Steve Jackson's "Sorcery!" - The Shamutanti Hills playthrough

Originally published at http://fightyourfantasy.blogspot.co.uk/ by Justin MacCormack - Please be sure to check out the original article, and support the author by purchasing his latest book, "Return to 'Return to Oz', and other tales".

Written by Steve Jackson, Artwork by John Blanche

If someone asked you to travel from your home in Analand across the land of Kakhabad, across the Shamutanti Hills and over the Baddu-Bak plains and the dreaded Forest of Snatta to get to the fortress of Mampang that lies in the peaks of High Xamen, and recover the Crown of Kings from the villainous Archmage of Mampang, you'd probably say "How did you come up with all those silly names?"

But that's what Steve Jackson did really well. That, and make up encounters with very strange people, in very odd locations, which were all very colourful and strange. In those early, slightly trippy days of Fighting Fantasy, Steve Jackson brought a lot of the weirder elements. Ian Livingstone brought the risk of being instant-killed by a horde of zombies. They complimented themselves perfectly, like Rob Grant and Doug Naylor did when writing Red Dwarf.

So when Steve Jackson wrote a series of four books, all of which continued on from each other to form one massive and epic adventure, it was a really neat twist. Like many of the early FF books, it had an experimental magic system, and artwork by the amazing John Blanche, whose unique flair gives this series a fantastic atmosphere. In fact, I like his artwork so much, it's pretty much all I've used in this post. Enjoy!

The storyline is simple enough - you need to cross from the borders of Analand to the port city of Khare. Later books in the series take you further in the journey, but for now, our focus is on crossing the Shamutanti Hills and getting to the city. I had a copy of this book as a kid, which I got at an indoor market in Blackpool one year. The eyes on the monster on the cover were covered over in black marker pen, possibly because his despairing expression scared a previous owner of the book. I do regard this as the better version of the cover, though, because the newer one has a rather grotesque dismembered body littering the floor by the manticore, it's not even a cartoonish body, it's simply too realistic and grotesque.

So let's get things underway. The book can be played in two 'modes', basic and advanced. If you choose basic, it works just like any other FF book, then you play as just a regular adventurer. If you go for the advanced mode, you take a slightly diminished skill score but have access to a variety of magic spells. The spells are listed in a separate section in the book, and all have a simple three-letter name like 'zap' or 'dim', which makes them easier to memorise - and memorise them you must, because you're not allowed to look at them once your adventure has begun!

And given that I have managed to win a grand total of zero Fighting Fantasy books so far in this blog, I am clearly ready to charge head-first into an advanced escapade!

My stats are very fortunate when starting out - a full 12 in luck, 20 in stamina and 10 in skill (the highest that you can have for a wizard-type character in this game). I also have 20 gold pieces, and only two meals which I can eat only when instructed.

The adventure begins as I stand at the gate from my homeland of Analand. I have to admit, any country that marks its borders by building a giant wall around it tends to be a little suspicious in my book, and I'm now starting to work on the theory that I'm not so much 'liberating' the crown as instead 'sneaking in and nicking it' or something similar. Nevertheless, a guard in a silly hat opens the gate and lets me out, telling me that he won't wish me a safe journey because I'm pretty much dead meat.

A short walk from the border gate, and I've found my way into a trader's village. Given that I have only twenty gold, I take the chance to buy a few useful items, but I'm unsure at this point what would count as useful. I know immediately that a lot of the objects listed are used in spells, because I remember them being mentioned in the spell section of the book. I play it a little conservatively and don't buy all the items I want right away. I end up with a bag of monster's teeth, and a bottle of Bilbury Juice. I remember that the teeth are useful in a few spells, but the juice's use eludes my memory. It does, however, refresh some stamina, so maybe I can use it as a quick energy drink.

I leave the village, and quickly encounter my first combat sequence of the game, in the guise of a pair of bandits who demand that I pass over my worldly goods (namely the bag of teeth and bottle of juice). They should be easy enough to dispatch by hand, but I'm keen to try out the magic system. I recognise one spell from the ones I'm allowed to choose, and select that one, which creates a force-field. The bandits hammer on the field for a while, before they get bored and go home.

Pressing on in my travels, I soon encounter an old man who seems to be stuck in a tree. He explains that he was chased up the tree by some elves, who stole all his belongings. I help him down, and he gives me a little riddle about a monster who protects a key. It's not very useful at this stage, only really telling me that the monster in the riddle may be a bit near-sighted, so I convince the old man to go home so that I can steal some honey from a nearby beehive. I manage to swipe the honey without being stung by the bees, which will serve as a spare meal. Lovely!

I press on until the sun is going down, whereupon I make camp for the night. I dine on honey that night, and fall asleep beneath the stars. During the night, I am woken by the sounds of elven creatures playing in the river, tormenting fish and the like. The book actually asks if I wish to call out to them. Knowing the way that elves are racially profiled in these books, this would count as suicidal, so I hide from them and am lucky enough to not be noticed. The next day, I continue my travels.

Crossing at a bridge, I push on through the undergrowth when something unusual happens. The flooring beneath me collapses, and I am about to fall into a trap... when the book gives me the option of NOT testing my luck. This is really odd. why would I choose not to test my luck? This makes me curious, I choose this option. Sure enough, I collapse into the pit trap, only to wake up being tied and bound by a group of headhunters. Not quite sure what the point of this was...

I try to blast them with a spell, only to be told that I have now learned that magic does not work when my hands are bound. This is a mistake I won't make again, I can attest to that. Meanwhile, the dark-skinned headhunters who wear animal skins and have bones through their noses start to gather around a large boiling pot filled with human bones and oh god this is so politically incorrect right now.

I'm unsure if now is a good time to pray to the goddess Libra to free me, or if I should sit tight and wait for the cannibals to start doing their impersonations of the crows from Disney's "Dumbo".  That's another point that I'd neglected to mention about this book - in desperate times, you can pray to your goddess for salvation. She can help free you if you're trapped, or you can ask her to restore your stats or cure you from a curse/poison, but you can only choose to invoke her once during the adventure.

