Fighting Fantasy by Molly Metroid

Introduction

Back in the 80s and early 90s, there was a popular series of children’s gamebooks a-la Choose Your Own Adventure, but with dice and monsters and treasure. They were called Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. There’ve been Let’s Read threads of several of these books on these very forums! But did you know they also made an actual RPG based on it?




Check out that awesomely 80s cover!


There are actually three separate editions of the Fighting Fantasy RPG: Fighting Fantasy (1984), which I’ll be discussing in this post, Advanced Fighting Fantasy: Dungeoneer (1989), which expanded greatly on the core systems, and a second edition of the latter licensed and released by Cubicle 7 games in 2011.

Also released were several sourcebooks – Out of the Pit , a collection of monsters, Titan , a book detailing the world most of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were set in, The Riddling Reaver , an adventure/campaign for the Fighting Fantasy core system, as well as Blacksand and Allansia , presenting Advanced Fighting Fantasy-compatible rules for city and wilderness adventures respectively. I've got all of these (as well as all but one of the gamebooks) and as long as nobody tells me to shut up about it I can go through all of them. It's a somewhat interesting progression from being a terrible, nearly unplayable game into something that at least nominally works...

A Bit Of History!

The Fighting Fantasy line was created by a pair of British dudes, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson—not the GURPS guy, but a different one. These guys were also the co-founders of Games Workshop, incidentally, and were pretty huge and instrumental in the UK gaming scene back in the day.

Anyway, the gamebooks were intended to be basically a first step into the world of roleplaying games, which they did well enough at. By 1984, there were about a dozen of the books in print, and other authors had been hired to contribute as well (including the other Steve Jackson, the GURPS one.) They were quite popular, and the series continued until the mid-90s, with 59 main-series gamebooks, a 4-book miniseries as a single continuous adventure, several novels, a pair of gamebooks meant to be played together as a two-player game, and the above-mentioned RPG books.

The RPG books are…odd. They’re definitely a product of their times, with elements of adversarial GMing, arbitrary randomness, and completely uneven character generation rules. As I go through the books, you’ll see what I mean

So first, we’re treated to one of the inevitable “what is an RPG?” sections. It compares it to the gamebooks pretty heavily, which makes sense, since most readers were likely familiar with them at the time. The role of the GM is compared to a benevolent deity, and the duties of the GM are outlined. The book suggests using a d6 to arbitrarily determine things like whether a hobgoblin falls for a trick or not—“it has a 5 in 6 chance of rushing in blindly.”

We are treated to an example of play! It includes a HURR HURR YOU DIDN’T SAY YOU LIT YOUR LANTERN moment in which a character trips and takes damage. It includes a gotcha trap: a door that is locked and won’t open, a player bashes it and due to fiat fails (taking damage), then the second bash attempt the door automatically opens (gotcha!) sending the bashing character sprawling.

Also featured is a dwarf who won’t talk to the players unless and until they eat nuts he offers them, which have a 1 in 6 chance of doing damage from causing indigestion. Yay! We also learn that doors, apparently, have an arbitrary chance of being locked—guess what, another d6 check whenever they come to a door!

This is the kind of game where you are encouraged, if the players are keeping a map, to do something to take the map away in-character and steal the map from the players, as well. Some of this is a product of the time the game came out, of course, but this isn’t actually a good game—not in this version, anyway. To illustrate the point, let’s look at how to create a character!

You have three stats: SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK. To determine SKILL and LUCK you roll 1d6+6, and for STAMINA you roll 2d6+12. Then you write down your equipment, which is basically sword, backpack, leather armor, provisions, and maybe a potion. Then you’re done.

That’s it. You can make a Fighting Fantasy character now. In this version of the game, there are no classes, no magic, no races, and no customization.

Awesome! Did you roll a 1 for your SKILL? Did your buddy roll a 6? Congratulations, he is literally better at everything than you are. And there is absolutely no method for character advancement, either. You’re gimped, and you’re going to stay gimped, forever.

Some of this stuff is addressed in the later books in the line…but we’ll get there in due time.

Next time: The rest of the game mechanics!

Mechanics

All right, so continuing with Fighting Fantasy , here's how the game actually works. Note that I've kept the formatting as close as I can to the way it's noted in the books--SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK are always capitalized, Test for Luck is always italicized, etc.

Almost everything you do in the game is determined by rolling 2d6 and comparing it to your SKILL stat. Rolling under your SKILL means you succeed, rolling over fails.

The same mechanic is used for something called “ Test for Luck ”, only instead of SKILL you’re rolling versus LUCK, and if you roll under you’re Lucky , over is Unlucky , and either way your current LUCK goes down by 1.

These two systems are pretty much it for the game mechanics out of combat. If it’s something that has to do with skill, like leaping, searching, pickpocketing, or bashing down doors, you check SKILL. If it’s something that’s random chance, like winning at cards or a coin toss, or just to see if the universe hates you, you test luck.

Combat is simple, but operates completely differently from the rest of the game. You roll 2d6, add your SKILL, and so does your opponent. The total is called your Attack Strength. Whoever has the higher total Attack Strength wins, and the opponent loses 2 STAMINA. You can Test for Luck to do 2 additional damage, but if you’re Unlucky , you do one less damage. In this version of the rules, at least, all weapons deal the same amount of damage on a hit unless some special property of the weapon changes that.

You can fight multiple things at once, but you can only deal damage to as many creatures in one round as your ATTACKS stat, which for adventurers is always 1. However, ATTACKS can be higher for monsters. You only roll Attack Strength once per round, and compare it to everything you’re fighting. If you are fighting more creatures than you have ATTACKS, winning the roll on additional creatures just means you don’t take damage. Having more ATTACKS than targets doesn’t give you extra strikes in a turn, though—an octopus may have 8 ATTACKS, but if it’s fighting just one guy, it’s still only getting one hit per attack round. When one side hits 0 STAMINA, it’s dead and the battle ends.

Most commonly, STAMINA is reduced by combat or other things that would cause damage, and is restored through potions or provisions. Potions restore STAMINA to full, and provisions restore 4 points each. You can also get STAMINA back through random acts of GM fiat. STAMINA never goes over its maximum ( Initial ) value.

SKILL doesn’t generally go up or down very often. Most commonly SKILL penalties happen due to having no weapon, which is a -4 penalty, or GM fiat. The usual way of restoring SKILL is through potions, which restores SKILL to full. Fine weapons, or magic weapons, can offer bonuses to SKILL. Magic weapons can bring you over your Initial SKILL, but otherwise it’s a hard cap.

LUCK is all over the place. Testing LUCK changes it, and you can be called to test your luck any time the GM feels like it, or voluntarily in combat. It goes up whenever the GM feels like you’ve been particularly fortunate, and down whenever the GM feels you’ve done something particularly foolish or unlucky. Unlike the other two stats, a potion of luck doesn’t just restore it to full, but rather raises your Initial LUCK by one point and restores it to the new total.

The mechanics chapter also includes the fact that random doors are locked on a roll of 1-2 on a d6, and chests on 1-5. You’re meant to check this every single time you come to a door or a chest. You’re also advised to roll frequently, as a DM, just so that the players don’t know when you’re rolling for something important—so that you don’t give away that something important is happening when you roll. Optional making noises about the results not included, I guess.

The most bizarre bit of rules in this system is how time works. Specifically: things happen in real time. A bunch of stuff in the two included adventures triggers on timing—a certain monster comes back to life every 20 minutes, for example—and you’re advised to have a stopwatch (or two) to track that so that you can fuck with your players. This is hands down the worst fucking rule, and there’s a couple situations in the pack-in adventures that will illustrate exactly why.

Later books do include rules for more varied weapons and weapon damage, going unconscious, and additional character options, but we'll get to those when we come to them. At this point, that's it for the rules.

Next time, we'll look at the first of the two adventures that take up the bulk of the book: The Wishing Well!

The Wishing Well, Part 1

• A silver necklace. If you put it on it tries to choke you: pass 3 skill tests in a row or die. In your backpack it is harmless. Dick move!
  
• A leather pouch. Inside is a single gold piece. If you take it out and wait 15 minutes (real time, remember?) another gold piece appears in its place. This will repeat indefinitely, provided the gold piece is removed every quarter hour. How the players would notice this, I have no idea. Semi-dickish, since there’s no way this’d ever get noticed and seems to be there so you can laugh at the players for discarding the best item in this damn place.
  
• A battle axe. The GM is explicitly told to lie and describe it as being a very nice weapon, and not to reveal that it secretly subtracts one from the user’s Attack Strength. I guess the GM is doing all his rolling in secret, since there’s otherwise no way for that to work. Dick move.
  
• A jeweled pendant. The jewel is made of ice. It’ll melt if you take it and the pendant part is worthless. Dick move.
  
• A torch. You already have lanterns, but hey, this is there for the taking if you actually want it.
  
• A picture of Marg the Slayer. Not exciting, valuable, or even pretty to look at.
  

The Wishing Well, Part 2

The Riddling Reaver, Part 1

Weapon            1   2   3   4   5   6 
---------------------------------------
Battle Axe        1   2   2   2   2   3
Dagger            1   1   2   2   2   2
Mace              2   2   2   2   2   2
Spear             1   1   2   2   3   3
Morning Star*     1   2   2   2   3   3
Sword             2   2   2   2   2   2
2H Sword**        2   2   2   3   3   3
---------------------------------------
*Adventurer fights at -1 SKILL
**Adventurer fights at -2 SKILL

The Riddling Reaver, Part 2

The Riddling Reaver, Part 3

Voyage of Engima, Part 1

Ooh, Paranoia. That ought to be good fun! Too bad I'm stuck doing...

Fighting Fantasy RPG: The Riddling Reaver
Act Two: Voyage of Engima

When we left our heroes they were in lukewarm pursuit of a villain who’d done them no personal wrongdoing, on the promise of no reward, on the basis of he’d teased them and then offered to give them a ride on his magic boat if they went through some bullshit. This they have accomplished, because heroes are nothing if not ridiculously fucking stupid.

We rejoin our fucking stupid, yet intrepid heroes as they come aboard the Twice Shy , personal sea-going vessel of the Riddlng Reaver, a man who murdered a couple people and made them solve some ridiculous riddles in the last scene/adventure.

Because this is as good a time as any to get a bit more information on our antagonist, here is what Titan , the sourcebook detailing the world of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and RPG setting, has to say about the Riddling Reaver (emphasis mine):

“The Riddling Reaver is another unusual servant of the Tricksters. Legend says that he dwells somewhere amid the jungles of southern Allansia, in a place where all the normal rules have been disregarded – where water no longer flows downwards, where trees seem not to need soil, but float free in the air, and so on. Wherever he actually has his residence, however, he is most often seen aboard his enormous ship, in which he sails around the world to carry out his tasks.”

“The Reaver is said to be a master of disguise, able to transform himself into just about anyone or anything in a matter of minutes; he often uses such disguises to get close to his ‘victims’. He is also a very puzzling being, for he delights in leaving enigmatic rhymes behind him wherever he goes – hence his name. He seems to have almost limitless powers to draw on in his tasks of bringing confusion and balance to the world . Where he actually originates from is anyone’s guess. He may be a human being blessed with peculiar powers by his equally peculiar gods, or he may be a supernatural being sent by the Tricksters to work special missions on the Earthly Plane, perhaps where a Genie – the usual Trickster emissary – would not be subtle enough .”

The idea is supposed to be that the Reaver is a servant of the Trickster gods of neutrality, and is to be working to maintain the balance between good and evil. Particularly good beings—like heroes or whatever—may find him acting like a villain just to offset their goodness. Alignment is fucking dumb, I guess? The problem is, of course, that as you will see, the Riddling Reaver is doing exactly the opposite of this, and his goals are explicitly to create chaos and destroy the balance. This isn’t actually revealed until the next chapter of the adventure, but it’s no big deal to reveal it now, especially since this particular act of the adventure is so blatantly full of bullshit, dick moves, and time-wasting and I really want to put off writing about it as long as possible.

