier books. At the beginning of the adventure the hero comes across an inn called The Sword of the Samurai. The Keep of the Lich-Lord was also the third time Thomson had collaborated on a Fighting Fantasy gamebook with another author. (It would also turn out to be his last.) But had he never been tempted to write one by himself ? “I should have squeezed a couple in!” admits Thomson. “But really, having a creative partner is great for gamebooks – it’s not the amount of words that is

Hand’s horror movie influences – everything from Universal, Hammer and Amicus, to Spanish and Italian films and ‘80s Splatter – were even more obvious in this book, particularly with the introduction of Kauderwelsch’s Frankenstein-like Monster. The adventure is formed from a series of vignettes that give it the feeling of a long-running RPG campaign, more epic in scope, rather than just a one-off solo gamebook. However, the climax to the adventure remains unique out of all the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks ever published, with the hero having to forgive and heal the enemy rather than kill and destroy him. “‘You put your arms around an old man, crying with the simple joy of being alive’ is simply the most emotionally satisfying conclusion to the series next to retrieving the Crown of Kings,” says FF fan Lin Liren.

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Spectral Stalkers Even though it was the forty-fifth entry in the series, Peter Darvill-Evans’ Spectral Stalkers (FF45) still managed to do something entirely different with the FF setting. In fact, it could be argued that it isn’t a Fighting Fantasy adventure at all, only that it uses the rules system devised by Jackson and Livingstone. The plot involved the hero retrieving a transdimensional teleportation device called The Aleph, and then having to stop the villain of the piece, Globus the Archmage, from getting his hands on the artefact, whilst being pursued by trans-dimensional hunters, the Spectral Stalkers of the title.

Haggworts, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1991 and 2014)

The memorable pumpkin-headed Haggworts that appeared on the cover were realised in acrylics by Terry Oakes. But how successful did Oakes feel his contribution was compared to other covers he produced for the series? “Sometimes opinions can be swayed by the ego,” says Oakes, “by this I mean one of my favourites is Rings of Kether, possibly followed by The 10th Anniversary Yearbook... The reasons for my choice are the ‘trick’ I pulled by using a very tall, very thin man as reference for the totally obese image on the cover of the former, and the freedom I was given concerning the second. None of the creatures or monsters are described in any of the books; they all came from my imagination. “But – I’m a little ashamed to say – as stated above, my ego was tweaked by the comments I later spotted regarding Legend of the Shadow Warriors, whereby someone at Puffin had written high praise for the idea across the top half of the pencil rough I had sent off. So, speaking in my most shallow guise, let’s say the last mentioned became my favourite in retrospect.” 142 ◉

Darvill-Evans was driven by the same impulse that had been at work when he was writing his previous FF titles: “The impulse to write a story that would stand out a bit. I also wanted to stretch the FF envelope.” The book featured fantastic cover art by Ian Miller and it was also the first time a young artist by the name of Tony Hough, another Games Workshop alumnus, would contribute to the series. But how did it compare to commissions he had received in the past? “A dream job! The challenges imposed by format, deadlines and style are intriguing. Every illustration must fit within that small rectangle yet somehow be a window into a vast and varied universe, as seen from the reader’s own point-of-view. Each has to tell a story in little more than a glimpse.” How does he feel his work on Spectral Stalkers stands up now that he looks back on the illustrations more than twenty years later? “To me now they look a bit overworked since I was layering on shading and details with a tiny 0.18 Rotring pen – pretty unnecessary considering the small print size of the finished product. However since I’d been doing copious amounts of art for Games Workshop for quite a while by then, my technique was quite well practised, and with Puffin’s sensible deadlines I could redo stuff that came out too badly!” Hough has recently returned to those original

illustrations, as a means of helping him hone his Photoshop skills. “Initially it was an exercise in digital art spurred by a combination of the resurgence of interest in Fighting Fantasy (which spurred me to scan the originals) and my acquiring a decent Wacom tablet which I wanted to practise with. I used the tablet with Photoshop 7 for all of them. “Although I enjoy the discipline of creating pen images, it’s also quite a restrictive medium where colour, shade and textures are all conveyed by way of black marks on a white background. There’s always more room for developing an image beyond this!  When the job itself is done it’s tempting to want to carry on and see how one can represent the images in a different style I thought the FF illos would make a sound foundation from which to proceed. “What I was attempting to produce were not just colourised drawings. Although I decided I wasn’t to radically alter composition or content, I was aiming to transform the A4 sized drawings into large fully fledged digital paintings in their own right, changing half-tones and cross-hatching into tonal shading for instance, adding textures and altering light sources and yes, correcting  mistakes in the underlying drawing where necessary, too. In most cases I added considerable detail to background and characters since I wanted the images to blow up quite large.”

The Hunt of the Gods, by Tony Hough. (© Tony Hough, 2014)

Tower of Destruction Tower of Destruction (FF46) was Keith Martin’s fourth foray into the worlds of Fighting Fantasy, and the first of his adventures to be set in Allansia itself. As with his previous entries into the series, Martin added various additional attribute scores to keep track of, more than in any of his books up to that point.

Marvip the Magician, by Tony Hough. (© Tony Hough, 2014)

After his northern home is destroyed by a blazing sphere of death, the hero sets out to discover where the object came from, who made it, and whether or not it can be stopped. But the sphere is only the key to a far greater danger – the Tower of Destruction itself. ◉ 143

The book featured another cover by Terry Oakes, his seventh for the FF series. He had become the go-to guy for covers at this time, producing five out of the ten covers of the FF gamebooks numbered in the forties, and was one the most prolific FF cover artists of the Puffin era. Tower of Destruction was the first gamebook to have Pete Knifton – an artist who had previously provided artwork for Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl game – on interior art duties. “Marc Gascoigne suggested I send in samples to Penguin,” explains Knifton. “Subsequently I drew two. The editors were lovely and very encouraging. I did the best work I could in the time available. I aimed to do one illo a day. Sometimes the pictures took longer. I was fond of the picture of the ice zombies.”

Night Demon, by Pete Knifton. (© Pete Knifton, 1991 and 2014)

The Crimson Tide

Ice Ghosts, by Pete Knifton. (© Pete Knifton, 1991 and 2014)

The first Fighting Fantasy title of 1992 was The Crimson Tide (FF47), Paul Mason’s third entry into the series, but the first with him given sole writing credit. Unusually the book featured internal illustrations by Terry Oakes, the second and last time he would perform those duties, having previously produced Black Vein Prophecy’s internal images. Oakes: “Whereas my goal in painting remained pretty much constant – i.e. I simply toiled to try and execute

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a piece that was as realistic and believable as possible – my approach to pen and ink varied. The medium gave me opportunities to experiment with different and differing styles – some more successful than others; also, it gave me a chance to alter the pen work to suit the subject matter.”

drew attention to the fact that the Isles of the Dawn of Black Vein Prophecy was a much weirder place than the China-knock-off I wanted to write about.” Cover art was by Alan Craddock whose last contribution to the series had been the SF title Star Strider.

Alan Craddock’s cover rough for The Crimson Tide. (© Alan Craddock, 1992 and 2014)

Moonrunner

Yuemo, by Terry Oakes. (© Terry Oakes, 1992 and 2014) With The Crimson Tide Mason tried something that had not been attempted in a Fighting Fantasy gamebook before; the storyline took the hero from childhood through to adulthood. This ambitious idea did give rise to one unforeseen problem however. One of the first enemies the hero encounters is a Giant Mudworm. At this point in the adventure, the highest SKILL score the hero can have is 6 but the Mudworm had its SKILL score raised from 6 to 12 during the editing process, making the battle almost impossible to win, the editor concerned forgetting that the hero started the story as a child. “The Crimson Tide was me, bereft of  Steve Williams’s febrile imagination, going back to the setting of the last book, and putting in a few continuity references,” says Mason. “But in a way that was a mistake, as it just

Book number forty-eight was another adventure by Stephen Hand, which was set in Gallantaria during the aftermath of the War of the Four Kingdoms, first referred to in Steve Jackson’s The Tasks of Tantalon. Echoing the final scene of Legend of the Shadow Warriors, the conclusion has the hero having to capture the archetypal Fu Manchu/ Moriarty villain, the war criminal Karam Gruul, so that he might stand trial for his crimes, rather than simply killing him in revenge for what he did to the hero during the course of the war. “Stephen Hand would be the author of my favourite FF books,” says FF author Paul Mason, “just because I enjoyed the way he did that Hammer Horror pastiche approach with such relish.” ◉ 145

With Moonrunner (FF48, story copyright Stephen Hand) Terry Oakes was on cover art duties again while Martin McKenna’s internals made it three for three for the creative trio.

sorcerer and the Storm Giant’s castle was painted by Les Edwards, while Pete Knifton produced the internal black and white illustrations. “FF had a great effect on my career in terms of kudos,” says Knifton. “They were very popular, and people were interested that I had been a contributor. You had to be spot on with the details in FF. They were respectable illustration jobs!”

Beggar, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1992 and 2014) McKenna and Hand were both clearly inspired by the same source material, namely Hammer horror films. However, Hand was also heavily influenced by his love of such 1940s American pulp film serials as The Crimson Ghost, The Whispering Shadow, and SOS Coastguard. He wanted to make the player feel like he really was a hero in a pulp serial, so from the very first scene (in which the hero is found beside a dead body and is wrongly accused of murder) the pace never lets up for a moment. Moonrunner, like Hand’s other titles, is a favourite of many a Fighting Fantasy fan, including Zsolt Matyusz. “I love detective stories and Moonrunner provides us with an exciting investigation and manhunt. The storyline is logical; if you play well, then you will succeed. If you are stupid, you will be punished. Unfortunately, in many other books there were twists like, ‘Okay, so you turned left, well sorry you’re dead because of a trap’ which can be quite annoying. A lot of action is packed into the book; it feels like more than 400 sections. Also, the book is not unreal in terms of difficulty… The enemies are more down-to-earth... Stephen’s other books – Dead of Night and Legend of the Shadow Warriors – are also excellent in my opinion.”

Siege of Sardath Siege of Sardath (FF49) introduced a new writer to the FF stable (the first new writer since Dave Morris took Sukumvit’s shilling when he co-wrote The Keep of the Lich-Lord with Jamie Thomson), one-time teacher Keith P Phillips. The cover image of the Dark Elf 146 ◉

Xanthic Horror, by Pete Knifton. (© Pete Knifton, 1992 and 2014) The story starts with a dramatic aerial pursuit and builds from there. Including an encounter with a demi-god and the perception-warping architecture of the Dark Elves, it is a memorable adventure and it is a shame that it was Phillips’ only contribution to the range. Siege of Sardath was also rather overshadowed by another publication that year. For 1992 saw the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, an event marked by the publication of a brand new Fighting Fantasy gamebook and the first one written by Ian Livingstone since Armies of Death, four years earlier…

Right: Mould Zombie, by Pete Knifton. (© Pete Knifton, 1992 and 2014)

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Chapter Fifteen

The Dungeoneers of Firetop Mountain Advanced Fighting Fantasy

F

requently, during the 1980s, Fighting Fantasy was marketed as an introductory role-playing game, but this belittled what it offered gamers as a system. After all, simplicity should not be confused with childishness. Yes, the Fighting Fantasy system was very simple, with only three basic attributes involved in character creation, but that did not mean that it wasn’t extremely flexible. Steve Jackson had already written up rules for a multi-player Fighting Fantasy RPG back in 1984. Paul Mason and Steve Williams had then run with the idea, creating The Riddling Reaver campaign for the system two years later. “I think everyone in the industry had always seen FF as a gateway drug to full-fledged role-playing,” says Cheryl Morgan, Hugo award-winning science fiction critic and publisher. But then in 1989, Marc Gascoigne, the consultant editor on the FF line at the time, and his games designer friend Pete Tamlyn, set about updating the system to produce an expanded Fighting Fantasy RPG for a younger audience, who might not have played a more traditional RPG before. They restyled the traditional GamesMaster role as that of a movie Director, and the player heroes as the Cast of a fantasy epic. The Advanced Fighting Fantasy titles are full of Gascoigne’s trademark wit (which served him so well when he was writing Sonic the Hedgehog books) whilst also allowing Tamlyn’s talents as a games designer to shine through. Considering that Gascoigne had written both Out of the Pit and Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World, as well as guiding numerous FF titles to publication, it may come as a surprise to many to learn that by the time he and Tamlyn sat down to develop Advanced Fighting Fantasy, it was Tamlyn who came up with the bulk of 148 ◉

the content of the adventures, while Gascoigne wrote the rules sections and, as editor, gave the adventures their movies-in-the-making style of presentation.

Dungeoneer Dungeoneer (AFF1) was the first book in what would become the Advanced Fighting Fantasy series. Published in 1989, it had both cover art and internal illustrations produced by the same artist, dinosaurresurrector John Sibbick. When talking about the project, Sibbick says that he, “enjoyed the process of creating on-going characters for Dungeoneer. I had to design their armour, clothes and general ‘look’ from a 360 degree viewpoint, including above and below.” Dungeoneer started where the FF series in general had begun – that is, underground. Much of Tower of the Sorcerer, the very first AFF adventure in which the heroes have to rescue the kidnapped Princess Sarissa of  Salamonis, takes place inside the peak upon which stands the castle lair of the jealous mage Xortan Throg. Although the second adventure in the book is set partly in Port Blacksand, the majority of Revenge of the Sorcerer unfolds in the sewers beneath the notorious City of Thieves. It has the heroes hunting down the real Xortan Throg in the ruins of the city of Carsepolis (upon which the harbour area of Port Blacksand now stands), aided by a ghostly priest called Sargon. One of the players can even play as the hero from the Ian Livingstone-penned classic City of Thieves.

Right: Dungeoneer, by John Sibbick. (© John Sibbick, 1989 and 2014)

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image of a two-headed Troll city guard, while the ever-dependable Russ Nicholson was called upon to produce the stunning internal illustrations. Where Dungeoneer had featured two pre-prepared adventures, Blacksand! only had the one, A Shadow Over Blacksand. What starts as a murder mystery tale ends with a Brass Golem running amok through the City of Thieves like some kind of clockwork King Kong. And all of it has something to do with the mysterious, and now corporeal, Sargon the Black and the Priests of Elim.

Griffin, by John Sibbick. (© John Sibbick, 1989 and 2014)

Blacksand! A sequel, focusing on city-based adventures rather than ones set underground, followed a year later in 1990 and was named, appropriately enough, Blacksand! (AFF2). The book contained a detailed map of Port Blacksand that first appeared in Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World. In Blacksand! Gascoigne was able to expand on what he had begun in that previous title, adding detail to the City of Thieves, giving an insight into the individuals, the taverns, businesses and temples of Port Blacksand, as well as its various guilds and nefarious cults. John Sibbick returned for cover duties, painting an 150 ◉

The Golem Walks, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1990 and 2014) Blacksand! allowed one of the players to take on the guise of another of the heroes from a previous FF outing, in this case the eponymous thief-hero from Graeme Davis’ Midnight Rogue. This way of reusing characters from existing FF books, really helped to tie AFF into the on-going continuity of the Allansianbased adventures.

Allansia It would be another four years before fans were treated to the third instalment of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy line, but it was most definitely worth the wait. Allansia (AFF3) covered wilderness adventures, taking in everything from frozen mountain peaks and arid, baking deserts, to fetid swamplands and even the ocean’s depths.

wilderness aspect of the book. In A Darkness Over Kaad, the band of heroes travels from glacial mountain passes to tangled forests and stinking marshes, gathering an army to take on Sargon the Black and his Elimite hordes along the way. Sibbick and Nicholson returned for art duties, painting the cover and producing the internal black and white illustrations respectively.

Allansia seemed even more like an appendix to Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World than Blacksand! had, adding more detail to an already richly developed world. It also continued to develop the pantheon of supernatural beings which, according to ancient Allansian legend, had created the better known pantheon of gods that by now appeared regularly throughout your average FF adventure. In fact Allansia introduced a whole new set of rules to the AFF system to deal with religion and playercharacter priests, even covering the Animal Court first touched upon in Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World. But by far the biggest change, compared to the previous AFF titles, was the introduction of rules for conducting massed battles between whole armies (not that these rules were ever effectively tested, according to Gascoigne). It was both these elements – religion and battling armies – that influenced the campaign that appeared within the pages of Allansia just as much as the

Sky Battle, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1994 and 2014)

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Tamlyn wrote the Advanced Fighting Fantasy adventures on the beach during summer holidays spent on the Isles of Scilly – a far cry from the wilds of Allansia or the dark alleyways of Port Blacksand – because that was the only time he was able to clear his mind enough from work concerns to write them.

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Just as Dungeoneer had taken the hero from City of Thieves and plonked him slap-bang in the middle of the AFF campaign setting, and Blacksand! had done the same with the hero from Midnight Rogue, so Allansia allowed for the heroes from the previous AFF adventures to be incorporated into the campaign as well as the hero from Return to Firetop Mountain (FF50). And just as the FF books had lent something to the AFF books, so the favour was to be later returned. Jonathan Green’s second FF adventure, Knights of Doom (FF56), features the Assassin’s Dagger spell that first appeared in Allansia, while Howl of the Werewolf (FF62) features the Silent Death Demon that first appeared in the opening scene of A Shadow Over Blacksand from Blacksand! The humour levels were raised in A Darkness Over Kaad, perhaps to contrast with the very real darkness of parts of the adventure, one laugh out loud scene being the insult contest undertaken against the Tanglewood Goblins. After Puffin pulled the plug on FF a year later, in 1995, fans thought that would be the end of AFF as well. But people who had discovered role-playing games via the system were not so ready to give up on Advanced Fighting Fantasy; people like Dave Holt, who during the lean years of the later 1990s worked on a new edition of the AFF system, and Graham Bottley.

Second Edition In 2011 Advanced Fighting Fantasy Second Edition was released by Arion Games (through games publishing company Cubicle 7) updating Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy – The Introductory Role-Playing Game, with the addition of some new rules.

with Jamie Wallis at Greywood Publishing who had published some FF RPG stuff, who put me in touch with Steve Jackson. The rest was easy. Well, easy-ish!” AFF 2nd edition has also seen a former contributor return to the franchise, cartographer Steve Luxton: “After almost twenty years away from FF/AFF I am now back in the game and producing maps for Arion Games.” The response from fans in recent years has been very encouraging. “I think it is better than the original AFF series as the gameplay is more balanced,” says FF fan Zsolt Matyusz. “In the original books a group of Heroes was just too strong for ordinary monsters. The catch here is that FF promotes single adventurers but in an RPG you have a whole team, so the rules have to be adjusted accordingly.” Fellow fan Lin Liren agrees that Arion Games’ reissues, “are more balanced than AFF First Edition, even if your heroes do start out humbly weak. With a bit of tweaking, I do intend to use the system, though not the setting of Titan. The AFF second edition is just that flexible and elegant a system!” Such positive reviews have enabled Bottley to release more and more content, as well as multi-player campaign versions of a couple of FF classics. “I have recently finished the Crown of Kings campaign book… and I am planning more AFF releases.” So, for the time being at least, it would appear that Advanced Fighting Fantasy is just as alive and well as Fighting Fantasy itself.

But how did Advanced Fighting Fantasy – The Role-Playing Game end up being revived seventeen years after Allansia had seen print? “FF Gamebooks got me into RPGs nearly 30 years ago,” explains Bottley. “I read and reread them and I can honestly say much of my life has been influenced by the knock-on effect of those early books… I had republished the classic Maelstrom RPG and in an idle moment asked my contact there about the rights for AFF, which I had played a lot in earlier years. Puffin no longer held the rights, but she put me in touch 152 ◉

Right: Allansia, by John Sibbick. (© John Sibbick, 1994 and 2014)

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Chapter Sixteen

A Decade of Firetop Mountain Ten Years And Counting

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aving published as many as six Fighting Fantasy gamebooks a year from 1984-1988, along with a number of other titles that expanded the FF world in one way or another, by the early 1990s releases were down to three a year. This is still impressive for any series of children’s books, but nothing like the level of success or popularity Fighting Fantasy had enjoyed in its heyday. “There was a certain cost involved in publishing a new FF book,” explains Jackson. “Author advances, artwork, production work… You had to be sure the book would sell enough to break even at least. It was becoming a close thing whether it was worthwhile to publish more than 50 books.”

The story has the diabolical sorcerer Zagor returning from the dead, ready to wreak his terrible revenge upon Allansia. The hero, a brave adventurer used to dealing with such troublesome mages, must enter the labyrinthine tunnels beneath Firetop Mountain once more to face the resurrected villain in his lair. The book’s highly detailed cover, showing the various degenerate denizens of Firetop Mountain, was created by fantasy art legend Les Edwards, while Martin McKenna provided the black and white internal illustrations.

It was decided between the team at Puffin Books, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, that the publication rate would be ramped up again, with the intention that the release of the fiftieth gamebook, planned to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, would draw the series to a close. With this in mind, Ian Livingstone set about writing Return to Firetop Mountain, an adventure in which the hero would return to the eponymous mountain and encounter such legendary FF characters as Zagor the Warlock and the Darkwood’s guardian Gereth Yaztromo one last time.

Return to Firetop Mountain Return to Firetop Mountain, as the title might suggest, had the hero returning to that part of Allansia where Fighting Fantasy had begun all those years ago, whilst adding details to the area, especially with the chance to visit the town of Kaad. 154 ◉

Chaos Beastman, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1992 and 2014)

Right: Return to Firetop Mountain, by Les Edwards (© Les Edwards, 1992 and 2014)

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Back in the days of Puffin’s guardianship of the FF brand, the art produced for the books remained the property of the artists who created it. This meant that they could sell these images again and again, in fact as many times as they liked. This is why Edwards’ cover for Return to Firetop Mountain appeared as the cover of the fantasy anthology book Battle Magic, published in 1998 (edited by Martin H Greenberg and Larry Segriff). Sometimes the artwork in question was generic enough for it not to matter. Take for example, Edwards’ cover for Vault of the Vampire, or Martin McKenna’s cover image for Howl of the Werewolf, which has appeared on everything from magazine covers and heavy metal gig posters to a man’s back, in the form of a tattoo! But on other occasions the use of such images could appear wholly out of place. A case in point is the painting of Kharé that John Blanche produced for Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World. This was later reused on the cover of a Games Workshop licenced product for the Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play system The Dying of the Light, published by Hogshead Publishing. In this instance the image was supposed to represent the free port of Marienburg, although the name of the goddess Libra is still quite clearly visible daubed on the river wall.

Livingstone dedicated Return to Firetop Mountain to the crew of his sailing boat, an Ultra 30 ten-man racing dinghy, that was sponsored by Games Workshop and which won The Daily Telegraph Ultra 30 Grand Prix UK Championship in both 1990 and 1991, as well as the Ultra 30 World Championships held in Falmouth in 1990. “To all members of my Ultra 30 Race Team without whom this book would not have been necessary!” The ‘necessary’ part of the dedication gives an insight into how much it cost to run the boat, which was actually called ‘Games Workshop’ as the company was the main sponsor. A stylised illustration of the boat even appears inside the gamebook, as do the crew, the names of the characters they represent being Fighting Fantasy versions of their real names. The Ultra 30 Team aboard ‘Games Workshop’. (© Ian Livingstone, 1990 and 2014)

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Livingstone makes a cameo appearance in one of the illustrations as the Inquisitor, the guardian of the path to the inner sanctum of  Firetop Mountain. If the hero passes the Inquisitor’s trial he is invited to peruse the guardian’s library. Five of the books in the Inquisitor’s collection are named. One is Casket of Souls while another is Eye of the Dragon.

Most unusual is probably a near complete Clarecraft figurine collection including the massive Titan dragon.”

Clarecraft Clarecraft Designs Ltd are probably most well-known for producing statuettes of characters from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, but back in 1992 the company released a series of figurines based on famous characters – or more accurately infamous characters, in most cases – from the Fighting Fantasy books. Thirteen were originally designed, but only twelve were actually produced, after the Hydra from Crown of Kings was deemed to be too complex. They included Zagor the Warlock, Titan the Dragon (inspired by Chris Achilleos’s cover for Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World), Zhandar Marr The Undead Sorcerer (from Creature of Havoc, ‘ Zhandar’ being a misspelling of ‘Zharradan’), Shareella the Snow Witch, the Shape Changer (based on Iain McCaig’s seminal cover for The Forest of Doom), a Doragar, Gillibran Lord of the Dwarfs, a Minotaur, the Hell Demon (from House of Hell), the Ghoul (from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain), and the Skull Bearer (that appeared in Return to Firetop Mountain). Possibly the most collectable piece is the Fighting Fantasy Statue Plaque. The plaque – which can, rather appropriately, also be used as a bookend – bears the image of the traditional ‘FF’ Fighting Fantasy logo and the names ‘Steve Jackson’ and ‘Ian Livingstone’ surmounted by a dragon, tying it in to Puffin’s later editions of the gamebook series. When the range of FF figurines was rereleased in 2004, with Wizard Books now publishing Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, the plaque and Titan the Dragon did not make a reappearance, although Titan the Dragon was rereleased by Clarecraft but as part of another series dedicated to dragons sculpted by Leigh Pamment. At one stage, Yaztromo the wizard was listed as being part of the ‘Fighting Fantasy Collection’ even though it had never been part of the Clarecraft series. FF fan Steven Dean has made it his mission to collect these rare items, and his FF collection is extensive, to say the least. “First edition, first printings of all the books from all the UK series. Same with all the US releases.  Loads of boxed sets and computer items. 

Steven Dean with his Fighting Fantasy Statue Plaque. (© Jonathan Green, 2014)

The Fighting Fantasy 10th Anniversary Yearbook At the same time as Return to Firetop Mountain was unleashed upon the world, another FF title was released. Compiled by Marc Gascoigne, The Fighting Fantasy 10th Anniversary Yearbook was presented in the form of a diary, with pertinent dates in the Titan calendar appearing alongside those of the real world for 1993, but given a Fighting Fantasy twist. Each month’s entry began with an Out of the Pitstyle profile of a classic monster from the series, which included the Shape Changer and the unforgettable Bloodbeast from Deathtrap Dungeon. There were also profiles of famous heroes and infamous villains from the series, including Malbordus the Storm Child from Temple of Terror, and Zagor the Warlock. And it was here the subject matter of the unpublished fourth Fighting Fantasy novel Spiderbones was alluded to. Since this was a Fighting Fantasy product, the yearbook also contained a 200 paragraph adventure entitled Rogue Mage. The story is nothing special. ◉ 157

Attempting to steal from a merchant, having wasted all your cash living the high life, you are captured and arrested. At that moment, a wizard from the Guild of Magicians rocks up and offers you a way out of your tricky predicament. Defeat the rogue mage Galthazzeth in his dungeon lair and you can be a free man once more. Rogue Mage had actually appeared before, in issue #10 of Warlock magazine. Originally written by Graeme Davis (the author of Midnight Rogue), the yearbook version included minor amendments made by Gascoigne. When asked how he came to write Rogue Mage, Davis replies, “I worked a few desks away from Warlock editor Marc Gascoigne in the Games Workshop design studio, and if memory serves he let me know that he was short on adventures.” And how did he feel about it being reprinted in the anniversary yearbook? “I was very pleased. The first I knew of it was when Marc told me that Puffin was going to reprint it, but I got to go to a big tenth anniversary shindig in London and meet a lot of other people whose names I knew from FF books.”

introduction to his new publisher! Liz Attenborough the Head of Puffin sweetly presented me with a Puffin badge and made me an honorary Puffin. I was chuffed! I’ve still got my badge!” “It was quite a party but a bit of a blur,” confesses Livingstone. “I can’t remember much about it really except that Steve and I were presented with two enormous hand-painted dragons cast in resin. And the actor Patrick Mower turned up and caused quite a stir. He’d starred on TV and in many Carry On films and I knew him from charity golf days. That connection led to Parker Brothers using him as the voice actor in the Legend of Zagor game. “Another Puffin Books party I do remember was one where I met Roald Dahl. He had incredible presence and I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say. But the great man was brilliant and made me relax. He told me he knew about Fighting Fantasy and said that he thought interactive fiction was very powerful. He was surprised at how young I was (which I wasn’t). Alas nobody took photos.”

Unusually, the anniversary books were displayed in shops on point of sale bookstands. Previously many authors had felt that the series wasn’t promoted well enough by Puffin, who seemed happy to rely on its existing fan base and word of mouth to keep people buying the books.

Puffin Party The tenth anniversary of Fighting Fantasy was also marked by Puffin Books, with a party held at their offices in London. But what was it like for those who were there? “I remember Steve saying some very nice things in his speech,” reminisces original commissioning editor Geraldine Cooke, “and signing my copy [of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain]. I had just successfully won the auction for a terrific book called Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, and the author Peter Turner, who arrived at the same time as the party to meet me for the first time, was hauled off by me to the party on the floor below. He didn’t seem to mind at all this rather odd

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The buzz surrounding the landmark ten year anniversary had an unexpected side effect on the FF series. “Return to Firetop Mountain sold better than the last few titles,” explains Jackson, “so Puffin agreed to continue the series.” And so Gascoigne was tasked with organising a new release schedule and finding writers who could come up with the goods – and fast! Enter Keith Martin (a.k.a. game designer, parapsychologist and ex-Games Workshop employee Carl Sargent), who wrote two new titles back to back, and new author Jonathan Green…

Right: Fighting Fantasy’s 10th Anniversary, by Terry Oakes. (© Terry Oakes, 1992 and 2014)

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Chapter Seventeen

Tales of Firetop Mountain (Part 3) From Island of the Undead to Revenge of the Vampire

he 10th anniversary and Zagor’s return over and done with, Fighting Fantasy commenced its second decade looking like there would be no stopping the series reaching one hundred published gamebook titles in 2002.

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the front of the next entry in the series, Night Dragon. Another Keith Martin adventure, the hero makes a hazardous sea crossing to discover what has become of the wizards of Solani Island, who are supposed to protect the coastline.

Island of the Undead

Artwork was by the redoubtable Russ Nicholson and the cover art conjured up by airbrushing wizard Terry Oakes.

FF saw its tenth anniversary year out with the publication of Island of the Undead (FF51) – curiously listed under its working title of Plague of the Undead in

Left: Stonewight, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1992 and 2014)

Night Dragon Hot on the heels of Island of the Undead came Night Dragon (FF52), written once again by Keith Martin, quite possibly the hardest-working FF writer at the time. A creature of pure evil from before time existed, the eponymous Night Dragon is awakening in its lair deep beneath the savage Dragon Reaches, absorbing powerful magical energy that will soon allow it to cross into this world. Of course, if it succeeds, all Allansia will be crushed beneath its claws! The beginning of the book marked the third time an adventurer was able to explore a part of Port Blacksand, before heading off into uncharted territory. 160 ◉

Right: Revenge of the Vampire, by Les Edwards. (© Les Edwards, 1995 and 2014)

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The adventure also featured a great deal of additional rules, and whole sections which should probably have been broken up into multiple additional references, had there been greater flexibility at the time regarding the 400 reference page count. Even though it was the fifty-second entry in the series, Night Dragon still marked another first. It was the first time Tony Hough had produced a fully painted cover for a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, and not just internal pen and ink illustrations.

confident with since we were taught to use it at art college. Gouache allows wet blending and reworking on the picture surface since the paint remains soluble even after drying. The colours aren’t as intense as acrylics but can be bolstered by mixing with inks. I was pretty happy with the finished result but by the time Knights of Doom came around I was ready to move on to acrylics.”

