Steve Jackson's Sorcery! now available on all major consoles

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! The Complete Collection is now available for Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, and is already taking the gaming community by storm.

Indeed, Finger Guns recently called it, "a real page turner," while The Xbox Hub has rated it 4.5/5.

Sorcery! was a Game of the Year finalist for TouchArcade and Mashable, while Rock Paper Shotgun called it, "one of the finest RPGs ever made."

The Sixth Axis has rated the game 9/10, as has the Use A Potion video game review site.

If you've not played inkle studios' adaptation of Steve Jackson's seminal gamebook quartet, the release of the quadrilogy on Switch will provide you with the perfect opportunity.

Journey through hills, forests, cities, dungeons, and even time in the magical world of Sorcery! where every choice matters. Fight, explore, solve puzzles, and most importantly, survive and craft your own unique story! Each part can be played on its own, or you can load your character from one part to the next, carrying over equipment, stats, and narrative choices.

Features: 

 - Freedom to explore

 - pick your own path and make your own choices, thousands of them

 - Progression that counts - load your progress from the previous part and continue your journey

 - Spellbook full of wonders - a plethora of weird and wonderful spells that can affect the narrative in wild and unpredictable ways

 - Swindle with the best of them

 - Play Swindlestones, a game of cunning and deceit, for profit or for information

 - God(s) be with you - multiple deities, each with their own quirks and powers

 - Life of the city - hundreds of characters to interact with

 - Slay the night - fight hundreds of unique monsters

 - Storytime - adapted from the best-selling gamebook series by legendary game designer Steve Jackson

 - Music to my ears - listen to a beautiful soundtrack by the "80 Days" composer, Laurence Chapman

Jon Ingold, inkle's Narrative Director, will be attending Fighting Fantasy Fest 4 two months today, on Saturday 3 September at the University of West London in Ealing.

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is coming to Switch

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! The Complete Collection is coming to Nintendo Switch on Thursday 23rd June 2022.

If you've not played inkle studios' adaptation of Steve Jackson's seminal gamebook quartet, the release of the quadrilogy on Switch will provide you with the perfect opportunity.

Journey through hills, forests, cities, dungeons, and even time in the magical world of Sorcery! where every choice matters. Fight, explore, solve puzzles, and most importantly, survive and craft your own unique story! Each part can be played on its own, or you can load your character from one part to the next, carrying over equipment, stats, and narrative choices.

Features: 

 - Freedom to explore

 - pick your own path and make your own choices, thousands of them

 - Progression that counts - load your progress from the previous part and continue your journey

 - Spellbook full of wonders - a plethora of weird and wonderful spells that can affect the narrative in wild and unpredictable ways

 - Swindle with the best of them

 - Play Swindlestones, a game of cunning and deceit, for profit or for information

 - God(s) be with you - multiple deities, each with their own quirks and powers

 - Life of the city - hundreds of characters to interact with

 - Slay the night - fight hundreds of unique monsters

 - Storytime - adapted from the best-selling gamebook series by legendary game designer Steve Jackson

 - Music to my ears - listen to a beautiful soundtrack by the "80 Days" composer, Laurence Chapman

What's your ideal summer Fighting Fantasy read?

Now that summer has well and truly arrived upon your Earthly Plane*, bringing with it cold winds and rain, what is your go to Fighting Fantasy adventure for when you want to imagine yourself lying on a sandy beach under a blazing hot sun?

If Caribbean holidays are your thing, maybe it's Ian Livingstone's Island of the Lizard King?

Or, if you like things really hot, you might prefer to visit the Desert of Skulls via Ian Livingstone's Temple of Terror.

If you enjoy donning your backpack and hiking in the hills of some distant land, then the first book in Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series, The Shamutanti Hills, might be a favourite.

And if you like your holiday destinations even more exotic, you might want to visit the flying archipelago of Rhianna Pratchett's Crystal of Storms.

Of course, if you can't tolerate the heat, maybe you would prefer to head north to the Icefinger Mountains and the Caverns of the Snow Witch instead.

So what's you favourite summer FF read? Let us know in the comments below.

* For those of your in the northern hemisphere, at least. 

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is coming to Nintendo Switch!

Inkle, the developer behind the superb digital adaptation of the Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series, will be bringing the game(s) to Nintendo Switch later this year.

Here's what Eurogamer.net had to say about the Sorcery! games:

"Jackson's source material - a four-part spin-off of the Fighting Fantasy series - is still a delight, and Inkle gives the adaptation's predominantly text-based choose-your-own-adventure proceedings a real sense of presence, through some satisfyingly chunky map exploration, enhanced combat, and other nifty tricks."

And here's what PocketGamer.com thought:

"Beautifully realised and with a compelling if familiar narrative... this gripping tale has us well and truly hooked."

While Inkle originally released the four-part epic in installments, the Switch version, which is being handled by Polish publisher No Gravity Games, will include all four chapters in a single package. 

