#IS THE MOST CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED ANIMORPHS BOOK IN THE SERIES

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Role-Playing for One: Revisiting the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook Series

https://gamebooks.org was used as reference for this piece, with background from http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-08-16-you-are-the-hero-a-history-of-fighting-fantasy

I've always loved reading. When other kids were playing our school's custom made tennis ball tag game (largely an excuse to whip tennis balls at people), messing around in class or just generally engaging in grade-school mayhem, I always had a book handy.

I read in class when I was done my work (and sometimes when I wasn’t). I read on car trips. I read on the bus rides home, or while walking. I read when I had nothing else to do. I read at home instead of going outside, or even instead of video games; my usual escapist pastime of my formative years.

By the summer I turned eleven, I was reading literally anything I could get my hands on, from the Animorphs series, X-Files episode novelizations, ‘Young Adult’ novels about first aid, or even the Star Trek technical manual. I will even admit to having read crappy novelizations of Ninja Gaiden and Blaster Master at some point.

In my defense - it was a different time.

So, while kids my age were at summer camp, my idea of a day out was either going to my local bookstore or biking over to the library. I'd spend entire afternoons wandering the air-conditioned stacks, checking books out armfuls at a time, then spending stretches of days inside alternating between console RPGs and reading stacks of books by my bed.

It was around that time, on one of my trips that I first found a gamebook.

You probably know them as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. At very least, you’ve probably seen the covers. The concept behind the series is simple: books with non-linear page numbers dividing the narrative into decision points, ending in a number of ways based on your decisions throughout.

The series has always been the poster child for utterly ridiculous deaths -  and some of them were downright gruesome for a series that was aimed at pre-teens. An illustrated scene featuring your character being strangled by a Yakuza assassin is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, as a connoisseur of truly awful video game character deaths - a trait developed from a childhood playing adventure games, I can confirm that some of these are actually pretty gruesome. 

I was content enough in my discovery, but little did I know that the well went deeper. I still hadn’t heard about Gamebook Adventures. While the Choose Your Own Adventure series got its start in the 70s, the concept of a gamebook that was also a role playing game didn’t materialize until the start of the Fighting Fantasy series of books, starting with 1982’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

The book was penned jointly by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson both of Games Workshop founding fame (Not to be confused with the man behind Steve Jackson games - who confusingly started writing Fighting Fantasy books as well) as an attempt to describe the substance of tabletop role-playing to a wider audience. The end result was something else entirely; a self-contained RPG adventure with Choose Your Own Adventure trappings.

The concept proved decently popular, and Fighting Fantasy exploded to include almost seventy entries in 25 years, including Sorcery!; a story told across 4 separate books that allowed players to transfer their character between them. 

But I wasn't aware of them until the 1990s, when I fished a copy of Appointment with FEAR from a shelf of dog-eared paperbacks at what was quite possibly the world’s most disorganized used bookstore. It’s easy to see why I bought it - It’s pretty hard to say no to a cover this cool.

When I got home, I remember just about flipping out when the book asked me to go get some dice and a pencil to fill out a character sheet. And even though my first run probably ended in failure - most of them do - I was hooked.

I was hooked because, for me, the Fighting Fantasy series was a relief. Beyond it being a cool concept, it allowed a scared, lonely, depressed kid lacking in friends and safe places to see what was so engaging about pencil and paper games. The books hint at what makes pencil-and-paper gaming what it is: skill checks, dice rolls, inventory, combat, and world building, since most of the books take place in the world of Titan - a stand-in for the world building of Dungeons & Dragons without needing the critical element - people. And I love them for it.

These days, a handful of the books have made their way to mobile devices, boasting quality of life improvements like and bookmarks, which saves me trying to read a paperback while trying to hold it like a bowling ball - fingers trying to save various decision points to go back to when you failed.

And fail you would; Fighting Fantasy books are the worst of D&D dungeon design that we love to hate so much - or maybe just hate, depending on your taste. Dead end skill checks that force a restart of the entire book, insufferable mazes that required reams of graph paper to map properly, entire branches of the book that served as red herrings, and even unwinnable states, triggered by forgetting to pick up a key items early in the story. Some of the books boast an instant-death kill-count well in the 30s, not counting combat deaths. I’m working through House of Hell right now, and haven’t gotten more than a few encounters in before dying to some seemingly harmless choice.

While some of the earlier entries show their age, there’s still a lot of worth here - with some caveats. There is a lot of nostalgia at play here. If you’re not the sort of person that likes to make their own maps in video games, or write down notes, this might not be the right fit for you. Many of the Fighting Fantasy apps, published by Tin Man Games on iOS and Android, have a mode where you can “Play like an old-school cheater!”, allowing you to bypass skill checks or item checks that normally lock you out of choices otherwise.

While I certainly don’t think they’re perfect, I do still think they’re worth a look, especially at their price point on mobile - less than $3 on the Canadian Apple or Google Play stores. I don’t guarantee you’ll find them great, but hopefully you can find something of value looking back over what I have no trouble calling a criminally underrated series.