Night Dragon, by Tony Hough. (© Tony Hough, 1993 and 2014)

Spellbreaker Iron Serpents, by Tony Hough. (© Tony Hough, 1993 and 2014) “I had done lots of black and white work for both Puffin and Games Workshop,” explains Hough, “but hadn’t been asked for colour work by anyone. So I took some colour samples to a Fighting Fantasy function at Puffin and waved them at the art editor over a couple of sherries and on the strength of that he agreed I could do the cover of Night Dragon... a totally black dragon in a dark cave! Not an easy gig! “In my private pieces I had been experimenting with acrylics for a while but for my first commissioned cover I decided to work in gouache, a medium I was more 162 ◉

June 1993 saw the publication of the first book by an author who, twenty years on, remains the newest writer on the series. Spellbreaker (FF53) was written by Jonathan Green when he was still studying at university. The story begins with the hero inadvertently enabling Nazek (another Warlock) to steal the Black Grimoire

from its guardians at Rassin Abbey in the Old World kingdom of Ruddlestone. To make amends, the hero sets off to track the villain down and stop him from opening the legendary Casket of Shadows, and releasing the evil imprisoned within it. Art – both exterior and interior – was provided by Alan Langford. It was the first and last time that Langford painted a cover for the series, despite having illustrated five FF adventures before Spellbreaker. “They just asked me to do it,” says Langford, “which was rather nice, because you get paid rather more for cover art than you do for your inside work.” The image was produced using predominantly watercolours. “I used a little bit of permanent white gouache as well, which is my normal technique for watercolour.”

The Devilworm, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1993 and 2014) However, it was John Sibbick’s cover image of a dragon attacking a band of adventurers, determined to steal its treasure hoard that appeared on the front of Dungeoneer that inspired Green to write Spellbreaker in the first place.

Legend of Zagor The last gamebook release of 1993 was Ian Livingstone’s Legend of Zagor (FF54), which tied in directly with the release of the board game of the same name, published by Parker Brothers. The reader plays the book as one of four different heroes – Anvar the Barbarian, Braxus the Warrior, Stubble the Dwarf  or Sallazar the Wizard – each having his own strengths and weaknesses.

Mungus, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1993 and 2014)

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For many years, the gamebook version of Legend of Zagor was the subject of a rumour regarding the authorship of the adventure. Livingstone is credited with writing the book but the adventure uses elements more common to those written by the prolific Keith Martin. In fact, many of the new Unique Rules featured within (Test Your Spot Skill for example) appear in Keith Martin’s other gamebooks such as Island of the Undead and later, Revenge of the Vampire. Keith Martin, of course, was a pen name of parapsychologist and game designer Carl Sargent who wrote The Zagor Chronicles, which connect both directly and indirectly with not only Legend of Zagor but also Casket of Souls. So did Ian Livingstone really write the gamebook version of the board game? “It’s about time somebody asked me that! Yes, Carl Sargent did write the gamebook version of Legend of Zagor. I was too busy working on the game to find time to write it myself, but I was very aware that Parker Brothers wanted the gamebook to be published at the same time as the game to benefit from crosspromotion at launch. So I commissioned Carl in December 1992 to write the book based on the characters and settings I’d created for the game. I asked him to stay as close as possible to the game narrative, ensuring the four main games characters were playable in the book. Carl was brilliant and delivered the manuscript in two months. The book and game launch went ahead as planned. In hindsight it should have been credited as an ‘Ian Livingstone and Carl Sargent’ book, but nobody in marketing liked that idea at the time. If it is ever published again, I will make sure that Carl is correctly credited.”

“I think of myself as the Legend of Zagor warrior Braxus,” admits FF fan James Aukett. “In his description at the beginning, it is centrally focused on his versatility and that was a thoughtful moment for me when I read that paragraph. I am always aiming to be versatile in life and learn to become adept at whatever challenges I may come across, like Braxus himself.” The cover reused the artwork Jim Burns’ created for the boxed game, and Martin McKenna’s sketches of 164 ◉

the four heroes, also originally produced for the boxed game. Legend of Zagor is the only FF gamebook to be set in the world of Amarillia, the same setting as Ian Livingstone’s Casket of Souls puzzle quest book, although the hero does briefly communicate with Yaztromo the wizard, safe in his tower at the edge of Darkwood Forest in Allansia, at the beginning of the book.

Deathmoor Having been away from Fighting Fantasy for some years, Robin Waterfield returned in the 1990s with Deathmoor (FF55). In the book the hero has to rescue the Princess Telessa of Arion who had been kidnapped by Arachnos the ‘Life-Stealer’, from the Deathmoor of the title.

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Two of the characters the hero can meet in Arion during the course of Deathmoor are a pair of plumbers named Oiram and Igiul. If you spell the names backwards you get Mario and Luigi, of Nintendo games fame.

Once more Russ Nicholson was on art duties inside, with the ever dependable Terry Oakes producing the cover, although the art department’s reproduction of the image allows you to see the canvas it was painted on quite clearly.

Knights of Doom Having had his first FF adventure published in 1993, Green returned a year later with an adventure that was even harder than the now infamous Spellbreaker. Why the reason for such complexity? Quite simply Green was trying to cheat the cheaters. As Green confessed to Fighting Fantazine back in 2010, “I’ve actually tried to tone that sort of thing down. At the end of the day I feel that I’m in the entertainment business. When people sit down to read one of my books I want them to put the book down half an hour, an hour, two hours later and feel that they’ve enjoyed the time they’ve spent reading, or in the case of Fighting Fantasy, playing it. “If people want to cheat, and still get a buzz from the imaginative encounters and dramatic set pieces, then that’s up to them. If they want to play the adventure fairly, then I feel that I should be just as fair in how I set out the information they need to know.” Ghoul, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1994 and 2014)

Knights of Doom (FF56) cast the hero in the role of a mystical Templar Knight, not unlike the DemonStalker of Bambra and Hand’s Dead of Night, only this time he was a servant of the warrior god Telak. The ◉ 165

hero’s quest is to destroy the undead sorcerer Belgaroth and his order of Chaos Knights. Knights of Doom was only the second time the word ‘Doom’ was used in a Fighting Fantasy gamebook title, and it was also only the second time Tony Hough produced both internals and the cover for an adventure.

“Warlock,” the author replies. “Simple as that. Oh and a desire to get back to the Arabian setting and do it in a more mysterious way, probably inspired by Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nightmare… I should point out that I learned from my mistake with The Crimson Tide, and deliberately built in multiple victory paths, and different levels of victory.” During the course of the adventure, the hero meets many familiar Fighting Fantasy monsters, which are instantly recognizable to the regular FF reader, but not to the Magehunter himself. So we have the Golden Lion-Lord (really a Dracon), a Bird of Prodigious Size (a Roc), the Demon of the Ring (a Genie), and the Dweller Below (actually a Dark Elf).

Chaos Steed, by Tony Hough. (© Tony Hough, 1994 and 2014)

Magehunter Paul Mason returned in 1995 with another adventure set in and around the southern Allansian city of Kallamehr. The hero of Magehunter (FF57) is the Magehunter himself who comes from an alternate fantasy world a little different from the more familiar Titan. Having been transported to Titan by foul sorcery, the hero must hunt down and slay the wizard Mencius before returning to his own alternate dimension. So what was Mason’s inspiration for writing the adventure? 166 ◉

Genie, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1995 and 2014)

Magehunter sported a cover by Ian Miller at his best (a view not shared by author Paul Mason), while the inside art was produced by the seemingly indefatigable Russ Nicholson. Mason: “There are some artists I really like, whose best work may not be for FF – Ian Miller, for example, who I think is wonderful, but whose Magehunter cover wasn’t as dynamic as my wife’s draft. I very much liked John Blanche as a person. I think I’ll have to plump for Russ Nicholson, who may not be the most technically accomplished of the FF artists, but whose style I particularly like.”

Revenge of the Vampire Revenge of the Vampire (FF58) was Keith Martin’s seventh contribution to the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series. Although Vault of the Vampire had appeared only six years before, it had proved to be an instant classic – rather like the original source material that had spawned it. So popular was it, in fact, that Puffin commissioned a sequel – only the fourth time in the series’ run, after Trial of Champions, Return to Firetop Mountain and Legend of Zagor. In the story, Count Reiner Heydrich returns from the dead once more to stalk the Old World in search of fresh blood and new slaves. It is up to the hero (who is not the same hero as featured in Vault of the Vampire) to put an end to him once and for all. As well as being written by Keith Martin, author of Vault of the Vampire, once again Les Edwards painted the stunning cover image while Martin McKenna came up trumps with the internals.

Demon Steed, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1993 and 2014)

Revenge of the Vampire was originally going to be called Curse of the Vampire, until a proposal for a new gamebook arrived on consultant editor Marc Gascoigne’s desk for a book called Curse of the Mummy…

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Chapter Eighteen

The Young Pretender of Firetop Mountain The Adventures of Goldhawk

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y 1995, despite Puffin publishing three new Fighting Fantasy gamebooks a year since the tenth anniversary and the resulting resurgence of interest in the series, little did fans know it at the time, but Fighting Fantasy was on its last legs. Sales were down – although still competitive compared to other kids’ books, just not at the heady heights they had once enjoyed – and there was an underlying concern at Penguin that what had started out as a series for children had grown up over the intervening decade, leaving its target readership behind. Rather than alienate those teenagers and gamers who loved the books and were continuing to pick them up from their local branch of WHSmith or Waterstones, the editorial team at Puffin decided to bring out a new line intended to appeal to younger readers and grab a new market share while they were at it.

First Fighting Fantasy Sometimes referred to as First Fighting Fantasy Adventures, it was Ian Livingstone who was tasked with writing the books that, it was hoped, would appeal

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to younger children. “Puffin wanted to reach a younger audience which I attempted to do with the Goldhawk series. I did not enjoy writing them as much as Fighting Fantasy which was a process of self-indulgence, writing for myself rather than trying to guess what a very young reader might want to read.” To ensure the books appealed to younger readers, a different cover artist was employed, one Simon Dewey. However, once again, the original FF illustrator provided the internal illustrations, although this time Russ Nicholson was allowed to express himself in colour as well! The Adventures of Goldhawk consist of four books in total – Darkmoon’s Curse, The Demon Spider, Mudworm Swamp, and Ghost Road. The over-arching plot of the adventures had the hero being magically transported to the world of Karazan and made to look like Prince Goldhawk, before setting about thwarting the evil wizard Darkmoon’s plans. During all of this he is accompanied on his quest by Orlando, a once-Dwarf now turned tin pig, and Edge, a talking sword. The Adventures of Goldhawk featured a pared down, simplified version of the Fighting Fantasy system in

Right: Mudworm, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1995 and 2014)

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which there was only one attribute – SKILL – which was used both to keep track of the hero’s health and to resolve combat with the various monsters that inhabited the adventures. It was also necessary to keep a track of how much gold the hero was carrying, as in many other FF adventures. To help make them appeal to their intended audience, the books were in a larger format than your typical Fighting Fantasy fare, considerably shorter, and in full-colour throughout. Another difference between First Fighting Fantasy and the main range was that The Adventures of Goldhawk formed one on-going storyline. Had the new books been more successful, this change in narrative structure and the characterization of the hero could have led to new marketing opportunities for Jackson and Livingstone, something they had denied themselves with the main FF line. By making the reader of the Fighting Fantasy books the hero, without even specifying the hero’s gender, rather than having the reader play the part of a specific named character (as the Lone Wolf or Way of the Tiger books did, or in the way that video game franchises have in recent years), Jackson and

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Livingstone denied themselves the chance to cash in on a host of potential merchandising. Livingstone: “The appeal of the reader being the hero in Fighting Fantasy is that the reader is the hero! It is more exciting to assume the adventuring role yourself rather than directing a third person character. The downside is the merchandising opportunities are reduced as there are no central characters. However, the world of Fighting Fantasy is rich in having been developed over such a long period of time. There are plenty of characters, creatures and places that resonate with our readers. Characters like Zagor, Yaztromo, Balthus Dire, Nicodemus, Baron Sukumvit, Lord Azzur and Throm. Creatures such as the Bloodbeast, Shape Changer and Ganjees. Places like Firetop Mountain, Darkwood Forest, Port Blacksand, Fang, Trolltooth Pass and Kakhabad. I think there is plenty of future potential for merchandise, especially now with the opportunities available via Kickstarter.com.” While four Goldhawk adventures were published in the UK, only the first two in the series were given a US release. And while realistic covers appeared on the UK editions, Nicholson himself provided the artwork for the American covers. Despite releasing four titles within a space of only a few months, The Adventures of Goldhawk did not make the big impact Puffin was hoping for and did nothing to build the readership of Fighting Fantasy. However, with hindsight, many now believe that the fate of the Fighting Fantasy franchise had already been decided.

Right: Stone Giant, by Russ Nicholson. (© Russ Nicholson, 1995 and 2014)

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Chapter Nineteen

The Fall of Firetop Mountain Puffin Pulls the Plug

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pon leaving university in the summer of 1994, with two titles already under his belt, Jonathan Green was commissioned to write his third Fighting Fantasy gamebook.

It wasn’t only the cover of Curse of the Mummy that referenced one of Tom Baker’s most memorable Doctor Who stories. An illustration showing multiple mummies included, amongst their number, one of the servitor robots from the same serial.

Curse of the Mummy Curse of the Mummy (FF59) sees the hero helping Indiana Jones impersonator Jerran Farr unearth an ancient tomb in the Desert of Skulls – a tomb that just so happens to belong to Akharis, legendary ruler from a previous age, whose followers are attempting to return to life. If they succeed, all Allansia will suffer the effects of the Mummy’s curse. Amazingly, Curse of the Mummy was the first time that artist Martin McKenna was given solo responsibility for the cover art for a Fighting Fantasy gamebook. Green had been keen to have McKenna illustrate one of his FF adventures ever since being commissioned to write his first book, Spellbreaker. Despite turning in a fantastic cover image (that was in part an homage to the Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars) unfortunately the internals were rushed, and were not all they might have been. McKenna: “I remember Curse was done in next to no time because time had run out, and I was reduced to desperately scribbling in felt tip, and weeping.”

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Death Spider, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1995 and 2014)

Right: Curse of the Mummy, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 1995 and 2014)

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FF60 and beyond With Curse of the Mummy in the hands of the editors at Puffin Books, Green began discussing plans for a fourth title with series consultant editor Marc Gascoigne. Gascoigne was planning on writing the sixtieth book in the series himself but he told Green that the slot for book FF61 was available. Green set about working up a proposal for a Norseinspired Fighting Fantasy adventure but, despite submitting a third of the book and a detailed plan for the rest for consideration, Gascoigne preferred an idea Green had previously mentioned concerning voodoo zombie pirates. So, putting the proposal for Saga of the Stormchaser to one side, Green set to work developing this new gamebook under the working title Pirates of the Black Skull. This proposal passed the submissions process and was commissioned by Puffin, but underwent a change of name to become Bloodbones. It had now been some time since Green had written Curse of the Mummy and in that time, Puffin Books had been considering how best to proceed with the series. Green began to suspect that something was wrong when the release of Curse of the Mummy was delayed. Richard Scrivener was commissioning editor on the range at the time. “Richard wrote to me in August 1995 explaining that the delay in commissioning me [to write Bloodbones] was due to Puffin looking at ways of revamping the entire series,” says Green. “The thrust of this was the inclusion of some kind of electronic dice in a fold-over cover. There was also talk of improving the paper quality and of having full-colour illustrations throughout. In the end the electronic dice idea didn’t prove to be viable but other changes still needed to be finalised.” Puffin Books was considering a shake-up of the range in the hope of winning back a younger reading audience for the series. The plan that was finally settled upon was to commission all future titles at only 300 paragraphs rather than the usual 400, and for Gascoigne to go through the entire back catalogue and edit all of the books to make them only 300 paragraphs long as well. The first title to follow this new format was to be Bloodbones, which was now scheduled to be number 60 in the series, Gascoigne’s own Night of the Creature having been delayed due to the work he would have

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to do on the rest of the series to bring it into line with Puffin’s new vision for Fighting Fantasy. Bloodbones was finally commissioned in January 1996, with an intended publication date of October or November that same year. The book was written and artist Mike Posen commissioned to produce both the internal illustrations and the painted cover (although Martin McKenna had been offered the gig first, but had to turn it down due to other work commitments at the time). However, 1996 came and went with still no sign of Bloodbones seeing print. “It had now been a while since FF59 had come out and there was still no sign of a publication date for Bloodbones either,” explains Green. “Every so often I would hear from Puffin only for them to tell me once again that they were postponing the relaunch of the series. I think the last date I was given for Bloodbones being published was March 1998 but, of course, it never happened. At least not until Wizard Books took over the licence to publish Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.” Finally, in 1997, Green was informed by Puffin Books that his fourth gamebook would not be published, as he had already suspected by then anyway, meaning that the range concluded with his previous book. Had the Mummy’s Curse struck again?

The End of an Era Having enjoyed very good sales throughout the 1980s, Fighting Fantasy ran into trouble in the early 1990s, along with the rest of the role-playing industry, as video games became more and more sophisticated and more and more prevalent in homes, not just in the UK but right around the world. “There were several attempts to make FF books into games but they did not translate and of course the old text adventures such as The Philosopher’s Stone came out about the time FF appeared,” FF author Luke Sharp points out. “Initially I did not really think computer games captured the all-enveloping feel of the FF books until stuff like Doom appeared on fast PCs. They had the blood pounding fear factor of the books. The claustrophobic feel of Doom reminded me of my very own Chasms of Malice. Then as the graphics got better and faster, video games took off in their own direction.” Author Paul Mason believes the reason for the series’ cancellation was money: “It wasn’t bringing in enough

profit to counteract the fundamental distaste with which the posh types who ran Puffin viewed it. I don’t think many Puffin staff had ever really liked FF very much. They never made much effort to promote the series... In a way FF was a victim of its own success. Its early sales were so spectacular that when it settled down it seemed to be doing so badly in comparison that it could be axed with relative impunity.” It is still not entirely clear at what point Puffin finally decided to pull the plug on the series, but when the company did, the rights to the series reverted to Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. “In 1999 they formally advised us that FF was being dropped from the back catalogue and we could have our copyrights back,” recalls Jackson. It was a sad day when we heard the news,” says Livingstone. “We’d had an amazing run... Millions of copies had been sold and we’d enjoyed topping the Children’s Bestsellers’ Charts for years. We never wanted it to end, but the incredible sales we had enjoyed during the 1980s were simply not sustainable. However, I think it was the wrong decision to stop publishing the books. The market for them might have reduced but there was still a market for them. Gallimard proved that in France.” Of the 17 million Fighting Fantasy gamebooks sold worldwide, three million were in France. Many of the series’ authors were disappointed to see

Fighting Fantasy come to an end, although they were not entirely surprised either. “Well, it wasn’t just FF that died,” says gamebook author Jamie Thomson. “The whole Gamebook thing just faded away ... the market was dead.”

The Lost Treasure of the Pirates of the Black Skull For a long time Bloodbones was regarded as the longlost Fighting Fantasy book, but little was actually known about the book, as far as fans and the general public were concerned. Rumours varied widely, including one which claimed that the book had been written by FF scribe Paul Mason. And that was how things stayed until Green himself got online for the first time and discovered all the random rumours that had been spread about the book in the intervening five years. In 2001, Green wrote a letter to Fighting Fantasy fan John Stock regarding the true story of the unpublished Bloodbones, how it had been commissioned to be only 300 paragraphs long and how it was to be the first in a revamped Fighting Fantasy series designed to appeal to a younger audience. As far as Green and everyone else was concerned at the time that was the end of that. The Fighting Fantasy series was dead and buried. But Bloodbones wasn’t the only lost Fighting Fantasy gamebook…

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Online book retailer Amazon continued to advertise Bloodbones as being available to order for a number of years after the cancellation of the FF series by Puffin, even listing it as having been published in July 1999. This listing remains in place to this day, with one used copy once being offered for purchase for the princely, Deathtrap Dungeon competition-winning sum of £1,192.73!

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Chapter Twenty

Lost Tales of Firetop Mountain The Gamebooks That Never Were

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ith the Fighting Fantasy range really starting to take off in the mid-1980s, Puffin Books took to promoting forthcoming titles inside the pages of newly published adventures. However, because of the lead times involved in producing a book, sometimes these titles got bumped, were changed, or in some cases never saw print at all. These ‘missing’ Fighting Fantasy adventures enjoyed something of a cult status and it wasn’t until the age of the Internet that many ever discovered what became of these long lost titles.

What’s in a name? Many Fighting Fantasy fans may well be surprised to learn just how many of the books underwent a change of name before seeing print. For example, an advertisement appeared in the back of the first edition of The Seven Serpents (S3) listing a number of forthcoming Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

The Rings of Kether appears in the #12 slot, with Lord of Shadow Keep listed as #13, Freeway Fighter at #14, and the intriguingly titled Dragon Master at #15. Space Assassin, which eventually saw print as the twelfth Fighting Fantasy adventure, was originally simply going to be called Assassin. Freeway Fighter became the thirteenth title, while Dragon Master was actually released in the number fourteen slot, only now under the title of Temple of Terror. Issue #5 of Warlock magazine had Appointment with F.E.A.R. (FF17) and Rebel Planet (FF18) listed as Superheroes and The Aliens of Arcadion respectively. The adventure that would eventually be known as Crypt of the Sorcerer had two alternative working titles during its gestation, The Howling Tunnels and the more sinister sounding Crypt of the Necromancer. It was only at the last minute that ‘Necromancer’ was changed to ‘Sorcerer’. At the time, Puffin Books did not believe that a book could be marketed for children with the word ‘Necromancer’ in the title. But times change and in 2010 Night of the Necromancer was published, intended to appeal to children as much as it was to forty year-old FF fans riding the wave of nostalgia that the series was enjoying in the run up to the 30th anniversary. Strangely, Island of the Undead (FF51) was listed in Night Dragon (FF52) – the book that came after it in the series – as Plague of the Undead, its original working title, while Revenge of the Vampire (FF58) was originally going to be called Curse of the Vampire. The legendary ‘lost’ FF gamebook Bloodbones (FF61), was originally pitched to Puffin under the title Pirates of the Black Skull. Eye of the Storm became Stormslayer (FF63) after the title Eye of the Storm was deemed to be too close to Eye of the Dragon (FF60), although more than thirty alternative suggestions were banded about between Green, Jackson, Livingstone, and Wizard Books before the name Stormslayer was finally settled upon.

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Right: Bloodbones, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2006 and 2014)

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Blood of the Zombies (FF65) did not exactly have a different working title – it had two working titles. Zombie blood is a vital element of the plot, while the adventure takes place in a Romanian castle. Livingstone did not know whether to call the adventure Blood of the Zombies or Escape From Zombie Castle, and so, for the first time ever in the history of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, he let the fans decide, with the vote being cast via social media.

Puffin for the FF range since 1988. In fact, before The Keep of the Lich-Lord was accepted for publication they submitted six other ideas that were all rejected for one reason or another. These were, Dinosaurs of Death, Knights of Renown, Masters of Combat, The Mists of Horror, Curse of the God Kings, and The Thief of Arantis.

But of course adventures that underwent a change of name are one thing. The adventures that fans really want to know about, and are still intrigued by to this day, are those that were never to join the Fighting Fantasy stable, for one reason or another. For a while – almost ten years, in fact – Bloodbones (FF61) was the most notorious of these, until it eventually saw print in 2006. But there are still a number of titles that have never seen print and two that strangely did, but not as Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. One of them was the aforementioned Lord of Shadow Keep.

Dinosaurs of Death was set after the lifting of the siege of Vymorna (which features in Marc Gascoigne’s Battleblade Warrior). The hero is summoned to the palace by Queen Perriel and told that the Lizardmen of Silur Cha have prepared an army of dinosaur cavalry to make one last, desperate assault on the city. And so the hero heads behind enemy lines to the edge of the Plain of Bones, with the intention of plunging the dinosaurs and their Lizardmen masters into a volcanic fault deep beneath the earth.

Lord of Shadow Keep “Lord of Shadow Keep was originally planned as the eleventh or twelfth in the FF series,” Dave Morris explains, “and I was going to write it with Oliver Johnson. It was even advertised in the back of the Sorcery! books. Then Oliver decided to put it in the Golden Dragon series instead. Which would have been fine, except that he didn’t tell Philippa Dickinson, who was in charge of FF then.”

Dinosaurs of Death

The book was to feature an aerial joust between the hero and a Lizardman champion, utilising rules that would allow for combat in three dimensions, in which altitude would be a factor that would need to be carefully considered. Morris also planned on referring to the dinosaurs by more literal names, as opposed to correct paleontological ones, such as ‘Thunder Lizard’ or ‘Three-Horn Mask’.

“Dave and I were doing freelance work for Games Workshop and contributing to White Dwarf at the time,” explains Johnson. “I guess I was aware of other Choose Your Own franchises, and I actually ended up re-editing the whole Tunnels and Trolls line as one of my first jobs in publishing. Steve and Ian approached us to write in the FF series but Dave and I thought we’d go it alone, hence Golden Dragon.” The Lord of Shadow Keep (the title now including the definite article in the title) was published in 1985 by the Dragon imprint of Grafton Books, written solely by Oliver Johnson, and illustrated by renowned Fighting Fantasy cartographer Leo Hartas.

Masters of Mayhem As every Fighting Fantasy fan knows, Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson collaborated on The Keep of the Lich-Lord (FF43). But maybe not every fan knows that Morris and Thomson had been submitting ideas to 178 ◉

Tyrannosaurus Rex vs Triceratops, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1988 and 2014)

Knights of Renown Rather than being set on the world of Titan, Knights of Renown was set in Arthurian Britain, with the hero being a young knight. The hero’s quest was to best a giant, the Grey Knight of the Wastes, and win a place for himself at King Arthur’s Round Table. Along the way he would meet such familiar characters as Lancelot, Gawain, Guinevere and Mordred. The gamebook was actually pitched as both a Fighting Fantasy adventure and, potentially, the first in a new series of gamebooks. If it had become an FF adventure the knightly hero would have had a variety of new abilities including Renown, Chivalry, Jousting and Piety.

Masters of Combat Master of Combat made the hero one of the brothers at a martial arts monastery in the mysterious quasi-Oriental land of Hachiman. One evening, the monastery funeral bells are rung to announce the death of the old abbot. A new abbot must be appointed. It is the tradition of the order, to which the hero belongs, that this decision will be determined by a series of martial contests. The hero decides to join the best warriors in the monastery in the contests to prevent a rival from overturning the noble virtues the order stands for. The combat system, which would have been the main feature of the book, would allow the hero to choose from a range of martial styles and develop these for use in battle. The various challenges he would face would not be limited to physical ones, but would involve tests of initiative, strategic thinking and courage.

The Mists of Horror The Mists of Horror was to be set in Ruddlestone in the Old World, and cast the hero in the role of a journeyman-sorcerer travelling to a new College of Magic where he intends to continue his studies. Having ridden ahead of his retinue to arrange lodging at an inn further along the road, the hero returns to the party only to find himself riding into a thick fog. There is no sign of his servants, nor the books and travellingchest being carried by the mules travelling with them. The hero returns to the inn, hoping his servants will turn up there in due course, but as night falls there is still no sign of them. As the clock is about to strike midnight the miller from the next village down the road stumbles into the

inn, his clothes in tatters and mumbling a few cryptic remarks about ‘the Faerie King’ and ‘the Unseelie Court’ before collapsing. The next day, with the terrified locals preparing to sacrifice the innkeeper’s daughter to the Old Gods in order to close the portal to the magical Otherworld and keep the spiteful fays at bay, the hero offers to close it himself using his own magical powers. As a consequence, throughout the adventure, the hero would need to be careful to conserve his magic ready for a no holds barred battle with the Faerie King.

Curse of the God Kings The idea behind Curse of the God Kings was based on an epic role-playing campaign that Morris and Thomson had once undertaken with Oliver Johnson and Mark Smith. It was to begin with the hero being tasked with a new mission by his old friend the wizard Aramanthis, to travel to Titan’s uncharted south-west continent and stop Chargan the Golden from using the Language of the Gods to un-make the world. Morris and Thomson told their editors at Puffin that the adventure had the potential to be the toughest Fighting Fantasy gamebook ever written, as the hero explored a land that was unlike anywhere else on Titan. A cunning twist in the game’s design was to have Chargan lose his memory and join the hero’s expedition, believing himself to be a travelling priest. It would only have been as they made their way inland towards the ruins of the lost civilisation of Kamada Varrentis that Chargan would remember who he was and begin to exert his reality-warping powers. However, Puffin preferred the duo’s proposal for The Keep of the Lich-Lord and so that was what they got instead.

The Thief of Arantis The Thief of Arantis (also known as The Best Thief in Arantis) was to have been Dave Morris’s first solo contribution to the FF series. In the adventure, whilst visiting the port of Arantis, the hero hears of an object of priceless value – the egg of the Roc, a mythical bird of gigantic proportions. This One Thousand And One Nights-inspired tale included everything from shipwrecks to genies and even the possibility of the hero ending up as Vizier to the Sultan. Despite having been submitted to Puffin Books in 1989 and rejected, the book eventually saw print in ◉ 179

1994, after a fashion, relocated to the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights, and now entitled Twist of Fate, one of the Virtual Reality Gamebooks series that Morris wrote with Mark Smith. The book was reprinted in 2013 now under the title Once Upon a Time in Arabia, as part of the Critical IF Gamebooks series.

Outlaws of Kaan In the summer of 1990 a then as yet unpublished writer set about preparing a submission for the Fighting Fantasy series. Jonathan Green was eighteen years old at the time and the name of his submission was Outlaws of Kaan. Set in north-western Allansia, the plot of this adventure had the hero heading into the forests north of the town of Kaan to sort out a band of evil bandits and their sorcerous leader. Sharp-eyed fans (especially those who have read Return to Firetop Mountain or the third Advanced Fighting Fantasy volume Allansia) will already be thinking, “Kaan? But there’s no such place in Allansia. Now Kaad – well that’s a different matter.” This confusion over the name of the town came from Green’s reading of Dave Andrews’ map in Out of the Pit, although when he submitted the idea (not once, but twice) this error in naming was never raised. Outlaws of Kaan did not make it through Fighting Fantasy’s rigorous gamebook selection process, but the best bits were recycled in Green’s future published FF adventures. The noble outlaw Lord ‘Filthy’ Lucre became Spellbreaker’s ‘The Mask’ (while the name was reused fourteen years later during the writing of Howl of the Werewolf ), and the Nightmare-riding nemesis became Belgaroth the Sorcerer, the Big Bad at the end of Knights of Doom.

