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Post by thealmightymudworm on Aug 4, 2023 19:26:09 GMT
By the way, if this is making it sound like I enjoyed this book because I'm some kind of petrolhead, I'm really not. I have about as much knowledge of cars as a medieval yeoman. A couple of years back, I went to hire a car for a family holiday, and the guy from the car hire place sat with me as I took it out on a test run. 'Nice runner isn't it mate?' he said, clearly very enthusiastic about his job. 'Yeah, a nice runner,' I replied, knowing full well I had no frame of reference for what would differentiate a 'nice' runner from a 'not nice' one. 'What litre do you reckon she is?' What? 'Ooh, I wouldn't like to say.' 'No go on, have a guess. It'll surprise you. What litre do you reckon?' Christ, he's not taking no for an answer. I'm desperately picturing a measuring jug in my head, trying to work out how many litres a car engine, any car engine, might be. 'I dunno, maybe, like...twenty?' He stopped talking to me after that. I suppose at least that was one advantage to him realising that I was a blithering idiot. This made me genuinely LOL. Glad there's someone out there who knows even less about cars than me! Does anyone know how much involvement Green actually had? I've also heard a few mentions of him also assisting with Gates of Death and Crystal of Storms, but not sure where this came from or what his level of involvement was. For Secrets I think Steve asked JG that question at FFF4, saying something like "How much of this do you reckon is down to you?". It sounded a bit like Steve came up with a big bunch of ideas and Jon wove an adventure out of them.
Edit: The brief comment I'm remembering is at 1:52:30 in the second livestream video I embedded in this post. You sense Jon is being modest. They talk a bit more about it as the video goes on of course.
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Post by schlendrian on Aug 4, 2023 20:35:24 GMT
(as many others have observed before, burning a load of petrol in a race to win some more petrol in a world where petrol is an incredibly valuable and limited commodity is kinda daft) Burning valuable petrol in a show of my prowess is exactly what I'd do if I wanted to establish my status in such a world.
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Post by petch on Aug 5, 2023 7:32:32 GMT
21 - Spectral Stalkers
One of the most unusual adventures in the FF canon on account of it feeling sci-fi without actually being sci-fi, and that's primarily down to the planar travelling functionality of the Aleph. I've said this before, but the way it works reminds me so strongly of Quantum Leap that I can't help but think that that series must have been a huge influence on Darvill-Evans' thinking as he wrote the book - specifically, those pre-credits sequences where Scott Bakula leaps into a new body only to find himself in a compromising situation that sets up the action for the rest of the episode. The Aleph does much the same, dropping you right into the midst of all kinds of mishaps. You've appeared on a sacrificial altar just as an army of skeletal warriors are preparing a blood ritual? Oh boy! You find yourself as a playing piece in an elaborate and deadly chess game played by uncaring gods? Oh boy! You've materialised as the filling in a spitroast between the Chuckle Brothers saying that 'to me, to you' thing as they gyrate back and forth? Oh boy! I may have made one of those up. Such is the breadth of imagination here, it's amazing that Darvill-Evans managed to pack it all in to 400 references. In a way, it's a shame that he didn't have the clout that Steve Jackson had which meant that Jackson could extend that standard number of references, as you get the impression that there's so much more he could have done. But then, as it is Darvill-Evans cleverly does just enough to leave you with a lasting impression of the worlds you visit, while still leaving you wanting more. Some of the more fully realised worlds feel like they could have a whole gamebook based in them alone (the vast libraries of Limbo are endlessly fascinating). Other visits are brief enough to give you a quick teasing flavour before you rapidly move on (that creepy playhouse has a wonderfully evoked sense of horror, like a proto YouTube creepypasta). If I do have a criticism, it's that there is so little dice rolling involved that it frequently feels more like an extended Choose Your Own Adventure rather than a Fighting Fantasy, but everything is just so captivating thanks to its unbounded creativity and imagination that in the end that hardly really matters.
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Post by petch on Aug 5, 2023 10:02:39 GMT
I'm just wondering which country has started more wars, Russia, Iran or the US? Which country has used nukes: Russia, Iran or the US? Which country has killed more children, committed more genocide and promoted more conflict: Russia, Iran or the US? Which country has invaded the most other countries: Russian, Iran or the US? Bonus question: which country is the most evil, Russia, Iran or the US (I will also accept 'Israel' as an answer here for those who cannot think but can only repeat)? Point taken. I think Mr Sadler is referring to a glib comparison I made in the opening sentence of my Secrets of Salamonis writeup, which was only intended to be a flippant joke but on reflection had no place here. I've edited my review to remove it.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,462
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Aug 5, 2023 12:36:13 GMT
I think Spectral Stalkers would be a firm contender for my favourite book in the series but for two points: - collecting the signs and portents is mathematically very unlikely and seems to serve little purpose anyway - I haaaaaaate that maze
Still comfortably in my top 20 though.
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Post by petch on Aug 5, 2023 14:53:10 GMT
20 - Demons of the Deep
Here we go, top twenty. The creme de la creme. The pick of the bunch. The cream of the crop. The smashing orangey bit in the middle of your Jaffa Cake. In my inept opinion, anyway.