Sadly, I’m out of good, informative filler, so I’m going to blast through this motherfucker. First, let me get this out of the way: there’s a bit in the first adventure, as a random encounter, where the group can be press ganged and dragged off to work as oarsmen on a ship. The book suggests that if this happens, skip the remainder of act 1 and all of this act and start them getting shipwrecked at the start of act 3. They would lose nothing of value or interest by this shortcut. There is no information, insight, or treasure gained by playing through this part of the Riddling Reaver scenario; it exists explicitly to kill time.

To that end, it tells the GM to set a timer for how long he wants to waste, and end this act once the time is up. A good GM would set the timer to about as long as it takes to say “Your journey aboard the strange magical vessel is uneventful, and after a few hours you arrive at your apparent destination”. This is not what the book tells you to do.

So, since our hypothetical GM is as stupid as his hypothetical players at this point, we dutifully set the timer and begin the adventure. Onward, to tedium.


The good ship Twice Shy

The first place our stalwart adventurers find themselves is on deck. There is a random encounter table here, meant to be used to keep the PCs from just waiting out the voyage. Each of the six encounters is to be used only once, though, so a sufficiently determined group could, if they survive all six, lean back, fold their arms across their chests defiantly, stare at the GM in silence and wait for the clock to wind down.

The encounters aren’t necessarily easy, though.

1) A plesiosaurus (SKILL 9 STAMINA 22) swims up looking for food. There’s food in the hold if the adventurers want to leave the deck, otherwise it’s fighty time.
2) A massive storm hits, complete with 1-6 storm spirits (each SKILL 10 STAMINA 6). On top of their not insignificant SKILL score, these fuckers can shoot lighting up to twice each, hitting on a 1-4 for 2 damage, and anyone using a metal weapon takes a point of damage every time they hit the spirits, due to electrical feedback.
3) Another ship crosses the path of the Twice Shy and it turns out it’s a plague ship. 1-6 plague zombies (SKILL 5 STAMINA 7) leap across, another 1-6 try and fail, falling in the water. Anyone sufficiently awful at life to let one of these fuckers reduce him to 0 STAMINA becomes a plague zombie himself after 5 minutes. This would be more threatening if SKILL 5 had any real chance of hitting. On the other hand, if you’re doing this adventure by staring down the GM, you may have already taken enough damage that they can win by attrition
4) Another ship crosses the path of the Twice Shy , this time it’s an old merchant ship and it gets smashed to driftwood, dumping all hands into the sea. The PCs have no control over the ship, so they can do nothing but watch.
5) A giant squid attacks. SKILL 9 STAMANA 12 ATTACKS 2. If it wins two successive attack rounds on a single adventurer it’ll squeeze for an extra damage and will continue to do so each round until the target wins a round.
6) A Sea Giant pops up and demands to know which is more powerful, wind or sea? If the heroes aren’t smart enough to give the obvious answer and come up with a marginally convincing reason, they’re gonna fight the thing. SKILL 10, STAMINA 17, ATTACKS 3. If they convince it they actually do believe the sea is stronger, it splashes them and fucks off.

Like I said, if you really wanted to, you could conceivably deal with all of the above and then stare down the GM until he ends this adventure, but chances are you’re playing in good faith. Maybe the GM didn’t put you through The Wishing Well or Shagradd’s Hives of Peril, and you managed to skip the bathhouse shit in the last act by being focused on the task at hand. I don’t know.

Location 2 is the hold. There are four barrels of salted fish, one of which contains a vicious rat that’ll jump out and bite whoever opened the barrel for 1 damage, because this adventure is a dick. The fish tastes terrible but eating as much as you can stomach restores 2 STAMINA. There’s also six small packing cases nearby and one large one at the far end of the hold. The six small ones each contain a glass body part, which combine to form a Mannikin that will obey any order or statement that could be interpreted as an order. It has SKILL 8 and STAMINA 3 and can be used as an ally if the PCs order it around clearly, but it’s fucking dumb and doesn’t give a shit who gives the orders, so any intelligent enemy can order it to do something else.

The packing crate in the far end has a riddle on it: What has the head of a jungle king, the body of a hill climber, the tail of a legless lizard and the breath of a winged hoarder? The answer’s in the box!” Stupid adventurers who open it anyway get to fight a chimera. SKILL 12, STAMINA 20, ATTACKS 3, this fucker could kill someone even without breathing fire every 3 rounds for 2 damage on a 1-4. Running away is a very viable tactic, but if you’re dumbshit enough to open that box you probably aren’t going to enumerate that among the available options.

Location 3 is a small cabin. Aside from a bunch of stuffed fish and a hammock, there’s a box with a pair of eyeholes in the side, secured to the floor by some iron bolts. Each person looking inside sees something different, from treasure to a bound maiden to a swarm of insects to another box. If the players decide to pry the box open, a giant fucking jack in the box springs out and towers over them for a couple minutes before saying “Gluttony has proved the downfall of many a brave adventurer.”

This is supposed to be a hint or some shit, but whatever. If the PCs hack it to bits as soon as it appears, they don’t get this tidbit of “wisdom”. I’ve read more useful information on fortune cookie slips.

Location 4 : A big “portal” with no door and only blackness visible. Going inside leads to a giant-sized room—actually, the heroes have been shrunk to the size of an insect. If they want to hack through the purple underbrush (plush carpet) and explore, they will find a mouse (SKILL 10 STAMINA 16 ATTACKS 2) and if they kill it, they may spot a treasure if they are Lucky on a Test for Luck or if anyone bought the eagle tattoo in act 1. A giant ingot of gold, a meter long! (well, to the tiny heroes, anyway.) Making the effort to get it out of this fucking room returns the heroes to their former size, revealing their grand treasure to be a sliver of gold worth 2 gp.

Location 5 features a table upon which is laid out a sumptuous feast, complete with a domed silver platter as the centerpiece. The food on the table counts as the equivalent of three sets of Provisions. Under the platter are a fuckton of FLESH GRUBS, which will immediately assault whoever opens the platter. 2-12 damage, instant, unavoidable. They’re easy to get off once they’ve done their damage, but sticking around the table once the grubs are released will only get you covered in more of the fucking things.

Meanwhile, the door got replaced by an Imitator. Which is like a mimic, but instead of being a chest, it’s a door, with glue, and a fucking fist to punch you with. SKILL 9 STAMINA 8 and the first person to touch it fights at -2 SKILL thanks to the glue. Meanwhile, if the fight goes on more than 4 rounds, the flesh grubs get there too!

Location 6 is the cabin of an unfortunate sage the Reaver made the acquaintance of. Once the poor sap stumbled on a perfect system of government that would revolutionize the way people think and make everyone all nice, the Reaver killed him to maintain balance, apparently, but probably more accurately to shut him up because that kind of shit is really insufferable. His ghost will appear and mumble incomprehensible “intellectual gibberish” and the only useful information he has is that the answer to the riddle on a door we haven’t got to yet is “the answer is a riddle”. He’s got a Scroll of Fortune that behaves like a potion of luck somewhere in this mess of a room, and 10 gold.

We’re halfway through this fucking time-waster. I’ll pick up with the rest of it next post, because there’s only so much of this bullshit I feel like dealing with at once. If you like, imagine this being the interlude where the GM halts the timer, says “okay guys I’m sorry” and goes out to buy everyone snacks as an act of contrition for this fucking adventure.

Next time: Voyage of Engima, my ass.

Voyage of Enigma, Part 2

Pendulum of Fate, Part 1

Oh shit, I’m not dead. Back to this, then:

The Riddling Reaver, Act 3: Pendulum of Fate

I’ve been putting this off, partly due to getting extremely sick for awhile and having a ton of other stuff to catch up on, partly because this book is nowhere near as fun as I remembered.

Since it’s been awhile, let’s start with a refresher:

For reasons of on account of it’s where the story started, our heroes had travelled to Kallamehr, where they arrived just in time to involve themselves in the murder of the Baron by the infamous villain the Riddling Reaver, for reasons unknown and unknowable. The Reaver left a clue to his whereabouts in the form of a box that said “solve these riddles and I’ll send a ship to bring you to my whereabouts”, so the heroes did that. Then they got on the ship and faffed around for awhile being tortured by stupid pointless events for little to no reward. At the end of that “adventure” they ended up being put ashore somewhere new…which is where this picks up.

I’m going to try and blast through this in less detail than I have been, if only because I’d like to move on from it as quickly as possible.

So the first thing that happens here is that from within the jungle they hear a scream, moving towards them rapidly, and then an adventurer sails overhead as though catapulted, landing in the water and being torn apart by sharks or something. Another soon follows, and another, as the heroes rush towards the source. By the time they get there, they find a group of mutant lizard men preparing to launch their final prisoner, and presumably they rush to the rescue.

See, this? This is way better as an opening for an adventure than the actual opening. You could easily skip the first two acts of this damn thing and start the players off here, and lose little to nothing in the process, since Fighting Fantasy RPG has no rules for character advancement and there’s been fuckall really worthwhile treasure. It gets the characters right into the middle of things and as you’ll see, it actually would set them up with a more personal reason to be pissed off at the Reaver. Just start them off saying they got shipwrecked on their way somewhere else or something. It may not actually be a better adventure…but it cuts half of the bullshit by skipping the first two acts entirely.

Anyway. The lizard men have randomly determined mutations, which include spitting, multiple heads, barbed tails, or the ability to cause mutations in creatures they attack. It’s kind of neat. Once they have finished rescuing the prisoner, he will introduce himself as Waxley Speed, explorer. He’s searching for a legendary treasure hidden in a shrine in the jungle, and spent years putting together a team and suchlike. They got ambushed by lizardmen shortly after a flying vessel passed overhead and a robed figure stole the map. Fortunately, Waxley has a good memory and knows the way through the jungle as well as anyone who hasn’t already been there, and proposes the heroes team up with him for a share of the treasure. Supposedly, the legendary Pendulum of Fate lies in the shrine he seeks.

Secretly, Waxley Speed is the Riddling Reaver. He can’t get into the shrine himself, so he’s using the players to get the Pendulum so he can use it to disrupt the balance between good and evil. This doesn’t actually make sense as a plan given that he’s supposed to be a servant of neutrality, not chaos, but whatever. He is immune to the E.S.P. spell and will appear genuine if it is cast on him. He will offer the characters hundreds of gold upon returning to civilization if they help him, plus a share of the treasure…in short, he’s got a good cover here. If the players still don’t buy it, he’ll cast a spell to stun the heroes and make his escape, reappearing at the end of the act. Otherwise, he keeps up the charade.

What follows is a series of jungle scenes. There are random encounters, plus encounters with quicksand, mud-men, head-hunters and pygmies, a log bridge with a giant spider, a giant carnivorous plant, a crazy carved cave with a shaman and bats and stuff inside…the usual Indiana Jones style stuff. A couple of these have dickish elements, but it’s nothing on the level of some of the crap in the previous act. The giant carnivorous plant encounter seriously injures Waxley Speed, if he hasn’t been forced to reveal his true nature.

Once they finally reach the shrine, they discover it is surrounded by a deep chasm, only passable via an invisible bridge. Waxley basically collapses here, saying he’s too exhausted to continue and will keep a lookout for the Reaver. Truth is, the invisible bridge won’t support him, and there’s magical Flying Guardians that keep anyone from climbing the walls of the shrine or flying out to it.

The Shrine of Destiny itself is pretty sizable and sort of interesting, so I’ll cover it in another post.

Pendulum of Fate, Part 2

The Realm of Entropy, Part 1

The Realm of Entropy, Part 2

Let's get this sucker finished.

The Riddling Reaver - Act Four: The Realm of Entropy
Scene Two: The Reaver's Lab

Okay, the Reaver's Lab? This is absolutely the best part of this entire campaign. There's not anything here that goes out of its way to be dickish or gotcha, and everything in this area makes sense thematically and feels like it belongs in the laboratory of a powerful madman. There's definitely dangerous, fatal shit in here, but it's stuff that anyone with the sense to realize that in the lair of the dangerous archvillain, you don't just prod things willy-nilly should be able to come through intact. This is the part of this book that I remember as being really fucking cool, and it's almost--almost--worth the price of admission.



