New (or 'new') Blood Sword

I'm a tremendous fan of the world of Legend - the setting for both the Dragon Warriors RPG (seriously, grab the pdf of the core rules - it is PWYW, so get it free, read the setting material, and then come back and pay for it - or buy the PoD) and the Blood Sword gamebooks. So I was pleased to see that Dave Morris is Kickstarting a new edition of book five of the Blood Sword series 'The Walls of Spyte'. As Dave says on his blog:

"The Kickstarter is for a limited edition full-colour hardcover. That's going to be a genuine collector's edition, as it will only be available to backers of the Kickstarter. The paperback will go on sale as soon as all the hardcover copies have gone out to backers. So if you just want a paperback copy of The Walls of Spyte, you don't need to back the Kickstarter, you just need to wait a few months."

Importantly, it *is* a new, improved edition of the book; Dave Morris describes his dissatisfaction with the original version here. Now, I'm not one for hardback gamebooks - though this is very tempting, and I would love to see this project hit its stretch goal of £6000 which is an omnibus edition of the Blood Sword gamebooks using something more akin to the system in the Fabled Lands books.    

Fighting Fantasy books going cheap...

Or free, even.

I've 'just' moved house. A modest 'international' move. From Wales to Yorkshire. The actual move started in the summer but we only moved into our new house in November, and for a number of reasons, not least of which I still work most weeks back in Wales, we've only just got round to unpacking some of our boxes. Including those containing my Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

Now, I have a few duplicates, having slowly but surely added to my original collection and replaced (and replaced again) the tattier books as I buy 'job lots' from eBays, car boots, charity shops, etc. Being a rather unhealthy collector, I keep one of each cover variant - so for example I have 4 copies of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain on my shelf (plus Brett Schofield's adaptation to AFF2e). But even so, I have a few I'd like to pass on to a good home. And I'm guessing that the people reading my blog, or visiting here from Google+, are more likely to give these books a good home than the average Doncaster charity shop.

See here are what I have on offer.

[a] FF#4 Starship Traveller (Original Cover - pre-green spine) in fairly solid shape.

[b] FF#4 Starship Traveller (Original Cover - pre-green spine) a few creases on the cover but in otherwise good shape.

[c] FF#4 Starship Traveller (Jagged Green) with a some quite visible creases on the cover near the spine. OFFERED REFUGE

[d] FF#8 Scorpion Swamp (Gold Dragon) in pretty tatty shape. REHOMED

[e] FF#11 Talisman of Death (Jagged Green) solid condition, though quite yellowed pages. REHOMED

[f] FF#11 Talisman of Death (Gold Dragon) creases on the cover, but solid.

[g] FF#13 Freeway Fighter (Jagged Green) superficially tatty cover. ADOPTED

[h] FF#14 Temple of Terror (Jagged Green) a few creases on the cover. CLAIMED

[i] FF#14 Temple of Terror (Jagged Green) a really quite tatty cover.

[j] FF#15 The Rings of Kether (Jagged Green) solid, a few creases, not too yellowed. [REHOUSED]

[k] FF#17 Appointment with FEAR (Jagged Green) fairly solid shape, though a sharp crease on cover next to spine.

[l] FF#18 Rebel Planet (Jagged Green) a bit warped, superficially creased cover.

[m] FF#18 Rebel Planet (Jagged Green) solid shape though a prominent crease on the cover. ADOPTED

[n] FF#19 Demons of the Deep (Jagged Green) pretty tatty cover, but solid all the same. CLAIMED

[o] FF#25 Beneath Nightmare Castle (Gold Dragon) tatty cover with a bit of pen on it. REHOUSED

[p] FF#35 Daggers of Darkness (Gold Dragon) some creases on the cover, but none which obscure the coolest man on Titan! REHOUSED

[q] Wizard Books # 14 Armies of Death in very tatty shape, with some red ink having leaked onto the corners of the first three of so pages. Perfectly playable, with no loose pages.

[r] Wizard Books #28 Spellbreaker in as close to new condition as an unread second hand book can be. ADOPTED

And I also have a duplicate Lone Wold #4 The Chasm of Doom, with the original Sparrow Books Gary Chalk cover. Lovely, in pretty good condition. CLAIMED

THE OFFER: If you are in the UK, and want (or even need) one or more of these books, and promise to give them a good home, just get in touch on here or on Google+ and I'll post it to you. First come, first served, I'm afraid. But remember, a gamebook is for life, not just for Christmas!

