Monday 10 August 2009

Port Blacksand and Khare

The cover to my favourite Fighting Fantasy book...

I'm a city boy me, and this was the first one where you got to go urban. Port Blacksand is propah! Full of weird shops, drunken monsters, cutthroats and dark alleys!

It's not as good as the ultimate Choose Your Own Adventure city book though...

I believe that this later got rebranded as an FF book, but when it first came out it stood apart from the main line. The second installment of Steve Jackson's epic Sorcery quadrilogy, (not a real word, but it should be), Khare was an ace book full of killer statues, sewer monsters, vampires and the obligatory dangerous taverns. Blew my tiny mind as a lad and still has a prime spot on my bookshelf.

3 comments:

Mr A. P. Salmond, esq. said...

I remember that Sorcery was released as the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons of the FF realm, all a little more complicated than the basic books.

I have so many great memories of these and their many imitators. Me and Jon who used to work at Gosh would reminisce about them: the Lone Wolf series, the Way of the Tiger series and my fave, the Grailquest series. I also loved it when the FF books did different genres, especially the Mad Max knock-off they did.

Dom Sutton said...

That'll be Freeway Fighter!

The Lone Wolf series and Sorcery were my faves. I've got a signed hardback of the first two Lone Wolf books.

Gary Chalk who did the art on those books is a genius, (and I really mean that), my favourite fantasy artist of all time.

There's bits in Sorcery where you can use stuff you learnt in the previous books to unlock secret pages in the later books (something to do with spotting assassins in the pictures as I recall) which was totally awesome. Also having to memorise the spells!!!!

Got to love the Bolland cover on the FF Superhero book Appointment With Fear.

Man I love Choose your own adventure!

Anonymous said...

Fighting Fantasy was really my gateway drug into Games Workshop and role playing games. I loved the covers... Forest of Doom was insane... Citadel of Chaos was quite frightening. I should mention I was only ten or something. Heh.