Some Fighting Fantasy news, January 2015

Well, the new year marches on and I'm currently writing something else (work stuff), and I tend to find when I'm in the swing of writing something, it's hard to get the inspiration for writing other things. So I'm a bit late this week on the blog and don't have anything ready to discuss in detail right now (though I have been working on a couple of things in the background, so watch this space). There have been a few bits and pieces of interesting news on the FF front though, which I thought I'd share with you just in case you've missed any of them.

• Inkle's Sorcery! 3 is thankfully coming our way, though there's no date yet for its release. In the mean time, we can enjoy this fab illustration of the Baklands' most iconic creature, the Baddu-Beetle.
• While we wait though, there's more Mike Schley loveliness in the form of poster-sized prints of his maps from the first two Inkle Sorcery! adventures. These look bloody brilliant and I can't wait till the end of the month when I (might) have some spare cash to order them!
• Bloodbones is here! The Tin Man Games app of Jon Green's FF adventure is already available via Google Play (since December 24th), and they have announced that it will be available tomorrow via iOS. Great stuff, looking forward to it.
• Issue 14 of Fighting Fantazine is out, and features a brilliant in-depth interview with Fighting Fantasy legend Marc Gascoigne (where we finally learn more about his unpublished/unwritten FF adventure, Night of the Creature), a report on the Fighting Fantasy Fest, a mini (but not that mini!) Lone Wolf adventure by the Kai Master himself, Simon Osborne, and all the usual features.
• And a shout out for another FF blog which is great but a bit under the radar, Brett Schofield's excellent Trolltooth. Some nice discussion on there, and his latest posts have really got me thinking and are providing inspiration for future musings on here.

I think that's about it for now, let me know if you've heard about anything else of note.

Various bits of Fighting Fantasy-related news

I've been swamped with work lately so things have been a bit slow around here, but here are a few bits and pieces of news relating to the world of Fighting Fantasy:

• Issue 13 of Fighting Fantazine (website currently down due to server malfunction seemingly) is out, featuring an interview with Lord of FF Darkness, Peter Darvill-Evans, a Western-themed FF adventure by Gaetano Abbondanza, author of the Tin Man gamebooks Slaves of Rema and Sultans of Rema (this link's not working either right now; what the hell is wrong with the internet today?!), and loads of other stuff.
• Dave Morris keeps us dreaming of what might have been over on the Fabled Lands blog with his outline of the 'lost' FF gamebook, The Thief of Arantis, which ultimately became the Virtual Reality book Twist of Fate (now the Critical IF book Once Upon a Time in Arabia). More Arabian Nights themed action in southern Allansia would have been a lot of fun!
• Steve Luxton, master of the FF map, has produced an amazing MapMaker package which allows you to draw your own fantasy maps using over 200 predefined map symbols drawn in his inimitable style. I've had a brief play with it and it's a doddle (and pleasure) to use.
• Jon Green has arranged the first ever Fighting Fantasy convention, to take place in Ealing on the 7th of September, 2014 (cost £50). Guests will include Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, and the convention will also see the official launch of Jon's eagerly awaited history of FF, YOU are the Hero.

I'll be back soon with more FF news, analysis and comment.

Fighting Fantasy LEGO!

Happy New Year all! Now that the pre-Christmas deadlines and Christmas itself are out of the way, I thought I'd better get back to the blog.

One of my childhood passions, long before I'd even heard of Fighting Fantasy, was Lego, especially classic space Lego. Birthdays, Christmas and summer trips were eagerly awaited so that I could get my hands on a new set or two. My interest in Lego waned in my later teenage years and 20s, but like many an FF fan in the same situation, I rediscovered Lego later in life, coming out of my 'dark ages' and becoming a proper AFOL (what's the FF equivalent I wonder - an AFOFF?). In the time I'd been away from Lego, it had changed dramatically, from a pretty basic set of bricks and building techniques, where all the characters had the same simple smiling face, to a much more complex array of pieces, complicated building procedures, and minifigures with all sorts of faces, fashions and accessories. You can now buy anything from a Super Star Destroyer to Helm's Deep, and when it comes to making your own creations (MOCs), the only limiting factors are your time, imagination and money, especially since you can source any amount of spare parts online.

Perhaps naturally enough, it has occurred to me that combining my passions for Lego and FF might be fun. But it turns out that I'm not the first person to think of this. Indeed, latter-day master of Fighting Fantasy Jonathan Green has seen the potential and has done some mini-MOCs of characters from his own FF books - see here, here and here for example. Great stuff, and certainly an inspiration to me to do the same sort of thing.

So I thought it might be fun to build some MOCs on an FF theme myself. The problem is that this takes a lot of time and more than a little bit of cash, to accrue the necessary bricks and to get things looking right. So I don't have any proper builds to offer you right now, but it is something I'm hoping for in the future, so watch this space. But in the meantime, I thought it might be fun to throw together a few simple dioramas based on FF, and to let you guess what I'm trying to represent. The first one, not polished by any means but pretty obvious anyway, is this:

Who's this tosser?

So can you work out what FF scene this is based on? 5gp to the person who gets it first!