It seemed for a time the young man would not actually pursue the Warlock, for he was quite taken with the young ladies of the town, and they with him. Even a fight with young Wallium over his dear sister's virtue had not driven the adventurer to see about the business of adventuring. The people complained to each other why they couldn't have a better class of adventurer, like that dear Mrs. Chalk.
In the end it was not the quarreling jealousy of the young women, nor the brawls with their brothers, that drove the young man out of town. No, it was the very earnest and genuine speeches of Mr. Malmon. Mr. Malmon was delighted that his daughter had taken a fancy to the adventurer, and, being a man of the world, Mr. Malmon had little doubt his girl would be with child if it kept up. So he drank with the young man, and told him how eager he was for the marriage, and to grandchildren, and to have a helpful hand about the farm, and all manner of other cheery things. The young man managed three of these nights, before he decided the company of the Warlock was more to his liking.
So, off he trudged for two days, full of plans and hope, to the foothills of Firetop Mountain itself. He was surprised, when he got there, to see a stout matronly woman in an apron leaning against a nearby tree.
"Are you the guardian of this mountain?" he said cautiously, "An ogress perhaps?"
"An ogress?" the woman cried in disbelief, "Why, never in all my years. An ogress indeed! Young man, for your impertinence I have half a mind to say nothing to you at all. I could be off in the great beyond already, searching for my late husband. Though, I dare say I'm the one who's truly been late."
"The great beyond?" the young man asked in disbelief. "Then you are a spirit!" he held up his sword, as though it would protect him.
The woman sighed. "Yes, I am a spirit. Now put that down before you poke your eye out. You're about to walk in and fight the Warlock, or think you are, but there's a lot to be found past that cavern mouth. I dare say I've barely seen half of it, but I have seen some of it. So, put the pig sticker away, sit down, and listen. Maybe you can do better."
* * *
Well, Yesterday I missed my first deadline in making this daily. I will work to have a proper buffer to prevent this in the future. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is done. We say our goodbyes to poor, dead Henrietta Chalk, hoping she will find something in the next world.
Next up is Citadel of Chaos, but before we get into Steve Jackson's (still not that one) first solo credited title, let's take a look back at The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
First off, if you were wondering about the strapping young warlock on the covers, there's a reason for that image. Flipping back and forth from section to section, I couldn't help but notice this image:
Now, those other covers never quite show this man. For one thing he doesn't have the quite prominent mole in any of those covers, but they do look an awful lot like what you'd get if someone described him to an illustrator who wasn't interested in depicting ugliness.
It really is another image in this book that both strikes me as incredibly cool, and not quite right. His hands and feet all seem rather small compared to his head, for example. Still, the magical energy and ornamented robes and trinkets rock very hard.
My review of the image isn't far from my review of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain as a whole. It's not good. The prose is often rather bland, there's no real story with emotional weight or depth at play, and the whole thing is just very simple. On the other hand, there are glimmers of the occasional quite evocative image, striking features, genuine humor, and genuine cleverness.
I would say the tone shifts bizarrely, but I don't think that's accurate. It switches seamlessly between shocking violence and goofy comedy, with surprisingly toned down brutality and bloodshed, precisely because it has a distinctly boyish attitude to the whole thing. Things happen with the kind of logic and tempo of a young boy telling a story, full of elements slapped together without thought, switching between violence and mirth without really understanding the difference. There is no weight to the violence, so there is no reason for it to be somber or serious.
In the end, I think The Warlock of Firetop Mountain survives less because of its own quality, and more because of its pioneering role. Fighting Fantasy introduces a new innovation to the Choose Your Own Adventure genre that allows for a change in how stories can be told with it. Moving stats, a stronger focus on inventory, and dice rolling are all new innovations to interactive books, even if they were first seen in Tabletop Games.
So, how do those changes themselves fare? Let's break them down.
The primary advantage of moving stats is that you can make a poor decision not an immediate death. Most Choose Your Own Adventure books feature many deaths or other bad ends along the way, so turning a page can be an immediate grisly end. Then you begin again. With Stamina, we can instead say you take a hit to your Stamina and keep going.
This allows for longer game runs, which is stops readers always returning to the beginning and making the same choices in repetition right up until they get to the last choice that killed them. A frequently tedious process. On the other hand, many books take advantage of the more frequent true ends to describe horrible ends and deaths. In books like the "Give Yourself Goosebumps" series, finding all the deaths was half the fun. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, by contrast, has many fights that have no special text to describe your death at all. In some ways I feel lucky Henrietta died to the ghoul, so we could at least see it dancing afterwards.
I'm not going to claim other Choose Your Own Adventure books don't have some level of inventory. Finding something and having it come up later is an important moment in many stories. That said, i don't recall any Choose Your Own Adventure books asking me to write down my inventory the way Fighting Fantasy does. Having an inventory introduces bookkeeping, but it does give a strong reason to search around and find things. This desire to search leads to greater risk taking early on, even Henrietta opened many doors that were safer left shut near the start. Situations where you have to choose between items to use or take also leads to potential puzzles. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain din't actually have many such puzzles, at least on not many we saw on Henrietta's run, but they're there. Since the use of an item has to be described in text, it also provides hints as to what to look for in a playthrough.
Not that writing down extensive inventories is a worthwhile use of time if runs are short. Who wants to write down a dozen items that never come up?
As to randomness... my first instinct is that it's bad. It's a strong rule of thumb in game design to disfavor randomness whenever possible. To let the player choose their path, and have outcomes based on decisions.
But, then I think of the frequent replays to beat a game like this. Randomness really increases the replayability of a game like this. After Henrietta I might roll up a character with amazing skill, terrible Stamina, and mediocre Luck. Playing that character, I would make different decisions to Henrietta. For that matter, even if I rolled exactly the same as Henrietta, and took all the same choices, there's no guarantee that the adventure would be the same. The trial and error gameplay of Choose Your Own Adventure books often suffers from the boredom of the frequent replays required to win, but randomness makes each run tense and interesting in a way that a completely determined approach does not.
Each of these rules favors a longer, more thoughtful approach to the game. Each run will take longer, but each run will be more unique as a result. It has strong potential for a more serious style of Choose Your Own Adventure game than games without these mechanisms, which often thrive on finding all the different endings, instead of on the goal of actually winning. In this it becomes more of a game.
All those considerations said, the actual way Fighting Fantasy chose to handle dice is awful. A single fight can easily take five or more rounds, each time requiring at least two rolls a rounds and sometimes having 3. There's too much dice rolling, and the fights aren't settled quickly enough. It would have been quite simple to half the number just by assuming a static value for the enemy and a roll for the player alone. If you just take every creature, add 7 to its Skill and use that number without a Roll for them, then the chances of success and failure are not changed at all. It's so very clunky.
The game has ideas. It has personality. It has charm. For some people, it has nostalgia. All of these make it fun, and it's certainly an easy read one could give to a preteen to read, but for all its virtues The Warlock of Firetop Mountain never quite rises to being good.
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