The action picks up directly from the previous section. After opening the eye-door, the heroes trudge down the stairs. The light coming from the ceiling changes color down here to an eerie shade of blue, and they find themselves in a room filled with...

Nothing. Room 1 is completely empty. The door isn't locked.

The corridor it opens up into has doors on either side, as shown by the map. Every five minutes, a Replicanth comes out of Room 3 and heads to Room 9, unless it spots adventurers, in which case they have to fight it. Like all Replicanths it's SKILL 6 STAMINA 4. This one will try to flee, either to Room 9 or Room 3, depending on where the party is in the hall. If it makes it to Room 3, it returns with 5 of the 8 Replicanths from within. If it makes it to Room 9, on the other hand, it comes back with 2-12 more Replicanths.

Room 2 was always one of the cooler conceptual rooms to me in this entire place. It's lined with test tubes, filled with powders of different colors, each labelled and stoppered. There's also a trough of water. On entering the room, the heroes create a draught or something by opening the door, which somehow manages to cause a stack of papers to knock down one of the racks of tubes. One tube, filled with icy blue powder, shatters, and a bit of the powder falls into the water, where it becomes a tiny Silver Dragon.

The Reaver's got a room full of powdered creatures. The Silver Dragon is tiny because most of the powder didn't get in the water. It has no idea it's tiny and thinks it's more than a match for the puny humans. It's SKILL 6 STAMINA 8 with 4 attacks, and it has a breath attack. Most of the other tubes contain normal things like dogs or cats-apparently the Silver Dragon was the pride of the Reaver's collection. There are a couple of powdered monsters the heroes can take if they want, though. The book doesn't say whether or not the released monsters will fight for the heroes, or just attack whatever's nearby; use with caution, brave adventurers, for if you are playing this your GM is probably a dick.

Room 3 is where the new Replicanths are made. 8 Replicanths are currently working on making more, unless they've been used as reinforcements. Every 5 minutes, a new one is completed. The process goes like this: they collect bones from Room 4 (which connects both to this room, through a door barred from this side, and contains nothing but bones and the chute to the upper level that we skipped before), glue the bones together using paste, then hang the completed skeleton from a hook. The hook moves along a rail, dipping the skeleton into three vats of jelly, then letting the completed replicanth off at the end of the assembly line, where it goes out into the hall and makes for Room 9.

To shut this down, there's a lever at the end of the room. The Replicanths occupying the room--3 or 5, depending--will fight to prevent this from being switched off. That's it for this room and Room 4.

Room 5 is small and contains two two-meter square plates of metal, between which there is a glowing, pulsing light. It does nothing to nonliving matter. A living creature that walks through the magical field, though, will be mutated--this is how the mutant lizard men in the jungle were created. There's a table of mutations back where those mutants were first encountered that can be applied to whoever is stupid enough to walk into a glowing energy field in an empty room.

Room 6 has a big weird looking machine inside, and nothing else. The machine has two hoppers or chutes, and if something is dumped into one of these chutes, it will be spat out of a hole at the bottom of the machine a few moments later, undamaged and slightly cleaner. If two things at once are dropped in, though, the machine combines them into something new. A sword and a shield would become a shield with a sword blade coming out of it, to take the example in the book. It's noted that only a very thin adventurer could go into one of the chutes, but that it would be inadvisable to do so, since the process is fatal.

Why anyone would want to...

Anyway. Nothing else here, moving along.

Room 7 is the Reaver's workshop, with benches of tools and suchlike. The dominating sight in here is a tall suit of plate armor, with no obvious weaknesses. As it turns out, the Reaver is slightly sensitive about his lack of physical prowess in combat, so he decided to build a suit of armor that would protect him from harm and fight his battles for him. He could never get it to work right, though, and eventually he abandoned it to work on other projects.

There's a hatch on the back into which someone can climb. If someone does so, they'll discover several levers. Pulling the larger one causes the armor to step forward. Pulling it again causes it to step back and slump inert. Touching any of the others causes the armor to go berserk with them inside. The armor is...beastly. It has SKILL 14 STAMINA 20, takes -1 damage when it's hit, and when it's below 5 STAMINA whoever's inside gets damaged as well.

The poor sap inside the armor can deactivate it, though, by fiddling with the levers. This requires a successful test against SKILL on 2d6+4. Once he passes that, the armor turns off and he can get out of it.

There's other bits and pieces of machinery and scraps in this room, but none of it does anything.

Room 8 contains a doorway to blackness. Above the door there are several iron rings, one of which has a scrap of rope above it. This leads to the Void, and is where the Reaver disposes of dangerous enemies or experiments. Going in without a rope is a very bad idea. You will never be found. Ever. Even the Gods can't bring you back.

Finally, Room 9 is where the Reaver is performing his ritual to destroy the Pendulum of Fate. The players can slip into the room without being noticed, at least for the time being--if they left the Replicanth assembly line online they'll get spotted when the next Replicanth comes in, though. The Reaver is standing on a raised area, where there's a pool of water above which floats the Pendulum, and it is crackling with arcane energies--it's clear the thing is going to be destroyed, anyway. Between the adventurers and the Reaver are 132 Replicanths. (This is the number in the book. It's very specific.) Behind the Reaver is a flow of lava...presumably to add to the drama of the whole thing, and give a convenient out.

The suggested method of dealing with the Reaver is to throw shit over the crowd of Replicanths. Powdered creatures, Yokka eggs, or the Dice of Logaan all provide good options. It's the climax of the adventure, though, so the GM is advised to play it up for drama, and let whatever feels appropriate happen. The book also advises trying to let the Reaver get stopped in a way that either allows him to escape or at least doesn't leave a body, so that you can use him again later if you like. Maybe it was another stuffed Reaver that fell into the lava, etc.

And then...that's it. That's the finale. There are no stats given for the Reaver, there's no definitive "this is the way to defeat him", and ultimately it leaves the end up to whatever suits you and your group. Which is actually a good thing and a pretty decent way to handle it, provided the GM isn't an utter dick. Which, of course, if he's learned from the way the Fighting Fantasy and Riddling Reaver adventures have taught so far...

So, I figure from here I'll do a light post about Out of the Pit next, covering some of the more interesting, cool, or stupid entries. I mean, yeah, there's the usual lions and bears and shit, but then you have things like the Wheelies. And while the Riddling Reaver has given an opportunity to cover some of the stupidest critters already (the Jib-Jib, the Mucalytic, the Wrapper, and the Wheelies are all among the most idiotic WTF creatures) there's some others that are pretty out there.

After that I'll do a crash post on Titan , the setting of the Fighting Fantasy RPG and the majority of the gamebooks, before diving back into the second version of the RPG rules with Dungeoneer and its expansions...

Out of the Pit

TITAN: the Fighting Fantasy World

The World of Titan

History and Legend, Part 1

Time of Heroes

The War of the Wizards

The Forces of Good, Part 1

The Forces of Good, Part 2

The Forces of Neutrality

The Forces of Evil/Chaos

              Primus - The Demon Princes
The Rulers    Ishtra     Myurr         Sith                 
The Generals  Shakor     Kalin     Relem  Vradna             
---           Secundus - Greater Demons - Captains and Commanders
              Gtr Fire Demons      Iron Demons       Slime Demons
The           Lightning Demons     Rust Demons       Shadow Demons
              Storm Demons         Plague Demons     Venom Demons
              Tertius - The Lesser Demons - Shock Troops and Slayers
Legion        Lssr Fire Demons     Horned Demons     Hell Demons
              Lava Demons          Sand Demons       Mirror Demons
of the                   Nanka                Ice Demons
              Quartus - The Great Undead - Haunters and Killers
              Messengers of Death
              Vampires
Damned        Spirit Stalkers
              Phantoms
              Demonic Servants 
              Quintus - The Lesser Undead - Guardians and Keepers
              Ghouls
              Skeletons
              Zombies
---           Sextus - The Brainless Ones
              Clones
              Clone Warriors
              Septimus - The Formless
              Demonspawn

We're still talking about evil stuff!

Still talking about evil!

Dark Elves

Argh.

I'm not dead, and I'm not abandoned this writeup! Yar! Things just...kinda suck here right now.

But enough whining, it's time for...

Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World
Part Whatever - Dark Elves

So Elves, right? Peaceful, long-lived, prone to taking the long view and letting things happen and resolve themselves with the younger races. Only there was a bunch, shortly after the big wars, who felt that since the Elves were clearly smarter, wiser, and more skillful than anyone else they should be in charge of fuckin' everything. The guys in charge of the Elves thought this was a bad idea, though, and figured hey, we'll still be around long after all of those other races die off, why bother getting involved in the petty skirmishes?

Elves in general can be kinda dicks, I guess.

Anyway, this faction of more active elves was led by Prince Viridel Kerithrion, secretly a follower of Slangg, who you possibly remember as the God of Malice. Kerithrion had been one of the most eager to fight in the war against Evil, though, so he had respect and the ear of the Council. Since they didn't listen, though, he decided to take matters into his own hands; he marched on the council with like-minded elves, slaughtered dozens of other clan leaders, and declared himself in charge.

Fortunately (or unfortunately for Kerithrion, at least) the elven Queen, Ariel Aurlindol, had the power of prophecy and she'd seen this shit coming, and her husband the King had enough warning to get their whole family out of there ahead of time, though the dream came the night before and there wasn't time to warn anyone else. Within three days, they'd raised a massive Elven army to take back the palace of the Council, and for nineteen more days, they laid siege to it. On the twentieth day, three of Kerithrion's captains marched out under a banner of parlay, and while the peace talks were going on, the rest of the rebel elves snuck out through tunnels they'd spent the entire siege desperately building--they weren't stupid and knew there was no way they could hold out. The captains dragged out their talks till well after dark, then promised to bring the demand for surrender back to their own side and lead out all the rebels, at which point they, too, got the hell out of elf-Dodge.

They retreated back to Kerithrion's lands, where they declared themselves an independent nation. That didn't go over any better, and they very quickly found themselves facing down the very same army as before. The rebels were driven into the mountains and finally into an abandoned dwarf city, and further underground. The Elves struck all the names of the rebels from their histories, pulled down any building that they'd been in, including the Council palace (which was rebuilt way far away) and basically did their damnedest to pretend the rebels had never existed at all.

The rebels got used to life underground, found a series of natural caverns beneath Darkwood Forest, and started worshiping demons openly (though as I mentioned previously, some of the rebel elves who didn't hold with that part split off and became Black Elves, who don't get along well with either the ordinary elves on the surface or the Dark Elves. The Dark Elves send raiding parties against the wood elves of Darkwood regularly, and live in a city known as Tiranduil Kelthas (or Darkside), in an enormous natural vavern.

Darkside started with traditional Elven style buildings but soon became twisted and bizarre, carved with frescoes of demons and filled with winding, twisting alleys, and all that good stuff. All Dark Elves belong to clans, and each has their own heirarchy. It's basically what you'd expect from any typical fantasy Dark Elf thing, no surprises there.

Dark Elves like to wear silver, which all but the poorest have tons of. Every Dark Elf is related to the nobility, and it's stated that the Dark Elf women are especially beautiful.

Lots of slavery down there. Most common are human slaves, Dwarves are most popular because they don't die as fast. Orcs, trolls, and goblins get relegated to shit duty and are often killed out of sheer frustration.

Elves, on the other hand, are never kept as slaves, either being killed outright or used as sacrifices in dark rites.

There's a section on the rulers of the city, including the feeble and paranoid King Eilden Kerithrion, on the brink of madness, or the High Priestess Velicoma, his sister--who loves him so much she's planning to end him any day now to take over. Prince Astrëa and Princess Leya Garathrim are their cousins and a balancing force in the council, working together to bring stability and keep things running smoothly. These two will be most likely to take power if Eilden and Velicoma get in a power struggle, since Leya is married to the prince of the clan Camcarneyar, who handle day to day security and military operations. The final member is Prince Menel Ithilkir, a hothead who spends most of his time on surface raids. When he's in town he sides with the Garathrim, but mostly he only bothers to show up if there's military matters on the table or a particularly bloody sacrifice is planned. He's only on the council because he's heir to the Ithilkir, following the death of his much stronger mother to poison. Mostly people think that was Velicoma's work, but it was actually Astrëa and Leya, presumably to give them a malleable ally.