Sorcery! Parts 1-4, as the game will be known on Switch, is due to arrive in the third quarter this year.

An epic adventure through an open world of monsters, traps and magic. Infiltrate the Fortress of Sorcerers, and create your own unique story where every decision you make is remembered, no matter how small. Cheat death, uncover ancient mysteries, and recover the Crown of Kings – if you can. Spanning four interconnected games, players weave their own unique tale of adventure, daring, luck and cunning from a million words of dynamic content and tens of thousands of decisions. Each part can be played separately, or strung together, with consequences of decisions that span the whole series.

The Crown of Kings - 35 years of magic

2020 marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of The Crown of Kings, the fourth and concluding adventure of Steve Jackson's seminal Sorcery! series.

Jackson conceived the epic gamebook experiment after holidaying in Nepal, and several of the settlements that appear in The Shamutanti Hills, the first book in the quartet, are named after actual villages he came across on a five day trek he undertook from the city of Pokhara.

The Shamutanti Hills concludes with the hero - the Analander - battling the Manticore that has appeared on the cover of every edition of the book ever published. The second book in the series, Kharé – Cityport of Traps, charts the hero’s challenging journey through the titular city to the spell-locked Northern Gate, through which he has to pass to continue the quest for the Crown of Kings.

The Seven Serpents, the third book in the series, takes the hero across the inhospitable Baklands – a treacherous wilderness of deserts, forests, and swamps – and a vast lake, as the Analander attempts to hunt down and do away with the Archmage’s assassin-agents of the title, seven deadly and magical serpents. And in The Crown of Kings, the hero has to climb through the Xamen Peaks to the Mampang Fortress, and then battle his way through the Archmage’s lair.

The Crown of Kings was a whopping 800 references in length - a record yet to be broken by any other Fighting Fantasy gamebook) – was a suitably epic finale to Sorcery! series, and featured one of the most memorable (and clever) denouements of any adventure ever published, not to mention encounters with a god-headed Hydra and entire societies of birdmen and she-satyrs.

When Jackson talks about the Sorcery! series, he does so, understandably, with great fondness. When pressed on the subject of which of the gamebooks he has written are his favourites, he cites two: “Warlock because it was the first. And Sorcery! because it was the most complex. Creating a four-part adventure in which your actions in Book 2 might affect your choices in Book 4 was a real challenge. Also making sure they were all good adventures in their own right; you didn’t need to have completed Sorcery 1 to play Sorcery 2. I was very proud of Sorcery!”

Of course, in more recent years, the Sorcery! series has been turned into a series of apps by inkle studios, as well as a multi-player role-playing campaign published by Arion Games, while the first two parts of the Analander's momentous quest are now in print again, courtesy of Scholastic Books.

     

Return to Kharé - Cityport of Traps

Inspired by inkle's adaptation of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! books, Fighting Fantasy fan Minh Trần Duy has created a digital 3D model of that infamous Kakhabadian den of thieves and monsters, Kharé, also known as the Cityport of Traps.

And while we're talking of traps, don't forget that Sunday 30th September is the deadline for entries in our Trial of Champions competition, which is the day after Ian Livingstone and Charlie Higson are appearing at the Bath Children's Literature Festival.

Blast from the Past! The Shamutanti Hills

The next tranche of Fighting Fantasy releases from Scholastic Books include the first title in Steve Jackson's seminal Sorcery! series. So it seemed timely today to revisit this classic gamebook title - The Shamutanti Hills!

The first book in the Sorcery! series, aimed squarely at adult gamers, was released in late 1983. TheShamutanti Hills - which bore the dedication ‘To Ian Livingstone’ and which was illustrated inside and out by fantasy art legend John Blanche - saw the commencement of an epic quest to recover the Crown of Kings from the evil Archmage of Kakhabad. In the adventure, the hero has to make his way through the hills of the title, “alive with evil creatures, lawless wanderers and bloodthirsty monsters, the land is riddled with tricks and traps waiting for the unwary traveller.”

Despite being for adults, the game still used the usual Fighting Fantasy gaming mechanics, the cover proudly stating the mantra familiar to Fighting Fantasy fans that, “Two dice, a pencil and an eraser are all you need for this adventure – YOU decide which paths to take, which dangers to risk and which monsters to fight.” The big difference came from what gave the series its name. As well as being a mighty warrior, the hero of the Sorcery! series could also be played as a powerful magic-user.

The ‘simple’ version of the adventure involved the use of no magic whatsoever, as with most FF adventures up until this point (with the notable exception of The Citadel of Chaos). However, there was also the option whereby the reader could opt for the ‘advanced’ version of the game, which relied heavily on magic, with the hero being able to cast a wide range of spells. Each spell cost between 1 and 4 STAMINA points to cast, and each was denoted by a three letter word (following the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant), and often required very specific ingredients to be cast successfully at all.

There was also the option to call on Libra, the goddess of justice, once during the course of the adventure, either to enable the hero to escape a tricky battle, to be cleansed of curses or diseases, or to have their starting attributes restored to their Initial level.