Demons of the Deep feels like a good one to kick this off, as there's something that just seems so inherently likeable about it. I've been racking my brains trying to think of a way to articulate why this is. It's got an original and well done underwater setting, yes. It has the hallmarks of an SJ2 adventure that understands the essential elements that make a gamebook fun to play - an emphasis on exploration, multiple ways of winning it, semi-victories that leave you wanting to come back and try to do even better next time. All good stuff, but not quite enough to rank it amongst the very best in the series. Then flicking through it again, the thing that made me like it so much came back to me: it's its sense of playfulness. Jackson imbues what could otherwise have been throwaway filler with an irresistible charm. The old merman workman using undersea critters in place of tools. The sunken cathedral housing angelfish as well as devilfish. A dapper swordfish appropriately announcing himself as the greatest swordfighter in the ocean. All of these things could have been presented with the wacky sense of humour that made Sky Lord so divisive, but instead Jackson does so with a straight face so that they seem like a natural part of his beguiling undersea world.
19 - Stormslayer
Stormslayer feels to me like Green trying to do something a little different to his previous books. He'd already established (lots of times) his ability to build a convincing and authentic-feeling world around the theme and mood of a book. Here, while that strong writing is still present, it takes something of a back seat to Green experimenting with what he can do with the gameplay aspect of a gamebook. There's a strong sense that he is growing in confidence as a gamebook author, and so is trying to play with what else the medium can do. And what he does is really quite clever indeed.
During your initial character generation, you're required to determine via a die roll the day of the week on which your adventure starts. This randomisation in essence creates an astonishingly vast number of ways in which your adventure can unfold, as the events that occur at different locations in the book can vary wildly depending on the day you visit them. How your quest proceeds is no longer simply the result of your own choices and whether you pass or fail particular checks or combats; you're now also at the mercy of the calendar, so what may have been a more desirable or less troublesome route through the book in one playthrough may not be such for the next. This, added to the fact that there are so many places to go and different ways of getting to each, makes this one of the most technically ingenious and well designed books FF can offer. It's nice to see there was still room for canny innovation even sixty odd books and thirty odd years into the series' life, and Green pulls it off with style.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,462
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Aug 5, 2023 15:03:33 GMT
Then flicking through it again, the thing that made me like it so much came back to me: it's its sense of playfulness. Jackson imbues what could otherwise have been throwaway filler with an irresistible charm. The old merman workman using undersea critters in place of tools. The sunken cathedral housing angelfish as well as devilfish. A dapper swordfish appropriately announcing himself as the greatest swordfighter in the ocean. All of these things could have been presented with the wacky sense of humour that made Sky Lord so divisive, but instead Jackson does so with a straight face so that they seem like a natural part of his beguiling undersea world. It always puts me in mind of that 70s adaptation of The Water Babies if you've ever seen that.
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Post by tyrion on Aug 5, 2023 19:45:47 GMT
Stormslayer could have been great but some of the sub quests devolve into mini dungeon crawls.
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Post by petch on Aug 6, 2023 8:51:07 GMT
18 - Magehunter
If there's one thing Paul Mason can't be accused of, it's a lack of ambition. One of the main gameplay hooks here is a body swap, caused by passing through a magic portal. Not satisfied with just having two characters switch bodies, like some of those eighties comedy films that used the trope, Mason has it affect three: yourself (the titular Magehunter), the book's main antagonist Mencius, and new Margrave-in-waiting Reinhardt (more on him later). This creates a staggering number of permutations as to how many of the situations in the book play out. It's truly impressive how Mason manages to contain it all without the book falling over. It also allows him to play a very mean but very clever trick - in order to beat the book 'perfectly' and get its best ending, you need to face Mencius while he is inhabiting your own body, making this a title where rolling low scores for your Skill and Stamina is advantageous to the player. A nasty flip of FF convention, sure, but one that fits the body swap premise perfectly and so doesn't feel unfair at all.
The whole body swap thing isn't the only aspect of the book that makes Magehunter stand out though. There's also the factor that you are a foreign tourist to Allansia, dragged there by that aforementioned magic portal. Your character's home world doesn't get a whole lot of air time - during the adventure itself you only spend a handful of references there right at the beginning - but what there is gives you a tantalising sense of it, in the thrilling chase detailed in the Background section, the wonderfully creative supplement 'The Most Revered Treatise of Mage Hunting' which is full of all kinds of odd snippets that suggest that wizards are very different creatures here to the ones in Titan we are used to, and in a fantastic storytelling sequence that takes on the quality of a lucid dream and provides hints at the Magehunter's own background. Mason nails the odd dissonance that's at work here where you, the player (assuming you have read FF before and have some familiarity with Allansia) has more knowledge of the world than the avatar that you are controlling, who is frequently confused as to why those rules from the Treatise don't apply to local wizards and who doesn't realise that not all wizards here are evil. Exploring with foreign eyes is made great fun by Mason's inventive descriptions of standard fantasy beasts as perceived by one who doesn't know what they are, so a Roc becomes a 'bird of prodigious size' and dark elves become 'dwellers in darkness'.