It's a bit of a gamble, because I was hoping to save this for later, but I'm not really wanting to think about what might happen if we let this silly escapade go on any longer. My prayers are answered as clouds start to gather and rain pours down, extinguishing the cooking fire and sending the natives fleeing at this terrifying display of typical British weather. I toddle along on my merry way.

Before too long, I find my way to the entrance of a goblin's mine. Deciding to be especially greedy, I slip into the mine and poke around for a bit, until I find a processing room where the minerals are shoved through machinery by a large ogre, resulting in a few pretty gems coming out of the other end. The other end of the machine, that is. Not the ogre. We don't want to think about what comes out of the ogre's other end. Any way, I kill the ogre (with my sword this time, rather than risking a spell) and take the gems.

I head down from the hills and into a small village. Hitting the nearby inn to unwind, I decide to spend the evening chatting to an old man, because old men often have strange wisdom and are usually powerful wizards in disguise. It seems that this time it was just a local farmer, because he tells me a little bit of advice (informing me that there is a lady who lives in a cabin that I should probably avoid) and giving me an apple. I don't think it's a magic apple, but you never know!

The local inn rips me off for a full 5 gold pieces for a night's dinner and bed, but in exchange I do manage to get my stamina points up to their full level once again. The next day, I head across the hills and make route towards the unfortunately named village of Dhumpus. I feel sorry for anyone who ever has to admit that they're from a village called Dhumpus. The people of Dhumpus seem nervous, possibly because all the people from neighbouring villages make fun of their village's name, but also because I'm carrying a sword. So as to avoid a diplomatic incident with the noble village of Dhumpus, I leave my weapon to one side and chat with a few of the locals. Sadly, this all goes down badly when I say something insulting (possibly "So what's it like being from a village with a name that sounds like a genital disease?") and wind up being chased out of town. To make things a little more entertaining, I've managed to leave my sword in Dhumpus, meaning that my skill now has a -4 pentalty, bringing it to a mere rating of 6.

I make camp for the night, and the book asks me to roll to see if I am attacked by a random monster. Sure enough, during the night a wolf attacks me, and I have to cast a spell to fend it off (because with my skill of a mere 6, I'm liable to fall over and hit my head on a rock, resulting in instant death). I cast a spell which transforms me into a twelve-foot tall giant, which causes the wolf to flee in terror.

I don't want to use my remaining provisions, so when I'm told to eat, I don't. Instead I chug down the Bilbury Juice, as I still can't remember what spell it has any use with, and make my way into the next village. And here is where I display a total lack of any kind of common sense whatsoever. The villagers, many of whom are sickly and missing limbs, flee from the sight of me. Some of them lock themselves inside their houses. I decide that they must be hiding something, so try to make friends with a family that is cowering in terror. Only after shaking hands do they tell me that they have THE PLAGUE!! And although I thought it required a bit more than just a handshake to catch the plague, I'm also now infected. Joy of joys. Silly question, but if you're reading this, do you remember if Bilbury Juice was a cure for the plague?

It seems that the book was not satisfied to simply give me the plague, because it then decides to give me something even worse - a little pixie companion. Her name is Jaan, but I call her Navi. This charming little creature asks if it can accompany me along my journey, I decide to allow it in the hopes that I can feed her to a monster at some point. Navi goes on to tell me that the next village is quite large and populated with very annoying children who are running wild.

A little word about the kids in this village, and this is something that's quintessentially Steve Jackson - there is a local festival going on at the moment, a day during which children and adults swap roles. The kids, of course, take this a step too far and run riot. I initially thought of checking out one of the local sights, but decided not to risk it in case I run afoul of the Children Of The Corn. This little town offers a place to stay, but at a cost of 9 gold for bed and food - I opt to pay for this by handing over a gem, as I only have seven gold pieces left. I go to sleep, hoping that the children of the village won't decide to tie me up and feed me to a rancor overnight.

I wake the next morning, and I'm sure that Navi laughs at me while I spew up part of my lungs as the plague causes me to lose three stamina points. I hate this little pixie, and I'm sure that it is plotting my untimely demise. This suspicion is later confirmed to be correct. I pick a route to lead me to the next stop on my journey, and the pixie cheerfully advises that yes, this lovely and merry field full of sweet-smelling flowers is definitely the quickest route. So off I go, through a field full of black lotus flowers, on the advice of Jaan the Demented.

It's only by the time I start to see all the skeletons of previously-deceased adventurers that I realise that the pixie's plan has succeeded.  Sure enough, the scent of the flowers is poisonous, and I die there in the field. All I can hope is that I have the strength remaining in my body to grab Jaan and bite her little pixie head clean off. It's a fair death, because it gave me the choice of using a spell to determine if this route was indeed the best route. I was foolish enough to trust an evil, demented pixie who has no doubt lead many poor adventurers to her field of death over the years.

This is a fun adventure for sure, and definitely has that classic Fighting Fantasy feel that is so unique to its time. I'd forgotten how much fun this was, how unique it feels, and hopefully if you've not played this before you'll want to give it a shot!

I'll be running an AFF scenario at Dragonmeet

Hi gamebookers!  Just a quick one to say that I'll be running a 3 hour Advanced Fighting Fantasy game at Dragonmeet on the 6th December.  The game is called Holy Order.  Here is the synopsis...

When the High Priestess of  Usrel is kidnapped by black cloaked abominations, fear spreads through the town of Chalice that an invasion is imminent. It falls to you to discover her kidnappers and save her.  However, as you delve deeper into a labyrinthine plot, you start to fear that an invasion from the forces of Chaos is probably the least of your troubles...

I'll be running it at some point in the afternoon (from 2:30pm).

If you want to sign up, or if you want to go to Dragonmeet, go here.

Food and water in gamebooks

I'm finally getting round to writing about the things I said I would back in January 2011.  Better late than never!