Desert of Desolation “I started writing in about 1991,” explains Graeme Davis. “The previous October I had left Games Workshop, moved from Britain to the USA, and embarked upon a freelance game writing career. Midnight Rogue had been a modest success for me, so it was natural that I would be interested in writing more FF books. “I picked a desert theme because at that time it was an environment that no other FF book had touched” – apart from Temple of Terror, and Master of Chaos to a certain extent – “and I thought it had some possibilities for new challenges and new monsters. The plot was 180 ◉

going to fall into two unequal parts. The opening section would be a journey through the desert, braving various hazards, and the second would be the exploration of a lost city full of mummies (this was four years before Curse of the Mummy), undead, djinn, and so on. The final encounter would be with a mummy liche-priest – something like a Warhammer Tomb King, although I don’t think Games Workshop had developed the Tomb Kings army at that time. “The outline got a lukewarm reception from Marc [Gascoigne], and I think there were two reasons for this. Firstly, my 100 sample entries were all from the journey section (I was very rigid in those days about doing things in order) so they did not really show off what I planned to do with the heart of the book. Secondly, of course, Puffin was planning to wind up the series at #50, which was to be published in July 1992. By the middle of 1991 when I sent the proposal, they probably had more proposals in house than they had open slots.”

The End of the Line When Puffin pulled the plug on the Fighting Fantasy line, there were a number of gamebooks already in development, which ended up being canned. With the rise of the Internet, several gamebook authors have since come forward to talk about the projects that they were in the process of planning when the series was cancelled.

Night of the Creature The book that was supposed to follow Jonathan Green’s Curse of the Mummy (FF59) was called Night of the Creature and was to have been FF consultant editor Marc Gascoigne’s second contribution to the standard FF line. The plot (as Gascoigne once outlined it to Green) involved the hero being employed to stop the villain of the piece from bringing his monstrous creation to life, having been hired by a local wizard, and given a particular potion to take upon reaching the villain’s tower to enable him to complete his mission. However, as soon as the potion was imbibed the hero would shrink to the size of a doll and from there on in would have to complete his mission in this new state of reduced stature, creeping through the hollows between the walls of the antagonist’s tower. The hero would have encountered two different

factions within the tower, one bat-like, the other a tribe of Gremlin-esque creatures, before ultimately making it to the techno-sorcerer’s lab just as the villain was about to waken the creature of the title. However, when it came to actually writing the sixtieth book in the series, Green was farther advanced with Pirates of the Black Skull (now renamed Bloodbones) and so his next title was brought forwards in the schedule, with Gascoigne’s Night of the Creature bumped to #61. Only the FF series was cancelled before Gascoigne could ever put pen to paper, or at least set fingers to keyboard.

while I set about preparing the proposal for Pirates of the Black Skull.” During the plotting phase of the adventure, Green drew a detailed map of the Iceberg Straits and the Giant’s Teeth island chain, naming many of the islands of the archipelago as well as creating different cultures for each of them. If it had not have been for the fact that Gascoigne had preferred his idea for an adventure involving undead voodoo pirates, Saga of the Stormchaser might have seen print when Wizard Books revived the series seven years after Puffin’s run ended.

Saga of the Stormchaser Saga of the Stormchaser was actually the idea Green submitted for his fourth gamebook after Curse of the Mummy. Set in north-east Allansia, in the Scandinavian-inspired region of Frostholm, it cast the hero as the King of Vynheim, who sets out with his trusted crew aboard his longship – the Stormchaser of the title – to stop the evil sorcerer Mambres bringing about the End of the World. “The plot involved Lord Logaan the Trickster setting you the task of thwarting Mambres and stopping him from awakening an ancient evil,” says Green. “You set off from Vynheim on board the Stormchaser with a trusty crew and a band of even trustier companions. In my second gamebook, Knights of Doom, I utilised a system of introducing different skills that the reader could choose for their hero. In Saga of the Stormchaser your crew took the place of these skills with individual characters displaying a whole range of different abilities. There was a barbarian strongman, a Valkyrie warrior-woman, a Dwarf, an archer, a bard, and various others, including new companions you could collect during the course of the adventure. “Navigating the treacherous waters of the Iceberg Straits, on your voyage across Bjorngrim’s Sea towards a distant isle at the end of the Giant’s Teeth chain, you fought with sea monsters such as the Orca killer whale, you visited the Claw, a rocky island that was home to a tribe of savage birdmen, and came across the demonic, shape-shifting Mara. “Having written the introduction to the adventure, the first hundred paragraphs and a detailed plot synopsis, I sent the whole lot off to Marc Gascoigne. I awaited a response with baited breath. However, at an earlier meeting I had mentioned to Marc that I also had an idea for a pirate adventure and he liked the sound of this better. So, Saga of the Stormchaser was put to one side

Plagues of the Mummy Just as Knights of Doom had, in the initial planning phase at least, started out as a direct sequel to Spellbreaker (FF53), one of the ideas that Green had been mulling over when Puffin cancelled the Fighting Fantasy series was a sequel to Curse of the Mummy (FF59) that variously went under the name The Sands of Time or Plagues of the Mummy. The sequel would have featured the snake-like Caarth in much greater numbers, quasi-Biblical plagues and even a visit to an Ancient Egyptian-inspired afterlife.

The Wailing World The Wailing World was another submission in progress when Puffin ceased publishing new Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. “It was probably the most ‘thought-through’ of all the FF books I started,” says Paul Mason, who came up with the adventure. “I was clear that I wanted to do a ‘dungeon’, because I’d been so sniffy about them ◉ 181

for years, and yet playing Empire of the Petal Throne had shown me there were many wonderful possibilities to be found in the underworld. I also wanted a tighter plot than most of my previous ones. But I wanted to retain the characteristic of my books that they play with genre expectations somewhat. So the enemies were not necessarily going to be the obvious ones.” The story was to begin with the hero being employed by the ministers of Lagash to rescue the prince of that particular city-state, who had been kidnapped by a mad sorcerer whose tower was conveniently located only a short walk away. However, what seems like a relatively straightforward job turns into something much more complicated and treacherous. The prince has, in truth, joined the sorcerer of his own free will, seeing him as some kind of guru. Conversing with the sorcerer, the hero learns of the Wailing World, a subterranean realm that the sorcerer has only recently discovered. Ultimately returning to Lagash, the hero discovers that the city is in effect a huge prison and that his only way out is to brave the dangers of the labyrinthine Wailing World itself and confront its spike-covered inhabitants. Mason: “I liked the idea of giving the reader some level of choice over how they approached the book: a crude ‘role’, which the Virtual Reality books had shown could work well. And I wanted to make it straight fantasy. Up until then my books had reflected my interest in other cultures, but I wanted to tap into the stuff I had liked when I first got into fantasy, especially Leiber, Vance and so on. “FF was not just the mechanic but the whole fantasy ethos, and I was always a little estranged from that. Wailing World was to be my attempt to find space for myself within it, and that never happened.” Mason had already planned the adventure to fit into 300 paragraphs, as had been proposed by Puffin Books for their revamp of the series before they ceased publication of Fighting Fantasy altogether. But what did he think of the publisher’s plans to change the length of the FF books? “I thought it was stupid,” says Mason. “Symptomatic of their distaste for the whole series.”

Deathlord Deathlord was a collaboration between Andrew Chapman (of Clash of the Princes, Space Assassin and Seas of Blood fame) and Martin Allen (who wrote Sky 182 ◉

Lord). Set in the Dead City, close to Kish in southern Khul, the plot involved the imminent destruction of Titan due to the appearance of a Demon Lord, the Chaos creature’s very presence beginning to disintegrate the planet.

Deathtrap Dungeon 3 Other than The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the only FF gamebook to have another adventure written featuring the same setting as well as characters was Deathtrap Dungeon. While The Warlock of Firetop Mountain actually had two sequels – Return to Firetop Mountain and Legend of Zagor – Deathtrap Dungeon only had the one, Trial of Champions. However, with the release of the Deathtrap Dungeon video game in 1998 another follow-up to the ultimate dungeon bash was mooted, and got so far as acquiring an author. Dave Morris: “It was supposed to be based on the Deathtrap Dungeon computer game, which didn’t really have a story to speak of – Barbarian enters the medieval equivalent of a reality TV game show – i.e. it was last man standing in a dungeon full of monsters and treasure. No logic to it. There was an insect level, a circus level, exploding pigs, shotguns. A female character was suddenly added because Tomb Raider was doing well and somebody got the idea that every game needed a busty heroine. Nobody missed anything, believe me. The world did not need it to happen.” Rather than publish a new FF Deathtrap Dungeon adventure, a new edition of the original Deathtrap Dungeon gamebook was published and released with certain versions of the video game, using the same cover artwork as the video game box art. However, the idea for a third Deathtrap Dungeon adventure resurfaced in 2009 when Jonathan Green was invited to submit ideas to Wizard Books for possible new FF titles. Entitled The Thief of Fang, Green’s adventure was set during the dungeon’s off-season. It began with the hero pursuing a thief

through the city of Fang. Eventually the thief finds a shaft leading into the hill beneath which lies Baron Sukumvit’s dungeon. The hero follows the thief inside, only to find his quarry dead at the claws of some terrible beastie. However, now trapped inside the dungeon himself he has to find his way out again… And that’s only just the beginning. It is not long before the hero discovers that a rebellious Trialmaster is creating an army for himself, made up of the denizens of the dungeon, with which he plans to seize Fang from Sukumvit’s control. The adventure would have revisited some familiar encounters from the previous books, whilst also having parts of the dungeon being rebuilt ready for the next year’s Trial of Champions. Who knows – maybe Deathtrap Dungeon 3 could still happen, one day – but not without Ian Livingstone’s blessing!

The Keeper of the Seven Keys One of the most intriguing and exciting ideas for a gamebook that never came to fruition was another collaboration between Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson. Set close to the city of Arkand in Khul, in The Keeper of the Seven Keys the hero was the bad guy, Karabane the Banelord. (Anyone who has ever played Dungeon Keeper will see plenty of similarities here, although it should be noted that The Keeper of the Seven Keys was pitched before that particular video game came out.) In actual fact Karabane – Master of the Seals and Runes, Knower of the Way and Member of the Honoured Society of Sages – isn’t the bad guy, but a misunderstood sorcerer whom everybody thinks is bad. In reality, he’s the only person capable of keeping the dreaded Archdemon bound. The gamebook would have featured groups of ‘good guys’ invading Karabane’s tower – a berserker, a knight errant, a rogue, a wizard, an alchemist-priest, a master of martial arts, a lord-less samurai, an amazon, and a princely warrior-mage – but sadly it was not to be. Although the idea has been aped in numerous video games since, when they started planning The Keeper of the Seven Keys, Morris and Thomson knew they had struck on something truly innovative. “We thought it was really original back then,” says Thomson. “I suppose it was. Since then we’ve had various Dungeon Keeper-type products etc., and it seems old hat, but it was logical progression at the time. I suppose my Dark Lord series of comedy books come out of that. I guess Dave and I have always wanted to tell

the story from Evil’s point of view. It would still make a great book or game though I think.” The performing of certain hourly rituals would have been an important part of the game, while the hero would have also needed to deploy his forces – everything from Demonkin and Orcs to Hellgaunts and Homunculi – across his castle’s defences to stop the ‘good guys’ from stopping him.

Blood of the Mandrake In Legend of the Shadow Warriors, Stephen Hand had introduced the sinister Mandrakes to Fighting Fantasy – sentient plant-creatures that mimicked human beings (clearly inspired by the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Blood of the Mandrake was intended to conclude Hand’s Old World series, following on from Moonrunner. Hand himself has said that it would have contained more horror and melodrama. Having taken a full-time job with PC games company MicroProse, Hand had less and less time to devote to his freelance work. Series consultant editor Marc Gascoigne kept hassling him to write another Fighting Fantasy gamebook and used to wind him up by saying that he was grooming another author to copy his style, ready to replace him. As a result of Gascoigne’s urging, Hand actually started work on two books, Blood of the Mandrake and Smuggler’s Gold. Blood of the Mandrake would have seen the Mandrake conspiracy brought to a suitably dramatic end and would have featured the return of such recurring characters as Doctor Kauderwelsch. As well as tying up many of the themes Hand had developed through his previous solo books, Blood of the Mandrake was also intended to set up some new ones to be explored in future adventures.

Smuggler’s Gold Hand claims that the plot of Smuggler’s Gold would have been unlike anything seen in any other gamebook ever written. He cannot be encouraged to expand upon this claim since he stills considers the concept to be truly original and is saving it for use elsewhere in the future. What is known is that it would have been a change of pace from his usual fare. Whilst retaining the grim reality of the Old World, as Hand saw it, the plot would have been much lighter and more humorous in tone.

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Heart of the Labyrinth

Citadel of Chaos) and Zharradan Marr (from Creature of Havoc).

Steve Lyons, author of a number of Doctor Who spinoff novels amongst other things, also pitched an idea for an FF adventure when the future of the series was in doubt in the mid-’90s, called Heart of the Labyrinth. “I had been a fan of the books in the early ‘80s, but I’d long since drifted away from them, I’m afraid, by the time I submitted. Maybe, if I’d been more familiar with the newer books at the time that would have helped!” According to Lyons his proposal was for “a fairly bogstandard dungeon crawl, with a Minotaur and an evil wizard at the end of it and a couple of nice twists, but nothing too startling.” Herein lay the reason why the adventure was never actually commissioned to become a Fighting Fantasy gamebook. “Marc [Gascoigne] turned it down, mostly on the grounds that there was nothing really new about it, which is fair enough. I was trying to do The Warlock of Firetop Mountain again, and that had already been done. I did start work on another proposal, but other things must have got in the way as I never finished it, and then of course the series ended.”

Post Puffin Green pitched a number of different ideas for adventures to Wizard Books around the time of their ‘Series 2’ relaunch. As well as The Thief of Fang and Saga of the Stormchaser (mentioned above) his list included Tooth and Claw (an adventure set in the dinosaur-haunted Plain of Bones), Blood War (featuring a war between werewolves and vampires, set in the Mauristatian principality of Bathoria, which went on to become the Warhammer Path to Victory gamebook Shadows Over Sylvania), Assassin’s Blade (in which the ninja hero has to slay an evil high priest in Arantis), Hell and High Water (a follow-up to Bloodbones), and Darkstorm Rising, about the return of Volgera Darkstorm, the evil wizard who trained not only Zagor the Warlock (he of Firetop Mountain) but also Balthus Dire (from The

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In the lead up to Fighting Fantasy’s thirtieth in 2012, Green attempted to encourage Wizard Books to really embrace the anniversary by releasing not just one new adventure, but a whole glut of new material. One of his ideas cast the hero as Zagor the Warlock himself. Master of Firetop Mountain would have been set after the Demonic Three – Zagor, Balthus Dire and Zharradan Marr – go their separate ways to claim their respective inheritances, having murdered their tutor Volgera Darkstorm. During the course of the adventure, Zagor would have entered the Dwarf hold under Firetop Mountain, battling his way through its ancient halls, enslaving monsters as he went, until he could claim dominion of the mountain and become the Master of Firetop Mountain. But possibly Green’s most ambitious idea was an epic trilogy, very much in the style of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Set almost three centuries before the ‘current’ FF timeline, it would have recounted the legendary, catastrophic, and world-changing events of the War of the Wizards, as first related in Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World. Green planned on extrapolating the material from this ‘official’ account of the war to create a storyline that spread over three books, with the last one culminating in the apocalyptic Siege of Carsepolis. The player would have been able to choose from a selection of different heroes, who could draw on different abilities, characterised as being either MAGIC, STRENGTH or WARRIOR. A Wizard character would select special abilities from MAGIC only; a Knight would select from WARRIOR only. However, a Giant would select from STRENGTH and WARRIOR (but fewer from each list), whilst a Dragon would select from STRENGTH and MAGIC (and again fewer from each). Yes, that’s right, the War of the Wizards trilogy would have allowed readers to play as a Giant and a Dragon for the first time as well, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, just like so many other great gamebook ideas.

War of the Wizards, by Alan Langford. (© Alan Langford, 1986 and 2014)

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Chapter Twenty-One

The Gamesmasters of Firetop Mountain Fighting Fantasy Board Games

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t was board games such as Diplomacy and Warlord that had got Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone into gaming in the first place (amongst other things) so it seems only right that they should come to make their own contributions to the world of traditional board games in their own right, each in their own time. But what prompted the move from gamebooks to board games? “We liked the world that we had created and wanted to do more with it,” explains Livingstone. “As games designers it seemed natural to base two of our board games in our own fantasy world.” It was Jackson who would dip his toes in the board games lagoon first. While Livingstone was penning such classics as Freeway Fighter, Temple of Terror and Trial of Champions, Jackson was busy turning their original FF collaboration into a board game.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain “The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was a board game design I had come up with some time before,” says Jackson. “Games Workshop agreed to publish it and did a really excellent job with the design. It was published in French and German as well as English and sold quite well.”

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain board game.

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Right: Legend of Zagor, by Jim Burns. (© Jim Burns, 1993 and 2014)

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The box art was produced by Peter Andrew Jones while the interior illustrations, and the board itself, were created by Dave Andrews. The game’s design was loosely based on Cluedo. Intended to be played by two to six players, the average game lasts about two hours, although the Maze of Zagor still foxes a lot of people. For the board game, Jackson made use of the three attributes used in almost all Fighting Fantasy gamebooks; SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK. In the game, the players wander through the tunnels beneath Firetop Mountain, battling creatures and collecting treasures, with the winner being the first to reach the end of the dungeon and open the Warlock’s treasure chest. The box set included six plastic playing pieces, which were used to represent the players in the game; a wizard, a fighter, a priest, a Dwarf, an Elven archer, and a barbarian.

But is the route through Firetop Mountain that features in the board game the same as that in the original gamebook version? “There are elements of the route through Firetop Mountain,” admits Jackson, “but it’s not an exact copy of the Warlock dungeon. When I wrote the first FF novel, The Trolltooth Wars, the plan was to send Darkmane (the hero) through the Firetop Mountain dungeon in such a way that you could work out the solution to the adventure by following his travels. But having read through it, our editor didn’t like this; mainly because it took up half the book!”

Legend of Zagor In 1993, it was Ian Livingstone’s turn to produce a Fighting Fantasy-themed board game, this time for Parker Brothers. Much more complex in terms of its physical design – in that the ‘board’ was made from injection-moulded plastic – much was made of its 48K chip at the time, which allowed Zagor to interact with the players, issuing commands and generally berating them for daring to trespass inside his castle lair.

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“I spent the best part of a year designing the game,” says Livingstone. “It got a lot of play-testing and I thought it was a very enjoyable board game that could go head-to-head with HeroQuest. It had a working title of Monstermaze when I took it to Parker Brothers to see if they would be interested in publishing it. Parker Brothers liked the game because of the Fighting Fantasy-style game mechanics combined with exploration and dungeon crawling. But they wanted something else. That something else ended up being a big chunk of plastic that was the electronic voice and game moderator. I thought that was an unnecessary addition but Parker management thought it was a unique selling point. The game had superb plastic miniatures and board, but for me, the gameplay was compromised by the electronic voice box.” Designed for four players, the game began with each player choosing which character they wanted to be – either Anvar the Barbarian, Stubble the Dwarf, Braxus the Warrior, or Sallazar the Wizard. Each player was then issued with the appropriate plastic figure and Hero’s Character Sheet. There was also a plethora of counters – everything from gold coins to Stamina and Strength tokens, for the monsters the heroes would encounter, and for the heroes themselves – as well as various spell cards and treasure tokens, not to mention the obligatory dice.

A game of Legend of Zagor in progress. (© Jonathan Green, 2014) Unfortunately, the game did not sell particularly well. Some have put this down to the fact that the entire Fighting Fantasy range was in its dying phase, while others have suggested it was because another similar game, The Key to the Kingdom, was available at the time for half the price, although it had a much more lowtech spec.

Anvar the Barbarian’s Adventure Sheet and introduction to the Legend of Zagor.

The heroes began in the Chambers of Death before moving into the Halls of Fear, battling Goblins, Orcs, Zombies, Skeletons, Trolls, Ogres, Chaos Champions and Hellhorns along the way, as well as collecting Tower Chests. These chests contained the Golden Talismans and Silver Daggers that were necessary to complete the adventure. Once a player had collected enough, his hero could enter the Dragon Cave and from there, hopefully, the Crypt of Zagor. Only there could he face the villain of the piece and either defeat the evil Warlock or lose everything in the attempt.

Is Livingstone disappointed that Legend of Zagor did not make more of an impact at the time? “That depends on whether you think sales in excess of 100,000 copies should be deemed a failure! I was pretty pleased with the sales but I guess the numbers weren’t high enough for a company the size of Parker Brothers. Sadly it never made it to the USA.” However well the game did or didn’t sell, twenty years later the Legend of Zagor board game has become something of a legend itself.

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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The Shamutanti Hills app by Inkle Studios uses 126MB, while the iOS version of the latest The Forest of Doom app from Tin Man Games takes up 135MB – a whopping 2880 times the amount of memory as Legend of Zagor’s 48K chip!

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Chapter Twenty-Two

Return to Firetop Mountain Rise of the Wizards

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hen Curse of the Mummy was published in 1995, the Fighting Fantasy series had sold over 15 million copies worldwide and had been translated into more than 20 languages. Clearly this was a series with a significant global fan base, no matter how poorly the money men at Penguin might have regarded the books at the time. In 2001, the small independent publisher Icon Books was looking to enter the children’s book market. Simon Flynn was the company’s Publishing Manager at the time. “We had an idea for a book that would involve the choose-your-own-adventure format. The Fighting Fantasy series were the main reference point, mainly because I’d been a huge fan of them as a child. But it’d been a while since I’d read/played them and I’d originally stopped around the twentieth title. I wanted to get some new copies and contacted a number of bookshops who told me the series was no longer in print, which seemed amazing given their original success. So, after a bit of hunting around on the Internet, I managed to find Steve Jackson’s contact details and the rest, as they say, is history.”

couldn’t, they simply scanned in each page as a jpg. When it came to doing Sorcery!, this wouldn’t work so well as the original Sorcery! books were a different size. The text would appear too small. So to fit the Sorcery! text to the Icon size the solution was to have my son Ben OCR [electronically convert scanned images of printed text into computer-readable text] all the Sorcery! pages so they could be easily reformatted to Icon size.” In June 2002, twenty years less two months after The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was first published by Puffin Books in 1982, Wizard Books began republishing the series in a different order from the original series, but still starting with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, followed by The Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon and Creature of Havoc.

Flynn felt that children in the new millennium would fall in love with Fighting Fantasy, just as a previous generation had, if they only knew the books existed. As far as Icon was concerned, it was the perfect series with which to launch their new children’s imprint, Wizard Books (named after Zagor and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain). A deal was struck with Jackson and Livingstone at Joe Allen’s restaurant in Covent Garden, London. Ever the gamers, the final advance for each book was decided by a game of Spoof ! (No prizes for guessing who won.)

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone relaunch the premier gamebook series in 2002. (© Wizard Books)

“The original books were written in the days before word processors,” explains Jackson. “I think The Trolltooth Wars was the first book I wrote on a word processor. Icon were expecting us to be able to give them digital versions of all the books. But since we

Dave Holt, a long-time FF fan, was asked by Jackson and Livingstone to set up the series’ official website, www.fightingfantasy.com. (As of 2007 the site’s fan club, The Adventurer’s Guild, had over 15,000 members.) The years 2003 and 2004 saw a TV advertising

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Right: House of Hell, by Nicholas Halliday. (©Nicholas Halliday, 2010 and 2014)

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Fighting Fantasy, as seen on TV! campaign that declared, in a tone not dissimilar to the Warlock’s electronic voice from the Legend of Zagor board game when the batteries were starting to run out of juice, “In Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, YOU are the hero!” and for a while the series became established in the hearts and minds of a new generation of young readers.

Wizard Books ‘Series 1’ The new releases, which are now officially referred to as Wizard Books’ ‘Series 1’, featured the same familiar artwork, text and even typefaces as the Puffin editions, but a few things had changed. Gone were the different title fonts favoured in Puffin’s days. Instead, foilstamped titles sprang out from the covers. The books also featured brand new cover art, some of it by some very familiar FF artists. It has to be said, some of these covers were more effective than others. While it could be argued that even if they did not actually improve upon the originals, then at least the new art produced for The Forest of Doom and Island of the Lizard King was a pleasing homage to Iain McCaig’s seminal covers. Some images, however, ended up looking rather dull, to the point of being virtually irrelevant (such as the cover 192 ◉

produced for the new edition of Temple of Terror), while fans of House of Hell could see immediately that the new cover, although undeniably striking, gave away the final twist of the tale. Fighting Fantasy stalwart Les Edwards painted a brand new cover for Creature of Havoc. “I don’t have a favourite book,” admits Edwards, “but I think Creature of Havoc is my favourite cover of the ones that I did.” Jim Burns was another artist who got to have another crack at a cover for a book he had illustrated the first time around, contributing a new image for the rereleased Freeway Fighter. Other artists new to Fighting Fantasy, Mel Grant and Kevin Jenkins, were tasked with creating new art for Deathtrap Dungeon and The Citadel of Chaos respectively (even if Grant’s cover was a reworking of one of Iain McCaig’s original black and white illustrations). Martin McKenna – an artist almost totally overlooked when it came to producing cover art during the Puffin era, but who had worked for Ian Livingstone at Eidos during the interim – took on the eponymous Warlock, and his infamous pet dragon, for a reworking of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

McKenna quickly became the cover artist of choice for the new era, producing brand new art for fourteen out of the twenty-nine titles released as part of ‘Series 1’. When Island of the Lizard King was republished by Wizard, McKenna wanted his cover to reflect something of Iain McCaig’s original, whilst incorporating the jungle elements Ian Livingstone wanted to be included in the revision. To keep the composition clean, McKenna left out the Lizard King’s Black Lion, whilst adding some suitably sinister-looking statues to the background, having them half hidden by impenetrable undergrowth. McKenna’s work on the ‘Series 1’ covers has garnered praise from one very significant individual in particular. “I’m very fond of Martin McKenna’s covers for the books,” says Iain McCaig.

That Old Black Magic Under Wizard Books’ tenure, Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series became amalgamated into the main Fighting Fantasy line. Something else that the new books had, which was borrowed from Penguin Books’ original

editions of Sorcery!, was the inclusion of dice rolls on the bottom of pages throughout the book.

Not the 20th anniversary! Although 2002 marked the 20th anniversary of Fighting Fantasy, the release of the new editions was not promoted as marking any kind of anniversary at all. After all, Wizard Books were keen to appeal to new readers, and wanted children to think that they were reading something new and as up to date as they were, as opposed to something that had been around when their own parents were kids. However, equally aware of how important the fans of the original series would be in bringing Fighting Fantasy to a new generation – be they booksellers, teachers or parents introducing their offspring to the stories they had loved as children – Wizard Books did arrange a number of events to help relaunch the series, giving old and new fans alike the opportunity to meet their idols, Fighting Fantasy’s creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.

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Myriador and the d20 Conversions of Doom At Gen Con Europe, in 2003, games company Myriador launched RPG modules of classic FF gamebooks, converted by Jamie Wallis, making them compatible with the popular d20 system (created by Wizards of the Coast). The first two titles to be converted were The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (inevitably), and Caverns of the Snow Witch, and took Fighting Fantasy back to its role-playing roots. “I was a huge fan of the FF books when they came out,” explain Wallis. “I was already playing RPGs by then which is what made the solo gamebooks more appealing to me. They were something that I could immerse myself in with little preparation and on my own. We did play Deathtrap Dungeon as a ‘gamesmaster and player’ a couple of times, which was fun to do.” So how did he come to be involved with Myriador’s d20 FF conversions? “I was off work due to personal injury and was approached by Mike Dymond (one of my D&D group) if I would mind doing the conversion as I had more knowledge of the books (being several years older than most of the group). We formed Myriador and gained the license to produce ten d20 conversions of books of our choosing.” A further six FF d20 modules followed; Deathtrap Dungeon, Trial of Champions, The Forest of Doom, and the first three titles in the Sorcery! series – The Shamutanti

Hills, Kharé – Cityport of Traps, and The Seven Serpents. Due to the nature of the product, Wallis was able to expand upon the world that had been created in the gamebooks, and so, for the first time, role-players were invited to explore the city of Fang properly. “The d20 adventures were faithful reproductions of the FF books. You can follow any of the eight gamebooks using the maps that appear in the d20 versions. The biggest changes were the ‘Your adventure ends here’ passages from the FF books. Those had to be changed into situations where a difficulty check could mean that you could survive that encounter rather than instantly dying. “The d20 conversions didn’t suffer from the linear path of the FF gamebooks. If you failed to find a key in d20 Warlock, you could go back and recheck rooms or areas that you missed. All of that had to be taken into account with wandering monsters or how monsters in un-encountered rooms would react to hearing a fight in a corridor or room. The books could be played with one Dungeon Master, and one to four players, by following the ‘scaling the adventure’ section in the appendix of each of the d20 adventures. These accounted for the party’s extra firepower and kept the adventure challenging.” “I thought Jamie Wallis did an excellent job of creating d20 versions of the original adventures,” says FF cooriginator Steve Jackson. “Myriador had signed up to publish ten FF d20 adventures, but they didn’t all get published. Perhaps Myriador were over-optimistic of the demand for FF d20.”  Unfortunately, Wallis was not fully aware of the rich depth of information already available about the Fighting Fantasy world and so, inevitably, some errors and inconsistencies did slip in. “All the books were run past a Fighting Fantasy expert, as requested by Steve Jackson, and all of those instances should have been picked up. We are only human I guess. Some of the reviews picked up on little elements of the game that were not run of the mill, such as shops in the middle of dungeons etc. The d20 adventures weren’t reviewed as faithful reproductions of the FF books but rather as stand-alone d20 adventures.” So does Wallis have a favourite d20 adaptation out of the eight he worked on?  “My favourite d20 conversion was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. It was one of the gamebooks that I never

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actually completed. I played the d20 version several times with my D&D group using the pre-generated characters and they never completed it either. Steve Jackson also played d20 Warlock of Firetop Mountain, with me as DM, at the launch at GenCon London. He didn’t make it either.”

The Year of Fighting Fantasy

But simply publishing new editions of old books wasn’t what Wizard Books were about, and so, as the line began to expand again, and interest in Fighting Fantasy grew anew, commissioning editor Simon Flynn started to look for potential new titles for the range.

In 2003, Wizard Books brought out a Fighting Fantasy 2004 calendar to help boost sales of the books. The calendar featured art by Les Edwards, Martin McKenna, Kevin Jenkins, Mel Grant and Nicholas Halliday.

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Only three artists have had the cover artwork they produced for the original Fighting Fantasy series, as published by Puffin Books, reused on the editions put out by Wizard Books. They are Peter Andrew Jones, whose very first image of a whitehaired Zagor the Warlock was reused on the 25th anniversary edition of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, British comics legend Brian Bolland, who produced the original cover art for Appointment with F.E.A.R., and Martin McKenna, who digitally remastered his painting of Akharis the Accursed for the 2007 reissue of Curse of the Mummy.