I can't talk about Magehunter without mentioning Reinhardt, as he is easily my favourite companion character in the whole series (sorry, Throm). And that's because he is such a prick. Cowardly, vain and ceaselessly self-serving, he is only a 'companion' inasmuch that he travels with you, he is certainly not a friend; in fact he's more often an out-and-out liability, with more than one place where his actions can get you killed. His relationship with you puts me in mind of a sitcom where one much cleverer character has no choice but to put up with another because he's their social better, like Edmund and the Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third or Kif and Zapp Brannigan in Futurama. But - in Fighting Fantasy character undergoes actual character development shocker - by the end he has learned from and been humbled by his experiences, and you get the feeling that he will be a better ruler, and a better man, because of them.
If I'm going to nitpick, the path to that best ending, once found, makes for a pretty short adventure. However, that is only because Mason uses lots of paragraphs for all of the different situations that can occur depending on which body you are inhabiting, and also because, similarly to Steve Jackson, he provides a wealth of detail on the false or sub-optimal paths. Also actually looking for that true path is great fun, as unlike The Crimson Tide there's a much more traditional way of finding it, exploration is a joy thanks to little touches like the now-customary cameo from the Riddling Reaver and a storyteller boring himself to sleep while recounting the story of Slaves of the Abyss (in a lovely bit of self deprecating humour), and uncharacteristically from the usually tough-as-nails Mason books there are some part-victory endings where you can defeat your rival but don't manage to get everybody placed back in their right bodies. Technically clever and enormous fun to play, Magehunter is a gem.
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Post by CharlesX on Aug 6, 2023 9:09:46 GMT
Magehunter is one of my favourite books too (not just FF or gamebooks, but as the yanks say, period). I love the concept of worlds with real witches and warlocks, The Witches is very much amazing to me, and as you say Paul Mason does it with definite Skill. I think though 'the style and spirit is better than the whole' - sometimes I prefer adventures that are longer even if they are sword-and-sorcery derivative.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,462
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Aug 6, 2023 16:46:27 GMT
who is frequently confused as to why those rules from the Treatise don't apply to local wizards The issue isn't that the rules don't apply (actually I think every rule does technically do what it says it does on Titan), it's that magic-users are way more common on Titan. So, for example, using a technique to find the nearest wizard is way less effective at finding a particular wizard than it would be back home. Anyway, Magehunter is indeed great: my favourite Mason offering. If the final fight weren't so unfair and there weren't a few instances where you find yourself having to take an action that you know is wrong because you cannot do any of the alternatives (an issue in all the Mason books I think), it would probably be in my top 5.
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Post by petch on Aug 7, 2023 9:11:02 GMT
17 - Siege of Sardath
It's funny how some books take on a different complexion when you know a little more about their author. When I read about Keith Martin's past as a psychologist, I started spotting telltale signs about his background in some of his books, especially Stealer of Souls. Similarly, I started looking at Siege of Sardath in a new light when I discovered Keith P Phillips worked in the education industry; yeah, that fits, I thought, as Siege of Sardath is so incredibly cerebral. And by that I mean it asks a lot of its player. Now, class, you'd better be up to scratch on your Roman numerals, lateral thinking, visual comprehension and geometric shape building or else you're going to be in for a tough ride. But it's not just in failing to solve one of its many puzzles that Siege of Sardath can scupper your chances of success. You can take too long exploring and so your time limit runs out. You can fail to explore thoroughly enough and so miss out on a vital item, piece of information or Steve Jackson-style hidden paragraph trigger. You can pick one of the wrong options in the numerous trial-and-error sections such as putting the wrong ingredients into the potion-mixing machine or choosing an incorrect dialogue option in the inventive climactic confrontation with the Dark Elf Sorcerer. Add to that the fact that it contains one of the nastiest red herrings in FF history - namely, that visiting Sardath itself takes you off of the true path and you can't win if you go there. It's not the first book in the series to employ a smokescreen to try to trick the player of course, but to have one in the book's title? Genius.
Unsurprisingly, all of this makes for a very, very difficult adventure. It's up there with Creature of Havoc and The Crimson Tide in the toughness department in my view. I'd argue there are a couple of occasions where it oversteps the mark from 'challenging' to 'unfair' - there's an early meeting with a trader in which you have to pick the very counter-intuitive option of telling him that you don't want to buy potions from him even though you do actually need a potion from him, and that geometric puzzle I mentioned earlier doesn't really work. While a neat idea for a puzzle in theory, requiring the player to have access to a photocopier or some tracing paper or something doesn't lend itself well to the pick-up-and-play value of FF, and if you do manage to solve it, it doesn't really look much like the numerical value it is supposed to represent. Overall though, the cleverness of the book's design and its numerous creative and well-implemented puzzles makes this incredibly satisfying to complete, and even though it will take the average player a good few tries to do it, it's a pleasure to go back and try again thanks to its excellent storytelling (its Background section, in particular, is one of the most explosive openings to an adventure the series can offer). Gold star, Mr Phillips.