So, does food restore about 17%- 28% of your entire stamina or do you lose 10%-14% of your endurance if you do not eat them? Or is food just another item that might come in handy?  Or does the gamebook rarelymention eating and drinking and lets you concentrate on other things?


It seems that food and water has mixed effects in gamebooks, but why is this?

Food, water and sword fighting in real life

We eat and we drink to prevent starvation and thirst.  It's a constant struggle to hold off suffering.  Sure, substances in the food will eventually be used by out body to help with repair and healing.  The act of sitting down to a meal and taking your time over eating and drinking will help remove some fatigue and it will leave you feeling relaxed, but wounds will not heal up before your eyes as you eat.

Now, if you look at some real life sword fighting (number 4 on the list), it seems that people do not wound each other anyway, until the killing blow it seems.

Food and water in Fighting Fantasy

So it seems that if you were engaged in a fight using the Fighting Fantasy system and you lost stamina, you are wounded.  A meal of provisions cures the effects of two wounds (such as being hit with a sword twice), so food is unrealistic.  It certainly wasn't written with simulation in mind.

Provisions also rarely come up in the text after the rules beyond buying them or feeding the odd creature, and, in most cases, we're not even told what you are eating, so they have very little to do with the narrative.  Provisions in Fighting Fantasy were there for the game - the writers needed some way to replenish stamina and came up with food and water, and, if you play Fighting Fantasy books not expecting a detailed simulation, that is fine.

Ian Livingstone changed provisions to a healing potion in Crypt of the Sorcerer and Keith Phillips used healing herbs in Seige of Sardath (a narrative choice, as your character is a woodland ranger who would know where to find them) and there were various other items in the sci-fi books that may or may not have made more sense, but it seems that provisions in Fighting Fantasy are there purely for the game.
as being worn down, then sitting down to eat provisions and restoring 4 stamina points might be quite realistic.

However, it is clear in the Fighting Fantasy rules that every 2 stamina point strike you deal is a wound, so each meal cures the damage from two wounds.  Also, you are not allowed to eat during combat, but you are allowed to eat when being pursued by a horde of zombies, climbing down a cliff or swimming across a river.  So, provisions restoring 4 stamina is not very realistic and so it is not an attempt at




Water comes up occasionally in survival situations where you are likely to not have much water (the desert in Temple of Terror, a bit of Caverns of the Snow Witch and a bit in Island of the Undead are some examples), but the rules are inconsistent.  In Island of the Undead, being thirsty causes 4 stamina points of damage in Island of the Undead, which seems a bit much (but then it is quickly restored) and 1 stamina point in Caverns of the Snow Witch (which is also quickly restored).

Food in Lone Wolf (and Sorcery!)

Most food in Lone Wolf does not restore any endurance (unless it is a laumspur meal), but if you do not eat, you will lose 3 endurance points.  This is closer to the idea that if you don't eat bad things will happen, but using this system, if Lone Wolf did not eat, he would be dead in 7-10 days.  Sure, not eating anything for a
day gives discomfort and hunger pains, but it will not bring you 10% closer to death.

It is possible for almost everyone to not eat for a week and survive, and food is rarely named, so this is added more for game reasons.Sorcery does a curious thing where food restores a small amount of stamina (2 for meal 1, 1 for every other meal) but lose 3 stamina points if you don't eat at all.  This would lead to a player death in 5-8 days.  So not very realistic from that perspective.

Also, I like this less than food restoring stamina as it makes food just one more thing that could kill you.  It always seems less fun to have a task that does nothing if you fulfill it and does bad things if you don't.

Ignoring food

So, it seems that Fabled Lands, by ignoring food and water, has the most realistic system.  It also lets you concentrate on more fun game things, such as exploring and levelling up.  There is recourse management in Fabled Lands (light sources, blessings, money), but food and water do not take part in it.  It seems to assume that if you are in good health, you will just find food and water or buy it for a negligible cost.  There is a section in book 1 where you might get enchanted to wander around for a few days without being able to do anything and you do lose stamina because you forget to eat and drink for several days, but otherwise, you don't have to think about it.

Food for narrative reasons

Some gamebooks name their food items (such as Necklace of Skulls) and you can use this food to give to people, so it has much more of a narrative purpose.  There are also situations where you might want to nameOutsider has this example, where you might find a crust of stale bread at the beginning.  You are then given the option to feed it to a guard dog, but if you do, you are chastised for trying to feed it something inappropriate.
food - for example, you might want meat to feed the guard dog.

Conclusion

So, it seems that if food is a big part in your system, it will not play a realistic part, but, to be honest, I doubt anyone plays gamebooks for a simulation.  A system where food has a realistic effect will be too complex for most gamebook systems (which are usually very simple).  The most realistic option seems to be ignoring food and water until it might become relevant (if you are stuck in a desert, for example).

But we don't play gamebooks for realism.  I, for one, am happy with carrying 40 stamina points worth of food around with me, and  the endurance loss in Lone Wolf is only mildly annoying.

So the conclusion is - if you want to be realistic, do not include food in the game system, but not being realistic is something we can live with and if the food can cure two hits with a bloody great axe, then no one is going to complain.

Return to Firetop Mountain playthrough

Originally published at http://fightyourfantasy.blogspot.co.uk/ by Justin MacCormack - Please be sure to check out the original article, and support the author by purchasing his latest book, "Return to 'Return to Oz', and other tales".

Written by Ian Livingstone, Artwork by Martin McKenna

Sometimes, they come back.

It was 1992, ten years after The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain was published. The Fighting Fantasy series had been a big hit, a huge hit. By this stage there were 49 books in the main series, not counting all of the side series and spin-off items. For the fiftieth book, Ian Livingstone wrote Return To Firetop Mountain, a book which boasts its pedigree right on the cover.

And that's a lovely cover, showing a veritable army of monsters, with the imposing mountain itself looming in the background, atop which stands the haunting visage of the now-undead warlock Zagor himself. The cover also features the letter '50' in huge, powerful lettering, making damn sure you know what number in the series you're holding. I've a sneaking suspicion that this may have been intended to be the last in the series, because of the strong theme of returning to where it all began.