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Chapter Twenty-Three

Tales of Firetop Mountain (Part 4) From Eye of the Dragon to Night of the Necromancer

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n 2002 Wizard Books had begun reprinting many of the original Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, while the official website featured a poll calling for fan requests with regard to upcoming reprints. (The list included the unpublished Bloodbones as one of the possible choices.) However, in 2005 something happened that many Fighting Fantasy fans had scarcely believed would ever happen. Ten years after Puffin Books published Curse of the Mummy, Wizard Books published the first brand new Fighting Fantasy gamebook seen in a decade.

Inkle’s version of Sorcery!, which they launched in May 2013, has shown that there is definitely a market for digital FF.” Martin McKenna revised Nicholson’s original illustrations, adding a fair few new ones to go with Livingstone’s newly created encounters. McKenna also produced a computer-painted cover that actually worked better shrunk down for Wizard Books’ ‘Series 2’ relaunch.

Eye of the Dragon To be fair, Eye of the Dragon (FF60) wasn’t an entirely new gamebook. Just as Caverns of the Snow Witch and House of Hell had appeared as truncated versions published in Warlock magazine, the first half of Eye of the Dragon originally appeared in Ian Livingstone’s Dicing With Dragons: An Introduction to Role-Playing Games, published in 1982. In its previous incarnation it had featured an entirely different combat system, had been illustrated by the ever dependable Russ Nicholson, and was only 134 paragraphs long. Revisiting the adventure he had first composed twentythree years earlier, Livingstone clearly had to expand the adventure, and dump the original rules set. But what does Steve Jackson think about the idea of him writing a brand new FF gamebook? “I would love to design another FF adventure. But the idea of doing another book has less appeal. We’re in the digital age now and I would be much more enthusiastic about doing something digital. Tin Man’s FF Apps and 196 ◉

Skeleton King, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2005 and 2014)

Right: Howl of the Werewolf, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2007 and 2014)

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The adventure begins with the hero imbibing a poisoned potion and then continues with him setting off to recover a solid golden dragon from a dungeon that lies beneath Darkwood Forest. During the course of the story the hero meets an ally, a common aspect of many of Livingstone’s FF adventures, the imprisoned Dwarf Littlebig.

Bloodbones The next new FF title to be published by Wizard Books appeared the following year in 2006, making Bloodbones the sixty-first solo player gamebook in the series, as it had originally been commissioned to be, back in 1995.

commissioned new artwork for the book, the writer was also able to change the subject matter of some of the pictures, cutting those that had not worked so well in Mike Posen’s original illustrations, and adding illustrations for scenes that had been cut from the original (such as the Giant Octopus). Art duties were provided by a pair of artists who had both worked on Green’s books before. Tony Hough returned to produce the new set of interior images, while Martin McKenna used digital painting methods to create a stunning image reminiscent of something out of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (although Bloodbones was written long before the first movie in that particular franchise was released). Curiously, up until Bloodbones, all of Green’s adventures had only one illustrator work on both the cover artwork and the internal black and white images.

The plot of the book is centred upon the return of the dreaded piratelord Cinnabar – also known by the moniker ‘Bloodbones’ – scourge of the twelve seas. The hero has his own score to settle with the voodoo-practising buccaneer, Cinnabar having murdered the hero’s family when he was only a child. And so he sets out to bring the pirate captain and his crew of cutthroats to justice, come hell or high water. Ironically, the very first sentence of the Background sections reads, ‘It all started ten years ago.’ This was not a revision made by Green in preparing the adventure for publication by Wizard Books in 2006 but had been in the original manuscript submitted to Puffin. And ten years after he had written the first draft of the gamebook, Green found himself rewriting it in 2005. The manuscript needed to be drastically reworked as it ran to only 300 paragraphs, to bring the adventure into line with Puffin’s misguided plan to make the gamebooks appeal to a younger readership again. The books might have been shorter, but the language and the adventures the writers were creating, attempting to push the boundaries of the gamebook genre, were no less complex. Green’s original submission had been for a 400 paragraph book, so when it came to rewriting the adventure he was able to put back in much of what he had originally been asked to take out. As Wizard 198 ◉

Behemoth and The Witch Doctor, by Tony Hough. (© Tony Hough, 2014)

Howl of the Werewolf Keen to bring out at least one new title a year, while continuing to reprint the Jackson and Livingstone back catalogue, Wizard Books talked to the series’ co-creators, who in turn approached Green to see if he would be willing to write another new adventure for publication in 2007. Green leapt at the chance to write his first wholly original gamebook in twelve years, although for the plot he did dust off an idea he had first come up with when writing for the series back in the 1990s.

Fearing that he might never be offered the opportunity to write a new FF gamebook again, Green really went to town on the adventure, throwing in every werewolfrelated horror reference he could. He was also indulged by Wizard Books, the completed manuscript coming in at a whopping 515 references, the longest gamebook published after the cyclopean Crown of Kings.

Howl of the Werewolf (FF62) kept things grounded and personal. Rather than having him stopping some mad mage from taking over the world, the story sees the hero trying to save himself from the curse of lycanthropy after he is attacked by a sinister black wolf on the boundary of the Mauristatian principality of Lupravia.

The Headless Highwayman, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2007 and 2014) In writing the book, Green wanted to create an adventure that drew on the mythology and folklore surrounding werewolves, disappointed that their previous appearances in Fighting Fantasy had taken the form of shallow side-encounters. The book was listed on online book retailer Amazon.co.uk as being Fighting Fantasy meets An American Werewolf in London!

Count Varcolac, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2007 and 2014)

Howl of the Werewolf changed how the hero’s SKILL and STAMINA scores were calculated at the beginning, and the reader also had to keep track of a CHANGE score, which measured how far the hero’s transformation into a werewolf  has progressed. Green toyed with the idea of having the hero change into a fully-formed lycanthrope during the course of the ◉ 199

adventure, but settled instead for subtle changes that were on-going throughout the story, and which could be both a blessing as well as a curse. Martin McKenna provided both the cover and the internal illlustrations, which were some of his most dramatic to date.

Wizard Books ‘Series 2’ With both sales and interest in the range flagging, in 2008 Wizard Books decided a rebrand was needed, to give the books in the Fighting Fantasy series a more cohesive appearance (like many other series for children at the time, such as the Beast Quest books). It was also decided to relaunch the series, as well as rebrand the books, and so Wizard’s ‘Series 2’, as it is now known, was born. “What makes Fighting Fantasy special for me is those distinctive green spines that adorned most of the classic Puffin series,” says FF fan James Aukett. “If I wanted to bolster my Fighting Fantasy collection,

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I could walk into any first or second hand bookshop knowing those spines would be the key element in what to look out for, alongside Steve Jackson and/or Ian Livingstone’s name followed by the gamebook’s title and (in most cases) the number of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook. It’s impossible not to locate them when you have some Fighting Fantasies from the Puffin era batched together, and on the odd occasion one could even stumble across some Advanced Fighting Fantasy books or novels as well. “The first set of Wizard reprints just didn’t match that feel in my opinion, and thankfully that was rectified when Wizard decided to reprint some of the Fighting Fantasies again for a second time, with all the gamebooks more identifiable with a grey coloured spine. This made me happy as those spines were always what I was going to be looking out for.” As well as giving all of the covers a consistent shield design and making the name Fighting Fantasy the dominant title on the cover, inside the rules section was moved to the back while three pre-generated

characters were introduced. Wizard did not want younger readers to be put off by the presence of the rules, hoping that they would simply dive straight into the adventures. The new ‘Series 2’ editions were in a larger format than before, and bore a new introductory tagline on the back cover. “The book you hold in your hands is a gateway to a world in which YOU are the HERO! You decide which route to take, which dangers to risk, and which creatures to fight. But be warned – it will also be YOU who has to live or die by the consequences of your actions.”

artist Stephen Player, who had previously illustrated some of Terry Pratchett’s books, amongst others, but only after Player had submitted a test piece based on an encounter the hero has during the course of the adventure with an ill-tempered Giant.

The first four titles chosen for the 2009 relaunch were the classics The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon, and a brand new title, Stormslayer.

Stormslayer As with Howl of the Werewolf, Stormslayer (FF63) was developed from an idea Green had first had fourteen years earlier. Originally pitched as Eye of the Storm, the adventure underwent a change of name so as to avoid there being any confusion between it and the still relatively recently published Eye of the Dragon. The first FF adventure to be set in Femphrey in the Old World, Stormslayer had the weather mage Balthazar Sturm interfering with the climate in order to wreak his revenge upon those he saw as having passed him over for greatness in the past. Green describes the adventure as, “an attempt to write a book that was more like the original adventures and also one that didn’t rely on Demons, Chaos or Undead for the villains. It was to be more elemental altogether.” As with the other titles published as part of ‘Series 2’, Stormslayer featured a set of three pre-generated characters. Simon Flynn, publishing manager of Wizard Books’ parent imprint Icon at the time and the man responsible for the relaunched Fighting Fantasy series, wanted to find a new artist whose style might appeal to a younger audience. He settled on San Francisco-based

Steam Golem, by Stephen Player. (© Stephen Player, 2009 and 2014) “It was one of my all-time favourite jobs so far,” says Player of his first Fighting Fantasy commission. “As a fantasy illustrator there is nothing I like better than drawing monsters. This was an orgy of monsters and mayhem; never a dull moment. I also love working in black and white line; you can put all your time into the design and atmosphere and it also means the process is shorter with no time for boredom to set in. Jon Green’s imagination is so fertile, the locations, events and creatures in Stormslayer so exotic and varied. It was like illustrating the climactic moments from twenty-five different books. “There were also new challenges. How to keep the poses different and fresh when so many figures are advancing towards the viewer was one issue I had to ◉ 201

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone signing at the UK Games Expo in 2010, and the queue of people waiting to meet them. (© Ian Livingstone, 2010 and 2014) wrestle with. Illustrating a collection of objects and weapons in an interesting manner was another.”

for its cover (the other being Night of the Necromancer), as the image only had to fit inside the circle in the centre of the new shield design, one compromise too far in the eyes of many of the older generation of FF fans.

Night of the Necromancer Keen to maintain the momentum and interest achieved by the relaunch, even before Stormslayer saw print in September 2009, Flynn contacted Green and asked if he would be willing to write another new gamebook for the series at short notice. The adventure Green came up with, Night of the Necromancer (FF64), began where up until that point all other Fighting Fantasy adventures had ended – with the death of the hero. Returning from fighting in a crusade against the forces of Darkness, the hero is ambushed and killed. Rising again as a ghost, he must set about solving his own murder and bring the scheme’s perpetrator to justice.

Abyssal Horror, by Stephen Player. (© Stephen Player, 2009 and 2014)

Stormslayer was one of only two Fighting Fantasy gamebooks not to have a full page painting produced

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Of course, the hero being a ghost put restrictions on what could and could not happen in the game, but also created the opportunity to try things that had never been done in a Fighting Fantasy gamebook before. For example, the hero cannot collect items, as his spectral form is unable to hold

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In 2009, prior to the publication of Night of the Necromancer, Wizard Books ran a competition suggested by author Jonathan Green, whereby one reader could make a cameo appearance in one of Martin McKenna’s illustrations for the book. Nicki Gray was the winner, having taken a photograph of herself looking frightened out of her wits whilst holding a copy of Stormslayer (FF63). Nicki Gray poses for her winning entry, and Martin McKenna’s portrait of her, lurking behind Van Richten the Ghost Hunter and his henchman Streng. (© Martin McKenna, 2010 and 2014)

anything, so he has to gather information instead. On the up side, being a ghost means the hero can walk through walls, fly, and even possess other characters encountered during the adventure. Martin McKenna returned for art duties, as much as a favour to Green as anything else, but still managed to produce some utterly awesome and memorable images, such as those of the Grave Golem, the Skeletal Serpent, the Sea Demon and the Hellfire Golem. Sea Demon, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2010 and 2014)

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Chapter Twenty-Four

The Silver Peak of Firetop Mountain Fighting Fantasy’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

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n 2007, Wizard Books celebrated the 25th anniversary of the publication of the original Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, with another new release – The Warlock of Firetop Mountain! However, this was a special hardback 25th anniversary limited edition of the gamebook that started it all. In fact it remains the only FF gamebook to be published in hardback. This new old edition of the book featured Peter Andrew Jones’ original wrap-around cover, and previously unpublished material including a brief history of Fighting Fantasy, the first draft of the opening of The Magic Quest, a solution to the game, Ian Livingstone’s handdrawn map of his half of the adventure, and a fold-out map of the dungeon beneath Firetop Mountain in its entirety. The map was created by Nicholas Halliday: “The original route came from a simple drawing by Steve Jackson, which I used to create my final fourpage map. There was a degree of revision after my first draft when notes flew back and forth describing steps going up or down, right or left twisting corridors and levels of detail.” So was Halliday a fan of Fighting Fantasy before he contributed to the 25th anniversary edition of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain? “I must confess I’ve never followed one to its natural conclusion,” admits Halliday, “but truly appreciate the skill involved in the writing.” 204 ◉

“I thought the Warlock 25th edition was a fantastic job,” says Jackson. “Simon Flynn worked really hard to compile the ‘extras’ section at the back. And as a hardback book it had a great ‘feel’ to it. I was hoping it would be a great success and would herald a new dawn of FF format, relaunching the entire series in hardback. But sadly it was not a success sales-wise and I think many copies were simply pulped. The trouble was that no one knew it existed. As a one-off it was lost in the bookshops, and the FF website made little mention of it. So it just made no impression at all. No one knew it existed.” It just so happened that the 25th anniversary year also saw the reprinting of two of Jonathan Green’s gamebooks – Curse of the Mummy and Spellbreaker – and publication of the brand new adventure Howl of the Werewolf, which featured a plot twist as yet unseen in the series.

The Evolution of a Logo Fighting Fantasy gamebooks have enjoyed various different cover formats over the years, but it is the FF shield and dagger logo that is easily the most recognisable across the range, even though it was only used from 1984 to 1995 (until it was reinvented for the thirtieth anniversary release of Ian Livingstone’s Blood of the Zombies). The first edition of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (FF1) did not bear the name Fighting Fantasy anywhere upon its cover, as creating a series of gamebooks had not even been considered at this stage, let alone what to call it.

Right: Spellbreaker, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2007 and 2014)

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The simultaneous releases of The Citadel of Chaos (FF2) and The Forest of Doom (FF3) were the first books to bear the coloured number on the front. The last book was Island of the Lizard King (FF7). Only one Sorcery! title used this format, and that was the first edition of Kharé - Cityport of Traps (S2).

Scorpion Swamp (FF8) was the first adventure to bear the now infamous green zigzag Adventure Gamebooks banner and the fondlyremembered Fighting Fantasy logo, which was also green at the time. Even though the zigzag only remained in use until Creature of Havoc (FF24), the spines of FF gamebooks stayed green until the end of Puffin Books’ run in 1995. Beneath Nightmare Castle (FF25) saw the introduction of what is now known as the dragon cover format. The dragon surmounting the cover credit box was created by fantasy art veteran Chris Achilleos. The FF logo still featured in this revised cover design but 206 ◉

Map of Firetop Mountain, by Nicholas Halliday. (© Nicholas Halliday, 2007 and 2014)

now appeared at the bottom right-hand corner and in yellow, rather than green. Each adventure’s number in the series also appeared on the cover until the publication of Portal of Evil (FF37) when it was removed completely. This proved unpopular with fans and numbers were reinstated from Dead of Night (FF40) onwards, although now it only appeared on the spine. The only exception was Return to Firetop Mountain (FF50), which had the number of the book front and centre, and finished in gold foil.

When Wizard Books took over publication of the series in 2002, the company completely revised the cover format. The name of the book appeared in silver foil, and always in the same font, while the FF logo became a circular silver shield.

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain sported a retro cover look that used the same wraparound cover as the very first edition of the book from 1982.

When Wizard relaunched the series in 2010, the shield logo changed again, taking up the whole of the front cover with the art restricted to a small circle at its centre. The words Fighting Fantasy were now the most prominent part of the design, with the title of the book appearing beneath the series’ name in a smaller font. For the release of the thirtieth anniversary adventure Blood of the Zombies (FF65), the series was given another makeover. Livingstone insisted that the green spine was restored after an absence of seventeen years, as was the yellow FF dagger and shield logo, although in a subtly modified form. It was this version of the logo that would go on to appear on all of Tin Man Games’ app versions of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

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Chapter Twenty-Five

The Fandom of Firetop Mountain Fan-sites, Fanzines and Fanatics

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hen Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone sat down to write The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, they had no idea that this one, simple adventure would go on to become a publishing phenomenon, let alone begin to guess at the impact it would have on a generation of children growing up in Thatcher’s Britain during the 1980s. What did become quickly apparent, however, was that children (and adults, in some cases) had never read anything like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook before. Certainly there had been examples of interactive fiction before, but despite them having a branching narrative structure, there was no actual quest to complete, and no puzzles to solve. The diverging narrative structure of many such choose-able path books also made a read through of the story a brief and fleeting experience. And then along came Fighting Fantasy… Where (the often inane) Choose Your Own Adventure titles provided a rambling random storytelling experience, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain presented the reader with a challenge; there was only one right way through the mountain labyrinth hidden within its pages and it was up to the reader to find it! Just as a crossword fanatic effectively enters into a battle of wits with the puzzle-setter every time they tackle a crossword, so with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain the reader was taking up the challenge set by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone – even when the book was first published two of the biggest names in the games industry! And it was this aspect of the books that engendered such passion in their readership, a group that was all too often written off as reluctant readers. FF fan Steve Brown could have been classed as one of those reluctant readers. “Fighting Fantasy was a major part of my childhood and teenage years and was a massive revelation in reading for me. Here were books 208 ◉

that I could control my own destiny in (to a degree) and were a lot of fun. They were the first books to really engage me and turned me from a casual reader into an avid bookworm.” “I did not like to read novels when I was young,” says Sebastien Boudaud, editor at Le Grimoire Publishing, publishers of the French translations of recent FF titles. “With gamebooks, I discovered that it could be funny to read some books. Then, I discovered RPG books and I played L’oeil Noir, Warhammer... Then in 1992 I decided to publish some material for these universes… I did not know what Fantasy was before FF. Today Fantasy is everywhere.” Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, “made reading far less passive, and I think for kids that were not natural readers, this was a massive boost,” says author Anthony Reynolds. “They put the reader squarely in the centre of the story and let them choose their own path forward; a sure-fire way to get readers engrossed in the story and really care about what happens.” Fighting Fantasy came to the attention of teachers nationwide because of the peculiar effect it was having on their pupils – particularly the male ones. It was making boys read, and not just that, but making them enthuse about reading. A level of energy and enthusiasm that had formerly been reserved for talking about what they had watched on TV the night before, or the latest unmissable football match, was now being expended talking about the characters and monsters from a series of fantasy books. Six things in particular engaged these so called reluctant readers. First there were the plots – exciting, dramatic, heroic, epic in scope and personal in their execution. Second was the fact that the reader was the hero, the story putting him right at the centre of the action, and not once making him feel like he was being talked down to due to the sometimes challenging vocabulary that the writing employed. Third there

Right: Eye of the Storm, by Emerson Tung. (© Emerson Tung, 2010 and 2014)

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was the interactive aspect of the adventures, the fact that the reader was instrumental in deciding what happened next. Fourth there were the illustrations – frequently of suitably hideous monsters – which once again helped to make a bizarre fantasy world the reader’s reality for the duration of the reading experience. Fifth was the structure of the book itself. The individual references, or paragraphs, were in the main relatively short, ensuring that the reader wasn’t put off by having to wade through a chapter ten pages long (or longer). Due to the very nature of a gamebook, having to continually turn to different pages, backwards and forwards throughout the book, the reader never really had any clear idea of how far through the book he was and so wasn’t put off by the feeling that he had been reading for a day and wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the story. And last of all there was the fact that the reader was playing a game as well as reading a book, enjoying the tactile sensation of actually rolling dice, their pulse racing as they awaited the outcome of those random dice rolls.

Artist Russ Nicholson says of the books that they were, “unique and according to teaching friends helped a lot of lads who did not read… and according to those same friends it was my illustrations that were a key for many. I was pleased when I heard that.” Gary Mayes, FF SF illustrator, had his own first-hand experience of seeing how the books helped encourage children to read. “When I was a teacher for a while, many of the children I taught were very familiar with the books and enjoyed reading them simply because it wasn’t necessary to plough through a book from cover to cover. I guess it was an early development of interactive storytelling.” Fighting Fantasy “has an enduring quality which I think is a tribute to the guys actually,” says original editor Philippa Dickinson. “I had thought that with the advent of computers, and all the games you can play… There’s so much that’s available now that doesn’t involve turning pages and rolling dice, is there still an audience for this? And there clearly is.” As well as reluctant readers, Fighting Fantasy inspired a new generation of young writers. Author Anthony Reynolds’s first experience of FF gamebooks was Ian Livingstone’s The Forest of Doom. “I read it back to front over and over again until it fell apart. I loved it. It felt like I’d just found the gateway to a whole new world… FF certainly played its part in cementing my love of the fantasy genre. I spent many hours lost in the worlds of the FF books as a kid – in some ways, I guess I’m still wandering around in those realms.” “I got together with a friend of mine at school when we were about ten and we started writing one called Trauma of the Timewarp,” says FF fan Andy Jones. “It had something to do with warping back and forth through Titan’s history, trying to collect gems. I can’t remember what the gems were for, though... Anyway, we never finished it because we found the process too difficult so I have every respect for all the FF authors for putting their books together so well!”

Serpent Queen, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1983 and 2014)

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“I was about 15 and can remember being sat at my mum’s old electronic typewriter tapping out paragraphs and having the numbers 1 through to 300 written out and crossing them off as I used each one up,” says Steve Brown, another FF enthusiast. “It wasn’t a particularly good attempt and blatantly plagiarised certain favourite bits from a number of gamebooks of the day – Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Bloodsword and the Golden Dragon gamebook series.”

“I have a whole series myself and a mate used to write, scribbled in exercise books and including an Out of the Pit style monster guide, and never-finished guide book to our world,” admits Phil Williams, now Art Manager at Egmont Creative Center, a Danishbased company that creates content for Donald Duck Weekly and Disney Preschool magazines, then an aspiring gamebook author. “Somehow, the headmaster at my high school found out that I was writing books (Fighting Fantasy style ones).  My school was a huge, tough comprehensive and it was unlikely you’d ever actually speak to the headmaster as he was this strange, distant and pretty scary figurehead.  So to be called to his office was pretty scary… “When I got there, it was even stranger – some dignitaries from the city council were there… I recall being rather confused by all these old guys in red robes and chains.  They all shook my hand and congratulated me… presumably because it was such a rarity for someone to be writing stories, rather than beating up teachers.  God knows what they’d have thought if they’d bothered to read one of my books… Making your own decisions? Killing zombies and orcs? Fighting trolls and conjuring spells?  A specific section you read if you get killed?  Maybe they wouldn’t have been so congratulatory!”

The Female of the Species Although primarily aimed at boys, only very rarely did a Fighting Fantasy adventure ever specify that the hero was male. As a result, large numbers of girls also ended up reading and enjoying the books. “The first Fighting Fantasy gamebook I ever read was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain,” says author, and feminist, Magda Knight. “I was there at the start and consider it a crowning achievement in my life. “I will never forget the day my grandparents bought me The Warlock of Firetop Mountain… on our caravan holiday in Brighton after I’d tugged on their sleeve a bit. At the age of ten, I still harboured hopes I was a fairy changeling, born to be queen in a magical kingdom. Once I started flipping through the pages of Firetop Mountain, I realised I’d been right all along. There really was a magical kingdom. My job, however, was not to rule it but to plunder it. Fortunately, I was okay with that. Kids are flexible that way.” “I encountered Fighting Fantasy gamebooks not too long after they first appeared,” says fantasy author Juliet E McKenna. “I’d gone up to university in 1983 and that’s where I discovered Dungeons & Dragons,

Traveller, Aftermath, Toon, Heroes, Car Wars and other tabletop role-playing games which instantly appealed to my lifelong love of fantasy and science-fiction. Such gaming offered me a whole new interactive and participatory way of engaging with such stories... “Then someone lent me a copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain… Solo gaming within a system that played fair, in the sense of punishing stupidity as well as rewarding intelligent thinking, and still with the added edge of unpredictable dice rolls landing you in no-win situations. Because game systems should be fair but, as the Goblin King reminds us in Labyrinth, real life simply isn’t. Which was great, because the endless variations and possibilities meant you could play the book time and again. Even once you’d won, you could go back and see where the roads not taken might have led.” So what was it about Fighting Fantasy that appealed to girls in particular? “I really did love that the books never provided an illustration of you, the hero,” says Knight. “They never alluded to your gender. It was superficially about your non gender-specific identity and profession (traveller, starship captain, thief), and 99% about the decisions you made. Even at the time, I found the lack of gender enormously satisfying because it really helped to make me believe I was capable of doing these things. “It’s very liberating to not have to imagine you’re a different gender... just to imagine you’re playing a different role. It saves up your belief points so you can spend more of them on the game, book and essentially the story itself.” “The gender-specific issue didn’t particularly cross my mind as a child,” says writer and games designer Sarah Newton, “I guess that was part of the fun of role-playing. However, it was very cool that Fighting Fantasy didn’t predetermine your character’s gender; I tended to create both male and female characters. I think if the books had tried to dictate gender, then they wouldn’t have been quite as appealing. “I remember playing a separate solo adventure for The Fantasy Trip called GrailQuest, where your character was supposed to be a knight. They didn’t specify you had to be a male knight, but you did do a bit of maiden-rescuing, as I recall. Even then, if anything, solos of that type flagged up the ideologies of the genre they were addressing; I never felt like they were saying, “Hey, you’re a girl, this isn’t for you!” but they did make me realise how confining women’s roles often were historically. ◉ 211

“I do find it a bit tiresome when fantasy worlds decide to replicate traditional male/female roles in their societies. When you’ve got elves, dwarves, dragons, and magic, is it really so tough to imagine a world where women can have roles beyond the traditional fauxmediaeval ones? That’s perhaps less of an issue these days, but I think it’s a trap fantasy can easily fall into. I guess I hope FF and RPGs in general rise up and above these limitations – but the temptation is always there.” Juliet E McKenna: “I love the way these books endured despite the arrival of computer games. I remember playing early attempts at those and being very unimpressed, both by the quality of the writing and plotting and by the inadequacies of the graphics. Fighting Fantasy gamebooks offered far superior game play for a good long while as well as the fabulous pictures inside my own head, spun off the wonderful cover art and the line drawings inside. It’s only in recent years that computer games have come anywhere near matching such visuals, never mind such intricate storytelling and replayability.” But has the series’ influence followed its female fans into adulthood? Knight: “FF influenced my writing career a huge amount. I like to mix fear with quirk and genuine surprises. I like to set traps and puzzles for the reader in my stories, and to take them on a journey where they wonder ‘How would I handle this?’ It has given me a healthy respect for tight corners, strangers on the road and being prepared. It has taught me to think fast and not make assumptions. It also filled my brain with wonderful images and encounters when I was young enough to get really and truly saturated with this stuff. The FF creators generously gave me their dreams so I could go and make some dreams of my own.” “I bet I’m not the only one currently writing epic fantasy fiction with such fond memories of flipping through an increasingly creased paperback, pencil between teeth and dice ready to hand,” adds McKenna. So, in this age of gender equality geekdom, what of the next generation of female Fighting Fantasy fans? Knight: “I frequently recommend FF to young female readers! They’ve been brought up on Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and many of them want to be Arya or a dragon… FF books are not just a lovely part of our geeky heritage, they’re still here... and they’re empowering (and fun, naturally) whoever you are. All for choice, and choice for all!” 212 ◉

Keeping the Dream Alive Fighting Fantasy captured the imaginations of a generation of young fans, and it was the loyalty and passion of those fans that helped keep the franchise alive after the books went out of print in the 1990s. And it is thanks to a handful of those fans that Fighting Fantasy has been reborn, not once, but twice; first in print, through Wizard Books – thanks to Simon Flynn, who was publishing manager at Icon Books at the time – and once again in app form, thanks to the likes of Neil Rennison and Ben Britten Smith of Tin Man Games, as well as Joseph Humfrey and Jon Ingold of Inkle Studios. Ironically, computer games, which many blamed for Fighting Fantasy’s premature demise in the mid-‘90s, now appear to be the future of the gamebook genre; so not so much a demise as a transition. As computers became more and more common place in homes around the world – with gamebooks being put to one side in favour of playing games like Doom and Tomb Raider on the family PC, or latest gaming console – so too did the Internet. And some of those Net-connected homes were places where ardent FF fans still dwelt. It was the rise of the Internet that helped keep the memory of Fighting Fantasy and other gamebook series alive, as fans set up websites, blogs and forums where they could share their love of the genre with like-minded individuals the world over, whilst also attracting new fans along the way. No doubt some, if not all, of the following list of websites will be familiar to many readers.

FightingFantasy.com (official) AdvancedFightingFantasy.com Amaylase The Book of Legends Fang’s Finest Emporium Fighting Fantasy Collector The Fighting Fantasy Project The Unofficial Fighting Fantasy Forum Rebuilding Titan (and Titan Rebuilding) The Black Tower

The Fighting Fantasy Vault

Treasures of the Warlock

The Shrine of Hamaskis

Fighting Fantasy Collector is a Fighting Fantasyorientated website run by Jamie Fry and launched in 2004. The introductory paragraph of the site reads: “This site I hope will satisfy any Fighting Fantasy collector looking for an archive of all known related FF material.” It is well-known amongst hardened fans for its lists of collectibles and accompanying price guide. But how did www. fightingfantasycollector.co.uk first come about?

Yaztromo’s Fighting Fantasy Site Fighting Dantasy Fighting for your Fantasy Turn to 400 Redswift’s Tower Demian’s Gamebook Web Page Lloyd of Gamebooks The Fighting Fantasy Webring FF Reviews Archive Mithrandir’s Gamebook Grotto World of Fighting Fantasy

Two of these sites are particularly worthy of note. Advancedfightingfantasy.com was set up and launched by David Holt in 2001. As well as featuring information about the gamebooks, maps and solutions, it also hosted a number of interviews with some of the artists and authors involved in the series. The site was replaced in 2003 by the official website. This was also created, and to begin with maintained, by Holt (with some assistance from Wizard Books) after Jackson and Livingstone invited him to do so.

“It roughly started back when Icon released the books again under the Wizard imprint. I started collecting the books again on the back of this and felt the need to collect all the originals as well. In order to establish the full back catalogue I looked to the Internet for a full inventory but it was lacking in this area. Sites existed but not one had everything in one place and it was then I saw a gap and sought to fill it with my own site that drew on all that content to create a one-stop shop.” So what’s the rarest item in the Fighting Fantasy Collector’s collection? “I have a pen and ink colour map of Allansia by Leo Hartas that I am particularly proud of that my wife bought me, and is the only one in existence. Original posters and box-sets are rare and a must in any collection as these rarely survive. I also own an original Puffin Books counter display once owned by Steve and no one has ever seen another since.” When Holt had to step down from running the official Fighting Fantasy website due to ill health, Fry took up the Warlock’s mantle, again at the behest of Zagor’s overlords, Jackson and Livingstone.

