I'd been meaning to blog about Fighting Fantasy ever since I dug my old gamebooks out, but it had somehow completely escaped me that the very first of them all, Warlock of Firetop Mountain, is the same age I am: we both turned 40 last year. So what better time to revisit it?
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I can't remember where I first came across Fighting Fantasy myself. It was almost certainly when I was very young, and at Rygaards in Copenhagen. At least in my time, the school was run on very British lines, and I remember reading a whole bunch of stuff in the Boy's Own way, probably including some gamebooks. I spoke very little English and was bullied quite badly at school, so spending time alone with English books will have been quite attractive to me. Somehow I ended up owning Crimson Tide as my first Fighting Fantasy book; definitely a memorable one, and I'll get back to it later. We'll start with Firetop Mountain.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Fighting Fantasy, it's a series of gamebooks, so basically a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. These ones are directly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, and have the added attraction of featuring a character sheet. Here's the one from Warlock:
As you can see, the Adventure Sheet has boxes for your stats, equipment and monster encounters, so it's effectively a tiny little role-playing game. You even use two dice to work out combat and other challenges. You have three stats, and I'm afraid to say that I rolled obscenely for my character. There's Skill, which you use to fight, and it's d6+6, which in my case meant 11! Stamina is basically hit points, and the starting value if 12+2d6; I rolled a nine. Luck is also d6+6, and I rolled a six. I wonder if I've ever had such an overpowered character!
Here's my adventure sheet and the beginning of the book.
The whole thing has 400 entries. You start at 1 and are always told where to turn next. I'm actually surprised how much it plays like an old-fashioned computer text adventure: "To go north, turn to 292. To go south, turn to 47." Anyway, we're off.
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The story is that you're an adventurer, basically a murder hobo, as it would much later be put, looking to retrieve the Warlock Zagor's treasure. To do this, you have to get through the dungeon, including a proper maze and everything. Sometimes you end up in combat. My first fight started when a snake hiding in a box attacked me. Here's how it happened:
Combat is fairly simple. You roll 2d6 and add your opponent's Skill, and then 2d6 plus your Skill. Whoever has the higher result wounds the other party, inflicting 2 Stamina points of damage. With my Skill of 11 and Stamina of 21, this particular fight was a foregone conclusion. Most of the combats in the book were actually quite easy, which isn't how I remembered!
Monsters aren't the only obstacles you encounter, either. The underground river and its sinister boatman were one of the things I remembered from this book, not least because of the lovely illustration.
I also came across this delightful vignette of some tools working by themselves. This is one of the things I love the most about Fighting Fantasy: you never quite know what you're going to get!
Anyway, once I was across the river, I made my way through a very spooky crypt, and into Zagor's Maze. Where I almost immediately ran right into the toughest fight I had in the whole book: a Minotaur.
However, beating the Minotaur was easy compared to the maze! I wandered around for a bit, and eventually had to get out the pen and paper, and start a proper map.
After quite a while navigating through the maze, I finally made it past the last guardian, and into the presence of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Zagor.
These last fights were not easy! I managed to remember something I'd read at the very beginning of the story, which gave me the advantage over Zagor, and eventually I defeated him. His treasure was now within reach:
To be entirely honest with you, I remembered this would happen. I actually had two of the keys! This is how we did replayability back in the day. Nonetheless, my adventure is over.
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I really had a good time playing through this book! If I had to critique it, I'd say that my playthrough shows that the random stat range is too high; with my massive starting Skill, all the combats were much too easy. Bearing in mind that the target audience for these books is kids, the overall difficulty is actually quite high. I remember these books being quite challenging when I was ten or eleven years old, especially with my limited command of English at the time. Even now, I thought this would be a breeze to play through, right until I had to start drawing the map...
All in all, I feel that Warlock of Firetop Mountain has actually stood the test of time quite well. It's kind of charming in its simplicity, and there's a lot of memorable scenes and good storytelling. I might have to play some more of these...