Funny thing, for the 30th anniversary of FF, I was in London to get a copy of Blood of the Zombies. In 1992 on the tenth anniversary of FF, I bought a copy of Return to Firetop Mountain in London. Specifically one of the airports, while waiting for a flight back home from a peculiar adventure involving the BBC which we won't get into at this point. I hadn't even realised at the time that FF books had been out for 10 years, all I knew was that this was the fiftieth and Zagor needed to be taught a lesson.

So let's get to it. I've been spectacularly lucky with my rolls in creating my character here, with a skill of 11 and a stamina of a full impressive 24. From what I remember of the book, I need to collect dragon's teeth in order to win, just like you collect keys in the first game. Only this time, rather than stealing his treasure, your goal is to destroy the evil warlock. I have to admit, it's a more noble and heroic goal. To paraphrase from a Dungeons and Dragons game I played once, the truth of the first book is that we'd broken into an old man's home, beaten him up violently, and stolen his possessions like a group of chavs.

Eager to go and pick on the poor old man again, my adventurer has grabbed the quest to head into the mountain, where Zagor is imprisoning local villagers and using their body parts to create a whole new body for himself.... ick. I'll try not to think about that too much. Anyway, as I set out on the journey to the mountain, only to be stopped by the tavern keeper from the local town, who tells me that a pair of scouts are on their way ahead to alert Zagor's forces to my arrival. Together we duck into the undergrowth, where I find a rather nice polished shield just laying in the dirt.

Geek references FTW

The shield comes in quite useful, because the scouts attack soon after and I'm able to deflect their throwing dagger with it. Together, myself and the tavern keeper make short work of the scouts, and find a few coins marked with the letter 'Z'. I guess that Zagor is minting his own coins now. Got to admit, that's the mark of a real evil genius. I wonder what the exchange rate is between Zagor coins and the Euro right now. In fact, the British pound sterling is still very strong against the Bison Dollar, due to M. Bison's inability to kidnap the Queen.

The scouts were also carrying a scroll which puts a curse on me when I look at it, lowering my skill to a 9. Why would they even have this kind of thing? And why would they be carrying a cursed scroll around in their smelly boots? I'm sure it's some kind of evil plan of some sort. I opt to press on towards Yaztromo's Tower, which along with Port Blacksand is one of the most important (and often-visited) locations in the whole of the FF universe. I'm pretty certain that Ol' Yaz will be keen to help me. We're friends, see, from way back in the Forest of Doom days.

As I travel to the tower, things are certainly not uneventful. I am given a mushroom from a travelling mushroom seller, and am rewarded with a ring of invisibility in gratitude for saving a man who has been tied to the ground by bandits. Nearing the dwarf village of Stonebridge, I spend the night in a rickety old hut, and find a key hidden there (keys are always, always useful). I spend the night in the celler of the hut, and although I can hear scratching of claws and inhuman mutterings from the main part of the hut, but they don't come down to bother me. The next day, we arrive in Stonebridge.

The dwarves are taking a break from drinking ale and singing about gold. In fact, they have discovered a new hobby - sailing. They tell me that my buddy Yaz isn't in the tower, but has gone off on a little holiday to the village of Kaad, which needs to be said in a William Shatner voice from now on. They invite me to sail with them down the river to get to KAAAD!! so I pack my things up and go along with them.

This does not end well. Along the way we are sabotaged by a boat full of orcs, who shoot half the boat's crew. After managing to escape the orcs, we sail along until we catch sight of an important messenger bird flying over to us, carrying extremely important information for the success of my mission - but before it can arrive, a giant eagle catches the bird and eats it. And to top the day off in the best possible way, the ship accidentally collapses and we all fall into the river and the whole crew get eaten by piranhas. Except for me. I suppose I had been sure to bring a snorkel with me.

To be fair, it could have ended worse. The sky could have spat fire at me. So I guess we got out of it alright in the end. 

Dragging myself along the bank of the river, I realise that I'm probably not going to live to see Firetop Mountain. It all seems so far away. As I lay there trying to recover, I renew my determination to succeed. I refuse to just lay down and give up, even when a poisonous snake decides to crawl over me. I get up and march on towards KAAAD!!

Along the way I see an old hunchbacked man. He asks me for a gold coin, and being the generous and kindly sort, I hand over one to him. Sadly, he seems to take offense to my asking if he'll accept Zagor Money, and beats me with an ugly stick. No, really, his magically-enchanted walking stick turns me into a hunchback too. My skill score has now plummeted to a mere 7. So much for a good deed! I explain to the man that I'm not one of Zagor's minions, and eventually he believes me and apologises. But tells me that he can't fix the power of his ugly stick. Seriously, old man, why do you even have something like that?

I arrive in KAAAD!! to find that it's a plague site. It seems that Yaz's holiday out here wasn't just sight-seeing after all. I'm eventually able to track him down, or at least someone who looks just like him. I'm rather suspicious of the kindly old man I meet who claims to be Yaztromo, as I've never known him to be particularly friendly in any of the previous books. Turned out that this is indeed something of a beginner's trap, because this man is an imposter. It's a changeling monster posing as Yaz, and he proceeds to kick me around the whole town before I'm able to land a lucky blow and kill it.

I have already used up all of my Star Trek Deep Space Nine jokes about Changelings, so let's just move on. 

When I find the real Yaz, he grumbles and moans about everything, so I know it's the real him. He then gives you the means to kill Zagor - finding the gold dragon teeth that are hidden around Firetop Mountain, and also figuring out the right magic words to use them. He gives me some gold coins to buy some items, and... does not heal my hunchback-ery status ailment. Oh gee, thanks sooo much Yaz.

