The Warlock Returns - Issue #14

Available now from White Hare Games is Issue #14 of The Warlock Returns, the FF and Advanced Fighting Fantasy fanzine.

This issue brings you new material for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, including...

* Denizens of the Pit - Perils from the Plain of Ice!

* Interview with Marc Gascoigne - FF's new Brand Manager

* Adventure Jam Details Pinned Down!

* Wizardry Spell Cards

* Director Advice Articles with rumours and plot hooks

* Queen of Ruin - Advanced Fighting Fantasy solo game

* Reviews - The Warlock of Firetop Mountain Collector's Edition & Legion of the Necromancer

* The Legend of Gareus agony aunt page

* Stellar Adventures: The Endless Reach - Part I of a new campaign setting

and more!

The Warlock Returns - Issue #13

Available now from Arion Games is Issue #13 of The Warlock Returns, the Advanced Fighting Fantasy fanzine.

This issue brings you new material for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, including...

* Denizens of the Pit - The Strangest Folk You Meet!

* Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 - Report by White Hare Games

* Adventure Jam - News!

* Wizardy - Spell Cards

* Director Advice - Articles with rumours and plot hooks

* Asteroid Prison Escape ­- Stellar Adventures solo game

* Wreck Age and Stonebeak Hospital ­- Lore and Locations!

* The Legend of Gareus - graphic novel and agony aunt page

* Stellar Adventures - Into the Doors of Eryx ­ Part VII (Final Part!)

and more!

The Warlock Returns - Issue #12

Available now from Arion Games is Issue #12 of The Warlock Returns, the Advanced Fighting Fantasy fanzine.

This issue brings you new material for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, including...

* Denizens of the Pit - More of Titan's ocean bounty!

* Halfling Heroes - Plus Occupations for AFF2

* Irritaria - How the world of Titan started!

* Director Advice - Articles with rumours and plot hooks

* Psionics on the Run - Stellar Adventures solo game

* One Page Witch Hunt - A fun one page dungeon

* The Legend of Gareus - Agony aunt page

* Stellar Adventures - Into the Doors of Eryx Part IV

and more!

White Hare Games (the team behind The Warlock Returns) and Arion Games will be attending Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 on Saturday 7 September 2024. 

The Warlock Returns - Issue #11

Available now from Arion Games is Issue #11 of The Warlock Returns, the Advanced Fighting Fantasy fanzine.

Within this issue you will find...

* Denizens of the Pit - This time a host of horrors rise from the Deep Ocean!

* Lunara - Scriptarium's alternative moon lore

* Bhingara, Orc Mage - The start of a new graphic comic

* Director Advice - Articles with rumours and plot hooks

* Bringing Back the Princess - AFF solo game

* Grappling Rules - Two different takes on grappling!

* The Legend of Gareus - comic and agony aunt page

* Stellar Adventures - Into the Doors of Eryx - Part V

and more!

The Warlock Returns - Issue #9

For those of you who have been eagerly awaiting the release of Issue #9 of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy fanzine The Warlock Returns, it is now available to download from DriveThruRPG, courtesy of Arion Games.

This issue contains...

* Denizens of the Pit - More of Titan's spawn from the Pit! 

* Rules Summary and AFF Character Sheet 

* Sleeping on the Job - New sleep rules 

* Director advice articles with rumours and plot hooks 

* Adding Themed Monsters to AFF - Crafting New Monsters 

* Roll20 Macros for the Director - Creating NPCs and Skill Rolls 

* The Legend of Gareus comic and agony aunt page 

* Stellar Adventures: Into the Doors of Eryx - Part III 

... and more!

The Advanced Fighting Fantasy Christmas Sale

It's December (already!) which means it's time for the annual Arion Games festive sale. As in previous years, every Arion Games PDF available through DTRPG is on sale at a massive 40% discount until the end of the month. 

In addition to that, Arion Games also have FOUR brand new adventures for four different games and these will be sent to every customer who has bought something from their store during December for FREE!

So what are you waiting for? Check out the Arion Games festive sale now and pick up those AFF titles that are missing from your collection!

 

The Warlock Returns - Issue #3

Available now from Arion Games is Issue #3 of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy fanzine The Warlock Returns, featuring a cover that is out of this world!

This issue contains more new material from fans of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy Roleplaying Game and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, including:

* Denizens of the Pit - New monsters from Titan

* Jungle Mania - Non-Player Characters from the jungles of Titan.