If the Dark Elf leadership DID ever unite, they'd be more than powerful enough to take the fight back to the surface, but they're way too scheming and manipulative to get there.

Next up, the list of notable evil figures on Titan.

There are really not a lot of good images in this section...sorry.

Faces of Evil & Chaos

It's Saturday night and I'm livin' the nerd life, bringing to you some more of Fighting Fantasy.

Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World
Faces of Evil and Chaos

So here we have another list of powerful figures of the appropriate alignment in the Titan setting. Unlike the list for the Neutral forces, there's actually more than one character to put here. On the other hand, most of them are less immediately useful than the Good characters as NPCs, since any player already familiar with these guys isn't going to remember "hey, I remember Yaztromo, he totally helped out my dude in Temple of Terror " so much as it would be "Hey I remember Zharradan Marr, he was a cock in Creature of Havoc ." Failing that little twinge of recognition, really all this list is good for is a catalog of example villains to throw out there, unless you really fancy reviving the classics. As a note...several of the gamebook villains have exactly that happen. At least once.

It's not even a full listing, either, even for the abbreviated selection of gamebooks that had been released by the time Titan saw print. No mention is made of Zanbar Bone, ultimate foozle of City of Thieves , nor is the evil wizard of Scorpion Swamp listed here.

On the other hand,Baron Sukumvit of Fang and Lord Azzur of Port Blacksand are both technically villainous rulers who could be interesting even while not directly confronted. (Although in Sukumvit's case, since Deathtrap Dungeon is a completely voluntary challenge with a very generous prize as a reward, and not actually there to be malicious so much as bring business to Fang, the villain label may be misapplied.)

I've added notes on each one of these villains with regards to their current "canonical" status assuming a timeline where all the gamebooks have already happened with the victorious endings; this information is not present in Titan and is based on both my own assessment and the gamebooks in question.

Anyway, the list:

Razaak, the Undying One
Once an apprentice to a great Lawful wizard, he was fascinated by what his master told him of dark magic, and realized he had the potential to be a great necromancer, plus that using magic to help people was for sissies. He fucked off, spent forty years mastering the dark arts, and finally, when he'd managed to sufficiently learn necromancy to his own satisfaction, sent messages off to the nobles of Allansia, demanding to be acknowledged as their ruler.

Of course, when you spend forty years off in the fucking desert practicing raising dead things in a cave, nobody has ever fucking heard of you back in civilization, so they ignored the shit out of his messages. In turn, Razaak sent a plague of insects across the land, and then they took him seriously...enough so to send out assassins after him. Sorry, he's evil, they were brave warriors. All of them got killed. Finally, a dude named Kull showed up, with a sword he'd found gripped in a skeletal hand in a misty lake up in the Moonstone Hills while he was crossing on a raft. It was enchanted and could cut through plate mail without effort or dulling. This was, of course, Razaak's own former sword, and the only weapon that could kill him. As part of his final pacts with his demonic masters, Razaak had been forced to give up all weapons other than the sacrificial knives used in the evil rituals; however, his sword couldn't be destroyed, so he chucked it in a lake, and of course, it rose in the hands of a skeleton.

Well, Kull sure as hell didn't know that, but it didn't really matter, since when he hacked Razaak with the damn thing, Razaak died, and as far as Kull knew that was supposed to happen. Sadly, Razaak cast a curse on poor Kull and his flesh turned to dust, and he became a skeleton himself, cursed to forever carry the sword that had slain Razaak. Kull's skeleton returned to the lake where he found the sword in the first place and he has been hanging around there waiting for someone to claim it from him and grant him rest. Meanwhile, Razaak was buried in a sarcophagus and placed in a deep fissure in the hills...and forgotten, until recently.

Current Status : Dead again, as of Crypt of the Sorcerer . The player of the book locates Kull, kills Razaak, and avoids being cursed like the previous bearer of the magical blade, thanks to Yaztromo's help. Of course, the blade itself is now buried under tons and tons of rubble at the bottom of a fissure, so if the fucker comes back again that could be trouble...

Malbordus, the Storm Child
A human sorcerer raised by dark elves, who found him abandoned in the woods during a raid. He was a magical prodigy, torched an elven village in Darkwood Forest before puberty, a test of magic that was the first step towards becoming a master of dark magics. His second test saw him travel to the Temple of Terror in the midst of the desert...

Current Status ...where he had to find five Dragon Artefacts and revive them, using them to raze the civilized world. Sadly for poor Malbordus, the player of Temple of Terror managed to find the five dragon artefacts before him, and, using the oft-stolen hammer of Gillibran of Stonebridge, destroy them, before slaying Malbordus himself in single combat. Again, Yaztromo's help was instrumental to the hero, who learned a few invaluable spells from the old wizard before his journey. The book's more fun than its villain.

Shareela, the Snow Witch
Once a human sorceress from Zengis, she was sent into the frosty northlands on a test of her skills, where she was to survive for five weeks. Four weeks into the test she encountered an ice demon, who promised her vast powers and rulership in his service, and she decided that was way cooler than being nice and friendly. She decided to go along with the demon, became a vampire and a powerful necromancer, and sits in her caverns, gathering slaves and preparing to cast powerful ice magic to create a new ice age.

Current Status Killing Shareela doesn't remotely end Caverns of the Snow Witch , with something like a third of the book being after her demise. She does, however, cast a death spell on the hero, but it's not a very good one, since he (or she) has enough time to travel south to find Pen Ty Kora the Healer (remember him? He's the one who's not Nicodemus and not Yaztromo) and reach the summit of Firetop Mountain for a healing ritual. As a vampire, though, there's always the potential that she'll return again...

The Demonic Three
This is kinda cheating as a section. It's actually talking about Balthus Dire, Zagor, and Zharradan Marr. So take Yaztromo, Nicodemus, and Pen Ty Kora, and imagine evil versions, and that's what you have here. They studied under a master of dark magics, then killed him and went their separate ways.

Balthus Dire went off to Craggen Rock, his ancestral home, murdered his own father, and started raising an army.

Current Status: Dead, killed in Citadel of Chaos without any special bullshit.

Zagor and Zharradan Marr went the other way, and while Zharradan wandered off into the Moonstone Hills, Zagor continued on to Firetop Mountain, where he took over the Dwarven settlement there and stole all their treasure, then sat around chillin'.

Current Status: Anyone's guess, probably dead. He was slain in Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first of the gamebook line. And again in Return to Firetop Mountain, the fiftieth (and at the time, planned to be the last.) And again in Legend of Zagor. And apparently there was a series of novels about the guy, so he's really the energizer bunny of villains. Kiiiiinda not likely to be a favorite among players to have to kill again and again and again, though.

Zharradan Marr, for his part, vanished in the Moonstone Hills. What is he up to? Nobody knows.

Current Status: Kinda trapped in limbo. In Creature of Havoc Marr's whereabouts and activities are somewhat explored; he's been experimenting with a "science" called marrangha, which can be used to basically mutate and modify creatures, and created the titular Creature from the captain of a Sky Galleon out of Salamonis. Marr was hunted down by his own creation, who found his way back to his airship and used a crystal club to shatter the mirror Marr was residing within, returning himself to his former human self.

Real World Note: Balthus Dire and Zharradan Marr appeared only in titles by Steve Jackson (the UK one, not the US one) who really didn't like covering the same ground, and tended to be the one of the original pair of creators to push the envelope and try more experimental things. After Creature of Havoc he stopped writing gamebooks. Ian Livingstone, on the other hand had no qualms about revisiting the same villain or writing fairly standard fantasy gamebooks, and was the more traditional of the pair, and he wrote all of the Zagor sequels solo, even though the Warlock himself was Jackson's creation in the original gamebook.

Back to the villains...

Sukumvit and Carnuss

Sukumvit's the baron of Fang, and Carnuss is his try-hard younger brother. Carnuss felt neglected and was pissed off that his brother inherited the title of Baron when their father died. He started hanging out with scum, and a group of the scum, hearing him mutter about how much he wanted to kill his brother, offered to assassinate Sukumvit for only a thousand gold...and Carnuss paid.

The "scum" went to Sukumvit and told the Baron what happened, since they were actually members of the palace guard Sukumvit had ordered to watch his idiot younger brother. Humiliated and exposed, Carnuss fucked off and plotted his revenge.

Sukumvit built Deathtrap Dungeon, a...well, it's what it sounds like. It's a sadistic labyrinth, with a prize of 10, 000 gold to anyone who comes out alive. For years, nobody did, but finally someone managed, and Sukumvit immediately started renovating.

Carnuss saw how Sukumvit's reputation suffered when he had to pay out to the victorious adventurer, and set up his own training program--he began capturing people and putting them through strenuous, murderous tests, which none have yet survived, but he plans to send the first one who does to compete in the Trial of Champions and humiliate Sukumvit in his name.

Current Status Sukumvit's stil alive after two successful adventurers have completed his trial, though several thousand gold poorer, and popular with his subjects, since his violent tendencies are channeled into the dungeon, which brings a lot of tourists and adventurers who spend money like it's going out of style. Carnuss, on the other hand, got his sorry ass killed by the same adventurer he sent to participate in the Trial of Champions, who was also granted the right to duel Carnuss by the Baron after he'd successfully emerged from the Trial. The hero then went on to raise an army and fight off some dark force in Armies of Darkness, the exact plot of which I can't remember beyond that it's a direct sequel to Trial of Champions. Not how I'd personally spend 10,000 gold but as it happens, probably good that he did.

The Archmage
None know where he came from, nor any name for him beyond the cryptic title by which he is known. He built the fortress of Mampang, in Kakhabad, and started organizing the forces there. At some point, he battled a hydra, which was probably fairly epic, and when he had slain it, he used his dark magic to turn its heads into the Seven Serpents, each corresponding to one of the Gods he had once followed, and who serve him still. He stole the Crown of Kings from Analand.

He's not a very interesting character...

Current Status : ..and he is very dead, after the Analander sent to retrieve the Crown got finished with him. There's a Let's Play of the Sorcery series ongoing that I'm not going to spoil further, just in case.

Finally...
Lord Azzur, the Tyrant of Blacksand

For a guy who never directly appears in any of the gamebooks, Azzur's backstory is actually pretty damn cool. He's been in charge of Port Blacksand for the past thirty years, is a deadly pirate, a cruel and sadistic ruler, has a girl with a snake head for a girlfriend, and a fondness for carnivorous topiary.

Azzur was born not on Allansia, but in Arion, on Khul, where he was fascinated by the cult of Kukulak, Khulian god of storms. He snuck into the temple during a ritual to find out why the acolytes of Kukulak always went about swathed in black clothes that hid their faces, and was caught...and found out firsthand why they did so--as a part of their initiation into the temple, they were branded. If the scars formed themselves into the runes of Kukulak, they were accepted into the church, otherwise, they were...disposed of. The young Azzur was offered the choice of taking the test of flames himself or dying there and then. Like anyone not an idiot, he took the test, and to the disappointment of the administering priest, the burns formed the necessary runes.

Fearing what his parents would do to punish him, the new acolyte of Kukulak fled Arion aboard a ship, which was soon taken by pirates; the captain was fascinated by the scarred, black-clad boy and took him on as a cabin boy. From there, Azzur learned the arts of piracy...and eventually, he had a fleet of his own and enough gold to buy half a continent.

Instead, he conquered Port Blacksand, which has become a wretched hive of scum and villainy under his rule. Neat place if you want adventure, though...

Current Status: He's not going anywhere any time soon. He's got a veritable army of fanatically loyal guards, and he's pretty likely to be terrifyingly deadly in personal combat himself. He's probably in his 50s, but that's not that old when you're that rich. He occasionally still sails off on raids. What'll happen to Blacksand when he does finally die is anyone's guess.

