The Allansian Adventurer

I don't know about you, but my favourite role in the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks has always been the 'Adventurer' - that nameless, wandering sword-for-hire who stalks the lands of Titan looking for adventure and gold, stopping every now and then in some more civilised place to rest, recover, and find a new mission. The Adventurer lives for the thrill of battle, the romance of the open plain, the glitter of gold, and the fame that comes with banishing evil wizards and mighty beasts. What's not to like?

An unnamed adventurer

OK, so the Adventurer is probably also a short-lived, rather smelly and generally unpleasant sociopath (borderline psychopath), kind of the opposite of what I try to be in real life, but maybe that's not so much of a problem if your home is the treacherous verminpit that is the world of Fighting Fantasy rather than the quiet suburbs of Britain.

I particularly associate this role with the early FF books set in northwest Allansia. Concentrating just on that continent in this post, the following gamebooks (not including the role-playing adventures, where you can choose to be whoever you want) cast you in the role of a nameless wandering Adventurer:

• The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
• Forest of Doom
• City of Thieves
• Deathtrap Dungeon
• Island of the Lizard King
• Caverns of the Snow Witch
• Temple of Terror
• Trial of Champions
• Crypt of the Sorcerer
• Slaves of the Abyss
• Armies of Death (although you've gained a fortune and an army)
• Return to Firetop Mountain
• Night Dragon
• Curse of the Mummy
• Eye of the Dragon

It's conceivable that you are/were such an individual in Creature of Havoc too, but that fortune has taken some rather dramatic turns in recent times. Your characters in Tower of Destruction and Siege of Sardath are also adventurers but appear to be locally based ones rather than the prototypical wandering nameless Adventurer.

Of all of these, only three weren't written by Ian Livingstone (TWoFM was of course co-authored with Steve Jackson), and, as I've discussed already here, here and here, quite a few of these books form little sub-series within Fighting Fantasy. But is it possible to construct a coherent sequence of all of these adventures which would allow you to imagine yourself as a single Adventurer in all of them? Well, one day soon I might give it a try, but there are various difficulties involving the Zagor and the Galleykeep timelines, especially when you factor in the FF novels and AFF roleplaying adventures (which also add several other complexities). For now, it's easy enough to imagine the Blacksand/Fang series following on from the Stonebridge trilogy, perhaps with you coming back north from Vatos to Silverton (in which case, Crypt of the Sorcerer would be at some later date after Deathtrap Dungeon at least, maybe even after Armies of Death). Return to Firetop Mountain and, especially, Eye of the Dragon, are set quite a few years later than the other Livingstone adventures, whilst the start point of Curse of the Mummy (in Kaynlesh-Ma) suggests a possible tie-in with the Kallamehr based adventures. Night Dragon could be set at any time, as far as I can tell. I'll come back to the history of Zagor and the Galleykeep in future posts.

Fighting Fantasy SVGs

To me, and I'm sure to many of you, mapping Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and exploring all of the hidden nooks and crannies is one of the great pleasures of the hobby. Some books are easy to map, because they are logically laid out in geographical terms:

Others, though, present something more of a challenge, either because their geographical layout is not logical (e.g. turning left and right ultimately lead you to the same place), they are not geographically structured (so that the focus is on what you do, and how and when you do it), or their structure is so complex that simple forms of representation just don't cut it. We've all been in this situation, I'm sure:

We're rather far removed from the traditional North-East-South-West or forwards-backwards-left-right type map here; what's important isn't the geographical relations between places, but the relations between paragraphs in a flowchart arrangement.

Unfortunately, unless the adventure is very short or simple, flowcharts of this sort are hard to draw, and end up rather messy and cluttered (and often spill across several pages). But thankfully technology can come to our aid here and do all the hard work for us. Using fairly simple software and code, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) - essentially flowcharts - can be created which lay the boxes out in an economical position and connect them with the necessary lines (with as little overlap as possible). The style and colours of the lines and boxes can be customised and identifying/explanatory text added to the various elements in the chart.

Before you head off and start creating SVGs for the FF books (which is a somewhat laborious process to be honest), have a look here, where gamebook master Simon Osborne has uploaded colour-coded SVGs to his website, The Outspaced Shrine, for all the FF gamebooks and various other gamebooks too. Excellent work, it must have taken hours!

