Fighting Fantasy vs religion

[coppertop71]

I have just read an interesting article by BBC news entitled "the retro cult around Fighting Fantasy" dated 25th August 2014 (it wouldn't let me post link).

I'm sure many of you have read it but I was intrigued by the statement from Ian Livingstone about the backlash the books received from religious groups about summoning evil forces and communing with the devil and other nonsenses. One woman even apparently stated that her son "levitated" while reading one of the books and a vicar chained himself to railings in protest or something similar.

I was wondering if, in this age of political correctness, whether publishers would touch these books if pitched to them as a new idea today for fear of upsetting religious sensibilities? (I seem to remember the Harry Potter books getting a similar response when they came out)

As a kid, I don't remember thinking i was consorting with demons or anything like that and I certainly never levitated while reading one! Has anyone else had a negative response from anyone about the books?

[philsadler]

I just think that people back then were a bit less stupid and much less brainwashed. Also, the likes of Thatcher and Major had power back then and they both came from working class backgrounds. Unlike the Eton lot we have nowadays.

[coppertop71]

Jun 5, 2016 16:22:26 GMT philsadler said:

I just think that people back then were a bit less stupid and much less brainwashed. Also, the likes of Thatcher and Major had power back then and they both came from working class backgrounds. Unlike the Eton lot we have nowadays.

Mmm... not sure I'd agree that Thatcher had anything to do with it. Her and Major may have come from working class backgrounds but they were hardly working class were they? The whole political correctness thing probably got worse under Tony Blair so I'm not sure you can blame the rubbish we've got now for that either.

It was really from a religious standpoint that i was coming from and whether anyone had heard any negative stuff from anyone about it. Personally, I haven't but I did have a friend who got really upset by the Harry Potter books when they came out and i remember telling her to just not read them if she was that bothered and like many people who become outraged she admitted that she'd never actually read them herself lol

[johnbrawn1972]

The drivel about art being corrupting goes back to Plato. Why not science as well? See the counter-strikes of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

[thealmightymudworm]

Jun 5, 2016 15:04:03 GMT coppertop71 said:

I have just read an interesting article by BBC news entitled "the retro cult around Fighting Fantasy" dated 25th August 2014 (it wouldn't let me post link).

This one?

I'm sure many of you have read it but I was intrigued by the statement from Ian Livingstone about the backlash the books received from religious groups about summoning evil forces and communing with the devil and other nonsenses. One woman even apparently stated that her son "levitated" while reading one of the books and a vicar chained himself to railings in protest or something similar.

I was wondering if, in this age of political correctness, whether publishers would touch these books if pitched to them as a new idea today for fear of upsetting religious sensibilities? (I seem to remember the Harry Potter books getting a similar response when they came out)

I doubt that S & I would have much difficulty in getting this sort of thing published these days - at least in the UK. The influence of religion, especially Christianity, has declined. Harry Potter was published after all, (like many magic-themed books before it) as were Philip Pullman's books (which are more directly hostile to religion). People protest a bit of course but they're on the fringe.

The internet has moved the goalposts for what counts as shocking. In any case the FF books never encouraged you to serve demonic evil, which made the hysteria particularly silly.
Now a gamebook encouraging you to serve the Slender Man would get a backlash, but that's another matter.

As a kid, I don't remember thinking i was consorting with demons or anything like that and I certainly never levitated while reading one!

I think it was only first editions that allowed people to levitate.

[bloodbeasthandler]

I think the FF gamebooks were getting caught up in a more general backlash against D & D and roleplaying in general in the 1980’s. Talk of pentagrams and demon summoning and whatnot genuinely worried some people who saw it as smoothing the way to ‘real life devil worship’ (and I suppose is understandable if you actually believe summoning demons is possible). I think one of the death scenes in Talisman of Death [guts spilling out when a harpoon hits you or something like that] got quoted by an anti-FFer.
Some things that spring to mind about the 1980s -
I seem to remember a rumour or theory that there was widespread abuse of children by ‘Satanic Cults’ going on in the 80’s.
The Hungerford spree-killer Michael Ryan was reported to take part in play-by-mail games.
Heavy Metal bands were consciously using occult imagery and supposedly playing ‘subliminal messages’ to their fans, apparently causing suicides.
Bear in mind that it’s against this background – that of a moral panic – that there was a ‘problem’ with FF. Thankfully it was not strong enough to squash the books and the hobby.