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]

Thoughts on boring systems...

Despite having a wealth new games to play (or never play, but admire, and the same old suspects are wheeled out again and again), I often find my thoughts turning to the world of Titan, and Fighting Fantasy in general. A couple of days I read an old blog post, which I cannot now find. In that post, nostalgia for FF gamebooks was tempered by the assertion that you couldn't get kids these days to play these books when they could be smashing things to bits in [Insert Current Game Title Here]*. And I think that assertion is, sadly, more or less true. But a fantasy adventure gamebook does things in a different way to a viscerally thrilling fantasy adventure video game. And in that difference there is a virtue that we should remember when playing roleplaying games. 

FF combat is boring. It is boring because there are no choices (most of the time). Roll dice until one side wins, with not even the possibility of retreat, is not uncommon. This means that the whole thing could be settled by a single dice roll, the probability of victory being fixed the moment the encounter begins. It'd lose some tension, sure, but the end result, mechanically speaking, would be the same.

So where is this virtue, eh? Well, mechanically boring combat is feature, not a bug. 

I play mostly with people who have not and will not read the rules. And so I am acutely aware that combat with lots of choices equals victory to those with system mastery. I find nothing more disheartening when I read roleplaying forums that are 'epic' accounts of encounters that concentrate on the 'synergies' that the players managed to set up between their powers or other clever exploitation of the system. In the games that I run, once combat is started I want the encounter settled quickly. I want it settled quickly because I want the consequences of that combat to result in further interesting choices for the PCs. Choices about the game world, not the game system. 

By having such boring combat and task resolution, FF gamebooks remind me of the things that roleplaying games can do better than video games. Roleplaying games can never match the complexity of micro-choices about the system that are the focus of many (not all) video games - ability to master the controller and the powers and abilities of the character. And if we use a system that wasn't put together by designers worrying about that, the actual play of a roleplaying game will by necessity focus on the choices being made in relation to the game world rather than the game system. And while a gamebook has the same 'dead' GM as a video game, in a tabletop RPG this perspective can be taken to the extremes, with truly open worlds existing in living imaginations rather than fixed on paper or in code. 

So thank you Fighting Fantasy - I glad that you were my introduction to fantasy adventure gaming and not [Insert Video Game Title Here]*.

*I am out of touch, but not that much. I could have named a video game - probably one that I have enjoyed tremendously - but I don't want to make this about that particular  video game. This isn't about denigrating video games. But simple systems force the play(choices) to be about the world, while a complex system allows the play(choices) to be about the system.

Didn’t we have a lovely time // the day we went to Mampang

A beautiful day, we had lunch on the way // And all for under a pound, you know

Actually, the PCs had lunch in the kitchens of the Fortress. Despite the quite frightful possibilities, Ho Lee’s adventures in evil cuisine passed off with disappointingly little consequence. The luck of the dice sometimes does fall the way of the PCs. And for under a pound? Now that would be a bargain, given the price gouging rip off merchants that pass themselves off as traders and innkeepers in the Shamutanti Hills.

How on Titan did the PCs get into Mampang? Well, the last we heard from the party they were about to try the 'Chewbacca Gambit'. In fact, I’m pretty sure that D, playing Ho Lee, did utter the line, ‘We’re fine, how are you?’ and, ‘Boring conversation anyway,’ during the three sessions it took the party to reach their fate deep in the Fortress. That said, my memory is sketchy these days – despite my ‘it were better in my day’ shtick, that’s probably the multiple concussions more than it is age.

The first session involved negotiating the three courtyards of the Fortress of Mampang. The first courtyard is mostly empty, with the first set of magical Throben doors requiring merely requiring a key. Easy peasy; the party searched the rooms around the gate, made mincemeat of some Dark Elves for no reward, but found the key nonetheless.