The book's got a map of Blacksand here, but that'll come up several more times in the course of the examination of further material and it's not really elaborated on at this time. There's a buncha other illustrations from various gamebooks of the villains throughout this section but I don't have a scanner that works and the pdf I've found of the book that I used for earlier image-fetching is really kind of shitty in this segment, so I can't really readily share them. Sorry. If anyone is terribly put out by the lack of art, I can always go digging, but I don't figure it's THAT big an issue...

anyway. Next time, mermaids.

I wish I was shitting you.

Mermaids

1.  Dragon
2.  Lion
3.  Snake
4.  Ox
5.  Tiger
6.  Goat
7.  Mouse
8.  Deer
9.  Bat
10. Wolf
11. Eagle
12. Dog
13. Spider
14. Rabbit
15. Fox
16. Crocodile
17. Owl
18. Cat
19. Shark
20. Horse

DUNGEONEER: Advanced Fighting Fantasy

And now...


DUNGEONEER: Advanced Fighting Fantasy

But First, A Bit of Overview and History

Finally we hit the point where Fighting Fantasy has something that's got actual character customization and advancement! Dungeoneer was published in 1989, along with reprints of Titan and Out of the Pit in a new size format, larger than the existing gamebooks but not the same size as the previous coffee-table format that the two sourcebooks had taken. (When I have some time I'll get my camera and take some photos of the different versions side by side.) By the end of 1989, the series had hit its 40th gamebook in the main line, plus the four book Sorcery! mini-series, the two-book two-player experiment, and even a novel (featuring the Demonic Three, Zagor, Balthus Dire, and Zharradan Marr, in a storyline unrelated to the gamebooks they star in but involving their defeat at the hands of some guy nobody should care about, Chadda Darkmane.)

In short, there was lots of material to go by, and the series was actually heading towards a slump in popularity. The 50th gamebook, Return to Firetop Mountain, was actually planned to be the final one in the series, but it sold well enough to give the series another 9 books thereafter--but that's all in the future, as far as Dungeoneer is concerned.

Like Titan and Out of the Pit, Dungeoneer was helmed by Marc Gascoigne, with the aid of Pete Tamlyn, despite the Jackson and Livingstone billing on the cover. As I've mentioned before, Gascoigne was responsible for Out of the Pit and Titan, and much of the friendly, eminently readable tone of the latter has carried over here. Despite the rules being flawed in some pretty key ways, this is absolutely the best presented of the different versions of the Fighting Fantasy roleplaying games, and the two books that follow ( Blacksand and Allansia , in order of release) are similarly well presented. These books also feature a set of sample adventures that--while very much on rails--actually seems like it would be really quite fun to play through, especially with a little bit of expansion to make them less linear.

So, without further ado...

Dungeoneer opens up with the now-traditional introduction to roleplaying, with the twist that it's presented as making imaginary movies set on Titan with your friends. This metaphor carries through the entire edition, with the GM referred to as the Director, the adventures being broken down into Scenes, and NPCs called Extras, etcetera. It's a bit goofy but it's not actually the worst presentation of the concept for an introductory roleplaying game, and at least it makes sense.

The book goes over game prep in a physical sense in some detail. You need dice, pencils and paper, somewhere to play, snacks, etc. They do suggest the option of miniatures to represent who is standing where, along with some examples of how to make cheap scenery (hills represented by books under a tablecloth, blue ribbon for a river, etc.) but stress that it's optional. They also suggest optional use of props, feelies to give the players to bring them into the scene. Throughout the sample adventures ideas are given for these, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek. I admit it's something I've always liked the idea of and that neither myself nor any DM I've ever played with has had the time or initiative to actually do. Maybe I should sit down and prep more...

It also provides a quick run-down of the other books, which we're familiar with on account of I've covered them in some detail already. Then, it advises jumping right in, providing sample heroes at the back of the book to be copied and shared with the players for the introductory session, and a straightforward, ready to play sample adventure ready to run at once, plus some quick-start rules. The full rules and how to create your own characters are found after the adventure, giving a hands-on play experience before you have to actually build something to go forward. It's a very simple adventure, and could probably be run in an hour or two at most--but we'll get to that.

There are six sample characters at the back of the book--an elf, a dwarf, a barbarian, a mercenary fighter, a sneaky rogue, and a bookish nerdy wizard. It's suggested to allow the players to pick which ones they want to play. I'm not reproducing all of them here, because we don't need to see that to understand the basic rules, but having one to refer to makes it easier, so...



Meet Aspen Darkfire. Aspen is an elf, which doesn't come with any special advantages or disadvantages. As you can see, she has the familiar SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK stats, along with some Special Skills and Spells . (They've chosen to use one of the characters with the Magic skill as the example in the book, and it's as good an example as any, so I used her too.) There's also a page to fill in with personality, background, and quotes, etcetera, which in the case of the sample characters gives something to go by for the players. This is pretty obviously intended to be very newbie-friendly.

So, I'm not going to bother refreshing on SKILL, STAMINA or LUCK because they are identical to their previous incarnations, and even generated the same way, though at this point we aren't told how that works. Special Skills work just like SKILL, though they replace it in any instance when they could apply. (Alternately phrased, you roll SKILL only when you do not have an applicable Special Skill.) Again, at this point we don't have any idea how Special Skills are calculated. Aspen's Special Skills are pretty self explanatory. Notice that while she carries a sword, she has no Sword Special Skill--she will use her SKILL of 8 in combat while wielding a sword. Bows work slightly differently, as I recall, and in a bit of oversight the rules for them are not actually presented in the sample adventure, so it's just as well she isn't carrying any arrows!

Then there's Spells, which come hand in hand with the Magic skill. At this point we are only given a list of the spells that the sample characters know--three of the six have some magic ability--Aspen, obviously, the wizard, and the barbarian character has a few non-flashy spells like Strength or Luck.)

Each spell has a cost listed, which is how many STAMINA points you lose for attempting to cast it (successful or not.) Though we're not told this now, starting characters can take Spells with a maximum STAMINA cost of 4, with spells costing 6, 8, or 10 STAMINA being only for NPCs or advanced heroes. Again, we'll come back to that later.

Aspen's spells are Fire Bolt, Illusion, Stamina, Darkness, and Mirror Selves. For now we get a quick rundown only--I believe the spells are revisited later with more detail, as well. The book really, really wants us to get a play experience before anything else.

Darkness puts out all artificial light (and counters Dark Seeing ) in a circular area up to 5 meters around the caster for 3 minutes.

_{oh yeah the real-time clock thing is still in here but it's not really used to dick the players around like it was in the earlier editions, to my recollection}

Fire Bolt does 1d6 damage to one target.

Illusion creates an illusion that will fool one target for up to three minutes, unless something happens to reveal that it doesn't exist or isn't what it appears to be. (The example then says something about wounds from imaginary swords only vanishing after the illusion runs out, though, so ???)

Mirror Selves is an illusion spell that creates two duplicates of the caster for three minutes, fooling one person. The target has only a one in three chance of choosing the right caster to fight back against, but all three mirrors can fight and wound the victim.

Stamina restores up to 6 points of STAMINA, not to surpass the Initial value. This isn't presented as a roll--"up to" seems to simply mean that it won't go over. If the caster uses it on themselves, the spell cost is subtracted after the restoration happens, and it can't be cast while the caster is in combat--though the latter two limitations aren't presented in the quick-list of spells.

There's also a Luck spell which restores up to 4 luck, a Levitation spell that allows breif levitation, a Weakness spell to reduce the target's SKILL by 1d6 for 5 minutes, a Sleep spell that targets one creature for 5 minutes, an ESP spell that allows general emotions and feelings to be read for one minute on one target, and a fear spell that causes the single target to flee for two minutes. Those are what the other two guys have.

So far, so good, right? Nothing at this point is really overtly broken...but we'll come back to that once we have the actual character generation rules at hand and look at it again in more detail.

Next time, though, we'll look through the first sample adventure, Tower of the Sorcerer !

Tower of the Sorcerer

COMBAT
Axe    Dagger    Pole Arm     Spear     Sword     Two-Handed Sword 
Other Weapon     Bow          Crossbow  Javelin   Throwing Dagger
Strength         Unarmed Combat

MOVEMENT
Climb  Dodge     Jump         Ride      Swim

STEALTH
Awareness        Dark Seeing  Hide      Lock Picking
Sleight of Hand  Sneak        Trap Knowledge

LEARNING
Con    Etiquette Languages    Magic     Sea Lore   Underground Lore
Wood Lore        World Lore

Character-Men

Vampire periods aren't something I want to think about, so I'm going to talk about

instead.

Okay. Last time I talked a bit about the basics of character creation. Quick recap, roll 1d6+6 for SKILL, 2d6+12 for STAMINA, and 1d6+6 for LUCK. Your SKILL stat is your base stat to check for doing anything you don't have a Special Skill in, as well as being your base to which you add your Special Skill points and the number of Special Skill points you get to spend. You can take up to 4 points in any Special Skill at character creation. A character who rolls a 7 SKILL can be not-useless in combat, which is good, but will still not be as good at anything, ever, as a guy with 12 SKILL is at everything, even before training, so it's kind of a shitty imbalanced system that way.

Taking Magic drops your initial SKILL by 1 per point, except you don't lose any of your starting Special Skill point allotment by doing this. Each point of Magic you take gets you spells of 3 STAMINA cost. You can't take spells with a STAMINA cost higher than 4 as a starting hero.

Stuff I didn't get to last time: Playing an elf! Take at least one point of Magic , Wood Lore , and Bow . Poof, you're an elf. If you want.

Playing a dwarf! Underground Lore, Dark Seeing, and Axe .

Special Skills are mostly self-explanatory. A few have special rules. Dark Seeing can only be added to a character at creation, but can be improved with experience. Strength automatically adds one damage to non-ranged combat regardless of how high your skill in it is. And then, Magic.

Magic is weird. As long as you or someone in the party has access to the Stamina spell, you can pretty much expect to continue being able to cast indefinitely in a given day, with a certain caveat that I'll come to in a bit. Most of the basic spells, I've either gone over previously or are self explanatory, but...

Spell       Cost              Effect     
Darkness     1     Creates 5 meter circle of magical darkness for 3 min.
Fear         1     Causes target to flee for 2 min.
Fire Bolt    1     1d6 damage unless target passes Dodge/Luck test
Illusion     1     Fools one target for 3 min or till disproven.
Light        1     Light as torch, 15 min or till cancelled/Darkness
Lock         1     Magically locks chest/door tillOpen or Lock
                          spell cast on it.
Luck         1     Restores 4 LUCK, up to Initial.  Not in combat.
Open         1     Opens lock, counters Lock
Skill        1     Restores 4 SKILL, as Luck spell.
Stamina      1     Restores 6 STAMINA, as Luck spell. Cost 
                          deducted after.
Strength     1     Grants Troll's strength for 1 task/1 minute.
Ward         1     Deflects one arrow/spear/thrown weapon aimed at caster.
Weakness     1     Reduce target's SKILL by 1d6 for 5 minutes.

Counterspell 2*    Counters target spell. Cost= 1+[Cost of Countered Spell]
                          Magic skill reduced by cost of incoming spell.
ESP          2     Read feelings, emotions, be Troi for 1 min.
Farseeing    2     See as through binoculars, up to 5km, 10 min or cancelled
Force Bolt   2     1d6 damage, only stopped by Counterspell or 
                          Wall
Languages    2     Grants temporary skill of 12 in Languages for  
                          speaking only.  No duration listed.
Levitate     2     Levitates target (or self) up and down only, 5 min.  
                          After 5 min target falls slowly to ground.
Mirror Selves 2    1 target thinks caster 3 people, 3 min.  All 3 can attack
Sleep        2     KOs one target, 5 min.  Wakes immediately on injury.

