Fighting Fantasy
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"A thrilling fantasy adventure in which YOU are the hero!"
- – the Fighting Fantasy tagline
Created by Ian Livingstone and British Steve Jackson (though American Steve Jackson was an occasional guest-author), Fighting Fantasy is a series of adventure game books from the 1980's. If the names sound familiar, that's normal; these were the same guys who founded Games Workshop.
Unlike a normal boring book you get to make choices in the story as YOU are the hero. Usually it's either you succeed or you go down the wrong corridor and die. The story does not progress in a linear fashion but rather is divided into a series of numbered sections. Beginning at the first section, the reader chooses an option (e.g. Section 1 to Section 180) which in turn provides an outcome for the decision and advances the story. Usually. What actually happens is most people read all the potential options, and then pick one. This leads to multiple bookmarks and fingers being jammed in the book. . . and ya we know it's basically a dead tree version of a Visual Novel but it has less weeaboo and it's old enough to get grandfathered into the TG canon.
In its day, Fighting Fantasy was incredibly popular. At one point (1983), the top three in the Sunday Times Best Seller List were FF books. This was at a time when the video games market had totally crashed in North America and the economies in Europe were struggling (especially Britain), and FF had the benefits of being cheap and not needing to be good with computer. (Or friends, for that matter.) Also, as they were published by Puffin - predominantly a children’s book publisher at the time - they found their way into many public libraries and even school libraries practically without any screening with most adults neither knowing nor giving a shit what they were. In such environs they could usually be found with holes in their character sheets where people had repeatedly rubbed out pencil rather than just fucking photocopy or just hand copy them onto something else. In addition to their native UK, they enjoyed a brief period of popularity in Japan, including among one kid named Hidetaka Miyazaki, who went on to do something or other.
Also, dice are involved, but not really! You're supposed to roll two dice during combat, but no-one ever does. Sometimes you 'have' to roll dice to pick the next option etc. Keeping your thumb on the page where you are and then flipping back if you mess up and die. Sometimes the authors would put in some maths or number question to make you think and stop the reader from cheating (done in Return to Firetop Mountain). In one book you even commanded your own personal army and could have them do the fighting for you (Armies of Death).
The hero of each story is YOU, an otherwise unnamed adventurer (well, usually) with the ability to single-handedly defeat the most terrible opponents the world could offer, including demigod-like demons and immortal sorcerers. To do this, YOU had the aforementioned mystical ability to fudge bad dice rolls and reverse poor decisions by returning to the previous paragraph as if nothing had happened. And no matter how terrible the ultimate bad guy was, YOU would be able to find some relic to totally neutralise them or reduce them to some easily mushable mook. Ian Livingstone or Steve Jackson wrote most of the earlier books but other writers eventually joined, for better or worse. There were 59 books of the main series, along with a smattering of associated books.
Fighting Fantasy were by no means the first 'choose your own adventure' books but they were the first to have a metagame involved. As writer above explained, it was often ignored because it could be fucking tedious. But on the upside, the mechanics were very simple to learn, which is why the books tended to appeal to the pre-tweens (despite the objections of some particular kind of parents). The basic combat calculation is this: you and the enemy roll two dice and add it to your SKILL score. The highest of the two hits and deducts 2 STAMINA points from the other. There were also "tests" where you had to roll under or equal to your LUCK or SKILL scores. And that is where it was all ridiculously poorly balanced; roll a 1 for SKILL and the book could be downright impossible, roll a 6 and you cruised through every test without even needing to roll most of the time as it's impossible to not roll less than equal to 12 on two six sided dice.
You generally got the first idea of what you were in for just by seeing who wrote a given book. Steve Jackson was the more experimental author, throwing in magic systems, vehicle rules and nonstandard settings (the fourth book was a Star Trek ripoff where you statted out the whole crew and the ship itself). He also like to claim that YOU could beat all of his books even with minimal rolls, and to be fair his books were a bit more forgiving than his partner-in crime. That said a few books were written by the other Steve Jackson, the one from Texas, so this isn't an entirely reliable indicator.
Ian Livingstone's books, meanwhile, were pure Old School Roleplaying; straightforward dungeon crawls (even if they weren't set in a dungeon, they were still dungeon crawls) with a very strict "path to victory" that was covered in save-or-die (or just die) deathtraps for going the wrong way, and finding out right at the end that the random crap you picked up along the way was actually the key to survivng the final boss's pre-fight antics (or, more likely, discovering that you failed to pick up all the necessary crap and dying before the fight even starts). The infamously difficult Crypt of the Sorceror was his work, and it has all the hallmarks of his style dialled up to maximum. The final boss has SKILL 12 STAMINA 20, and instakills you if it hits you twice in a row, evening out to a 5.5% chance of victory if you have maximum stats yourself (and if you do the smart thing and ignore the insta-kill mechanic, you still only have a 40% chance of seeing the ending because you need at least 6 STAMINA afterwards to escape the collapsing lair afterwards). And this is after the usual scavenger-hunt for random crap to even get to the fight.