[Klea]

I remember that my grandmother was really bothered by my RPG hobbies. She disapproved of my AD&D books being on the shelf in the living room where company could see them, and she was afraid I was becoming too wrapped up in Fighting Fantasy when she saw me rolling dice for several minutes in the kitchen (hey, some of those Deathtrap Dungeon combats take awhile, especially when you keep really detailed notes!). She raised the whole witchcraft thing after having seen the "Mazes and Monsters" movie on TV and read an article about it.

I'd been reading the Dragonlance novels, and the earliest ones described how to cast a sleep spell. So I decided on a little demonstration. I went outside and got the same material components used by the mage character, Raistlin, and double-checked the words he'd used. I then went into my grandmother's room and said, "Pay attention to this." I went through the motions, said the words, and she just looked at me, waiting to see what she was supposed to pay attention to.

"Are you asleep?" I asked her, and she said no, of course not. So I told her I had just cast a sleep spell, the way the books said to. The fact that she was still wide awake should be proof enough that the spells weren't real, didn't work, and there was nothing to worry about. This was back in the late '80s or so.

I still play Fighting Fantasy to this day. And no, I am still not able to cast spells to put people to sleep.

[sylas]

Aug 16, 2017 4:43:48 GMT Klea said:

I am still not able to cast spells to put people to sleep.

If you recite the incantation long enough you'll find that it works.

[Klea]

Considering that it's very short, it would take a lot of recitations!

[thealmightymudworm]

Aug 16, 2017 4:43:48 GMT Klea said:

I remember that my grandmother was really bothered by my RPG hobbies. She disapproved of my AD&D books being on the shelf in the living room where company could see them, and she was afraid I was becoming too wrapped up in Fighting Fantasy when she saw me rolling dice for several minutes in the kitchen (hey, some of those Deathtrap Dungeon combats take awhile, especially when you keep really detailed notes!). She raised the whole witchcraft thing after having seen the "Mazes and Monsters" movie on TV and read an article about it.

I'd been reading the Dragonlance novels, and the earliest ones described how to cast a sleep spell. So I decided on a little demonstration. I went outside and got the same material components used by the mage character, Raistlin, and double-checked the words he'd used. I then went into my grandmother's room and said, "Pay attention to this." I went through the motions, said the words, and she just looked at me, waiting to see what she was supposed to pay attention to.

"Are you asleep?" I asked her, and she said no, of course not. So I told her I had just cast a sleep spell, the way the books said to. The fact that she was still wide awake should be proof enough that the spells weren't real, didn't work, and there was nothing to worry about. This was back in the late '80s or so.

I still play Fighting Fantasy to this day. And no, I am still not able to cast spells to put people to sleep.

That's great.
Good thinking on choosing a Sleep spell too. That way if she had fallen asleep, you could just wake her up and say, "Honestly, I asked you to pay attention!"
It might have been harder to row back from conjuring up Burning Hands or bopping her on the head with a Spiritual Hammer.

(I've never read the Dragonlance books but there was a related game on the Amiga back in the '90s – I assume the spells were similar.)

Interesting that both the stories of panicking relatives come from female FMs (you and ex-FM Tammy) given that you're not exactly overrepresented on here. Maybe people thought young girls were particularly susceptible to the lure of witchcraft. Or maybe boys are just expected to be evil. Or maybe families thought too much running naked with demons would put off potential husbands. (Or maybe it's just a coincidence.)

For comparison: most of my FF books were bought at WH Smith at the end of shopping trips with my grandparents, and my granddad was a vicar. In fact I think he bought them for me.
Mind you, that's Anglicanism for you. "A bit of devil worship is fine, lad, but try not to get carried away".

[Klea]

Aug 16, 2017 15:58:33 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

Aug 16, 2017 4:43:48 GMT Klea said:

I remember that my grandmother was really bothered by my RPG hobbies. She disapproved of my AD&D books being on the shelf in the living room where company could see them, and she was afraid I was becoming too wrapped up in Fighting Fantasy when she saw me rolling dice for several minutes in the kitchen (hey, some of those Deathtrap Dungeon combats take awhile, especially when you keep really detailed notes!). She raised the whole witchcraft thing after having seen the "Mazes and Monsters" movie on TV and read an article about it.

I'd been reading the Dragonlance novels, and the earliest ones described how to cast a sleep spell. So I decided on a little demonstration. I went outside and got the same material components used by the mage character, Raistlin, and double-checked the words he'd used. I then went into my grandmother's room and said, "Pay attention to this." I went through the motions, said the words, and she just looked at me, waiting to see what she was supposed to pay attention to.

