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Seriously bro, this house couldn’t be more haunted – why not just wait in the car for the AA van? House Of Hell starts with your car breaking down in the sticks, forcing you to see refuge from the storm in a clearly haunted house.
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In a strange way it was also the precursor for most videogames in the Nineties where forests were basically collections of green corridors linking green rooms.Īpparently being adapted into a movie (?!), House Of Hell was a disconcerting departure from the traditional Fighting Fantasy setting in that while they were all varied, they were all clearly somewhere else – forests where dwarves die in your arms, and planets where dinosaurs must be punched to death by Autobots. Mainly though, it was nice to meet a few characters that didn’t want to either eat your face, or pretend they didn’t want to eat your face but really they did. Subsequently it felt like the first true Fighting Fantasy narrative, with a fuller range of characters and motivations, and a far more clearly defined goal. The Forest Of Doom marked the first real expansion of the gameworld, and the first glimpse of some part of it that didn’t include strangely labyrinthine tunnels containing monsters and non-sequiturs (You enter the room, it contains six orcs a single top hat filled with fire). The Forest Of Doom was actually the first Fighting Fantasy book I read, I borrowed it from the local library (now probably a Tesco Express) thinking it was a book, y’know, the old fashioned sort of book where you turn pages sequentially like our parents used to, and instead was confronted with my very first game book, setting me on the path towards roleplaying, Warhammer, and eventually editing SciFiNow, so take that mum. The third book in the series, and by now the ‘Thing Of Bad Thing’ naming formula was pretty much established as a big part of the whole Fighting Fantasy experience, its use rivalled only by Seventies Doctor Who. Interestingly Carl Sargent, as Keith Martin is known among muggles, has a PHd in experimental parapsychology, and Vault Of The Vampire is the most vivid example in his Fighting Fantasy output of this bubbling to the surface, with chunks of the book featuring confrontations that can only be overcome with your Faith score.
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Vault Of The Vampire is better than Dracula, basically. Needless to say Ravenloft was my favourite Dungeons & Dragons setting, and Vault Of The Vampire placed me like a stake through the heart of my own Draculastory, one I didn’t have to share with a reedy Jonathan Harker and one that wasn’t written as a collection of insipid letters and journal enteries.
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It seems a bit mean-spirited to single out one particular Fighting Fantasy book for being contrived, but even at my tender age with an enthusiasm for vampires I recognised Vault Of The Vampire as a collection of generic vampire tropes, and ‘Mortvania’ as the pseudo-Germanic Uberwald that it was. While most Fighting Fantasy books are either archetypical Dungeons & Dragons/Tolkein-inspired dwarf tossing, or else dragged kicking and screaming from popular culture and made to wear a slightly different coloured dress and told your name is Krazy Ken (see Freeway Fighter), Robot Commando appears to be entirely the product of a 13-year-old’s fever dream where giant robots herd dinosaurs… IN SPACE. In honour of this year’s 30th Anniversary Fighting Fantasy book by the almighty Ian Livingstone, here’s our not entirely serious and completely subjective run-down of the ten best in the landmark game book series.Īre you kidding me? There’s a flipping TRANSFORMER FIGHTING A T-REX!Ĭirca 1986 this was basically the equivalent of printing a book cover showing Harry Potter firing Pokéballs at Barack Obama – only perhaps even more exciting because we kids of the day didn’t have DeviantArt to act as a haven for imaginary (non-sexual) couplings.