Awesome illustrations were used to help depict where you were, as befits camp 80s high fantasy. A variety of books were printed starting with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain more titles followed such as The Forest of Doom and Appointment with F.E.A.R (for which UK comic artist Brian Bolland provided the illustrations). The cover art was one of the secrets to the success of the series, much supplied by Games Workshop and big names like Iain McCaig and Peter Andrew Jones. (Some of the earlier covers were not quite so striking but were improved in reprints.)
Some ground rules to stay alive in Fighting Fantasy:
- If your character ever opens a door and the room doesn't contain a big scary monster, run like hell because it's a trap!
- never play "Chasms of Malice", it gets to the point where you just start counting how many times your character died instead of counting stamina points. (The current record is 247 deaths before winning.)
- never fight an elemental.
- never ever fight an earth elemental.
- never fight a dragon (obviously) unless you see an obvious way to win, like finding a spell that kills dragons.
- play "Sorcery!", it's good, and you can play as a wizard who (spoiler alert) can accidentally cast a time travel spell that makes you win if you do roll for it right or become trapped in the time of the dinosaurs etc if you roll for it wrong.
- play "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" because it's very much an old-school dungeon crawler and the plot is basically a D&D murderhobo who goes off to kill a nice old man in a dungeon and steal his treasure. Always go east.
Also some computer game versions came out, like Forest of Doom on the ZX Spectrum and DeathTrap Dungeon on the PC and Playstation 1. There was also a mediocre Warlock of Firetop Mountain boardgame. Sorcery is now available in a pretty nice computerised version in iOS and Steam. It even lets you "put your finger in the book" and rewind a decision that you instantly regret. Part 3 turns the game into an open world with a unique time travel mechanic, which is a refreshing change for those who read the original part 3, and Part 4 taketh away your privilege to rewind time so be warned.
Video games may have been the main reason that by the late 80s the series was mainly tapped out, as the pre-tweens became teenagers and found those video games (or God-forbid, girls) more interesting. In the beginning quality of books was generally good with a blip here and there, but became much more variable as time went on. Either they tried to hook attention towards their waning popularity by latching onto every popular trope (even going as far as a Transformers/mecha rip-off), or they were allowing in books rejected by other publishers after a few tweaks to get them to fit the setting.
Competition had also ramped up during the decade. Trying to cash in on the success of Fighting Fantasy, other adventure gamebook series had appeared and usually had much more interesting metagames. Fighting Fantasy outlived them all though and limped on to about book 50, which was made a special to close it all off to a decisive finale: Return to Firetop Mountain. It was extremely well received, and sold so well that they decided to keep making books after this.
But nothing had really changed, and after poor sales for the next few they eventually dried up after exhausting the thesaurus and dictionary of cool words to send the readers to. The series (almost) completely stopped. Reprints of the fighting fantasy books have since been issued, mostly the best of the series (and trying to ignore that some had ever existed). They are even still publishing new Fighting Fantasy books intermittently, but they're no longer part of the old numbered series. They are, as might be expected, not exactly flying off the shelves any more.
Eventually they decided to join them if they can't beat them and adapted a number of the books, like Sorcery, into a computer format for around $5 each (complete with a cheaty difficulty mode to go around to which ever page you want and the ability to fudge the dice rolls by clicking before the rolling dice lie still). Bloodbones is available for free.
Titan
The Fighting Fantasy weren’t actually all based in fantasy: there were a few (normally pretty bad) and otherwise non-interconnected sci-fi books, and at least one that was based in the real world, but where they were fantasy they took place in a world which was originally nameless but would eventually be called Titan. Originally quite thin on fluff, the world got fleshed out as the books went on, and eventually a few lore books were released and even some novelizations like the Trolltooth Wars series. Titan's fluff was summarised and expanded by a book of the same name, which left the result of the Fighting Fantasy adventures as cliffhangers, as if YOU hadn't already effortlessly beaten them.
Titan is an generic Standard Fantasy Setting, though it may have been one of a select group of early fantasy settings that defined the standard. It has dwarfs, elves, dark elves, lizardmen, orcs and goblins, undead creatures, dragons, good and evil gods, a wasteland ruined by the corrupting powers of Chaos, Demon Princes…
Holy shit. Doesn’t the Chaos thing look really familiar and utterly derivative? Well, two things you need to remember. First is that this produced by the same people behind Games Workshop, so that same idea appearing in early Warhammer isn’t surprising. Secondly it was really early, beginning 1982, before most other fantasy franchises still in popular culture, and well before Warhammer. As far as other mainstream fantasy franchises go, only Dungeons and Dragons really predates it, so it would be fairer to say most of these borrowed ideas from Fighting Fantasy rather than the reverse. Well, that and the usual influences that most fantasy heavily ripped off.
