Advanced Fighting Fantasy is Big in Japan

This will be of interest to both Japanese fans and serious collectors of Fighting Fantasy, but a Japanese language version of Advanced Fighting Fantasy has recently been released by Group SNE.

Available so far are the Advanced Fighting Fantasy Rulebook and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain adventure, but there are more titles still to come, including Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World.

Steve Jackson and Charlie Higson at the Hay Festival this Wednesday!

Join the Steve Jackson, co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy series of adventure gamebooks, and long-time fan Charlie Higson, at the Hay Festival, to hear all about Charlie's new book, The Gates of Death.

Suitable for anyone age 9 and above, the Fighting Fantasy talk takes place on Wednesday 30th May 2018 in Hay-on-Wye, between 4:00pm - 5:00pm, and tickets can be purchased from the box office here.

Steve Jackson, Charlie Higson and Ian Livingstone at Forbidden Planet.

Fighting Fantasy Classics is coming to Steam!

With Fighting Fantasy fast approaching it's 36th anniversary in August, there have been some exciting developments of late, talk of a potential TV series being developed in China, new audio dramas being produced by FoxYason Productions, and the news that The Warlock of Firetop Mountain will be coming to Nintendo Switch!

Tin Man Games have been working closely with another Australian game developer to bring the smash-hit PC/iOS adaptation of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain to Nintendo’s amazing new console. There isn't a release date yet, but keep an eye on Tin Man Games' social media channels over the coming weeks for more news!

As if that wasn't enough to get even the most hard-bitten adventurer frothing at the mouth in anticipation, the company has announced that their recent Fighting Fantasy library app is coming to Steam. Fighting Fantasy Classics will become available for download on 6th June and will include free access to Jonathan Green’s supernatural pirate adventure, Bloodbones!

Fighting Fantasy Classics will also feature all the current digital gamebooks available in the mobile version, including Ian Livingstone’s Deathtrap Dungeon, which was released last month. You can also expect Deathtrap Dungeon's epic sequel Trial of Champions to join in on the library app in the coming months, as it was the overwhelming winner of Tin Man Games' recent poll which they ran so that players and fans could decide which classic gamebook was developed next! (Second place was a close call but with Freeway Fighter just taking it.)

Don't forget that Ian Livingstone will be giving a live reading of Deathtrap Dungeon, next Friday, 1st June 2018, at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham, when he will be leading host of The Dark Room, Mr John Robertson, to his undoubted doom.

For more information of the event and the UK Games Expo, which is the biggest of its kind within the UK, simply follow this link.

The Second Swordsman – More of Martin’s Mêlées

This week, Malcolm Garcia is back with his 16th Second Swordsman post, which is intriguingly entitled...

The Second Swordsman – More of Martin’s Mêlées

By Malcolm Garcia

After the recent enjoyment of exploring Castle Heydrich in Vault of the Vampire, I chose to have a go at a few other adventures which had been written by its author, Keith Martin (the writing alias of Carl Sargent). I’d previously tried the Second Swordsman process in his books Stealer of Souls (where I found my way into the Empire of Illusions beyond the Iron Crypts), Night Dragon (where I actually got to encounter several dragons) and Legend of Zagor (where I survived for quite some time before being killed by a thief with an unusually high SKILL). This time I would see whether always choosing the second option would lead to similar longevity in Martin’s Island of the Undead, Master of Chaos and Tower of Destruction.

Island of the Undead, illustrated inside by the prolific Russ Nicholson, started well enough, with some promising numbers and a Presence score to keep track of. Some of Martin’s other books also have extra scores to influence the gameplay – the Faith value in Vault and the Honour, Nemesis and Time values in Night. I did, however, start Island with just a knife for a weapon, which imposed not only a SKILL penalty, but also made it likely I’d inflict only half my usual STAMINA damage. I’m not usually a fan of these sorts of impediments, but I suppose they do mean you’re more likely to fail early if you don’t find the right gear, rather than wasting time marching to your inevitable doom.

The backstory has YOU on a ship en route to the Island of Solani to investigate why storms have returned to your village on the Strait of Knives in southeastern Allansia. The vessel sinks and section one has YOU immediately thrown into a battle against a Sea Zombie. While a fight at the very start is what I’d usually expect in a Jonathan Green adventure, Stealer also had a similar early fight – and that was against the much harder Giant Stormbird. After winning this skirmish I started exploring the island, but it became obvious pretty quickly that always choosing the second option meant I was aimlessly wandering around and missing out on opportunities to find information or objects that would assist me in my quest. Not only did I fail to find a sword, but I didn’t find a book about fungi, I never learned the name of a hermit who lived in a tree, I had no special green cream, and I neglected to explore a monastery when given the opportunity.

