Your adventure ends here

I have a lot of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I have had some of them since the early 1980s. I have had some for a few days. And I am now married, have a PhD, and am a father. So, I decided that I finally have the maturity to obey all the rolls of the dice and to hold myself to the decisions that I have made.

However, playing one book over and over until it has been completed is boring. If you are not going to cheat the books become a mechanical problem. Who wants to read the same passages over and over again, or worse, to not read passages at all, simply making a series of paragraph number choices? I want to enjoy a fantasy adventure.

I have decided to play each book in my collection in turn. When that adventure ends, I will move on to the next book in the series, with nary a backward glance at the dice rolls that I should have fudged or the places where I should have changed my mind. Well, apart from a brief recap, listing the doom of my adventurer.

#1 The Warlock of Firetop Mountain – A very good start, but a little bit of a cheat before I have properly begun. My adventurer killed his way through the mountain to reach the Warlock, defeated him, and had the keys needed to open his treasure chest. The cheat I relied on was the help of the internet to get through the Maze of Zagor, but otherwise everything else was by the book. Putting the cheat in context, I completed this book before I had settled on this programme of gamebook adventuring. Firetop Mountain has a new master.

#2 The Citadel of Chaos – My adventurer, avoiding combat more or less entirely – only fighting a GOLEM that had been weakened by a fight with a CREATURE COPY – very quickly got to the room with the GANJEES in it. Though my adventure ended here in the majority of my previous plays of this book, and I will not resort to an internet walkthrough. It is not quite the same scale of frustration as the Maze of Zagor. Death by falling.

#3 The Forest of Doom – my adventurer survived a series of nasty combats with high SKILL opponents, didn’t find either of the parts of the warhammer, and then died in a fight against a fire-breathing WYVERN. He had equal SKILL, and nearly twice as much STAMINA, but rolled badly, and even a last ditch TEST OF LUCK didn’t come off. The first time so far that the dice have failed me, but it will not be the last. Rare, or well done?

Turn to 400 has a much funnier take on working through the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks in order. All I'm doing is listing the fate of my characters - death, more often than not - and waiting for Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e.