#13 - "Freeway Fighter" (1985), by Ian Livingstone

The aluminium-foil ducts really give it that "B-movie" feel.

 

Dateline: 1981
 
The scene is a cold, concrete-floored garage where STEVE and IAN write gamebooks. They are not yet billionaires. Rain rattles upon the iron roof.   A busted washing machine appears to have vomited its contents across one half of the garage, the foamy wash hemmed in by a dyke of sopping towels. A dusty black-board leans against the wall, a map of the Maze of Zagor marked up on it, variously smudged, scribbled on and over-written. There are two hammocks strung from the rafters. In the centre of the garage is a battered wooden picnic table, bearing a 1940s-era typewriter. Next to the typewriter, there lies a grimy tyre iron and an eyeless teddy bear. Unpainted war-game miniatures with missing heads and limbs are strewn everywhere.

STEVE is sitting at the typewriter, tapping hunt-and-peck at the keys, pausing occasionally to alternately sigh or glare skyward towards an uncaring God.

Metal rasps and graunches are heard as the roller door is raised. IAN enters.

STEVE: "Ian! Where've you been all afternoon! You're supposed to be helping me break this GANJEES scene."

IAN: "Oof, come off it, Steve! I've been down the pictures! Seen Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior - cor, it were a right blast! Top action, car chases, a fit bird in tennis gear, this film's got it all! One bloke gets his fingers chopped off trying to catch a metal boomerang, it's ace!"

STEVE: (annoyed) "Well, that's fine and well, but if you're not going to help me I'll take your name off the cover of Citadel of Monsters (working title). Now listen to this - suddenly, a big spooky face flies at your face. You throw yourself down on the ground and begin to feel frightened -- "

STEVE chews on the end of a pencil.  
(continuing) "I don't think it's intense enough. Maybe I should say very frightened. What do you think? You throw yourself down on the ground and begin to feel very frightened."

IAN: (offhandedly) "Very frightened, definitely."

STEVE: (nodding) "Yeah... mmm."

STEVE produces a bottle of Twink and begins daubing it upon the manuscript. Meanwhile, IAN paces up and down, visibly pumped up from watching Mad Max.


Moments pass, Ian suddenly jolts as if hit by a static shock.

IAN: "Here, I've just had a wizard notion, Steve!"

STEVE: (tongue protruding from corner of mouth as he hunches over the manuscript, twinking away) "And what would that be, Ian?"

IAN: "Listen, do you think we can get the license to do a Mad Max gamebook?"

STEVE:  (sighs, looks up) "Fat chance, mate. You know I wanted to get the license for Star Trek but I couldn't keep Roddenberry's assistant's assistant on the line long enough to even explain what a gamebook is! Don't even bother. Look though, there's no reason you can't do a gamebook about driving around the wasteland and just call it Mad Gordon or something."


IAN: "What a smashing idea! Yes, I'm definitely going to do that!"

--------------------------

And that, friends, is how the world came to have: FREEWAY FIGHTER
But as we shall see, the road from conception to reality can be rocky and bandit-harried...

Never thought I'd say it, but the American cover is better.

Background

Well if you want a post-apocalyptic setting you need an actual apocalypse to get there and while there are many options, only a few are classics. Given the vintage ('85) you might expect that Ian would go for global thermonuclear war, but he obviously thought that was played out and you know what: he was right. So instead he went for a devastating pandemic which may seem pretty obvious to today's reader but I assure you was quite recherche in the mid-80s.

Ian decides to really throw Us Readers into the moment of the World's Doom by forgoing the FF-traditional title "BACKGROUND" and instead titling the passage:

VID NEWS BULLETIN

DATELINE 21 JULY 2022

This boundary-pushing format is then instantaneously abandoned in favour of the usual past tense narrative - somewhere along the creative highway the concept was turfed but the title remained, lingering uselessly like an outie belly-button. Ian tells us that actually the world of 2022 is super utopian, World War III was completely averted, East and West are cooling out together with a vodka and Coke, some kind of revolution in agriculture means no-one is hungry, and "increased mobility [has] led to people's greater understanding of one another." (Do not forget that the man went back-packing around Thailand to research Deathtrap Dungeon so he knows what's up)

Ian then says that 21 July was a hot day (everywhere?) and he remembers about the news bulletin idea and he tells us what was on the news that morning, which was basically that everything is great and "England is to play the United States in the World Cup final in Sydney" - no doubt this notion tickled him pink, but what must've seemed like a truly fantastical scenario in 1985, nowadays seems kind of more viable (except for the part about England making the final, obviously)

Okay so there's nothing in the news bulletin about an apocalypse anyway, but later that afternoon a killer virus breaks out in New York and four days later, 85 percent of the world's population is dead. As far as viruses goes this is over-achieving and I bet the virus had cause to regret it afterwards. Better to piss around for generations havin' a ball like the common cold, than burn yourself out from workaholism and leave nobody alive to infect afterwards. Take it from me, viruses, you gotta play it smart in the modern world.

I tell ya! Today's virus got it tougher than evah!

But anyway. Ian then labours through half a page in order to tell us that "Mad Max happens". Mad Max is such effective short-hand for this scenario that the author'/s annoyance at having to explain Mad Max from first principles is palpable. So I won't put myself to the same trouble because you already know the drill - one thing that struck me though was that Ian Livingstone describes the marauding wasteland gangs as "the new barbarians", which is also the title of an entertaining Italian film that coincidentally explores many of the same themes.

"The New Barbarians" is considered a snuff movie by fashion store mannequins.

To complete the circle, the trailer for The New Barbarians is, by chance or fate, a functional precis of the plot of Freeway Fighter (you can watch it in lieu of reading the rest of the post if you are in a rush).

Anyway, we established that Mad Max has happened. YOU are one of luckier people in this scenario, you eke out a comparatively civilised existence in a walled town called New Hope, that clings to some virtues of the vanished world. One day you are cooling out the garage tinkering with some shit and a couple of guys "from the town council" run in all pumped up about something they heard on the short wave. Somewhere to the south is another town called San Anglo and they called up to make a deal - 10,000 litres of petroleum in exchange for "grain and seeds". They tell you that a Dodge Interceptor will be kitted out with guns and a bunch of James Bond shit and suggest that you are just the man to volunteer to drive. You immediately agree, in accordance with the now well-established  tendencies of Fighting Fantasy protagonists (i.e. obedience to small town authorities, and a thriving death-wish).

By the by - it occurred to me on later reflection that the unspecified amount of grain you are delivering to San Anglo has to be able to fit into a highly modified 1984 Dodge Interceptor, which is a two-door and you couldn't put a baby in the back seat even if you folded it, whereas it is clearly stated that you will be driving a petrol tanker back with ten thousand litres in it.

The Interceptor - it fits exactly one sack of grain, propped up in the passenger seat like a person.

Gotta be a trap, right? Who's gonna trade ten thousand litres of Texas Tea for three handfuls of trail mix? Gotta be a trap.

Rolling Up My Dude

First up there is an exciting innovation in the Character Sheet for Freeway Fighter as it includes a field for "Driver's Name", which to my delight had been filled out already by a previous imaginaut:

Dartin Shot. They call me "Star". As in "star shot". Which means, like, "good shot".
I am good at shots. Am like a Hollywood star, of shots. Shot celebrity.
I can shoot darts.
Okay seeya.

And here are Mr. Shot's stats, they are okay:

SKILL - 10
STAMINA - 23
LUCK - 8

You also get to roll stats for your vehicle:

FIREPOWER - 8
ARMOUR - 28

This is basically just SKILL and STAMINA for cars. The Interceptor also gets its own character sheet which is pretty sick:

Come on, they're not called "Spare Wheels" you damn nerds. Do some research.