All Heal     4     Completely restores target's SKILL, STAMINA, LUCK.
                           Cost deducted after if cast on self.
Arrow-Snake  4     Turns one notched arrow into a snake, does 4 damage.
Find         4     Finds direction towards any physical object.
                          Does not specify distance, can be general.
Fly          4     Fly for 5 min.
Grand Illusion 4   As Illusion, affects number of targets up to  
                          Magic score.
Grow         4     Enlarges target to 150% normal size, 3 min.  Doesn't
                          affect target's gear.  No stat changes listed.
Invisibility 4     One target invisible, 3 minutes.  Doesn't affect gear.
Restrain     4     Holds target in spot, able to breathe and move eyes, 
                          nothing more.  3 minutes.  Objects up to 3m^3 can be 
                          affected.
Shrink       4     Exact opposite of Grow spell.
Speak to Animals 4  Speak to animals.  They're not smart.  10 minutes.
Wall         4     Creates wall 5m around target 5 min, completely 
                          impenetrable from outside.  Fails if touched within.
Banish Undead 6    Destroys one undead.  Can be used on corpse to prevent
                           being raised. Costs as per Raise Skeleton for
                           different undead types.
Cockroach     6    Polymorph one target on failed Test for Luck.
Petrify       6    Turns one target to stone on failed Luck test.
                          Target loses 1 STAMINA every 2 rounds till fully stone,
                          starting at feet.  Reversed by Counterspell or
                          killing caster before victim dies.
Raise Skeleton 6   Raises 1 corpse as skeleton.  Other undead cost more.
Teleport      6    Teleport caster + contents of hands (can include person)
                          up to 10km radius.  
Death         10   Kills one target.  Caster ages 1 year.

Adventures

Experience Points

Blacksand!

I don't feel nearly ambitious enough to get an image of the title off the book's cover for this one so it's back to bold-face titles with

Blacksand!
Advanced Fighting Fantasy: Book 2

This book is a mixed bag. It's divided into four sections: New rules, guidelines for creating and running urban environments and adventures, a street-by-street detail on Port Blackand, and an adventure sequel to the ones in Dungeoneer that takes up at least a third of the book.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to be skipping the street-by-street rundown of Port Blacksand, or at least skimming it for highlights at most.

First, new Special Skills! I'm just going to list these, with comments only where

Animal Lore
Bargain Can be used with Con , but represents honest barter
Bird Lore
Battle Tactics For use in mass battles--more on this to come in Book 3.
City Lore
Disguise
Law Now you can play your courtroom scenes!
Minor Magic More on this in a few moments
Pacify Calm that raging bull!
Secret Signs Taken by organization, can learn multiple groups. Limited in scope depending on the purpose of the organization.
(Subject) Lore Literally covers any subject. There's an NPC in the third book with Fish Lore at 16 or something.

Magic gets expanded, with reversing spells (costs 1 extra STAMINA at 4 or less, 2 extra at 6 or more.) Can be used as a specific counter, or to produce the opposite effect--you can now use Light spells to create darkness, or vice versa, though they have the duration and limitations of the original spell, so Darkness cast reversed only lasts 3 minutes, as opposed to 15. There's a bunch of spells, including Skill, Stamina, Luck, Force Bolt, Fire Bolt, Levitate, All Heal and a few others, that simply can't be cast for reverse effect, though they will counter someone else casting them. A couple of spells (like Light) that have existing counterparts have special notes (Light only works for 3 minutes in reverse, like the normal Darkness spell.) Reversing the Death spell ages the caster a full year, just as the normal version does, costs 12 STAMINA, and the subject may still be so badly wounded as to immediately die again, but it does put ressing on the table as an option, if someone can be found to cast it.

Also new to magic are several new spells, along with Priestly Magic, an option selected at character creation to allow access to a different spell list.

New wizard spells:

1 STAMINA Spells

Flash! - Yes the exclamation point is part of the name. It causes a blinding flash of light. Test for Luck to avoid being blinded for 1-6 minutes, if you're not expecting the spell.

Peace calms down two targets, can be resisted with Test for Luck and strongly aggressive action breaks it. Two additional targets can be added for each 1 STAMINA added to the spell cost.

Personalize Spell Technically a +1 STAMINA spell, this lets you modify what your stock spells look like. Want your Fire Bolt to look like a flaming golden dagger striking the foe? Spend an extra STAMINA to get the effect. Major effects can add more STAMINA to the cost of the spell, up to 6 points. I love and hate this spell--it's an awesome touch to have it in the game, but the added cost makes it pretty dumb to actually use.

Thunder is like Flash! but with noise, down to resisting with Luck tests to avoid being deafened. They can be cast together as a single spell requiring a single roll for 2 STAMINA, to make an impressive entrance.

2 STAMINA Spells

Fog is like Darkness, but covers a larger area, lasts longer, and creates fog instead of darkness. Thus the name.

Starry Orb creates a glowing ball that hypnotizes animals and things with up to Average intelligence (humans and most humanoids have High intelligence) 4 times in 6. High intelligence creatures get to test either LUCK or SKILL (target's choice) to avoid it. Lasts 3 minutes, can be recast.

Strong Arm is Sure Shot but for melee--raises the appropriate Skill by 2 for ten minutes.

Sure Shot is listed after Strong Arm, which references it. Guess what it does?

4 STAMINA Spells

Poison turns a small amount of food or liquid into deadly poison. Can be used with the Fog spell to create poison gas. If the caster is touching a target's bare flesh, he can deliver the poison directly, resisted with a Luck test. The poison does (2+STAMINA spent casting the spell) damage.

6 STAMINA Spells

Enchant Item allows spells to be cast into an item and stored there. It actually costs a lot of money, plus it takes 6 STAMINA plus the cost of the spell being cast three times into the item, over a period of days equal to the total STAMINA cost of the operation. Furthermore, there's no actual explanation on how such enchanted items work, what this allows them to do, or how the spell selection matters, nor on how many charges they would get...this spell is butts and meant for NPCs. Probably listed with such a ridiculously unwieldy cost to head off PC questions about "Can I make an enchanted sword?"

Hurricane creates a hurricane. Lasts 5 minutes, covers up to 30 meters around the caster, smashes shit, throws people off their feet on a failed SKILL or LUCK test, does 1-3 damage if it does, and generally makes a mess. Not a very damage-y spell, and since it targets allies and everything else in the area, not all that useful for your average adventuring wizard, but you never know?

See Future lets you catch a glimpse of the future, and is supposed to be vague and/or disallowed entirely.

Web is a 5 meter area Restrain that can be recast before it runs out and broken with Strength special skill.

8 STAMINA Spells

Assassin's Dagger creates a floating magical hand holding a dagger that slowly but inevitably seeks out its target. It has SKILL 10, cannot be destroyed, can be held only temporarily, and can never be escaped short of someone managing a banishing spell on it for 9 STAMINA. Otherwise, it's Death but without the instantaneousness and without the sacrifice. Also, pretty much never going to be a heroic spell to cast.

Earthquake creates an earthquake. Actually causes fissures to open up--anyone in the area except the caster has to pass a SKILL check and a LUCK test or fall into a crack in the ground. Nasty shit. Wrecks buildings. Range can be extended for extra STAMINA.

Okay, so next, it's Minor Magic. Minor Magic doesn't affect your Initial SKILL to take, grants a number of spells equal to your LUCK score, and only costs STAMINA when you fail to cast. There's no Oops! table, a double-six just gives a dramatic misfire. The spells are pretty simple:

Attraction - Burn - Cool - Enhance - Extinguish - Glimmer - Hear - Heat - Hold - Honesty - Instil - Jab - Mend - Mistake - Pied Piper - Pucker - Push - Repulsion - Slip - Sour - Spark - Weather Improver

Attraction is your average love spell, Repulsion its opposite. Lasts about an hour.
Burn acts like a candleflame being held under something.
Cool and Heat are personal climate control, or can be used to reheat food and cool your ale.
Enhance makes something look better than it is--a rotten apple looks shiny and succulent, a battered lamp looks brand new, etc.
Extinguish puts out fires.
Glimmer creates a dim glow, like a nightlight.
Hear is for eavesdropping.
Instil allows you to cast another Minor Magic spell into a drink or food. Hey hey, instant love potions...or instant chill potions for those hot days. Lasts 1-3 days.
Hold acts like superglue for 30 seconds.
Honesty makes a liar own up to a single lie or cheat.
Mend patches cloaks and other simple holes, but nothing major.
Mistake causes the victim to make a single small mistake.
Pied Piper summons a small swarm of vermin.
Pucker causes someone's face to pucker uncontrollably.
Push is what it sounds like, dangerous near piles of compost, riverbanks, or cliffs.
Slip merely causes someone to banana-peel slip.
Sour ruins a single container of food or drink. Stomach-aches, nothing serious.
Jab pokes someone sharply.
Spark creates a small spark. Both of these are good for surprising someone, or getting their attention, but not much damage.
Weather Improver is actually a spell that allows the caster to converse with passing bonobos. It's named Weather Improver just to fuck with people.

I made that last bit up. It improves the weather.

I'm really bored of listing spells right now, so I'll take up again in another post, where I'll run through Priestly Magic.

Priest Magic

A Shadow Over Blacksand

Okay I was...Right.

Blacksand!
Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Book 2

Okay so I said I wasn't going to go over the chapter on Port Blacksand. I stand by that decision, and here's why: it's presented in a format that basically covers the main points of interest district by district in point form. Name of building, prominent occupant, adventure hook.

I can't summarize that any more than it already is, and I'm not going to reproduce it in its entirety.

To be frank, most of it is uninspiring anyway.

SO...

A Shadow Over Blacksand!

This is the sequel to the adventures in Dungeoneer. It's not a direct followup--at least, in the sense that it pretty much expects time to have passed since the end of the previous prewritten offering. It is designed for 3-6 heroes.

The option is given to create brand new heroes, though, and in truth it would probably work pretty well without having played the Dungeoneer pre-written adventure. The identity of a certain character will not have the same resonance as it otherwise might have. New players will also certainly not have access to magical weapons, which is gonna be a problem when they have to fight certain demon enemies that can only be harmed by magic weapons. Only one magic weapon was handed out in the original, though, so...yeah.

Could also have a City of Thieves adventurer, just like the last Dungeoneer! quest, but also a hero from Midnight Rogue, FF29. Someone did a let's read of that one, but for them as never saw it, the idea of Midnight Rogue is that you're a native of Blacksand and a thief, taking your graduation exam. Whichever player chooses to be this guy gets a special introduction basically saying they were exiled from Blacksand after knifing a rival gang member in a brawl--not realizing he was a fellow guild member. You also get a background connection to a character of some importance to the plot, a merchant named Brass.

The adventure begins with the adventurers being hired by a merchant named Waldo, who is terrified of Port Blacksand but is doing business with another merchant who lives there, a man named Brass. He's so terrified of Blacksand that he's hiring ridiculous amounts of muscle to guard him even though Brass is meeting him in a town 35 km away from Blacksand. The idiot is paying well, though.

Waldo is a coward, and an idiot, and is along for the ride to cause trouble for the heroes, mostly, more than anything else. He stammers, very badly, which is about the only way the heroes can avoid him blithely chattering every bit of dangerous detail to authorities in terror or complete lack of guile.

He is useless in a fight (SKILL 3, STAMINA 8) but he has Bargain at 15 and Etiquette at 10, meaning that he's not necessarily entirely useless. Just mostly.
He's basically only risking this deal because he's had a series of disasters and he's down to his last bit of money, and Brass is giving him a great deal as a favor to help him recover.

Brass has a bunch of guards himself, including a bodyguard named Veldik who has a sword that's enchanted if none of the PCs do, so that the demon that's going to be the centerpiece of the first scene.

Waldo and Brass meet, Brass goes into his tent saying he has a few letters to write and tells Waldo to set up his stuff then join him in the tent to discuss, and then the heroes get to interact or whatever. They don't have to do any of the tent setup or anything, though, because Waldo has servants. They get to chat with Veldik a bit, because he's going to be important later, and then Waldo goes to meet with Brass, emerging a few minutes later to declare that Brass is dead. Veldik immediately assumes that Waldo did it, but what's meant to happen is that the entire group immediately realizes that Waldo couldn't possibly have done, and investigate. Nobody entered or left the tent, aside from Brass and Waldo, so...

