I’d always been fascinated by fantasy and speculative science-fiction novels, artwork and television programmes. In my pre-teens I had read two of the Scott Saunders near-future space mystery novels written in the 1970s by Patrick Moore and at school I remember loving both of Alice’s (Psychedelic) Adventures in Wonderland. I found most children’s literature to be either mundane or borderline crazy, although I wasn’t aware that they were at the time. The Hungry Caterpillar seemed to be just a drug crazed insect with the munchies. The junior school I attended had a class reading programme which used the space adventures of a group of anamorphic heroes which seemed even to a six year old kid to be extremely LSD influenced and trippy. Looking back on it it must have been of French origin, as that country has a monopoly on the weird and fantastic, you only need to look at their comics and artists, and films.
For the first two years of my secondary school life in Chantry in Ipswich, I made a couple of friends who I kept in contact with even after I got transferred to a new better secondary school, Westbourne. I was your typical nerd kid in that I was into fantasy, science fiction novels and had an unhealthy interest in computers, listened to non-mainstream music and failed to connect with most people in my peer groups. When I moved to Westbourne it became a place where a tiny group of us accidentally discovered, and developed a taste, for social gaming and fantasy literature, and a life-long career of reading, writing and playing role-playing games of all kinds. We survived the initial passing fad of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to become adults who couldn't wait to go out on our next bold imaginary adventure.
It wasn't until my third year at Westbourne that all these elements started to fall into place, the music, the books, the TV shows. I was thirteen when the Fighting Fantasy book craze started in 1982. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s released their first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. The Fighting Fantasy books took the Choose Your Own Adventure style of books that were popular in America at the time, but were unheard of in the United Kingdom, and added to it a simple set of rules for fighting fantasy monsters, solving puzzles and surviving traps. The rules for Fighting Fantasy were ridiculously simple and took up barely two pages, while the rest of the book had four-hundred numbered paragraphs. You started at paragraph one, read the text, at the end of the paragraph you were given a choice of which paragraph to turn to next. Each choice took you onto a new numbered paragraph, and so on. You never read the book sequentially, but instead jumped around the book to the paragraph number associated with your choice. I would later discover some of the original Choose Your Own Adventure books that were released in America in second hand and remainder bookshops and I found them severely disappointing in comparison with Fighting Fantasy. None of these had any rules or risks at all, just choices which didn't really seem to affect the final outcome. You could easily see how these inspired Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson to create their own line of fantasy adventure gamebooks.
The Fighting Fantasy gamebook concept was an incredibly simple idea and equally very successful. It was like having your own television adventure game show, similar to weird BBC Two programmes that I was watching at the time such as The Adventure Game and The Great Egg Race all inside a book. The Fighting Fantasy craze at our school lasted only six months, but for me it was all the push I needed to investigate these games further. At the time there was nothing else like it. I had never heard of the authors Ian Livingstone or Steve Jackson before, and knew nothing of their pedigree, or of their company, Games Workshop.
The original “holy trinity” of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom, and in my opinion these three books combined have not only stood the test of time, but are the purest form of fantasy gaming. They have in 2014 been released for mobile phones as Apps and still sell very well, even though they are priced at the same price point as the actual book itself. For me it was the starting point of my gaming career which extends to this day.
At our school, there were only a handful of these fantasy books circulating around at the time, and unless you bought one yourself, you had to wait in line for your chance to borrow one as they were extremely popular. Because of their very nature, it was unlikely you ever played through them again once you had finished the adventure, so passing them on once you’d finished them was perfectly natural and the turnover was quite fast. I did try to buy one of these books, looking in the bookshops, but never seemed to find any of them. Their distinctly beautiful covers and unique green spines should have made them easy to spot. I was worried that I would only play them once, and that the adventure would last only a few days, and compared to other books this seemed like poor value for money, two days for a Fighting Fantasy gamebook compared to a regular novel would keep me entertained for weeks. I had to endure weeks of waiting and of people narrating the things they did and the monsters, puzzles and traps they encountered and solved before I could experience one of these books myself. I tried to convince myself it was a silly craze that would pass just like all the other ones, but it didn't work as I was becoming more frustrated to hear of the adventures other people had, the things they had encountered and deeds they had undertaken. I was entranced by the small moments of fame that came with being the first to complete these adventures. I tried to avoid all the stories as I didn't want to have my own game spoiled. I wanted to join these very same ranks, but I think the initial rush had gone by the time it was my turn for glory and I finally got my hands on one of the books.
