Your Adventure Ends Here, Again!

192

The lair of the Demons is guarded by a terrible device: a large swinging pendulum blade, which even now plunges deep into your forehead. Your adventure is over.

(Bambra and Hand, Fighting Fantasy #40, Dead of Night)

Okay, I've skipped on a few books since I last recorded my 'choose your own death by misadventures'. I'd dutifully recorded the demise of my various characters until I kind of ran out of steam last summer with #18 Rebel Planet. I was never much of a fan of the non-fantasy FF books - they just didn't have the verve or inventiveness - the character - of those set on Titan. Shortly after that we began playing The Crown of Kings for Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e, so I got my fill of Jacksonian trickery by inflicting it on my players. I did play the *other* Steve Jackson's Demons of the Deep (#19). Unfortunately, one year on from my sub-marine adventure the best I can remember of that was that it had an interestingly 'sandboxy' structure (as does 'not the real' Steve Jackson's Scorpion Swamp), but that, despite the fact that a Merman spa had raised my SKILL to superhuman levels - allowing me to defeat a Kraken in single combat(!!) - I failed in my mission. For some reason, I had set myself the task of killing Captain Bloodaxe by the end of the day. Ambitious. So that the adventure ended in unsatisfying non-death defeat. 'Oh, woe is me', my character wailed, before realising that he was nigh-on the incarnation of Courga, and that he could always kill Captain Bloodaxe tomorrow. And cut a bloody swathe across Titan; and unto this, YOU, destined to wear the jewelled crown of Salamonis upon a troubled brow. 

But back to Dead of Night, a very good gamebook set in Gallantria, a northern kingdom of the Old World. I had never played this before, as 'back-in-the-day' my Fighting Fantasy collection only ran to the mid-thirties. I know that I owned #35 Daggers of Darkness. No-one forgets that cover. In Dead of Night YOU play a renowned Demon-Stalker, a Templar from the Sacred Citadel in Royal Lendle. Demon-Stalkers make enemies, and YOU have made an enemy of Myurr, the loathsome Frog Demon. He has done... something to your parents, and YOU are off to find out what. 

I played this gamebook twice. The first time through I had a SKILL 11 Templar as my hero, but managed just 25 sections before meeting my doom, as above. A failed Test of Luck, of course. I thwarted no major evils, though I did manage to defeat a Vampire with a bit of holy symbol action.

In my second attempt I rolled a SKILL 9, STAMINA 15 and LUCK 8 hero. Not a character likely to see section 400, for sure, but this time I got much further. After defeating Calbert the Vampire once again, this time I read the map correcting and found my old ally Sharleena (whose name sounds a bit too much like Shareella, the Snow Witch, for my liking). Unfortunately, while I was sipping hot wine in an anteroom, she accidentally summoned a Spirit Demon. Luckily, this isn't a book full of Livingstonian SKILL 12 monsters, and even with modest attributes I had the edge on the horror. With her last ounce of life, the dying seer scrawled 'N' on the floor in her own blood. North it is then.

I survived being drugged and taken captive in the Hanged Man Inn, run by Kremper the Half-Orc. Now, I wanted to see the best in people, to give even Half-Orcs a chance, but...

But they shouldn't have messed with me. Even at SKILL 9, I escaped the slave cart, found my way to Colton-on-the-Marsh, and cut my way through zombies to defeat bone-crowned Magrand the Necromancer, who was collecting the patrons of the Inn for his 'experiments'. Leaving the Colton a hero and continuing north, I almost immediately came across a Moon Demon reincarnating Magrand. They wouldn't let him lie, would they? Despite the undead Magrand having SKILL 10, I killed them both. I then saved friendly old Tom Hickson and his family from Skeletons, before accepting a ride on a barge up river to Axmoor. 