In comments to my post on FF Solutions, Stuart Lloyd pointed out that SVGs are also a kind of solution. This is true if the creator of the SVG highlights the optimal path through the chart, but SVGs are much more, and a bit less, than true solutions. They're more like DNA sequences of gamebooks, laying bare the skeletons of adventures so that their full structure and workings can be appreciated. They really do show how complex gamebooks can be (see, for example, the SVGs for Luke Sharp's or Paul Mason's book - how is that even possible?!). With an SVG, you can see all of the paths through the book, optimal or not, get a feel for how linear the adventure is, and explore particular parts of the adventure exhaustively. I find them really useful for researching particular FF topics in a book (say, for a Titannica article or a blog post) for example. But they aren't quite solutions either - they don't tell you which path to follow unless it is highlighted, nor do they tell you what to do or why.

The Pit has been reopened!

Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time - pledge a small amount of money in the hope that a new Fighting Fantasy project could come to fruition. Little did you know what you were unleashing, but ignorance is no excuse for those who dabble in things beyond their ken. The Pit has been reopened, and once more from the darkest corners, from the deepest pools and from dungeons thought only to exist in nightmares come the Fighting Fantasy monsters. May the gods of Titan save us all from destruction!

Yes - The Beyond the Pit Kickstarter has been a runaway success and has gone beyond the level required for its production. Brilliant news. In fact, this is a hugely significant publication for Fighting Fantasy - the first completely new product in the Arion Games line (of course some of their previous books have contained new stuff, but this is completely new), and the first major new FF fantasy publication since Night of the Necromancer. Let's hope it is only the start and that there's more stuff in the pipeline.

 
So what are we going to get? Well, there will be descriptions and stats (normal and Advanced Fighting Fantasy) for 250 creatures and monsters from the FF books, along with the original illustrations from the gamebooks (no bestiary would be complete without them), and an all-new text by FF master, Andy Wright (greyarea13). In case you are not familiar with Andy's work on creatures from Fighting Fantasy, see the Out of the Pit articles in issues 1, 3, 6 and 7 of Fighting Fantazine, which I suspect give a mouth-watering taste of what's to come.

According to the Kickstarter page for Beyond the Pit, copies should be sent out in December, so that should make for an excellent Christmas present (it's 26 years since I got the last one for Xmas, so it has been a long wait!). Once I get hold of my copy, expect a full review here.

Fighting Fantasy solutions

Maybe you've never made it out of the dungeon in Creature of Havoc. Or solved that annoying puzzle in Tower of Destruction. Perhaps you've ended up in the kitchen one time too many in House of Hell. Or wondered whether it is in fact possible to beat Crypt of the Sorcerer with a 12-24-12 character. There are many reasons why you might want to have solutions to the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and not all of them involve trying to figure out how to finish a book you've always been defeated by (e.g. maybe you just want to relive the experience of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain without trying to solve Zagor's maze again 30 years later, or see how many medallions you can actually get in Daggers of Darkness). So if you are after Fighting Fantasy gamebook solutions, help is at hand. Starting on the (now defunct) Unofficial Fighting Fantasy Forum!, 'Champskees' set his hand to working out the perfect solution for each of the FF gamebooks (judged by the highest and easiest level of success with the weakest character).

In the kitchen again?
Mwa-ha-ha-hah!

Unfortunately the plug was pulled on the Unofficial Forum in September 2013 and Champskees' solutions disappeared with it. (Warning! If you post something interesting on an internet chat forum, remember to make a copy of it for yourself.) But thanks to Google's cache, he was able to retrieve the solutions and has been putting them up on the Fighting Fantazine Forum for us all to enjoy again (currently books 1-50, Puffin numbering of course, are available).

- Choose Luck Potion. Take the two parts of the luck potion immediately.
- Go west.
- Test Luck. Fail = Fight Sk 6 St 5 Orc.
- Go north.
- Open door.

...

...

...
- At least a thousand Gold Pieces, diamonds, jewellery, rubies and pearls are in the chest. You also find the Warlock’s spell book. With this book, unlimited power is yours and the safety of your return to the village is ensured. Or you could remain as master of Firetop Mountain...

Brilliant stuff. And, what's more, it looks like Champskees' solutions are going to feature in future issues of Fighting Fantazine too, so keep an eye out for those as well. So now you have no excuse for failing to reach the end of that problem gamebook (actually, that's not strictly true; Champskees points out that even with the perfect solution, many of the gamebooks are extremely difficult to complete). If your Stamina fails, it's probably not your fault!