The Official Fighting Fantasy Website – fightingfantasy.com.

Steve Jackson, Jamie Fry and Ian Livingstone at Train2Game/ Epic Games ‘Make Something Unreal’ event at the 2012 Gadget Show Live in Birmingham. (© Jamie Fry, 2014)

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The advent of the Internet brought many FF fans and the series’ original creators together. “I was a tad late getting into the Internet, but was blown away by what was on there re: The Forest of Doom and me!” says artist Malcolm Barter. “It didn’t quite shock me into action though. Seven years later I decided to contact a chap named Demian Katz on one of the RPG sites and quell the rumours concerning my possible early death... I’d no idea the influence it had had on other people and I’m still amazed by it all… In the last few months I’ve been in touch with artists, publishers, authors and RPG enthusiasts in the UK, USA, France and Spain.” The art of Fighting Fantasy has become just as collectible as other items associated with the series. Some fans have made it their mission to collect as much original cover art as they can – now that they have the disposable incomes needed to indulge such a hobby – people like Pat Robinson and Irina Ivashova. Amongst the couple’s collection are Pater Andrew Jones’ covers for The Riddling Reaver and Sword of the Samurai, Les Edwards’ covers for Sky Lord and Demons of the Deep, and Terry Oakes’ covers for Dead of Night, Slaves of the Abyss, Island of the Undead, The Rings of Kether and Beneath Nightmare Castle.

the black and white illustrations from numerous FF adventures – all ones which he wrote himself, of course – and the card art created for the Legend of Zagor board game. Steve Jackson also owns most of the original art created for his Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, including both the original Peter Andrew Jones The Warlock of Firetop Mountain cover and all of John Blanche’s Sorcery! art.

Fighting Fantasy Fact

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Fighting Fantasy has its own unofficial, and yet highly comprehensive, wiki (a web application which allows people to add, modify, and delete content in a collaboration with others) containing over 7,400 articles. Founded in 2007 by Ken Beuden, it is named Titannica, after Titan, the Fighting Fantasy World, and can be found at www.fightingfantasy. wikia.com. Fighting Fantasy fans also have their own Facebook group. The 400th person to join the group (on 18th April 2014) was Jonathan Hicks, the Farsight Blogger.

Fighting Fantazine Fighting Fantasy fanzines (or ‘fan magazines’) have been around for as long as Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Even the author of this book ran one back in the ‘80s (not that he knew what a fanzine was, at the time).

Irina Ivashova with some of the original Fighting Fantasy art she owns along with husband Pat Robinson. (© Pat Robinson, 2014)

But there is one that has made more of an impact in recent years than any other, with those behind it helping to raise awareness of the gamebook genre’s renaissance, and conducting in depth interviews with many of the original FF creators.

Unsurprisingly, Ian Livingstone has his own extensive collection of FF art, including the original cover art for The Forest of Doom, City of Thieves, Deathtrap Dungeon, Island of the Lizard King, Caverns of the Snow Witch, Freeway Fighter (both of Jim Burns’ versions of the cover), Temple of Terror, Trial of Champions, Crypt of the Sorcerer and Blood of the Zombies. He also owns all the watercolours Iain McCaig produced for Casket of Souls,

Fighting Fantazine was launched in 2009 by Alexander Ballingall, with the support of such FF fandom champions as Andrew Wright and Warren Maguire, and contributing editors Demian Katz, Guillermo Paredes and Stuart Lloyd.

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Part of Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy art collection. (© Jonathan Green, 2014)

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“I came to FF fandom relatively recently in 2007,” says Ballingall, “when I discovered the existence of the official FF magazine Warlock from the ‘80s. I was inspired to try and replicate that in a form for today’s fans.” In many ways, Fighting Fantazine is just like an online modern version of Warlock magazine, resurrecting the ‘Omens and Auguries’ column that appeared in the original, whilst also introducing new, regular features such as ‘The Fact of Fiction’. And just like Warlock magazine, each issue comes with a complete, and brand new mini-FF adventure, which many older fans have come to rely on for their regular fix of new Fighting Fantasy gamebook material. Some of these have been unofficial sequels to well-known adventures such as Return to the Icefinger Mountains, a follow up to Ian Livingstone’s Caverns of the Snow Witch (FF9).

sort of definite body of criticism of the FF range. The other was to be a platform for fans to present their own interpretations and extensions of the FF mythos in word and art.” Such was fandom’s support for the fanzine that in 2013, Fighting Fantazine appeared in print form for the first time, rather than just as a web-based magazine.

Fighting Fantazine is also notable for carrying out a survey of its readership in 2010, to find out which was the most popular FF gamebook at the time. Each adventure was rated according to four criteria: Plot, Gameplay, Atmosphere and Illustrations. Helped in no small part by illustrator Martin McKenna’s contribution, the book which ended up topping the chart was one of the newer Fighting Fantasy titles published by Wizard Books, Howl of the Werewolf (FF62).

Movers and shakers

Toiling in the Mines, by Brett Schofield (from The Shrine of the Salamander mini adventure by Andrew Wright). (© Brett Schofield, 2014) Ballingall: “Primarily I wanted the magazine to do two things, both of which could be seen as helping the FF legacy to endure. One was that it provided a place where both straight and occasionally more amusing analysis of the books could be represented in a way that wouldn’t be lost in the ever expanding haze of ephemeral blogs and forums, thus creating some 216 ◉

Another aspect of fandom that aided the resurgence of interest in gamebooks in the lead up to Fighting Fantasy’s 30th anniversary was the fact that many of the series’ original young fans are now movers and shakers in both the world of publishing and the gaming industry. People like Neil Rennison, founder of Tin Man Games, and Graham Bottley of Arion Games, as well as the likes of New York Times bestselling author Graham McNeill and New York Times bestselling editor Christian Dunn. McNeill: “Without The Warlock of Firetop Mountain I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. It was the first book I read that really opened my eyes to the possibility of being a writer. I wrote a couple of FF style books myself (Silver Death and Fortress of the Desert Lord) which I still have, handwritten in school jotters. I’ve read bits of them over the decades since I wrote them, and though they’re clearly the product of a young teenage imagination, there’s some good, solid stuff in there.”

For Rennison the series, “introduced interactive gameplay, which at that point I’d only experienced on my ZX Spectrum and adventure games were few and far between… My love of gaming continued through school and university and into working in the video game industry itself. Years later I now find myself full circle, creating my own interactive gamebooks. I think it’s safe to say that finding Fighting Fantasy was a pretty important event in my life.” Christian Dunn, whose time with Games Workshop’s Black Library publishing arm included, “helming the Path To Victory brand which is our name for the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 gamebooks we publish” also credits FF with setting him on his current career path. “I think it’s safe to say that if it wasn’t for Fighting Fantasy then I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.” So how do fans of Fighting Fantasy and gamebook aficionados explain the gamebook resurgence of recent years? FF fan Damian Butt: “Pure nostalgia. There are hundreds of thousands of people who fondly remember thumbing those precious pages whilst clutching a pencil and dice, their imagination going into overdrive. Those same people have now settled down, they’re most likely parents, more affluent, and new FF books are a direct link to their childhood – and who doesn’t want to relive memories like that?” FF fan Matthew Smith: “I think the surge in eBooks and the associated book readers has allowed people to rediscover reading and in doing so the whole gamebook genre. Even the video gaming side of things, more and more people are enjoying the games that have a good solid plot and storylines, and even more so games where you can influence the ending, change or tamper with fate so to speak. Either that or just accept that sometimes things just come back into fashion, even mullets.” FF fan Steve Jones: “I think the gamebook resurgence is partly due to the success of fantasy in the film industry. It wasn’t long ago that Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards and Goblins and swords and sorcery were all seen as very geeky and uncool. Then we have the emergence of Harry Potter and films of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and the recent Game of Thrones TV series and suddenly fantasy has become mainstream with everyone looking into everything the genre has to offer.” “It’s all down to us!” quips Neil Rennison of Tin Man Games. “I joke, but I do like to think we’ve played

an important role in gamebooks coming back to prominence. The advance of digital reading devices has encouraged the interest in gamebooks because they allow all of the interactive logic to work by just pressing the touch screen. I also believe that fantasy is cool again after The Lord of the Rings films and massive online computer games like World of Warcraft. As gamebooks are traditionally tied into fantasy themes, it makes sense for people wanting to get their fantasy reading fix, and what better way than influencing the story yourself ?” Author Anthony Reynolds: “Partly retro-cool, partly nostalgia, partly a response to console/computer gaming. They [gamebooks] are still a great way to help youngsters develop a love of reading.” Of course the gamification of literature is proving to be a boon for reluctant readers all over again, as children’s author David Lee Stone has discovered. “I’m a school governor, so I’m very aware of how the attention span of young readers has shortened over the years. Having FF arrive back in the school playground is just wonderful. You can’t really describe the sense of victory when something great from your childhood reemerges: it would be like finding out that Knightmare had been recommissioned by CITV!” Jon Ingold, creative director and narrative designer at Inkle Studios: “We’re the gamebook generation, and we’re now, finally, in the position of being able to decide what gets made. We remember how great these experiences were and can’t understand why they aren’t around anymore, so we make them again.  “Secondly, iPads and Kindles – and this is the bit that got Inkle started, and makes me really interested. An iPad lets you read, but it can also remember everything you’ve read. An iPad lets you make choices really fast, so you can have a lot more choices. And an iPad doesn’t need the words on the page to be fixed. There are places in the Sorcery! books where Steve has really carefully worded a paragraph so it makes sense regardless of which branch you’ve taken, avoiding using too much detail because a character might be lying dead, or standing around nearby, or whatever... With a digital gamebook, there’s no need for that. The text can change on the fly. That’s an exciting prospect.” Magda Knight, author of speculative and YA fiction: “Those FF kids have grown up, and some of them are commuters. Train journeys are boring. Holding an FF book in your hands makes you look cool, and playing a gamebook app is a rewarding and snack way to live in the world you want to live in during that blissful train ◉ 217

ride to work. An orc-encrusted adventure sets you up for the day.” “I think nostalgia is playing quite a large part in the resurgence of interest,” says Ian Livingstone. “When parents think of the books they used to read as children themselves, they imagine that going through a Fighting Fantasy gamebook with their own children would be a lot of fun. Collectors are also looking to revisit their childhood passions.”

Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders In March 2014, Ian Livingstone presented Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games and the creative maverick behind the Grand Theft Auto series, with his BAFTA for Best British Game. At the time Houser told Livingstone that he loved FF when he was young and tweeted the following to his 2.4 million followers on Twitter: @ian_livingstone it was an honour to receive it from you! We’ve been huge fans since Warlock of Firetop Mountain & Games Workshop Hammersmith!

“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” adds FF cover artist Les Edwards, “and I’ve had several private commissions from FF fans who are now ‘grown up’ and would like to own an FF style painting.” FF fan Steven Dean has his own theory for the gamebook revival: “People are bored of the first person shooter-style game which doesn’t leave any room for intelligence or strategy.” FF artist Pete Knifton agrees: “The resurgence is due to people becoming bored with video games. They want something more tactile. Also FF has a lovely retro charm.” And it’s not just popular authors and the people running the small, independent games companies who are FF fans.

Famous Fans Fighting Fantasy has some particularly famous fans, who are happy to recognise the influence the books have had on their lives and, in some cases, even directed their future careers. These individuals are now household names and yet many fans may not have known that they share a common bond: people like comedy game show host and science boffin Dara O’Briain; screenwriter and novelist Alex Garland; comedian, actor, writer and producer Charlie Higson; fantasy author Joe Abercrombie; entrepreneur dot.com businessman, and creator of the newest kids’ craze Moshi Monsters, Michael Acton Smith; thriller writer and author of the soviet crime thriller Child 44, Tom Rob Smith; Gadget Show presenter Jason Bradbury; Labour MP Tom Watson; and comedian Richard Herring. “I think probably Warlock was my favourite,” says Herring, “but I also recall enjoying the one set in space… I enjoyed the books, and the geekery behind that and other sci-fi stuff has certainly informed my adult persona… The interactivity and element of random chance made it particularly exciting and 218 ◉

Ian Livingstone and Sam Houser at the British Academy Games Awards. (© Ian Livingstone, 2014)

showed the possibilities of literature in a way that was engaging for kids. Michael Acton Smith cites The Forest of Doom as his favourite FF adventure and credits the series with being a huge influence on what he is doing now at Mind Candy. “The books really sparked my imagination, so much so that I started to create my own. There wasn’t really anything like it at the time. It made reading so much more fun and exciting. They inspired a generation and I’m sure many video game makers of today will cite them as hugely influential.” Author Gavin G Smith is also a life-long fan of the series. “Deathtrap Dungeon really stumped nine yearold me.  I then played The Warlock of Firetop Mountain which had been serialised in a games magazine. I quite enjoyed the non-fantasy ones like Starship Troopers and Freeway Fighter. However, I remember The Forest of Doom and Island of the Lizard King with fondness… You can’t beat a big lizard for a bad guy. Actually I think I liked the Lizard King because my tastes in fantasy lean more towards Howard/Leiber and less toward Tolkein and the Lizard King seemed to support that.”

Thirty Years of Deathtrap Dungeon On 29 April 2014, Ian Livingstone posted the following tweet via Twitter:

The tweet was viewed over 87,000 times and within twenty-four hours had received 900 re-tweets. It also received 614 favourites, including one from Edgar Wright, writer and director of zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead, who passed it on to his 440,556 followers, and another from Graham Linehan, the comedy writer responsible for such classics as Father Ted and The IT Crowd, who spread the news to his 363,272 followers!

But how much of an impact did Fighting Fantasy have on Smith’s writing career? “I think they were part of the influence that gaming has in a lot of my writing. They were very good at engaging and challenging the reader. By keeping the reader engaged they taught some valuable lessons in pacing.” Fantasy and science fiction novelist Gav Thorpe also learnt a portion of his writing craft from FF gamebooks. “I’ve always admired the interactivity of the storylines, and I suppose they helped me understand the nature of narrative conflict and character choice.”

The Sincerest Form of Flattery They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, just like anything that achieves a certain level of success, as well as spawning a host of inferior rival gamebook series, and a few good ones, Fighting Fantasy has also attracted its fair share of parodies. Like a cocky literature student meeting his author idol for the first time, The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain (published by Bantam Press in 2008) is an out and out spoof of a certain well-known Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebook.

Claiming to be “a skilful comic account of the drudgery of modern life” married to “a thrilling adventure populated by creatures of myth and legend” the book was intended to appeal to those former fans of Fighting Fantasy, who were then twenty- and thirtysomethings who had grown up to discover that the real world wasn’t as exciting as the world that existed inside the pages of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and its ilk. Neither was The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain. Described as “a geeky treasure-chest of comedy, fizzing with ideas and wit” by comedian David Schneider, Enemy of Chaos, by Leila Johnston (published by Snowbooks in 2009) has the Fighting Fantasy devotee of the 1980s coming out of retirement one more time, to put his dicerolling skills to good use and defeat the rise of chaos; or, as the book’s cover blurb puts it, “What if the fate of the world hung upon your ability to choose wisely between turning to p36 or p75?” Comics writer, author and Fighting Fantasy fan Al Ewing acknowledged FF’s achievement, and the gamebook genre in general, in a Judge Dredd strip published in 2000AD Prog 2012. In ‘Choose Your Own Xmas’, which was drawn by comics legend John Higgins, the unfortunate protagonist of the story is one Jackson Packard, a citizen of Mega-City One who works as a lab technician at West 17 Test Labs with a certain Steve Livingstone. (During the course of the story the city-within-a-city-sized residential building Joe Dever Block is destroyed by an exploding chemical tanker.)

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Judge Dredd: Choose Your Own Xmas, by Al Ewing and John Higgins. (© Rebellion A/S, 2014)

But despite the various parodies and spoofs, the original gamebooks are still held in high regard – you could even go so far as to say loved – by thousands of fans worldwide, but particularly in the UK. After all, the Fighting Fantasy adventures are the books that shaped a generation.

Spoof Fighting Fantasy covers created by Christopher Bird.

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Chapter Twenty-Six

Le Sorcier de la Montagne de Feu Foreign Editions

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t wasn’t only rival British publishers who wanted a piece of the gamebook genre pie when it became clear that Puffin Books had a hit on its hands with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and the Fighting Fantasy series as a whole. From their gloomy towers far across the sea, other publishers saw what was happening on balmy British shores and wanted in. Over the last three decades, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks have been published in Australia, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, South Korea, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, and the former Yugoslavia. But it all began with France. “The publishers Gallimard really did a fantastic job with the series,” says Livingstone. “They branded every title ‘Un livre dont vous etes le Hero’ in large letters on the front cover. It was their ‘Ronseal factor’ description that was very effective. Fighting Fantasy never went out of print in France and Gallimard are still publishing and promoting the series to this day.”

Fighting Fantasy by any other name Depending on which country the gamebooks were published in, the Fighting Fantasy range underwent a number of name changes. In France the books were known as Défis fantastiques, in Germany as FantasyAbenteuerSpielbücher, in Italy as both Serie di avventure and Dimensione avventura. In Holland, Fighting Fantasy became Fantasy Avonturenboeken, in Denmark the series was called Sværd og trolddom, and in Norway it was Fantastiske farer. In Spain the books were labelled as Lucha ficción, while in Portugal they became Aventuras fantásticas. In Bulgaria they were known as Bitki Bezbroy, and in Hungary they were variously Fantázia harcos or Kaland, játék, kockázat. In Iceland Fighting Fantasy became Leikjabók, in Finland it was Taistelupeli, 222 ◉

and in Estonia it was Võitlus-fantaasiad. In Brazil the publishers called the series Aventuras fantásticas (as they were in Portugal), while in both Sweden and the Czech Republic, it was known simply as Fighting Fantasy. Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series also made the transition into various foreign language formats, being known as Die Analand Saga in Germany, Artes mágicas! in Portugal, and as both ¡Brujeria! and Brujos y guerreros in Spain. In Hungary the quartet was classified as Kaland játék varázslat, while the Czech version was called, simply, Magie. In Bulgaria Sorcery! became Magosnichestva, in Italy it was Sortilegio, while in France it was renamed Sorcellerie! The Danish version was called Sagaen om den magiske krone, which translates, appropriately enough as, The Saga of the Magical Crown. It is clear that Fighting Fantasy was very popular in Eastern Europe, as Hungarian fan Zsolt Matyusz can attest: “Many of the books were translated into Hungarian and published mostly between 1989 and 1993. Thirty books out of fifty-nine were published in Hungarian, plus the four Sorcery! books and Titan… It was a huge thing in Hungary in 1989 when the series (and with it the genre) came in and FF became the gamebook series very quickly, thanks to its high quality level. It is an excellent series, simple as that.” However, non-English fans were not treated to the same wealth of material as their English-speaking counterparts. “I have only read The Trolltooth Wars,” says FF devotee Thomas Nielsen, “since that was the only one that was published in Danish. I think it was decent and worth reading, though not mind-blowingly awesome. The best part of it was definitely to see some new sides to some of my favourite characters like Zagor, Balthus Dire and Yaztromo.” Portuguese FF fan Tiago Alexandre da Cruz Correia Sequeira: “The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was my first one, so it will forever have a special place in my heart, but I also enjoyed Legend of the Shadow Warriors,

Right: Seas of Blood, by Rodney Matthews. (© Rodney Matthews, 1985 and 2014)

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A Pizza the Action It took a little longer for gamebooks to find their niche in Italy, but in 1985 Italian publisher Edizioni EL coined the term ‘librogame’ and set about spearheading a campaign to bring gamebooks to an Italian audience, including Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. So successful were they that by the late Eighties gamebooks had become almost mainstream in their appeal in Italy. Bookshops had whole sections dedicated to librogames and so popular were they with the nation’s children that Disney produced both Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck gamebooks. During the Eighties, as in the UK and elsewhere, librogames saw a massive drop in sales, but a dedicated hardcore fanbase hung in there, utilising the burgeoning Internet to share their love of gamebooks. The biggest, and most regularly frequented, Italian gamebook fan website is Librogame’s Land (www. librogame.net), which is not just an invaluable resource for authors, translators and artists, but also a meeting place for Italian Fighting Fantasy fans.

probably because I had to play it so many times, as a problem with its translation into Portuguese prevented me from solving it. “Fighting Fantasy kept me interested in reading and introduced me to a world of fantasy that stimulated my imagination. I am a creative person today and I know that I have to thank Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone for it. “Back in the day, I was an authority as far as Fighting Fantasy was concerned. All that was available to me was the Portuguese translations. As some of the puzzles weren’t translated into Portuguese, it was very hard to solve them properly. I was, however, the only kid around that did solve those puzzles and I was known for having finished books like Tower of Destruction or Vault of the Vampire.” But of all the foreign markets, France, the USA and Japan were the biggest – in other words best-selling – as far as Fighting Fantasy was concerned.

Défis Fantastiques and Vous Etes le Hero Défis fantastiques (or ‘Fantastic Challenges’) was the French name for the Fighting Fantasy series as published by Folio Junior, an imprint of  French language publishers Gallimard. The Fighting Fantasy titles were grouped together with French translations of other gamebook series under the umbrella title of Un livre dont vous êtes le héros. The French titles of the books often were not actually literal translations of the English ones. So there was Le Sorcier de la Montagne de Feu (The Wizard of the Mountain of Fire), La Forêt de la Malédiction (The Forest of the Curse), La Galaxie tragique (The Tragic Galaxy, a.k.a. Starship Traveller), and Le Combattant de l’autoroute (The Combatant of the Motorway, in other words Freeway Fighter). “Gallimard Publishing is one of the three biggest publishers in France,” explains French editor Sebastien Boudaud. “The gamebooks never went out of print in thirty years.” Steve Jackson’s The Tasks of Tantalon was also translated into French. It first appeared in the second issue of  Piranha, a magazine edited by Gallimard, before being released as a hardback book entitled Les Douze Secrets du Sorcier (The Twelve Secrets of the Sorcerer). Since Wizard Books started publishing the FF series in 2002, several of the newer Fighting Fantasy adventures have been translated by new imprint Gallimard Jeunesse (now published under the heading Vous Etes le Hero), including Bloodbones, Night of the Necromancer and Howl of the Werewolf. Interestingly, Eye of the Dragon has become L’Oeil d’Émeraude (The Emerald Eye). Graham Bottley’s update of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG has also recently been published in France by Scriptarium, a project that has been driven forward by publisher Florent Haro. So what motivated him to start translating the AFF adventures and publishing them in France? “Mainly because I had never understood why the first RPG and the first AFF hadn’t been translated

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into French, when FF sold well,” explains Haro. “I seized the opportunity in 2011 with Scriptarium… We wanted to have the possibility of promoting and developing the game, and becoming the official publisher for the French version. Then we contacted Steve Jackson, and agreed on a licence. “We have managed to publish an augmented rulebook with new illustrations and layout, an exclusive colour poster map of Allansia, a game-screen with a new adventure, and a set of tiles and paper figures, much appreciated by most of our clients. I’m very proud of our work, and hope the creation part will be soon translated to be shared via Arion Games with the English-reading AFF fans.”

Shakaishisou Sha even arranged a Fighting Fantasy Day and went so far as to register the names of the co-creators in Kanji (the system of Japanese writing that uses Chinese characters). Jackson: “First event was a signing at a big bookstore in Tokyo. We arrived to find a queue stretching from our signing table, right across the shop floor and up three flights of stairs. And people had brought us small gifts. Next day was a ‘Fighting Fantasy Convention’. The hall was packed with fans who we spoke to through our interpreter. Then we went on the Bullet train to various other cities for signings, etc. We were overwhelmed by the response to this tour.

Big in Japan ファイティング・ファンタジー was the name given to the Fighting Fantasy series in Japan, which translates simply as ‘Fighting Fantasy’. In 1986, Shakaishisou Sha, the Japanese publishers of the range, arranged a publicity tour for the two cofounders of Fighting Fantasy, and invited Jackson and Livingstone to visit Tokyo to sign copies of their books. Fans turned out in their hundreds. “Shakaishisou Sha was a small publisher of mainly dry, academic works; sociology and the like,” Jackson explains. “Penguin’s Japanese agent approached them with Fighting Fantasy. It wasn’t their thing at all. But the editor gave a sample of Warlock to his teenage son, who was studying English. The son was so enthusiastic that they signed up a deal. I have no idea what happened to bring the books into the public eye. But suddenly FF was something of a sensation. And Shakaishisou Sha, who would normally sell 5-10,000 copies max of one of their academic books, suddenly found they’d sold 250,000 copies of Warlock! Through Penguin we got them to agree that if they sold two million plus books in Japanese they would invite us over for a publicity tour. They honoured their promise. “And so it was that in 1986 Ian and I flew to Tokyo and embarked on a memorable publicity tour. On our arrival, our hosts gave us both envelopes which we assumed were itineraries. But later we found they had given us around £1,000 cash each! I suggested this was to pay the hotel and put a limit on our expenses – so they didn’t have to pay for long phone calls back to our families in the UK, but no. As we checked out of the hotel we were told that the company had paid for our rooms already. The cash was simply our ‘pocket money’!”

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone on tour in Japan in 1986. (© Ian Livingstone, 1986 and 2014) “On the Bullet train to Kyoto we asked our editor how our names would appear on the book covers in traditional Japanese. He explained that Western names were not really translatable, but they could be registered in Kanji. It was a bit like the trade mark system. You put some characters together and officially registered them. And from then on they meant ◉ 225

something in Kanji. He offered to create Kanji characters that would represent our names. Mine was a combination of three existing characters which translated into ‘Happy Emperor Samurai’ or something like that. Three weeks after we returned home I received a packet from Japan which contained official ink stamps with our Kanji translations, and a few T-shirts with our characters printed on them. The only problem was we couldn’t tell which was which! So for all I know, Ian has three T-shirts with ‘Steve Jackson’ on, and I have the Ian Livingstone ones!” To the English-speaking reader, the literal Japanese translations of some FF titles seem particularly peculiar, whilst still making (im)perfect sense. When Wizard Books began reprinting the Fighting Fantasy series in the new millennium, the Hobby Japan company took over publishing the Japanese translations. When looking at these new editions of Japanese FF gamebooks, what stand out the most – after the Kanji characters and the layout of text on the page – are the illustrations. Where Shakaishisou Sha reused the original illustrations, Hobby Japan had them redrawn (meticulously copying the originals in many cases) to include the hero of the books who never really appeared in the UK editions (other than a hand here, as in Midnight Rogue, or a foot there, as with Night of the Necromancer). This means that in Deathtrap Dungeon for example (or rather Underground labyrinth of trap of death) the artwork features a busty, female warrior drawn in

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FF

English title

1 4 11 15 17 18 21 32

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain Starship Traveller Talisman of Death The Rings of Kether Appointment with F.E.A.R. Rebel Planet Trial of Champions Slaves of the Abyss

a distinctly manga, or anime, style, and wearing the sort of outfit that you would hardly expect a warrior to wear to the beach, let alone for the duration of a gruelling dungeon bash! As a result, it is referred to as the ‘Double-D’ cover in some circles. Both the Fighting Fantasy Puzzle Quest books The Tasks of Tantalon and Casket of Souls were published in Japanese editions, as was Warlock magazine, of course.

Beyond the Pond Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were published in the United States of America, in the 1980s, by Laurel Leaf, an imprint of  Dell Publishing, the publishers commissioning new cover art from artists Richard Corben and R Courtney. It wasn’t until book #14, Temple of Terror, that they started reusing the original UK cover art. “We were quite chuffed that they had commissioned Richard Corben to do the covers,” says Jackson. “He’s a very famous fantasy artist. But I remember we weren’t too keen on the Warlock cover because it showed the Hero. And in FF YOU are the Hero. But by then it was too late.” The first eleven covers featured a white background, while from book twelve onwards the white was changed for black. Long before Wizard Books’ second relaunch of the series in the UK in 2009, the American editions of the FF gamebooks had a cohesive look, even if the style of cover art wasn’t what it might have been. The first FF title, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, appeared in the States towards the end of 1983. The last title to be published State-side was Trial of Champions (FF21). It is interesting to note that when House of Hell was released in the US it was renamed as House of Hades, since ‘Hell’ was a more common swearword with religious connotations in America than it Literal translation of the Japanese name Magical using of fire blowing mountain The space ship which you can wander about Necklace of dead god Federal criminal investigator of outer space Push down the cyborg Electric brain destructive manoeuvres Labyrinth exploration competition Monarch of basement

was in the UK.

Chinese Takeaway

In October 2003, iBooks of  New York republished the first two Fighting Fantasy adventures, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and The Citadel of Chaos. The company was the first trade publisher to publish their titles simultaneously in eBook and print formats. Unfortunately no other FF titles were released by the company and iBooks filed for bankruptcy in February 2006.

The two newest foreign translations of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks will bring the series to a new market that makes up one seventh of the world’s population, Jackson and Livingstone having signed deals with not one but two different publishers in China.

“We had great hopes for US sales through iBooks,” says Jackson. “But the whole thing was not a great success. This was a big deal that had been set up by Icon, with minimum guarantees. But when the iBooks editions were a flop, it all went out the window.”

“There’s one publisher in mainland China ◉ 227

(simplified Chinese) and another in Taiwan (traditional Chinese),” Jackson explains. “We are still waiting to hear how they are doing.”

Hungary for more Gamebooks proved to be very popular in Hungary during the 1980s, since they were the first Western books released in the country whilst it was still under Communist rule. In the 1990s, Hungarian authors and gamers took to writing their own adventure gamebooks inspired by the Fighting Fantasy titles. Building on their popularity, two books were published around the year 2000 (Legend of Zagor and Knights of Doom) but the venture proved to be a financial failure. Today, the Hungarian gamebook community is very small, understandable when you consider that the entire population of the country is only 10 million people, and mainly made up of people who were teenagers back in the ‘80s, with a particular interest in rare Western books. The website Zagor.hu is now the hub of the fan community in Hungary, offering downloadable content and free gifts for members, who share their love of Fighting Fantasy through eBooks translated from English into Hungarian. Various foreign language editions of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and the Casket of Souls, from Ian Livingstone’s personal collection. (© Jonathan Green, 2014)

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Right: Geant, by Jidus. (© Scriptarium, 2013 and 2014)

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Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Technomancers of Firetop Mountain The Rise of the (Fighting Fantasy) Video Game

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he 1980s are not only remembered for the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike and Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, of course. It was also the decade that many families acquired their first home computer. Those who were around at the time remember the rivalry between Commodore 64 owners and those with a ZX Spectrum at home. You were either one or the other – never both! The companies that had a vested interest in this burgeoning craze, producing games for the home computer market, were not slow to associate themselves with something that was an even bigger craze at the time – Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. The first book to be adapted in 1984 by Crystal Computing, and published by Puffin Books, was, naturally, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A simplistic arcade maze game, released only for the ZX Spectrum, the game bore virtually no resemblance to the book whatsoever. It was said to bear a striking resemblance, however, to Halls of the Things, a game created by Neil Mottershead and Simon Brattel of Crystal Computing in 1983, and named game of the year by Sinclair User Magazine. One positive outcome of the release of the game, however, was that it led to Fighting Fantasy being covered more frequently in the increasingly popular Spectrum-oriented magazines. Adaptations of The Citadel of Chaos (FF2) and The Forest of Doom (FF3) – for both the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 this time – soon followed, but these thankfully stuck to the plotlines of the original books and took the form of text adventures. This meant that the experience of playing the games was little more than reading a Fighting Fantasy gamebook on the screen, only without the advantage of being able to flick backwards and forwards through the book to admire the art, or cheat when things did not go your way. 230 ◉

Puffin Books published the first three Fighting Fantasy computer games in the form of a Software Pack, which included the game and the original book it was based on. The Forest of Doom was the last FF computer game published by Puffin Books, AdventureSoft taking over the licence in 1985 after signing a deal with Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Over the next three years, three more computer adaptations were released, this time marketed for the Amstrad, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, as well as the Spectrum and Commodore 64. Strangely, rather than continue the series with Starship Traveller (FF4), City of Thieves (FF5) and Deathtrap Dungeon (FF6), the programmers chose Seas of Blood (FF16), Rebel Planet (FF18) and Temple of Terror (FF14) to be their next releases.