Since some punk kid had already written on (and carefully shaded) parts of my DODGE INTERCEPTOR SPECIFICATION, I got my pencil out and under "Car Modifications" wrote:

In my version of Freeway Fighter, Dartin Shot threw away the grain.

The Adventure

Something felt very familiar to me about this adventure, mainly because I have seen Mad Max, but also because I have driven road trips before. Your main concerns in Freeway Fighter are basically the same as driving inter-city in the real world, i.e.

1) Am I Gunna Run Out Of Petrol, and;
2) Those Other Assholes On The Road, plus;
3) Am I Gunna Get A Speeding Ticket.

But oh yeah, we can scratch #3, because in the lawless badlands of the hollowed world, of course you will not get a speeding ticket. Dartin Shot, being a "glass half-full" kind of dude, devotes significant time and mental energy to this consideration:

"Despite the hazard of having to avoid abandoned cars, the highway is wide enough for you to gather plenty of speed. It's exciting to drive so freely, without fear of being hauled in by the police for violating some traffic regulation or other. "

What a refreshing attitude! Contrast this with that other well-known work of post-apocalyptic fiction, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Well, I think we can agree that the guy in that book is a right gloomy sod and no mistake.

“You walk out in the gray light and stand and you see for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The BLIND DOGS of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like GROUND-FOXES in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” 

This guy resolutely refuses to see the "upside" of the collapse of civilisation/all-moral-boundaries. Does the protagonist in The Road ever take a moment to appreciate life? Not really. But look what he's getting away with - no laws, no limits - you can wee wherever you want - you can take the shopping cart out of the supermarket car-park and push it around with all your stuff in it, and you won't get in trouble.

But here's ya boy Dartin "Star" Shot again:

"The road is open and wrecked cars are an infrequent hazard. The speedometer reads well above the  maximum speed-limit that used to control the road, but you know that there is no chance of getting a speeding-ticket now."

He's still thinking about it! It's still a big deal for him. This is truly to "make lemonade when life gives you lemons".
  

When life gives you New Barbarians...  just take a moment to appreciate that at least there's no fukken five-oh breathin' down ya neck, ya feel me?

Anyway the first couple of encounters once you roll out the gates of New Hope are not much to write about. Dartin overhears a guy shooting at a dog and then drives past a phoney gas station which is pretending that it still sells gas, an obvious trap. Instead of falling for that one he goes to a McDonald's drive-in and pretends to order. "This is sick!" Dartin says to himself, "I can do whatever I want."

And he has another one of his Deep Thoughts further down the road when he notices shit is kind of run down.  "You didn't realise how much maintenance was needed to support civilisation." Nobody is mowin' the lawns or nothing! Shit is crazy.

People used to take a bit of pride, you know?

At last Dartin gets an overdue reality check when the RED CHEVVY on the cover rolls up on him with guns blazing. I couldn't be bothered so I used one of my four rockets, which allow you to instantly win combat. Dartin surveys the wreckage. "Who were these people and why did they attack you without warning?" he wonders. It's like topsy-turvy land out here! Dartin suddenly understands why the mechanics swapped his indicator lights and windscreen wipers for a hundred machine guns with infinite ammo.

Just then the radio fires up, someone from back at New Hope lets you know that a biker gang attacked the town and kidnapped the town leader, Sinclair, "so, ah, keep an eye out for them, okay hon?"

Given that this book was written by an Englishman in 1985, I can only conclude that the character of "Sinclair" is a reference to the great British inventor and lap-dance enthusiast, Sir Clive Sinclair.

You acknowledge the message and say goodbye - the prose in this section is so workmanlike that you get the impression that Dartin Shot doesn't really give a shit about Sinclair - Dartin just rolls his eyes and nonchalantly drops the receiver with a careless flip of the wrist. "Sinclair? That guy? Pffft."

Ian doesn't give much of a shit about Sinclair either, really.  If you tiki-tour around for a while and blow up a few goons you can find him locked up in a shack in an abandoned town. Your only interaction is that he tells you about the raid on New Hope and his kidnapping. Normally that sentence would segue into some information about... the raid on New Hope and Sinclair's kidnapping, but in this case all we know is that Sinclair TOLD us about it, i.e. we know the general topic of some words he said. Readers are generously invited to dip their brush into the rich palette of their own imagination and just go nuts conjuring up this gripping account for themselves!  A rare treat for Us Readers - but I wasn't feeling very inspired at the time, so my mental image of Sinclair's kidnapping was basically just the first ten seconds of this video:

Sinclair: "Oh no, 'Mad Max' is happening to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...!"

Then he fucks off on a Harley. You get one LUCK point.

Beyond that, there's a single, final off-hand reference to Sinclair on the winning paragraph 380, where you return to New Hope with the fuel tanker and the grubby post-apocalyptic urchins of that town throw a sad parade with three handfuls of confetti they've been hoarding. And, we are told, "if you managed to rescue Sinclair during your adventure, consider your mission a triumph." But if you didn't, hey, good job anyway. It's Mad Max out there, you're gonna lose your town mayor once in a while, right? People are over Sinclair already, I mean, he only invented the motherfukken ZX Spectrum.

I guess Ian wanted to add some higher stakes to the story beyond "will the town of New Hope manage to scam a butt-load of petrol", but why bother to introduce this sub-plot if you're gonna leave it so soggy? Let's be clear, Sinclair is no Mungo, not by a long shot.


Anyway, you have the general idea of this book already. You drive around and a bunch of dumb things happen, all of which are car-themed. e.g. you see a broken-down ambulance or a broken-down bus. You drive under a bridge and a guy on top of the bridge tries to drop a rock on you or something. I didn't really care about any of this stuff.

Notable Encounters

There's really only one encounter in this book which rings my bell, which is this guy, Leonardi.

It's Leonardi! Love that guy.

Leonardi and his pals have blockaded a road. Here's what happens when you reach the blockade:

Two armed men in leather uniforms approach you and tell you that the only way you will be allowed to drive any further south is to win a speed race along the straight road, against their ace driver. If you lose the race, you will be forced to turn back.

Okay, but... why? What's their motivation? Who knows! Ian is wracking his brain for car-themed encounters here. Do you know how hard it is to come up with a whole gamebook's worth of car-themed encounters? It's pretty hard.

So then Leonardi pulls up in an E-Type Jag and he winds down the window and looks at you and here is an exact transcription of what he says:

"Hi, my name's Leonardi. I used to play ball for the Mets, but now I race cars. Too bad you are driving that old trash can, but good luck anyway."

You then race up the road a little bit and the book tells us there are six people cheering at the finish line. If you lose, Leonardi will get out of his car and say:

"You're good, but you're just not good enough. You'd better turn around now and head back towards the canyon."

...leaving us none the wiser. You can also get into a fight with Leonardi and blow him up but you'd have to be kind of a dick to do that.

Failure, and a Long Walk

Anyway I didn't get to race Leonardi when I played, because I fell foul of #1 on that earlier list - I ran out of gas. In fact this is the most probable way of losing, you need to employ Bizarre Search Behaviour to scrounge five or six cans of petrol on your way to San Anglo or you get sent to paragraph 364 which basically says "too bad you ran out of petrol, guess you're walking home, lol".

It would be nice if the petrol scarcity thing was set up a bit better - just have a guy in New Hope warn you about conserving fuel or something, make you nervous right from the get-go since it is undeniably the biggest threat in the game.

Might coulda strapped a rocket launcher on one of these bad boys instead.

The SKELETON Count

The inclusion of magically re-animated undead in this setting would have been a challenge to justify (while undoubtedly making for a better read). So, it will come as no surprise that:

This message is brought to you by That Skeleton with the Weird Bosom Portholes from The New Barbarians.