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Post by CharlesX on Aug 7, 2023 11:28:15 GMT
Do you have to tell the trader you don't want to buy anything to get his mystery potion, or is the potion just advantageous\beneficial? They've been known to ask players to do that in Japanese video games too, personally I think it's as unfair to ask the player to guess when to put on the Brain Slayer Amulet. The conversation does read like a mind-game you'd have with a teacher who wants to give you a D for a paper you worked hard on .
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Post by petch on Aug 7, 2023 11:53:33 GMT
Do you have to tell the trader you don't want to buy anything to get his mystery potion, or is the potion just advantageous\beneficial? Yes I believe so, using the mystery potion is the only way to save Colrhyn who holds a vital quest item.
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Post by sleepyscholar on Aug 7, 2023 13:07:48 GMT
Magehunter is one of my favourite books too (not just FF or gamebooks, but as the yanks say, period). I love the concept of worlds with real witches and warlocks, The Witches is very much amazing to me, and as you say Paul Mason does it with definite Skill. I think though 'the style and spirit is better than the whole' - sometimes I prefer adventures that are longer even if they are sword-and-sorcery derivative. This is a fair thing to ask, but remember that authors and publishers were moving in different directions at this point. Before the series was cancelled they were saying that new book proposals should be 300 paras. I think there was some pressure at the time of Magehunter, which I resisted. I would have loved to have done what you asked and added more paragraphs (this is probably the first book where I actually paid attention to readers, which probably explains why it isn't quite as mercilessly difficult as its predecessors). Though that of course would have made it even harder to keep track of all the body-swappery.
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Post by sleepyscholar on Aug 7, 2023 13:09:44 GMT
18 - Magehunter a storyteller boring himself to sleep while recounting the story of Slaves of the Abyss . I'm so glad you noticed my little joke.
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Post by pip on Aug 7, 2023 13:16:22 GMT
Magehunter is one of the few FF books I never got to read, even though I really want to. It seems really hard to find, and the price people ask for it on auction websites is insane.
I love Siege of Sardath. When I first read it, I knew I was in for something special with that awesome introduction. Then the book continues being awesome with clever puzzles, red herrings, Steve Jackson-like hidden triggers, a memorable boss fight, and the kind of tough difficulty I enjoy (finding the true path, not being lucky with the dice). It would be top 5 for me.
Ok, the geometric puzzle doesn't 100% work, for that pace-breaking issue you mentioned, and also because, yes, even when solved, it's not that obvious (IMO the three numbers look fine, but it's the fourth letter that you're supposed to just omit that makes it confusing). Still, it's a minor gripe, and that puzzle has somehow become part of the book's legend.
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Post by petch on Aug 8, 2023 9:53:47 GMT
16 - Sword of the Samurai
This is another of those books that had the advantage of appearing early enough in the series that it could explore a setting that hadn't been done before, so straight away for the reader there's the excitement of trying something that feels fresh and new. Paul Mason would arguably later capture an eastern setting more authentically in his Isles of the Dawn set books as he would manage to do so without resorting to archetypes - but it's what Sword of the Samurai does with its archetypes that makes it special. It draws on well-selected pieces of Japanese folklore and turns them into memorable encounters, like a village plagued by Rokuro-Kubi, beings whose heads can freely detach from their bodies to stalk their prey, or the Tatsu, a wingless dragon who swims rather than flies through the air and can make for either a dangerous enemy or a powerful ally if you can prove yourself worthy.
Of course, the setting isn't the only thing that's original here. It's also the first book to try to implement a Special Skill system, and while not perfect (two of the skills, archery and fast draw, are by a wide margin more useful than the other two) it's still nicely done and lets you add a level of personalisation to the type of eastern warrior you want your avatar to be. Additionally, the book is designed so that the very first decision you make in reference 1 will set you off on one of two completely separate paths to your goal. One is noticeably more difficult than the other; I'm not sure if that was a conscious decision by Smith and Thomson but regardless I quite like having that 'select your difficulty setting' option at the beginning, and of course this effectively gives you two adventures for the price of one and when the adventure is this good, that's a very welcome thing.
The two paths reconvene at an encounter with the demonic Dai-Oni where you must defeat him and his monstrous allies in the Tourney of the Planes. Simply put, this bit is awesome. First, you get to pick which plane you want to visit from a large selection with cool names like 'The Mountain of Ineffable Holiness' or 'The Pinnacle of Ultimate Height'. Then, depending on the actions you have taken in your journey so far (and which of the two initial paths you chose) you may be able to recruit various creatures to your cause. It goes without saying that you can feel really hardcore if you know you've got a battalion of holy knights or a dragon standing in your corner. And then - and this is the best bit - you get to choose which of your allies you want to face-off against each of the Dai-Oni's minions, Pokemon style. Eleanor the Enchantress, I choose you! The battles here are really brought to life by the artwork - a lot of the book's illustrations depict the various potential standoffs that can occur, and that's a good thing, because they're all ace. You may be able to tell from my enthusiasm that I really liked this bit - but it is just one highlight from an overall very good book.