An advertisement for the Rebel Planet computer game. Sword of the Samurai (FF20) was advertised as a future release, and both Appointment with F.E.A.R. (FF17) and Demons of the Deep (FF19) were rumoured to have gone into production as well, but in the end none of these adventures were realised in a computer game format. Ironically, considering that it was the advent of video games that – even if it did not actually kill the gamebook genre, at least beat it to a pulp and left it in a coma for the best part of a decade – in the early days of the home computer boom, the adaptations of the early Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were a weak substitute for the real thing. Computer graphics and sound effects at the time came a poor second to the fantastic artwork of the original gamebooks coupled

Right: Temple of Terror, by Chris Achilleos. (© Chris Achilleos, 1985 and 2014)

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with the readers’ vivid imaginations. Once you got past the novelty of playing a Fighting Fantasy adventure on your computer – and, in the case of many, had got fed up with the games failing to load time and again – it quickly became apparent that, as with so many other things in life, the original really was the best. “There wasn’t much the developers could do in terms of graphics with the memory of a 48k Spectrum in the early 1980s,” says Ian Livingstone. “They did their best, but the computer games did not add anything more than the books offered. In fact the art was much worse than in the books!”

Sukumvit’s personal labyrinth of death, and some familiar faces made an appearance along the way – such as the prehistoric Pit Fiend, as well as various Orcs and Giant Spiders – much of it made little sense in terms of structure, with the dungeon acquiring an entire Circus level and such absurdities as flying turtles and exploding pigs. That said, there were some creations that it would have been fun to see make it into the long-rumoured Deathtrap Dungeon 3 gamebook, such as the gut-squashing and fire-breathing Automatons, and the four-armed Demonwitches.

FF fan Matthew Smith is less generous in his assessment of those early Fighting Fantasy computer games: “Let’s face it, the graphics weren’t really there and it was a backwards step from actually having a book with its unique artwork, and the computer game actually taking longer to use.”

One of the designers who worked on the game was FF alumnus Jamie Thomson. The experience of working on the game was, “Long and hard and difficult,” according to Thomson, “but very interesting. Unfortunately, the game went in a direction I didn’t think was right for it, too ‘Lara Croft action’ and not enough RPG. But I wasn’t in a position to do anything about that.”

It wasn’t until the arrival of gaming consoles such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Mega Drive, the Sony PlayStation, and more powerful home PCs with greater processing power, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, that Fighting Fantasy, and the gamebook genre in general, came under threat of being wiped out entirely by the new, full colour, surround sound, digital role-playing experience they offered.

In the game, the player took on the role of either the muscled male hero Chaindog or the leather-clad, buxom female adventurer Red Lotus. But was the addition of Red Lotus purely a response to the success of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider?

Ian Livingstone’s Deathtrap Dungeon In 1998, with the gamebook effectively dead as a literary form, Eidos Interactive retaliated, introducing the world of Fighting Fantasy to a new generation of gamers (as well as reintroducing it to a host of older fans) with the release of Ian Livingstone’s Deathtrap Dungeon. Described as a medieval action/adventure video game, for the PlayStation and Windows PC, it bore only a passing resemblance to the book of the same name. Although the adventure still took place in Baron 232 ◉

“A little,” admits Thomson, “but also to the fact that there were more women in gaming than there had been before (but still in much smaller numbers than men back then), but also to the fact that in FF, and gamebooks in general, you could choose your own hero, and the text never said whether you were male or female (or tried not so say). In the computer game, the hero was there on screen for all to see. That meant names, and providing both genders to play as. Of course, in those days it still suffered a

little from the usual ‘gaming sexism’ in its portrayal of women. As many still do today, in fact.”

gamebook author, to design the game. But the programmers in the inexperienced team struggled to code a game with a 3D character moving through a 3D world. The scope of the game had to be trimmed, and much to my disappointment, the RPG element had to be dropped. On publication it certainly got mixed reviews, but there are fans to this day who still love the game.”

Big Blue Bubble For more than a decade no new FF games were released. Then in 2009, developer Big Blue Bubble asked if they could produce a version of the enduring The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for the Nintendo DS. However, rather than being an adaptation of the original book, Big Blue Bubble actually approached Jackson with a completed game that they wanted to promote using the Fighting Fantasy name.

If the addition of Red Lotus was not exactly evidence of more women playing video games, it was proof of the fact that teenage boys liked playing video games featuring impossibly proportioned maidens. The fact that a young Kelly Brook featured in the original advertising campaign for the game probably did not hurt initial sales either. Deathtrap Dungeon’s success suffered in part as a result of being subject to a number of delays that meant it wasn’t released until several years after it was first announced. In that time, video game graphics had improved, but unfortunately those that featured in Deathtrap Dungeon had not. This gave the game the look of a first generation PlayStation game when it was having to compete in a market saturated with third generation titles. The consequence of this was that it went largely unnoticed by critics and consumers alike. “It wasn’t the best game ever developed to put it mildly, yet it sold over 500,000 copies,” Livingstone says in defence of the game. “I’d say that was pretty successful, but not if you compared it to the first Tomb Raider which sold over 7 million copies. I’d hired Richard Halliwell, one of the original Warhammer designers, and Jamie Thomson, ex-editor of White Dwarf and

“Big Blue Bubble had developed quite an impressive 3D engine for Nintendo DS,” says Jackson, “and they had been working on a traditional dungeon-type adventure. Ian persuaded BBB that if it was going to be successful sales-wise they needed to hang it on a license, specifically the FF license. A deal was signed up. But as it had not originally been designed in the FF universe, BBB needed help to turn it into an FF adventure. “I did a lot of work on this, introducing ◉ 233

Firetop Mountain characters and creatures” – as well as taking out references to pizza – “but it just didn’t work out well. It was too obviously a botch-up. There was not enough of the Firetop Mountain adventure to make it seem like it really was based on the FF universe. Aspyr came in as publishers to fund the development needed to turn it into a finished product. In the end it was rushed out, only in the USA, and shortly afterwards Aspyr went bust. So it was a bit of a disaster, that one.” Ever the shrewd businessmen, Jackson and Livingstone signed a deal whereby, as well as producing the game that was now entitled Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (published by Aspyr Media in 2009), Big Blue Bubble would continue developing and releasing adaptations of other classic titles from the Fighting Fantasy vault, but as iPhone games rather than DS titles. These were almost identical to the published books but with the addition of some basic animation and colour added to the original illustrations, with dice-rolling and battle damage being calculated by the phone’s internal processor. The adventures released in this format include The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, City of Thieves, Deathtrap Dungeon, and Creature of Havoc.

Tin Man Games Founded in 2008 by gamebook fan Neil Rennison, Tin Man Games was the company that really brought the concept of adventure gamebooks to the iPhone generation. Despite having been inspired by Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and the like, the company built up its reputation based on its own fantasy world and by releasing a gamebook app featuring future lawman Judge Dredd (from the British anthology comic 2000AD). This led to a meeting between Neil Rennison and Ian Livingstone at Dragonmeet, the annual London games convention, in 2011; a meeting which proved to be very fateful indeed. 234 ◉

With the Big Blue Bubble licence for FF having expired, it was announced in May 2012 – first via the official Fighting Fantasy website, and later at the UK Games Expo the same month – that Tin Man Games had secured the licence to bring Fighting Fantasy to both the iOS and Android platforms. Remaining respectful of the advances Big Blue Bubble had already made into the gamebook app arena, Tin Man Games agreed not to adapt any of the titles already released as iPhone adventures in their first slew of releases. As a result the company’s first four FF apps were Livingstone’s Blood of the Zombies, Jackson’s House of Hell, the classic The Forest of Doom, and Island of the Lizard King. “The Big Blue Bubble adaptations were serviceable, though clinical and dry in their presentation,” says FF enthusiast Lin Liren. “This is a problem that Tin Man Games more than adequately rectified with their adaptations, which are fine combinations of nostalgia enhanced with technological and artistic progress. I eagerly await each and every new release!” The Tin Man Games versions of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks differed from previous iPhone apps in that they included animated, and physically realistic dicerolling, achievements to be collected and unlocked, and a range of difficulty settings. With the release of their version of The Forest of Doom, Tin Man Games also added a self-drawing map to the app. As FF fan Steven Dean points out, “Part of the joy of FF was constructing a map so you could gradually work your way through the adventure.” “One of the biggest decisions we had to make when taking up the Fighting Fantasy license was just how to present the gamebooks of old in this spanking new digital format,” explains Neil Rennsion, the Tin Man behind Tin Man Games. “We felt it was very important to capture the nostalgia of the series as much as possible, so we kept in the dice rolling as a priority and even introduced a retro mode where you could read the gamebook without all the coloured illustrations and snazzy interface that we designed. We knew a lot of thirty- and forty-somethings would really love that. From the feedback we’ve had, that decision has been completely validated! “With our first few releases like House of Hell and The Forest of Doom, we chose not play with the words too much, although I think as we progress through the series we’ll certainly tinker more and more with the narrative, expanding and modifying it. We’re also looking to make more use of the digital platform and

introduce more complex mapping as well as remove the dice rolling from a few of the books completely and visualize the combat in a brand new way.” “I’d love to see a way to develop something like The Forest of Doom app into a more physical environment,” says Phil Williams, another devoted FF fan, “a way to hide the mechanics of ‘turn to 23’ at each choice, so you feel more like you can go anywhere.” As at the time of publication, future FF titles scheduled for development by Tin Man Games include Appointment with F.E.A.R., Starship Traveller, Caverns of the Snow Witch, Bloodbones, Freeway Fighter, Sword of the Samurai, The Citadel of Chaos and, once again, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

pointing at a game and demanding that people play it. This is one of those times. Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is an absolutely marvellous fantasy storybook adventure. Lushly illustrated and expertly told, it should not be missed by anyone even remotely interested in the genre.” In Inkle’s hands, the adventure had morphed from being a book-based experience to a map-based RPG, incorporating a completely new combat system, with the player watching the hero enter into animated battles with a host of monstrous foes. Jon Ingold, Inkle’s creative director and narrative designer: “We started off talking with Steve about directions we could take the books. How much rewriting were we willing to do? Any extra mechanics? How were we going to adapt the spell-casting and the combat, to make them feel easy for newcomers to pick up and play? How could we mimic the ‘fingers-in-thepage’ gameplay of the original books without making the player’s decisions feel throwaway? “Our initial design brainstorms left us with a huge pile of ideas to try. Then that’s what we did - tried things out, and saw what worked. The writing was

Inkle Studios In September 2012 another exciting development occurred in the world of Fighting Fantasy apps. It was announced that Steve Jackson had teamed up with Inkle Studios to put a twenty-first century spin on the Sorcery! series. The first game, based on The Shamutanti Hills, was released in May 2013 and was an instant hit. Gaming website Gamezebo had this to say about the app: “Sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my time writing a review when I should really just be ◉ 235

a particular pleasure, as we discovered that the encounters in the Sorcery! books lent themselves beautifully to being pulled apart, turning one or two decisions in the original into sequences of lots and lots of little decisions, all building towards one outcome or another.

players to feel ‘left out’, and we didn’t want returning players to feel let down! That was a really hard line to walk. But the response so far from fans has been really good. I think a lot of old Sorcery! fans have been excited to see something they loved given so much attention and new work.”

“The spell-casting was particularly difficult: the original mechanic of memorising spell names was such a standout feature it was hard to do anything different, but we didn’t believe that a modern player would be willing to make the effort at the start of a game! In the end, the solution we came up with for the first release was probably still a little too opaque – we didn’t provide a way for players to read the spell book directly from the spell-casting screen.” (This is something Inkle changed for their app version of Kharé – Cityport of Traps.)

But why did the app’s designers feel the need to completely change the classic combat system as featured in the original books?

“The biggest discovery was the map: we originally wanted to include it, to make sure there was a standout visual element, but once we tried it, lots of other elements slotted together. Having a map meant the player could tell how far through the adventure they were – a problem the original FF books never solved! Having a map provided some context to decisions about which path to take – left or right becomes ‘left, up into the mountains and the caves, or right, through the forest with the house?’ It also became the basis of our ‘fingers-in-the-pages’ mechanic: the map provides a clear way to rewind to any previous point in the book. But it also lets us not provide a rewind mechanic within a given location. We actually took away some of the rewinding ability that players had in the original books! But that added some risk to the gameplay.” With a project full of challenges, which was the toughest obstacle Inkle had to overcome? Ingold: “The biggest challenge was trying to make sure that we kept a balance between changing things and keeping them true to the books – we didn’t want new 236 ◉

“That was a hard decision. How do you replace something so famous? And whatever new mechanic you come up with has got to be really good, because otherwise new players won’t like it, and old fans will be disappointed. But it was Steve’s call. He wanted to try and find something that suited the iPad form; something that was truly ‘digital’. “For us, it was a question of finding a fight system that felt truly seamless. We wanted to make sure that combat slotted into the story without a break. When you fight, it generates more story, and when you finish you’re back into the main flow without a break. We wanted to ensure combat didn’t feel like a mini-game that got in the way of the story, but instead was a core element of the interactivity.” So what can players expect from Inkle’s second Sorcery! game, Kharé – Cityport of Traps? “The app has a map of the city of Kharé through which the player journeys, and one of our goals is to stuff every interestinglooking location in the city with someone to meet, something to do, an encounter – either good, bad or strange. So we’re throwing in a tonne of extra content, but making sure it fits with the original style and tone of the book. This is my favourite part of the adaptation process: when you’ve got coverage of the game, and can start playing it and saying, ‘What can we add that’ll make this even better?’

“In Kharé the book describes a situation – an empty shop, perhaps, that you could search for valuables, but whose owner could appear at any time – and then provides a list of different approaches the player could take. Each one ups the tension a bit, things happen, the different routes weave back and forth, and in the end the encounter ends one of two ways – a big monster, or you get away with the gold – but as a player it’s hard to exactly track all the routes because they criss-cross so much. And that idea, of lots of small, interesting choices, that weave together to make an interactive scene, is something I’ve always strived for in the games I make.” So how has this new take on a veritable FF classic been received? Ingold: “We’ve had great reviews in the mainstream gaming press, with 90%+ reviews from Pocket Gamer, GamesMaster, Touch Arcade, Gamezebo, IGN, Kotaku, and positive write-ups in Eurogamer, Forbes, USA Today and The Sunday Times. It’s worth noting some of those sites don’t really cover mobile games, and certainly don’t cover gamebooks, books, or publishing. But they’ve been willing to step outside their comfort zone, play Sorcery!, and report back to their readers to say – this thing is fantastic, and unusual, and you’re going to love it.”

The Keep of the Lich-Lord In 2012, Megara Entertainment released an app version of The Keep of the Lich-Lord. However, this was not an official Fighting Fantasy release. “Mikaël Louys, the man behind Megara Entertainment, needed something he could do for his next iOS product,” explains Jamie Thomson, who co-wrote the original gamebook with Dave Morris. “He’d been talking to Ian and Steve about Keep, and they were fine about him doing it as long as he made it clear it wasn’t an official FF title anymore. It is actually set in Titan, but Mikael stripped out the places and references to the FF world and set it in the Fabled Lands universe.” The intro blurb to the adventure now reads as follows: “Vognar Keep has fallen to a deadly foe. The safety of the northern continent of the Fabled Lands is threatened once more by the forces of Evil! After two centuries of peace the dark necromancer, Lord Nydaedus of Hagor, has returned from the grave to rekindle the flames of war with his own legions of foul undead warriors. YOU are a mercenary, battle-hardened and cunning. You will need all your skills if you are to penetrate Vognar Keep and destroy the threat to the land. Many dangers lie ahead and your success is by no means certain. Powerful adversaries are ranged against you, and it’s up to YOU to decide which route to follow, which dangers to risk and which foes to fight!”

At the time of publication, the Sorcery! apps have sold over 140,000 copies across a variety of platforms.

Fighting Fantasy Fact 28 Developer Laughing Jackal Games brought out two Fighting Fantasy adventures for the PSP Minis range. Interestingly Talisman of Death was converted first, followed by The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. The games both featured a Tarot Card character generation system, along with the classic dice-rolling rules set, and optional all-new Battle and Test Your Luck systems for bold adventurers to explore. An intuitive Inventory system and Log Book were added to aid the hero in his endeavours. Another company, Worldweaver Ltd, produced Kindle versions of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon, City of Thieves, House of Hell and Creature of Havoc, but these adaptations were only available to users with a US-registered Kindle account.

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A Digital Future

across the rooftops of Port Blacksand as an aspirant of the Thieves’ Guild.

Returning to where this chapter began, considering that many blame video games for the demise of Fighting Fantasy and the gamebook genre in general in the mid-‘90s, it is an irony worth noting that modern handheld devices appear to be the genre’s salvation and where the future of gamebooks lies. “Now we enter a new golden age,” suggests FF fan Matthew Smith, “where the FF book format lends itself perfectly to the technology available for discreet read and play on the go, without getting funny looks from people on the bus for producing a set of dice, or even funnier looks from anyone that has heard of The Dice Man.” “Both FF and computer games offered that sense of  agency, and as the graphics got better, it was clear where people were going to go,” says Fighting Fantasy scribe Paul Mason. “In the same way that radio survived the advent of television, however, because it has its own advantages, FF has just managed to keep its head above water.”

What fans really want to see… But of course, with the release of another new generation of consoles in 2013 (with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4), and games such as Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed 4, and Batman: Arkham Origins, what FF fans are really hoping for one day is a Fighting Fantasy version of the above, where you can wander the wilds of Allansia battling monsters left, right and centre, or run

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“I truly believe that the industry has unwittingly made a lumbering sloth of the collective imagination,” laments Illmoor Chronicles’ creator David Lee Stone. “I do think that back in the days of classic computer RPGs like Eye of  the Beholder II or Dungeon Master, interactive gamebooks could still compete due to the basic nature of the graphical interface. Nowadays, the makers of Elder Scrolls and others really do lay it all out for you... but they still haven’t quite managed Port Blacksand. Not yet.” “I’d kill to wander Port Blacksand in the way Skyrim allows you,” enthuses FF fan Phil Williams. “But of course, those games have already done it, even if their source material relies heavily on FF’s heritage.” “The one thing I’d love to see would be a ‘proper’ FF video game,” says another FF fan, freelance writer Andy Jones. “By that I mean an epic adventure with high-quality graphics on a next-gen console. Something like Batman: Arkham Asylum but obviously set on Titan, either following the general storyline of one of the existing gamebooks or a completely new story. Done right, this would be absolutely brilliant.” Perhaps it’s even time to return to Deathtrap Dungeon once more, or perhaps City of Thieves for all those wishing to visit Port Blacksand and meet Zanbar Bone!

Right: Starship Traveller, by Simon Lissaman. (© Tin Man Games Pty. Ltd, 2014)

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Chapter Twenty-Eight The Phantasmagoria of Firetop Mountain Fighting Fantasy Goes to the Movies

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urely it is every author’s dream to see one of his books turned into a multi-million dollar movie. It is certainly this author’s dream, and it is certainly true of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. But married to that excited desire to see The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos or The Forest of Doom adapted for the silver screen is an even stronger desire to protect the Fighting Fantasy brand and have it treated faithfully and sensitively by the movie moguls. Before there was ever talk of producing a Fighting Fantasy movie, Jackson and Livingstone were approached, more than once, by interested parties who were keen on bringing the publishing phenomenon to the small screen.

in the gamebook of the same name to make it work as a movie, including having two lead characters who could interact with each other. Paterson planned on utilising something he calls 2.5D which, so he claims, creates the illusion of 3D without the need for special glasses or any new technology whatsoever. If the system had worked, it would have meant that cinema-goers would have been treated to such nerve-shredding visions as spiders emerging from the screen and appearing to scuttle up the wall of the cinema beside them, or blood dripping from the roof of the screening room onto the floor in front of them.

“We were approached by a couple of TV companies way back when,” says Jackson. “But these always stumbled when it came to how the interactive bit would work in a linear TV format. We did get a couple of TV interviews where they had attempted to stick with the FF theme. In particular one in New Zealand where they created an FF set, but only as a backdrop for the interview.” Despite having had interest from various quarters, including a producer in Germany who suggested turning Sorcery! into a movie, it wasn’t until Ian Paterson of Superteam Productions got in touch with Steve Jackson, expressing an interest in creating an interactive movie based on Jackson’s 1984 classic House of Hell, that the idea of a Fighting Fantasy film looked like it might actually become a reality at last.

House of Hell – The Movie “House of Hell is the story of a stranded young couple who seek shelter at an old house in the middle of nowhere. They soon find the house is not all it seems,” says Paterson, who understandably had to make some changes and additions to the original story as presented 240 ◉

Before approaching Jackson, Paterson – whose background as a director includes having made music videos and Internet webisodes – had a dry run, making a short twenty minute film with a budget of only £30,000 (most of which went on lighting rigs). “We did a short film called Forest of Fear before we started, just to test out certain ideas,” Paterson reveals. “The most important thing for us was to get the balance right in terms of scariness.” The rights for making a cinematic adaptation of House of Hell were obtained by Superteam Productions in 2010. This allowed the company to produce a conventional live-action movie but also interactive

Right: Deathtrap Dungeon, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1984 and 2014)

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versions utilising BluRay technology, as well as iPhone apps (which would have differed from those produced by Tin Man Games or Inkle Studios due to them being in a video format rather than a digital book) and the Internet. “The ninety minute feature film version is the ‘one true way’ through the book,” explains Paterson. “The online version will be interactive and will allow viewers to choose their own paths like the BluRay version, but clues will be hidden within the online adventure. Playing online incurs a small download fee per segment. But if viewers find the clues they can win valuable cash prizes. We are currently in talks with mobile content providers to push the segments on to phones, allowing everyone to download and watch the film.” The material needed for all the interactive versions meant that the director was planning on shooting six movies’ worth of footage, but for the price of one. Unfortunately, during the writing of this book, the House of Hell movie site closed down and the status of the movie remains in doubt. However, House of Hell was not the only Fighting Fantasy gamebook that has been optioned to be made into a movie…

Deathtrap Dungeon – The Movie Another film-maker keen to introduce a modern multiplex-going audience to his childhood passion is Martin Gooch. “When I was a kid the FF books came out and I just thought they were the best things ever.” Gooch has worked on more than 200 productions, from Harry Potter to Big Brother and everything in between (including EastEnders, Doctors, Hollyoaks and Robot Wars) but he was a fan of Fighting Fantasy before he knew he wanted to make films for a living. “Those images in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain – the Russ Nicholson ones – are just brilliant. I loved his drawing. Those books (it’s been documented) helped people read and develop. For me they got me into creative writing and art. I was copying the Iain McCaig illustrations from Deathtrap Dungeon, and drawing dragons, and that hugely improved my artistic ability, because there was nowhere else to get hold of artwork like that.” So how did Gooch make the move from reading Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to tackling the frankly daunting task of turning an interactive adventure like Deathtrap Dungeon into a movie? “Judge Dredd, that was my first film – back at Shepperton Studios, Stage D – and then I did lots of stuff. But I always thought, ‘God, 242 ◉

I’d love to make The Warlock of Firetop Mountain into a film; that would be brilliant.’ “My brother Daniel was working for the Department of Health and he got seconded to the Department of Trade and Industry. He went to a do and Ian Livingstone was there giving a presentation about games. Daniel went up to him afterwards and said, ‘Look, my brother Martin has been banging on for years about turning The Warlock of Firetop Mountain into a screenplay. Why don’t you have a chat?’ And Ian gave my brother his card. Gooch and Livingstone met up, following which the director went away to work on his FF movie idea. However, it wasn’t The Warlock of Firetop Mountain that was going to get the screenplay treatment anymore, but Deathtrap Dungeon. “I don’t think he ever thought he’d hear from me ever again,” says Gooch, but two years later, Livingstone did hear from the director again. “I went off… and I broke Deathtrap down. I bought two copies. I actually

Knightmare First broadcast on 7 September 1987, on British television channel ITV, five years after the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Knightmare was an adventure game show for children. It featured a team of three children guiding a fourth around a blue screen, Chroma key-generated dungeon, a process which used the same technology as employed by weather forecasters at the time. These young adventurers pitted their wits against a variety of puzzles and obstacles as they explored the non-existent dungeon, meeting a host of unusual characters along the way. Clearly riding the zeitgeist of role-playing games that was so prevalent in the 1980s, producer Tim Child was unable to approach either the Dungeons & Dragons or Fighting Fantasy franchises when it came to making the show due to the negative publicity that both had received from certain religious groups. However, things came full circle, taking the show back to its early gamebook and RPG roots, when a series of Knightmare books was produced. Written by gamebook veteran Dave Morris (co-author of the Fighting Fantasy adventure The Keep of the Lich-Lord), four of the titles, which were intended for older readers, took the format of half-fiction and half-interactive story. The next two books retained the interactive format, but were aimed at a younger readership. The interactive sections of the books had the reader keeping track of Life Force, as well as the objects they had collected. Some of the books even had additional statistics or special skills that needed to be monitored as well. Knightmare’s final television episode was broadcast on 11 November 1994, although the show was revived by Google for a one-off special in August 2013, as part of YouTube’s Geek Week.

cut it down the spine so I could put it all out on my table and look at it in one go. Heart-breaking to tear the book to pieces, but it was the only way to do it, and I discovered that the story was there, but it wasn’t really enough for a feature film. So I went to Trial of Champions, which is the sequel, and I found that the good bits of Deathtrap and the good bits of Trial of Champions, plus the narrative I had to write to fit it together, was enough for a feature film. “At the end of Act One the hero’s shipped off to Fang, on the banks of the River Kok, and he spends a night in a pub, because all medieval fantasy films have to have a tavern, and meets the other adventurers or challengers, and at the beginning of Act Two we’re into the dungeon.” It’s clear that Gooch is passionate about his pet project. “I wrote the screenplay, and I got back in touch with Ian, I handed it over, and he read it and he said he really loved it. He thought it was great.”

“In the collective mind of the audience, I would imagine, the scenes in the book they remember the most are the ones that were illustrated. So I very specifically chose scenes that were illustrated.” So does that mean the prehistoric Pit Fiend will be making an appearance? “We don’t have the Pit Fiend, because I thought it was too much like the Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park, and in terms of budget, it would blow a whole chunk. We’ve got the Bloodbeast, of course, and the Bloodbeast is unlike anything else. He turns up three times; three is the magic number.”

Pit Fiend, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1984 and 2014)

The Deathtrap Dungeon movie screenplay by Ian Livingstone and Martin Gooch. (© Ian Livingstone and Martin Gooch, 2014)

Although it is only one man’s interpretation of Deathtrap Dungeon, rather than a doggedly faithful adaptation of the original adventure, there is plenty in Gooch’s version that fans will recognise and, no doubt, will be delighted to know is in there.

Gooch has also tried to impose rather more logic upon the world presented in Deathtrap Dungeon than might have come through in the original gamebook. “If you lived in that world, and every year there was the Trial of Champions, Deathtrap Dungeon, and you’d travelled all the way to Fang, just to watch it, you’re having a great time, you’ve eaten a rat on a stick, and you’ve had a couple of pints of mead, and you see all these seven people all go into the dungeon, and then they’re gone – then what do you do? Just sit around twiddling your thumbs? And then no one comes out, and it’s all a little bit of an anti-climax. ◉ 243

“I thought, you’re in the Deathtrap, you’re only in there for a day, and I think it should stop at sundown, and if you’re not out as the sun sets behind Firetop Mountain in the distance… either they lock the doors and even if you turn up after that it doesn’t matter, they just leave you, or they flood it, or they send a herd of raging Troglodytes through to kill everything. Or they set fire to it. Or they send in a dozen Bloodbeasts.” Like Paterson, Gooch ran into one obvious problem in turning the story that runs through the book into something that would engage with cinema-goers. “The biggest problem was there’s no dialogue and no character, and the most important thing about a movie, really, is story and emotional attachment to the character. So if you, the audience, don’t give a toss… We need to have two people, because if there’s one person, there’s no one for them to talk to, and a silent film is a bit dull, so it’s a bit of a buddy movie. But I thought it would be much more interesting if it was a moral question – a fantasy adventure with a moral question – and the moral question is, of course, that you have to team up with your colleagues to get through the dungeon but only one person can win. So if you team up with Throm, or the Elf, or the Assassin, you’ve got to kill them.