So after a quick bit of shopping (wherein I gather the usual dungeoneering supplies of rope, leather gloves, garlic, silver knives and the like), a friendly local elf gives me a ride on the back of a giant eagle to the base of Firetop Mountain, and we are finally ready to begin the adventure proper. With my both my skill, stamina and luck now just a mere 7 apiece. Gosh, I'm doing well at this!

I venture into the entrance tunnel of the mountain, and am confronted with the first choice from the very first Fighting Fantasy adventure - turn left or right. In Warlock, turning right leads to a pit trap, so I decide to see what new twist this book has put on this. The door into the room is boarded up, but I find a bottle on the floor that contains a small brass egg. No idea what that's doing there, or how someone managed to fit an egg into a bottle. Oh well, let's get exploring!

Eggs, eggs everywhere! Eggs!

A good few of the rooms from the original layout are sealed shut, but I eventually find one occupied by a group of skeletons, who all seem to be arguing over what to have for lunch. There's about five of the buggers, and because I'm barely able to survive a strong wind at the moment, I decide to sneak out of the room before they can stamp on me. I head into the next room I come across, which seems to be a rubbish site. I dig around and do manage to find a tin whistle and an onyx egg. Odd, I wonder why there's been two eggs already in the dungeon.

I find a chain on the wall and, hoping it's not an alarm bell, give it a good yank. It opens a secret chamber. I can't quite resist the urge to stick my hand into secret chambers, so I grope around inside it until I find a sealed container inside the chamber, immersed in enough acidic goo that is sure to ruin those nice leather gloves I'd bought. Inside the container I find a gold dragon's tooth. Not too bad, not too bad!

Then I notice something odd. Yaz told me that the dragon's teeth had numbers printed on them. This one has an icon, a little heart  surrounded by a ring of fire. No idea why this is. Could be that it's a code of some sort, which I'll decipher later in the adventure. This reminds me of an curious thing that happened a few weeks ago. I bought some incense for my flat, to create a relaxing zen atmosphere. I read the label on the dragon's blood incense, and I'm guessing that the company must have had complaints from customers because the box included a large section which read "Dragon's blood is a type of plant. This product does not contain real blood from any dragons." My mind boggles sometimes, it really does.

I figure that it's pretty unlikely that the next room would contain anything useful after that, so I skip it and instead go into the following room which appears to be a torture chamber. There's a skeleton laid out on a rack, and he's sporting a rather nice gold ring. Hey, who's averse to a little bit of looting the dead? I try to pry the ring off, when a net damn near descends on me. It's only by the luck of the dice that I barely (and I do mean barely, as if I'd rolled even one number off then I'd have been caught) avoid it.

I notice that the trap was set by a goblin, and I lose my patience. I charge after the little bugger, my low stamina score be damned, I'm not going to be caught by a damn goblin. I follow him into a tunnel, where I find the ancient sword of the first Chaos Warrior... wait, what? I... don't even... huh? I genuinely don't know what this is doing here, but eh, I take it with me planning to sink it into the goblin's head. I charge after him, scrambling through tunnels (and falling over) and leaping over piles of skulls, until I eventually admit to myself that he's escaped and I've lost him. Pah. Pah, I say. Pah, pah, and pah again.

I try to figure out where I am, and find that I've wound up somewhere completely off the map of the original game. Again, the way that the dungeon here is structured to be built 'on top' of the old one from the first book, it's very impressive! So instead of trying to figure out where the heck I've got to, I go into a nearby room and find that it's full of statues. Each of the statues look like a warrior, except with an expression of horror on their faces. Then the door behind me slams shut, and a wall on the room starts to lift up, revealing something snake-like beneath. Oh joy. I employ my amazing special technique for how to deal with horrifying medusa-type monsters - I try to run away.

Oh great, the door's locked. But not to worry, because the book gives me the option of using an item to help me. I'm so lucky that I found that polished shield at the start of the adventure, eh? Just like in the original Clash of the Titans, I'm sure that a polished shield will help me slay this monster. I turn to the section and.... oh, I can't use my shield. I don't know why, the section just simply doesn't list it as an option. Maybe I lost my shield at some point. Maybe it was rendered scratched and dented when the scouts threw a knife or two at it. Must be honest, I'm a bit disappointed that it isn't even mentioned.

Instead I have the option of using garlic, a mirror, or a tin whistle. I don't have a mirror, and garlic is for use on vampires, which leaves me the whistle. Hey, maybe medusas are allergic to loud noises? Let's try it.

No. No, they are not allergic to loud noises. I'm turned to stone on the spot. On the plus side, I like to think that I strike a stunning pose, in order to make sure that I leave a damn beautiful corpse.

Return to Firetop Mountain ranks up as one of the underrated gems in the Fighting Fantasy canon. The way that it uses the original dungeon layout as a base, but builds on top of it to create a whole different adventure is very impressive. The inclusion of the entire adventure tracking down Yaztromo is excellent, giving the player the chance to see a see and experience some classic Fighting Fantasy tropes.

The atmosphere feels rich, and the writing is very strong with Livingstone's style. It feels that there are traps and dangers around every turn, and I strongly feel that I only got as far as I did on this playthrough by luck. The artwork is among the best in the series, fully detailed and utterly vibrant. It's a real shame that this book is overlooked so often, because if the series had gone through with concluding with this book as was initially planned, it would have been a damn good send-off.

Out of all of the Fighting Fantasy books, I consider this to be an under-rated gem, and definitely suggest that you give it another playthrough today. Go on, do it. It's raining outside, you may as well put your feet up and play this for a few hours. You'll enjoy it!

Fighting without dice

Post by Paltogue.

I'm currently in the planning stages of writing a gamebook (or even a series of gamebooks) and, as a long-time fan of Fighting Fantasy, my first inclination is to go with the familiar and use FF rules, including plenty of fighting (it is FIGHTING Fantasy after all). But there's a problem, currently being discussed in blogs and on Twitter by people like Dave Morris and Matt Hill, which I want to explore in this post on Lloyd of Gamebooks.