Titan is made up of three main continents. The majority of FF adventures take place in Allansia and Khul, with Sorcery! adventures taking place in the continent oddly named only The Old World (not that one). Some adventures also take place on islands outside the main continents to give authors a bit of creative freedom, especially as the canon developed proper. Khul is mainly barbarous wilderness and Chaos waste, while Allansia is the most populated and 'civilised'. Everywhere you go, there's always some evil character or another planning their return, with only an adventurer's sharp sword and two dice to stop him/her.
The grimdark in Titan was never quite dialled up to 11 like Warhammer ostensibly due to FF still being considered children’s books (and due to the unfailing ability of YOU to defeat every villain in the setting.) And also because the point of the setting was solo adventures, so there was no need to invent fluff reasons why factions would be constantly at each other’s throats like in Warhammer. The idea of balance was a persistent trope in FF where no matter how powerful the bad guy was, he had to leave some exploitable weakness so that he could be ultimately defeated. Yet it did have a really irritating habit of bringing back major bad guys who had already been killed and resurrected several times, probably in the (wrong) assumption that people would buy more books if they returned popular bad guys.
Titan is mostly forgotten now except by a few sparsely maintained wikis, but a few select locations may have remained in the pop culture in some way or another:
Firetop Mountain: The setting where it all began as a typical dungeon delve adventure, later given a backstory to get around the embarassing fact that YOU bust in and murder some guy for no given reason and steal his shit. A mountain in Allansia named after the red plants that grow on it (no, it’s not a volcano), it originally was a dwarven city before taken over by evil warlock Zagor who evicted the dwarves and made those who couldn’t escape into his private undead slaves. In typical FF fashion, YOU manage to penetrate his defences and kill him not once but twice three times! during the series, proving that true evil is no match for plot armor. Or cheating like fuck.
Deathtrap Dungeon: Yes, it’s a dungeon full of deathtraps. And monsters. And puzzles that are also deathtraps. Created by Baron Sukumvit near Fang, a city in Allansia, it’s a trial of champions as devious as it is unimaginatively named. It is a labyrinth where adventurers sign up to take on its challenges, and each other, for a grand prize (much like a deadly variety of the Crystal Maze). Those who succeed become incredibly wealthy, enough to raise armies of their own. But very few ever come out. YOU, naturally, does so twice. Basis of the popular 90s video game, probably still the most "mainstream" thing to happen to FF since the mid-80s.
Port Blacksand: The infamous City of Thieves. Possibly the coolest setting in any fantasy, and so popular that several books of the series take place there fully or in part, including the later RPG. Blacksand is a coastal pirate city on the Catfish River in Allansia, just as dangerous or more so as the uncivilised wilds that surround it. Its town guard is full of trolls, the city teems with vicious gangs, has a thriving Thieves Guild, and it’s ruled with an iron fist by the mysterious Lord Varek Azzur who rarely leaves his palace and never shows his face. Azzur is in league with evil sorcerer Zanbar Bone (don’t laugh) and likes to feed internees of the city’s corrupt legal system alive to his leaf beasts. On top of that, the city is built on the ruins of ancient Carsepolis, and occasionally people disappear chilling out in their basements or end up tunnelling into Very Bad Things while cleaning the sewers (another punishment doled out by the city courts).
Hachiman: Literally a fantasy feudal Japan on Khul. Not really notable per-se, except as an object lesson of how FF was willing to bastardise itself for sales by jumping on popular bandwagons. It’s what happens when you let weebs write Fighting Fantasy. Hachiman (literally the name of the Japanese god of war) is completely cut off from the rest of Khul and civilisation in general by monster-ridden seas and impassable mountains, and full of lots of monsters from Japanese folklore. It’s still pretty cool though, pity it only ended up in a single book (Sword of the Samurai).
Advanced Fighting Fantasy
Apart from single player books, several multi-player roleplay books came out such as the Riddling Reaver, Dungeoneer and Blacksand!. Art books such as Out of the Pit with illustrations by Christos Achilleos were released as well. These multi-player versions were amusing to play since the core rules were not changed much between single and multi-player, so your characters could do pretty much whatever the fuck they liked with only the occasional need to roll dice, and, since there are only three characteristics in fighting fantasy, it's very easy to get the hang of.
It never seemed very popular, as by the 90s when it was released Fighting Fantasy was old hat: game books had mainly been replaced by video games at this time, and Fighting Fantasy books appeared in charity shops rather than bookshops. It was also, as explained above, a rather simplistic RPG compared to some more adult-themed RPGs around the time.
There was apparently a 2016 Advanced Fighting Fantasy Deluxe. No, I don't know what happened to it either.