Fighting Fantasy

The very first book of the series.

"A thrilling fantasy adventure in which YOU are the hero!"

– the Fighting Fantasy tagline

Created by Ian Livingstone and the other Steve Jackson (not the one from Texas), 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, four in the top ten 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. 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 were people had repeatedly rubbed out pencil rather than just fucking photocopy or just hand copy them onto something else.

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 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 throw, including demigod-like demons and immortal sorcerers. To do this, YOU had a 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. (Until they came back in a later book, that is.)

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 was fucking tedious. If the author was being a dick, he could throw you against a mandatory SKILL 10 STAMINA 22 monster which could take dozens of dice rolls to resolve, and not always in the favour of YOU. 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). On the again downside, it was ridiculously poorly balanced; roll a 1 for SKILL and the book could be downright impossible, roll a 6 and you cruised through every challenge without even needing to roll most of the time. Steve Jackson claimed his adventures could all be completed with the lowest possible SKILL, which may have been true, but that also made the meta pointlessly easy and therefore added to the skippability.

Awesome illustrations were used to help depict where you were. 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 Games Workship cover art was one of the secrets to the success of the series, though it did tend to make them a bit controversial among school librarians. (Some of the earlier covers were derp and were improved in reprints though.)

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. Eventually after exhausting the thesarus 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.

Sorcery is now available in a pretty nice computerised version in iOS and Steam. It even let's 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.

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 novels were released and even some novelisations like the Trolltooth Wars series. Titan was given more fluff 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.

At first glance, Titan looks like a generic medieval stasis cardboard-cutout fantasy world. 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 this 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 the same ideas appearing in early Warhammer isn’t surprising. Secondly it was really early, beginning 1982, before most other fantasy in popular culture, and well before Warhammer. As far as other fantasy franchises go, only Dungeons and Dragons really predates it and not by much, 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. 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 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 adventure'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. Multiple times, usually.) And also because the point of the setting was solo adventures, so there was no reason to invent reasons why factions would be constantly at each other’s throats like in Warhammer. Yet it did have a really irritating habit of bringing back major bad guys who had already been killed and resurrected several times...

Titan is mostly forgotten now (except by a few sparesely 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 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 come out. YOU, naturally, does so twice. The popular 90s video game had little in common with the Titan lore, other than it being a dungeon full of deathtraps.

Port Blacksand: 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 pirate city on the River Catfish in Allansia, just as dangerous or more so as the uncivilised wilds that surround it. Its town guard is full of trolls, full of vicious gangs, it 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 or end up tunnelling into bad things while cleaning the sewers (normally another legal punishment) or chilling out in their basements.

Hachiman: Literally a fantasy feudal Japan on Khul. It’s 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 what happens when you let weebs write Fighting Fantasy. 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: books in general had mainly been replaced by video games at this time, and Fighting Fantasy books appeared in charity shops rather than libraries. 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 haven’t heard of it either.