The Wonder of Fighting Fantasy: A Statement of Purpose

     Back in Standard One I spent a lot of time reading. Usually I was reading various Beginner Books from Go Dogs Go through the totality of Theodore Gisel's work. At school I ended up reading quite a few of the Griffin Pirate Stories. Oh, and at least once I came back from the library with an academic textbook on Termites that had no place in my school library to begin with.

32 page book for children.
Current Amazon price: $975.33 US

     At some point in my literary adventures, however, the kindly librarian decided that the appropriate answer to a seven year old boy's (and I was a boy back then) request for reading material was to pull out this gem:

Come, child, learn the joys of reading!

     I snapped it up for the creepy cover alone and dove right in. Thus began my days of playing the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I owe a lot to Mr. Livingstone and the FFG books. It was my first real exposure to pulp fantasy and many of the tropes therein. It was my first exposure to the thought that somewhere out there in the world someone was making a living writing the kind of stuff my head was churning with every time I got lost inside it. Perhaps most importantly, it was my first real brush with roleplaying games, which many, many years later would become my true passion.

     For those of you unfamiliar with the works of Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (no not that one), the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were a series of books "in which YOU become the hero!" They combined the existing model of Choose Your Own Adventure books with simple dice mechanics common in miniatures and Dungeons and Dragons gaming. I say "Dungeons and Dragons" and not "Roleplaying Games" because A) these books were first published in 1982, when D&D was still the only big RPG in town (town here meaning: world), and B) Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (still not that one), along with John Peake, were the founders of Games Workshop and had acquired the rights to sell D&D in Europe. Let's not kid ourselves, they had D&D on the mind when these books first came to the publishers. The books play a lot like early text based video games or solo introductions to basic roleplaying in the D&D mold. Lots of nasty deaths and dead ends, with usually only one successful path.

     I devoured what the library had to offer from the series. It wasn't much. Crypt of the Sorcerer, Scorpion Swamp, and Armies of Death are the only ones I know were there. Maybe over the course of this I'll remember another one or two. Having completed those, and won them with a minimum of keeping my finger on the last page (even then I didn't want to cheat), I devoured the other gamebooks in the library. I found quickly the other gamebooks were...

They put this in reach of children!

     ... not great. My brother, who shared my interest in the gamebooks (though he always cheated and claimed victory whenever the dice showed up) did get ahold of the excellent Lovecraftian Where the Shadows Stalk, a gamebook of similar nature. It was, in retrospect, my first brush with the Lovecraftian genre.

"What says 'Lovecraftian horror'?"
"Green guy with a pickaxe."
"Genius!"

     Over the years I kept my eye out for more FFGs, and for Ian Livingstone's name in particular. Led me to some children's books with a similar theme, but little else. I wasn't terribly computer literate in my childhood, and it was before the online retail juggernauts that now shape our reading. I found out later the books were out of print. They came back into it, and left it again, and returned. Lately new books get added seemingly every few years, and a few classics have been updated and released for mobile devices. My curiosity, born in no small part by nostalgia, remains mostly with the original series.

     Which brings me to this project. The preamble is over. I've established context and an emotional connection. From here on in it's going to be about the books themselves. I'm not going to review them. Oh, no, I'm going to play them. This series is to be an Actual Play of the books, starting from the first and winding its way through the rest.

     Some ground rules:

1. I am playing not to win. Nor am I playing to show any level of completeness. Each book will be played till an ending, whether death or victory or something worse than death. This may make some play throughs very short indeed, but fear not, there's more than fifty of these things.
2. No cheating. Dice are going to fall where they fall, for good or ill.
3. Roleplaying. I won't lie, a lot of these books, especially early on, don't assume any level of roleplaying. It's more like an early adventure game where you just force through with trial and error, rather than getting into a character's head. I don't care. I'm going to make characters for each book that does not already provide them and play those characters.
4. There will be review sections and asides, but consider them asides. The primary focus here is the playing and the roleplaying.
5. Frequency. This entire project is part nostalgia trip, part writing exercise, and part experiment. I know it's putting myself on my own chopping block even saying I'm going to attempt daily updates, but that's the plan. Every day I'm going to craft a single post for this blog, dealing with a single entry in the book. Maybe I'll sometimes post extra; hopefully I'll never post less. This may mean my editing might be a bit lax, but to me the roughness of the reaction is a of a feature. Fewer barriers between my reaction and the content.

     And... yeah. That's it.

     Next post I'll begin The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by looking at the introduction and making a character.