Axmoor, scene of Geiger-esque nightmares, where human sacrifices were fed into the furnaces of a 'pyramid of bone' [edit: the 'pyramid of bone' is something else - the visions of the fortune teller on the barge misled me - this atrocity is known as a 'Land-Blight'] a factory that belched poison gas, terraforming Titan for Myurr's demonic armies. This was a great encounter, one that I did not expect in the slightest, full of biomechanical weirdness that I'll have to add to the ingredients of my next RPG session set in Titan. 

Well, who can blame me for assuming that this was the final battle, and I threw everything into destroying the Death-Stone, the 'seed' from which this canker had grown. All my Holy Water, all my magics, but it was enough. Oh, but that's *not* the end? No turn to 400? Bugger. But I did 'level up', gaining a SKILL and two LUCK points. On to the final battle(?) then, at Dunningham, where an agent of Logaan, the Trickster (everyone's favourite God) helped me see through the illusions of Myurr and offered me some advice. But it was all for nought, as I was caught in the gaze of the Baleful Eye.

224

If the tower is not on fire, you are set upon by hundreds of Orcs. Although you sell your life dearly, you are bound to succumb to the attacking hordes. The forces of Evil have triumphed.  

Rule one of fantasy adventuring; When someone asks you if you want to set something on fire, you say, 'Yes!'

[Zhu wrote a good review of tone of Dead of Night here]

Adventures Among The Colonials

Fighting Fantasy #18, Rebel Planet: YOU are humanity’s last hope, a super-spy from SAROS, on a mission to destroy the alien supercomputer that controls the inhuman Arcadian Empire. All you need a string of binary numbers, which presumably are converted into page references in a manner reminiscent of the careless keymaster of Firetop Mountain. Trouble is, you need to get the numbers from the rebel leaders on various human colonies under Arcadian rule, and you don’t know very much about them. So the plan is this; you fly to each planet and have a day or so to make contact with the rebel movement and get hold of the binary McGuffin.

Might have to get myself a Spectrum emulator... (image from www.gamesdbase.com)

Luckily, you are trained in unarmed combat, which will kill or incapacitate an opponent on a roll of 6 after winning an Attack Round. Unluckily, the first fight I get in is with an Arcadian POLICE CHIEF who doles out an extra 2 STAMINA points of damage on a roll of 5-6 regardless of whether or not he wins the Attack Round. And I’m drunk to boot.

But it isn’t lack of STAMINA that ends my adventure, just a poor choice. While losing 2 LUCK points (because I asked a taxi to drive into a futuristic congestion zone and was ‘hard hearted’) and 2 STAMINA points (as I was tired and hungry) before getting ten sections in was a bad omen, I did manage to get one of the binary numbers thanks to an acute sensitivity to the kind of acrostic poems favoured by the militaristic Northern Arcadians.

My downfall is related to my crude approach to computer hacking. While others crack the security codes, I crack open the head of the Southern ARCADIAN SECRETARY sat at the computer, hacking him apart with my laser sword. I stop to read the files, searching for hints as to the location of the rebel leader, only to find that I am too engrossed in browsing to hear the approaching guards. Yep, that sounds like me. My adventure ended in the office of a university administrator. Yep, that sounds a little familiar too!

Postscript: I get the feeling that Robin Waterfield’s description of the colony planet of Tropos (settled 2070 – I might just get to see that if I live to nearly 100) mirrors some 1970s/1980s views of ‘the colonies’. Tropos is a backward place, its economy built on mineral wealth that attracts immigrants from the mother planet with the notion that it is ‘more terrestrial than the terrestrials’. Quite which former colony the obese inhabitant of Radix, whose lives of luxury rely on labour-saving devices, are a meant to represent to the imagination of 1980s Britain is anyone’s guess…

Addendum: Robin Waterfield is a classical scholar!

Missed Appointment

I am terrible at keeping track of my appointments. Thank God for e-mail and the internet; no matter what I need to do, I regularly have to check / double-check the place, time and details of whatever meeting I am scheduled to attend. I rarely miss an appointment; I just exist in a state of perpetual uncertainty.

