40 years of Appointment with F.E.A.R.

Another Fighting Fantasy gamebook celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025 is Steve Jackson's superhero smackdown Appointment with F.E.A.R.

Back in 1985, Steve Jackson had not written a Titan-set FF adventure since The Citadel of Chaos and his fifth title in the series continued this trend. Appointment with F.E.A.R. (FF17) took as its inspiration the comic books Jackson had so loved as a child and involved more problem-solving as opposed to the item collection ‘shopping list’ approach of some gamebooks.

The action takes place in the suspiciously familiar sounding Titan City with the hero assuming the role of Jean Lafayette and his alter ego, the crime-fighting Silver Crusader.

The Silver Crusader does battle with such colourful characters as the Scarlet Prankster, the Serpent, and the Alchemists, as he struggles to discover the time and location of the next meeting of F.E.A.R. – the Federation of Euro-American Rebels – an evil organisation led by Vladimir Utoshski, a.k.a. the Titanium Cyborg.

It is the Titanium Cyborg who is the subject of the book’s cover art by legendary comic book cover artist Brian Bolland, while internal illustrations were provided by Declan Considine, who made his artwork look like panels from the pages of a comic book.

The Macro Brain, a super-villain from Appointment with F.E.A.R.,
by Declan Considine.

The adventure begins with the reader choosing one of four superpowers for the Silver Crusader from Super Strength, Psi-Powers, Enhanced Technological Skill (or ETS), and Energy Blast.

Appointment with F.E.A.R. also made use of a new HERO POINTS attribute. These points are awarded for every villain the Silver Crusader captures and every potential disaster he manages to avert. (Although it doesn’t necessarily affect the outcome of the game, it does allow players to compare performances from one read-through to the next.) Rather like Batman, the Silver Crusader is not permitted to kill his enemies, and any such deaths that may occur result in the loss of precious HERO POINTS. In one-on-one combat, when an enemy’s STAMINA score drops to 2 STAMINA points, the enemy simply surrenders.

It could be argued that Appointment with F.E.A.R. is only a science fiction adventure in as much as Spider-Man or Superman comics are science fiction stories. It is, in truth, a comic book superhero gamebook; nothing more, nothing less.

To date, Appointment with F.E.A.R. is the only non-fantasy adventure published by Scholastic, and the gamebook also exists now as a video game from Tin Man Games.

Will we ever see an Appointmentwith F.E.A.R. comic one day? We can but hope.

If you enjoy watching playthroughs of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, GoneHollowMedia have recorded their own attempt at tackling the adventure.

And if you want to learn more about the history of your favourite gamebooks, pick up Jonathan Green's YOU ARE THE HERO: An Interactive History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks today.

Are you ready to become a Superhero Sleuth?

Available now from Tin Man Games on Steam is Steve Jackson's '80s comicbook-inspired classic, Appointment with F.E.A.R.!

Tin Man first adapted the 17th Fighting Fantasy gamebook nine years ago, but this time around it's a more authentic FF experience, featuring all the powers and fights as they originally appeared, and maintaining the storylines to each of the four powers exactly as they flowed in the original adventure. Even though this has meant a complete re-coding of the gamebook, it means players can now revisit Titan City and join the wacky supervillains that are hell-bent on taking over the world!

To download Appointment with F.E.A.R. for Fighting Fantasy Classics from Steam, click this link.

Classic Cover! Appointment with F.E.A.R.

As capes and spandex seem to be very much on everyone's minds at the moment, today we thought we would revisit Fighting Fantasy's one and only superhero-themed adventure, Steve Jackson's Appointment with F.E.A.R.

Back in 1985, Steve Jackson had not written a Titan-set adventure since The Citadel of Chaos, and his fifth title in the series continued this trend. The hero of Appointment with F.E.A.R. is Jean Lafayette, or rather, his alter ego, the crime-fighting Silver Crusader.

The Silver Crusader does battle with such colourful characters as the Scarlet Prankster, the Serpent and the Alchemists, as he struggles to discover the time and location of the next meeting of F.E.A.R. – the Federation of Euro-American Rebels. This evil organisation is led by Vladimir Utoshski, a.k.a. the Titanium Cyborg who is the subject of the book’s cover art.

Appropriately enough, seeing as how Appointment with F.E.A.R. is, in truth, a comic book superhero gamebook - nothing more, nothing less - the original cover was painted by veteran British comic book artist, Brian Bolland, who was famous for drawing such iconic comic book characters as Batman and Judge Dredd!

Appointment with F.E.A.R. has since been turned into a nostalgic '80s-themed app, by Tin Man Games, and the cover of the most recent edition, published by Scholastic Books, features Vladimir Utoshski once again, this time as realised by Robert Ball.

But for many, it is Brian Bolland's cover that holds a special place in their heart.

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.

Jackson, Livingstone and Higson signing at Forbidden Planet on Tuesday

Tomorrow, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone - co-creators of the bestselling, global Fighting Fantasy gamebook phenomenon - will be at the Forbidden Planet Megastore in London, signing copies of the latest batch of FF titles re-released by Scholastic Books.