Other Fighting Fantasy sub-series

There have been a number of other sub-series within the Fighting Fantasy range over the years. By sub-series, I don't just mean books by the same author(s) or adventures which take place in the same setting. Something else significant (and particular) must feature within the gamebooks themselves, connecting them into a series. The following is a list of some possible sub-series, with the features that connect them highlighted:

• The 'Astragal' trilogy: Chasms of Malice, Daggers of Darkness and Fangs of Fury (by Luke Sharp). All set in southwest Khul, with different heroes, but with the recurrent character Astragal the Wizard who appears to be trying to keep a lid on chaos in this turbulent part of Titan (another recurrent character is Alkis Fearslicer).
• The 'Mandrake trilogy': Legend of the Shadow Warriors, Moonrunner and the unfortunately never written/published Blood of the Mandrake (by Stephen Hand). Set in and around Gallantaria in the Old World, featuring several recurrent sub-plots (e.g. the Mandrakes and the Kauderwelsches). It's not clear that the hero of LotSW and MR are the same individual, but they could be interpreted as such I think.
• The 'Vampire' saga: Vault of the Vampire and Revenge of the Vampire (by Keith Martin). These two books involve attempting to destroy the vampire Count Reiner Heydrich. It's not clear that the hero is the same in the two books (otherwise we'd expect to see more obvious links). Tempting though it is, there isn't really anything much to connect these two books with Jon Green's Howl of the Werewolf other than VotV and HotW being set very close to each other geographically and featuring the same kind of adventurer.
• The 'Isles of the Dawn' or 'Maior' duology: Black Vein Prophecy and The Crimson Tide, both written (at least in part) by Paul Mason, set in the Isles of the Dawn, and featuring recurrent characters, including Maior and Poo Ta. The hero cannot be the same individual in the two books (and indeed the heroes from the two books may meet).
• The 'Riddling Reaver' or 'Kallamehr' series: The Dreaming Sands (Warlock 13), The Riddling Reaver, Slaves of the Abyss and Magehunter, all written, in part at least, by Paul Mason. Warlock 13 tells us that The Dreaming Sands was written as a prelude to The Riddling Reaver. Slaves of the Abyss could conceivably follow on from TRR, but there's no sure evidence that the hero is the same; it does follow on in terms of the history of Kallamehr though (Baron Bluestone is dead and the Lady Carolina rules the city). Magehunter has an entirely different hero, but follows on chronologically (in terms of the history of Kallamehr) from SotA. All of the adventures except The Dreaming Sands feature the city Kallamehr, two of the adventures include encounters with the nightmarish Maijem-Nosoth, and all have appearances by the Riddling Reaver.
• And then of course there's Zagor. It used to be relatively simple; there was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and then a while later Return to Firetop Mountain came along. The adventures are set 10 years apart, but both involve you entering Firetop Mountain and confronting Zagor. Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World gave us a bit of backstory, and The Trolltooth Wars complicated things slightly. But then Legend of Zagor and the Zagor Chronicles were published (and were tied in with Casket of Souls), and I no longer have a clue what the deal is with Zagor, where he came from or how old he is. I think I'll return to that problem in another post!

So I think that's the obvious sub-series within Fighting Fantasy (Sorcery!, the novels and Advanced Fighting Fantasy adventures aside of course); have I missed anything obvious?

Another early Fighting Fantasy trilogy?

The 'Stonebridge' trilogy is not the only sub-series in the early days of Fighting Fantasy. Three of Ian Livingstone's other early gamebooks also seem to have been linked: City of Thieves, Deathtrap Dungeon and Island of the Lizard King.

City of Thieves, the fifth FF gamebook, begins in Silverton with no apparent connection with any other gamebook. Silverton is about 50 miles east of Port Blacksand (para. 1). After your adventures in Port Blacksand and Zanbar Bone's tower, you return to Silverton to receive your reward and the thanks of the people of the town.

The sixth FF gamebook, Deathtrap Dungeon, begins with you spotting an advert for the Trial of Champions. You decide to head for Fang, walking two days west to Port Blacksand, where you catch a boat north to your destination. Although Silverton is not mentioned, a two day walk east of Port Blacksand must put you in the area of that town. Deathrap Dungeon ends with you being proclaimed 'Champion of Deathtrap Dungeon' in Fang (in the unlikely event that you actually survive the adventure...).