The easiest of the Sorcery! series to complete – and the shortest, despite having 456 references in total, numerous paragraphs being given over to spell-casting rather than plot development – TheShamutanti Hills concludes with the hero battling the Manticore that has appeared on the cover of every edition of the book ever published.

Will Scholastic Books follow in that tradition? We will just have to wait and see...

The Shamutanti Hills is now available as an app from inkle studios.

You can find out more about the creation of the best-selling Sorcery! series - in both book and app form - in Jonathan Green's YOU ARE THE HERO - A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and YOU ARE THE HERO Part 2, available now from Snowbooks.

     

Fighting Fantasy Fest 2 - Talks and Panels

Just four weeks from today, on Saturday 2nd September, Fighting Fantasy Fest 2 is taking place at the University of West London in Ealing.

With a host of guests and exhibitors in attendance there will be something for every Fighting Fantasy fan, be it role-playing game sessions, creator talks, or video game demonstrations.

This year there are two talk strands which will include the following...

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone giving a behind-the-scenes talk about how the Scholastic Era of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks came about...

Nomad Games showcasing Fighting Fantasy Legends in a Fighting Fantasy Fest exclusive...

Former Fighting Fantasy consultant editor and author Marc Gascoigne in conversation with Fighting Fantasy historian Jonathan Green...

Arion Games on their plans for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy Second Edition role-playing game...

Jamie Thomson talking about his Fighting Fantasy collaborations with Mark Smith and Dave Morris - the gamebooks Talisman of Death, Sword of the Samurai and The Keep of the Lich-Lord...

Fox Yason Productions previewing their brand new Fighting Fantasy audio dramas...

Three-time FF author Peter Darvill-Evans with Alan Langford and Tony Hough, talking about their creative collaborations...

A panel featuring the creative team behind the new Freeway Fighter comic, published by Titan Comics...

A play-through of inkle studios' Sorcery! game, with narrative director Jon Ingold and Steve Jackson himself...

Tickets are on sale now but event-exclusive Adventurer's Backpacks - which include a t-shirt, lanyard, A4 art print, and Balthus Dire miniature - are only available for pre-order until midnight on Sunday 6th August.

Unfortunately, due to health reasons, Russ Nicholson is no longer able to attend Fighting Fantasy Fest 2, and all of us at FightingFantasy.com wish him a speedy recovery. Get well soon, Russ!

The Upgrade of Firetop Mountain

There are now five weeks remaining until Fighting Fantasy Fest 2 takes place on Saturday 2nd September, in Ealing.

As well as Scholastic selling the new editions of the classic FF adventures, along with Ian Livingstone's brand new The Port of Peril, and companies like Otherworld Miniatures and Arion Games being in attendance, we have a number of features that will appeal to fans of computer games.

First off, Nomad Games will be showcasing their new game Fighting Fantasy Legends for the very first time, which will be an exclusive for Fighting Fantasy Fest 2.

Secondly, inkle studios will be there on the day, demoing a run through of their highly-acclaimed ad-app-tation of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!

And don't forget, you only have until end of play on Sunday 6th August to pre-order your Adventurer's Backpack!

Fighting Fantasy Audio Dramas to preview at Fighting Fantasy Fest 2!

As of posting, there are just 12 hours left to secure yourself an Early Bird ticket for Fighting Fantasy Fest 2. And don't forget that the Adventurer's Backpack now also includes a limited edition Balthus Dire miniature.

Doors open on Fighting Fantasy Fest 2 at 9:00am on Saturday 2nd September, at the University of West London in Ealing, at which point attendees will be able to register, collect their backpacks, and enter the venue.

Following a welcome talk in a lecture theatre (that seats 300 people) the day will be filled with all manner of FF-related activities. There will be two separate strands of talks, featuring the creators of the original gamebook series as well as new companies taking Fighting Fantasy in new and interesting directions, and one of these is FoxYason Music Productions.

FoxYason Music Productions will be presenting the launch of the a new, exciting range of full-cast, original audio dramas, beginning in September, with the release of the first story in the series, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Members of the production team, plus cast, will be at Fighting Fantasy Fest 2 to officially launch the range featuring interviews, clips, a Q&A and the plans for the future range.

Other highlights of the day will be Nomad Games showcase of Fighting Fantasy Legends, and inkle Studios taking attendees back to the world of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, while the creative team behind Ian Livingstone's FREEWAY FIGHTER will be there to talk about the gestation of the very first Fighting Fantasy comic.

There will also be guest signings (and we do not charge for signatures at Fighting Fantasy Fest 2, in case you were wondering), role-playing game sessions, cosplay, an FF exhibition, numerous traders, a cafe and bar on site, and the opportunity to hang-out with fellow gamebook fans, as well as an auction of rare FF items!

There are still a few Early Bird tickets* left, so don't delay and grab yours today!

* Early Bird Adult tickets are £35 each, but after midnight tonight they will go up in price to £45.