The second courtyard is a much more interesting place, filled with the kind of colourful encounters that are the essence of the early Fighting Fantasy books. Gambling guards, a pathetic beggar, a mysterious column, aggressive Red Eyes and treacherous Sightmasters. The PCs had been told by the guards on the main gate that they needed to go straight to Valignya, First Assistant to the Lord Treasurer of Mampang, to pay the tax on their ‘booty’. I’m not sure that Cramer would appreciate being described so…

Throughout this game the party never really acquired the ‘world sense’ required to adventure in Titan. Set a goal – whether it was cross Kakabad or find NPCX – and they would pursue it single-mindedly. That's probably a very good strategy when given a mission in the real world. Unfortunately for them, Titan is a *very* strange place. Dismissing a wretched beggar or a strange shop as unimportant with regard to the pursuit of goal might work in the logic of the real world, but on Titan (not least because of the legacy of the gamebook structure), YOU can never know what might be found pursuing those little diversions.

Death, quite possibly. As a legacy of the gamebook structure it is often the case that, on Titan, players must make decisions without sufficient information, and the decisions are therefore meaningless. Do YOU open the door? Do YOU go left or do YOU go right? Do YOU approach the beggar? In gamebooks it is often the case that acquiring the necessary information necessary is achieved by way of (repeated) failure. And I don’t care what you all say – in a game failure can be fun.

YOUR Adventure Ends Here. Roll up a new YOU. See my adventures in failure here.

That works... for a gamebook; as much as some of the ways to fail in a FF book are 'unfair', I am pretty confident that I would feel cheated if gamebooks were routinely 'won' on the first play. But then,when playing a gamebook there is just YOU, so playing again is simply a matter of grabbing a new sheet of paper, rolling four d6, and returning to section 1. But in a multiplayer tabletop RPG (for which you have assembled your friends in the face of the demands of real life) there can be only one attempt to recover the Crown of Kings, else the success or failure of the quest, in having no consequence, has no meaning. If there is one thing that the Arion Games version of Crown of Kings needs, it is a GM willing and able to saturate the adventure with the kind of information (clues, hints, foreshadowing, and the obligatory confessions extracted by torture) necessary for the players to make informed, meaningful decisions and avoid (though good play) the multitude of possible TPKs. I got better at this as we played, though I did swallow my principles and ‘rescue’ the party a few times, something that I would not have done in a living sandbox. But then my living sandbox would never involve the kind of deathraps with which the Archmage had peppered his Fortress.

Scan of picture, by John Blanche, borrowed from Fighting Fantasy Project, which, coincidentally has just finished its own playthrough of the the Sorcery! gamebook series.

First though - Valignya and the tax. Curiously, his room is found off the second courtyard beyond the chambers of a monster trainer. I redrew the map somewhat, to make it possible for the residents of Mampang to pay their dues without having to get past a murderous MUCALYTIC. Despite the utterly unhelpful monster trainer, the party made it to Valignya's room unmolested. Valignya was a fat man living in superficial opulence, with ornate fabrics and elaborate trinkets on every surface; the accumulation of tax paid in kind. He demanded a cut of the value of the 'prisoner', which the party paid, but the taxman then demanded the prisoner herself; he would either add Cramer to his retinue of slaves, or he could use her to enhance his credit with those who reside deeper in the Fortress. The party resisted, naturally enough, demanding the honour of turning her over to the master torturer in person. Valignya surreptitiously tried to poison the PCs, but failed (never underestimate high Luck scores). Shifting nervously, he decided to take the profit where he could find it, and demanded a 'door tax' if he was to give them the information they needed to pass the second set of Throben Doors and find Naggamanteh.

"Alaralatanalara!"

A GM should always change the names found in a published adventure if they are unpronounceable. Alara-whatnow? Few things are worse for immersion in a fantasy world than a GM who needs ten attempts to pronounce a word. Ahem...

But at least this was a magic word, not the mangling of an ordinary name that looked good when written down. And with that magic word, the second set of Throben Doors opened harmlessly and the party found themselves in the third (and final) courtyard of Mampang. From this courtyard the party enjoyed a diversion in the kitchens of the Fortress, before heading straight for the torture chamber. Opting not to open doors unnecessarily, they managed to avoid meeting the good BIRDMEN, the Samaritans of Schinn, and a crowd of bad Birdmen, loyal to the Archmage. They managed to avoid an amusing romp in a room full of mutants. Instead, confident that the goal that they had set themselves was, without question, the necessary next step in the adventure, they made straight for the torture chamber of Naggamenteh.