Inside the tent there's basically the body, a big chest of gold, some letters and a candle and sealing wax. Brass was strangled, completely ruling out Waldo--the dude's fingers wouldn't even have fit around Brass's neck. No sound was heard...and it's because basically there's a Silent Death demon sealed into the candle, which radiates a silence field for five meters. It can only be harmed by magic weapons, surprise surprise, and has SKILL 10 STAMINA 20 2 attacks with Large Claws, and it also has both Strength and Unarmed Combat, the latter at 14. That makes it a serious threat, especially since spellcasting is ruled out by the silence field. This is a very significant threat, especially compared to the stuff in the previous Dungeoneer adventures--it's definitely been ramped up. Obviously it's been sent by someone with a grudge who doesn't want their identity known.

The letters are the biggest clue to who might have done that--Brass lit the candle to use the sealing wax there, incidentally--and there are three. One is a red herring, to a merchant in Salamonis, the other two are Clues. The first is to his wife, mentioning that a fellow named Dvorgar will be getting a letter demanding the money owed, and sending love to the wife and kids. The second is the aforementioned demand of repayment to this Dvorgar fellow.

So assuming the fight is actually survived, which is not a given with starting characters, it's obvious that whoever is behind it had access to a wizard or some other kind of magic. Fortunately our PCs are accredited wizard slayers, right? Also, Waldo, being unable to conclude his deal with Brass, now has no choice but to travel to Blacksand to finish it up with Brass's son instead, and he sure as hell isn't going without his bodyguards.

Then we get treated to the novelty of a scene with some trolls at the gates of Blacksand. Guess what? Waldo's going to do the talking if none of the heroes shut him up. Guess what else? The trolls want a bribe. Guess what else? They'll pick a fight with dwarves or elves, or otherwise make up fees or taxes to demand. This is the same scene as we had the last time we came to Blacksand with the added complication of Waldo being around. Veldik, for his part, just quietly pays the trolls a small fee and enters the city without incident, which should be what our heroes do here. Just in case, the adventure has a bit of a convoluted path to allow the heroes entry without doing that, or if they decide to kill the trolls, or whatever, but we'll assume they did the smart thing instead. (For the record, it offers two alternatives: one, pay a 2000 gold fine to the captain of the guard, forfeiting all possible reward from Waldo as it cleans him out, or two, follow a beggar boy and be wanted by the guards for the remainder of their time here. Neither is great.)

Moving right along, whatever they end up doing, they have a couple of leads. Brass's house, obviously, is a good starting point, to find out if he had any other enemies. Dvorgar's house is known to Veldik, as well as basically anyone else they may contact. If the heroes are the same ones from the Dungeoneer adventures, they know Nicodemus and also Halim Thrumbar, their contact from that adventure.

The basic gist of the gathering information bit is as follows: Dvorgar is a bit of scum who has a bad reputation around town for being a cheat and a liar, but he's got nowhere near the resources to hire the kind of magical muscle needed. A visit to his residence can confirm that.

Halim Thrumbar doesn't work for free--last time he was on the payroll of the King of Salamonis, this time he wants cash for info. He doesn't know jack shit about what happened here, but points out that any magic user would charge thousands for the kind of spell that took Brass out, and if Dvorgar owed less than that it rules him out. He also knows where to find Dvorgar's house, Brass's house, or, for a bit of an extra fee, the wizard Nicodemus, assuming someone knows Nicodemus is in Blacksand but doesn't know where, somehow. Probably player knowledge.

Nicodemus also doesn't know, and moved to Blacksand specifically to avoid getting pestered by everyone with a minor problem to solve, so he's not really that keen on being bothered. Again, last time he had the King of Salamonis involved, plus Throg was a known evil wizard raising an army of the dead. IF someone mentions the demon, Nicodemus comments that he had wondered what that was about, but that he has no idea who was behind it or he'd have already dealt with it. He's pretty disinterested in having his time wasted and will not sell potions, spells, or anything else, and anyone who asks risks being turned into something small and squirmy.

Dvorgar owed Brass a few hundred gold. He has a few thugs as hired muscle, unpaid (though they don't know that yet) and he'll give in to a bit of intimidation once they're removed from the equation. He knows nothing, and can be intimidated further by being dragged to the public gardens, where Lord Azzur has some animated plants that he uses for executions, and threatened to be fed to them. It's unproductive.

There's also a scene where the desperate heroes can visit a clairvoyant. She's actually got the ability to see the future, but it's a future that's beyond the point where the heroes have found the info they need, not a future where they're in the act of finding it, and thus isn't much use except to foreshadow.

Brass was in thick with the Thieves' Guild, and anyone asking questions about the man will pick up a guild tail. They want to know who dunnit, too. This can go to the guild proper, and eventually will need to to get the information that's required to finish...but not without a visit to Brass's house first.

Brass had a wife, who knows about his dealings with the Guild and thinks they did it. Not Rannik, the usual contact, but a rival gang, which--if anyone's the hero from Midnight Rogue--is the same rival gang they knifed someone from.

Brass also had a daughter, who is a sobbing wreck and knew nothing. She's a pretty 18 year old and there is a suggestion that marriage is a possibility for a successful group of heroes, but she wouldn't be a good wife for an adventurer. I dunno what kind of group thinks about marrying the distraught daughter of a murdered merchant, but oh well.

Finally...Brass had a son, who is the only source of the critical bit of information that moves the plot along. He knows Dvorgar isn't in sufficient debt to make it worth the magic. He knows for a fact that the thieves guild wasn't in on it, since Brass was carrying wares from the rival gang when he was murdered, and it set them back. He is afflicted with sleepwalking, which is dangerous, and nobody seems to be able to cure it. Brass had found a new religious group worshiping some god Brass never heard of before, and Brass gave them some money at first hoping to get their help, but cut ties after a few weeks figuring they were swindling him. All he knows is that the deity was named Elim. (Bells ringing now for anyone with a good memory who played the original Dungeoneer adventures.) He directs the group to speak with Rannik the master thief for further information, as Rannik ought to be able to help them track down the cult.

So after the tense visit to the guild to talk to Rannik, who will generously loan a magic sword to the heroes if they don't have one, there's a trip to the local cult of Elim! Yay! They have a small basement temple, and there's a fight with some terrible useless cultists there, along with the magically capable High Priest, who is not Sargon. He knows several spells, including the ones to summon the Silent Death demon, on account of he dunnit. Once they kill those guys, they find a letter from Sargon to the high priest, informing him that he's doing well, temples are being established elsewhere, and instructing him to kill Brass and summon the spirit of Elim as he was instructed to inhabit the brass golem with the sacrifices as planned.

Wait, what?

The cultists have a giant goddamn brass golem that they were planning to unleash on the city, funded by Brass's contributions. Now it's going wild. It takes a bit to get it out of the temple, but it's cramped in there...then it goes goddamn wild on the city.

It has SKILL 10 STAMINA 30, 2 attacks with very large claws (the most damaging weapon type) and it absorbs 2 damage from every hit it takes, making it nearly invulnerable to normal weapons. There's 2 ways to hit it, hinted at in Sargon's letter--one is to destroy its heart, which can be hit only by missile weapons or if the golem is bending down, since the golem is so huge. The first hit takes a Test for Luck to dislodge the protective plate, and then another is required to destroy the heart.

The second option for taking the thing down is to drain it of Oil of Life, its blood. The stopper is in the golem's navel, also too high to reach normally, and takes a LUCK test to hit, but after it's hit the golem loses 4 STAMINA per round till dead. Slightly easier to achieve, slower to finish it off.

And then...

Torbul (Brass's son) and Waldo pay up any outstanding debts to the heroes, assuming Waldo still has the funds to do so. Rannik's magic sword, if not returned, vanishes mysteriously. If the golem made it into the city proper before being shut down, Lord Azzur puts a 500 gold reward on the heads of those responsible, at least until it becomes clear they actually saved the day. Rannik can get them out of town safely, though.

Nicodemus, if anyone feels like pestering him, will actually be happy to discuss things at this point, since it's clearly a matter of national security. He doesn't have much to say of any real import, though--report this to the authorities, go after Sargon, etc.

There was a spellbook of dark magics in the church, which just about everyone will tell the heroes it's a bad idea to hang onto. It's a bad idea to hang onto it, and anyone of the contacts can dispose of it properly. If Nicodemus is consulted, he knows they have it and will deal with it one way or another, whether the PCs agree or not.

Ultimately, this adventure was still fairly railsy, but the investigation section makes it feel somewhat more open. A clever group can bypass a lot of the red herrings, though--no need to talk to the clairvoyant, no need to get tangled up with beggars or guards, no need to waste time in taverns or under bridges, and definitely no time wasted shaking down small-time debtors. Straight to Brass's house, talk to Torbul, talk to Rannik at the Thieves' Guild, raid the temple, Bob's your uncle. Short and direct.

And that's it for Blacksand!. Next, the final volume of the original edition of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Allansia . Then it'll be on to the modern edition, and after that...after that, who knows? I sure as hell have a lot of options, now that the end of this is in sight...

Book 3: Allansia

I'm not dead! I'm just very lazy when it comes to posting.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy
Book 3: Allansia

So, this is the third and final book in the original Advanced Fighting Fantasy system. It primarily presents rules for outdoor adventures, in the same way that Blacksand covered rules for urban adventures. It presents a number of new Special Skills, most of which are either pretty specialized or pretty self explanatory. It has new spells, too, of course, for Priest, Wizard, and Minor Magic. There's rules for Mass Battles, which I'm not sure I can comment on effectively, and finally, the (de facto) final chapter in the set of adventures begun in Dungeoneer !, which doesn't exactly conclude the tale of Sargon the Dark, but ends up being a capstone by default since the line was abandoned after Allansia came out.

See, in 1994, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were pretty much tapering off. The publisher had intended to kill the line entirely two years earlier, in fact, with the publication of Return to Firetop Mountain, the fiftieth gamebook, featuring a return to the site and villain of the first, Zagor the Warlock. There had been a decline in sales of the gamebooks in the preceding years, attributed to the dominance of video games. I'm not sure I buy that explanation, personally. However, RtFM sold well enough to see an additional ten game books commissioned, only nine of which were published before the plug was finally pulled. During that time, Allansia was released. There were only 3 or 4 books released after this one in the original Fighting Fantasy series, which I suppose makes it fairly rare--given that the last two or three gamebooks have been known to fetch an asking price of almost $100 or more on the secondary market. I've never really tried pricing Allansia until now, but quick searches establish it at around $150 or so on amazon.com and alibris, though there's an ebay auction at $25 or so.

Huh. Go figure, I guess I should be taking better care of my copy.

Anyway. There are also rules for playing nonhuman characters, with expanded sections for Elves and Dwarves, plus Goblins, Centaurs, Orcs, and Trolls. I think by now I've clearly established that these guys weren't that great at game balance, and these races definitely don't show off any new insights in that arena.

Rather than go through the whole list of spells and skills and such, I'm going to just cover the interesting bits this time around.

New Special Skills.

There's a couple of Dark-Seeing like skills, in that you can take them at the start of your career but not after the fact, that have to do with perception, like Excellent Hearing There are also a couple of skills, like Battle Combat, intended for use with the new mass battles system. There's Fishing and Hunting skills, and a couple of other primarily outdoorsy types, and a Disarm skill...

One really gets the sense that they just added skills for whatever their players were trying to do that hadn't already got a set of rules to adjudicate in previous books. By the time this book came out, my group had largely discarded the list of special skills as a reference and we just wrote down whatever seemed about right for our skills, since it's pretty clear the designers of the system were doing roughly the same thing.

