Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
The first few Fighting Fantasy books -- like the first Dungeons & Dragons modules -- were pretty basic. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Citadel of Chaos featured a lone adventurer penetrating an enemy location with the goal of killing a big bad in the final few rooms. Forest of Doom was a proto-point crawl, but it was an incredibly simple one, with most of its replay value in figuring out which path was required to find all of the MacGuffins needed to win (the quest giver would literally send you back to the beginning of the forest if you failed to do so). Starship Traveller was a similar pointcrawl, with a pretty terrible "find the stuff you need with no real clues to do so, or you fail the adventure" set-up that was also part of Warlock of Firetop Mountain, although with a lot less charm and fun along the way.
But starting with the fourth book, the authors started getting much more ambitious. City of Thieves was a wonderful urban pointcrawl, full of evocative encounters, urban goblins and orcs, morally ambiguous NPCs and more. (Notably, the really good early Fighting Fantasy books tended to be written by Ian Livingstone, not by the UK edition of Steve Jackson.)
The ninth book (House of Hell was the 10th book originally published, for the record), Caverns of the Snow Witch was one of the series' most ambitious early adventures, with surprise changes in scope and a big twist about the central villain that I certainly didn't see coming back in 1984. Since this book predates Frozen by 29 years, the snow witch's aesthetic is very fabulously 1980s, with lots of white fur coats and -- checks notes -- slinky red dresses.
The novel was also explicitly set in the the Allansia setting that had been getting assembled piecemeal in previous books, as you'll see.
I haven't played through this adventure all the way through since 1984, although I did pick up two or maybe three digital versions of the book (iOS standalone, Steam standalone and iOS as part of a Fighting Fantasy library app, which is what I'll be using for this run-through, rather than a 42 year old paperback).
The book is currently in print via Scholastic (and available in the US via Amazon and probably other book sellers). It seems like a good bet to be in either the first or second wave of books published in the US by Steve Jackson Games in the next few years.
In addition to all the dangers a basic Fighting Fantasy warrior character can face, when they lose all of their Stamina in combat or from misadventure, I recall that there's at least one way to suffer a premature failure early in the adventure if I make the wrong choice. I'd like to at least get to the middle third of this adventure before dying horribly, and ideally get to the final third, when its full scope is clear, so I might rewind a poor choice or two if they grind things to a halt too early. But my goal is to try and get as far as I can without cheating.
The typical Fighting Fantasy rules are in effect here. The game uses 2d6 rolls, along with Skill, Stamina and Luck stats and mostly a universal roll-under resolution system. I'll update my stats whenever they change, so people can follow along.
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