Fighting Fantasy - Vault of the Vampire and Revenge of the Vampire

Well, Twilight’s finally behind me, and even though I’ve made no mystery about my disinterest in vampires in general, I should probably do something to cleanse my palette, and maybe do something to kinda sorta acknowledge Halloween around here. Maybe with a vampire who has numerical proof of his badassery.

In many respects, Vault of the Vampire’s a storm of cliches. You’re a brave adventurer on a quest up to the remote, forbidding castle of the local tyrannical overlord, Reiner Heydrich. Who happens to be one of that most powerful example of the undead, and who for all the tiny development he gets might as well be Dracula. And you’d better be quick about it, before he decides to snack on the latest nubile example of the female species he’s hauled up there. It doesn’t really help that it was written by Keith Martin, who had a few interesting ideas but was never any great shakes as an author of interactive fiction.

That aside, it’s a surprisingly effective little adventure. It’d be suicide to just go waltzing into Reiner’s crypt without first loading yourself to the gills with all the magic weapons and clues you can find. Obviously. Because here’s a vampire who actually will squish your head with ease if you show up insufficiently prepared.

For one thing, it introduces a good psychological element to the search for the best weapons. That being a Faith score, which is a measure of your faith in your cause that allows you to resist fear, mind control, and in some cases even make the forces of evil think twice about starting a fight with you. It’s nice that sometimes you need fo find out if it’s something your character can stand up to, instead of just deciding that you can. Granted none of the tests are against thing as senses-shattering as you’d see in, say, the aptly-named Beneath Nightmare Castle, but it’s kind of interesting to see even somebody daring enough to face a vampire in his lair face something that can strike fear in them.

For that matter, the denizens of the castle are a pretty memorable bunch for these kinds of books, and I don’t just mean the ones who try to kill you on sight. Not that Reiner’s house doesn’t have some interesting defenders, the Thassalosses and living tigerskin rug in particular, but there are friends to be found there. Not everybody who can help you is necessarily motivated out of the goodness of their hearts, though, and with some of them you definitely have to ask yourself if what you’re hoping to get out of it is worth what they might ask. Like say Reiner’s obviously evil but upwardly mobile sister, and his hardworking but underappreciated in-house scholar.

And while I was hardly ever impressed by Keith Martin’s abilities as a writer, the interior illustrations were done by Martin McKenna, easily one of the finest artists ever to put ink to paper in the name of Fighting Fantasy. His atmospheric artwork does a lot to elevate this book, or really any book his work shows up in.

Without contributing factors like these, Vault of the Vampire could’ve easily become just another semi-mindless dungeon crawl with a simplistic goal. However, its relative simplicity is also one of the book’s strengths in light of some of the other books in the series. That is, ones with interesting settings but tons of little secrets that must be discovered. Failing to do so resulting in the player plodding along for a while, thinking they’re making progress, only to encounter an unavoidable death somewhere down the line. See, for example, Creature of Havoc, or to a lesser extent Martin’s own Night Dragon, which is far more scavenger hunt-y than this book. That simple lack of complexity can be a nice break knowing it exists elsewhere in the same series. Here your objectives are pretty clear (get all of Siegfried’s magic weapons, use them to save the girl), as opposed to your average book in the series from Games Workshop!Steve Jackson (here’s your goal. If you don’t find the one, completely arbitrary true path to victory, you’re dead. Have fun!).

Just so nobody gets the wrong idea, Steve wrote some of the best books to carry the Fighting Fantasy label.

But…let nobody dispute they had lots of unforgiving trial-and-error gameplay.

Unfortunately, also let no one dispute that the second outing with the major characters from Vault of the Vampire was not nearly as successful.

Which is a shame, because the author was obviously trying to be a lot more epic this time around. You see, Reiner wasn’t really dead. Even in the sense that he was a vampire. Apparently anticipating that some brave hero might stake him, he had his vital essences preserved so he could be brought back to life should the need arise. You’re tasked with bopping around the countryside, trying to find the secrets that enabled his resurrection, and the means to get around them and kill him again. And not waste too much time doing it.

Yeah. Apparently inspired by his own Night Dragon (where the longer you take to assemble all the magic weapons, the stronger your already pants-darkeningly powerful final enemy becomes), you have a stat called Blood. Whenever you find anything useful in re-killing the vampire, it goes up. Any time you spend any amount of time not turning up results, you lose them. The number affects how strong Reiner is during your final battle.