"Are you asleep?" I asked her, and she said no, of course not. So I told her I had just cast a sleep spell, the way the books said to. The fact that she was still wide awake should be proof enough that the spells weren't real, didn't work, and there was nothing to worry about. This was back in the late '80s or so.

I still play Fighting Fantasy to this day. And no, I am still not able to cast spells to put people to sleep.

That's great.
Good thinking on choosing a Sleep spell too. That way if she had fallen asleep, you could just wake her up and say, "Honestly, I asked you to pay attention!"
It might have been harder to row back from conjuring up Burning Hands or bopping her on the head with a Spiritual Hammer.

(I've never read the Dragonlance books but there was a related game on the Amiga back in the '90s – I assume the spells were similar.)

Interesting that both the stories of panicking relatives come from female FMs (you and ex-FM Tammy) given that you're not exactly overrepresented on here. Maybe people thought young girls were particularly susceptible to the lure of witchcraft. Or maybe boys are just expected to be evil. Or maybe families thought too much running naked with demons would put off potential husbands. (Or maybe it's just a coincidence.)

For comparison: most of my FF books were bought at WH Smith at the end of shopping trips with my grandparents, and my granddad was a vicar. In fact I think he bought them for me.
Mind you, that's Anglicanism for you. "A bit of devil worship is fine, lad, but try not to get carried away".

The sleep spell from Dragons of Autumn Twilight is "Ast tasark sinuralan krynawi." It's short, and the material component can either be sand or rose petals. The mage lets the components sift through the fingers of one hand, while the other hand (finger, actually) points toward the creature(s) he or she wants to fall asleep.

So that's what I did with my grandmother (we had a rose bush in the front yard), and of course she didn't fall asleep. The only other spell I remember from the novel was featherfall, which I wasn't about to demonstrate, since it involves falling slowly and gently from a great height (handy for when you have to get into a pit without a rope, or jump off a cliff to get away from the bad guys). Getting rose petals on the floor is one thing. Ending up in the hospital to prove that I really can't jump off a roof without getting hurt would have been insane.

I never saw any Amiga games like that - I did have an Amiga 500 in the '90s (still have it, actually, but somebody stole the monitor and wrecked the external disk drive and the power box when I moved). The games I played on that were Ishido, Ports of Call, Zany Golf, and some of the Infocom games.

My age wasn't a factor in my grandmother's panicking. I was in college when I saw Warlock of Firetop Mountain, bought it, and spent the night playing it when I was supposed to be doing my French homework. Since I've been novelizing various FF books for my NaNoWriMo projects for the past few years, I'd intended to do Warlock of Firetop Mountain (since someone packed away my Forest of Doom book after I told them not to - I had to move suddenly a few months ago, just before the April NaNoWriMo contest). The book is sitting right here, and I see by the notation inside that I bought it on January 13, 1983... which means I'd have been in 2nd-year university French, and probably slogging my way through an essay on one of the really depressing existentialist books we had to read.

It was more fun to kill monsters, and even get stuck in the maze because my map got smudged and I couldn't find the one corridor that I had to take to get to the last few encounters. Those dwarves were absolutely furious that I kept showing up since by that time I was basically going in circles.


I got lucky in the '80s - there was a great independent bookstore in town then, owned by a local family. One of the clerks was good at finding the UK-published stuff I wanted to order, whether it was Fighting Fantasy, Doctor Who novelizations, or Penguin classics (for my classical history course). That's the bookstore where I ordered lots of weird-sounding stuff, and startled one of the other clerks the day I walked in (having been phoned about my order arriving) and announced, "I've come to pick up A Casket of Souls."

This elderly lady looked at me, a shocked expression on her face, and I realized how it sounded. "It's a book I ordered," I assured her.

Then she brightened. "Oh," she said, her relief obvious. So I got my book, took it home, and unfortunately it's one that was lost in the same move as my Amiga stuff. I never did get through it.

[thealmightymudworm]

Aug 16, 2017 16:31:05 GMT Klea said:

Aug 16, 2017 15:58:33 GMT thealmightymudworm said:

That's great.
Good thinking on choosing a Sleep spell too. That way if she had fallen asleep, you could just wake her up and say, "Honestly, I asked you to pay attention!"
It might have been harder to row back from conjuring up Burning Hands or bopping her on the head with a Spiritual Hammer.