They will be joined by the newest guest author on the series, and a bestseller in his own right, Charlie Higson, whose new book The Gates of Death has been met with rave reviews.

The event takes place on Tuesday 17th April from 6:00pm - 7:00pm, and to find out more simply follow this link.

Classic Fighting Fantasy titles relaunched by Scholastic Books

As well as releasing The Gates of Death this week, Scholastic Books have also re-released another five classic Fighting Fantasy titles by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, including the hardest and most devious FF gamebook ever created - Creature of Havoc - and the bestselling dungeon bash ever - Deathtrap Dungeon!

Which of these classic titles are you most excited to see back in print? 

There are still plenty of Jackson and Livingstone titles still to be reprinted, including such fondly-remembered titles as Caverns of the Snow Witch, Trial of Champions, Armies of Death, Starship Traveller, and the rest of the Sorcery! quartet.

Let us know which of these classic titles you would like to see brought back next in the comments below.

The Gates of Death open today!

It's the day Fighting Fantasy fans have been waiting for, for today is the day that Charlie Higson's much-anticipated brand-new Fighting Fantasy gamebook The Gates of Death is released!

But not only that, three classic Jackson titles and two classic Livingstone titles are also re-released today.

  

  

Remember to let us know what you think of the new releases by posting a comment on this blog post, and perhaps leave a review online.

Appointment with Havoc*

Next week the next tranche of Fighting Fantasy titles are released by Scholastic Books, and among them are three classic titles by Steve Jackson - Creature of Havoc, Appointment with F.E.A.R. and Sorcery! 1: The Shamutanti Hills.

Utilising a device that has been imitated in numerous gamebooks many times since (and not just Fighting Fantasy ones), Creature of Havoc begins with the hero waking up with no memory of where they are, how they came to be there, who they are or even what they are. The hero is the havoc-creating Creature of the title!

Featuring a flying ship, an undead Half-Elf and Zharradan Marr, an evil witch-born sorcerer, it is a truly memorable adventure with some wonderful set-pieces.

The book took Steve Jackson five months to write and has the longest background section of any FF adventure, containing information on everything from Elven birthing practices to the sorcerer Volgera Darkstorm.

"Always looking for new angles, I’d decided that Creature of Havoc would set the reader as a monster," says Jackson. "That was a new feature. And that I wouldn’t be bound by the 400-reference adventure. I was particularly pleased with the reader having to learn a language."

Appointment with F.E.A.R. was inspired by the comic books Jackson had so loved as a child and involved more problem-solving as opposed to the item collection ‘shopping list’ approach of some gamebooks. The action takes place in Titan City with the hero assuming the role of Jean Lafayette and his alter ego, the crime-fighting Silver Crusader.

The Silver Crusader does battle with such colourful characters as the Scarlet Prankster, the Serpent and the Alchemists, as he struggles to discover the time and location of the next meeting of F.E.A.R. – the Federation of Euro-American Rebels – an evil organisation led by Vladimir Utoshski, a.k.a. the Titanium Cyborg.

The adventure begins with the reader choosing one of four superpowers for the Silver Crusader from Super Strength, Psi-Powers, Enhanced Technological Skill (or ETS), and Energy Blast. Appointment with F.E.A.R. also makes use of a new HERO POINTS attribute. These points are awarded for every villain the Silver Crusader captures and every potential disaster he manages to avert. Rather like Batman, the Silver Crusader is not permitted to kill his enemies, and any such deaths that may occur result in the loss of precious HERO POINTS.

You can read more about the first book in the Sorcery! series - The Shamutanit Hills - here.

New editions of Creature of Havoc, Appointment with F.E.A.R and Sorcery! 1: The Shamutanti Hills will be published on 5th April 2018, and you can read more about the stories behind the gamebooks in You Are The Hero - A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.

In other news, Fighting Fantasy historian Jonathan Green will be attending the Chatham Dockyard Festival of Steam and Transport on Sunday 1st and Monday 2nd April 2018. So if you're in the area, and you've yet to pick up a copy of YOU ARE THE HERO or YOU ARE THE HERO Part 2, why not pop along?

Tell him the Warlock sent you.


* Or should that be Galleykeep Crusader?

The Second Swordsman - 'The Jackson Three'

This week it's time for another of Malcolm Garcia's Second Swordsman posts. Enjoy!


The Second Swordsman – 'The Jackson Three'

By Malcolm Garcia

So far I’ve attempted to complete ten FIGHTING FANTASY adventures by unfailingly choosing the second option. But I’ve noticed that something has been amiss. It’s not that I’ve yet to be successful in reaching section 400 (I’m accustomed to that), or that I’ve died within a few paragraphs of starting (that’s only happened a couple of times), or even that I’ve not managed to fight any gruesome creatures (I’ve done that a few times too). No. What’s been wrong is that of all my adventures, five have been solo efforts by Ian Livingstone, but only one – The Citadel of Chaos – has been the work of the co-founder of the FIGHTING FANTASY series, Steve Jackson.