Before I explain what I counted instead, I should point out that it is hypothetically possible, however unlikely, that a female person or "Wo-man" might someday have cause to read this blog, and that this chimerical being, whom I have dared to imagine, might be dismayed by the sweaty-lidded Male Gaze inherent in my "SEXY DAMES Count", which you may recall stood in for SKELETONS way back when I wrote about Island of the Lizard King, sometime around the turn of the century.

It has been on my mind for these many intervening years that the Sexy Scales are very much askew and that there is a balance to be restored, a debt that must needs be redeemed.
Well, my Hypothetical Lady Readers - consider it paid in full:

The SLAMMIN' BODZ Report

(Editorial notes - listening to "I'm Too Sexy" is MANDATORY while reading this section)
(Yes, "on repeat", of course on repeat, why are you even asking)
(Okay if you're really that upset, you COULD listen to "Deeply Dippy" instead but it will make a lot less sense thematically)

The SLAMMIN' BODZ Report is brought to you by modern-day Right Said Fred.

Let the count-down begin!
(You are listening to the song, right?)

Chuck

Chuck here takes great care of himself, all of his striations and individual muscle fibres are plainly visible and just pressed up against his straining, creaking skin like you would not believe. Tap on those pecs and they'll sound off like a couple of finely tuned timbales! We asked Chuck for the secret behind his amazing achievement, it turns out he attaches diving weights to his Uzi and also he always take the stairs.

That's another Fighting Fantasy:

Vincente "Kid Panther" Cobretti

Ladies, some of you out there prefer more of a dancer's physique, am I right? Don't interrupt me to agree. Well look no further than  the "Kid Panther", Vincente Cobretti. As the unacknowledged love-child of Lt. Marion Cobretti (Sly Stallone's character in Cobra) and whoever Olivia Newton John was playing in the video for Physical, he attributes his bod almost entirely to lucky genes.
"But I also got my own technique called Micro-Training!" he blurts. "This week I've been really focused on pumping up that vein in my left elbow pit."

The Total Micro-Training (C) System with Vincente "Kid Panther" Cobretti is available now on VHS and Betamax.

ANIMAL

As the leader of a gang of New Barbarians, ANIMAL has made it to the very top of his profession. But he still makes time to keep his body in top condition by energetically beating strangers to death in unregulated lucha libre combats, or "pounding ass", as he describes it. "You better believe I am pounding ass day and night", he will state unequivocally when asked, and sometimes when not asked also.


Incredibly, ANIMAL has achieved -1.7% body fat, yes that's MINUS 1.7%. His body contains small amounts of the anti-matter form of fat, which scientists have not yet decided whether to call "anti-fat" or "taf". This also means that one sip of a thickshake would cause him to literally explode in a detonation three times more powerful than the destruction of Hiroshima. "It definitely keeps me on target in my intake control," Animal confided warmly to us. "Uh uh uh! No cheating!" he added with a throaty chuckle, waggling one deliciously muscular index finger from side to side.

Maximus Doombro

Maximus Doombro is a well-known local character, tooling about the wasteland in his instantly recognisable CHARIOT, a converted Toyota Hilux. We asked Maximus how he came up with his unique look.

"When the plague hit," he tells us, "me and some buddies holed up at a sauna called 'Centurions' where we always used to go, it was like a Roman-style place, just a fun place with a theme, you know."

"Eventually we ran out of tinned spaghetti and we had to go out foraging, and we didn't know what to expect, so we raided the costume closet and I found this gladiator helmet and some of the boys put on some legionary gear and we stepped out and said 'Hello, world! Here we are, this is us!' Well, we felt a bit silly at first, but you know, everybody in the wasteland has been really supportive, the kids like it when they see us, the parents are supportive, a lot of the dads ask me how they can get into it, it's just a bit of fun and colour for everyone."

The CHARIOT has bullet holes in the fuel tank, so it's pulled by a harnessed team of six gleaming body-builders, crawling on all fours with ball-gags stuffed into their drooling mouths.

"We each get one day a week riding in the back," Maximus explains, "it's fitness AND it's fun."
"And of course our friendship is stronger than ever!" he laughs. "Come on boys, mush, mush!"
And the CHARIOT is rolling again.

------------------------

Well, that concludes the SLAMMIN' BODZ Report, I hope all of the heterosexual women out there thoroughly enjoyed it. I felt a bit strange while I was writing it and zooming in closely on the detail of all those incredible muscles, but this was one for the ladies and I will do anything to be fair.

Final Thoughts

Well I suppose it probably fairly clear that I found this book pretty boring and a bit rubbish. I feel like Ian Livingstone didn't enjoy writing it, and thus I didn't enjoy reading it. He was much more enthusiastic writing high fantasy and it shows. It's a shame that the book got fixated on the car angle because there is a lot of fun tropes you can play with in a post-apocalyptic setting (consider something more akin to the Fallout series - there's no reason why this book couldn't have been populated with bizarrely mutated animals and such to spice it up). This is also a contributing factor as to why it has taken me so many months to finish writing about the bleedin' thing.

Back in the day, of course, Ian had Steve Jackson to kick his arse for him...

Dateline, 1985

The scene is a breath-takingly beautiful, sun-lit conservatory full of rare tropical plants and exquisitely tasteful furnishings. This is where IAN and STEVE write gamebooks. A small fountain plashes endearingly. Two white tigers lounge together on the floor. Hot ladies are carrying drinks around and what-not. 

STEVE is stretched out in a sun-chair, reading a book about cryptography.

STEVE (looking up from his book): "I say, Ian, I dropped three hundred thousand pounds at the roulette table last night, I think we better put out another gamebook, what! How's that Mad Gordon thing coming along?"

IAN is seated at a mahogany table nearby. He looks up from a charcoal sketch he is working on. It is a manticore blazing a J.

Ian: (shrugs) "Oh, I dunno mate, I started it but... cars are boring. I got bored."

STEVE's eyes smoulder with rage, like lava from a magic volcano where a boss lives.

Steve: "That's the bloody attitude I've been telling you about! FINISH THE BOOK, IAN."

Ian: "Look mate, I'm really not bothered on this one --"

Steve: "Don't tell it to me, Ian. Tell to the Board of Directors when you hand in your resignation."

Ian: "Oo-er, I'll get cracking then, eh."

And then he finished it off in a big rush in one afternoon, and he couldn't even think of an extra 20 paragraphs about cars so he made it finish on paragraph 380. The End.

#7 - "Island of the Lizard King", by Ian Livingstone (1984)

Okay so the cover of this book is another one of them Cistine chapel joints. It's deep. I'm pretty sure that the original portrait is in a vault in Switzerland, it probably belonged to Mubarak's cousin or something. I heard there is a task force in the British Museum set up only to find this picture and bring it back for HRH the Queen's boudoir. This thing is like a bargaining chip in international diplomacy. Folks is like "okay you can keep your plutonium refinery but first you gotta give us back the OG print from Island of the Lizard King". You might think I'm joking, but this is too important.

The focus of this masterpiece is the boss of the book, the Lizard King, putting in a good run at the title of History's Most Menacing Nudist. His reptilian tackle is mercifully obscured by his snarling pet - you might take it for a panther or puma, but it is in fact a mighty BLACK LION. And, I hope, genuinely black and not just a normal lion that's been doused with a poisonous dye like that poor tiger from Beastmaster (it died, you know).

The only plausible criticism is one of accuracy. According to the book, the Lizard King is supposed to wield a "flaming" sword - he has a collection of them, which is a bit surprising since they're the only weapon in the world that can actually damage him, but I suppose he felt safer knowing where they all were. Anyway here on the cover he has a scimitar that is just kind of gleaming, I mean I'll grant that it is really gleaming a lot, but it's a far cry from honest-to-goodness flaming. Then again, as we saw back in Forest of Doom, flaming swords can be pretty hard to draw - perhaps it's better to just draw whatever kind of sword you're good at, rather than over-reaching and winding up with basically a feather-duster.

