Write your favorite thing about your first FF Gamebook

[jmisbest]

How about we each post our favorite thing about the first Fighting Fantasy Gamebook we ever read?. Here's mine

It was Forest of Doom and favorite thing it is that it is the only Fighting Fantasy Gamebook Book that I ever beat on the first attempt without cheating, using a guide or getting hints, tips and advise from either friends, family or off of the net and I said first attempt rather then first playthrough cos it was in 1 attempt but as I didn't get The Handle during The First 2 playthroughs I had to play through the book 3 times

[vagsancho]

Seeing him.. Ow god... That presence... My heart stopped... Nicodemus.

[sylas]

I think mine was Forest of Doom as well. Technically my first was House of Hell but I was really little and I only got a few paragraphs in before I got too scared by the story and the art. I put the book down and never encountered anything FF for years. So did not enjoy my first back then. But if I'm using Forest as the one I actually finished first then probably it's the shopping list at the beginning. At the time, I'd not come across anything like that in a book and here, not only did I get to choose where to go and what to fight, but also what magical items to buy. Thought that was pretty special. Normally I would ask my parents if I could have something and the reply would usually be 'No'. But here, the choice was MINE!

[offm]

Me was warlock ftm , I had ,13 yo , my friend father's worked on a book store and got him the book we played for a few minutes then I bought one for me.

[nathanh]

Forest of Doom was also my first gamebook. I think the thing I liked most at the time, and I still enjoy very much to this day, is the sidequest with the fire demon and its crown, and the related unsuccessful quest conclusion.

[The Count]

I can't remember if mine was Temple of Terror or Demons of the Deep... I might have got them both from the library at the same time,  possibly with Citadel though that was probably later. (It definitely wasn't Warlock as that was one of the last ones I read...)

Since I can't confirm, I'll do all three:

Citadel - the Wheelies! I thought they were fun. I was eating a Wagon Wheel at the time. I also recall not really enjoying the rest of the book.
Temple - the atmosphere, especially as there was the tension of finding the letters instead of the dragons. This was a mix of the writing, encounters, plot and illustrations.
Demons - the sense of exploring an unusual, mystical and mythical environment. This was again a mix of the writing, encounters, plot and illustrations. Not forgetting the Toolfish.

[Law]

Stealer of Souls and oh, boy yeah what a cracking first game-book to read. Not too easy and not too hard for a nine-year-old.

1.) The slight moral ambiguity with the island's monsters. From the sea giant's pet skull crab "Edwina", the avenging mate of the stormbird, the intelligent and helpful lizard and the forest sprite trying to steal your treasure.

2.) Russ Nicholson's impeccable art. Especially the gory / hard-hitting illustrations of the Minotaur, the dark priest's illusionary chained victim, the hobgoblin duel along with the charnel house and boiling-blood weeping Death Skull.
Hell, which other book in the series rewarded your victory with a final pic of your enemy crumpled at your feet?

3.) I'm deranged, so upon reading my first ever instance (even a mention) of physical torture in a book, it left an indelible and rather morbid fascination with the horror of it. Surely only ogres would deliberately inflict pain on poor old wizards; this wasn't something humans did to each other, right?!

Oh how naive I was... Not enough to not cheer when Alsander gave his torturer a taste of his own medicine though!

[Wilf]

The sheer imagination that thought up the bizarre monsters in the Citadel. The whirlwind lady. The wheelies. The rhino-man. All beautifully illustrated by Russ Nicholson, in an extremely well written and constructed gamebook. I even love the Emmanuel cover.

[tyrion]

Warlock was my first. Favourite parts:
The illustrations
The shop (even if it's not on the correct path)
The maze. I love drawing maps.

[a moderator]

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was my first FF gamebook. My favourite thing about it is probably the 'paralysed by the Ghoul' ending, because it was just so mind-blowing that something like that could happen to the hero in a book targeted at kids.

Incidentally, my first ever gamebook was Skyjacked from the Tracker Books series, a completely different sort of adventure with a lengthy 'wandering around getting lost in subterranean passages' sequence towards the end and a possible ending in which you defeat the villain(s), but fail to get the loot.

[Mabinogion]

Rings of Kether was the first FF book I read (borrowed from the local library). Forest of Doom was the first book I owned. I had read some of the Choose Your Own Adventure books but they were very quickly dropped in favour of FF. Still collecting now. Fab series.

