It was back in the dim, dark days of 1982. Space Invaders was old hat, and the fate of Han Solo still hung in the balance. Too young to see Blade Runner, the next best thing for teenaged geeks was the pathetically sappy E.T. And Madonna and the Culture Club were still two years away. Into this dismal, empty universe, came Steve “No, The Other One” Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and they were selling something bigger than walkmen and cooler than leg warmers. They were Fighting Fantasy books: half novel, half game and all attitude. They promised the Holy Grail of entertainment – “a fantasy adventure where YOU are the hero!”
They were a runaway success. The first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, sold 2 million copies, and at one point, the top three positions on the British best-sellers list were all occupied by Fighting Fantasy novels. The series went on to produce 59 books, sold 15 million copies worldwide and was translated into 20 languages. It also spawned thousands of imitators, kick-started a massive pick-a-path craze and according to one commentator, taught an entire generation of schoolkids to read by making books cool. They were the Harry Potters of their day, and may have even led a whole stack of people to “true” RPGs (particularly after Corgi put out an RPG in the same format, with very similar rules).
But you know what? I hated them.
I had Khare: Cityport of Traps, and House of Hell, and one about some tower, and I didn’t like any of them. Maybe I got into them too late, but they seemed to me nothing but a spiritless dice mechanic welded to some of the most clumsily written pick-a-paths I’d ever encountered. They were full of meaningless choices, infuriating death-traps and monumentally stupid outcomes, and the stories were generally pretty boring as well. I gave up when I discovered, in House of Hell, that walking into one large section of the house led to certain death no matter which options you chose once there, and you never, ever got a choice to leave again. Frankly, I thought a book where the hero kept dying for no reason at all sucked, no matter who that hero might be.
For those of you have fonder memories of killing the Lizard King and rolling 2d6+10 for your Stamina, or who missed the books entirely, rejoice, for you now have the chance to relive the Fighting Fantasy novels – in RPG form! Thanks to Myriador, they have been born again, in all their glory, as D&D 3E adventure modules! And I your humble reviewer, am here to review some of them for you. As a consumate professional, my own personal biases will never cloud my judgement, or effect my ratings in any way.
No, seriously!
Book one is based on book one of the FF series: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. So what do we get for our US$15.95? We get a forty page book with two glossy covers. Said covers roll up like a bastard within a few days, so it helps to have a lot of heavy books to wedge these between, if you want to keep them flat. The cover is nicely done, showing a very mod mage, with swirly spell stuff and a big honking dragon. This, presumably, is the eponymous Warlock, and you, the mighty heroes, are going to kill him and take his stuff.
Yes, that is the sole plot of this piece. But it’s a totally old-school dungeon crawl; it needs plot like a wandering monster needs a reason to attack.
Before the killing begins, however, we get some new rules. To truly simulate the FF experience, PCs now have a luck attribute, determined like the other six. Roll and add your bonus, beat a DC of 10 and you get +1 to any die roll. For every two points above 10, you get another +1. Fail a luck roll and you get +0; fail by more than 5 and you get –2. Most importantly, after each luck test, your luck drops by one until restored magically, or through GM award.
As is carefully explained, luck can effect skills, saving throws, attack rolls and damage, but not magic. All in all, a fun little rule. It adds something, doesn’t take away or invalidate anything else and is hardly a game breaker. Those of you who want a luck stat in your games might want to check it out.
Should you need them, there are also four pre-generated characters at the back. They are at fourth level; the adventure is tailored for three or four players of 4th level, and contains instructions for scaling it both down or up a little. It can also, they say, be completed by smaller groups – even individuals – thanks to the luck score. This, combined with the fact that the pregens have their stats and how to use them explained slowly for newbies on the back of their sheets means that this is a product which, in conception, is quite perfect for introducing old-school FFers to roleplaying. It’s quick to set up, quick to read, easy to play and easy to run. It’s everything a mindless dungeon crawl should be. It even has cheesy boxed text!
And it’s with cheesy boxed text, of course, that we begin. Gathered in the Unicorn Run tavern, our heroes here a few stories about other brave souls who have also played this adventure, get given some healing potions to jot down in their inventory (always us a pencil) and are told to take notes and make a map. Yes, the memories all come flooding back, don’t they? Now turn to page 1…
As I said, there is no plot here, but there is a general progression of events. First, the players wander around aimlessly through the first twenty rooms, dealing with goblins and orcs and ogres and rats, all of whom attack instantly and fight to the death as per usual. Then they discover an amazing healing bench and a completely ridiculous gambling game and equally ludicrous shop. Here, FF feel really comes through – the gambler only gambles, he can offer no information or explanation for his purpose, and if attacked, he gets away through an impossible-to-find secret door. Likewise, the shopkeeper only sells candles, and will not tell the players anything except that they need his candles, and if attacked, erects a Wall of Force. If you buy his candles, turn to page 85. If you leave without them, turn to page 206. Ugh.
There’s also plenty of stupid choices, like the helmet room. One gives you +2 Strength, the other takes it down by 2 for the rest of the game. No, the bad one can’t be removed. Elsewhere, there is a stick and a rope. If picked up, the stick does nothing. If picked up, the rope attacks you. Stunning. But at least stupid choice is better than no choice at all, like monsters that attack if you see them (but don’t if you don’t), or the magic mouth trap that doesn’t have any effect on the game at all. In another good FF standard, there’s also a mysterious picture gallery that causes fear. Finally, the players reach the underground river, and can take the ferry (turn to page 223), the bridge (page 165), the raft (page 300) or swim (page 4).