Background

The set up of this book is that you're on your way to the small coastal village of Oyster Bay. Why? You want to take a break, visit your old friend Mungo, do some snorkelling, dig up some pipis and whatever.

BUT WAIT A MINUTE - was that the sound of a needle skipping across a record, universally recognized signifier that "the game done changed"? I certainly hope so, because the game HAS done changed. This is the first time we have seen any indication that a Fighting Fantasy protagonist has a friend, or indeed any kind of normal human relationship. Ian Livingstone tells you how to feel about Mungo in typically straightforward prose:

You think about the good times you used to have with Mungo, his constant cheerful nature and willingness to help people in need. You find it difficult to believe that so much evil exists in the land when there live the likes of Mungo. 

You plainly have some pretty sappy feelings for Mungo. But while having the two of you lay around on the beach explaining why and how much you value each other could qualify as an adventure in friendship, the Fighting Fantasy seal always signifies adventures of the significantly more violent kind.

Your guarantee of stabby times since 1982.

Therefore, you arrive at Oyster Bay, polystyrene surfboard tucked under your arm, only to discover that your holiday has already gone badly awry. LIZARD MEN from nearby Fire Island have twice raided the village, kidnapping several young men and kicking over some buckets. Your buddy Mungo bursts out of a hut and announces that he's going to sail to Fire Island to mount a rescue, and then "stares at you in silence". You reluctantly set aside your beach-ball and remove the knotted handkerchief from your head. Then you button up your aloha shirt and kick the jandals from your feet. And then you take the snorkel out your mouth and ineffectually try to scrape the bright orange zinc from off your nose. "Alright Mungo you old son-of-a-bitch... let's go save those villagers" you growl and you both grin wolfishly and laugh like men, and then, old brothers-in-arms that you are, you and Mungo do the Predator handshake.

Mungo lays on some ill hospitality by boiling up a lobster and then he explains the setting of the book as the two of you tuck into that bad boy. Your destination, Fire Island, is basically an aborted gulag that was set up by some   jerk-off called Prince Olaf who doesn't get mentioned again. He built a prison on the island and shipped a bunch of "undesirable characters" (read: political dissidents) over from the mainland before suddenly losing interest in the whole venture. After he stopped paying the Lizard Men, they re-purposed Fire Island as a commercial concern and gave the former prisoners a chance to learn marketable skills by having them dig a bunch of gold mines. Unfortunately these mines don't have a great Health and Safety record and there's a bunch of administrative and governance issues all round. At the bottom of things, it seems like the whole situation is Prince Olaf's fault, but nevertheless it's the Lizard King that you're clambering into a boat to go and murder despite that fact that he has really just been carried along by circumstances and is pretty much just playing the hand he was dealt. But he did kidnap and enslave those villagers I suppose, so there's that.

Rolling Up My Dude

SKILL- 11
STAMINA - 20
LUCK - 10

These were good numbers. Standard rules again, I paid careful attention this time and remembered to mark 10 PROVISIONS on my Adventure Sheet. And just as well, because this book is just filthy with combat. I basically had to keep a sandwich in my free hand even as I was sword-fighting. I got beat up so many times I had to eat nine meals a day, four of them simultaneously. Just shoving a taco into one corner of my mouth and smashing a watermelon slice against the other. All sitting cross-legged on the bare ground post-fight to wolf down a big bowl of instant mashed potatoes, right next to the steaming guts of some barely-slain abomination. That's when you know you're on the ropes. That's when it's tough.

The Adventure

Paragraph 1 kicks off with the boat trip to Fire Island, which the book uses as another opportunity to remind you of what good buddies you and Mungo are. In what may be the longest continuous speech by any Fighting Fantasy character (eight sentences), Mungo relates the story of how his father, a circus strongman, entered the Trial of Champions one year and predictably died. "At least he tried" Mungo notes with callous good cheer. Let the record show that I have retroactively decided that my protagonist in Deathtrap Dungeon was actually Mungo's dad.

Strangely, when you come in sight of the island, Mungo leaps to his feet and "shouts 'Land ahoy!' at the top of his voice, as though he were yelling the news to the crew of a galleon".

"Shit, Mungo, I'm right here. And Fire Island looks like it's all of five miles away, it must've been visible for hours. What the hell is wrong with you."

Mungo beaches the boat and once again the book's first choice is to go either left or right. Given the option of "scrambling" over rocks to the left vs. "clambering" over rocks to the right I went with scrambling since it sounds easier, if marginally less dignified. So, after scrambling with vigor and pizzazz to the next cove over, you make it about halfway up the beach before Mungo is snatched up and mercilessly dandled by a GIANT CRAB that just pops up from under the sand. The intense pathos of this scene is slightly undermined by the fact that the illustrator didn't trouble to find any reference material for what a crab's face looks like.

Crabs, crabs.... they got like googly cartoon eyes, a big old  mouth like a catfish, and little Martian antennas, right? Or am I thinking of alligators?

You're given the option of abandoning Mungo and fleeing but such tactical good sense cowardice is immediately punished as you blunder into quicksand and are forced to see your friend devoured while you slowly drown. For added poignancy Mungo yells "Why!?", "No!!!" and "I forgive you!!!" as he is drawn inch-by-inch into the creature's anatomically anomalous muppet mouth. 

Not that aiding your friend does him any good. It might look as though he's on a mildly thrilling fairground ride, perched daintily up there on the claw, but apparently he was getting 100% of his internal organs crushed. You murder the crab just quickly enough to hear him gasp his last. In the book his dying words evince the same "easy-come, easy-go" attitude he displayed to his father's proxy-suicide - "Oh well! A lot of use I've been!" - which didn't really ring true for me so I wrote my own version. 

Mungo's Last Words

(the remix)

"Ah... my friend... my friend... it got me... that... that fucked-up looking crab... I swear that thing had eyelids... it's killed me, it's killed me dammit... all up to you now... you get that lizard, that Lizard King... PROMISE ME YOU'LL GET HIM, YOU PROMISE ME DAMMIT ... ah... shoulda gone right... back when we landed... I told you... clambering... much.... easiaaaaaaaah........... "

Of course if you do decide to go right instead of left at the beginning, you run into some PIRATES who are partway through the hilariously stereotypical act of burying a treasure chest, and Mungo gets fatally stabbed by the captain. There is absolutely no way to keep him alive long enough to get further than the intertidal zone. I mean this guy can't even reach the dunes. Reading for the first time as a child I felt utterly gypped as I had been genuinely enthusiastic about the novelty of having a companion on the adventure. However, his only purpose is to set up the story and provide some under-developed motivation for the protagonist, after which he is ruthlessly dispatched before he can start demanding inconvenient new combat rules.

Both PIRATE CAPTAIN and GIANT CRAB are SKILL 10 fights by the way - first fight in the book. Remember back in Warlock when they were breaking us in with GOBLINS, SKILL 5? They saved SKILL 10 for the MINOTAUR, who was like a minor boss. Now we got our best friend dying and SKILL 10 fights straight off the bat. Sheesh.

After burying Mungo in the sand - not in the fun way -  I made my way up the beach and into the tropical vegetation. At the outset the protagonist's plan seems to be simply to walk inland until he gets his bearings which is an okay plan if you've got nothing else to work with I suppose. This first part of the adventure is much in the vein of earlier books, particularly Forest of Doom, just a wander through some more or less random encounters, this time in a vaguely Caribbean setting. An early encounter was with some HEADHUNTERS who appeared to have gotten lost on their way to an Allan Quatermain story from 1910 or something.

Let's just take this at face value okay. 