Certainly the author tries to be scarier this time around, and McKenna was back providing the illustrations again. The monsters are more ghoulish than before, the atmosphere’s a little more oppressive, and the author tries to evoke a little nostalgia for the previous book, like when you see a tigerskin rug and he makes a point that it doesn’t come to life and attack you.

But it’s just not that good, and seeing the same characters in the exact same contexts in a different, larger-scale setting doesn’t work. Because despite being larger and more complicated, the familiar characters had been scaled back. Siegfried is only a ghost who shows up to tell you where to get the best weapon, Katarina jumps out and attacks you after your fight with Reiner because…that’s what she did in the first book. Even though there's been nary a mention of her in this book until after you've beaten Reiner and she springs out for a sudden last battle. And that’s not even addressing the poor design, with several choices leading to the wrong paragraph, and a particularly glaring oversight where you need gold to lodge at an inn where you can find some very important items, but the only way you’d get there is by losing all your gold.

Still more coherent than the plot to Twilight…

House of Hell

In the gaming world there are two famous Steve Jacksons, and believe it or not both contributed books to the Fighting Fantasy series. The one who wrote House of Hell and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’s the one who founded Games Workshop, and was, in my opinion, one of the more creative writers for the series. In his first, Citadel of Chaos, he was already playing with the rules system by giving your character the ability to cast magic spells. He continued to do new things in his books, like setting them outside the swords-and-sorcery milieu that dominated the series. Like in modern-day Earth.

For readers offended by the word "hell," but not satanic cults and human sacrifice.

Driving on deserted backroads in heavy rainstorms in the middle of the night always ends in tears. As you’re speeding along, desperate to make your appointment the next day, you swerve to avoid someone in the road and total your car. The only possible source of help is a rundown old mansion, and while the master of the house warmly welcomes you at first, it doesn’t take a genius to know something evil’s going on.

Was the artist inspired by Guyver or something?

Being set in a spooky old house filled with supernatural dangers, House of Hell was the first book in the series to add a statistic representing your ability to stand up to fear. It’s pretty crude, this being the first time, though. You have a score from 7-12 and gradually add points as scary things happen. Once you reach or exceed the number, you’ve been scared to death. There’s really no way to see them coming, and since this is a Steve Jackson book (more on that in a minute), you’ll have to explore a lot which you’ll be hesitant to do if you didn’t roll high.

Have 3 Fear for looking out the window.

For that matter, Fighting Fantasy would usually penalize your combat skill score if you didn’t have a weapon. And since this happens on twentieth century Earth, you have to find one somewhere in the house before you’ll actually be able to use the score you rolled before you started reading.

Have 3 Fear for being silly enough to think you could walk out the front door.

However, besides taking the books in previously unattempted directions, a hallmark of Steve Jackson’s books was having one, and only one, correct path through each adventure with little wiggle room. Which was never easy to find. House of Hell is the first book to show this tendency, and boy does it show it. Even if you roll extremely well, unless you know when and were to find all the clues and special items you need, you’ll eventually die without stopping the evil in the house. In most of the books you at least have a chance if you survive far enough even if you didn’t find the one optimal path.

The good news is there aren’t many special items you’ll need, and there are plenty of interesting things to see while you’re learning where and where not to go. Maybe not the wide variety you’d see in an Ian Livingstone dungeon crawl, but believe me when I say that’s a good thing. There’s plenty of fantastic stuff in this book, but nothing you wouldn’t reasonably expect to be associated with an evil cult. The atmosphere is strong and the writing not bad throughout. Not so much as in Howl of the Werewolf, but there’s no doubt it’s a cut above the other early Fighting Fantasy books.

While triumphing will require a lot of attempts and note-taking, more so than most in the series, I highly recommend this book. Jackson did an overall commendable job of taking Fighting Fantasy somewhere it hadn’t been before. Just don’t read it with the lights off.

Howl of the Werewolf

Of all the writers who could’ve come back to write new Fighting Fantasy books, I’m glad in no small way that the one who did was John Green. His work was consistently good more often than any other contributor to the series, and here he’s written what’s easily one of the greatest books in Fighting Fantasy history.

Finding yourself caught out in some spooky woods with no sign of civilization is bad enough, but it gets even worse when you find yourself surrounded by abnormally large wolves. After one bites you it turns out they weren’t wolves at all but lycanthropes, and unless you can find a cure before the next full moon in a few days you can look forward to becoming one yourself.

Tweaking the basic system of these books, whether it involved adding a magic system or a fear statistic, wasn’t always done well. Howl of the Werewolf did it very well. The maximums for combat skill and health scores while rolling up your character are lower than in most Fighting Fantasy books, but after pursuing a cure for a while the reason why becomes clear. When your transformation spikes, you’ll get stronger and gain lupine powers, like seeing in the dark and growing claws so you aren’t penalized for fighting without a weapon. It’s even possible to get your hands on a gun.

As you might expect it isn’t all good news, though. You have a score keeping track of how far along your change into a werewolf has progressed, and while it’s possible to push it back a little from time to time, the higher it is the harder it’ll be for you to ignore the beast within. And if you think people will care that you’re trying not to become a werewolf, be prepared to miss out on a lot of help.

Besides how well-implemented the mechanics are, the book’s an excellent piece of work from an atmospheric standpoint as well. Most of the book takes place in dark, oppressive forests, ruins or Bavarian-style villages full of distrustful locals, and the writing provides an excellent feeling of gothic horror.

Even a visit to the “carnivale” manages to keep you on edge. The excellent illustrations by Martin McKenna do plenty to enhance the atmosphere, and let it be a testament to how much I enjoy this book that I don’t want to damage my copy to scan pictures. As well, with the book being 115 sections longer than the books in the original series, there’s a ton of exploring to do.

The only problem I had with the book was the choice of monsters. There’s a ghost or two, some disturbing mutants, but mostly there’s a heaping helping of enemy lycanthropes. It’s appropriate, but after fighting the fourth one you’ll start to wonder if there weren’t any other appropriately creepy monsters Green could have mixed in.

It’s not that big a problem, though, and if you like solo role-playing with a good dash of horror, you’ll like this book. Do yourself a favor and pick it up now.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

In 1982 a book was released that took the experience of a fantasy role-playing game but removed the necessity of a large group of players and intimate knowledge of several thick (not to mention expensive) sourcebooks. The reader would decide where to go and how to react to each situation, and roll dice to deal with some dangers while keeping track of special items that would allow them to deal with others.

It was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first in the venerated Fighting Fantasy series. In my opinion a lot of the best interactive books of all time carry the Fighting Fantasy label, and the fact that the series is being republished now complete with never-before-seen books says I’m not the only one.

This is where it all began, with you playing a daring adventurer on a quest to penetrate the treacherous caverns of Firetop Mountain, defeat the evil warlock who reigns supreme over its many dangers and lay claim to his treasure trove. It wasn’t a very sophisticated premise, and neither was the adventure built on it. You wander around a series of tunnels and rooms, some which seem a bit out of place in a den of evil. Like the room where skeletons build boats.

It’s pretty plain the bugs were still being worked out of the system when this was written. The book warns about overusing your Luck stat (as the more times you’re called upon to test it, the less reliable it is), but lets you refill this stat far more often than succeeding books. I’d almost say it gives out Luck points like candy. Also, during one fight with a pair of monsters, their being totally blasted gives you a bonus to your attack rolls, while it seems like something should have been a figured-in penalty to theirs. Even if the end result is basically the same.

Also, the book contains something I hate more than just about anything in books like these: a maze. This one is particularly insidious, and took me a long, long time to map properly. I found it deliciously appropriate in a later book, Phantoms of Fear, when you ran into a former adventurer who was driven insane trying to get through this very maze.

Yet, the book manages to succeed in spite of these drawbacks. Aside from the maze, it isn’t overly difficult. At least until you finally get to the end and have to face a guardian dragon before squaring off against the Warlock himself, but that’s what gamers expect. Besides, there are ways to greatly reduce the threat both of those baddies pose. The thing with needing numbered keys found through the dungeon to open the treasure chest might seem kind of cheap, but it makes sense in a way. Imagine being the Warlock, and having the last laugh when the guy can’t get to your treasure after all he went through.

The artwork by Russ Nicholson is quite good. I wouldn’t call it his best work, but it’s up there. As for the writing, the imagery’s pretty good, and the story elements are just strong enough to keep you interested while not making you think too hard about what goes on. In these days of epic quests, it can be kind of nice to go on a nice, simple fantasy adventure. One free of silliness with snakes and bridles.