He looks bashful. So they bashed him in. Scanned image again borrowed from Fighting Fantasy Project, by John Blanche.

An OGRE - and an unusually ugly one, even by the standards of his species - Naggamenteh is not used to bargaining when he doesn't hold the whip hand. Literally. This encounter descended into a fight pretty quickly, but facing three hardened adventurers, the Ogre didn't stand a chance. Begging for his life, the party did as all good adventurers would do - they improvised, employing the material at hand. The material at hand was some of the most sophisticated torture equipment on the surface of Titan. They soon had one dead, mutilated Ogre and a warning that the magic that guards the third set of Throben Doors is not what it seems.

Next session: the party meet an obligatory Fighting Fantasy trader, avoid three deathtraps (just, well, kinda), before engaging in a most ludicrously futile fight.

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.

Fighting Fantasy in the Guardian

Well, I couldn't miss it, could I? The old Fighting Fantasy logo on the front page of the Guardian Online. Interestingly, the argument of the article - that the fusion of game and story in Fighting Fantasy has fundamentally changed our view of games - is undermined by Livingstone's 'desert island' game: chess. Of course, if Livingstone did spend eternity with only chess to play he may well end up house-ruling chess to replace the abstract playing peices with NPC mono-motivated pawns and PC knights with their own interest in L-shaped moves.

How Fighting Fantasy beat traditional games
 

Duck, You Sucker!

So, I finally get around to Island of the Lizard King.

All I wanted was a little holiday, a little sunshine down by the seaside. I was going to drop in on my old mate Mungo, do a little fishing, drink the local booze, and maybe chase some girls.

Instead, I died, knee-deep in slime as I fought a hopeless battle against the SLIME SUCKER. Skill 10? Yeah, but deduct 2 from your own Attack Strength, so if we weren't interested in mechanically representing the combined effects of fatigue and fighting in a bog, it really is Skill 12. Maybe if I had drunk my Potion of Luck (my potion of choice in FF character creation) a section or two back I might have been able to Test my Luck through the battle. But having given a bunch of my Provisions to some old crazy up in a tree, and eaten another hearty meal after fighting the GIANT CRAB, I was only going to stumble, low on Stamina, through the jungle of Fire Island, until something whittled away the last few points.

I had very fond memories of Island of the Lizard King. It was one of the few FF gamebooks that I had completed as a boy. But now I found it all a little flavourless. The encounters had no zip, no zest. There was nothing odd, weird, interesting - and I guess that is the lesson; when designing wilderness adventures, an array of 'GIANT' versions of ordinary creatures are, by themselves no substitute for the range of encounters that might populate a dungeon, or Port Blacksand, say. Encounter-wise, the jungle of Fire Island has nothing on the Forest of Doom, let me tell you.

Or maybe my adventurer died too early in his adventure.

The poster, by the way, is for a fun, often missed Sergio Leone Western, in which James Coburn plays an Irish revolutionary with an unhealthy obsession with dynamite.

In other news, you really should check out these extracts from an interview with Rick Priestley.

Death By One Hundred Foots

I lived abroad, in the Tropics, during my youth. I remember being told that we shouldn't really worry about the tarantulas, and that the scorpions looked far more frightening than they were. What were really nasty, we were told, were the big, fat, orange centipedes.

From Malaysia, not Allansia, but nasty all the same.

So was it that surprising that my latest Fighting Fantasy adventurer met his doom at the multitudinous feet of a GIANT CENTIPEDE in the sewers of Port Blacksand? And SKILL 10?! My adventurer would almost certainly have been able to whittle off the beast's 5 STAMINA points, had he not, trying out every strange object he could get his hands on, suffered a -2 SKILL curse.

City of Thieves is a great collection of random encounters, with the emphasis on random. Not just in the contemporary sense - each one being just the kind of oddness that characterises Titan - but in the Gygaxian sense - there is no way of planning a path through Port Blacksand; the adventurer is limited to taking the opportunity to experience the encounters that Ian Livingstone has rolled up on his Urban Encounters - Evil City d20 table. Great fun, all flaws considered, and my adventurer even had a couple of the special McGuffins that I would need to kill Zanbar Bone.