These guys are all about, and only about, hunting heads. The first time you encounter some of these dudes they have an actual argument about who is gonna be the one that gets to gets to hunt your head, no joke. The  level of intense skull contemplation going on in the ceremony above rivals a hundred Hamlets.

There's also a group of menacing PYGMIES, complete with blow-pipes and darts. You can appease them by handing over a plain old hand axe, which they... (sigh)... reverently accept as a religious artefact. It's all a bit suspect, really. They will give you some scroggin if you push your luck which is handy since like all food in Fighting Fantasy it is the regenerative equivalent of a dumpster full of stem cells.

Many of the encounters are extremely generic and forgettable - "You are walking around. Watch out -- GIANT DRAGONFLY!" - to the extent that I suspect the adventure might've only been 300 paragraphs in draft and needed some padding. But there are a few encounters that tie into the overall narrative, e.g. you can encounter a couple of escaped slaves from the mines. I also found a helpful "if you are reading this I am already dead" note left by another escapee that led me to the mine entrance and my first encounter with two LIZARD GUARDS who were keeping an eye someone's haphazardly stored crockery collection.

"Boss said ta guard them pots and such and that's what we gon do."

When you enter the mines something resembling a script starts to kick in as you sneak around freeing slaves from their LIZARD MAN overseers (at one point I even disguised myself as a LIZARD MAN by putting one of their cloaks - god knows how that fooled anyone, even from behind, it's not like I have a big Dimetrodon sail poking out my back, but it worked somehow - maybe LIZARDMEN hunt by smell?)  I managed to free 63 slaves in my sweep through the mines and we all tumbled outside and finished off the remaining guards. After that the boys were all hot to go and storm the Lizard King's fort but one Elf who never bothered to introduce himself took me aside for a few paragraphs of rapid exposition. Apparently the Lizard King had achieved his #1 standing in the society of LIZARDS by allowing a malevolent brain parasite called a GONCHONG to infest him, which somehow makes him invincible. Anyway the Elf insists that you need advice from the island's Shaman or the assault on the fort will be doomed, so you tell your team to just hang out for a couple of days while you go find the Shaman. "It would be impossible to to track him down in a group" the protagonist announces without any justification whatsoever, and the freedmen just say "okay, suit yourself" and then away you go. Incidentally, you also bum out a guy from Oyster Bay by telling him of Mungo's fate. He's like "Mungo? DAMN" and you're like "I know!"

The narrative doesn't give you any indication as to where the Shaman might be but you just wander off and after another series of random encounters, unerringly walk right up to him at his home halfway up the slopes of the active volcano that gives Fire Island its name.

I suppose a nice pair of dress pants and a tucked-in shirt was too much to hope for. 

You explain that you want advice as to how to defeat the Lizard King and his GONCHONG and the shaman "jumps in the air upon hearing the word Gonchong", which is a cute detail. I'd like to know whether he does this every subsequent time it comes up in the conversation, but the book doesn't say. Anyway, being a shaman, he demands that you undertake some "disturbing and painful" trials to prove yourself worthy of his wisdom. You have to pass three trials of your choice, from a set of six: Luck, Fear, Pain, Revulsion, Strength, and Dexterity. Basically, passing each of these requires either an item or a successful dice roll against one of your stats. The exception is "Pain", where the book tells you that you're in extreme pain and gives you the option "put up with it, y/n", which makes it the easiest of the trials unless you're extremely serious about role-playing. The Trial of Luck is basically a coin toss and in the Trial of Dexterity you just have to throw a dagger at an orange, so it's not all as wonderfully traumatic and primal as advertised either.

I was able to pass trials of Dexterity, Strength and Fear, whereupon the shaman rolled his eyes back and danced around for a while in a disgraceful display of charlatanism before looking me at me po-faced and just relaying a bunch of straightforward information. He says that you need a fire sword to kill the Lizard King/GONCHONG super-organism and, thanks to his woefully poor judgment, the Lizard King happens to have a small collection of them at his house (albeit magically disguised as rusty old knives). He also reveals one other incredible detail about the Lizard King, a moment of unalloyed genius for Ian Livingstone - I'm tempted to issue a spoiler warning but given that this entire blog is basically fat spoilinoma, I won't bother - the Lizard King is terrified of monkeys. "Lizard Men suffer an innate fear of monkeys, even if controlled by a Gonchong" the shaman states with a shrug, as if to say "don't blame me, this bull crap is coming straight from the spirits". All of it boils down to "keep an eye out for some crappy-looking old knives and a monkey", and with this advice fixed firmly in mind I headed back down the mountain to rendezvous with my troops. But unfortunately, I never made it.


Failure, and Death


I stated earlier that this book is lousy with combat, and despite my solid SKILL roll of 11, by the time I met the Shaman I had faced a steady barrage of tough opponents and was down to STAMINA of only 5. Worse yet, I had eaten all my Provisions and the handful of scroggin I got from the hardware-worshipping PYGMIES. So it was pretty bad luck for me that I ran into a LIZARD MAN riding on a fucking dinosaur.

Nuts.

Educated readers will have immediately identified the mount as a STYRACOSAURUS, which is like a Lexus-driver's version of the TRICERATOPS. He has SKILL 11, STAMINA 10 - by applying LUCK rolls to Attack Rounds I was just able to scrape through this fight with a single STAMINA point to spare. The rider, who up until that point had been leaning back in the saddle buffing his nails, then stepped from atop the corpse of his steed to attack me:

MUTANT LIZARD MAN - SKILL 9, STAMINA 9

Not overwhelmingly powerful but he only had to hit me once. He did.


Monsters, Combat, Noteworthy Encounters

There was probably an opportunity with this book to introduce some interesting tropical monsters but apart from a few carnivorous plants and those very broadly-drawn "tribal" stereotypes mentioned earlier, we mainly get the usual greenskins (GOBLINS, ORCS, OGRES, TROLLS etc), generic giant animals and of course some LIZARD MEN eventually. Even a tropical variety of GOBLIN that is e.g. wearing Bermuda shorts and a coconut bra, or something like that would have been welcome, but no dice. Nevertheless there are a few interesting beasts in the book, my favourite probably being the GONCHONG itself, delightfully creepy in both concept and appearance.

GONCHONG!

Also of note are these silly little GRANNITS, which look much like a horse-shoe crab would if it were drawn by someone who thinks crabs have people faces. I guess that isn't surprising.

Some GRANNITS in their natural habitat - a cave.
Inset: A horse-shoe crab in its natural habitat - a naked man's photography studio.

From skimming the book it looks like you can actually pick up a GRANNIT and keep it to throw at someone later on. There's also something called a RAZORJAW which, intriguingly, "has evolved to kill all other species".

I'll tell you one kind of encounter this book ain't got though...

The SKELETON Report

So there's every other generic monster like ORCS and OGRES and GIANT FUCKIN' WHATEVERS on this island, but no SKELETONS? That hardly seems proper. Given the lack of magically animated skeletons, I turn my attention instead to the other kind of skeletons - those that are found inside of SEXY DAMES.

And the illustrator was evidently a fan of One Million Years B.C. because they're both cavegirls. The first is a "blonde girl with wild feline eyes" and a pet SABRETOOTH TIGER. You can either run away from her or fight and slay her TIGER, which makes her cry and then you just sidle quietly away, feeling like a bit of a dick.

Somewhere out in the world there's a dude who was eleven years old in 1984 and now can't explain why he has a fetish for poorly-drawn sabre-tooths.

 The other cavelady leaps out from a cave (where else?) and just immediately hiffs a spear at you. With her it's a straight up case of kill-or-be-killed. Not such a big deal as she's only SKILL 5, STAMINA 5, which is pretty sexist now that I think about it.

I got a feeling this illustrator owns every book by Jean M. Auel and if you drop them they always fall open at the same pages. Just a hunch. 

