(This review first published in Fortean Times No 436, dated October 2023)

Dice Men
Ian Livingstone with Steve Jackson
Unbound 2022
Hb, 298pp, £30.00

Imagine a parallel universe where every British High Street boasts its own Quasigamic Expedition shop, stuffed to the rafters with copies of chart-topping gamebook The Magic Quest. Its these tiny glimpses into an alternative history of role-playing that help make Ian Livingstone’s memoir such a delight. Both were working titles for, respectively, the Games Workshop retail chain and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: the latter, of course, being the first instalment of the million-selling Fighting Fantasy range. And Livingstone’s journey to such literary and entrepreneurial heights is extraordinary. An academic under-achiever from a Rusholme terrace, he teamed up with schoolmate Steve Jackson to single-handedly (well, double-handedly) create, define and dominate the British gaming industry. Games Workshop, White Dwarf magazine, Citadel Miniatures, Warhammer RPG, Fighting Fantasy… it’s a giddying multiple whammy of success.

But despite the glories, Livingstone has never renounced his geeky roots. The proof? He keeps everything. And it’s all here. Every cover of the duo’s hand-typed mid-1970s gaming fanzine Owl & Weasel, complete with Livingstone’s own Robert Crumb-inspired drawings. A 1975 biro-drawn map to ‘The Inner Temple of the Golden Skeleton’, from their first-ever crack at running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Photos of an extraordinary, Gerald Ford-era US road trip to meet D&D creator Gary Gygax, with Livingstone a dead ringer for the young Richard Dreyfuss. The images alone make it a five-star purchase, an immersive visual record of a birthing process soundtracked by the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix.

Jackson and his fellow Games Workshop alumni contribute a smattering of heartwarming memories, but it’s Livingstone’s book and his style is splendidly wry. The joy is in the early years, in Livingstone and Jackson using a parked van as home, sleeping outside an office so tiny it was nicknamed ‘The Breadbin’. Glorious details are dropped with deadpan wit: the Newark canal presumably still filled with early rejects from the Citadel Miniatures factory; the ill-fated campaign to make a success of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s unlikely insurance-based RPG, Calamity. And hilariously, everything becomes a game. Even the office shrink-wrapping machine inspires a competition to pass larger and larger items of food through its mechanism… the winner, splendidly, being an unbroken fried egg. Through it all, the duo’s passion – and their friendship – is never tarnished, even in the face of Evangelical Christian protests that their predilection for fantastical derring-do is a gateway to adolescent Satanism. It’s an inspiring story for any budding geek with a burning ambition.

*****

Full Ian Livingstone interview here:
https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/2023/03/20/never-mind-the-warlocks-fighting-fantasy-at-40/

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