New Spells

There's a few new cosmetic spells that are there for NPC effect more than player utility, like Glowing Eyes, which...gives you glowing red eyes. There's a couple of new debuffs, too, like Befuddle, a spell that costs 1 STAMINA and gives a -6 penalty to making skill checks or attacks to one target for one minute (plus one per extra STAMINA spent while casting the spell.) Bearing in mind that the average Goblin has a SKILL of 6 and the average weapon-using adventurer can be expected to have a weapon Special Skill in the range of 12-16 as a starting character, this is kind of a killer spell. Admittedly, the spell requires touching the target, but there are tons of ways to accomplish that, as well, really...and they don't get a check to avoid it.

Other spells include buffs, utility stuff for camping and travel, utility spells that allow multiple spells to be cast as a single spell check or grant protection against the dreaded Oops! table, or a complicated Element Control spell that basically lets you determine whatever effect you want to achieve with the element you have learned the spell for and cast it at a Director-determined STAMINA cost for the effect. There's also the great villain spell Exchange Shape, which lets you swap forms with someone--either by trading bodies or transmogrifying, each of which has ups and downs. (Doing a mind-swap causes you to trade STAMINA stats, where changing both bodies around leaves both people dressed in their original clothes, which can be awkward.) Also works on animals...

New Minor Magic spells are the same general type of minor tricks and pranks and practical but not powerful magics. You can make someone drunk or sober, etc. Again, one gets the sense that the designers just threw in a bunch of other minor magic effects that they came up with at the game table...though I suppose that may just be me thinking about how simple it would be to design new effects with the type of tricks they already have.

Priest spells? Priests get analogs to most of the main Wizard attack spells like Fire Bolt, Force Bolt, Lightning Blast, etc. They also get a bunch more direct copies of the Wizard spell list, and a couple of spells like Locate Sacred Place or Commune With Element, which are pretty explanatory. They also get the same kind of special effects spells the Wizards do, too. Nothing stands out as exciting or unique here, more than what was already discussed.

New Races

There's expanded bits on roleplaying dwarves and elves, but no new rules for those races.

Centaurs get an extra 2 to STAMINA, can't really take skills like Ride or whatever. They move faster than humans, jump farther, but take penalties to sneaking and climbing. They can speak horse!

Goblins are kind of dicks, and rarely adventurers for obvious reasons (they don't get along with humans, etc.) They get modified stats, which suck. SKILL D6+4, STAMINA 2D6+6, and LUCK D6+8. Given that SKILL affects your starting outlay of Special Skills and access to everything else, taking a hit to it is kind of shitty, and losing out on STAMINA adds insult to injury. Or vice versa. I don't know. They also can't take a few Special Skills, most notably Strength, which is the go-to for adding extra damage. They get a limited spell list drawing from both Wizard and Priest spells, outside of which they can't expand. On the plus side, the individual restoration spells for the three stats, plus a couple of debuffs like Fear and Befuddle, are part of the list, so they're at least capable of doing something useful there...except for the further reduction of their SKILL total to get Magic in the first place.

Orcs are similar to Gobins, rule-wise. SKILL is D6+4, STAMINA 2D6+9 and LUCK D6+6, but they can choose from a few more spells if they wanna be wizards. They MUST take at least one point in Dark Seeing and a hand to hand weapon.

Trolls get human SKILL, an extra 3 STAMINA, and only D6+4 for LUCK. Everyone hates them, especially dwarves. They must take at least 1 point in Dark Seeing, Strength, and the use of a very large weapon. Most Lore skills can't be taken unless it's specifically in their background, and they can't take any magic but Minor Magic. Hill Trolls are an optional subrace that get a further +3 STAMINA and can pick Magic from the same list as an Orc shaman.

And then...
Mass Battles

There are two Mass Battle systems presented. The first is the Quick Battle system.

First, total up the number of soldiers present on both sides. Divide this by 100, that's how many Battle Rounds will be fought. Next, there's a set of modifiers for battle conditions that are applied. Each side's commander rolls two dice and adds to their Battle Tactics skill (or SKILL if they don't have it.) The loser of this contested roll subtracts their roll from the winner's total, multiplies by 20, and loses that many men from his side. This continues for the number of Battle Rounds determined by the number of combatants at the beginning, or until one side is out of men (or capitulates.) After the first round and every 3 rounds after that, every player has to fight a Heroic Combat, a one-on-one duel with a champion from the other side. This is meant to be set up so that the opponents are roughly equal in strength and abilities. Whichever side won the last Battle Round gets a +1 to their Attack Strength throughout the duel. Whichever side wins the majority of these duels in a round gets a +1 on their next Battle Round.

The other system is far more involved, and actually involves playing out the battles. Units of 10 combatants per token are set up, there's move speeds and stuff, and they get Battle Skill, Battle Stamina, Move, and Attacks stats. Then you basically play out the battle on the tabletop.

(The measurements they use are centimeters--a 1x1 centimeter square is a unit of 10 men. I've no idea what scale that comes to for miniatures.)

Things alternate. Step one is that first one side then the other can have their units move or fire. Step two, they engage in combat--basically the same rules as regular AFF combat, using Battle Skill etc. Units of creatures are advised to use all the same weapon type to simplify calculating damage. Step 3 involves a morale check.

There are of course modifiers for terrain. Firing is like regular ranged combat, and actual combat is, as mentioned, the standard rules, except that unlike standard fights, the Attacks stat is used as a damage multiplier, not to determine how many targets can be attacked.

Morale is determined by rolling a check against Battle Skill. If the check is a failure, the unit breaks and flees if possible. They get to check on the next Morale Check to see if they rally--a second failed Morale Check results in the unit fleeing the battle entirely.

Heroes in units take damage proportionally to their unit, and are only killed if the unit is wiped out entirely. If a unit has a Battle Stamina of 6, and takes 4 damage, a hero with 18 STAMINA will only have 6 remaining, for example.

Spells are cast during the Fire phase, one per Battle Round, instead of moving or firing. They have special (different) rules for how they work under the circumstances of battle. There are also special Battle specific spells, like Arrow Storm or Heal, that are not exactly equivalent to normal adventuring spells. Every 10 men in a unit, rounded up, adds 1 to the STAMINA cost of spells. This includes the first 10 men. If there are more than one spellcaster, the cost can be split--so casting Heal (2 STAMINA base) on a unit of 35 men (+4) would be a total cost of 6 STAMINA, but if there were 2 casters, each could take 3 of the cost.

There's also stats for fortifications, in case you want to run a siege.

Outdoor Adventure Rules

These mostly include environmental modifiers, discussions of what might be found in different types of terrain, and random encounter tables for different areas of Allansia. Boring!

Also, a second (Outdoor) Oops! table, with even more random and hee-larious ways to have your character removed from play. Amazing!

Right. So that's the crunchy bits of Allansia. Next time, I'll cover the adventure in the book, and then at long last I'll be ready to go over the new edition of Advanced Fighting Fantasy in all its obscure and mockable glory.

A Darkness Over Kaad

Several weeks and a username change later...

Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Book 3: Allansia
I forget how I formatted this shit.

Part the final: A Darkness over Kaad

I don't know why but writing this adventure up has just really been intensely unappealing to me for some reason. It's not especially bad...but neither is it especially great. Mostly it's a passable conclusion to the Sargon trilogy and an excuse to use the new mechanics introduced by the book.

The adventure immediately recognizes the problem inherent there: The characters made back in Dungeoneer who brought Sargon back, and who played through the adventure in Blacksand! won't have the new mechanics introduced in Allansia . (Unless you waited till after all three books had been printed before you got your group to play it.) They pretty much get around this by providing a guide NPC who can cover this, or suggesting that some players could roll new characters, though they do hope that at least one or two characters have the whole back story. Alternately, a short interim adventure to get them the skills they'll need is suggested.

The gamebook shout-out in this adventure is Return to Firetop Mountain, but there's really no benefit to this one. The character will have passed through the town that this adventure is set around one time, but doesn't know any of the main NPCs and didn't do anything meaningful there. He met Yaztromo, though? Which doesn't matter. So hey, be that dude or whatever, it really isn't A Thing the way the last two were.

The setup for this adventure is that Sargon, from his mountain lair in the Icefinger Mountains, has been gathering an army to destroy the really unimportant town of Kaad. Kaad is the site of a couple of old, ruined temples once dedicated to Ashra and Vuh, the deities of light and life that countered Sargon's god, Elim, the deity of darkness. Nobody in Kaad has the first fucking clue about this, and Yaztromo had to do some digging to figure it out. He and Nicodemus have been watching for Sargon, see.

So hey, you fuckers brought him back, you deal with him, is basically what Yaztromo tells the party during the intro. Gives 'em a map to the secret lair, which they follow to Sargon's monastery of Elim. The monastery is empty, except for two things: a manticore in the courtyard, which can be fought (there's rules about a bunch of doors that lead to passages around the courtyard and involve a yakkety-sax worthy chase sequence with the manticore) or set loose by opening the main gate to the courtyard and letting it go. (It'd rather hunt goats than deal with heavily armed adventurers.)

The only remaining occupant of the monastery is the goblin Giblet, a prisoner who happens to be able to be a guide to the party. He's a goblin scout who got captured by the elimites, and an exposition dump. Sargon's taken his army and headed to wipe Kaad off the map. He can help the party get to Kaad before the army, and hopefully shore up the defenses...by recruiting Giblet's tribe.

There's a few scenes of travel through hostile terrain--an ice wall and a swamp, including encounters with some nasty denizens of each. Then, in the middle of the swamp near Kaad, the heroes find a tribe of primitive folk who coincidentally worship Ashra and Vuh! And they're from a tribe called Ekaad! Yay! Coincidences abound! They recruit these guys to help, then keep moving. (There's a lot more actual roleplaying stuff here that I'm skimming over, obviously, but that's the end result)

Next it's a deep, dark, dangerous forest. Hey, so far: mountains, tundra, swamp, forest. Rushing through all the new outdoor terrain rules, are we? Carnivorous plants and wolves and bridge trolls, oh my! And then the goblin tribe. Giblet only now bothers to explain that to recruit the goblins, someone's gonna need to become the new goblin king, usurping the position from a dude named Bonebreaker. Sounds easy, right?

There's a ceremony which is pretty silly to issue the challenge, then a single combat with a goblin (SKILL 7 STAMINA 15, but he has the Sword Special Skill at 10, making him actually a reasonable challenge.)

There's literally a page and a half about jokingly harassing the player who's supposed to be becoming king by supposedly forcing him to memorize a lengthy challenge speech that must be got exactly right, but whatever.

Then, finally, the heroes head to Kaad, where they're quite probably arrested on sight.

The captain of the Kaad guard, see? He's secretly a member of Sargon's cult. He can be talked out of arresting them with sufficient rolls and paperwork and delaying long enough for someone else to arrive to check their story out and find it all reasonable, but if they just submit...

Anyway, once they're arrested, they end up getting released pretty quick as the guard captain is an idiot and openly discusses his plan to murder the heroes before Sargon gets there within hearing of said heroes, who are locked in a rickety, easily escaped cell at the time.

Anyway, next, they make battle plans, with a group of people whose pertinent Special Skills include Fish Lore 12 and Useless Facts 14. The plan is basically, the good guy armies of goblins, swampmen, and citizens of Kaad fight a battle to defend the town. The heroes distract Sargon long enough for the High Priest of Ashra and Vuh to sneak up and thwack him with a magic staff dedicated to those gods, which should knock Sargon straight back into spirit form, and hopefully the afterlife.

If they didn't get themselves arrested, the guard captain tries to sabotage the gates. He's as miserable at that task as anything else.

Finally, there's a battle. Things go according to plan with the whole Sargon distraction--the heroes mostly do their distraction thing by getting Sargon to cast Petrify spells at them and such. Once he's whacked by the staff, there's a big flash of light and there's no sign of Sargon at all...but the petrify spells keep going, implying that he may still be out there. We'll just have to wait for the next book to find out, right?

Except that as I said when I started this book, it was pretty close to the end of the line for Fighting Fantasy, and for a long time, it was the end of the AFF system. Then some enterprising young fellow got his hands on the rights and made a new edition...which I'll start on the next time I feel up to this.

Next: Dungeoneer, 2nd Edition: Advanced Fighting Fantasy returns!