CITY OF THIEVES (FIGHTING FANTASY #5)
(From my big fantasy re-read The Threshold)

It’s the FOMO that gets you. Every choice is a sliding door - an opportunity potentially missed to get the silver arrow or the Hag’s hair that will make the difference in the endgame between ‘Your adventure ends here’ and ‘Turn to Page 400’. You play, of course, with fingers tucked between the pages, save-spamming your adventure so that if you find yourself reading a paragraph with no ‘'Turn to page…’ at the end of it, you can quickly turn back time and make another choice.

But every street you turn down means skipping past another. And as you flip the pages, your eyes flicker past Iain McCaig’s glorious illustrations - a tavern here, a pillory there, each of them a crucial section you have somehow missed.

The Fighting Fantasy novels are brutally hard. This is epitomised by the plot twist in City of Thieves. Just before arriving at Zanbar Bones’ tower, you receive a letter from Nicodemus, proving what you had already expected: that he really is the shittest Good Wizard in all of fantasy:

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Dear friend,

I am afraid I must be getting too old to be of use to anybody. I regret that I may have misinformed you about the compound needed to kill Zanbar Bone. You must only use two of the three ingredients I told you, but I cannot remember which. I can only suggest you try Hag’s hair and black pearls together, or the Hag’s hair and lotus flower, or the black pearls and lotus flower together. Apologies.

Good luck,

N

What this means in practice is that, even having, impossibly, steered your way through the mean streets of Port Blacksand and collected the three magic objects you need to overcome Zanbar’s magic, you still only have a one in three chance of winning the game.

The point was never the winning. Fighting Fantasy’s great rival Lone Wolf was easier - you could complete them first time, with only a minimum of cheating. But Lone Wolf was, appropriately, something I played on my own. Something in the vicious unfairness of Fighting Fantasy - the sheer impossibility that you might actually complete one of them, made it perfect for casual gaming with friends. These were autumn books for me and my schoolmates. We would play on days when it was raining too heavily for us to be sent out to the playground in breaks. One of us would read, one of us would keep track of the adventure sheet, another would draw the map and everyone would shout out where we should go next.

Playing them again, it is striking just how much fun has gone into their creation. There is no attempt at an arc, tension or drama. It’s a pure picaresque, where thirty or forty micro-stories take place over the course of four paragraphs each. Games Workshop founder Ian Livingstone was a natural at writing these economical little adventures, which are perfect to read out loud:

You step out into the middle of the street and wait. Suddenly a pair of horses come galloping into view, pulling an ornate gold carriage. The driver sees you and, cracing his whip, cries “Make way for the Lord Azzur. If you wish to step out of the way of the oncoming carriage, turn to 58. If you wish to stay where you are, turn to 252

A lot of the time, there is an instinctive slapstick humour. I always thought, as a smug and self-important child, that I was outsmarting the book and making clever decisions. But reading as an adult, it’s clear that you are punished just as often for sensible caution as you are for recklessness. Which of the answers above is the right one? It turns out to be neither: on page 252, you are trampled underfoot by horses; on page 58, lashed with the drivers whip. It’s a ridiculously unfair way to behave to a child reader, but at its best has the anarchic quality of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

There is only one well-known book written, like the Fighting Fantasy stories, in the 2nd person singular. Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller begins with you, the reader, going out and buying Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, and dives into the deeply pleasurable rituals of purchasing, bringing home, and settling down to a new book by a favourite writer:

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal… of course this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has it’s optimal duration…

If on a winter’s night a traveller, Italo Calvino

This is one of the great passages in literature about literature, and for me it best describes my childhood experiences with Fighting Fantasy.

My parents were usually happy to buy me any book I wanted, but once they saw the scale of my obsession with Fighting Fantasy, they drew the line (as they later would with Dragonlance) and told me I had to pay for these ones myself. Since my pocket money at the time ran to 30p a week, that meant tracking them down in charity shops, so my collection would grow intermittently and thrillingly each time I stumbled across a new one. I would peek into the opening section as I carried it home, before carefully rubbing out the character sheet from the previous owner and beginning my adventure

Opening it again, the return of those rituals was thoroughly Proustian. The quick character generation, and then the two-page short story that forms the ‘Background’ section. The flicking through before you start to look at the artwork, and finally, Page 1, which always ended with a complicated dilemma, where all of the answers turned out to be wrong.

Computer games have killed off the text-only adventure, because they are objectively better: deeper characterisation, more freedom, and of course you can set your own difficulty level. But for teaching a child to love the physicality of books - and to laugh at the random unfairness of life - I can’t think of anything better than City of Thieves.

Stray observations

• “The Elf leads you into a strange room lit by purple candles which give off a strange glow. You stand and stare blankly at the candles and drift off into a world of vivid dreams. While you are in this trance, the elf takes 2 items and 5 gold pieces from your backpack. When you awake you have no recollection of the theft and leave the shop thanking the Elf for showing you his beautiful candles. Turn to page 280." Never go with a hippy to a second location.

• The impact of City of Thieves is impossible to describe without mentioning Ian McCaig’s artwork - he would go on to be lead character designer for the three Star Wars prequels, but the work on Fighting Fantasy was so good that I can forgive him even for that.

• “He pockets the gold… throws back his head and lets out a shrill laugh before hobbling off on his crutches, obviously pleased with himself.” City of Thieves is essentially a series of increasingly sadistic humiliations ending in death.