OK, picture the situation. You're lying asleep just before dawn in a first floor bedroom in an inn, on your way to deliver an important secret message to ... well, I'm not going to give the whole game away right now, just assume it's someone important! Test your Skill. If you are successful, you wake up, having heard noise from the floor below, which sounds like someone breaking into the inn. If you fail, you remain asleep. Let's say for now you were successful (which of course depends on what your SKILL score was in the first place, in large part determined by another random roll of the dice before you started your adventure). You bolt awake, realising your enemies are coming to get you before you can deliver your message. So what do you do now? Do you grab your stuff and stand by your door, preparing to attack anyone who tries to come in (this would be the only option if you didn't pass the SKILL test just before by the way), or do you grab the first thing at hand and get the hell out of there, jumping out the window to the back street below? Now, that's a proper choice that you as the reader get to decide, and I like it, as I have no idea who or how many people are coming up the stairs to get me, and as it's near dark outside I fancy my chances with the jump (the inn isn't very tall after all). So you chose which of your possessions to grab and out the window you go. Test your Luck. If you are lucky, you land well and get to your feet. If you are unlucky, you land awkwardly and twist your knee. Lose 2 STAMINA points (and maybe even a SKILL point if I'm being mean). You stand up and see a gaunt REIVER wearing a wide-brimmed hat standing in front of you. He is holding a flaming brand in one hand, and a jagged-edged knife in the other. You must fight him!

REIVER        8            9

After two attack rounds, another REIVER, this one short and waving a sword over his head comes running towards you and joins the fight. You must fight them both at the same time.

2nd REIVER         7           7

If you survive this fight to the death, you head off into the night in the hope of escaping your pursuers.

I don't know about you, but I thought this was quite fun up till the point when I had to fight the Reivers. But suddenly I've got to stop the enjoyment for a bit, while I roll some dice a couple of dozen times (allowing for a re-roll or two, let's be honest!). That was completely BORING (and would have been even more so if you'd chosen or been unlucky enough to have to fight the four Reivers coming up the stairs to your room, each in turn)... And what is it about those bloody dice anyway, especially the one I once filled in the dimples of with a blue pen? Why does it always seem to roll a low number?! I mean, I almost had to stop reading this book I've spent a fiver on and start it all over again just because of some annoying little red cubes that don't want to roll the way I want them to. And don't get me started on the fact that I only had an initial SKILL of 8 in the first place - again the fault of the pesky dice!

Don't get me wrong, I like dice as much as the next person. They are tactile, loaded with history and (a little bit of) mystery, and they make a nice noise and movement when you roll them on the right surface. But I don't want to depend on them for enjoyment of a story. Imagine reading your favourite novel, and not allowing yourself to start each new chapter until you'd rolled equal to or over a random number between 7 and 12 with two dice. Seriously?! As a long-time fan of Fighting Fantasy, you can imagine that this has presented me with a bit of a quandary. Actually, it hasn't really. I decided, pretty much after my first combat in Island of the Lizard King in 1985 that there was no real fun to be had rolling dice to see how good at adventuring you were and then rolling some more (again and again and again and again) to see if you could continue reading the book. Nope, not for me. I loved these books, but from now on I won every fight and succeeded in every roll (and had enough gold too, at least if the amount I started with was arbitrarily decided by the author). I didn't claim to have things I didn't or have done things I hadn't, but I did keep a spare finger or three in previous paragraphs just in case the author was going to kill me off without warning (another problem with the FF approach). And that's still how I play Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and I don't suppose I'll ever do it differently (I have tried playing by the rules many times, but I just get annoyed; oh, and curse you, Paul Mason, for your subversive ways!). Now maybe some of you are aghast at this, but seriously, how many of you really enjoy playing a book 100 times just to find out what happens if the dice go the right way for you? The internet is littered with gamebook playthroughs which (being generous) 9 times out of 10 don't get very far, even when the person doing them knows the book pretty well.

So what's the alternative for those of us wanting to write gamebooks which include some fighting? And who doesn't want fighting, really? I mean, I'm sure I can't be the only one who gets a shiver down my spine when I turn to a new paragraph and see something like BLOODBEAST plastered across the page! But I don't want that to mean "spend the next five minutes rolling dice in a monotonous fashion, after which you may have to start all over again anyway" or even "flick on to the next page, nothing of interest here YOU BIG CHEAT". Nor do I want to dodge the issue entirely and ask the reader if they want to run away or stay and get eaten/defeat the enemy automatically. That's equally boring and pointless; why include the 'fight' in the first place?

Obviously I'm not the first person to wrestle with this gamebook conundrum, so let's look at some possible solutions. First of all, we could go all Way of the Tiger ninja on the Reiver's ass, and present a range of different fighting moves, some of which will be more effective than others. But WotT still relies upon rolling dice and a lot of guesswork as to the best moves to make. I can imagine though that this is definitely an avenue we could pursue, though we would want to get rid of the dice from it completely (and perhaps simplify the kinds of moves you can make, as we're not all going to be ninjas). The recent Inkle adaptations of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! books go for a trade off between attack strength and energy levels, with textual clues as to the best approach to adopt in each attack round for each opponent. Again, this is an improvement, but it would be hard to do in a paper gamebook without dice, and in any case boils down to a set number of moves which are the same for every combat (and it sometimes feels like the combats are a rather easy formality that are only in there because this is a Fighting Fantasy adaptation). A kind of a half way house between WotT and the run away/get eaten approach is the one used in the Virtual Reality/Critical IF books, where you are presented with a list of possible actions to take, some of which you can only do if you have certain Skills. This works well, as in the example from Heart of Ice where you encounter a huge Fijian bodyguard. You can either run away, try and blag your way out of the situation, brandish your gun at him to make him back off, or fight him. This is a nice variety of options, certainly better than almost anything you'll encounter in Fighting Fantasy, but only one of them really involves you fighting, and the result is a single outcome (you lose some Life Points, then knock him out and make yourself scarce). So not really a fight as such, but let's be honest this is much better than rolling dice till you're sick and being told to turn to paragraph 236 if you win (and it's helped by the evocatively descriptive text of course). A more complex example is furnished by the Hydra in Necklace of Skulls. Here you can try to dodge, parry or attack. Each of these options leads to other similar options, and some may lead to loss of Life Points, but, depending on your Skills and what you chose before, the choices may be subtly different (you can dodge further away; you can now use a spear if you have one), or you may be returned to the original set of choices in a nice take on the repeated attack round. Depending upon your choices in this dangerous fight, you may be killed outright, suffer repeated loss of Life Points, or work out the right combination of choices to survive the fight with minimal or no injury. I think this works really well as a fight against a dangerous opponent - there's certainly a danger of injury and death, but thinking about your choices in light of your equipment and Skills should get you through. Most importantly, it's not boring or arbitrary. There is a danger of death here, but it's not one of those unavoidable Instant Deaths or the result of the author trying to kill off the reader, so I slightly disagree with Dave Morris here, who recently said on Twitter that "If you can fight you'd expect you can die, but that's always a fail for author & reader". After all, there has to be some risk in a gamebook, otherwise it's JUST a story with different ways of reading it (no harm in that of course, but that's a rather different kind of thing I think).