Because I chose to attack the aforementioned hermit I contracted the lung rot disease which eroded my STAMINA and, while not immediately fatal, was an annoyance. Other than the aforementioned Sea Zombie I only managed to defeat one other adversary, the tree-dwelling Grupplers (sort of a cross between a monkey and a frog), but not before my lung rot cost me some more STAMINA. Soon afterwards I fell into some swamp water and, while I didn’t drown instantly (as I did in Scorpion Swamp), an unlucky dice roll meant I was eaten by a Swamp Alligator during the middle of a fight against it.

In my attempt at Master of Chaos (which coincidentally had the same ranking in the Fighting Fantazine poll as Island) my starting scores were again decent, but once again there were some penalties to apply. The adventure started with YOU going undercover as a galley slave on a ship bound for Khul, thus earning Martin the rare trifecta of having a book set on each of the three continents of Titan. Once there YOU are expected to find your way to the desert ruins of the city of Kabesh, where a magical staff has been taken. While going undercover YOU possess no weapons, which means that in any fight your Attack Strength will be reduced by two, and you’ll do less damage to an opponent if you do manage to strike them. I also had a Notoriety score to keep track of, which measured how much attention I was attracting from local law enforcement, as well as selecting three special skills of my own choosing.

The adventure began with me losing eight STAMINA relatively quickly, partly because of the meagre rations and also because I chose to try and stop a shipmate from being whipped to death. When, soon after, I was given the choice to confront the orc wielding the whip, I did so. And while the orc was killed in the ensuring slave uprising, I was made to walk the plank and (unlike in Demons of the Deep where being forced into the ocean was the beginning of my journey) I soon became the meal for a shark. No treasure. No battles. No knowledge. While dead in just two choices isn’t quite as bad as what happened in Beneath Nightmare Castle, it was a very poor showing. So far, all I had learned was that choosing the second option in both of Martin’s books would result in me being eaten by some of the local fauna.

Returning to the frozen north of Allansia, for the first time since Caverns of the Snow Witch, I began Tower of Destruction with poor initial SKILL and LUCK scores, but mercifully no penalties to my SKILL. Tower does, however, also add Honour and Time values to keep track of. While returning to my village, which sits in the shadow of the Icefinger Mountains, an unusual sphere hurtled through the air and attacked my hometown. Pledging revenge on the sphere, I didn’t leave straight away and chose to linger just long enough to find some climbing equipment, but not helping anyone else earned an early penalty to my Honour – although it would be pretty unlikely that just one person could help an entire village. After being forced to eat my first meal (a process that would soon become irritating) I had my first fight against a Polar Worm. My adversary had a greater SKILL than I, but my higher STAMINA paid off and I defeated the creature, although it did take eleven rounds of combat.

After this initial excitement, my adventure in Tower fell into a routine of following a trail of burned trees while I slept, and ate my way through my provisions. Something similar happened during my attempt at Night, but in Tower the process was much duller – when given the chance to encounter a White Dragon (a creature I’d killed when I found one in Caverns) I instead chose to hide in a cave for a whole day and night, which wasted two meals. Eventually I started eating my meals unprompted, figuring that the penalty for not having a meal when forced to eat was less than what I would gain from eating one. Within a handful of days I found the mysterious sphere and had to fight two Ice Ghost guards. What should have been a fight against two easy enemies was made more difficult by my poor initial SKILL and that, because I must have missed a useful weapon somewhere, my sword only did half the usual damage against the pair of creatures.

I did eventually win the battle and ate my last meal to recover, just as I was attacked by a Demonic Servant. This creature had the same SKILL as me and I left the battle with just five STAMINA remaining and little chance of finding any more local wildlife to eat and rejuvenate myself. But I had at last reached the sphere! As I explored the inside of the device, choosing the second option did not help me to find any useful information or objects and I wandered pointlessly along corridors and up and down stairs. Eventually I did just my second LUCK test of the book and, lacking a special ring, failing this test meant that a trap of fire darts relieved me of my remaining STAMINA. A painful death, but at least I wasn’t eaten this time.