That said, THE SILVER CRUSADER did miss his Appointment with F.E.A.R. I knew when, and roughly where I was meant to meet Vladimir Utoshski, the Titanium Cyborg. But roughly where was not good enough…

SKILL 18? This geek is the most dangerous man on the planet!

I rolled up a super super-hero for this book, and with SKILL 12 I figured that as THE SILVER CRUSADER was the Goddam Batman I would not need ‘real’ superpowers, so I selected the ‘whizz with gadgets’ (Enhanced Technological Skill) power. Appointment with F.E.A.R. is an interesting Fighting Fantasy book as it has multiple start points; with four different superpower packages and a range of different starting clues, there is definitely the feeling that this is no ‘one true path’ gamebook.

It is not all superpowering about Titan City, though. Pity the Goddam Batman - no matter your superpowers, YOU have a front identity as an office drone working for J. Jonah Jameson. No, Perry White. Actually, Jonah Whyte. The book is full of little references to comic books and popular culture, no doubt many of which I missed reading it a quarter century after publication. I did not miss the worst; pop star, Michael Blaxson. Groan…

I have never been a big fan of the non-fantasy Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and I had remembered this book as being one of the worst (before playing I was prepared to call this post ‘Dis-Appointment with F.E.A.R.), but I enjoyed this read. The adventure is a mix of following the main mission – foiling a world domination plot by the super-terrorist group F.E.A.R. and responding to the everyday supervillainy of Titan City. I was surprised at just how much a sense of agency I had when reading this book – always being presented with several ‘adventuresome’ options, and always feeling that if I chose to defeat the monster in the park my adventure would turn out in a different way than if I had chosen to arrest a group of bank robbers. The actual villains are often quite gonzo – more Adam West than Christian Bale Batman – but the book is all the better for it; a gritty Titan City filled with enough supervillainy to avoid feeling like a railroad would be ridiculous, for all it might be ‘dark and gritty’, while a lighter, more gonzo setting can be populated with the likes of THE SCARLET PRANKSTER, STREAK GORDON, and THE CREATURE OF CARNAGE and yet maintain its (zany) coherence. Light and gonzo does not mean that YOUR adventure will not end pathetically.

And my Goddam Batman had a particularly pathetic end; destroyed by space laser while riding in a taxi. Okay, he had tracked down the time of the meeting of F.E.A.R., he knew which street the villains were meeting on. Hell, he had even discovered that the bad guys were having their pow-wow in a Chinese laundry. But he did not know the street number – and so did not know which page to turn to – and rather than trying *a* Chinese laundry, my Goddam Batman decided to take a taxi home. While he was engaging in idle chit chat with the driver, F.E.A.R. had presumably agreed their fiendish plan AND got their delegates out of Titan City, because before he got home F.E.A.R. took over the airwaves to announce their demands for world domination, before demonstrating the power of their space weapon by blowing up the very city in which they had been meeting just minutes earlier!

The Goddam Batman. Vaporised in a yellow cab.   

Jolly Pirates We!

So, back to ‘YOUR Adventure Ends Here’, my project to play each of the Fighting Fantasy books in order, by the rules and rolls, no fingers in pages, no backsies, nothing. Seas of Blood is in dock.

Seas of Blood was one of my favourites, back in the day. And it still is, kind of. Unlike some ‘quest’ orientated gamebooks, in which a map actually merely an illustration of the route upon which your character was taken by the writer/GM, in Seas of Blood there is the illusion (at least) that the map is a sandbox of choices. There YOU are, in the pirate port of Tak, dicing away the evening with rival Abdul the Butcher, when some drunk idiot comes up with the idea of fifty days of robbery to prove which of you is the greatest pirate of the Inland Sea.

The opening paragraph tells you some bare details about Lagash, the seas around Enraki, and the caravans of the Scythera Desert, and then asks; where do YOU want to go?