15 - Slaves of the Abyss
If Stealer of Souls is an example of a series debut where the author is playing it a little safe, then Slaves of the Abyss is one where its authors have the confidence to throw caution to the wind and go for something that's truly out there. It's a book that sets out to confound its reader's expectations at every turn, and succeeds. Just when you think it's one thing, it performs a sudden evasive manoeuvre and turns into another. It starts out straightforwardly enough, with your character as an elite warrior picked out to defend Kallamehr from an impending invasion. Things then take a turn for the peculiar and the book seems to become more about unravelling a mystery as it transpires that there is something very off indeed about this approaching army. Then you're whipped back to Kallamehr for some political intrigue at Lady Carolina's palace. We're back in fairly familiar fantasy territory after that with some forest exploration - oh look we even have some staple enemies here in ogres and goblins - but this is simply lulling you into a false sense of security before a truly leftfield turn into a planar travelling ending.
That synopsis there probably doesn't do the book any justice because if you try to break it down into its component parts it makes it sound quite disjointed. But the book's great triumph is that Mason and Williams take all of these bits and make it work. Each 'chapter' for want of a better word flows naturally into the next, each adding a few jigsaw pieces at a time to the fascinating mystery at the heart of the book so that its unexpected and otherworldly ending sequence, when it comes, feels earned. There is real narrative skill at work in making it all fit together, and some of the individual parts are outstanding - your first glimpse of the encroaching army, a black horde of subsumed peasants with eerily abandoned villages all around, is genuinely unsettling, and the sequence at the palace where you have to rely on snatches of half-heard conversations and an accumulation of minor clues to identify a traitor is subtle, clever and gripping. For something so unusual and so ambitious to come together as well as it does - and remain fun to play, and have a satisfyingly devious solution to find, and maintain a perfectly pitched gameplay balance - it can only be applauded, and makes for an astonishingly accomplished debut from both of its authors.
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Post by pip on Aug 8, 2023 14:50:14 GMT
Slaves of the Abyss is also one of my favourites, I love how it reads like a true "interactive novel". By that, I mean it's as interactive as all FF books are, but the story is also compelling enough that you just want to find out more about the book's universe and see what will happen next. For example, there's this chapter when you visit a village and everybody is staring you down, you can get arrested and asked to show the contents of your pockets, you wonder what this is all about since you didn't do anything wrong, then only later on you find out that someone has been impersonating you and they all think you're the impersonator. This "Ah! I get it now" moment is fun and rewarding. Then there's the court intrigue in Kallamehr, not too unlike Game of Thrones now that I think of it. And yes, the last chapter which is cleverly woven into the narrative, so that it feels natural despite being truly unconventional. This book is probably also top 5-tier for me.
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Post by petch on Aug 9, 2023 10:17:24 GMT
14 - Portal of Evil
Many years ago, in my first of several failed attempts to get my son into FF, this was the first book I turned to to try to make him into a fellow enthusiast, because it has dinosaurs and a cool story. I was excited at the prospect of bedtime storytime becoming a time where we could experience all of the adventures together, making the decisions and fighting all of the battles as a father and son team. It was going to be great. And then, during the very first encounter, he pointed at the picture and said 'That's not a spinosaurus. It's too small.' Like many five year olds who develop an interest in dinosaurs, he had rapidly acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of them and so knew his hadrosaur from his sauropod, and could quickly identify whether any dino you would care to name existed in the Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous era. So of course he knew that the spinosaurus was the largest land-based carnivore ever to walk the earth, bigger even than a T-Rex, and the creature depicted here was not much taller than a human. I tried to explain to him that perhaps it was immature, or that because it had passed through a trans-dimensional portal its genetic makeup had been corrupted by dark and unknown forces. Upon which he stared at me blankly and said 'Can we read the story about the hungry caterpillar again please daddy?'
I may have failed to convert my son to FF, but I still love Portal of Evil for the same reasons I chose it back then: because it has dinosaurs and a cool story. Now that I come to think of it, some of the remarks I made above about the way Slaves of the Abyss unfolds its story apply quite well here too - there's a subtle accumulation of hints about the true nature of the evil forces you are up against in the opening parts of the book (which you need to explore quite thoroughly to amass all of the information you need), before a conclusion that hurls you headlong into unknown territory to confront that evil. One of the many things that was especially effective for me in the early parts was the suggestion that the people suffering because of the portal were at least in part culpable for their own misfortune due to man's greed; in a world where the common peasants are usually blameless victims of evil wizards' schemes incorporating an anti-materialistic message made for a refreshing change, and while the corrupting influence of gold hangs over things Darvill-Evans resists the temptation to be too heavy-handed about it. The world beyond the portal has the feeling of a 'lost valley' film from early cinema, and exploring it evokes a similar feeling of wonder. It's telling that the final confrontation of the book isn't against the leader of the slave warrior army Horfak but against the portal itself; it's a brilliantly effective ending that reminds you that what you have been battling against all this time is something elemental, something unknowable, and like all well told stories leaves you thinking about it long after you have closed the book.
