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Fighting Fantasy: Role-Playing Game
Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-playing Game
Fighting Fantasy - the bestselling phenomenon of our time! The world of Fighting Fantasy, peopled by Orcs, dragons, zombies and vampires, has captured the imagination of millions of readers world-wide. Thrilling adventures of sword and sorcery come to life in the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, where the reader is the hero, dicing with death and demons in search of villains, treasure or freedom. Now YOU can create your own Fighting Fantasy adventures and send your friends off on dangerous missions! In this clearly written handbook, there are hints on devising combats, monsters to use, tricks and tactics, as well as two mini-adventures complete with Games-Master's notes for you to start with. Fighting Fantasy is the ideal introduction to the fast-growing world of role-playing games and literally countless adventures await you!
160 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 1984
2 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
About the author
Steve Jackson
68 books156 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Steve Jackson (born 20 May 1951) is a British game designer, writer, and game reviewer, who is often confused with the American game designer of the same name.
Along with Ian Livingstone, he is the creator of the Fighting Fantasy books. The US Jackson also wrote three books in the Fighting Fantasy series, which adds to the confusion, especially as these books were simply credited to "Steve Jackson" without any acknowledgement that it was a different person.
See also:
Steve Jackson, US game designer
Steve Jackson, author of works on crime
Steve Jackson, Scottish thriller writer
Steve Jackson (born 20 May 1951) is a British game designer, writer, and game reviewer, who is often confused with the American game designer of the same name.
Along with Ian Livingstone, he is the creator of the Fighting Fantasy books. The US Jackson also wrote three books in the Fighting Fantasy series, which adds to the confusion, especially as these books were simply credited to "Steve Jackson" without any acknowledgement that it was a different person.
See also:
Steve Jackson, US game designer
Steve Jackson, author of works on crime
Steve Jackson, Scottish thriller writer
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 4, 2009
It's kinda like an introduction to the Fighting Fantasy gamebook system. It lays out the rules and provide pointers, tips, and examples for readers to craft their own adventure. The system isn't difficult to understand and the sample adventure might be useful for novices of the role-playing genre.
November 25, 2020
The first ever tabletop roleplaying game (as we call them now) I ever played. My brother and my Nan were my players, during a rainy holiday in a caravan in 1985. Great fun!
February 26, 2018
nostalgia aside, these rpg mechanics are both terrible and unfleshed, and the written adventures aren't much better.
March 11, 2019
If you had no rules for a game (as in a game of "lets pretend") one would be left unable to judge whether or not an action succeeded or the like ("I shot you!" "No I shot you first!" and so on). I will leave to the ludologists what is the easiest game for beginning role playing. This is probably one of the simplest fantasy roleplaying games and so gives an interested neophyte one kind of introduction to the genre.
This book lays out a very simple roll playing system, characters have 3 stats: skill, stamina and luck. It codifies and expands the system used by Steve Jackson (not to be confused with Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games) and Ian Livingstone in their Fighting Fantasy (choose your own adventure-style) books turning it into a fantasy role-playing system.
The system is so simple that most of the book actually consists of the two starting adventures (two small dungeons) rather than rules or the like (the rules portion takes up the first 63 page of the 240 page book). The adventures give some sense of how the rules can be applied and how to design adventures.
The system is simple, but I do not think it would necessarily be easy to use. The system such as it is leaves much to the discretion or imagination of the GM (such as how to handle how much equipment adventurers can carry). This is good in that it avoids being bogged down with rules for every possible action from scratching an itch on up. However this means it leaves the GM to their own devices on how to deal with almost everything from the dialogue of people the adventurers meet to how much stuff they can fit in their backpacks.
There is not exactly a setting for this book or its adventures, although implicitly it is the setting of Jackson and Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy books. Other books details monsters (Out of the Pit) and the history and geography (Titan) of these books in detail. The rules such as they are deal with melee combat and things like opening doors and chests, so lends itself to rather stereotypical and limited of fantasy roleplaying scenarios like exploring a dungeon. One could expand on the rules and concepts to lay out almost any kind of adventure from science fiction to murder mystery but clearly you would need to make up a lot of rules, conventions or the like. In fact as the adventures in the book suggest you need new rules for new situations even if you just want to create more fantasy adventures in the mold of the two in this book (new traps, new items and so on), some more rules expanding on this system can be found in the book Dungeoneer.
The book has a lot of black and white artwork (each room described in a dungeon is depicted by a single page) and it is often relatively pedestrian but not really bad, however some pictures are more epic and some more basic or silly.
This book lays out a very simple roll playing system, characters have 3 stats: skill, stamina and luck. It codifies and expands the system used by Steve Jackson (not to be confused with Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games) and Ian Livingstone in their Fighting Fantasy (choose your own adventure-style) books turning it into a fantasy role-playing system.
The system is so simple that most of the book actually consists of the two starting adventures (two small dungeons) rather than rules or the like (the rules portion takes up the first 63 page of the 240 page book). The adventures give some sense of how the rules can be applied and how to design adventures.