This is where it all started, with the infamous Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Well for me it didn’t, it actually started with The Forest of Doom. I finally got the book at lunchtime, and sat down and began to read the rules. I learnt all about the statistics, Strength, Stamina and Luck and I was hooked. Looking back now those original trilogy of books were some of the most enjoyable and innocent and pure classic fantasy games I’d ever played. The rules were simple, and all you needed was a pencil and dice. I borrowed the dice from my parent’s Risk board game and off I went. You had a character sheet in the book which you wrote all your statistics on, including gold, weapons and equipment as well as other items of interest to your quest. I felt it was better to write everything on paper, and not in the book itself. The book I got had already been written in and rubbed out so many times the sheet was unusable anyway. The quest was to find three pieces of a legendary dwarven hammer which you needed to defeat a final enemy with. The journey through the Forest of Doom was plagued with danger, riddles and monsters. If you got to the end of the book and didn't have all three pieces, you had to return to the start and begin again. I played it through several times, just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I later progressed to Citadel of Chaos and then finally the legendary first gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. By the time I had finished these books, several more had been released. City of Thieves, Starship Traveller, Deathtrap Dungeon and Island of the Lizard King. Every book I read in the Fighting Fantasy series was different and exciting. Although after the sixth book was released, interest in the series began to wane at our school, I now started buying those books I hadn't played, and played through them. I remember being the captain of a starship in Starship Traveller one week, and a leader of a ship full of pirates in Seas of Blood hunting for treasure in a race against another pirate the next, and then a super hero threatened by an international super villain criminal operation, F.E.A.R (An Appointment with F.E.A.R.). While each book would still use the basic Fighting Fantasy rules, they would expand and add extra rules where needed, e.g. rules for your crew or super powers. They even did a Call of Cthulhu-esque horror game which used fear/sanity as a mechanic.
I also enjoyed some of the spin-off copycat books that were published around this time, as they were relatively easy to produce. A lot of these books never sold as well as the publishers had hoped and quickly turned up in remainder book stores within a few months. Book series such as Falcon, which was a science fiction and historical time-travelling game that had a lot of depth and was an ongoing six-book series. Lone Wolf by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk is probably the best known of the spin off books and again with each book you could play as a continuing series or as a stand alone adventure. Then there was the little known The Cretan Chronicles Trilogy of classical Greek mythology and adventure. And finally there was Steve Jackson’s highly regarded epic four-part Sorcery series. I also played the four-part Sagard the Barbarian series by Gary Gygax which was nothing more than a fantasy novel with no substantial choices, only encounters with dice rolls to simulate random combats and the odd optional choices. There were some prototype two-player game books, but sadly I never got to play them in the way they were meant to be played.
I played every one of the the Fighting Fantasy books right up to the seventeenth book, but by then I had stopped because my interest in gaming was beginning to develop and mature as I began to see the limitations or a pre-programmed adventure. For instance your choices were limited, luck was too big an issue, it was easy to cheat, and your initial starting attributes too random. I still have fond memories about these books even years later, and still own several original books. But for all their delight, these books could only let you explore and adventure what was written in the book and was therefore limited in scope. You always started with a new character (or crew ship or spaceship), your choices were narrow and focused to the story you could only choose paragraphs that were offered to you, and of course there was always the option of cheating, even though you were only cheating yourself. I began to look for longevity, and dare I say it a campaign that I had enjoyed with Falcon, Cretan Chronicles, Lone Wolf, Sorcery and suchlike. I wanted a character who would grow and cross over between books. I wanted a character that I could take to the next story and carry on the adventure. There was a limited series of books called Fatemaster which tried to increase the complexity of the rules and introduced the concept of creating your own map as you explored dungeons and the wilderness. Sadly the Fatemaster series never caught on and they published only two books in the series. I later found out that Jamie Thompson wrote a series of six linked books called Fabled Lands which attempted to do just that, and by rights should have been bigger and better than the Sorcery series, but it was released too late and in the role-playing lull of the 1990s. All six books were linked and you could move between each book depending on which island you were currently exploring. You made marks on the paragraph depending on what you did, you could leave items, treasure and notes so other characters could pick it up instead.
As an aside, Iron Crown Enterprises also released three gamebooks based on the Middle Earth Role-Playing game which even had a beautifully simplified set of rules from their Middle Earth Role-Playing game and they were incredible. I did own two of the three books before they were pulled from the shelves because they violated Iron Crown’s book publishing licence with Tolkien Enterprises.
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