This is Queen of Shades by Paul Struth and illustrated by myself:In their place stands a tall, slender woman, glowing in the darkness like a candle flame. The goddess of justice looks at you sadly.
It should have been an adventure like any other; an ancient tomb, a forgotten treasure and a band of brave souls willing to risk their lives in pursuit of fame and fortune. Now, a day after your successful return to Kharé, the notorious cityport of traps, two of your fellow adventurers lie dead – will YOU be the next victim of the curse?
Graham plans to host other entries on the official AFF website given the quality of the competition entries (as long as the entrants agree to this). So even though they won't appear in the magazine, they will hopefully be available to play in addition to the winner's tale. Congratulations to all who entered, may your STAMINA never fail!It’s been a week since you have left the cesspit of Port Blacksand and pickings are slim. After a month of traipsing across the Pagan Plains to guard a caravan of merchants on their journey to the deadly port, you want some adventure. However, you a bit too much adventure in Blacksand after one of you spilt a flagon of ale all over one of the city’s master assassins. Two minutes later, you were sprinting through the streets with a dozen highly trained killers close behind you. You got to the south gate, only to be stopped by the troll guards demanding a fishday tax. Too desperate to argue, you hand over most your money to avoid the sharp blades of the Assassins’ Guild. You have just arrived to the small fishing village of Meraki, eager for a hot meal and a comfortable bed. However, you can see that something is wrong. The villagers look sad and downtrodden. No one looks you in the eye as you walk through the streets to the market square. You get to an inn and ask the keeper for some food and drink. He serves it without a word. While you are eating your dinner, an old but well kempt and muscular man approaches you. ‘Good evening. My name is Grask. I am the headman of this village and we need your help. I will offer you a free bed for the next few nights and some gold if you can solve our woes. I fear that there is a curse upon our little village and now an innocent woman’s life hangs in the balance...
Were you a great reader of fantasy fiction?Not really. The first book to make a big impression on me was The Lord of the Rings; I loved the dark bits, especially the scenes with the orcs in Moria and the tower of Minas Morgul. If I hadn’t read those, I probably wouldn’t have got interested in Fighting Fantasy. Apart from Tolkien, the only author to really catch my imagination as a child was Ursula Le Guin; A Wizard of Earthsea is still my favourite fantasy book of all time.
How did you end up writing for Warlock magazine in 1985?I had been writing for White Dwarf since 1982, and as my college years drew to a close I decided to chance it and see if I could make a living out of writing for games. I had seen the rise of Fighting Fantasy and its various imitators, and gamebooks in general were wildly popular at the time - almost a Harry Potter level of popularity. I had co-written an analysis of the gamebook phenomenon for TSR UK’s Imagine magazine along with their regular book reviewer Colin Greenland, and did a semi-regular gamebook spot on BBC Radio Newcastle’s book programme; my first writing contract was to create two six-part gamebook series for Oxford University Press. Titled Quest Books (Kern the Strong and Oss the Quick), they were aimed at teenagers with reading difficulties, using the gamebook format and adventure content to encourage reading.
So when Warlock magazine started, it was natural that I’d pitch them some ideas. There were other gamebook magazines around at the time (I remember one called Proteus, and a gamebook-style comic put out under the 2000AD banner), but Warlock is the one that responded to my pitches.
I think it's a great idea! My main concern is size and time constraints. A 200 ref adventure does take a fair amount of time to design, playtest, and write. Also, would the illustrations all be new, or just drawn from previously published FF? [from here]
As the others have said, this might be a bit ambitious, even if it is a worthy aim. I've started loads of FF-style gamebooks, but never finished any of them (yet), even though I think there are some good ideas in there (one of my problems is that they are all so vast in scale they'd need about 800 refs each to do them justice, and that's a hell of a lot of work!). [from here]I agreed that it was ambitious, but that it could be done. For that reason, I wrote and illustrated the mini adventure that featured in the first issue (Resurrection of the Dead) to demonstrate that it could be done (and not for any ego-boosting reasons!). Whatever the merits of my own adventure, the gamble paid off and we have had an adventure in each issue since.
With the new version of Advanced Fighting Fantasy almost upon us, we’ve teamed up with Arion Games and Cubicle 7 Entertainment to give you a chance to win copies of the forthcoming AFF books: Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Out of the Pit and Titan.
To be in to win them, YOUR mission is to pen an original, entertaining, and imaginative short multi-player adventure using the original AFF rules as outlined in Dungeoneer, Blacksand! and Allansia.
Author of the new AFF series Graham Bottley will be judging the entries and picking the winner, who will not only be given copies of the new books, but have their adventure published in a future issue of this magazine for all to play and enjoy.
Criteria for entry:
- Your adventure must feature no more than two locations
- Your adventure must feature no more than five major NPCs (Non-Player Characters)
- Your adventure must be set somewhere on the world of Titan
- Any maps needed for the adventure are to be supplied by yourself
- Please keep the length of the adventure to about 10, 000 words
Deadline for entries: June 10th, 2011
Please email your entries along with your postal contact details (using the subject line “AFF Competition Entry”) to:
fightingfantazine@gmail.com
Stealer of Souls
Go charging into the cottage to rescue the prisoner within, and you get a 16-ton weight in the face (note: actual weight may be less Pythonesque). Show caution when approaching the next prisoner you encounter, and this gives the concealed Dark Priest time to hit you with a very nasty spell. Sometimes, the only thing you learn from making mistakes is how to make different ones.Moral: What works best in one place might not be so suitable for another.