And you know what really, really sucks about this? There are piranhas in the water, and crocs. However, if you take the ferry, bridge, or raft and you fall in, they will not eat you. But if you swim, they will eat you. Yes, they have accurately preserved the way the FF plot lines had no permanence or consistency of place or outcome. I actually found this dedication to the source endearing, as it demonstrated very clearly just how committed the writer are to recreating the feel of FF novels as closely as possible. It’s sort of charming to imagine players being as frustrated by this kind of stuff as I was as a youngster.
And of course if you liked these books, you’ll be over the moon about this approach.
Then, across the river, there’s zombies and dwarves, and an interminable maze full of teleporting alcoves and a minotaur which must, thankfully, be less irritating in an RPG than it would have been to read. At the end of all this, players get to fight a dragon (wyrmling) and then the warlock himself (Sorcerer Lvl 10). If they kill him, they can open his treasure chest and get all the loot they came for. That is, they can if they brought the right three keys. If not, they get hit by a lightning bolt for massive amounts of damage, and probably die. (You can disable the trap, but the best lockpicker in the pregens needs a 19 or 20 to even find it.)
What keys, you ask? Oh, there are about six keys scattered all over the dungeon, in the stupidest hiding places. Only the right three will open the box, so you have to find them all. Which means searching everything, in a dungeon which actively punishes you for searching. Indeed, in two similar rooms, the box in the first contains the key, and the box in the second contains a deadly snake which attacks when you open it. Miss out on easily avoidable combats (like the Minotaur and the Cyclops) and you miss the other two keys. So you have to kill every living thing in the place to be sure.
The FF novels could get away with things like this because they could arrange it so that you had to face the Minotaur and the Cyclops, no matter what, and because they advertised themselves as puzzles to be tried again and again (second time around, you knew which box had the snake). Roleplaying games don’t work like this – they’re freeform and not intended to be repeated. Once again, the writer was so keen on capturing the feel of the original books he’s taken a bog-standard but perfectly usable dungeon crawl, and dragged it firmly and fully into the Dark Realm of Suckage.
Unless of course that’s just my bias talking, and you like having to go through a dull dungeon over and over again to find the one key you’re missing so you can get the treasure and get the hell out of dodge. And if that is your thing, then who am I to judge? Crank this baby up and enjoy!
And if you do enjoy it, the book closes with a discussion on how to fit the adventure into a campaign, and provides a detailed run-down on the sample starting village of Gilford. At this point, things charge into the Realm of Suckage with great force and alacrity, and I’m not sure I can blame the original source material any more. Apparently, the village smithy is called Droin Oakenshield (no relation to Thorin, I’m sure). The mayor of this little burg is called Aedem (say it out loud). The villagers are happy go lucky folk who like dressing up as big four leaf clovers to please the God of Luck. This is the kind of village that DESERVES to be slaughtered by the forces of evil. Heck, this is the kind of village where you would call the orc hordes yourself, and pay for a chance to watch.
And worst of all, the village is situated on the River Kok. Yes, you read that right. I’m just praying that’s a subtle joke aimed at our immature past selves…but I fear it will be lost on their target audience, who will still be their past selves, if you follow me.
Book 2 of the series is set in the same world (“Titan”) but thankfully leaves out the village of Gilford. It works from book nine in the series, Caverns of the Snow Witch. Said witch is a powerful vampire (and, judging by the cover, a hottie) who also needs to be killed and have her stuff removed by three or four 8th level characters. Alas, this book shares all the faults of its predecessor, and then some. The original Snow Witch followed the model of many of the later FF books, that of breaking the adventure off half-way and sending you on a different quest. Here, this is accomplished by a friendly NPC accidentally giving you all a Death Curse just before you kill the Snow Witch, a curse which can only be cured by a mind-numbingly dull (not to mention anti-climactic) hike back to Firetop Mountain. So yes, we’ve now added insane and cruel railroading to the crimes against gaming perpetrated solely for the sake of being true to the source material.
There’s a lot of talk these days on RPGNet’s forums about how roleplaying games are a different medium to films and novels, and that it’s a mistake to think that what works for one medium will also work for another. Surprise surprise, this is also true of Fighting Fantasy books. If the writer had simply used the backstories and what for the sake of argument I will call the plots of the books, and turned them into “kill ‘em all” dungeon crawls, they would have been usable and useful products. Not particularly exciting by any means, but if dungeon hacks are your thing, such an adventure might easily fill a winter evening with mindless hack and slay, and provide a moment of reminiscence into the bargain. By insisting on including all the little things that made FF books what they were – ie puzzles to be cracked with repeated play – they’ve created a flawed, foolish and frustrating crawl that I wouldn’t wish on even the most bored twelve-year-old powergamers. There are just too many better alternatives on the shelves right now to put up with this.
In short, a FF book is a FF book. A dungeon crawl is a dungeon crawl. This attempt to combine the two is a non-starter that manages to capture the worst of both worlds, and served only to remind me of everything I loathed about FF novels in the first place.
Biased? You decide.
Substance: 1 Style 2
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