[dragonwarrior8]

Warlock of Firetop Mountain was my first. Favorite part was definitely making the map and map-making is probably still my favorite part of gamebooks now. That picture of the orc guard asleep at his post totally transported me inside the world and is an image that has stuck with me to this day.

[tyrion]

Jun 11, 2020 18:42:51 GMT dragonwarrior8 said:

Warlock of Firetop Mountain was my first. Favorite part was definitely making the map and map-making is probably still my favorite part of gamebooks now. That picture of the orc guard asleep at his post totally transported me inside the world and is an image that has stuck with me to this day.

Absolutely! That orc asleep is one of my favourite monsters (as posted on another thread) and I loved mapping the dungeon. 25 years later, I open the special edition and I swear they've broken into my house to steal the map I drew and stuck it in their book!

[kieran]

I'm also someone who started with Forest of Doom. The thing that prompted me to get it over Battleblade Warrior was the illustration of Yaztromo's tower. It just looked so otherworldly. I don't rate the other illustrations in the book that highly but that one is one of my favourites of the entire series.

My only previous experience with gamebooks was Dave Morris' Forbidden Gate which I think only had about 90 sections so finding one with 400 blew me completely away. It's a book that really encourages exploration and it took me a looooooong time to find that dust of levitation. I pretty much jumped for joy when I found Quin and he mentioned he had some.

Ah, sweet nostalgia.

[schlendrian]

My first ff was Sword of the Samurai. I still love it for all the things it uses to give it a fantasy-samurai atmosphere - the honor score, the monsters, the pseudo-japanese vocabulary. I was heavily into samurai back then.

My first gamebook was the German only Die Ruine, which was CYOA style (no stats or battles) but with occasional "roll the right number or die" dice rolls thrown in for good measure. Then came fabled lands, so it took a while before I discovered ff.

[peasantscribbler]

My first FF was the Citadel of Chaos, which I borrowed from a friend. I'm pretty sure my favourite thing about it was the choice of spells. I remember being disappointed that there were no spells when I moved on to the Warlock of Firetop Mountain. My attempt at recreating the CoC cover for grade 5 art class mildly impressed some of my classmates, though most of them thought I was going for a Michael Jackson Thriller tribute. The most memorable part of CoC for me was the illustration of the Gangees, which I saw over and over again as I exhausted every option but the right ones for getting past them.

[vastariner]

Island of the Lizard King.

The illustrations. Bad luck for me that the first one I read had Iain McCaig illustrating it - he is, to me, the best of the FF artists.

I can't now name much about the writing because, it being the first, it was all rather strange and new. So everything stood out. In retrospect it's a fairly bog-standard linear crawl where you don't even need to succeed on the side-quest because it's fairly obvious what your last choice should be.

[aggsol]

The first I read was a German translation of Citadel of Chaos and I just hated it (Having only read German Lone Wolf books before). The best thing I remember were the dice printed on the bottom of the page.

Decades later I read the WotFM and was suprised how great the map looked after drawing it multiple times.

[Wilf]

Jun 16, 2020 8:39:37 GMT vastariner said:

Island of the Lizard King.

The illustrations. Bad luck for me that the first one I read had Iain McCaig illustrating it - he is, to me, the best of the FF artists.

I can't now name much about the writing because, it being the first, it was all rather strange and new. So everything stood out. In retrospect it's a fairly bog-standard linear crawl where you don't even need to succeed on the side-quest because it's fairly obvious what your last choice should be.

Alan Langford did Lizard King - Iain McCaig only did the cover.

[schlendrian]

Wow, you don't often get people who hate Citadel

The sleeping ork also started a very proud tradition of idiot/useless guards in ff.

[bloodbeasthandler]

Deathtrap Dungeon, bought from the Puffin Bookclub being run in school in 1984.
It was the cover that caused the purchase.
My first experience of interactive fiction.
Favourite thing was the ability to choose the path through the book, the combination of game and book.
And it was very well illustrated to boot.

[linflas]

Starship Traveller, french translation, as a birthday gift by a friend I didn't like a lot of my grandma... She wanted me to force me to read, and she succeeded !

Loved the cover of course, by P.A.Jones and some of the illustrations such as sections 222 or 236. I liked the revolutionary concept of being the hero, rolling dice not only for me but for the whole spaceship team.