(I've never read the Dragonlance books but there was a related game on the Amiga back in the '90s – I assume the spells were similar.)

Interesting that both the stories of panicking relatives come from female FMs (you and ex-FM Tammy) given that you're not exactly overrepresented on here. Maybe people thought young girls were particularly susceptible to the lure of witchcraft. Or maybe boys are just expected to be evil. Or maybe families thought too much running naked with demons would put off potential husbands. (Or maybe it's just a coincidence.)

For comparison: most of my FF books were bought at WH Smith at the end of shopping trips with my grandparents, and my granddad was a vicar. In fact I think he bought them for me.
Mind you, that's Anglicanism for you. "A bit of devil worship is fine, lad, but try not to get carried away".

The sleep spell from Dragons of Autumn Twilight is "Ast tasark sinuralan krynawi." It's short, and the material component can either be sand or rose petals. The mage lets the components sift through the fingers of one hand, while the other hand (finger, actually) points toward the creature(s) he or she wants to fall asleep.

So that's what I did with my grandmother (we had a rose bush in the front yard), and of course she didn't fall asleep. The only other spell I remember from the novel was featherfall, which I wasn't about to demonstrate, since it involves falling slowly and gently from a great height (handy for when you have to get into a pit without a rope, or jump off a cliff to get away from the bad guys). Getting rose petals on the floor is one thing. Ending up in the hospital to prove that I really can't jump off a roof without getting hurt would have been insane.

I never saw any Amiga games like that - I did have an Amiga 500 in the '90s (still have it, actually, but somebody stole the monitor and wrecked the external disk drive and the power box when I moved). The games I played on that were Ishido, Ports of Call, Zany Golf, and some of the Infocom games.

My age wasn't a factor in my grandmother's panicking. I was in college when I saw Warlock of Firetop Mountain, bought it, and spent the night playing it when I was supposed to be doing my French homework. Since I've been novelizing various FF books for my NaNoWriMo projects for the past few years, I'd intended to do Warlock of Firetop Mountain (since someone packed away my Forest of Doom book after I told them not to - I had to move suddenly a few months ago, just before the April NaNoWriMo contest). The book is sitting right here, and I see by the notation inside that I bought it on January 13, 1983... which means I'd have been in 2nd-year university French, and probably slogging my way through an essay on one of the really depressing existentialist books we had to read.

It was more fun to kill monsters, and even get stuck in the maze because my map got smudged and I couldn't find the one corridor that I had to take to get to the last few encounters. Those dwarves were absolutely furious that I kept showing up since by that time I was basically going in circles.


I got lucky in the '80s - there was a great independent bookstore in town then, owned by a local family. One of the clerks was good at finding the UK-published stuff I wanted to order, whether it was Fighting Fantasy, Doctor Who novelizations, or Penguin classics (for my classical history course). That's the bookstore where I ordered lots of weird-sounding stuff, and startled one of the other clerks the day I walked in (having been phoned about my order arriving) and announced, "I've come to pick up A Casket of Souls."

This elderly lady looked at me, a shocked expression on her face, and I realized how it sounded. "It's a book I ordered," I assured her.

Then she brightened. "Oh," she said, her relief obvious. So I got my book, took it home, and unfortunately it's one that was lost in the same move as my Amiga stuff. I never did get through it.

Sorry to hear about your Amiga – mine also got chucked away though I still have loads of disks.
I'm not sure you missed all that much with the game. As I said I never read the books but imagine they had a bit of, well, magic about them. The game was a bit clunking – casting sleep didn't involve any rose petals or rousing incantations.

This was the Heroes of the Lance manual and a sample of the game just as I remember it. (Except the music at the start is excruciating – have your finger ready on the mute button!)

(Edit: This is really quite annoying to watch because of all the unnecessary errors. Witness, for example, the player repeatedly swinging a sword over a gnome-like creature's head, and eventually running away from its feeble kicks to the shins, because he hasn't figured out a low attack might be a good move.)

Interesting juxtaposition of existentialist literature with FF. I suppose one could say that they're both concerned with the fundamental importance of making one's own choices, but it would be a stretch to say there's an overlap. (Perhaps Paul Mason would say that there's a sense of that in The Crimson Tide.)

I remembered your story about picking up A Casket of Souls - that made me laugh a lot.   Hope you turn up a copy someday.