13 - Vault of the Vampire
Perhaps for a reader for whom Vault of the Vampire was not their first Keith Martin book, the impact of this one would not be as great. It's the book that basically invented that familiar 'Keith Martin formula', all hubs and hidden powerups located in optional areas. If you'd read a later Martin book before, this might seem enjoyable but maybe not all that new. But for me, both when reading as a kid and when reading through the books sequentially again as an adult, it felt like a completely fresh take on the Fighting Fantasy format, one which emphasised and mined new possibilities for the gameplay aspect of a book; in short, Martin found a new way to put the 'game' into 'gamebook'.
In fact, there's an argument to be made that even though this was the first time Martin used that formula, he never actually did so more effectively again. There are so many features of the book that keep the game interesting; you can become inflicted with an Affliction which should change your priorities to ridding yourself of it as soon as you can before it proves deadly, you can collect one of the many items that gives you a bonus in combat and decide when is most advantageous to use it, and late in the game you can even acquire some spells. The hub-based design of Castle Heydrich suits the subject matter perfectly, as it is essentially a haunted house and you have to carefully weigh up the risk / reward possibilities of exploration. Should you try and take the most direct route to your goal so as to avoid the traps and powerful undead guardians that reside in the unplumbed depths of the castle? Or do you take that risk of falling foul of them in the hope that you will discover equipment or helpful info that will aid you in your ultimate fight against your quarry, or even if you are very lucky find one of the Count's coffins and by destroying it weaken him? As it's an ancient family home, there are secrets too to be found from exploring its wings and hallways; you may find a ghost from Heydrich's past who holds family secrets the Count would rather remain buried, or you could find one of the castle's living inhabitants in the form of one of Heydrich's servants or family members, who may have their own agenda (in particular the Count's wonderfully untrustworthy scheming sister). Castle Heydrich, and the woods that surround it, are vividly brought to life by all of these things, which makes exploring it and encountering its ghoulish inhabitants intriguing and fun, and makes Vault of the Vampire a classic.
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Post by vastariner on Aug 9, 2023 10:37:16 GMT
Upon which he stared at me blankly and said 'Can we read the story about the hungry caterpillar again please daddy?' Sword of the Samurai?
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Post by CharlesX on Aug 9, 2023 10:49:29 GMT
Upon which he stared at me blankly and said 'Can we read the story about the hungry caterpillar again please daddy?' Sword of the Samurai? I'm sitting here wondering frankly what the hell age your kid was, because either hungry caterpillar is too young or Portal Of Evil too old .
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Post by petch on Aug 9, 2023 11:36:43 GMT
I'm sitting here wondering frankly what the hell age your kid was, because either hungry caterpillar is too young or Portal Of Evil too old . In my keenness to get him into FF I probably first tried when he was a bit too young. Sadly subsequent attempts when he got older met with similar failure.
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Post by CharlesX on Aug 9, 2023 12:19:12 GMT
I'm sitting here wondering frankly what the hell age your kid was, because either hungry caterpillar is too young or Portal Of Evil too old . In my keenness to get him into FF I probably first tried when he was a bit too young. Sadly subsequent attempts when he got older met with similar failure. Probably should have read your message more keenly and I would have seen where you wrote the answer! Never mind though.
So, I imagine late five\six? I might think a six-year-old might get that a baby dinosaur is much smaller than when it is full-grown, but not the trans-dimensional portal stuff . Kids tend to be pedantic know-it-alls even when they might be in the wrong (with evidence, I mean).
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Post by petch on Aug 10, 2023 15:24:00 GMT
12 - The Riddling Reaver
I'll admit to some nostalgia being at play here. Not too long after I joined secondary school, there was a week of rotten weather so my class were confined to our form room during lunchtimes and breaks. I brought in my copy of The Riddling Reaver and suggested to some of my friends that it might be a fun way to pass the time. None of them had ever role played before, and I'd never GM'd, so not surprisingly things got off to a shaky start. In the second scene, the answer to one of the riddles the party needs to solve to progress is 'minotaur', and none of my friends had ever heard of one of them, so were having a tough time trying to solve it even with Dappa's clues ('It's the thing from the labyrinth? Oh I know - it's David Bowie!'). After a while though, we all started to get properly into it, and even when the weather started to brighten up we'd voluntarily stay inside and carry on playing the game, and stayed behind after school into the evening on the Friday to finish it off. My friends began to embrace the role playing, got into character and started to think of outside the box solutions to the scenarios, and in that final confrontation with the Reaver they were becoming overwhelmed with the hordes of his Replicanth army when one of them had the bright idea to tactically retreat to the room containing the vials of powdered creatures which he then hurled into the Replicanth production line vats, causing havoc to break out in the Reaver's laboratory as swarms of jellified animals ran amok, culminating in the same player character barrelling through the assembled masses of the Reaver's minions on the back of a mucilaginous mammoth and heroically sacrificing himself as his mount charged the Reaver, with all three of them ultimately tumbling to their fiery doom in the lava pits.