After you put her to death you can enter her cave which is full of rubbish and "smells of rotten food and stale body odour". There doesn't seem to be any shampoo bottles, leg wax or even so much as a safety razor, which suggests a bit of a disconnect between the author and the illustrator.

Racquel Welch, just reeking of rotting food and stale body odour. 

Moving on, I almost felt obliged to bump the sexy count up to 3 after the Lizard King made a late play for recognition with this weirdly sexual-looking pose from the book's final boss fight:

I mean, if homie ever put on some damn clothes this would be okay. But as it stands it looks like one of them 9-ball themed porno shoots. 

Final Thoughts

I feel like Lizard King probably has the best plot out of any of the books so far. Which isn't to say that it's really a great plot, but it does at least work as a story.  You can imagine it playing out as a fantasy action movie, maybe one of the more coherent barbarian movies like e.g. Conan the Destroyer or Beastmaster. Whereas Forest of Doom, say, would be more equivalent to one of the really rubbish ones like Ator the Invincible and the projectionist plays the reels in the wrong order and also a fire alarm goes off before the end of the film and you have to evacuate the theatre.

Actually though I mentioned Beastmaster earlier, I retract that. Beastmaster is a bunch of nonsense - this book has a much better plot than Beastmaster. If you manage to not die, after visiting the Shaman you re-unite with your freedmen for a final battle with the Lizard King's forces, climaxing in a duel between you and LK and his kitty-cat atop the fort. Provided you're not silly enough to give the GONCHONG a chance to jump on your head after the fight, you and your troops triumph over the ev mine mismanagement and paragraph 400 ends: "Mungo would have been proud of you". So you can see there's something like an arc there.

I should note that although our hero has sprouted an unprecedented capacity for adult friendship and concern for others, he has no greater impulse control than any of his predecessors as I found myself turning down opportunities to e.g. stick my whole arm into a hole in the ground, or eat some unidentified fungus growing on a log (that one happened in Forest also, in much the same way: you win a battle and then you're like "oh hey check out this fuzzy stuff growing on that log next to the corpse of my slaughtered foe"). But I played fairly conservatively because for the first time since Warlock I really felt I had a good shot at winning - there aren't aren't a lot of ways to instantly die from making poor decisions, or because you missed an item earlier on - even if you fail to talk to the Shaman you can still blunder your way through to the finish. What difficulty there is comes mainly from the large number of high SKILL opponents strewn throughout the book. It is fairly linear, and I suspect that is a function of the tighter story. I'm not saying that it is impossible to have both a non-linear storyline and an okay plot, but I expect it's more of a challenge to write. We shall see in the weeks ahead if any of the later books really pull it off.

#5 - "City of Thieves" by Ian Livingstone (1983)

After the interstellar shenanigans of "Starship", book 5 of Fighting Fantasy lands us squarely back in both the fantasy land of Allansia and the ever-fashionable business of slaughtering wizards. In this case our target is grinning right there on the cover, thorny old Zanbar Bone, his tough-guy facade only slightly undermined by a Kermit ruff and kitten eyes.

Behind him is depicted the gates of Port Blacksand, the titular "City of Thieves", with the spiked head of thespian William Hartnell in the foreground as a grisly rebuke to those who would meddle in thiefly business.

"Forest of Doom" was notable as the first wilderness adventure in the series - City is the first to feature an urban environment and as we'll see it's a rather more interesting setting than Darkwood Forest. However, against expectations, Zanbar Bone doesn't actually reside in Port Blacksand, it's just a place we'll be stopping by to run a few errands on our way to the boss-battle at his lifestyle block some several kilometres upwind of the Outer Suburbs of Thieves. More on that to come.

William Hartnell in happier times - inset: doom.

As has become my habit, I present for your fleeting amusement the U.S. cover for City of Thieves:

Zanbar's monobrow is out of control.

Study it well.


Background


Much as in Forest, in City our protagonist is a solitary swordsman who wanders about taking on contract killings and relieving harmless monsters of their dignity, treasure, and lives.  As the story begins he arrives in the prosperous merchant town of Silverton which has a small problem with "Moon Dogs" dropping by every evening to urinate on the legs of distracted businessmen, steal strings of sausages from the butcher, and (perhaps most importantly) devour any unfortunate person who forgets to lock their doors and latch their windows. It's no overstatement to say that Silverton's night life has suffered, with anyone caught in the pub after sundown stuck there all night while Moon Dogs sniff around the door (reminds me somewhat of clubbing in Tokyo).

There's a quiet dignity in the eyes of tag-team wrestlers "The Moondogs", Spike and Cujo.

Nightfall finds our hero in that very predicament,  locked in Silverton's "Old Toad" pub, thinking to himself about how famous he is as a monster-killer and feeling slightly miffed that none of the locals have "come over to hear tales of adventure". Shortly after your arrival the town mayor suddenly scrambles in through a cat flap, the seat of his pants comically chewed out by a Moon Dog, and buys you a roast goose for dinner.

Take a moment to consider - when's the last time you ate roast goose for free? Exactly. Soon enough, Mayor Owen is launching into his hard luck story - ten days ago, a couple of sketchy dudes rolled up on black horses with fiery red eyes and asked the mayor whether he'd object to his daughter attending a slumber party with Zanbar Bone - "no doubt you know that he is the Night Prince", Owen adds.

Zanbar Bone - he's kind of a big deal.

It is never made clear what Zanbar intends with the mayor's daughter but it is presumably some kind of  G-rated magical rite / midnight sacrifice type deal - the dude is a skeleton after all, it won't be anything raunchy. Nevertheless, Mayor Owen isn't having a bar of it and he sent the messengers packing - thereby drawing Zanbar's creepy old curse upon the town. The Moon Dogs showed up that very evening, and every night since, eating 23 hapless townsfolk over the course of ten nights (a period which the people of Silverton have apparently spent waiting for some hobo with a sword to show up).

Owen's plan is to send you to Port Blacksand to hit up his old pal Nicodemus, a "wise old wizard" who has apparently taken up residence in the notoriously unsavoury city precisely to avoid people asking favours e.g. could you please kill the Night Prince, Nicodemus. Owen pays you with 30 Gold Pieces and a shiny new sword, which, in an echo of that crazy son-of-a-bitch from Forest of Doom, you appear to fall immediately in love with ("You have never wanted something so badly in your life before" - yes that refers to the sword, not the roast goose nor indeed Mayor Owen Carralif, whom Ian Livingstone takes unusual pains to describe as fat, bald and sweaty). Then you have a kip and set off for Port Blacksand in the morning.

Despite the mayor's one-sided exposition and all the off-putting detail we are given about  his glistening pate, I will say this is easily the most evocative and entertaining of the Backgrounds I've read so far. I recall that the protagonist's night upstairs at the tavern, "more than once woken by the sniffing, scratching and howling of the roaming Moon Dogs outside" left quite an impression on me as a child. (This may be because there would often be dogs on our lawn at night, as my parents had a habit of throwing carrion out the window - not joking).

Rolling Up My Dude


SKILL - 12
STAMINA - 18
LUCK - 7

Skill of twelve, again - I did mention I wasn't cheating right? I'm not cheating, really. Might be I'm just good at throwing dice. There aren't any variations on the rules in "City", although I noticed that healthful Provisions weren't mentioned in the instructions this time so I assumed I didn't have any (though later I had the option to swap "all my Provisions" for a silver arrow, and I was like "damn, I coulda been eating Provisions?")

The Adventure

The first of many fine, lovingly detailed illustrations in this book - note the artist's inclusion of a "background", basically a first for the series.

The adventure proper begins as you arrive at the gates of Port Blacksand and are offered this rather prissy challenge by an otherwise daunting guardsman:

Now imagine Queen Elizabeth II is saying these lines with her voice pitched up two octaves.