* Rumours In Arion - Rumours and plot hooks.

* AFF Spell Cards - Handy play aids

* Fear Characteristic - Be afraid, be very afraid...

* Director Advice Articles - Suggesting rumours and plot hooks

* Stellar Adventures Vehicle Sheet - A new version of the vehicle record

* A history of Mauristatia II - An area in the Old World of Titan

* Rituals and Races - New material for AFF

* The Legend of Gareus - Comic Strip and Agony Aunt page

* Bringing Down the House - Continuing the Stellar Adventures setting

* Letters from Arion

 You can buy the latest issue of The Warlock Returns, along with back issues, via DriveThruRPG.

The Warlock Returns... once again

Available now from Arion Games, via DriveThruRPG, is issue #2 of The Warlock Returns, the fanzine that brings you new material from fans of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy Roleplaying Game and the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.

Inside the latest issue you will find:

*Denizens of the Pit - New monsters from Titan

*Jungle - Starting Characters for use in the jungles of Titan.

*Interview with Rhianna Pratchett - about her Fighting Fantasy adventure Crystal of Storms

*Dream Labyrinth of Apollones II - An adventure for AFF

*Director Advice Articles - Suggesting rumours and plot hooks

*A History of Mauristatia - An area in the Old World of Titan

*Travelling the Multiverse - A Stellar Adventures setting

*The Legend of Gareus - Comic Strip and Agony Aunt page

*Torra-Factions - Continuing the Stellar Adventures setting

*Letters from Arion

*AFF & Roll20 - Creating a character sheet in Roll20

Plus a new Stellar Adventures character sheet from Ade Sant

Fighting Fantasy in Space!

This week is World Space Week, so it seems like an apposite time to revisit a blog first posted last year about Fighting Fantasy's forays beyond the final frontier.

I wonder if anyone has ever taken a Fighting Fantasy gamebook to the International Space Station...

New Advanced Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks now available from DriveThruRPG

As you may already know, recently Arion Games released a number of new Advanced Fighting Fantasy titles (including one for Stellar Adventures) as part of two Bundles of Holding offers.

Now that those offers have finished, those three new books are now available from DriveThruRPG. To find out more, click on the covers below.

Arion Games will be at Fighting Fantasy Fest 3, on Saturday 31st August, running RPG sessions throughout the day. So make sure you've got your ticket, and visit their stand at the event to experience Advanced Fighting Fantasy and Stellar Adventures for yourself.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy Bundles of Holding

Greetings, Adventurer.

Are you ready to undertake a new quest? The quest to find the Bundles of Holding and recover the treasures contained within?

Launched in 2013 by longtime adventure gaming writer and game designer Allen Varney, the Bundle of Holding has presented hundreds of bargain-priced, time-limited offers of tabletop role-playing game PDF rulebooks and RPG-related ebooks. Not only that, but ten percent of the revenue from each Bundle of Holding offer (after payment gateway fees) is donated to a charity. Since its founding, the Bundle of Holding has made donations totalling over half a million dollars to more than three dozen recognised institutions, mostly chosen by the contributing publishers.

And now Advanced Fighting Fantasy is back on Bundle of Holding. Presented here in its handsome 2011 Second Edition, as published by Arion Games, Advanced Fighting Fantasy is a complete role-playing game set in the classic Fighting Fantasy world, with a fast and adaptable system ideal for beginners and well suited to long-term campaigns.

For just US$7.95 you get all four titles in this revived offer's Starter Collection (retail value $40) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks:

• Advanced Fighting Fantasy Second Edition: Graham Bottley's completely rewritten RPG (2011) that revises Marc Gascoigne's original 1989 rules and adds lots of new material.
• Heroes Companion: Mass battle rules, loads of new magical styles, wilderness creation, organisations, hirelings, and more.
• The Sorcery Spell Book: The AFF version of the grimoire from Steve Jackson's four-book Sorcery! gamebook series (1983-85).
• Out of the Pit: The original, indispensable monster book with 250 loathsome creatures.

And if you pay more than this revival's threshold price of $18.29, you'll level up and also get this offer's entire Bonus Collection with five more titles worth an additional $59:

• Crown of Kings - The Sorcery Campaign: A full-length campaign based on the Sorcery! series.
• Beyond the Pit: Another 250 dangerous and intriguing denizens of Titan.
• Titan: A 128-page sourcebook about the Fighting Fantasy world. Discover Titan's history, kingdoms, and great powers. Includes the Titan Map.
• Blacksand: The City of Thieves, Port Blacksand, is home to rogues and pirates, and a destination for the bravest Heroes. This sourcebook adds rules for Firepowder weapons, naval sorcery, and sailing. Includes the Blacksand Map.
• The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: A full-length RPG scenario based on the first and most famous Fighting Fantasy gamebook.