Across these three books of Keith Martin’s, choosing every second option may have made me a nice person but it clearly did not work at all in Master, and in Island I fell into the usual Second Swordsman habit of wandering around aimlessly and ignoring things. Being eaten by a Swamp Alligator actually came as a welcome surprise. My failure in Tower was inevitable given my lack of food and hard fights, but it also reinforced the importance of LUCK, which is often overlooked as a factor in the success of any FIGHTING FANTASY adventure. For although a poor LUCK roll in Tower just helped to finish me off after some difficult battles, in Scorpion failing a single LUCK test actually ended the adventure for me.

Thanks, as ever, to Malcolm for taking the time to chronicle his adventure as the Second Swordsman. This is his penultimate Second Swordsman article for a while, as he has some other writing projects he needs to focus on in the coming months, so I am sure you are just as intrigued as we are as to what the subject of next month's piece will be...

Steve Jackson and Charlie Higson appearing at the Barnes Children's Literature Festival

Steve Jackson, co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy series of adventure gamebooks - and author of such classic titles as The Citadel of Chaos, House of Hell, and Creature of Havoc - will be appearing at the Barnes Children's Literature Festival tomorrow, Saturday 12th May 2018.

He will be joined by the actor, comedian and newest FF author Charlie Higson, to talk about Charlie's new book The Gates of Death and all things Fighting Fantasy.

Their talk will be taking place at the Kitson Hall from 5:00pm - 6:00pm, and is suitable for anyone aged 9 and above. Tickets are only £5 each.

To find out more and to book tickets, follow this link.

FF does SF

Apart from a few notable exceptions, Fighting Fantasy’s various forays into the realms of science fiction were not the most successful gamebooks Puffin produced, but the company still published nine of them over the course of half a decade.

But setting an adventure in the far-flung vastness of space was still a tempting prospect for an author. “I liked to try new things out,” says Steve Jackson. “Sorcery! had a new magic system, Starship Traveller was the first SF adventure.”

Set in the distant future, Starship Traveller had the hero become the commander of the eponymous starship and its crew. After his interstellar vessel is sucked through a black hole into an unknown quadrant of space, the hero has to search the local star systems for the coordinates to another black hole and the way home.

Jackson: “I was a big Star Trek fan. Always preferred it to Doctor Who. Mr Spock was my hero. I liked the episodes where Kirk & Co landed on a planet where they encountered alien races and philosophies. Never liked the deep space battle episodes. Starship Traveller was unashamedly based on Star Trek."

Starship Traveller was originally going to be included among the second tranche of FF gamebooks put out by Scholastic but it can still be enjoyed in an updated format thanks to Tin Man Games' app of the same name.

The next FF SF adventure to come along was Andrew Chapman's Space Assassin. The hero was the assassin of the title, his mission: to stop the crazed scientist Cyrus from unleashing a gruesome mutation experiment upon his homeworld from the vast hulk of the starship Vandervecken in orbit above it.

Then came Ian Livingstone's Freeway Fighter, which you can read more about here, and a prequel to which is now available as a graphic novel from Titan Comics.

The Rings of Kether, also by Andrew Chapman, casts the hero in the role of a narcotics officer attempting to break up a drug ring on the planet Kether.

Unusually, the hero is given some degree of freedom in regards to where he can travel between various locations on the planet’s surface, and in orbit as well, which in turn means that there are multiple paths leading to the final confrontation with the leaders of the drug cartel.

Next came Steve Jackson's Appointment with F.E.A.R., which is back in print, thanks to Scholastic Books, and also exists in the form of an app from Tin Man Games.

Rebel Planet was Robin Waterfield’s first contribution to the gamebook line as writer, having already edited a number of titles in the series. In the adventure, the leaders of SAROS (a secret Earth organization) are fighting to overthrow the alien Arcadian Empire. Having gathered together their last few resources, they send the hero on one last daring, and foolhardy, mission to strike at the heart of the Arcadian homeworld.

Wrapped inside a powerful Transformers meets Jurassic Park cover, Robot Commando was written by the other Steve Jackson (the US author behind Scorpion Swamp and Demons of the Deep). “It was inspired by the mecha genre,” explains US Steve, “of which Transformers was the first big-deal popularization in English.”