For many years thereafter, I still recalled The Riddling Reaver fondly but it wasn't until a recent reread that I realised just how good it really is. There's not a single bit of filler; every encounter is carefully and cleverly constructed to challenge the players and it bursts with energy and ideas. I mentioned in my brief thoughts on Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-Playing Game that due to the basic nature of FF's core rules it would take something a little special to enable a truly collaborative group campaign using them, and The Riddling Reaver does just that with its emphasis on problem solving and finding clever ways around the scenarios it presents, so that any player regardless of the stats of their character can get involved. It also adds a few optional rules that still keep things simple enough for novice gamers to get their heads around but really help with personalising their characters, like damage tables for different weapons and a rather ingenious lifting of the excellent magic system from The Citadel of Chaos.
Incidentally, the thing that made me reread it recently was a comment on here by sleepyscholar where he mentioned that it was written with the aim of one possible interpretation of it being that the player characters are the villains. I'd never considered that before, but they are after all questing to prevent an emissary of the gods from doing his duty of bringing balance to the universe; there's even one bit where the players' reckless interference in these matters is clearly spelled out, at the end of Act Three where they disrupt the equilibrium of the eternal struggle between the icons of good and evil. Which begs the question: is it wrong to prevent someone from doing evil deeds if those deeds were only performed with the aim of maintaining the cosmic balance in mind? Ooooooh. The next time the wife tells me to stop reading my stupid kids' books and go and clear the guttering, I'm going to tell her they are making me ponder important philosophical questions.
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Post by petch on Aug 11, 2023 11:37:45 GMT
11 - Talisman of Death
Up until this point in the series, Fighting Fantasy lacked a fully realised game world - Titan was still gradually being built, piece by piece, through the various locations in which each book was set. Ian Livingstone was clearly making an effort to join up some of the dots in his books; the Background sections would usually reference some geography, and in Caverns of the Snow Witch you actually got the chance to revisit some locations from prior books. But the world was clearly still in its infancy, and the publication of Titan to tie it all together was still two years away.
What we had here was a book set in a fully constructed and richly detailed universe for the first time, and it's all the better for it. The characters and locations present don't seem to just be there for the sake of moving the story along, they have personalities all of their own. While you meet and have highly entertaining interactions with the likes of Hawkana, Tyutchev and Cassandra over the course of your adventure, you can imagine them having a life outside of the page. Greyguilds has a lived-in feeling, and while you can explore many of its streets, churches, shops and establishments you get the feeling that you have only scratched its surface and you're left with a solid impression of what life would be like living there. What makes this work so well is the premise that your character is not a native of these lands, so both the reader and protagonist are learning about Orb, its land, lore and gods, together. Of course, it helps that there's an absolute cracker of an adventure to play within this game world too, one given gravity and intrigue by the idea that you are a pawn in a game of gods, and the eponymous talisman you are quested to carry is so charged with menace and mystery that it almost becomes a character in its own right.
10 - Phantoms of Fear
There are a couple of issues with this one I should point out at the outset: dream combat is unfairly weighted against the player, and a couple of the puzzles Waterfield includes are just too hard (the riddle in the pixie glade and the Trial of Ghosts). Despite these points though, I still think Phantoms of Fear is entirely deserving of the first spot in my top ten simply because it's so beautifully written and designed.
There's such an elegance to Waterfield's prose. If Masks of Mayhem saw him purposefully employ a stripped back writing style, here he allows himself to indulge in much more embellished, richer detail. References are often quite lengthy and wordy - reference 1 alone spans four pages - but that's okay, because frankly they are frequently beautiful. The adventure begins deep in the hidden glades of Affen Forest, and Waterfield has such a knack for delivering pastoral imagery that you feel like you're taking a stroll through the woodlands with him, the trees, the light, the sounds. It's vivid and almost poetic in places. And then, as you get nearer to Ishtra's lair, the rot and corruption almost seems to seep from the page, the blackening earth, the diseased trees. As well as the wonderful physical descriptions on offer here, there are also the much more unconventional dreamscapes portrayed. In quite a striking and novel gameplay hook, your character has the power of dream-walking - to be able to enter and interact with a dream world as if it were a heightened form of reality. Here is where Waterfield really has some fun with presenting bizarre, ethereal and otherworldly situations (including a lovely little Trial of Champions Easter egg), but again, he does it with such grace and style that reading about these lucid dreams becomes an entrancing pleasure. This concept really comes into its own in the final dungeon that you can negotiate by snapping back and forth between the dream state and the real world, and where the contents of the dreams often cleverly parallel the physical attributes of reality, so a forest glade ripe with fruit becomes a dining hall, or shifting, flowing desert sands become a subterranean river. It's incredibly intricate and elaborate and must have been a nightmare to design, but it's pulled off with flair and really adds another layer to the gameplay.
This dual level of reality allows Waterfield to include two different ways of overcoming your adversary, as you can opt to try to defeat Ishtra in either the dream world or the real world. Neither is easy - the real world option requires you to collect several artefacts that are well hidden in various places in the book, and if you want to beat him in the dream world you'll need to power yourself up by overcoming numerous spirit fights (which, as I mentioned earlier, always favour your opponent statistically). Nonetheless, the journey to try to do so is so richly evoked that traversing Waterfield's verdant forests and illusory dreamscapes makes each attempt a fulfilling joy.