3At the river the hero negotiates the cost of passage to the other bank.• Is the Ferryman seen here a nod to the Greek mythological character Charon, whose job it was to ferry the souls of the dead from the lands of the living to the world of the dead? One could attempt to build a case for the two parts of the book perhaps mirroring this division between the lands of the living (before the river) and the dead (after the river). This is because despite meeting none before the river crossing, the player encounters four different forms of the undead after crossing the river in the form of Zombies (see 122), a Vampire (see 17), a Wight (see 41), and a Ghoul (see 64)! Meanwhile, traditionally a coin would be placed in or on the mouth of the body of dead person to allow them to pay Charon for the crossing of the River Styx (see “The Fact of Fiction” in issue #4). That would make the Ferryman’s comment about inflation raising the price to 3 Gold Pieces even more amusing, rather than perhaps simply being perhaps a riff on the inflation the UK had suffered through in the late 1970s where prices rose by 25% per annum.• The river was also the point at which Livingstone handed the story over to Jackson, who wrote everything north of the river as well as doing a polish of the whole book after it was pointed out by Puffin editor Philippa Dickinson that there was a noticeable change in writing style at that point.
"Fighting Fantasy" Fan Magazine Proposal
STATS
* Presented as a downloadable .pdf file (rapidshare?)
* A4 size page layout
* 56 pages?
* Biannual? / Quarterly?
* Editorial team: Overall / News / Pit / Archive / Interview / Art / Mini-FF?
CONTENTS
* Colour Cover Art (Front & Back)
* B&W interior art
* "Omens and Auguries" - FF & other role-playing gamebook news (+ Titannica news?)
* "Out of the Pit" - 4 monsters from the world of FF (mix of monsters from post-OOTP FF gamebooks/mini-ffs & fan ones?)
* "The Arcane Archive" - reviews of FF & other role-playing gamebooks (colour cover scans)
* Mini-Adventure (200 refs with 6 minor b&w illustrations and 15 full page b&w illustrations)
* Interview with FF writer/artist (with colour photo of person interviewed)
* Articles about Titan
* Other regular features? (letters page, multi-player mini-ffs, Titan-based fiction?)
SUGGESTIONS
* Myself as overall editor + possibly interviewer. Also able to contribute some b&w art
* Per Jorner perhaps as Archive reviewer?
* Team from Titannica taking turns with articles about Titan
Issues per year.
===========
Most think 1~2 sounds right, which is a number I'm happy with and think can be managed (I have another fanzine that comes out about that often so I have some idea of the workload involved, especially since it is 56 pages per issue). If the responsibility for the bulk of the content is spread about then it shouldn't be too difficult to put an issue together. Only 1~2 a year also means that producing a mini-ff is more likely, but also we can cut/delay a mini-ff and simply do an issue without if need be.
Art
===
Here I was thinking of original art. While my mini-ff compilations are a fun exercise, for the fanzine it would be prudent to keep the contents (bar that it is based on the FF system and world) original. I'm happy to supply some of the art and thought that if it (like the text) was split between different people it would make producing it easier.
Contents
======
(with rough page allocations)
*Cover (1 page)
*Guff (1)
*Contents/Editorial (1)
*"Omens and Auguries" (2)
*"Out of the Pit" (2~3)
*"The Arcane Archive" (2~4)
*Interview (8)
*Fiction (2~3)
*Article (3~4)
*Mini-FF (20)
*Back Cover (1)
This gives roughly 53 pages. (Mini-ff estimate based on average space taken in "Warlock").
Division of Labour
=============
Art: 4 artists per issue (1 for colour cover art, 1 for general interior b&w art, 1 for mini-ff* and 1 for OOTP)
Text: 7 writers to cover OOTP, O&A, TAA, Interview, Article, Mini-FF*, Fiction
*This would presumably have the biggest workload of an issue.
Flying Pigs
========
All of this is currently just pie in the sky thinking, an idea I thought might be nice to try. Till people actually sit down and work out what they think they abel to do/can commit to time/effort-wise it can't really progress further. As noted, I'm happy to assemble each issue and do the overall editing, but wouldn't be able to produce the entire contents myself. I'm also willing to tackle the interviews, some art and the occasional mini-ff.
This is Escape from the Sorcerer by Sunil Prasannan (now a resident of the USA) and illustrated by Michael Wolmarans (of South Africa):You open the door into a very high-ceilinged room. You realise the reason for the spacious accommodations when a huge, twenty-foot long Cobra rears its head, hissing menacingly and trying to bite you!
The kingdom of Alkemis has come under repeated attack from neighbouring Agra. Unable to hold back the hordes of Lizard Men and chaotic Asuras led by the evil sorcerer Grudar Kreshnel, YOU and a few dozen fellow survivors were captured. One by one your fellow countrymen have been brutally executed, until only YOU remain. Will YOU be able to escape from the Sorcerer?
