I am 11 years old, sitting alone in the modest library of Levendale Primary School. It’s a rainy, early 1980s lunch hour and the babble of indoor playtime surrounds me, but it falls upon deaf ears. I am in mortal danger. Unwittingly, I have stumbled upon a torture chamber in which two hunchbacked Goblins have strapped a dying Dwarf to a hook mounted in the rocky ceiling. Drawing my sword, I swiftly despatch this brace of warty-faced tormenters, but it’s too late for their hapless victim: he is dead. Still, going through the Goblins’ foul-smelling pockets, I find a large piece of sweet-smelling cheese. At the climax of my adventure, I will throw this in the face of the evil Warlock Zagor, whose treasure I have come to spirit away from the pestilent labyrinth hewn into the living rock of Firetop Mountain. Somewhere on the fringes of consciousness, a buzzer sounds. It’s time for afternoon registration…
PAPERBACK PORTALS
Four decades later, the evil overlord who despatched me on this adventure is making us both a cup of “strong Northern tea”. There are no Goblins in his kitchen, just two friendly cockapoos called Pedro and Lola. At the turn of the 1980s, with no expectation of the chart-topping success that would follow, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson wrote The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first in their series of million-selling Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. These 59 original books, released between 1982 and 1995, transported children like myself from the everyday humdrum to fantastical worlds of Wizards and Wyverns. Boasting 400 short, numbered chapters apiece, the books combined immersive Tolkienesque fantasy, interactive roleplay (“To draw your sword and advance, turn to 102”) and the heart-stopping dice-rolls of Dungeons & Dragons. For a generation, they were the gateway to a world of fortean terrors. Portals opened from classrooms, libraries and living rooms alike: for me, it was only a short hop of the imagination from Levendale Primary School to the misty lowlands of the Moonstone Hills.
“The manuscripts are all here,” says the now Sir Ian Livingstone, proud recipient of a 2022 knighthood for services to the gaming industry. We’re in his handsome home in south-west London, and he’s pulling a cardboard box from the shadows beneath his desk. Hidden within are sacred texts: his original handwritten manuscripts for the earliest Fighting Fantasy books. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain lies on top, a beige folder brimming with lined A4 sheets and resolutely unfaded 40-year-old handwriting. There are countless annotations, and intriguing crossings-out. The fortunes of the books’ budding 1980s adventurers depended on three key attributes, permanently stylised in striking block capitals: SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK. But I don’t need a dice roll to know that, today, I am the luckiest fan in the world. Somewhere in a neglected corner of my psyche, there’s a shy 11-year-old schoolboy shaking with excitement.