The Dungeon Awaits, by Iain McCaig. (© Iain McCaig, 1984 and 2014) “So the way I wrote it, I thought, well, Sukumvit’s built it in the side of the hill, so we’ve got little viewports on top of rooms, so that once the adventurers go in, you can then scramble over the top of the dungeon and look in. So when they meet the Dwarf Trialmaster he’s in an open room like an amphitheatre, and he plays to the crowd. People are betting, and Baron Sukumvit has got spies looking at things, and there are little peep-holes so people can look in and see how the adventurers are doing and see if they’re dead. The hero might trip over his bootlace and smash his skull in, and no one will know, so they’ve got to have little things to look through and check – and the Baron’s got the whole of the dungeon mapped out on a table in front of him, and he keeps track of things. So if they’re doing quite well, Baron Sukumvit might turn to his little snivelling toadie and say, “Let’s bring on the Bloodbeast.” And you’ll see, in the background, this big sort of bamboo truck just being wheeled in, and you see maybe a tentacle whip out, and see it kill something with its scorpion sting, and then they pop it in. I don’t think the Bloodbeast sits in its little slimy pit all year long waiting. 244 ◉

“So what happens if you team up with someone you really like? Then you’ve got a double dilemma. So the obvious answer to that was you’ve got to have a male character and a female character and there’s some sort of shenanigans going on between them. They like each other.” If his hero is your typical, hard-bitten Fighting Fantasy hero, what’s his heroine like? “She’s this beautiful halfElven woman, a bit like a medieval Lara Croft, but more Elvish.” Various characters from other gamebooks are referenced in Gooch’s script and he’s hoping to involve some of the original Fighting Fantasy creators in making the movie, if he is able to secure the financial backing that any such project inevitably needs. “The exciting news is that Iain McCaig has agreed to be Head of Production,” reveals Livingstone. “Apart from illustrating Deathtrap Dungeon originally and being my favourite artist, Iain has plenty of movie experience having created Darth Maul for George Lucas.” But what of the interactive element of Deathtrap Dungeon? How is Gooch planning on addressing that in his film? The simple answer is, he doesn’t intend to. “Ian and I talked about the interactivity of the

book, but the thing is, a book is a book, a film is a film, a game is a game… The film has to work as a film. You’ve got to be able to invite people along who haven’t played the game or read the book (or done the app) and they’ve got to be able to watch it as a film, and it’s got to make sense as a film, and that for me, as a film-maker was really important.” It all sounds very exciting, and something fans of Fighting Fantasy would give their eye teeth to see. “If, like me, you’re a fan of the dungeon bash adventures of yesterday, where is that in cinema? No one’s ever done it. There’s a little bit of it in the first Lord of the Rings film when they go into the Mines of Moria. They go into the tomb room, and the goblins and the troll come in, and that is the best bit… They’re scared, and there’s skeletons, it’s in your face, then they go off and there’s millions of orcs and goblins. But that little bit when they’re in this claustrophobic tomb, I thought that’s what I want to create, that feeling of claustrophobia; the ceiling isn’t very high, and there’s cobwebs on your face, and it’s nasty, and you don’t know what’s up ahead, and you turn a corner and who knows what’s going to be there… That’s the attraction of the original Fighting Fantasy.” And with someone as passionate and as well-versed in the FF gamebooks as Gooch, we can only hope that, one day, the essential financial assistance is forthcoming and Deathtrap Dungeon – The Movie becomes a reality.

“I would love a cameo role in the movie if it were ever to go into production,” admits Livingstone, “even if it was just an old bloke in the background sweeping up the entrails of some poor soul who’d been half eaten by the Bloodbeast!” At the time of publication of this book, there have been rumours of some serious on-going discussions happening with regard to an option over the movie rights. Let’s hope the rumours are true.

Turn to 400 – The Fighting Fantasy Documentary Film It’s not only directors with aspirations to become the new masters of the big screen summer blockbuster who have shown an interest in Fighting Fantasy. Documentary filmmakers have too.

On 31 October 2012, former BBC cameraman Sean Riley launched the Turn to 400 Kickstarter, to raise

Fighting Fantasy Fact 29 Martin Gooch’s feature length, tragi-comic sci-fi drama The Search for Simon features Ian Livingstone as a member of a gaming group. The original green-spine Fighting Fantasy gamebooks also feature in the movie, on a bookcase in the home of the protagonist David, as well as in a passing reference David makes to The Rings of Kether (FF15). Livingstone also made a cameo appearance in Gooch’s debut feature film After Death, as a postman. Ian Livingstone as Derek the Postman in Martin Gooch’s After Death. (© Gothic Manor Ltd, 2014)

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£40,000 to make a television documentary historical retrospective of the FF series, rather like a film version of YOU ARE THE HERO. Rewards on offer included Turn to 400-themed USB keys, T-shirts, DVDs, posters, and even the chance to appear in the finished film. Unfortunately, the funding period ended with £15,659 having been raised – an impressive amount but a long way short of Riley’s goal. “I think there were a couple of problems with getting Turn to 400 funded,” says Riley. “One was lack of understanding of the crowd-funding model. I made the decision to be one of the first UK projects to launch on Kickstarter in the UK, believing (mistakenly it turns out!) that we’d ride a wave of crowd-funding publicity as it splashed into the consciousness of the public. Kickstarter seemed to go for a soft launch though, and in hindsight probably wanted a number of projects to be running already before announcing themselves. “Two was probably getting the word out there. I was quoted a few times as saying that we had no problem reaching the hard-core, but it was the lapsed gamers we needed. The ideal would have been to have reached a small percentage of the people who bought the 17 million books originally! I had Facebook advertising targeting the correct age-range, and was accused of spamming several times as I tried to reach fans of things that were either contemporaries or related hobbies (such as early micro-computer games sites and D&D sites).” Understandably, when the project did not achieve funding, Riley took it badly. “I was gutted. It felt like I’d put all that effort into the crowd-funding campaign, and you become friendly with all sorts of people who want to help you. Not to mention the help I’d had from Steve and Ian. Also, I still think it’s such a great story – the idea of living in a van while you get your business off the ground! “I was excited about the 30th anniversary as I thought it tied in nicely with Channel 4’s 30th anniversary and was intent on pitching the documentary idea to them. They, however, weren’t interested in it, citing it as too niche – a problem fantasy has had since time immemorial. I also tried BBC4, but they had similar reservations. It might have worked as part of a themed ‘season’ but not standalone.”

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Does Riley think he will ever relaunch the ‘Turn to 400’ Kickstarter one day, so that he will be able to finish filming his Fighting Fantasy documentary? “I’d really like to, but again, I’ve been quoted as saying that running a crowd-funding campaign is not for the faint-hearted! You effectively run it like a campaign and you have to work very hard at it for however long it is on for. Put it this way, I would still like to make the film, my ideal would be that someone else would run the campaign and once the money’s together we make the film together!” So what would he do differently next time? “I think I’d try what many are doing, to set a more achievable (lower) total but with stretch goals. Though I maintain that to make what I’d envisaged I really needed that amount… in theory I could make the film for a lot less money if I do all the jobs myself as I’m not eligible for VAT, but though I’m an experienced shooter/editor there’s nothing like working as part of a team to get the best results! “It’s worth pointing out that the turnto400.com website is the property of MEDIAmaker who I was working for. I’m on good terms with them, though they may decide to do something different with that IP, so it’s another thing that’s at the back of my mind. They funded all the work that went into both the crowdfunding campaign and the promo film we had made originally to pitch the idea to Channel 4 and BBC4. “If people are interested in helping reboot TT400, I’m still admin on the Facebook page, still manage the @turnto400 twitter and have set up an email address at my own site for contact purposes: tt400@boardie. com.” You can see the footage Riley managed to put together for his Kickstarter project on YouTube at http://youtu. be/vEvH12X95hE. And if you too would like to see his documentary finally get made, you can register your interest via Turnto400.com. For the time being, at least, a Fighting Fantasy movie remains a dream. But who knows… If a written history of the FF phenomenon can find backing via crowdfunding, what’s to say that one day Riley’s retrospective documentary won’t get made, or that there won’t be a big screen special effects-laden movie version of Deathtrap Dungeon? One day…

Right: House of Hell, by Dan Maxwell (© Tin Man Games Pty. Ltd, 2014)

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Chapter Twenty-Nine

Thirty Years of Firetop Mountain From Blood of the Zombies to You Are The Hero

H

aving released four gamebooks simultaneously in the autumn of 2009 to launch their ‘Series 2’ revamp of the Fighting Fantasy series, during the course of 2010 Wizard Books added eight titles to the list, including Night of the Necromancer. But in 2011, with the series still struggling to find a significant new following among 7 to 12 year-olds, momentum was lost, with only four books being reprinted that year and with no new titles added to the franchise. After March 2011, as far as fans were concerned, things had gone ominously quiet in the worlds of Fighting Fantasy and Wizard Books, with many decrying that the world’s premier gamebook series was gone for good this time. But unknown to the general public, behind the scenes plans were being made regarding the fast-approaching 30th anniversary of the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982. Feeling the need to scratch that gamebook itch one more time, Ian Livingstone had already started writing a new adventure. By the autumn of 2009 it was already half-written, but other work commitments and his role as a government skills advisor regularly got in the way of the important business of completing the adventure. (At a meeting between Livingstone and Jonathan Green in September 2009, Green cheekily offered to finish writing the book for him.) In November 2011, the Warlock (a.k.a. Jamie Fry) finally announced via the official Fighting Fantasy website (www.fightingfantasygamebooks.com) that Livingstone was writing a new gamebook to coincide with the 30th anniversary the following year. “People were expecting me to go back to Firetop Mountain or Port Blacksand,” says Livingstone. “I certainly started the project off with Allansia in mind. Zombies had never featured much in my books and I decided to make up for it by making them central to the new adventure. I’d been working in the video games industry for twenty years and was well aware of the continued popularity of zombies. But you really 248 ◉

need shotguns and other missile weapons to mow down swathes of zombies, so I decided to make the adventure contemporary, albeit set inside a medieval castle.” In February 2012, Livingstone took to Twitter, inviting fans to help determine what the adventure should be called – Blood of the Zombies or Escape from Zombie Castle – via an online poll. Blood of the Zombies won, with 65% of the vote. Close to 1,000 votes were cast in two days, 172 of them being cast within 30 minutes of the poll going live. The following announcement was made, again via the official website, on 21 February 2012: The Zombies are coming... in August! In this adventure YOU are kidnapped and sold to a deranged megalomaniac who wants to build an army of undead to exact terrible revenge on those who once mocked him. He hates everybody except for his scientists and servants. The scientists were instructed to develop a mutated gene in human blood which would be injected into innocent victims, turning them into Zombies. The madman’s henchmen kidnapped hundreds of people who were locked up to await their fate. YOU are about to be injected with Zombie blood. The Zombie army is almost complete, ready to be unleashed upon the world in a frenzy of killing and wanton destruction. YOU have to avoid being transformed into a Zombie. YOU have to kill all the Zombies, dispose of the madman and escape from the castle. To do this you will need a lot of firepower to take down the hordes of Zombies. But don’t kill everybody as there is one person who needs to be rescued... It wasn’t just the present day setting that was a change from the norm – the first time a modern setting had been used since Steve Jackson’s House of Hell in 1984. Livingstone tweaked the game mechanics as well, doing away with SKILL and LUCK altogether. But while such an action was regarded as being on the verge of sacrilege for some, others felt that Livingstone

Right: Blood of the Zombies, by Greg Staples. (© Ian Livingstone, 2012 and 2014)

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did not go far enough in changing the mechanics. “As a designer I was always disappointed with them,” says Jake Thornton, the man behind such modern classics in the making as Mantic Games’ Dreadball and Mars Attacks! tabletop war games. “They are sort of D&D lite that you can play without the effort of a Dungeon Master. However, because you still need pencil, paper and dice, they are still tied to a table. I always thought that they missed a trick. Why not design them to need nothing but the book then they could be played on buses, trains and in the back of a car on the way to the seaside?” In March 2012, an illustration from the book, went up on www.fightingfantasy.com. It was to be the first of several. The style was clearly quite different from what fans of the series were used to seeing. The illustration was by Kev Crossley, an artist familiar to readers of British anthology comic 2000AD but new to Fighting Fantasy.

says Livingstone. “I’d met Andi Ewington through Matt Woodley, another ex-Eidos employee. Andi seemed to know every comic book artist in the known universe. He showed me some of Kev’s illustrations and I thought he would be perfect for the job. I spoke to Kev and signed him up to do the black and white illustrations.” “Andi Ewington told me he ‘might have a cool project’ I’d be well suited for,” explains Crossley. “I rolled my sleeves up and instructed him to tell me more. When he told me what the project was, and who I would be working with, I was a bit stunned! “The process began with me producing a couple of test illustrations for Ian to see if I was suitable, so I worked to a brief which described eight zombies attacking you in an old blacksmith’s. I spent a full week drafting the image, getting the perspective nice and dramatic and cramming as much detail into it as I could. (Ian, I was enthusiastically informed, was something of a detail fan!) Detail is what he got, and luckily he loved it!  “So, I met with Ian and we got along just fine! It was a special treat for me as well, because he’d brought along a fat folder stuffed full of original art from lots of the FF books he’d written in the 1980s! I loved his concept for the new book, and I left that day with a signed copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, plus a monstrous pile of zombies to start sketching! “It was a great experience, when the project got into its stride, but gruelling too! Keeping that level of detail up within a set time period is always draining. But Ian was a pleasure to work for, and he didn’t mind when I needed to let up for a few days from time to time to recharge my batteries! He was also very focused with regards his vision for particular scenes, so quite often we would work closely together. I’d send him a sketch, he’d send me comments about what he’d like changed, then I might come back with my own ideas etc. It actually impacted on the delivery dates a bit sometimes, but it resulted in some fantastically rewarding, creative exchanges, and you don’t get that with all art directors. As a result, the images I did for Blood of The Zombies are still some of my favourites.”

Zombie Attack, by Kev Crossley. (© Ian Livingstone, 2012 and 2014) “I knew of Kev Crossley from the days when he worked at Core Design when I was Executive Chairman of Eidos, but didn’t actually know him,”

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Livingstone found those creative exchanges equally rewarding. “I really enjoyed working with Kev. His attention to detail was incredible, and he seemed undaunted even when I asked for tiny changes that probably weren’t necessary. The end result was fantastic and I bought all the originals. Andi [Ewington] also introduced me to Greg Staples who was likewise brilliant to work with.”

On 15 June 2012, the cover art for the book was revealed. Livingstone had wanted a cover that had a future-retro look, harking back to the glory days of Fighting Fantasy whilst also suggesting that Blood of the Zombies was something new and forward looking. And that was precisely what he got with Greg Staples’ painting of a Zombie bursting through a broken door, looking like a cross between Jack Nicholson in The Shining and something out of Shaun of the Dead. But what did the book’s author think of Staples’ cover for Blood of the Zombies? Livingstone: “Amazing! Realistically drawn and colourful, it captures an exciting moment in the book with movement and danger. It was true to the ethos of the covers of the original series in that the zombie is threatening to leap out and attack the reader.” Staples went on to give a detailed breakdown of the procedure by which he had produced the image in issue #88 of Imagine FX magazine, and a fascinating insight into the artistic creative process at the same time. But possibly more exciting even than the cover reveal, as far as older fans were concerned, was the news that Blood of the Zombies would see the return of the traditional green spine, which had made the gamebooks stand out so effectively on bookshop shelves back in the 1980s and ‘90s, along with an updated version of the original yellow FF dagger logo. Livingstone was determined that his new book would have the classic FF look but with a contemporary update. Icon Books agreed to the idea even though Blood of the Zombies would look very different in style from the current range of FF titles. Livingstone commissioned a new FF logo which was an updated version of the original dagger logo. He insisted on the green spine coming back, and also commissioned the cover art himself from Greg Staples, making sure the zombie leapt out at the reader in true FF style. “I was hoping that fans of old might enjoy a bit of FF nostalgia with the graphic style of Blood of the Zombies,” said Livingstone. They certainly did!

Retweet it to be in it Thanks to social media, and Twitter in particular, two FF fans ended up making cameo appearances in Blood of the Zombies. They were Labour MP Tom Watson, and author, actor, comedian and television producer Charlie Higson. Amy Fletcher and Zombie Chainsaw Massacre, by Kev Crossley. (© Ian Livingstone, 2012 and 2014)

Higson is the author of a series of young adult zombie horror novels called The Enemy. “I guess that’s why Ian ◉ 251

Charlie Higson and Ian Livingstone at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2012. (© Ian Livingstone, 2012 and 2014) Livingstone put me in the book,” muses Higson. “The series is about what happens when a disease wipes out everyone over the age of 14 except for the unlucky few who become mindless flesh eating cannibals. So basically, kids versus adults in a post-apocalypse London.”

Literature Festival, on Sunday 6 October 2012, when the two authors conducted a seminar on the enduring appeal of zombies in modern children’s fiction.

Although older than the average FF reader when the series was first launched in the earlier ‘80s, Higson was still a fan and cites the gamebooks as a valuable writing aid when it comes to learning how to structure a story.

The summer of 2012 saw Wizard Books – but Livingstone in particular, with a little help from his old friend Steve Jackson – promoting Blood of the Zombies in earnest. Livingstone even travelled as far as Sydney in Australia to spread the word of the new adventure’s arrival.

“The FF books are really interesting as a way of storytelling and are very useful when looking at how to construct plots. In each book there are many ways to get through to the end. I suppose when I write a book I am always asking myself the same questions you get asked as a reader of FF books. Do you open the door on the right? Do you use an axe or a morningstar? Do you kill the monster or try to talk to it… They are also interesting in that they show you that there are many ways to tell the same story… I can’t imagine what kind of a mind-churn writing these books must be. Having to keep so many plots going, so many storylines, but always folding it all back in so that the choices don’t become limitless and you can actually get to the end of the book/game. I’d love to work on a computer game adventure of some sort, but prefer to write novels the traditional way, where I’m fully in charge of the storyline and in control of the reader.” Ian Livingstone later met Higson at the Cheltenham 252 ◉

The Blood of the Zombies Official Launch

On 26 May 2012, Jackson and Livingstone attended the UK Games Expo in Birmingham where they gave a talk about their favourite games and met fans of the FF series, getting them all fired up about the forthcoming brand-new gamebook.

The official launch took place on Saturday 4 August 2012 at the Forbidden Planet Megastore, on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, and was attended by fans both young and old. Among those in attendance were Jamie Fry (the current Warlock responsible for maintaining the official Fighting Fantasy website), Neil Rennison (creative director of Tin Man Games) and fantasy artist (and FF alumnus) Tony Hough. “That was a great experience,” says Fry, “as I actually felt part of the team and part of Ian’s official entourage. It was a memorably historic moment that I played a part in it and watched from the other side for a change. Watching all the fans in the queue, seeing what they brought along to be signed, and listening to all the stories. It was a very exciting time for everyone because of the release of the new book.” “I hadn’t been to Forbidden Planet for several years so I was looking forward to exploring the new shop, as well as catching up with the friends I’ve made through my association with Fighting Fantasy,” recalls Hough. “Having not done a book signing for many years, I was a bit apprehensive about whether or not anybody would turn up!” admits Livingstone. “But my worries soon disappeared as a long queue built up ahead of the signing. What was slightly odd is that it was a line of 30 and 40 year-olds masquerading as 10 year-olds! The fans had turned out in number to talk about Fighting Fantasy. It was a brilliant day, and very gratifying to

know that those who had grown up with the series back in the 1980s still had a lot of love for Fighting Fantasy. A few had brought their own children along, hoping to get them into Fighting Fantasy. I numbered the first 100 copies that I signed, adding ‘Zombies win!’ as a warning about the difficulty they would have in getting through the book without cheating.” Later the same year, in December 2012, Jackson and Livingstone also attended Dragonmeet (a gaming convention the two of them had originally set up back in 1978) where they gave a talk about the creation of the Fighting Fantasy series, and Blood of the Zombies, to a packed auditorium. (It was at this event that YOU ARE THE HERO – A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, was first publically announced as well.) But how was the book received by the people who really matter – the fans? “I think Blood of the Zombies is a great addition to the series,” says FF fan Andy Jones. “It fills a gap in the FF library because it’s an all-out zombie-fest and I think FF needs one of those. Steve started it off with House of Hell and Ian has taken the spirit of that and just ramped it up a few notches. In typical Livingstone fashion, though, it’s a very hard book!”

The official Blood of the Zombies launch at the Forbidden Planet Megastore in London. (© Jamie Fry, 2014)

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“The genre was a good choice,” says fan Zsolt Matyusz. “Zombies are quite popular nowadays and there aren’t many horror-oriented FF adventures in the series. The Easter eggs related to Zagor, the 30th birthday etc., were really funny to read. I was also very happy that the protagonist travelled to Hungary as well in the Introduction as I am from this country.” “I thought it was a great read that simply oozed nostalgia,” says FF enthusiast Damian Butt, “and I’m glad it has been so successful.” Taiwanese fan Lin Liren thinks that Blood of the Zombies is “vintage Ian Livingstone; his most punishingly hard and brutal book since Crypt of the Sorcerer. This book makes you feel that every small victory is hard-earned. After three zombie apocalypses resulting from badmapping, the final victory makes you feel like the King of the World.” “I’m really glad that Ian Livingstone marked the thirtieth anniversary of Fighting Fantasy by writing Blood of the Zombies,” says FF enthusiast James Aukett. “It was a brave and totally different step away from previous Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. The alternative combat system worked really well and the twist at the end when you think you’ve won but then have to double check was very ingeniously worked out. And I can’t help but confess to falling oh so ever slightly in love with Amy Fletcher!” Blood of the Zombies has received some great reviews. One particularly amusing quote appeared in PC PowerPlay which gave the book 10/10. “Blood of the Zombies is awesome! My friend Shane doesn’t like it but that’s because it’s really hard and Shane is dumb.” Spain was the first country after the UK to publish a foreign language edition of Blood of the Zombies, but Livingstone recently announced that it is to be published in France and Bulgaria in 2014. For a series that started out as what was considered to be a one-off novelty book to celebrate its 30th anniversary is no small achievement, and despite much coverage in the press some fans would have 254 ◉

To cheat, or not to cheat For many people, cheating was as much a part of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook experience as the monsters and dice-rolling. “What’s really nice is that you can play it how you want to,” says author Magda Knight. “Sure, there were end puzzles where you had to figure stuff out and do some maths, maybe... but you could smoothly cheat and win every fight, or you could obsess lovingly over probabilities and tactics. It’s your call, your choice. Giving people choice is a wonderful thing.” Certain gamebooks became notorious for the difficulty of the quests their authors had created or the linearity of the One True Path that wound torturously through them. This was certainly true of Luke Sharp’s contributions to the series and Jonathan Green’s early adventures written at the end of Puffin Books’ run. Among the hardest FF titles are Creature of Havoc (FF24), Crypt of the Sorcerer (FF26), Chasms of Malice (FF30) and Knights of Doom (FF56). But what of the difficulty level of Blood of the Zombies? “I’d say it would be virtually impossible to finish the first edition of Blood of the Zombies without cheating,” admits Livingstone. “Players start with just 2d6 + 12 STAMINA points. I increased this to 2d6 + 20 STAMINA points in the second edition, but it is still rock hard. I figured that most of the readers would be in their 30s or 40s and they would relish a tough challenge. Of course cheating in Fighting Fantasy is perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned. It’s just ‘taking a peek around the corner’ really. Long live the five-fingered bookmark!”

liked to have seen greater and more widespread acknowledgement of that achievement. Damian Butt: “A signed limited edition collection of hardback editions of the first 20 books, some kind of super-special dice, and an accompanying tribute book/ DVD film.” (Well one out of four’s not bad.)

Rise of the Zombies However, there was one more treat in store for fans, particularly if they were iOS or Android smartphone or tablet owners. In October 2012, an app version of Blood of the Zombies was released by Tin Man Games, garnering both critical plaudits and popular acclaim from fans and reviewers alike. As well as being awarded a 9 out of 10 by Pocket Gamer (accompanied by their Gold Award), a fine 4.5 out of 5 from Gamezebo, an 8 out of 10 from Starburst Magazine, and the 148Apps Editor’s Choice award, the game also reached the coveted No.1 spot on the UK iPad RPG chart.

Fighting Fantasy Fact 30 Blood of the Zombies includes the original Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, within its pages. It appears in paragraph 347, in the description of a windowless room that could almost be Ian Livingstone’s own private gaming archive. But this was not The Warlock of Firetop Mountain ‘s first cameo appearance. The book can also be seen in Appointment with F.E.A.R., where it can be found, appropriately enough, in a bookstore. One of Kev Crossley’s illustrations for Blood of the Zombies includes an appearance by the sequel to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain – Return to Firetop Mountain – on a shelf in Goraya Castle’s library. Zombie Librarian, by Kev Crossley. (© Ian Livingstone, 2012 and 2014, colours by Joshua Wright)

“I was very pleased indeed with the Blood of the Zombies app,” says Livingstone. “Tin Man Games really did an excellent job in porting the book to a digital platform. And it wasn’t just a straight port of the book. It has an automated Adventure Sheet to keep track of stats and inventory, physics-based dice rolling, an artwork gallery, a bookmarking system which saves your position – much like putting your fingers between pages to mark a previous page when reading the gamebook. Not that anybody did that of course!”

Where many readers of the print version of the book had found the adventure incredibly challenging, the app introduced varying difficulty levels. “There is ‘Hardcore’ that mimics the book,” explains Tin Man Neil Rennison, “‘Medium’, which makes it slightly easier, and ‘Free Read’ which allows open reading.”

Kickstarter Towards the end of the year, Fighting Fantasy’s 30th anniversary was marked by two further, not dissimilar projects, both involving a crowd-funding website that could only have been dreamt of back when The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published in 1982. ◉ 255

The first, launched on 31 October 2012, was Turn to 400 – an ambitious project to produce a documentary about the history of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, set up by independent film-maker Sean Riley. Unfortunately, ultimately the project proved unviable. In December, following its announcement at Dragonmeet, another Fighting Fantasy Kickstarter project was launched. Entitled YOU ARE THE HERO – A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, it sought to raise money to produce a written history of the FF phenomenon, offering such rewards as signed copies of the finished book, themed adventurer’s sets (including the ever vital pencil, eraser and dice), and original art prints by well-known Fighting Fantasy artists. In this instance the Kickstarter was a success, and on 6 January 2013 the project achieved funding, thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of a host of Fighting Fantasy fans. The rest, as they say, is history…

When the Warlocks gathered On Wednesday 8 May 2013, four particularly dedicated Fighting Fantasy fans became honorary Warlocks for the day when they gathered at the office of Eidos Interactive in Wimbledon, south-west London, to meet their idols Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. One of those fans was freelance writer Andy Jones. “They say never meet your heroes, but I was not in the least bit disappointed. Both thoroughly nice guys.” But it wasn’t the first meeting for all the Warlocks. “First time I met Ian was at a Brighton Festival where he was chatting to kids and teaching them how to write adventures,” explains Steven Dean. “He was so engaging and obviously still loves the books.” After quizzing the fathers of Fighting Fantasy about their legendary creations (not to mention numerous photo opportunities) the Warlocks headed out into the wilds of Wimbledon for lunch with their heroes. Lin Liren had travelled all the way from Taiwan for the gathering. “Ian struck me as a serious, thoughtful and meticulous fellow who is efficient in thought, clear and sincere in his words. Though the straight-man of the two, he has a restrained yet undeniable passion for his work. I would expect no less of the man who put us through the roller-coaster rides of hair-pulling difficulty that were Crypt of the Sorcerer and Blood of the Zombies. “If Ian embodies the mature mind of the duo, then Steve is the enthusiastic and vibrant, boyish heart and soul. If ever anyone asks you to define ‘young at heart’, show him a photo of Steve in 2013. Even though sober of wit and calm, this is a warm, kind and funny man who has never lost the devilish wit and enthusiasm that allowed him to give us the darkly hilarious yet always exciting world of Kakhabad with Sorcery! If only every boy can grow up with an uncle as fun and cool as Steve!” The fourth member of the intrepid and exclusive party, Thomas Nielsen, had flown over from Denmark that very morning in order to dine out with Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. “It was a somewhat surreal experience to finally meet them after having been a fan-boy of their work for so long, but that was also because I had been up since half past four in the morning to fly to London. Still, it was very nice to meet them and hear all their tales from the times when they wrote FF and ran Games Workshop. It was great to feel that we were appreciated as fans, as well as for still supporting the work they did thirty years ago.” The Warlocks gather, first at the Eidos offices in Wimbledon and then at a nearby restaurant, for lunch with their heroes. (© Jonathan Green, 2014)

Right: Blood of the Zombies, by Martin McKenna. This image is actually an Easter Egg hidden in Tin Man Games' Blood of the Zombies app. The player has to collect four pieces of canvas and the painting will then appear in the Art Gallery. Not many people know about it, since not many people have found it! (© Ian Livingstone, 2012 and 2014) 256 ◉

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Chapter Thirty

The Legacy of Firetop Mountain And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth

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ublished in almost thirty languages and with worldwide sales now approaching 20 million, as digital apps as well as in printed book form, there can be no denying the impact Fighting Fantasy has had on the worlds of gaming and genre literature. In fact, it could be argued that the popularity of Fighting Fantasy, and the many imitators it spawned, has driven forward the gamification of literature that is inextricably linked to the way in which we enjoy mass media today. Just think of the popularity of DVD and BluRay bonus content, including deleted scenes and alternative endings; or consider how popular video games have become, and the depth of story that is revealed only when you play through the game multiple times; or online shared gaming worlds, where players direct the course of the narrative through their actions. And it all began with Fighting Fantasy. “I guess it was an early development of interactive storytelling,” says FF SF artist Gary Mayes. “It really tapped into that interactive zeitgeist that happened thirty years ago, when the age of home computing and home video games was dawning,” adds film-maker Sean Riley. “I remember reminiscing about Fighting Fantasy in the pub and this opened my eyes as to just how many people shared my childhood love of the series. I also suspect that many people of my age who loved the series then are now trying to get their own kids into them!” Fighting Fantasy combined stories and games, the proverbial meat and drink of ten year-olds left to their own devices. Everybody plays games when they’re ten; everybody reads stories at that age too. Thanks to Fighting Fantasy, and the trail it blazed for gaming to becoming more and more central to our culture, three decades since the publication of The Warlock of Firetop

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Mountain, it is just as socially acceptable for adults of any age to still do the same. “Fighting Fantasy gamebooks empower the reader,” says Ian Livingstone. “There are thousands of traditional books which are of course brilliantly written and have incredibly exciting storylines and thought-provoking philosophies. Yet traditional books have a linear storyline and a hero which the reader may or may not relate to. As soon as the reader is put in control of the action, it’s a whole different story – excuse the pun! We all like to imagine ourselves in the shoes of some legendary hero. Fighting Fantasy allowed people to do just that by becoming the main character in an interactive adventure.” The Fighting Fantasy experience solves that particular problem for the reader. And it is one that has stayed with its fans down through the years. “I would like to be a Hero,” says FF enthusiast Tiago Sequeira. “A sword for hire, the one who saves the world at the end of the day. I had the opportunity to be that guy hundreds of times playing Fighting Fantasy. And I did without stopping being myself. I was me, the dragonslayer. Wow! I didn’t think I had it in me.”

“FF instilled in me a love for heroes; brave folks who are the last bastion of decency, stalwartly refusing to back down in the face of all the world’s apathy, cynicism and cruelty, courageously battling to make the world a kinder and gentler place,” says Lin Liren, echoing his fellow fan’s experience. “The Sorcery! series in particular inspired me to reshape myself into a warrior-scholar through martial arts at university. “Fighting Fantasy allows you to be unfettered by the limitations of your mortal form, and let your inner hero out into a world where things like honour, bravery and kindness can still make the world a better place.”

Right: YOU ARE THE HERO, by Martin McKenna. (© Martin McKenna, 2014)

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Yachar Demon, by Dave Allsop. (© Dave Allsop, 2014)

at the heart of the story, an experience once unique to gamebooks, is now the standard in mass market, mass appeal video games.

“Most folks in games started out on D&D,” says artist and games designer Dave Allsop. “I started with the Fighting Fantasy books. One of my favourite books from the series was Out of the Pit... The creature that really intrigued me was called a Yachar Demon – a monstrous-looking guy with two rams’ heads on either shoulder.”