I choose to send my ship, the Banshee, to ‘the Scythera Desert to plunder the rich western caravans’. After camping out for several days in the burning sun, my crew are eventually able to ambush a caravan of LIZARD MEN. The cost in blood was not really worth the treasure; 60 gold pieces and one Lizard Man slave. Nevertheless, the idea that the ‘rich western caravans’ might include (traditionally) evil humanoids is, to my mind, one of the great things about Titan as a fantasy gaming world.

And then the Banshee is sunk. Sailing south, I fail as a captain and neglect several opportunities to flee! from a KISHIAN WARSHIP. We had her outmanned, I swear; a whole point of Crew Strike and three points of Crew Strength. The battle, and her booty, was mine, I gambled. But the dice fell against the odds, my crew fell, and I slipped beneath the waves. Glug. Glug.

Not much of an adventure, but enough to remind me of the illusion of an open world that I have always liked about Seas of Blood. Okay, so it is not as open as Fabled Lands, but in the context of the early(ish) Fighting Fantasy books, Seas of Blood suggested the freedom (as well as the adventure and aesthetics) of fantasy roleplaying games.

BONUS: Free RPG with a potential for piracy: Worlds Apart, a Traveller ‘powered’ fantasy seafaring game.

YOU are a buffoon!

Between the time when summer rains flooded the North, and the rise of the XXX Olympiad, there was an age undreamed of. And onto this, YOU, destined to roll 12 for SKILL and 8 for LUCK. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!

The Rings of Kether. Ugh. YOU play a space cop trying to bust some drug smugglers (brave for a kids book). Unfortunately, the space cop YOU play is also a buffoon.  My space cop landed at the space port and checked out the local underworld bar. Seeing a table where a bunch of known criminals were gambling, I decided that the space cop should join the game and see what he could learn. What does the buffoon do? He finds out that the horrible looking, criminally connected woman, Zera Gross, runs an import/export agency, and says, "More exporting than importing, I'd wager, the nature of the drug business being what it is! Ha, ha!'. I’m not kidding. Space cop gets beaten up, loses 2 STAMINA points, permanently. By the time my space cop gets his brains blown out on the roof of a warehouse (about 10 sections later) I couldn't really care what happened to this idiot. Is he really is a elite space cop, an agent of the Galactic Federation, a Grade 1 Investigator, or in some later twist does it turn out that YOU are playing a 'jimp'?

Anyhow, The Rings of Kether reminded me of the need for the fantastical in my fantasy gaming. Only the faintest of colours on the edges distinguished this book from one set in the 20th century. No science fictional or space fantastical elements had any major role in either driving plot or generating atmosphere. I could tolerate that, if it was a hard-boiled detective game with mere sci-fi dressing, but YOU are definitely not Philip Marlowe in space. 

YOU can’t fight the system

Well, that’s what I’m blaming my two latest Fighting Fantasy adventures on. 

Book 13, Freeway Fighter, introduces whole new systems. Rules for vehicle combat, of course, and firearm combat – which are not the same as the rules in Space Assassin – but also new rules for hand-to-hand combat. First to lose 6 STAMINA is knocked unconscious, basically. And, with 2d6+24 STAMINA, this game should be far less lethal. 

Well, what doesn't kill you... still ends your adventure. Three paragraphs into the book I pull my Dodge Interceptor up at a gas station, understanding that the general complaint about this book was the number of endings that involved running out of fuel. A woman comes out of a building. Do I want to speak to her, the book asks. Yes, what harm can calling through the window of my armoured Dodge Inceptor do. So I turn the page… and I find myself getting out of my car in the middle of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! D'oh! Naturally, there is a THUG, or a BANDIT, or somesuch, who I have to fight in hand-to-hand combat. I have a knife, he has a crowbar, but it is still a 'first to lose 6 points of STAMINA is unconscious' fight. Which makes having nigh on 30 STAMINA irrelevant, and even diminishes the effect of SKILL differences – over a long fight, the character with the higher SKILL score will win with crushing regularity, but over a short fight, you just need 3 (un)lucky rolls and, BAM! you’ve been knocked out, lost your Dodge Interceptor, and your adventure ends here. 