The next FF gamebook, Island of the Lizard King, sees you travelling south from Fang for a few days' rest with your friend Mungo in Oyster Bay (60 miles south of Port Blacksand). It ends with your victory over the Lizard King on Fire Island, off the west coast of Allansia.

So far so good - here we have three consecutive FF gamebooks by the same author, the last two of which start in the same place as the previous one finished. This can hardly have been by accident. That in itself marks this out as a little sub-series within the FF gamebooks, regardless of other considerations which I'll discuss below. But what can we call this FF trilogy? The only place common to them all is Port Blacksand, but in two of the books it is just somewhere you pass through in the Background to the story, so 'The Blacksand Trilogy' doesn't really work. What would YOU suggest?

Identifying these three books as a trilogy doesn't of course mean that the hero is the same individual in each of them. But (s)he could be. I suspect Livingstone intended the links between the adventures to allow readers to imagine that it's the same hero in all three books if they wanted to. But there are problems with assuming that it's the same hero in each book, as Ed rightly pointed out in the comments to my post on the 'Stonebridge' trilogy. These are:

1. The books don't actually say that the hero is the same in each adventure. As Ed suggested, just because he has a friend who's been to Wimbledon, that doesn't make her Tim Henman. But let's think about this a minute. There was no reason for Livingtone to start each book in the place the previous one finished unless he wanted to suggest that the heroes could be the same person.
2. After City of Thieves, you are a wanted individual in Port Blacksand with a very obvious identifying mark (as Dungeoneer points out). In that case, why would you pass through it between each adventure? I don't suppose it would be hard to wear a hood or a bit of make-up to hide the problem though.
3. In Deathtrap Dungeon, you meet Ivy, the sister of the troll Sourbelly, who you've met or perhaps even killed in Port Blacksand in City of Thieves. As Ed puts it, 'there's no hint of recognition when Ivy mentions being his sister'. Probably wise if you killed him of course!
4. In your conversation with the doomed Mungo at the start of Island of the Lizard King, he tells you that his father died in Deathtrap Dungeon at some point in the past. Ed is right that it is odd, since you've just won through the dungeon, that you don't make any comment here (even to yourself), but of course now is not really the time to be boasting that you survived the dungeon that killed your friend's father!

So there we have it - this is a trilogy, in which it is up to the reader to decide if the hero is the same individual in each book (which Livingstone appears to have suggested at least). But hang on a minute! Is it really just a trilogy? In issue 7 of Warlock - The Fighting Fantasy Magazine, a multi-player adventure by Paul Mason and Steve Williams called Deathtrap on Legs appears. This adventure, which takes place in the neighbourhood of Fang, is written as following straight on from Deathtrap Dungeon, and constitutes another installment in this series of adventures (in this case the third of four). But that's only a minor aside to the main trilogy to be honest. More strikingly, it's just about conceivable that another of Ian Livingstone's later books, Trial of Champions follows on, perhaps by some time (it is set a year after Deathtrap Dungeon according to Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World, Sukumvit and Carnuss), from Island of the Lizard King. You end Island of the Lizard King on Fire Island and start Trial of Champions sailing in a small boat south from Port Blacksand to Oyster Bay. Not the most convincing of links, I'll grant you, but it puts you in the right part of Allansia and you certainly have a reason to visit Oyster Bay again.

But there's more. deadshadowrunner has just pointed out in the comments to my last post (thanks!) that the Wizard 2nd edition of Trial of Champions states on its backcover that 'YOU are the legendary adventurer who conquered Baron Sukumvit's perilous labyrinth'. I had never noticed that before, as it is not present on the blurb on the back of the Puffin editions of the book! So this confirms that Trial of Champions follows on from Deathtrap Dungeon, which means that if Island of the Lizard King follows on from Deathtrap Dungeon, we are dealing here with a tetralogy (or a pentalogy if we include Deathtrap on Legs). And of course we all know what happens after Trial of Champions - you use your massive winnings to hire an army and take on the Shadow Demon Agglax in Armies of Death.

So actually, it looks like this isn't a trilogy after all. It's a pentalogy if we ignore the multi-player adventure in Warlock, or a hexalogy if we do include it.