The hero of Robot Commando is a dinosaur rancher in the country of Thalos, on a distant planet, who finds himself in the middle of an attack by the militaristic Karosseans. An unknown weapon is activated which causes everyone, save the protagonist, to fall into a deep sleep, leaving Thalos free to be invaded. During the course of the book the hero uses a number of different giant robots to battle both the dinosaurs and the Karosseans while searching for a way to wake his fellow countrymen. 

Robot Commando is also one of the books under consideration to be the next release for Tin Man Games' Fighting Fantasy Classic library app.

The next SF FF title came out over a year later. Inspired by the movies Bladder Runner and Escape From New York, Star Strider is notable for being the first of what would become four FF titles by Luke Sharp.

“I have to confess that I didn’t read FF before I started writing for FF," says Sharp. "Well I did read Rebel Planet by Robin Waterfield before I submitted a proposal for what I called Rogue Tracer, which eventually became Star Strider. That’s why my first book is SF. It was pure luck that I got a commission. I was working with Dave Robins a well-known writer who had books published by Penguin Books and I had helped him with a book he had written on movies. His agent suggested he submit a proposal for FF because there was little work around at the time and Puffin needed writers for FF. It was Dave who suggested I put in a proposal in the envelope along with his. I got the gig and he didn’t.”

The thirty-third FF adventure, and the ninth science fiction title, was the first and only solo gamebook written by Martin Allen, who had already co-written the Clash of the Princes double-header with Andrew Chapman. In Sky Lord, the hero is Jang Mistral, a four-armed soldier from the planet Ensulina. His mission is to travel to a lawless artificial planet and capture a scientist named L'Bastin, who has created a species of dog-headed humanoids (called the Prefectas) to be the ultimate warriors in the universe.

Although some later FF adventures would feature some SF elements - most notably Spectral Stalkers - Sky Lord remains the last space-set Fighting Fantasy gamebook to date.

However, role-players can still enjoy new space-set adventures, with Arion Games' Advanced Fighting Fantasy Stellar Adventures.

Which is your favourite SF FF adventure? And would you like to see new gamebooks set in distant galaxies? Let us know in the comments below.

The Gates of Death is CBBC's Book of the Month for May 2018!

Charlie Higson's new Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Gates of Death, has garnered a lot of press coverage since it's release last month, along with five further classic titles by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.

As well as being an Amazon bestseller, the book has been mentioned in The Guardian and The Metro, while Charlie was interviewed on BBC Radio 2 and ITV.

Pleasingly, news of the book has also been picked up by children's news media and has featured in The Week Junior as well as First News.

And now The Gates of Death has been selected as CBBC's Book of the Month! You can find out more, and post your own review of the book, here.

Steve Jackson and Charlie Higson open The Gates of Death at the Barnes Children's Literature Festival

Steve Jackson, co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy series of adventure gamebooks and co-founder of Games Workshop*, and Charlie Higson, the newest author in the FF stable, will be appearing together at the Barnes Children's Literature Festival on Saturday 12th May 2018. Their talk, suitable for anyone aged 9 and above, will be taking place at the Kitson Hall from 5:00pm - 6:00pm, and tickets are only £5 each.

To find out more and to book tickets, follow this link.

* Which opened its first physical store 40 years ago, in April 1978!

Are you ready to start your own Trial of Champions?

Despite its name, Fang was an ordinary small town in the northern province of Chiang Mai. Situated on the banks of the River Kok, it made a convenient stopover for river traders and passengers throughout most of the year. A few barges, rafts and sometimes even a large sailboat could usually be found moored at Fang. But all that was long ago, before the creation of the Trial of Champions. Now, once a year, the river is crammed with boats as people arrive from hundred of miles around, hoping to witness the breaking of an ancient tradition in Fang and see a victor in the Trial of Champions.

On 1 May each year, warriors and heroes come to Fang to face the test of their lives. Survival is unlikely, yet many take the risk, for the prize is great - a purse of 10,000 Gold Pieces and the freedom of Chiang Mai forever.

Are you ready to take on the challenge of Deathtrap Dungeon?

First published in 1984, Ian Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon is back, courtesy of Scholastic Books, in a brand new edition, illustrated by digital artist Vlado Krizan.

However, you can also play the original 1984 edition, as illustrated by Hollywood concept artist Iain McCaig, courtesy of Tin Man Games' Fighting Fantasy Classics app.

   

But whichever format you choose - book or app - you know you're going to be in for one hell of a ride! And remember - beware the Bloodbeast!