This actually highlights the problem that a lot of RPGs have with unarmed combat. Most provide opportunities to knock a character out well before his Hit Points or STAMINA has been whittled away. Cool? But, that means that it takes longer to incapacitate an opponent when you are hitting him with a sword than when you are hitting him with your fists! 

So, on to Book 14, Temple of Terror. Is this the first book in the series in which it is clear that YOU are a professional adventurer? A meeting with Yaztromo clearly ties this character with the YOU of the Forest of Doom (and, less explicitly, Caverns of the Snow Witch). 'Haven't I seen you somewhere before?' he asks. 'Nope, must have been some other sucker,' I’d have said, given the option. And I would have been that arrogant, as this YOU had SKILL 12. SKILL 12 is a licence to walk across Allansia killing anything and grabbing the loot, on the way to foiling Malbordus' evil plan. So, that's what I did – I began to walk to the Vatos in the Desert of Skulls, confident that my superheroic SKILL 12 and my Create Water spell would turn the trip into a delightful stroll. And so it was, I chopped down DARK ELVES like they were daisies in a meadow, and then that bastard Yaztromo decided to send me some 'help'. A GIANT EAGLE. A SKILL 6 GIANT EAGLE. A flying pansy. And we ran into a PTERANODON. A SKILL 7 PTERANODON. Even with the arrows I looted from the DARK ELVES, this is a fight that, the majority of the time, is going to end in defeat for the GIANT EAGLE. So my superhero clung to the back of the bird as she fought gamely, but lost. Given that this fight is one you can only be expected to lose, my adventure wouldn't end here, would it? I'd fall, lose a few points of STAMINA, and continue on foot. Right? Of course not. To be fair that is quite a long way to fall.

Hawkanaaaaaaaagh!

I’ve remembered the ‘feel’ of Talisman of Death since I first played it... damn, probably nearly a quarter of a century ago. It felt different to the other Fighting Fantasy books that I’d read until then, and not just because of the framing device of playing an adventurer (you, or YOU?) plucked from Earth, not unlike the characters in the D&D cartoon! Of course, I am now aware that Talisman of Death was written by Mark Smith and Jamie Thompson, gamebook writers of note, responsible for the Way of the Tiger series among other things, while Thompson, with Dave Morris, wrote the Fabled Lands series.   

Orb, not Titan. Greyguilds-on-the-Moor is just to the left of of that ominous looking Crack O' Doom.

My adventure in Talisman of Death was largely urban, with a reasonable variety of locations explored and characters met. I did a little research in a library, met several scholars, recruited help from the Thieves’ Guild, accidentally explored the Temple of Death, and died in battle with the High Priestess of the Shieldmaidens, Hawkana. When you can’t trust a Shieldmaiden, who can you trust? This combat reminded me of the problems with the Fighting Fantasy combat system – the three point difference in Skill between my Hero (Me?) and Hawkana made an 18 point difference in Stamina irrelevant. It works for gamebooks, but for a multiplayer RPG, I’m wary of using it over other simple systems, say, Dragon Warriors or OpenQuest.

Unlike the previous ten books in the series, there was a much greater sense that meaningful choices could be made on the basis of the sections that had been previously read. It didn’t feel – though the truth might be different – that you had to push your Hero into engaging in Bizarre Search Behaviour, as in the previous urban adventure in the series, City of Thieves. Though, perhaps relatedly, Greyguilds-on-the-Moor has very little of the colour or character of Blacksand. 

This sense of control was in stark contrast to my next experience of Fighting Fantasy, Space Assassin, an infiltration of the spaceship Vandervecken to kill the evil tyrant-scientist Cyrus. I remember completing the book on my first go when I last played, probably about ten years ago. This time, blowing apart a security robot, I examined its wreckage. Finding that it guarded a safe with three buttons, one green, one blue, and one red, the book left me with no option but to randomly press a button. That’s not even the bad GM’s game of ‘what am I thinking?’ BOOM!