1. City of Thieves
2. Deathtrap Dungeon
3. Deathtrap on Legs
4. Island of the Lizard King
5. Trial of Champions
6. Armies of Death

But that still leaves us with finding a suitable name for the series.

What was that? Did I just hear you mention Demons of the Deep (after all, if Conan could become a pirate...), Dungeoneer, Blacksand! and Allansia?! I think I'd better stop now before I work out how to link all of the Fighting Fantasy adventures in one grand scenario.

The 'Stonebridge' Trilogy?

Unlike the Lone Wolf series, each of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (other than the Sorcery! epic of course) was a stand-alone adventure. In other words, nothing you did in any adventure affected any other, and you technically played a new character in each book. I suspect this was one of the things that made the series interesting - it allowed greater freedom and variation for the authors and readers. That doesn't mean that some of the gamebooks weren't linked in some way though, and I'm going to explore some of these links in some posts here on The World of Fighting Fantasy.

One of the most obvious links is between three of Ian Livingstone's early gamebooks, Caverns of the Snow Witch, The Forest of Doom and Temple of Terror.

In Caverns of the Snow Witch, you begin your adventure guarding the caravans of the merchant Big Jim Sun in the frozen north of Allansia, with no hint of any connection with any other FF adventure. Assuming you survive as far as Stonebridge with your companions Stubb the Dwarf and Redswift the Elf (and that's a big assumption given how hard the book is!), you learn that the fabled war-hammer of Gillibran, Dwarfen king of Stonebridge, has been stolen by an eagle (which subsequently dropped it whilst flying over Darkwood Forest). Stubb leaves you and Redswift to join his fellow Dwarf, Bigleg, on a quest to find the war-hammer and return it to Stonebridge (see para. 211).

In Forest of Doom, you start your adventure as a sword for hire 'roaming the northern borderlands', where you chance upon the mortally wounded Bigleg, who has failed in his mission to find King Gillibran's war-hammer. You take on his quest, visiting the wizard Yaztromo and braving the perils of Darkwood Forest in an attempt to return the hammer to Stonebridge. There is no mention of any connection with any other FF adventure, not surprisingly as this was only the third one published, but Livingstone's retconning in Caverns of the Snow Witch clearly establishes a relationship between the two books.

Temple of Terror, the fourteenth FF gamebook, begins with you relaxing and recovering in Stonebridge after a recent quest. The wizard Yaztromo brings news of Malbordus and asks for aid to bring an end to the Storm Child's evil plans. When you volunteer to help, Yaztromo asks 'Haven't I seen you somewhere before?', and during the adventure you are given King Gillibran's war-hammer to help you in your quest (para. 171). No other link with other FF gamebooks is mentioned, but the obvious inference is that Temple of Terror starts where The Forest of Doom left off.

So there we have it, an early trilogy within the FF series by Ian Livingstone. Caverns comes first, then Forest, then Temple. The hero of Forest and Temple look like they could be the same individual, although there is no indication that the same goes for Caverns and Forest (though of course they might be). But what should we call this trilogy? I've named it the 'Stonebridge' trilogy in the title to this post, as Stonebridge is the only place that occurs in all of them, but have you got any other suggestions?

Oh, and it's possible that this isn't a trilogy at all, but a quadrilogy! Another of Ian Livingstone's books, Crypt of the Sorcerer, starts with you visiting your 'friend' Yaztromo, who hasn't seen you 'for over a year'. Other than that, though, there's no obvious link with the 'Stonebridge' trilogy, even though your adventure to defeat Razaak does take you to Stonebridge itself (well, if you can survive that far at any rate...). So is this the 'Stonebridge Quadrilogy'? Or am I going too far, and giving in to that temptation we've all had at one point or another to try and link ALL of the FF adventures with one super-human adventurer who stalks the world of Titan banishing evil wherever (s)he can find it?*

And just in case you are wondering, all of these adventures are probably set in 284 or 285 AC (After Chaos) in Titan's timeline. We know this because Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World states several times (e.g. in 'Dwarfs Today' and 'Reckoning the Years') that the current year is 284 AC, and at the time of writing Gillibran's war-hammer hasn't yet been stolen, and the Snow Witch, Malbordus, and Razaak are all incipient threats.

I'll have a look at some other sub-series within Fighting Fantasy in later posts.

*See here for a classic example from the early days of FF online fandom.