The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it...

Hang on, it's only the postman. Phew! They shall not find me after all. But what's that on the hall floor? A brown padded A4 envelope with an Arion Games label. Aaaaggghhhh! Yes, they are come. The nightmare creatures from Beyond the Pit have escaped and have found a way into our dimension - through the letter box. The letter box!

As I blogged about before, Beyond the Pit, by Andy Wright, is the first major brand-new Fighting Fantasy publication in a long time. And what a publication it is. Two-hundred-and-fifty FF monsters described in detail, complete with an illustration of each, from the original gamebooks or an excellent new one by Jason Lennox. The text is brilliantly written and full of details not only about the monsters themselves but about the world which they live in. We also get a (newish) map of Titan and treasure and encounters tables.

I haven't had a chance to read through the book yet but my favourite thing in it so far comes in the very first entry, AMAZON. Here we read that Amazons:

dwell in the mountainous wild east of the city-state of Kalamdar and other lonely places across Khul ... The identity of the Amazon Queen is a closely guarded secret, though there is a price on her head across the northern kingdoms of Kalamdar, Arion and Peleus.

Kalamdar, from the two-player FF adventure Clash of the Princes, is also listed alongside Fallow Dale and Arion as home to TRIBESMEN in northern Khul. Not only that, but Gundobad itself, where Clash of the Princes starts, is mentioned in the entries for FAIRY, SCUTTLIE and SHADE. At last we have an official FF publication which locates the lands of Clash of the Princes within Titan, indeed in northern Khul. This is something I argued for at length in my article in the very first issue of Fighting Fantazine; Andy was enthusiastic about the idea at the time and it's great to see Gundobad, Kalamdar and the lands around them finally brought properly into the FF fold.

I'll be reading Beyond the Pit properly when I get five minutes and I'll report on any other interesting things about the world of Fighting Fantasy that I find in there.

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!

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?