House of... oh Heck!

Before his car broke down on a country road in the rain, my Hero must have been an SAS veteran or something. SKILL 12, STAMINA 22, LUCK 11. This guy is one of Britain’s hardest men. But House of Hell is to Call of Cthulhu what Starship Traveller is to, well, Traveller. I remember an article in Dragon, I think (though I have not been able to find it since), in which a Call of Cthulhu Keeper wrote about allowing his PCs to tool up with machine guns and grenades – because, in the end, those aren’t going to help. What matters in Hammer House of Cthulhu (more Peter Cushing, less cosmic horror) is staying sane in the face of mind bending terror. 

So… [dice clatter on Android dice roller app] …SANITY, sorry, FEAR 7. What a roll! 

My Hero had the psychological constitution of someone already on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So, yes, my Hero is a war veteran, but he’s also psychologically damaged. Sure, he finds various dagger-like implements, and hacks a zombie to pieces (hiding behind the curtain in the Balthus room, of all places), but in the end he is done in by a book. No, seriously, he was frightened to death reading a book on hypnotism. I chose that over the book on black magic as I thought it would be less frightening, but at that point my Hero would have died had he opened a particularly well done pop-up book. Your adventure ends here.

Actually, if that book had been illustrated by Ian Miller, it might well have finished me off. I have always found his art brilliantly unsettling.

I know that some people have far less a taste for fear and sanity rules than I do. They reduce player agency, they say, and in the process they can turn a heroic character into a snivelling coward. I’m not sure about the first (I see a continuity from "I hit with my axe" [roll] "no, you don’t" to "I stand firm in the face of the horrors from beyond" [roll] "no, you don’t"), and, as for the second point, well, isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t it emulate some of the most interesting elements of fantastical fiction (and make the truly alien horrors of the campaign something more than a big bundle of hit points)? Now, WFRP has a sanity system. D&D traditionally doesn’t, but Ravenloft added one to AD&D2e, and made a particularly interesting distinction between ‘fear’ and ‘horror’. Call of Cthulhu obviously has the grandparent of these systems, one which can be transplanted over to any BRP-based system, while Mongoose RuneQuest II has its own in Necromantic Arts. Now, I like these kinds of ‘psychological systems’ in my games – somewhere on my hard drive is a fear and sanity system for Traveller that I’d written to try to produce an atmosphere of Aliens, Event Horizon, and the like (if you don’t find the horrors of the outer dark out there, where do you find it) – but do they find a place in your fantasy and sci-fi RPGs? In other RPG genres? Or are they reserved for games that are explicitly about ‘horror’?

Roll 2, Die 2

I really love Caverns of the Snow Witch. The art, that is. Gary Ward and Edward Crosby produced some stunning mock-woodcut illustrations that give the book a really distinctive atmosphere. If they had a wider portfolio of gaming art they might well have got up there with Chalk, Nicholson, and Blanche in my personal pantheon.

Borrowed from Turn to 400, who does this much better than I

Pity then, that I didn’t get to see many of the illustrations in their proper context, my adventurer dying after two – yes TWO! – paragraphs. So, there’s this ice bridge over a crevasse, right? It looks dangerous, yeah? Precarious, even. So, being a cautious adventurer, I decide to skirt the lip of this crevasse, only to run into a MAMMOTH. An angry, SKILL 10 MAMMOTH, with no option to retreat. With a SKILL 7 adventurer (I told you I was playing these straight, no cheating) there was very little chance of surviving this encounter. So, my adventure ended there.