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Post by pip on Aug 11, 2023 13:50:21 GMT
Talisman of Death (for those who may not know) is a crossover with the great Way of the Tiger series, which also takes place on Orb, and where Tyutchev, Thaum and Cassandra also appear (and have a bigger role than in this book, IIRC). I remember reading these characters and locations, among others, were actually part of a world the authors had created for a custom RPG they were playing, so it's no wonder the world feels so complete.
Phantoms of Fear is also great, I agree about it being well written, with the "dream" aspect becoming steadily more like a nightmare as you get closer to your nemesis. Being able to switch between dream world and real world, and having to figure out when is a good time to do so, is a real joy.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,462
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Aug 11, 2023 18:47:28 GMT
Phantoms really seems to have had a bit of a reappraisal amongst fans in recent years. It seemed to always be considered a bit mediocre by fans - some nice ideas that didn't really come together. Now it's frequently appearing in lists of favourite books in the series. And well deserved too.
In a way, it's sort of the antithesis of Deathmoor. Phantoms is very flawed from a gameplay perspective but one of the most interesting books to read and explore. Deathmoor is extremely competent in terms of gameplay (I think it doesn't get nearly enough appreciation from fans for that) but bar a few sequences, is a bit workmanlike. Can you imagine if Robin came back with a book that had the imagination, exploration and poetry of Phantoms with the design and balanced gameplay of Deathmoor? Probably be the best FF ever.
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Post by petch on Aug 12, 2023 8:54:07 GMT
Phantoms really seems to have had a bit of a reappraisal amongst fans in recent years. It seemed to always be considered a bit mediocre by fans - some nice ideas that didn't really come together. Now it's frequently appearing in lists of favourite books in the series. And well deserved too. In a way, it's sort of the antithesis of Deathmoor. Phantoms is very flawed from a gameplay perspective but one of the most interesting books to read and explore. Deathmoor is extremely competent in terms of gameplay (I think it doesn't get nearly enough appreciation from fans for that) but bar a few sequences, is a bit workmanlike. Can you imagine if Robin came back with a book that had the imagination, exploration and poetry of Phantoms with the design and balanced gameplay of Deathmoor? Probably be the best FF ever. I should give Deathmoor another chance really. I think I judged it so harshly because it was one I hadn't read before as a kid, and knowing what Waterfield was capable of from Phantoms I was really excited to play it, and ended up very disappointed.
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Post by petch on Aug 12, 2023 10:10:50 GMT
9 - City of Thieves
One of the many problems I've found myself having with the little exercise I've set myself of trying to do at least one writeup a day (also including noticing that I'm using the same words and phrases over and over again, and realising that my memory of some of the books isn't as good as it once was) is trying not to let myself be influenced too much by the views of others that I've either read on this forum or elsewhere, or by childhood nostalgia. I kind of wanted this to be as far as was possible a reflection of my own initial thoughts on the books before I was swayed by other opinions - that's proving tricky as in many cases I've read on here some really insightful thoughts that I hadn't noticed or considered, so it felt right to take these into account without looking like I'm just regurgitating the things that others have said in my own words. Looking back over my writeups, I think sometimes I've been mostly successful there, other times not so much!
The thing with City of Thieves, being the beloved early classic that it is, is that it's been discussed to death and so there's probably nothing I can say that hasn't been said a hundred times already. And as far as childhood nostalgia goes, well this one is the biggie. In my final year of primary school, nearly my entire class (or the boys at least) got big into FF. There were a few class favourites: Vault of the Vampire was well liked, Scorpion Swamp was a fave as it was fun to map, and Creature of Havoc got a lot of discussion if only because to our eleven year old brains it was the hardest thing that had ever been invented and finding its solution was akin to cracking the Enigma code. City of Thieves though was generally regarded as the best. You couldn't call yourself a proper FF fan if you hadn't beaten it at least three times by taking each of the different early game routes through Key Street, Market Street and Clock Street. I can remember we used to consider ourselves rebellious by pulling out and playing our FF books during quiet reading time in class (in retrospect hardly the greatest act of rebellion as the teacher never seemed to mind us clacking away with our dice, but y'know, we thought we were cool at the time) and then at break times we would discuss our progress and strategies. To today's generation, with their TicTacs and their GameStations, a bunch of kids talking about books in their spare time probably sounds about as quaint and archaic as a black and white Victorian photo, but that is what we did. That said, it's really heartening to see some discussion on the forum recently from some of the parents on here enjoying the books once again with their own children. Perhaps there will after all be a new generation who are enraptured by FF's lovely words, and fall in love with City of Thieves as I and my childhood friends once did thanks to its engaging characters like Sourbelly and Fatnose. As George Orwell so very nearly once said, if there is hope it lies in the trolls.
I might just leave this here. I'm conscious I haven't really talked at all about the specifics of what makes Port Blacksand so memorable and full of character, but perhaps in this instance the content is less important than what the book represents. Ian Livingstone caught in a bottle a piece of magic that captured the hearts and the imaginations of a generation.
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