It's not clear how he knows you weren't invited but I guess that's his business. As this was written by Ian Living-"stone-them-to-death" you are of course given the option to immediately attack the guard - but since I more or less exhausted the possibilities of role-playing a psychopath in Forest of Doom I decided to follow my more natural inclination and bluff my way in. I have embellished the resulting dialogue but the gist of it is true to the original:

Me: (approaching the gate, sideways) "Yooooooooooooooooooooooo--"
Guard: "Who would enter Port Blacksand uninvited? State the nature of your business or go back the way you came!"
Me: "--ooooooooooooooo! My man!" (goes for high five, is left hanging, effortlessly turns it into a little point-and-shoot gesture) "Did you you say something about a invitation? Do I got the wrong town? This is Port Blacksand, yeah? AKA, the 'City of Thieves', am I wrong? Be real with me, brother. What do you think it says on my business card, I give ya one guess."
Guard: (grips pike uncertainly, looks about for his supervisor but does not see him) "Um..."
Me: "Here's a hint, it rhymes with 'fief'. Which means a tenure of land subject to feudal obligations; but, you knew that, right? Rhymes with 'fief', the word is.... thhhhhhhhhh--, thhhhhhhhhhh-- ief. Thief. The word is thief."
(pause)
Me: "I am a thief."
(pause)
Guard: "You're saying you're a thief."
Me: "That's correct."
Guard: "Have you ever stolen anything?"
Me: "Have I ever sto--? Have I ever--? What, did the Port Blacksand City Council change the name to 'The City of Wasting-My-Fucking-Time'? Come on, be real with me hombre. Have I ever stolen anything. Man, I stole stuff yesterday. My backpack is just full of uh, silver chalices, silver candlesticks, silver, ah, silver ashtrays, you name it. And all of that stuff is stolen, no doubt."
Guard: "Where'd you get 'em?"
Me: "Silverton, maaaaan! I tell you, they love silver in that place! They got silver doorknobs, silver letter-boxes, just, just all kinds of silver in that place, man! I even saw a dude with silver belt, man, holding up he silver drawers. Not even joking - I was going nuts, just stealing everything! You couldn't hold me back! I was thiefing the hell out of that place, son! Now listen, you just let me through and hip me to a good spot to unload all this silver and it might be that I got a 1 Gold Piece that I'm kind of sick of carrying 'round with me, you know...? "
Guard: "Hmph. Silver chalices, huh. Silver doorknobs. Let me see."
Me: "Oh, you want to see...? Well... about that." (sucks air through teeth) "The silver's all cursed. Yep, totally cursed. Really, really cursed. Probably need to have a wizard look at it first. No idea what might happen otherwise. Something pretty bad, probably." (frowns speculatively)
Guard: "Oh, cursed, he says, from a whole town made out of cursed silver, I suppose. Citizen - I believe you're lying."
Me: "Okay, maybe I am and maybe I ain't. But consider this - what is a liar... if not the Thief of Truth? I'm still a thief either way. Come on, bro. Be. Real. With. Me."
Guard: "Hmmm. Thief of truth, huh. I suppose you got a point there. Alright. Come on in."
Me: (executes a perfect Morris Day slide into Port Blacksand)

While not quite so long-winded, let me re-iterate that this is actually how the conversation plays out in the book - you pretend you have silver chalices to fence, the guard asks to see it and you are given the option of laying down a weak line about it being cursed, whereupon the skeptical guard decides you are  "just the same as all the rest inside this city" and admits you. Evidently Port Blacksand is such a bad place that it's actually Bizzarro-evil, with guards at the gate to let thieves and liars in, and turn honest folk away. Good is bad and bad is good, and citizens get put in the stocks for being "ye Goody-Two-Shoes"

That woman in the foreground with hands like Dolly Parton gives you an egg to throw, but she also picks your pocket. The thought of those ghastly talons sliding into one's purse is much worse than the fact of the theft.

What was his crime, politeness? Attempting legitimate commerce? How Port Blacksand manages to operate with such systematically inverted mores is a real question - how can a city that is literally of, by, and for thieves work as a going concern? Having said that, my theory of Port Blacksand as a Bizzarro town isn't wholly consistent with the facts - or perhaps the facts themselves are not consistent with each other. At one point a burglar fired a crossbow at me because he thought I was a guard, and in another sequence  guardsmen are chasing an escaped murderer. So evidently there is some kind of conventional law enforcement going on.

At any rate, as you wander the town in search of Nicodemus it rapidly becomes a real challenge to hang on to the 30 GP you got from Mayor Owen - I was almost killed within about 200m of the gate when a gang shot me full of arrows after I refused to hand over my purse. There are cutpurses, thugs and fraudsters a-plenty - e.g. a kid selling phoney magic potion from a barrel, or a goblin mugger posing as an injured child. Even if you avoid mishap, your funds tends to be frittered away in the shops, out of anxiety that one of the items on sale will prove necessary to win the game. Not to mention the shopkeepers who are also fraudsters and thugs, such as the chandler who will drug you and leave you kidney-free in an ice bath if you agree to take a look at the "special candles in the back room". Readers will no doubt be pleased but unsurprised to learn that most times when you enter a shop you're also given the option to attack the owner (hey, they're probably evil shop-keepers, right?)

Attack him! He's a MAN-ORC for crying out loud. Might as well just attack him. GO ON ATTACK HIM.  

And if theft and shopping somehow aren't sufficient to empty your purse, there's also street gambling. I lost 5 GP in a game of toss-the-cannonball, a contest of manhood to rival Top Gun's beach volleyball scene in its homo-eroticism.

That'd be me lying crumpled on the ground there then. Why wasn't I offered an option to attack this guy?

Much as in other books you are given the option of popping into all sorts of random places seemingly on a whim - I have fond memories of clambering down a well in Forest of Doom, like Ed Hillary said, "because it was there" - but in a city, the strangeness of this behaviour becomes truly stark. Here's a passage for example:

105
Most of the houses in the street are joined in a long terrace, but you see one on the left that stands alone and is set back. There appears to be a large wooden kennel outside the heavy oak front door. If you wish to approach the front door, turn to 64. If you wish to keep walking north, turn to 304.

So what's going on in the protagonist's mind here? "Man! All these joined-up houses. This street is boring.  Wait a second! That house stands alone! And it's set back! And there's a kennel, so I'll maybe get attacked by a DOG! I think this could be the house where I find Nicodemus!" - but seriously, why this house and not any of the others? I have decided to call this syndrome  "Bizarre Search Behaviour" (BSB) and I very much suspect I will be applying this term again in discussion of future books.

Regardless of which streets you choose to walk down and whether you perform indiscriminate home invasions along the way, the book eventually herds you to Nicodemus, who is living in a wooden hut, under a bridge, next to stinking, polluted river, with the words "KEEP OUT" painted on the front door (hardly auspicious). Nicodemus answers the door despite his apparent misanthropy, and although he says he lives "here under Singing Bridge in Port Blacksand to escape pleas for aid from people fallen on hard times", he still has love for his boy Owen Caraliff and agrees to help. (Quite what qualifies as "falling on hard times" in Nicodemus' opinion is unclear, given his own circumstances). Nicodemus doesn't much fancy going toe-to-boney-toe with Zanbar personally, so instead he explains to you how to kill Zanbar Bone yourself, illustrating the key points with his pipe smoke "in case you're a visual learner".

Nicodemus - "BLAZIN' THA CROP"

How to kill Zanbar Bone
by
Nicodemus, Wizard

1) Six to twelve hours before you kill Zanbar Bone, take a mortar and pestle and grind the following ingredients into a fine paste that can be stirred without clumping:

• Black pearl
• Lotus flower
• Hair of a HAG

Keep aside in a sealed container.