So I think this gives us a decent kind of fighting interaction which doesn't involve dice but which also doesn't constitute a removal of fighting from gamebooks entirely. But it does mean abandoning my nostalgic attachment to the Fighting Fantasy system which, after all, I've personally abandoned using in my own adventures years ago, so why should I inflict it on others?!

With all that in mind, how does the following version of the scenario I started the post sound? Does it capture that essence of fighting and fantasy without recourse to dice and arbitrary decisions?

You're lying asleep just before dawn in a first floor bedroom in an inn, on your way to deliver an important secret message to ... Suddenly you wake up, having heard noise from the floor below, which sounds like someone breaking into the inn. (Let's be honest, as an author we want to give the reader the chance to make decisions, not have them forced on them, so there's no value in randomly having it decided if they wake up or not.) You bolt upright, realising your enemies are coming to get you before you can deliver your message. So what do you do now? Do you grab your stuff and stand by your door, preparing to attack anyone who tries to come in, or do you grab what you can and get the hell out of there, jumping out the window to the back street below? As before, I like the idea of jumping out the window, as I have no idea who or how many people are coming up the stairs to get me, and as it's near dark outside I fancy my chances with the jump. So out the window you go. You land with an umph on the ground, but you aren't hurt. (Let's not make the reader's life a misery here by deducting Life Points - punishing them for doing the wise thing and escaping when the other option was fighting a bunch of Reivers in a bedroom is just mean.) You stand up and see a surprised, gaunt REIVER wearing a wide-brimmed hat standing in front of you. He is holding a flaming brand in one hand, and a jagged-edged knife in the other. Which of the following will you do?

• Try to talk to him? (He will stick his fingers in his mouth and whistle loudly, and shout "He's ower here" at the top of his voice. Not good, but really, what did you think was going to happen? Another Reiver joins him for the fight.)
• Charge right at him to try knocking him out of your way? (Good idea. He's as shocked as you are, and he's gaunt, i.e. not a big meaty bloke. You knock him off his feet and, with the stink of his beery breath oomphing out all over you, you leap over him and run off into the night.)
• Attack him?

Of course, this last option is where it gets interesting. There's a couple of things to remember though. As an author, my job isn't (or at least shouldn't be) being the reader's enemy. I don't want my reader to die here, as I want them to enjoy the adventure and I've put them in this fix (and being down here on the street is a lot better than being upstairs with the Reivers). So I want the reader to work out what the best thing to do here is and to only get badly harmed if they do something stupid (this is a dangerous and important situation after all; you can be damned sure that this is a life-and-death situation for the person in the adventure, and I want the reader to feel a bit of that too). First things first. I neglected to tell you that you could play this adventure either as a soldier (fighting is good!) or as a friar (fighting not so good!). Also, following the lead of VR/CI, you have a list of Skills and some equipment. If you are going to get into a fight with an armed Reiver, you want to make sure you have a combat Skill, otherwise this isn't going to go so well for you. Why would you fight someone with a knife in their hand if you didn't?! (The friar may not have any combat skills.) You also want to make sure you have a weapon, otherwise it's fists against knives, and we all know how that can end (the friar has a staff and can use it for combat). So a number of variables that you already know about should dictate your actions and, if you decide to do something where the odds are very much stacked against you, don't expect it to go well. So the friar without any combat Skill who has left his staff sitting by the bed is only asking for trouble if they select the option to fight the Reiver. Better to run right at him, don't you think (especially if like me you imagine yourself as a portly and still-slightly-drunk-from-the-night-before kind of friar)? The soldier on the other hand might see combat as a reasonable option - they should have had the sense to pick up their sword from the bedside and will have a combat Skill. A quick lunge at the gaunt Reiver sends him reeling back with a cry as you thrust your sword into his shoulder. Now you can either stop to finish him off, or just run off and leave him (come on, the place is crawling with enemies, get the hell out of there unless you want another Reiver to come running at you from behind and slash at you with his sword!). If you end up having two Reivers to fight, you can't expect things to go quite as well, but unless you stand in the street shouting "Come on all of you if you think you're hard enough", it should be possible to get away from this situation with your life at least. The short Reiver comes running slashing his sword around. The gaunt one is just standing there surprised. Which do you attack first? If you go for the gaunt one, you'll certainly injure him, but the other one is already on the attack and will wound you before you can have a go back at him (if you are still alive of course). If you go for the short Reiver first, you can swipe his attack aside, perhaps even unbalancing him or disarming him, before turning to the gaunt Reiver who, by now has his defences up, but who shouldn't be too much of a problem (let's settle for a little bit of damage, not as much as if the short Reiver got a whack at you first). You knock him out off his feet and can run off into the night (again, if you are daft enough to hang around after that, you're going to have more Reivers to deal with and things aren't going to be pretty, but I should have given you enough hints by now that the name of the game is getting out of here as quickly as possible). Oh, and if you are still fighting Reivers in the bedroom, you have my sympathies. You should by now have stuck the first one to appear, shoved something against the door and dived out the window.