To redress the balance I embarked upon using the Second Swordsman process to tackle three of Steve Jackson’s adventures. (No, it’s not the Sorcery! series, yet.) Interestingly, none of these is set in the familiar territory of Titan. Starship Traveller has YOU in a Captain Kirk-esque role, trying to guide your spaceship and crew back to Earth after being pulled through a black hole. House of Hell has YOU attempting to survive being captured by a group of devil worshippers in the world’s worst haunted house. And in Appointment with F.E.A.R. YOU are the resident superhero of Titan City who is trying to serve truth and justice, whilst also trying to uncover just enough clues to disrupt a meeting of super-villains.

Refreshingly, choosing every second option did not lead to a sudden and inglorious death in any of these three adventures. Despite acting in a gung-ho manner in Starship, I survived for a surprisingly long time. I destroyed two other spaceships (using a process much more complicated than that in Seas of Blood, but for no gain), killed local fauna for food, drew my blasters on alien species, and beat up guards. This foolhardy approach did, however, leave my own spaceship only one laser blast away from destruction. It was good having several crew members join me in my attempts at hostile negotiations and I never lost a single red-shirted one of them; until towards the end when several of them lost all hope of rescue and committed suicide. And then I went into another black hole and everyone died.

Fighting was not quite so successful in House. When following the process I failed to find a weapon for a long time and lost three rounds in unarmed combat against the appropriately named Invisible Enemy. I did manage to find a knife just in time to fight a Ghoul in the kitchen. But by this point I was only one FEAR point away from being scared to death and, even though I beat the menace without losing a single STAMINA point, I made such a racket that I was captured by the inhabitants of the house and placed in a cell to await a horrible, and unspecified, end. I thought the addition of the FEAR statistic was interesting, as I had to rely less on my LUCK (which I only had to test once), but it did provide an immediate penalty to any wrong turn in a way that other FIGHTING FANTASY books don’t.

In Appointment I fought only one character, a pickpocket, and this was in a city teeming with super-villains! I’ll admit right now that, even with all of the punishing names of characters and places, I did not enjoy playing Appointment. While I survived a few days (helped by being able to replenish six STAMINA points every night), and knew what I ultimately needed to do (unlike in Demons of the Deep), I found the adventure to be very disjointed. Each day I would be given the choice of visiting several different places, almost on a whim, with no real sense that I was gradually getting closer to my goal. The process in Midnight Rogue was better with all the locations being presented up front and then YOU choose the order in which to investigate them. I was also unsure about the purpose of the HERO points. In House, when your FEAR score reaches its maximum you die. But in Appointment there didn’t seem to be a penalty for losing HERO points or a benefit to be gained from accumulating them. There was also an unusual scene in Appointment where I faced off against a super-villain who was about to destroy a nuclear reactor. My initial attack against him was rebuffed and I then fled the scene, but nothing happened to the nuclear reactor! And my last gripe with Appointment was that the Energy Blast skill I chose was worse than useless – I used it three times and it failed twice, the second time resulting in my own death.

The only good thing about Appointment was that choosing the second option every time did not have me ignoring everything. The usual options were to go to one place or another. This meant I was able to stop a plane hijacking and rescue some swimmers from a frozen pool. But while not ignoring things meant I learned a lot about the plans of other criminals, I was never able to actually use this knowledge.

The situation was different in Starship where, even though choosing every second option let me survive for a long time, I fell into a cycle of ignoring most opportunities – I orbited a lot of planets, but then I ignored most of those with intelligent life. I only beamed down a few times, and when I did get to the surface I always seemed to be in a hurry to get back into space. The result was that I never really learned anything about the galaxy I’d found myself in, or how to get back to Earth. I even ignored the one opportunity to repair my ship, and this was after I’d been pummeled in the aforementioned space battles, as well as by a storm of meteors.

In House, even though I ignored a multitude of places to explore - for old times’ sake I would have loved to check out the Balthus room – it probably had the Ganjees! - I didn’t ignore absolutely everything. But this meant I gathered FEAR points way too quickly to have a good chance of finding the golden path through the labyrinth. One area in which House certainly shone was atmosphere. As soon as you start reading you get the feeling that coming here was a bad idea – in other FIGHTING FANTASY adventures your character usually knows what they’re getting themselves into. There was a growing sense of dread as I waited for the adventure to turn from me being a house guest of some local aristocrat to fighting for my life as a prisoner of some fiends. This wasn’t lightened by the interesting choose-your-own-banquet sequence and it’s no wonder that House was rated in the top ten FIGHTING FANTASY adventures in a fan poll several years ago.

So, although attempting ‘The Jackson Three’ using the Second Swordsman process didn’t see me slain by an ogre or fail to collect an important artefact upon which the fate of the world rested, I still fell short of reaching section 400 (or 340 and 440 in Starship and Appointment respectively). Next time I’ll grab my trusty sword and shield and seek out monsters, magic, and expanding mushrooms back on Titan.


Thank you, as always, to Malcolm, for his latest Second Swordsman blog post. If you have any suggestions for items for the official Fighting Fantasy blog don't forget to get in touch via mail@fightingfantasy.com.