Naturally, I wasn’t satisfied with a two paragraph game, so I rolled again, this time getting a SKILL 9 LUCK 12 adventurer. Who cares about STAMINA? I’ve got 40 STAMINA points of provisions in my bag! Now, this guy, the luckiest man alive, I decided would be able to cross the ice bridge. Sure, of course he could. And, with SKILL 9 and a good dose of TEST YOUR LUCK, he killed the SKILL 11 YETI (it would have been SKILL 10 if my adventurer hadn’t fumbled his spear). The adventurer then lucked his way through, deep into the Snow Witch’s lair, only to run into a SKILL 11 CRYSTAL WARRIOR. My adventurer had a warhammer, so he was able to fight the diamond geezer, but the two point difference in SKILL was too much to overcome – easily eating up my adventurer’s extra 10 points of STAMINA and his 13 points of LUCK (Potion of Luck, never leave home without one). The annoying thing is that just a couple of paragraphs earlier my adventurer had won the favour of a GENIE. Had he not been carrying the warhammer he could have called on the GENIE for aid. As it was, my adventurer stood there, ineffectively swinging his warhammer as the CRYSTAL WARRIOR cut him to ribbons. The life of the second incarnation of my adventurer ended here.

Did Ian Livingstone expect the kids reading these books to cheat? The proliferation of SKILL 10+ combats in this book, most of which are either literally unavoidable on the part of the reader (the YETI) or unavoidable by the adventurer exploring on the basis of the information presented in preceding paragraphs, suggests that rolling up anything less than SKILL 10 is going to end with the adventurer dead at the hands of the dice rather than YOUR decisions. I’m sure that mid-1980s kids did write ‘12’ into the SKILL boxes by habit – I know that I did, but then I also held my fingers in pages to take back unwise choices. Designing an adventure with the expectation (or requirement – Creature of Havoc!) the reader cheat is, however, only going to frustrate 30-odd year old readers, 20-odd years later, who are trying to play the game by the rules!

These combats reminded me my misgivings about using Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e as an engine for a campaign. The consequence of using a 2D6 system, because it produces a bell curve distribution of results, is that when one character has just a couple more points of SKILL than another the difference is almost insurmountable in the repeated ‘opposed skill test’ of combat. The issue isn’t that a skilled fighter more often than not defeats a less skilled fighter – we’d want the system to do that. The issue is that the range of SKILL values in which a combat is still some kind of a contest is so low, a problem exacerbated by the ‘opposed skill test’ nature of Fighting Fantasy combat, where the one test incorporates both combatants’ attacks, meaning that the one with the higher SKILL is the only combatant doing damage.

Okay, AFF2e introduces a whole bunch of modifiers to the dice rolls to allow the adventurers (and monsters) to ‘act’, rather than ‘roll’, their way out of trouble. But when increasing a ‘special skill’ is pretty low, that characters will have an effective SKILL of 10+ in a short period of time looks a pretty likely outcome. Caveat: while I’m hoping to run a couple of games of AFF2e over Easter, I doubt that’ll be enough to get a feel of the advancement system in action.

Your Adventure Ends Here, Now!

Well, I am rubbish at Fighting Fantasy. Reading the line, ‘YOUR adventure ends here’ seems to come ever earlier with each gamebook that I play.

My hero has died in all but the Warlock of Firetop mountain so far (and in that one I did cheat my way through the Maze of Zagor). On my most recent excursion to Fire Island with ill-starred Mungo, my hero died knee deep in mud. So I approached Scorpion Swamp with some trepidation. I like Scorpion Swamp – the book, not the place – I like the choice of quests, the fact that your hero can move back and forth from area to area, and that mapping is important for the story of your hero, not solely for the puzzle that YOU, the reader, are solving standing on the bodies of the countless dead and used adventurers that YOU have thrown into this sandbox meatgrinder.

I thought that I'd need more space...

But, like it or not, I am rubbish. I managed to explore a grand total of four clearings. Including the one in which that your hero starts. I know, my magic ring was warning me of danger, but when faced with the MASTER OF SPIDERS, looming threateningly on his throne, I thought I might talk my way out of trouble. No such luck. Not even a TEST OF LUCK. Next time, when I have a SKILL 10 adventurer, I’m going to just kill sinister guys on sight. Or Snow Witches.