It's night. Next to a crackling fire, a human and an orc are talking chatting idly, holding on to their mugs of ale. two kobolds nuzzle each other, cackling. A read eye glints in the darkness as they look in you direction, teeth grin ... will you join them at the fire?
You can stumble across some such scene in the second Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson. A small, atmospheric moment that smells of warm, cozy danger and that encapsulates so much of what is good about these books. Yes, orcs and kobolds are usually simplistically evil in these books. But also yes, the moment really makes you want to join them, feel the fire's heat on your face, listen to their drawling talk, to their rising laughter, and laugh along. And however evil these kobolds may be, you feel that not only to they desire warmth and companionship, they deserve it, the same as everyone deserves it.
It may be an artifact of the gamebook format that monsters felt so much like people in these early Fighting Fantasy books. The series aimed to be hard to win, to lead you astray, so it was essential that you couldn't just murder-hobo your way through them. You could do a lot of murder-hoboing and were certainly expected to do so, but there were always a couple of both nasty and happy surprises. Some things were just too powerful. Others were actually helpful when you talked to them. It's certainly a testimony to the writing skills of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, who, despite the limitations of the form, managed to create these short, but meaningful character vignettes that kept you guessing. You wanted to know these characters, however unsavory they presented themselves.
Another reviewer has written about the dream-like atmosphere of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. It is a function of the quirkiness of the encounters and of the early dungeon architecture that doesn't make any sense and isn't expected to. Why are their three cute-ugly goblin children in the room between the watcher gargoyle and the evil sorceress? Where are their parents? As you pass through these rooms, how could it feel like anything but a bizarre dream?
It is annoying. Madenning. You are constantly required to make correct decisions in an environment that not only defies logic, but often actively subverts it. But what a delight it is to map a recurring dream, while it constantly changes, to solve something that is not rationally solvable! Or solvable only by the most mechanical rationality conveivable - writing down all the numbers of all the sections, protocolling each and every decision. Write down the magical numbers, follow them, and they will guide you through this bizarre maze like a sleepwalker, not missing a step.
There are things about these books that are just terrible. Rolling the combats? There must be some better way to make resource management a part of these books. Has anyone ever started again from the beginning, re-reading each and every sections, making all the rolls again, because they lost a fight? Probably yes, and I admire them, but no one who wants to enjoy a Fighting Fantasy should be expected to show such single-minded determination. and happily, no one is: They are difficult and strange and unpredictable enough without your hand ever touching the dice.
(Recently, my 8-year old son asked me to GM for him again ... it had been a while, and frankly, I'm not a good GM for kids; so I remembered my old FF books, and got Forest of Doom out. Me and my two kids solved that one together, and I went on hunting down used copies of the German translations of the other books [I need them in German for my kids]. Now we're in Citadel of Chaos, and our delight in it prompted me to write this.)
