Robin Marx reviewed The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by Steve Jackson
Review of 'The Warlock of Firetop Mountain' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I was a big fan of the Lone Wolf and TSR's Endless Quest books back when I was in elementary school, but it was only recently that I encountered Britain's venerable Fighting Fantasy series. It's very much a product of its time, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Like Lone Wolf, these game books pair Choose Your Own Adventure style interactivity with a simple conflict resolution system. It requires the use of six-sided dice, unlike Lone Wolf (which uses a pencil and a printed grid in the book as its randomizer), but it's clever and gets the job done.
As a game book it's fairly fun, but I found the maze towards the end a little tedious, as mazes in text-based games always are. After several failed play-throughs I ended up using a map found online to get through it.
The story itself is pretty sparse, basically a beginning and ending with many …
I was a big fan of the Lone Wolf and TSR's Endless Quest books back when I was in elementary school, but it was only recently that I encountered Britain's venerable Fighting Fantasy series. It's very much a product of its time, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Like Lone Wolf, these game books pair Choose Your Own Adventure style interactivity with a simple conflict resolution system. It requires the use of six-sided dice, unlike Lone Wolf (which uses a pencil and a printed grid in the book as its randomizer), but it's clever and gets the job done.
As a game book it's fairly fun, but I found the maze towards the end a little tedious, as mazes in text-based games always are. After several failed play-throughs I ended up using a map found online to get through it.
The story itself is pretty sparse, basically a beginning and ending with many unconnected vignettes in between. This is par for the course with Dungeons & Dragons-inspired cave-crawling, where you're never sure what's in the next room and not much of an effort was made to come up with a unifying theme or sensible ecology. I grew up with this sort of thing, so I find it charming, but modern readers without this background might not understand the appeal.
I look forward to playing through subsequent volumes.