And that's not all! Also available now is the More Fighting Fantasy bundle, with recent supplements and adventures. Three of these supplements are debuting in this offer and have never been available until now!

For just US$9.95 you get all six supplements in this offer's Starter Collection (retail value $38) as DRM-free PDF ebooks, including Rough Guide to the Pit, Demons of Doom, The Titan Herbal, and three short AFF adventures: Crooked King's Cup, The Floating Dungeon of Varrak Aslur, and Inn of Lost Hope.

And if you pay more than this offer's threshold price of $20.29, you'll level up and also get this offer's entire Bonus Collection with seven more titles worth an additional $57, including the three titles premiering here: the monster manual Return to the Pit, the city guide Travels in Arion (plus the Map of Arion), and the Weapons and Armour Catalogue for Stellar Adventures. You also get the rest of the Stellar ebook line - the rulebook itself, its Starship Catalogue, and the four-part scenario The Kaladarian Response.

The charity designated by Arion Games owner Graham Bottley that these bundles will support is CoppaFeel. "My wife has been selected to be part of a team of 100 inspirational people trekking through the Himalayas in October to raise money for the breast cancer awareness charity CoppaFeel," says Graham.

Don't delay - in 20 days these offers will have expired!

     

Arion Games' Christmas Sale

What do you give the Fighting Fantasy fan in your life, while they are waiting for new books to be announced by Scholastic? Why, the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG, of course! And there really couldn't be a better time to get into it, or to add to your existing collection of sourcebooks and gaming material, since Arion Games have launched their Christmas Sale on DriveThru RPG, with 40% off most items and some free gifts too!

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.

How does your Allansian garden grow?

With Nauk Fruit, and Niff Leaf, and Mudcaps all in a row?

Live now on Kickstarter is the latest venture from Arion Games, publishers of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy Second Edition RPG - The Titan Herbal, by Andrew Wright (author of Beyond the Pit).

Kickstarter is a tried and tested way of getting new AFF content to an eager role-playing public, the company having recently released Stellar Adventures, which takes your Advanced FF adventures into space and beyond!

There are only three reward tiers to choose from - PDF, softback and hardback - so, if a catalogue of 255 herbs, stats for plant monsters, and even new hero archetypes, sounds like your sort of thing, you know what to do...

It's the Final Countdown...

For Stellar Adventures, this week, which has already passed its first stretch goal. It's not too late to be a part of this brand new, SF, AFF project, so (if you haven't already) check out the Kickstarter page here.

In other news, another FF-themed project will soon be coming to Kickstarter - Ian Livingstone's Freeway Fighter: The Comic. The first art for the project by Simon Coleby, coloured by Len O'Grady can be seen below.

To keep up to date with developments on this new Kickstarter, join the Facebook group here.

Stellar Adventures rocketing into the future!

Arion Games' latest Kickstarter project Stellar Adventures has already passed its funding goal, and still has 18 days to run. If you've not backed the project yet yourself, it's not too late to join the fun(d), and bear in mind that one of the rewards is to receive a leatherbound copy of the rules.

To find out more, click this link.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy Adventures iiiin spaaaace!

Fans of Arion Games' Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG and science fiction adventures will be delighted to learn that the company have launched a Kickstarter to fund production of Stellar Adventures, the SF version of the AFF rules.

Due for publication later this year, this version will support all kinds of SF, from large Starships exploring unknown space, to small traders movings from spaceport to spaceport, to marines investigating ruined alien spacecraft, and even cyberpunk.

Backers of the Kickstarter will also be invited into the playtest area of the Arion Games forums at the end of the campaign to make sure that the game is as good as it can be!

The book will also be available through the Arion Games webstore in due course, but to get in early, visit the Kickstarter project page here and pledge your support today!

Arion Games are also pleased to announce that they are now able to sell PDFs of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy (Second Edition) core book. This PDF is available directly from RPGNow.

This development also means that from now on Arion Games can provide a free copy of the PDF whenever a customer buys a print copy of the book from they webstore. So there has never been a better time to get into the game if you are not already a fan.