Well, I've just returned from my first Fighting Fantasy Fest (but the sixth one; they've been going bi-annually since 2014) and I'm buzzing. It feels like a great time to be getting more involved with the gamebook world, with so many creative projects which have been inspired by the Fighting Fantasy originals. Something drew me back to these books a few years ago, or rather a series of things drew me back.
In fact it was December 2024; I was in London in Forbidden Planet, and saw that they had signed copies of some books called Dice Men and Magic Realms (signed by Ian Livingstone and Jonathan Green). I bought them and experienced the full force of nostalgia as I leafed through the wondrous art of the Fighting Fantasy world, and read the origin story of Steve and Ian, with Games Workshop making its first few sales in February 1975, the month of my birth. I realised I'd sort of grown with these things, gamebooks and TTRPGs, even though for much of my adult life, video game RPGs were the only ones I played.
So I started buying a few of my old favourite Fighting Fantasy gamebooks off ebay. Like many people I guess, I had sold all my collection - which included Titan, Out of the Pit, most of the issues of Warlock, the Sorcery box set, and a lot of the earlier gamebooks themselves - back in my early 20s, when I moved out of my childhood home. I think someone had the lot for 20 quid. Now I was buying some of these books back for 20 or more quid each!
As I read through these old books again, those worlds came back to me, and evoked fleeting feelings almost of another life, a strange parallel existence. Perhaps part of me was always wandering Darkwood Forest, searching for the two parts of the Dwarven hammer, waiting to be reunited with another older self, when I was ready to return.
In a post on Substack from around this time I write about how the experience of augmented or enchanted reality was induced by these books, especially Forest of Doom, the first one I read.
People talk about the art being absolutely essential for this sense of immersion, and they are right. It was a theme that came up a lot at FFF 6 in the talks. A company called Sound Realms are creating an audio interactive version of Warlock of Firetop Mountain, something that I am backing on Kickstarter. People are yearning for that immersion in magical fantasy worlds, and finding that old-school reading text and looking at illustrations can be more magical than the most hyper-real video games.
This sense that the artwork was playing something more than just a supporting role to the story was really evident at FFF6 in a few ways. First, there was the tribute to John Blanche (John died earlier this year), the artist who was most responsible for the 'grimdark' feel of Warhammer, with its gritty low-fantasy, medieval atmosphere. He had also done the illustrations for many people's favourite books in the FF range - Steve Jackson's Sorcery! books.
Now, it very much seems to me as if John Blanche had been a kind of magician, stirring up the images out of the collective unconscious, a shaman willing to descend into the underworld and bring back eldritch icons, strange spikey creatures from another world. And the power of these images was huge, especially on the psyche of an 8 year-old!
But even more thrilling for me was getting to meet the artist who had illustrated that very first FF gamebook that I had read - Forest of Doom - and that was Malcolm Barter. I had mentioned to Malcolm in a message on IG that his artwork had the most profound effect on me as a child, taking me into Darkwood Forest while reading the book, but also transforming my experience of walking in the actual forest near my home by inhabiting that heroic character imaginatively.
Meeting and chatting to Malcolm, looking at some of his more recent work, I can recognise someone who is clearly able to make that journey between the worlds, bringing back treasures:
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