The system is simple, but I do not think it would necessarily be easy to use. The system such as it is leaves much to the discretion or imagination of the GM (such as how to handle how much equipment adventurers can carry). This is good in that it avoids being bogged down with rules for every possible action from scratching an itch on up. However this means it leaves the GM to their own devices on how to deal with almost everything from the dialogue of people the adventurers meet to how much stuff they can fit in their backpacks.
There is not exactly a setting for this book or its adventures, although implicitly it is the setting of Jackson and Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy books. Other books details monsters (Out of the Pit) and the history and geography (Titan) of these books in detail. The rules such as they are deal with melee combat and things like opening doors and chests, so lends itself to rather stereotypical and limited of fantasy roleplaying scenarios like exploring a dungeon. One could expand on the rules and concepts to lay out almost any kind of adventure from science fiction to murder mystery but clearly you would need to make up a lot of rules, conventions or the like. In fact as the adventures in the book suggest you need new rules for new situations even if you just want to create more fantasy adventures in the mold of the two in this book (new traps, new items and so on), some more rules expanding on this system can be found in the book Dungeoneer.
The book has a lot of black and white artwork (each room described in a dungeon is depicted by a single page) and it is often relatively pedestrian but not really bad, however some pictures are more epic and some more basic or silly.
November 14, 2018
This takes the system that was used in the Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books from the 1980s and develops it into a proper table top role playing game for group play. It’s a perfect system for first time primary school (elementary school) age kids to get started on.
On top of the basic system from the books (2d6 roll under Skill to complete a task, in combat a contested 2d6 plus Skill, the one with the highest score wins the round), it doesn’t really add anything. If you want to pick a pocket, open a locked chest, search a room, it’s all just a basic Skill roll.
The book includes two starting adventures, both of which are those non-sensical old school dungeons where each room is a bit of a puzzle and has no logical connection to anything adjacent to it. We played through them and they’re a lot of fun (especially the first one, The Wishing Well). We played some more ‘realistic’ scenarios after this, and to be honest we’re going back to the illogical dungeon crawl as it’s just a lot more entertaining.
After we played these adventures the system started to creak a bit, it’s really too simple to be fun for more than a one-shot adventure. To add ‘Special Skills’ (like weapons skills, etiquette, swim etc) get the third book in the series, Dungeoneer, which lays out the rules for ‘Advanced’ Fighting Fantasy. The ineffably good Troika! has the best version of the system, but you might want to keep the bog standard Fighting Fantasy world if you’re audience is ten year olds who haven’t role played before, rather than Troika!’s space fantasy weirdness.
On top of the basic system from the books (2d6 roll under Skill to complete a task, in combat a contested 2d6 plus Skill, the one with the highest score wins the round), it doesn’t really add anything. If you want to pick a pocket, open a locked chest, search a room, it’s all just a basic Skill roll.
The book includes two starting adventures, both of which are those non-sensical old school dungeons where each room is a bit of a puzzle and has no logical connection to anything adjacent to it. We played through them and they’re a lot of fun (especially the first one, The Wishing Well). We played some more ‘realistic’ scenarios after this, and to be honest we’re going back to the illogical dungeon crawl as it’s just a lot more entertaining.
After we played these adventures the system started to creak a bit, it’s really too simple to be fun for more than a one-shot adventure. To add ‘Special Skills’ (like weapons skills, etiquette, swim etc) get the third book in the series, Dungeoneer, which lays out the rules for ‘Advanced’ Fighting Fantasy. The ineffably good Troika! has the best version of the system, but you might want to keep the bog standard Fighting Fantasy world if you’re audience is ten year olds who haven’t role played before, rather than Troika!’s space fantasy weirdness.
August 13, 2024
Loads of nostalgia, and the game system is perfectly workable, but a little unrefined. Everything is based off of your Skill stat, with damage applied to Stamina, and a Luck stat that occasionally crops up.
This is fine in the solo gamebooks, but this seeks to expand it into a simple RPG, and probably comes up a bit short. It's just a bit too simplistic to be satisfying.
The system is latter expanded and refines in Dungeoneer! and Blacksand! but I still have a soft spot for this book. Maybe it's the nostalgia, but back in the day when I gave the system a shot, it was still fun. It may have lacked the depth of D&D (even red box basic) or the free wheeling fun of WEG's Ghostbusters, but it worked for a session or two. And at the price of a single paperback!
The included adventure was pretty straightforward, but it still had that Fighting Fantasy style.
Overall, if you find it in a used bookshop, check it out!
This is fine in the solo gamebooks, but this seeks to expand it into a simple RPG, and probably comes up a bit short. It's just a bit too simplistic to be satisfying.
The system is latter expanded and refines in Dungeoneer! and Blacksand! but I still have a soft spot for this book. Maybe it's the nostalgia, but back in the day when I gave the system a shot, it was still fun. It may have lacked the depth of D&D (even red box basic) or the free wheeling fun of WEG's Ghostbusters, but it worked for a session or two. And at the price of a single paperback!
The included adventure was pretty straightforward, but it still had that Fighting Fantasy style.
Overall, if you find it in a used bookshop, check it out!
June 8, 2018
Not really a story book, but more of a rules book for creating your own Fighting Fantasy stories for others to play!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews