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Post by petch on Sept 10, 2021 15:41:36 GMT
A second very closely-fought semi final where the combatants are separated only by a single vote. The battle could have gone either way but it seems sylas' well reasoned argument in favour of Zagor there swayed at least one wavering voter and turned the tide in his favour. 5-4 to the Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
Winner: Zagor
Semi Final Eliminations: Reiner Heydrich, Balthus Dire
It has come down to this. After two and a half months of voting, bloodshed, narrow victories, comfortable walkovers and heroic comebacks, only the two finest characters FF has produced* are left standing. The finalists size each other up across the battlefield.
On one side, the Riddling Reaver. The trickster god himself watches on over his most favoured minion. Will he continue to be Logaan lucky, or will Logaan's run come to an end? In his route to the final, the Reaver overcame a motley selection of opponents in Astragal, the Lizard King, Shareella, Zharradan Marr and Reiner Heydrich, and only Heydrich seemed to present a significant challenge to him as he beat the others by quite wide margins. Along the way he accumulated a total of 28 votes for him, and 11 against.
On the other, Zagor. The Z man. The big Z. The Notorious Z.A.G. In the very first battle of the tournament, Zagor briefly looked to be in trouble, twice trailing to Ishtra, but in the end he would go on to win with a fairly comprehensive 7-3 victory. Since then, he has also overcome Abdul the Butcher, Belgaroth, Karam Gruul and his sorcerous peer Balthus Dire. He has had a total of 29 votes in his favour, and 10 against, so he has both scored more and conceded less votes than his rival up until this stage...how much of a bearing will this have in the final reckoning?
*According to us. And excepting all of the characters in the series who I didn't initially include. Which, admittedly, is loads.
Grand Final The Riddling Reaver vs Zagor
Your votes will determine the grand winner! Get them in by 4pm Sun 12th when the victor will be crowned.
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Post by philsadler on Sept 10, 2021 16:18:04 GMT
The Riddling Reaver.
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Post by bloodbeasthandler on Sept 10, 2021 16:38:14 GMT
A vote for the Riddling Reaver from me.
He’s a gift to a Gamesmaster or an author - enabling you to indulge in puzzles, traps, jokes (light-hearted and dark), violence of all sorts (from the fairly straightforward shoving people off roofs to catapulting them into shark-infested waters) and subtle plans. He is a master of disguise, so you can never know who he’ll appear as. He has an airship so you’ll never know when or where he’ll appear, and those who meet him can never be sure what he’ll do or why.
He’s a potential spanner in the works for anyone, from trying to let loose chaos across Allansia to buggering up Bythos’ plans by reintroducing him to his sense of humour.
Rightly, he is never given any SKILL and STAMINA scores but instead an encounter with him is limited only by the GM’s or author’s imagination.
And finally, in a gamebook series where
1) victory can depend on random choices like left or right, north or south ...?...
and
2) your chances of winning are usually decided by a dice roll or two before you even turn to paragraph 1 (I’m talking about the character-generation stage – and I’m looking at you in particular Initial SKILL = 6+d6 !!)
It is most fitting that the representative of the forces of Luck and Chance should be the winner.
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Post by The Count on Sept 10, 2021 16:48:10 GMT
Whoever wins, it is a moral victory for Count Reiner Heydrich.
I'll vote for Zagor as he only became a villain because of your greed, giving him an interesting character arc. The onesie wearer shows no development.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,434
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Sept 10, 2021 17:01:04 GMT
Riddling Reaver for me
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Post by CharlesX on Sept 10, 2021 17:18:21 GMT
Am I alone in thinking the forces of neutrality would consider it un-neutral for themselves to win... Or lose... I think the world of neutral, but there's something about not picking a side which seems less than brilliant. At the same time, I can't support someone because he's not someone else. I see Riddling Reaver as a world-beating foe, not even given statistics let alone limits, and Zagor as a vulnerable old man. Riddling Reaver.
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Post by peasantscribbler on Sept 10, 2021 21:14:13 GMT
I'm for Zagor, who is interesting to me in three gamebooks. (I think Legend of Zagor is my favourite of those three.) I only really know the Riddling Reaver from a cameo in Slaves of the Abyss, so it may be unfair of me to vote. On the other hand, I consider this a bit of a proxy vote for gamebooks over RPGs, which I never really got into much. I haven't played an RPG in about 30 years, but I continue to play gamebooks to this day.
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Post by sleepyscholar on Sept 11, 2021 16:19:04 GMT
Whoever wins, it is a moral victory for Count Reiner Heydrich. I'll vote for Zagor as he only became a villain because of your greed, giving him an interesting character arc. The onesie wearer shows no development. What is this business about onesies? Your argument about development is bang on, so I don't see what onesies have to do with anything (the Riddling Reaver I wrote doesn't wear a onesie. What you may imagine you have seen in third-party representations of him is neither here nor there). But more importantly, you are quite right that the Riddling Reaver doesn't show any development as a character. That's because he isn't a character. He's like Batman, Bond or Doctor Who, a plot-force with the shape of a character, but in which any real character development is not possible. I also think the argument that Zagor is the exemplar of FF, while the Reaver is more of an interjection, disrupting gamebooks with a sort of RPG infection, is quite well-observed. I like the fact that everyone who has voted in this from the beginning has made up their own rules, and has their own criteria for their votes, and that's as it should be, so the above need mean nothing. My vote is for Zagor.
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Post by tyrion on Sept 11, 2021 16:37:53 GMT
The Riddling Reaver makes an excellent nemesis, and can turn up whenever he likes for whatever reason he (or his master) has invented. However, he can never be defeated, which is as it should be for an agent of the gods.
I'm sure we all know a Zagor in real life - a chronic overachiever who nevertheless decided they wanted a quiet life instead of becoming a nuclear scientist. He is different in different incarnations, from hermit to vivisection expert to demon. People think Dire is arrogant, but that's nothing compared to naked knife fighting when you are a powerful sorcerer.
I'm voting for Zagor.
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sylas
Baron
"Don't just adventure for treasure; treasure the adventure!"
Posts: 1,677
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy, Way of the Tiger
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Post by sylas on Sept 11, 2021 17:18:44 GMT
The Riddling Reaver all the way!
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Post by a moderator on Sept 11, 2021 18:01:26 GMT
The Riddling Reaver makes an excellent nemesis, and can turn up whenever he likes for whatever reason he (or his master) has invented. However, he can never be defeated, which is as it should be for an agent of the gods. Spoiler for Magehunter. He can be shot dead.
Logaan grumbles about having to make a replacement, so there is a sense in which he can never be completely wiped out, but having the new Reaver be exactly the same as the old one was would go against his ethos. A new Reaver might be like a new Doctor in Doctor Who - the same at his core, but a very different personality.
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Post by petch on Sept 12, 2021 16:37:35 GMT
A suitably epic showdown for the final. The Riddling Reaver raced into a 4-1 lead, before a stirring recovery from a resurgent Zagor tied things back up at 4-4, only for the final vote submitted to win the match, and the tournament, 5-4 for the Reaver.
Winner: The Riddling Reaver
It is over. After weeks of strife, the champion of champions has at last been crowned. Having seen off all comers, the Riddling Reaver stands atop a festering pile of the vanquished slain and raises a bloodied fist in victory, holding aloft the coveted title of Most Bestest Fighting Fantasy Character Ever.
Well that's that done then. In all honesty when I first started this thread nearly three months ago I hadn't really thought it through properly and never intended for it to take this long, and when I realised how chuffing long it actually would take I was sure interest would start waning and it would fizzle out and die a death at some point. So I'm really pleased we managed to see it through to its conclusion, I enjoyed running it and the reason I did was down to the votes and always entertaining and insightful comments from this lovely forum's members.
Just to wind things up, here are a few individual awards from the tournament:-
Most Votes Overall Sharing this award are our two finalists the Riddling Reaver and Zagor, who both amassed a total of 33 votes each.
Most Votes Against Overall Something of a backhanded compliment of an award this one, as the winner would need to last long enough to have the opportunity to accumulate enough votes against them. And in some rather nice symmetry, it is once again shared by the two finalists, each of whom had 15 total votes made against them.
Most Votes in a Single Battle Balthus Dire garnered an unmatched 9 votes in his second round bout against Horfak.
Highest Scoring Match Three matches attracted the highest number of individual votes with 10 apiece: Zagor vs Ishtra, Shareella vs Yaztromo, and Horfak vs Balthus Dire.
Wooden Spoon for Worst Performance Spare a thought for poor Sharcle, Ulrakaah, Ikiru, Krazic, Minos and the Dire Spectre, all of whom failed to win a single vote, but Ulrakaah takes home the booby prize for also losing by the biggest margin (7-0 to Shareella)
Comeback Award (Sponsored by a hologrammatic ABBA) Both Lord Carnuss (in a second round match against Rannik) and Balthus Dire (in his quarter final match against Voivod) managed to overturn 3 vote deficits and went on to win their respective matches.
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Post by bloodbeasthandler on Sept 12, 2021 16:50:32 GMT
Thanks for running it, petch, and out of interest if it had been a tie which one would you have voted for and why?
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Post by petch on Sept 12, 2021 17:11:17 GMT
Thanks for running it, petch, and out of interest if it had been a tie which one would you have voted for and why? Good question...as the final was so close I really was considering the distinct possibility that I would have to put in a casting vote. That didn't sit very well with me; after running it for so long it didn't seem right or democratic that I would go ahead and choose the overall winner. So since the final featured the Riddling Reaver, if it came down to a draw I was going to leave it to the gods of luck and chance to pick the winner and toss a coin. Like some kind of an effete version of Anton Chigurh.
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Post by petch on Sept 12, 2021 17:50:08 GMT
Oh, but now it's over and I can drop my pretence at professional impartiality though, I can tell you who I was rooting for.
At the outset of the competition, it was Balthus Dire (just for the brilliance of the concluding encounter in The Citadel of Chaos) and Lord Azzur - I like the way he has maintained his aura of being an untouchable enigma pretty much throughout the entire series, plus he's synonymous with Blacksand, and I love Blacksand.
As it progressed however, I found myself really pulling for Jann. I couldn't help picturing the wee guy amongst all of the assorted powerful villains around him, and I'm an underdog-rooter at heart. I was genuinely gutted when he went out.
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Post by CharlesX on Sept 12, 2021 18:05:34 GMT
The last one was the most difficult decision ever - even now I don't know if I went with the right one. But as The Riddling Reader - or Treguard - might put it, it's a game, isn't it? Interesting some amazing characters from some of the best books didn't receive a single vote - Ikiru, Minos, Dire Spectre. I wouldn't have believed they would be in the same group as Sharcle and Ulrakaah. I would have expected Yaztromo to have done better.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,434
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Sept 12, 2021 23:03:24 GMT
Thanks for doing this Petch 🙂
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