2) Next, shoot Zanbar Bone in the heart with a silver arrow. This will paralyse him temporarily.

3) Once Zanbar Bone is adequately paralysed, take the paste you prepared earlier and rub it into his eyes, enough to cover each eye to about the depth of the first knuckle of your index finger.

4) You will definitely notice results within a few seconds.  If Zanbar Bone does not rapidly decompose into a small pile of dust, repeat steps 1-3 above.

Pro tips

• Don't let Zanbar Bone touch you! You'll die.
• Normal weapons do not harm Zanbar Bone!
• Zanbar Bone has an entrancing stare! To ensure best results, you should not attempt to kill Zanbar Bone without first tattooing  a white unicorn in a yellow sun upon your forehead.

------------------------------------------------------

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand that last point is a definite "WAIT, WHAT" moment for me. You have to realize that by the end of Nicodemus' monologue, your half-day mission for 30 GP and a fancy sword has gone from:

FIND NICODEMUS! ONLY YOU CAN DO IT!

...to:

Find Nicodemus. Then go hunt down a bunch of weird/expensive crap from various dangerous places. Attack a skeleton wizard and his allies on his home turf. Make a perfect shot to the heart with only once chance, against a guy who can kill you with a tap on the shoulder... and then walk around for the rest of your life with a fucking unicorn tattooed on your forehead. ONLY YOU CAN DO IT.

Preferable.

I should also mention that if you get far enough in the book (I didn't), Nicodemus will send you a note saying that he fucked up and you're only meant to use two of the three aforementioned ingredients to make Zanbar's eye-drops, and he can't remember which two. Meaning you have to guess. So take everything I just said about the mission and then add a random 2-out-of-3 chance of failure at the very last moment. In game design circles I believe this is called "a Dick Move".

Needless to say, if I had the option at this point I'd be going straight back to Silverton to re-negotiate the fine points of my deal with Mayor Lumpy, or more likely just slide some adoption pamphlets under his door and slink out of town. But since I'm a "hero", I persevere with this lunacy. Nicodemus off-handedly mentions that you can get all the ingredients you need in Port Blacksand "if you search hard enough [read: bizarrely enough]" which segues us nicely into the second part of the adventure, a scavenger hunt around Port Blacksand.


I was actually able to find all three of the black pearls, lotus flower and HAG's hair, but only because I vaguely remembered where to look from playing the game as a child. Bizarre Search Behaviour reaches a new high when you sneak onto a pirate ship at the docks and steal black pearls from the neck pouch of a sleeping sea dog. And then this apogee of BSB is massively exceeded about a street and a half later:

363
In the middle of the street you see a large manhole cover. If you wish to lift the manhole cover to see where it leads to, turn to 48. If you wish to keep walking walking east, turn to 205.

I just love the impulses that cross this guy's mind. If you go down the manhole, "you realise, much to your disgust, that you are standing in a sewer" (and what did you expect?). It's also the only sewer I'm aware of where someone is paid to go around mounting flaming brands on the walls for light, but anyway that's where you gotta go if you want to kill a HAG and chop her hair off.

Monsters and Combat


While Port Blacksand is quite an interesting setting the monsters you encounter are mainly the same stock models, GOBLINS, GIANT RATS and the such like, with fairly vanilla combat situations. The fight with the HAG is worth mentioning since she will cast an illusion on you so that you "think you are being burned alive with a crowd of skeletal faces looking on gleefully" which made me want to count SKELETONS but I don't know how many a "crowd" is or whether illusionary SKELETONS even qualify.

Probably the most intriguing monsters you face are the LEAF BEASTS who defend the Lotus Flower, which incidentally is the only anti-Zanbar ingredient that you'll find somewhere that a sane person would look for it - the public gardens.

What marvellously sculpted hedges! Why, they look like they could just leap right out and attack you!

Incidentally entry into the public gardens of Port Blacksand is via a gold coin donation in an honesty box (I know?!) - not exactly in keeping with the theme of the city, but the magically animated hedges that attempt to "crush and smother" you if you pick a flower are rather more in the spirit of the place.

While I'm on the topic of encounters I'd like to point out the single weirdest thing that can happen, should your Bizarre Search Behaviour lead you into a certain house on Candle Street...

You blunder in on two identical old ladies dressed in little girl's clothes arguing with knives over a wooden duck.

Probably my favourite thing in this or any book.

Okay maybe except for APE-DOG and DOG-APE.

Failure, And No More Christmas Cards From Mayor Owen Carralif

Your path through Port Blacksand will eventually lead to an unavoidable encounter with two TROLL guards which will result in either your death, or ejection from the city. I managed to not die, so, after being turfed out of the city I mentally ticked off the things I needed to kill Zanbar Bone and realized -- UH OH -- I forgot to get a unicorn tattooed on my face.

Regrets are funny things.

I suppose at this point you could ask someone to lend you a biro and a safety pin but unlike so many other lunatic notions, using his reflection in a puddle to work up a prison tattoo of a unicorn on his own face doesn't occur to the protagonist. So apparently you just walk back to Silverton and shrug your shoulders - and that's the end.

At least I survived.

The SKELETON report

At last!

City of Thieves actually presented me with a few theoretical challenges. First was the issue of whether to count Zanbar Bone, who is never actually referred to as a SKELETON in the text and while plainly constructed of human bones, has features such as eyeballs, scalp thorns and a Kermit ruff that are not considered typical features of SKELETONS generally. In the end I decided I would face all controversy and approbium, come what may, and include Zanbar in the count. His surname is "Bone", for fuck's sake.

The other three skeletons are these jokers, doing what they do best:

"The boys are back in town, the boys are back in town!"

If you make it to the boss-fight with Zanbar Bone he actually conjures them up by pulling out three of his teeth and throwing them on the floor, which for me raises the question of whether to count his other 29 teeth as SKELETONS in potentia. On reflection I thought this would look too much like I was juking the stats so I disregarded Zanbar's remaining teeth.

Finally, in the Background section, Mayor Owen describes Zanbar's two messengers as "skeletal" though apparently they are SPIRIT STALKERS. So I looked them up in my copy of Out of the Pit, the official Fighting Fantasy bestiary - it seems that while they are skinny, SPIRIT STALKERS still have some meat on them and are maybe more like ZOMBIE supermodels in appearance. So they don't count either.

Believe it or not I was given this as a wedding gift.

And check it out - there's your boy Zanbar Bone on the right side of the cover, standing on some other bloke's back. He's the Night Prince as I'm sure you know.

Final Thoughts

Judging from the number of Fighting Fantasy books released in 1983, Ian Livingstone must've written City of Thieves within a few weeks of Forest of Doom and yet, it is a far better book. I have very little hesitation in saying it's my favourite so far - apart from the urban setting, all the constant tricks and thievery create a compelling atmosphere of mistrust. It also features some of the best interior artwork of the early books.

It's pretty clear that the structure of the book is unfair but that's more or less par for the course and it's probably still easier than Starship. I suppose my main gripe is once again the random searching - this would actually be pretty easy to fix. Nicodemus could drop a few hints about where to look for the ingredients which would make it seem less insane to clamber into a sewer for no apparent reason - wouldn't have to give too much away, something about HAGS avoiding the daylight or whatever. Could even throw a roundabout red herring by suggesting that the player search taverns for the black pearls, "where sailors have been known to lose them at games of chance" - despite being a misdirection this would still make your solo raid on the pirate ship more understandable. JUST A THOUGHT IF YOU EVER DECIDE TO REWRITE A BOOK FROM THIRTY YEARS AGO TO INCORPORATE SUGGESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET, IAN.

Anyway thanks for reading (if you've made it this far) - I'll see if I can get through the next one a bit faster eh...