“In the early days of computer and video games there simply wasn’t enough available memory to include a compelling story, let alone graphics, speech and music,” says Livingstone. “But today that’s all changed, and storytelling has become an important and integral part of a video game.”

For author and games designer Alan Bligh, Fighting Fantasy was, “to use a slightly dubious, but rather apt analogy, something of a ‘gateway drug’ for me into the fantasy genre and gaming in general. From here I went ravenously on to Dungeons & Dragons, Robert E. Howard, Warhammer and all sorts of other cool stuff, and the rest, as they say, is history.” “The idea of a thrilling fantasy adventure where YOU are the hero is more than just a clever marketing line,” Damien Walter said in a piece in The Guardian about the impact Fighting Fantasy has had on our society and culture, “it’s central to the success of Fighting Fantasy and a very significant part of how games have changed stories.” The way Fighting Fantasy adventures put the reader 260 ◉

It would seem that over the last thirty years we have become a game-focused culture. In the marketing world, gamification is key, with a thousand Facebook games exploiting our rabid hunger for games in order to sell us products. In her 2010 TED talk, game designer and academic Jane McGonigal asked if gaming could help make a better world. Her argument was that an estimated 1.5 billion ‘virtuoso’ gamers represents a huge and untapped resource of expert problem solvers who could be set the challenge of solving the world’s current challenges! Just as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain first did back in 1982, today games are still putting players at the heart of the story. More than that, gamers are the beating heart of the story. Without the player directing the action, there is no game. Just as without those

first young readers picking up The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and all the adventures that came after it, there would have been no Magic Quest.

The Cult of Fighting Fantasy But just what is it that makes Fighting Fantasy so special, and gives it its enduring appeal? “It was the first gamebook series; it was published by the UK’s best-known children’s book publisher; Steve and Ian had a rags to riches story that was a publicist’s dream,” says FF author Peter Darvill-Evans. “They also had access to a team of potential writers in the GW staff; they knew the artists who were working in the fantasy genre. All of which explains why FF books were successful.” “It was the first, commercially published professionally produced ‘arted up’ version of solo fantasy roleplaying,” agrees Jamie Thomson, while his old writing partner Mark Smith adds, “You are the hero, and they started the whole gamebook cult.” FF fan Andy Jones is vociferous on the subject. “I think each book has such immense replay value; you can literally have a completely different experience every time you read/play one. I also love how each book has its own distinct identity and atmosphere, even the less popular ones. To experience every little battle, trap, setpiece and trick in the series would take a long time and as most of the books are set on Titan, that has become an incredibly rich and deep fantasy world which still has plenty of room for exploration. “Also, the quality of the artwork (covers and interiors) had an awful lot to do with FF’s early success. It’s vital that we acknowledge the importance of the artists’ contributions over the years, as they’ve really helped bring Titan to life.” Jamie Fry agrees. “I think FF without the artwork wouldn’t be so special… It is the artwork that helps you immerse yourself into that world beyond the words… I think it has to do with the way you unpack the book in your mind, as you build up in your imagination the scenarios you are in, and then act them out. The added dimensions of using dice and mapping makes it an even better experience.” Alex Ballingall, creator and editor of the Fighting Fantazine: “I see the FF audience primarily as 7-14 year olds and the books hit this sweet spot with precision. Compared to other gamebooks it makes the right decisions… There aren’t lengthy sections that go

on for pages to then present two options that both go on to more lengthy sections (I’m looking at you, US gamebooks of the ‘80s) and so kids get to feel involved on a more consistent basis. The art is gorgeous and doesn’t bland it up simply because of the age of the target audience. The rules aren’t a simple Choose Your Own Adventure pick a decision, which makes a kid work to win an adventure and gives them a sense of accomplishment afterwards. At the same time, they aren’t of  Dungeons & Dragons complexity.” “FF has something that is rare these days,” suggests cover artist and map illustrator Nicholas Halliday. “Originality. The series was published at a time when printed books still dominated the written word and children weren’t distracted by computers. A book becomes personal in a way a computer game can’t really match and FF is now part of thousands of people’s childhoods (and adulthoods).” FF author Paul Mason agrees: “Compared to video games, books offer a ‘ludic’, immersive experience. Their disadvantage is that they only go one way. FF offers some of the interactivity of video games, but keeps that imagination-fuelled dreamscape from books. That’s the combination that explains the appeal, I reckon. And of course, the setting is high fantasy, which as the current success of Game of Thrones and The Hobbit demonstrates, has many attractions.” “They were the console games of their era,” adds publisher Oliver Johnson. “But at least people read them, and we used to get a lot of feedback how they helped reluctant readers to get to the written word, so they were a force of good.” “I’m still amazed how those books could create what felt like an open-world of endless possibilities within just 400 paragraphs,” says FF fan Phil Williams. “I prefer not to see the maps of the book’s construction, as it shatters that incredible illusion that within a pretty thin paperback book is a massive universe waiting for you to explore.  It blew my teenage mind, I can tell you.” Author Magda Knight is equally effusive about the series. “FF builds worlds in people’s brains. Any strong creative project helps to rewire people. When it first came out, it put power and responsibility in the hands of young kids in a way that was fun. That was probably great for the self-esteem of a lot of younglings. “Fighting Fantasy is an interactive solo adventure in which YOU are the hero,” reiterates Livingstone, getting back to basics. “It was ground-breaking in its day and Steve and I are immensely proud of it.” ◉ 261

The Future of FF It is the current generation of movers and shakers that is responsible for the recent resurgence of the gamebook genre, driven by an almost over-whelming sense of nostalgia to recapture the golden days of their youth. For when the future looks bleak, society looks backwards to a more fondly remembered past. But while so much of what is great about FF is bathed in the warm glow of nostalgia, harking back to people’s childhoods, what of the future? Where can Fighting Fantasy and the wider gamebook genre go from here? Oliver Johnson: “I think enhanced FF-style epub gamebooks with a smooth game mechanic, sound effects, music and graphics might be successful as a bridge between eBooks and video games. The written word is in my view more immersive than the image on the screen.” So rather like the apps being produced by Tin Man Games and Inkle Studios then? “The obvious application (if you’ll pardon the pun) is on smartphones, I would have thought,” says Peter Darvill-Evans. “They replicate the portability of books.” Jon Ingold of Inkle Studios agrees. “I think the print form may have had its hey-day. The digital space, however, is wide open. With Sorcery! we’ve been trying to show that a ‘written game’ doesn’t need to be niche, or complicated, or particularly geeky. I think the kind of seamless interactive storytelling we’re experimenting with has a great future. Certainly, we’ve got quite a few ideas, and we keep meeting and talking to people who have ideas too. There are lots of directions to go now – multiplayer, serialisation, all the different kinds of interactivity available on a computer... That’s the future, I think.” Tin Man Games’ creative director Neil Rennison: “I think it’s about making sure that gamebooks evolve, while remaining true to their roots. It’s very easy to add features into a gamebook which turn it into a modern role-playing game and then it is no longer a gamebook in my eyes. We need to further investigate what it means to be an interactive story and finding new ways within the writing itself to tell better stories. We also need to encourage innovative designs that still fit within the gamebook mould. “Fantasy, science-fiction, horror have all really matured as a creative medium in the video games space as well as in movies and comics. Audience expectations are 262 ◉

higher from the story-telling point of view so that is pushing new gamebook writers to explore new ways of telling an interactive story. This can only be good for the future of gamebooks! “As for the future of FF itself, I’m sure it will always be around and the license will be used in many different ways. I for one would welcome a brand new run of FF stories!” New York Times best-selling author Graham McNeill is more philosophical in his analysis of where the gamebook genre needs to go next. “The same place all books need to go, deeper into more complex, more challenging stories, with robust plots, interesting characters and unexpected plot twists. The readers of FF books demand exactly the same as any other reader demands, so let’s give it to them!” “I think the possibilities are limitless if we’re talking about a fan-based hobby,” says FF author Graeme Davis. “If the mobile apps catch on, then the sky’s the limit. In book form, a lot is going to depend on eReader support and suchlike. But the only possible limitation I can see is the commercial one – is there enough of a market to make it practical to keep writing and publishing? Creatively there are no limits at all, and never were.” Michael J Ward, author of the Destiny Quest gamebook series: “We’re used to being active participants. It’s all about choice and accessibility. As technology continues to permeate our lives, with eReaders and mobile apps becoming primary delivery platforms, I think the very idea of what we consider a ‘book’ is starting to be challenged – and I really believe gamebooks could play quite a vital role in this literary revolution.” FF gamebook artist, Tony Hough: “There’s a whole multiverse out there! Text-based adventures in some or other form will always have an appeal, whatever technology they are implemented on.” “It’s going to be interesting to see how eBook and app technology affects the presentation of gamebooks,” says author and video game scriptwriter James Swallow. “In a way, these things bring gamebooks closer to video games – but I certainly think that one of the strengths of the concept is that gamebooks are portable, simple to play and entertaining, and all those are values that eBook and smartphone users would find appealing.” Michael Acton Smith, dot.com businessman and creator of Moshi Monsters: “With the growth of

video games, FF style books have become much more niche. They may not have a huge mainstream future but they will forever be remembered fondly by the thousands that grew up playing them.” FF fan Thomas Nielsen: “I think gamebooks still do have their merits next to video games. They are not limited by graphics engines and can potentially be much more versatile in the experience they provide the player. However, it would require that this potential is properly used. It is not going to work, if the publishers just keep rereleasing the same titles over and over. Fantasy and gaming in general have both moved on since the Eighties.” “There are always more stories to tell and more adventures to get immersed in, more witch-kings to dethrone and more dungeons to delve in,” says games designer and author Alan Bligh. “Why? Because it’s fun. Obviously there are new forms of media that spring up, and new ways of interaction, but good escapist entertainment in a myriad forms is never going to go out of fashion.” Games designer and author Sarah Newton: “I think the more we play RPGs, the more nuanced the portrayals of female and male characters is going to become, and the better the storylines. FF is a great venue not just for exploring the world, but for pushing the world’s boundaries, exploring alternative ways of doing things, the ultimate ‘what if ?’ RPGs in general let you change the world around you – I see no reason why FF shouldn’t continue to be a great vehicle for aspirational adventure for everyone, regardless of gender.” So, given the opportunity, what sort of adventures would fans like to see being published in the future? Über-fan Zsolt Matyusz certainly knows what he would like to see. “As there was a return to Firetop Mountain and to Baron Sukumvit’s dungeon, there may be a return to the Citadel of Chaos. Though Balthus Dire is dead, it is not impossible that his wife was already pregnant with their child. So this sequel would take place 20-25 years after The Citadel of Chaos… There are at least two adventure opportunities: either the player could impersonate the heir of Balthus as he or she is trying to regain full control of the Citadel and Craggen Rock with the help of (or against) their mother. Or it could be the classic heroic adventure to destroy the again increasing influence and power of the Citadel once and for all against the new heir.” Thomas Nielsen has simpler tastes: “Just a good oldfashioned, adventuring romp through Allansia.”

And Steven Dean’s requirements are even more basic than that: “Back into the dungeons for me.” “The beauty of the FF formula,” says gamebook fan Damian Butt, “is that there are so many ideas that could be turned into amazing books. How about an alien invasion of Earth? Or time travel? Or gladiators? Or gangsters? The list is endless.” But whatever Fighting Fantasy adventures may, or may not, end up being written in the future, many people are feeling more positive now about the future of the gamebook genre than they have had reason to be in a long time, even in this age of next gen consoles and hyper-realistic video games. One of those is long-time FF fan Graham McNeill. “Video games are a quick hit of fun, one that is more visceral and immediate; one you can play over and over again without having to actually engage your brain. But having said that, the new breed of games like Dragon Age, Skyrim, Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic are bringing back that love of storytelling and exploration. So as those games are completed and put back on the shelf, there’s going to be a whole lot of people who want more. Enter the gamebook...” “FF books will never disappear into the technological black hole of changing computer specs!” adds Inkle Studios’ Jon Ingold. “Our Sorcery! app certainly won’t exist in 30 years’ time, because iPads won’t exist anymore. At least books don’t become obsolete.” If people feel that there is still a place for books in this brave new world we are entering, what about comics, or, more specifically, a Fighting Fantasy comic?

Fighting Fantasy – The Comic Book “City of Thieves was my first taste of the Fighting Fantasy universe awaiting me,” says comics writer Andi Ewington, the man who plans to take the classic gamebook series into uncharted waters. “I had been reading TSR’s Endless Quest series for a while, and even though they were enjoyable, I found they didn’t quite leave you feeling ‘heroic’ at the end… I remember being drawn to that iconic Iain McCaig cover featuring Zanbar Bone. Picking it up and several brief scans of the interior later I realised I was holding the Holy Grail of single player gaming experience in my eleven year old hands. “I’ve been writing and creating comics since 2009 and trying to break into the mainstream comic market, all this while working a regular nine to five job as ◉ 263

a graphic designer... It’s a tough industry, but one I’m totally in love with; there are no boundaries in writing and I’m free to build worlds and craft stories as I see fit. I’ve got several comics at various stages of development, and I hope one day I’ll be writing for Marvel or DC rather than just myself.” Ewington cites FF as a massive influence on his career and what he’s doing today: “I tried creating a Fighting Fantasy fanzine at the age of twelve, and even though I was laughed off the shelf, I was determined to build on my love of RPGs and in particular Fighting Fantasy. Fast-forward twenty-eight years and through a quirk of fate I found myself sitting in Ian Livingstone’s house, sharing a glass of wine, reading through Blood of the Zombies. I have always maintained that Fighting Fantasy shaped me and my imagination, and helped me become the comic writer I am today. “I was fortunate enough to move in the same circles as Ian Livingstone when he was at Domark Interactive. I had been working for an agency as a designer and when I found out that Ian was a client I remember turning up with a copy of Deathtrap Dungeon for him to sign. Our paths wouldn’t cross again for nearly twenty years, but after my debut comic, 45, was released in 2009 a mutual friend gave a copy to Ian to read, and somehow (I still don’t quite remember how exactly) we met up and chatted about comics. Ian loved the medium and was interested in developing a comic for the Fighting Fantasy franchise. I instantly said I’d be up for the challenge and offered to write a Deathtrap Dungeon comic as it seemed the most obvious choice, as it was one of the most popular titles in the roster. I developed a comic script and presented it to Ian, a few edits later and the first Fighting Fantasy comic script was ready. Sadly a lack of funds has prevented us taking this and the Freeway Fighter comic I have penned further at this point. I’m not one to give up, I’ll find a way to bring this comic to life, even if I have to ‘Test my Luck’ with Kickstarter.” And we all know where that can lead…

Freeway Fighter, by Ian Livingstone and Andi Ewington. (© Ian Livingstone and Andi Ewington, 2014)

So how do you go about converting a gamebook into a comic? “The answer is very carefully! One thing I had to be mindful of was being as faithful to the book as possible without interfering with any established timeline. For Deathtrap Dungeon, I saw the dungeon as the main focus of the story in the same way the Twilight Zone works, stories and characters come and go, but Deathtrap Dungeon will always be there, constantly testing anyone brave enough to take those first fateful steps inside.  “The plan for the comic was to act as a prequel to a movie script, to throw a contestant into the depths of the dungeon with their own agenda that is slowly revealed to the reader. This would then neatly lead us to the main hero character of the film and complete the story arc. For Freeway Fighter, I wanted to know the background story to the Dodge Interceptor you end up driving in the books. I always found it strange such a

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car would be found at New Hope without a bigger tale to tell. The comic fills in those gaps and brings a depth to an already existing story. “Once I had the germ of the plot and I had my main characters, I would cherry pick scenes, encounters and baddies that fans would be familiar with and weave them into the narrative. It was imperative not to mess with the world so it would conflict with the gamebooks too much – for example, if I killed off the Bloodbeast – so every step I took in the comic I would ensure I wasn’t creating a ripple that would disrupt the source material. It was tricky, but I think I’ve managed to carefully tip-toe my way through it without causing too much disruption.”

don’t want to give Fighting Fantasy fans an alternative gamebook, but a background story that delves deeper into these adventures and maybe answer a few longburning questions.” So if Ewington’s FF comics eventually make it onto newsstands, are there any other classic titles he would like to give the graphic novel treatment? “Seas of Blood would make an excellent comic; lots of visually stunning set pieces that could be artistically interpreted. I’d also love to see Trials of Champions adapted; there’s nothing more gritty than a story peppered with a revenge plot. “I can see Fighting Fantasy making a real impact with comics, and with other media such as films, TV, or webisodes. Fighting Fantasy still has a story to tell, it just needs to find a way to reach the masses again.”

The 60th Anniversary Whether Fighting Fantasy ever manages to reach the masses in the same way that it did back in its heyday of the 1980s, do the fans and creators of the series believe that people will still be talking about Fighting Fantasy in another thirty years’ time? Steve Jackson is stoical: “I hope so. But it will be a miracle if I’ll be there to see it!” Ian Livingstone on the other hand (and the older of the two) is more optimistic: “I hope so. And I hope I will be still talking about it too!” “I think if something is good, a quality product, then there’s no reason why not,” says science fiction writer Gavin G Smith. “Thirty years ago I believe they were considered a flash in the pan. They’re still here.” Deathtrap Dungeon, by Ian Livingstone and Andi Ewington. (© Ian Livingstone and Andi Ewington, 2014)

Author Graham McNeill: “I know I will be, crusty and cantankerous on a panel at SFX Weekender 33.”

Has Ewington ever considered making an actual gamebook comic?

Novelist Gav Thorpe: “FF is one of those properties that has had a profound effect on the gaming and fantasy landscape, and now that it is being discovered by a new generation (and rediscovered by this old one) it can have that impact all over again.”

“I remember a rather unsuccessful game comic called Dice Man which featured a similar mechanic of choosing your way through different comic panels rather than reading blocks of prose. As novel as the concept was at the time, it failed to capture the market and lasted only five issues before being pulled. I don’t want the Fighting Fantasy comics to suffer a repeat of this, so have opted to avoid the interactive element of the gamebooks and focus purely on the story. I

Cartoonist Lew Stringer: “As with any specialist interest it’s never going to go away because it has followers that are passionate about the subject. And with fantasy the scenarios are as boundless as the imagination.” The Forest of Doom artist Malcolm Barter: “Yes. Whilst playing the holographic version.” ◉ 265

“If the current interest in FF is anything to go by, yes, I would imagine people will still be talking about FF in another thirty years,” affirms FF SF artist Gary Mayes. “However, it may have developed in a way that we know nothing about at the moment, like eBooks for example, or animated illustrations. Who knows what’s around the corner?” “I hope so,” muses best-selling author David Lee Stone. “I’ll still be talking about it if I’m around, though I’m not sure muttering ‘Balthus Dire’ while dribbling over a blanket in a retirement home really counts…” “Regardless of what may happen in the future,” states FF fan James Aukett, “I hope that thirty years down the line Fighting Fantasy is still fresh in people’s minds and being discussed as vividly as it is now, ranking alongside classics by the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens.” FF cartographer Steve Luxton has one last thought to add on the subject of where there might be left for Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to go. “Has anyone done a scratch and sniff version yet?”

The Legacy of Firetop Mountain The world would doubtless be a very different place from how it is today without the influence of Fighting Fantasy. Over the course of the last thirty or more years, the premier gamebook series has directly touched the lives of millions the world over. It has also made an indirect impact on millions more who have come into contact with books, games and philosophies created and expounded by people who were themselves originally influenced by The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and its kind. “I think it’s very easy to underestimate just how ground-breaking the FF books were,” points out author Gavin G Smith. For the vast majority, “they were pretty much the first time that there was any sort of non-passive interaction between the reader and the text. I also think that even more so than a normal novel they encouraged the reader to both think and use their imagination.” David Lee Stone, another best-selling author, has this to say about the series: “Fighting Fantasy was the single biggest influence that launched me on the road to becoming a published author. Along with Terry Pratchett’s Ankh Morpork, the Port Blacksand 266 ◉

‘city setting’ was absolutely vital inspiration for the creation of  Dullitch in the Illmoor Chronicles, a series we initially sold to Hodder and Disney back in 2003. I actually started an FF novel in 1994 that I sent to Steve Jackson; it was called Skullsong. Steve liked it, and replied with a very surprising letter explaining that he’d have seriously considered it had the series not just been cancelled by Penguin! Unsurprisingly, I still have the letter.” Marc Gascoigne, now publisher of Angry Robot Books, remembers his involvement with the series with pride: “These days, I look back on a huge body of work, with the many gamebooks, novels, game rules and spin-offs, and can scarce believe we all made it happen with such apparent ease.” It’s not only Gascoigne who was given a helping hand along the way by Fighting Fantasy. Philippa Dickinson is now Consultant Children’s Publisher at Penguin Random House UK. “It definitely helped my career in that it was an enormous success. Since then, I keep bumping into authors, who – when I say I used to work at Puffin and I used to work on the Fighting Fantasy books – they go ‘Oh, I love those books!’ and you sort of think, ‘Really? You can hardly have been born!’ And then it turns out they’ve read them the second time round. “I was just enormously fortunate to be handed this project, that I was able to contribute to, which then became an incredible success… And obviously I’m very happy at whatever part I had to play in that but it was of its moment.” Jamie Thomson is happy to credit the series for kick-starting his writing career too. “I am a novelist, script writer and game designer. None of that would have been possible without Way of the Tiger, Falcon and Fabled Lands. None of those would have been possible without FF. If I hadn’t written the Talisman of Death, I probably would have been an accountant or something.” Considering the impact Fighting Fantasy has had on the world, and its lasting legacy, some are amazed, and disappointed, that the series isn’t more widely recognised. “I can’t quite understand why an FF book was not included in the Mars Rover,” says speculative fiction and YA author Magda Knight. “They should be on Mars by now. But they’re not, and I think that this error on humanity’s part is making us look pretty backward. Embarrassing really.”

Hugo Award-winning expert on role-playing games Cheryl Morgan agrees: “Mars needs Fighting Fantasy. Think of all those poor, deprived Martian kids who have never had a chance to play.” “FF is still a great game and never went away,” says Fighting Fantasy cartographer Steve Luxton. “Older players can introduce it to their children and it is being used as an educational resource. Gamebooks provide a great alternative for those of us who are not very good at video games.” In fact, Fighting Fantasy taught many a young FF fan valuable life lessons. One of those impressionable young readers was Matthew Smith. So what was it that Fighting Fantasy gamebooks taught him, precisely? “I know not to push my luck and that if I ever want to get a tattoo, make sure it’s the right one. Oh, and never leave home without a bone monkey charm.”

Fighting Fantasy’s 40th Anniversary In 2022, the Fighting Fantasy series will be forty years old, and there will doubtless still be many a fan eager to commemorate such a momentous occasion. But will the series’ co-founders, the original Warlocks of Firetop Mountain, be back to mark the event with another new title?

Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. (© Steve Jackson, 2014) anniversary] on my @ian_livingstone Twitter account. So I have suggested to Steve that we co-write a new Firetop Mountain book for the 40th Anniversary. At our age it will probably take us ten years to write!” But whether Jackson and Livingstone continue to return to the series themselves, it looks as if FF will be influencing the game creators and best-selling genre authors of the future regardless. Novelist and games designer Sarah Newton certainly thinks so: “Story telling is fundamental to human beings, and FF plays a key role in carrying that social experience forwards. If it meets the challenges and exploits the opportunities of the eBook era, I think it has a shining future.” It is an indisputable fact that without Fighting Fantasy the worlds of gaming and genre fiction, and life in general, would be all the poorer for it. And so, united by our passion for adventure, tricks, traps and terrors unknown, let us gather, once more, in Port Blacksand’s Black Lobster tavern, and raise a flagon of Cloud Ale to the greatest gamebook series of them all. “To Fighting Fantasy! May your STAMINA never fail!”

Ian Livingstone: “I was bowled over by the positive reaction I received when I announced that I was writing a new Fighting Fantasy gamebook [for the 30th ◉ 267

Acknowledgements You Are The Heroes So many people have helped in so many different ways to make this history of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks what it is, from passing on contact details and sending me photographs and scans, to spreading the word about YOU ARE THE HERO in the first place. However there are some individuals I would like to single out for particular attention. First of all Jes Bickham and David Bradley, who respectively commissioned my original article about the history of Fighting Fantasy for the SFX Fantasy Special and promoted YOU ARE THE HERO through the SFX website. I also need to thank all those people who offered rewards for the original Kickstarter, including Neil Rennison and Ben Britten Smith of Tin Man Games, Dr Mike Reddy, and Mark Stoneham. I am very grateful to Tony Riseley for his sharp-eyed copy edit, as well as Emma Barnes of Snowbooks for doing such an excellent job on the layout of the book and publishing it in the UK. A debt of thanks is due to all those artists who allowed me to reproduce their work in the book, but a special

mention must go to Martin McKenna, Iain McCaig, Russ Nicholson and Tony Hough, who all contributed brand new artwork. I would also like to acknowledge the help of all the people – ranging from writers and artists, to editors, publishers and fans – who patiently answered my endless questions, in many cases revealing all kinds of previously unknown titbits about the creation of the premier gamebook series. And that brings me to Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Without their encouragement and support, the YOU ARE THE HERO Kickstarter would never have succeeded, and without their endless patience and the permission they granted me to reproduce never before published material, the book would not be the mighty tome it is now. But most of all, I would like to say a huge and heartfelt thank you to Fighting Fantasy’s legions of faithful fans the world over, who pledged their support to this project. Without them, YOU ARE THE HERO could not have happened at all. So here’s to you, all of you…

YOU ARE THE HERO!

Kickstarter Backers Cyclops Vivienne Dunstan • Dr Mike Reddy • Andrew Hunter • Kelvin Green • Moritz Eggert • Mike “Skippa” Thompson • Matt Gibbs • James A Hirons • Jeremy & Bucy Neech • Michael Hartland • Ashley Finney • Olivier Vigneresse • Michele Toscan • Simon Flynn

• Erik Odeldahl • Daniel Trevurra Pearce • James Graham • Kyle Cherry • Andrew “Brewin” Drage • Simon Osborne • Lloyd Ash Pyne • James T Stanley • Brendan O’Sullivan • Hans Peter Bak • Tristrim Murnane • Han-Leon Chia • PJ Montgomery • Julien Waite • Ben Staton • Cheryl Morgan • Raphael Perry • Kieran Coghlan • Michael Hutchings • Steve Lord

• Simon Day • Yaztromo • Daniel C Barton • Jason Hunt • Michael Zautner • Ken Wong • David Bailey • Yves-Arnaud Jouret • Simon Cleaton • Tom Waters • John D Hobkinson • Patrick Parkinson • Karl Von Dyson • Arthur Boff • Will Doyle • Jens Schumacher • Dennis Bueso-Calix • Julien Drouet • Duncan Salmons • Jonathan Bentley • Matt Marlor • James Milne • Dr Oliver M Traxel • Elidir Jones • Graham Hart • Dr Alexander Simkin • Andreas Rocha • Daniel Lloyd Brook • Epistolary Richard • Steven Vest • Steven Wall • Mark Paterson • Fee Leng Chew • Graeme Smith • Neil Rennison • Ben Britten • Paul Gilham • Havard Fridheim • Daniel Lee Salter • Steven Leicester • Antony McGarry-Thickitt • Alex Cotterill • Svein Børge Hjorthaug • Ian C Smith • Nick Molloy • Steve Pugh • Sandra Norval • Dave Masterson • Tom Boyle • Jonathon Kelly • Ross Howard • Dr Richard Forster • Karim Pedersen • Mark Stockton-Pitt • Joe Pereira • Martin Gooch • Richard Self • Peter Taylor • Steve Tothill • Jamie Prentice • John Rigdon • Cyril Corbaz • Wayne Kelly • David Christopher Lee • Chris Pramas • Nick Green • Christopher Constable • Matt “Catapult” Wang • Ken Nagasako • Martin Frowde • Tom Ewing • Adam Sparshott • Joshua Wright • Edwin Tan Choon Boon • Andy Chester • Lee Barker • Nicholas Campbell • Matthew Turner

Werewolf Paco Garcia Jaen • Duncan Bailey • Franck Teixidó • Martin Beijer • Jamie Oliver • Geoffrey Bertram • penwing • Tony Lane • Claire Roberts • Danny Morgan • Rhel ná DecVandé • John Ossoway • Paul Smith • Adrien Maudet • Adam Layzell • Michael Hartley • Emma Hyam • David “Yabon Gorky” Lallemand • Israel Perez Luque • Grant Easton • Richard Barley • John Berry • David L Clegg • Sean Franks • Psigh Dimitrios • Aaron Dembski-Bowden • Dirk Smith • Matt Sheriff • Jason Chaplin • Tiago Vieira Perretto • Clay Carter • Chris Brind • Iain Lowson • Donall Tansey • Jon Spillett • Pat Robinson & Irina Ivashova • Gary Blower • Ade Bardy • Freddy B • Ed Brenton

Vampire Matt Zitron • Matthew Sylvester • Richard Griggs • Gabriel Seah • Stuart A Harris • Matt Gilbert • Bill Heron •Vincent K A Wood • Hopper Boys • Ross Warren • Niki Lybæk • Michael Reilly • Ashley Knight • Matt Curzon • Rich Dodgin • Jamie Fry a.k.a The Warlock • Rachel & William West • Scott and Yasmin

Iyengar • Mark Stoneham • Chris Nunn • Stephen R Dutton • Paul Scott • Pete Wood • Andy Hicks • Mark Estdale • Lee Quinton • Wilf

Companion Eddie Boshell • Ross O’Brien • Kevin Schantz • Charles Lee • Anthony Jones

Ghoul Stuart Lloyd • Lee Robinson • Victor “Sylas” Cheng • Mossop • Jeremy Cunningham • George Lawie, for Robbie • Paul Richardson

Minotaur Y K Lee • Joe Kelly • Alex Ballingall • Tom KirbyGreen • Masakazu Taniguchi • Larry Lovoy • Matthew H Hill • Matthew M Konig • Aidan James Degg • Dane Winton • Callum MacKendrick • Matthew Dive • James Long • Mel Hall • Rob Smith • Steven Parry • Brett Schofield • Simon Smith • Gaelan D’costa • Vin de Silva • Richard McColm • David J Williams • Paul Arneil • Steven Isbell • Andrew Girdwood • Rebecca Scott • Steven • Lynsey Swift • VIK • Garyou_Tensei • David Poppel • Rms • Andrew Jay Nicholls • Daniel Gooch • Pauline Martyn • Bryce Undy • Matthieu Vallée • Paul Comis • Benjamin C Gray • Marc Wilson • Ciarán Bohane • IlJoon Kim • Neil Gardner • Aidan Thomson • Gordon Macleod • Nicholas Millar • Björn Lottner

Dr agon Damian Butt • Steve Brown • Tiago Alexandre da Cruz Correia Sequeira • James Aukett • Matt Smith • Zsolt Matyusz

Warlock Steve Dean • Andy Jones • Lin Liren • Thomas Dan Nielsen

You are the Hero Steve Jackson • Ian Livingstone