So I think it is possible, using a combination of textual hints, descriptions of your opponent's strengths and weaknesses, Skills, equipment, the possibility of returning to the same sets of choices, good judgement, as well as carefully graded Life Point penalties, to include an element of combat in gamebooks without belabouring it or relying on the vagaries of dice. The VR/CI system, maybe with some adaptations depending upon the kinds of Skills you offer and combats you want, seems like the best way forward. I think this can be entertaining and productive. What do you think?

The new, improved Gamebook Feed

Hello, gamebookers!  I'm just writing to tell you that I have changed the Gamebook Feed and that it
is new and improved.  I'm particularly proud of the blog now.

It used to be a collection of gadgets where each blog had a feed.  The trouble with that was that it was too busy and blogs that didn't update were taking up space.  However, after some searching and tinkering, I found a new way, where I just have a Feedly list of gamebook blogs and sites and every time a site on that list posts something, it will also appear as a post on the gamebook feed with a hyperlink.  No business, no fuss, and if one of the sites disappears, it won't make a mess.  If you want to see the list of sites I have used, I have it in Excel form and OPML (Feedly file) here.  I will try to keep it up to date.

There is also a list of websites that do not have an RSS feed and so won't work on Feedly.  I have found a website to RSS converter (there are several - just Google them), but I have no idea whether they will work if I stick the URLs into Feedly yet - if there's any social media whizzes who know the answer, I would be grateful if you could tell me.

I'm also going to tell you how I did it in case anyone wants to create a similar sort of feed for other topics.  Enjoy it!

So how does this feed work?

Well, first of all, I needed to know which blogs and websites I needed to add to the feed.  I then signed up to Feedly and added all of those websites to one Feedly group.

Then I signed up to If This Then That.  I clicked on Create a recipe and then the big this.

I then had a massive list of apps and websites.  I found Feedly and clicked on it.

I then chose "New article from category" and then chose the Gamebook Blogs category on the dropbox.

I then clicked the large that and chose blogger as my "that" action.

I then clicked "Create new blog post"

I then got this page:

Almost done!  Myself and some other people really wanted the link to the pages hyperlinked rather than be a copy and paste job (the script I was given at first did not hyperlink the link), so after some tinkering, I managed to get it to work with this script:

Where it originally said Article URL, I put on the left ,<a href="{{ArticleURL}}"> and to the right of it, I wrote </a>, turning it into hyperlink.  I also experimented with more and fewer <br> (breaks), but that is just window dressing.

And there you have it. I'm writing this because it took me about 4 hours looking for websites to help (I eventually got Feedly from Charlie Feming on Twitter.  Thanks Charlie), finding the websites to add to the feed (which you won't have to do if you want the same feed, because you can just upload this OPML file of my feed) and then work out how to hyperlink the links.  So, if you want to do something similar, it will take you a lot less time.

So there we go.  One lesson I have learnt is that if you have a bit of time to search and/or talk to your online network, anything is possible.

Happy gamebooking!

Down Among the Dead Men 2014 - the App

Down Among the Dead Men has been floating around on the seas of fiction since 1993, when Dave Morris wrote it as book number 2 in the Virtual Reality Adventures series. The story is excellent, a seafaring tale of revenge against a truly despicable pirate foe, the black-hearted bastard Skarvench. In game terms, it allows you a wide variety of character builds, and presents a ton of different routes to explore, particularly in the early parts of the story. And that equates to a gamebook you can reread again and again. And indeed I have; my own copy of Down Among the Dead Men is a battered, ex-library copy. I've battered it quite a bit more in the years that I've owned it.

When I learned that Inkle had converted this book to app format, my first thought was that it was an excellent choice - containing no randomness, no dice-rolling combat, it seemed a fine candidate for conversion into a gamebook app with a fairly literary tone. My second, contrasting thought was to wonder if it would hold up against the interactive fiction of the last few years. Y'see, the challenge to 'beat the book' is quite out of vogue, these days. Story is all-important; you can complete the story well, or complete the story badly, but death or truly miserable defeat are increasingly rare.

I needn't have worried. One of the first choices you get to make in Down Among the Dead Men is about the nature of the world in which you live - is it an optimistic land of high adventure, a grim world of harsh realism, or somewhere in between these two extremes? For those learned in the lore of interactive fiction, it's quickly apparent that you're choosing your difficulty level - or, if you prefer, the type of reading experience you're about to have. Will you read the book as originally written some twenty-plus years ago, or do you prefer to read a story where you need not fear the protagonist's sudden death, and any unfulfilling lack of dramatic resolution that results from such a fate?

This update to the original book by the guys at Inkle is a lovely touch, and an example of the sort of flexibility that allows stories told through the Inkle motor a great deal more nuance than those in the classic gamebook format. Difficulty levels aside, other nuances crop up throughout. When I played as a changeling sorcerer, who knew nothing about my origins, I passed mysterious buildings that seemed oddly familiar, and I wondered whether I might once have lived there, once. When I played as a pirate queen, disguised as a man, I struggled with the difficulty of hiding my sex during my travels with my fellow pirate escapees. Like DM's previous Inkle project, Frankenstein, Down Among the Dead Men keeps the game mechanics - your character's skills, and so on - hidden away 'under the hood'. And so much the better - if the game does your bookkeeping for you, why bother with them? If you've never read 1993's Down Among the Dead Men, you'll have little Inkling of the variables at play here. I came away from this story kind of wishing that I didn't know the original so well, in fact - I'd have loved to approach this app with no knowledge of the gamebook elements at work.

Another point worth mentioning is the price of this app. Just now it costs 0.89 euros for iPhone/iPad, or whatever that is in your local currency. That's super-cheap. And probably a bit less than I paid for my battered ex-library copy of the book back in the day.

(Review by Paul Gresty)