(This article first published in Fortean Times No 422, dated September 2022)

NEVER MIND THE WARLOCKS

In 1982, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson wrote The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first in their series of Fighting Fantasy role-playing gamebooks. The books sold in their millions, and – for the 40th anniversary – both writers have returned to the range with brand new adventures. But along the way, there have been accusations of devil-worship, occultism and even extreme bedwetting. Bob Fischer tests his LUCK and spends an afternoon with Sir Ian…

I am eleven years old, sitting alone in the modest library of Levendale Primary School. It’s a rainy, early 1980s lunchtime 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.

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 Tolkien-esque fantasy, interactive role-play (“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 Fighting Fantasy fan in the world. Somewhere in a neglected corner of my psyche, there’s a shy 11-year-old schoolboy shaking with excitement.

So how did it all start? For Ian and Steve Jackson, the success of the books goes hand-in-hand with a friendship that has endured for almost sixty years.

“We met at school,” recalls Ian. “I think because we both had Lambretta scooters… we were weekend mods! We started talking, and confessed we liked playing board games. Which was quite a thing to admit to in those days. We went to Altrincham Grammar School, along with another guy called John Peake… who also had a Lambretta. After we’d left school, we all went our separate ways, but we stayed in touch. Steve and John went to university, and I went to college. I’d been useless at my A-Levels. But then we all moved down to London at different times, and by 1973 we were sharing a flat.”

The flat, on Hammersmith’s Bolingbroke Road, was the birthplace of a hobby business that eventually became one of the biggest gaming companies in the world: Games Workshop.

“We all had pretty boring jobs, and we just played board games in the evenings,” remembers Ian. “We were badly paid, we stayed in a lot, and we thought ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we turned our passion into a business of some sort?’ We thought maybe we could start a community. So we put out a newsletter, trying to reach out to other gamers. Then we discovered American strategy games in some obscure shop in London, and our newsletter turned into a fanzine called Owl and Weasel. It was sent out to everyone we knew in the games world, and one copy found its way to Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He was also operating out of his flat and he wrote to us, saying ‘I love your little magazine – would you like to review our new game?’ That game was Dungeons & Dragons.”

Issue 6 of Owl and Weasel, dated July 1975, is a love letter to the trio’s epiphanic new discovery. “Quite honestly, we are obsessed with the thing,” proclaims the front cover. “Dungeons & Dragons… can be as tense as a bomb defusion, as scary as potholing, and as much fun as a Python gem”. The 25-year-old Ian, it seems, was one of Britain’s first-ever Dungeon Masters, with a crew of intrepid friends transformed into Dwarfs, Clerics, Fighters and Magic Users.

“It was a milestone in gaming history,” he says, 47 years on. “It had a pretty plain box, but it opened up your imagination like no game had ever done before. It was like theatre on the fly… killing monsters, finding treasure, becoming your alter egos. Fantastic journeys of the mind, and Steve and I become immediately obsessed. John didn’t, he enjoyed the more traditional games, but we used all the money we had to order six copies. And on the back of that order we got a three-year distribution agreement for the whole of Europe! We became the exclusive agents for Dungeons & Dragons from 1975-1979.
 
“Then, in 1976, Steve and I said ‘Let’s try and do this full-time’. At which point John left, he stayed with the day job. Steve and I gave up our flat and went to the States, to a convention called Gen Con in Lake Geneva, and we met Gary Gygax. We ordered loads of games and had nowhere to send them back to – so we had them delivered to my girlfriend’s flat! She wasn’t too happy. Then we came back and went immediately to the bank, hoping we could afford the rent for both a flat and an office. We said ‘Hello, Mr Bank Manager! We’ve got this great game called Dungeons & Dragons, where you kill monsters and find treasure. Can we have a loan, please?’ And he looked at us rather like a dog watching television, with no understanding whatsoever of what we were talking about. It was no surprise that he said no, and asked us to leave.  

“So we lived in Steve’s van for three months. We parked it outside the tiny room we used as our office, at the back of an estate agents in Shepherd’s Bush. And we joined a squash club nearby because it opened early, and we could have a shave and a shower there. We got really good at squash, too! That carried on until we had a few quid stashed away, then we rented a pretty rotten flat up the road.”

The van was nicknamed “Van Morrison”. The office, on Uxbridge Road, was so small it became known as “The Breadbin”. But, by July 1977, the tide was turning. Business was brisk, and Owl and Weasel was further transformed into a glossy, role-playing magazine: White Dwarf. The following year, Ian and Steve deserted “The Breadbin”, and moved Games Workshop into its first permanent shop unit.

“We ended up getting kicked out of our little office, the estate agents were sick of people coming and going,” he recalls. “If even one person came in, either Steve or me had to stand outside! So we said ‘You’re an estate agent – find us somewhere to operate from’. And they got us a unit in Dalling Road, Hammersmith. By that time, we’d launched White Dwarf, which I used to paste up in my bedroom, so through that we managed to promote the opening of the shop. 1st April 1978! And we were delighted when we saw the queue when we arrived. We thought ‘Wow – this is the real deal’.”

On that drizzly Saturday morning, with the doors about to open for the first time, an excited Ian took a photo of the enthusiastic gamers waiting patiently outside. It’s an evocative snapshot of a bygone age, a soggy-looking cavalcade of hairy young men in parkas, duffel coats and rain-sodden flares. As business burgeoned, Games Workshop began organising annual gatherings of the assorted role-playing clans, and it was here that the nascent Fighting Fantasy series was conceived, in collaboration with Penguin Books.

“We used to run Games Days in the early days,” he says. “By 1979, other traders were coming in… so we had several thousand people turning up to play games. Penguin took a stand to promote their book, Playing Politics. The editor, Geraldine Cook, was just fascinated by the enthusiasm of the people playing Dungeons & Dragons. She said to Steve and me, ‘Have you ever considered writing a book about the whole role-playing hobby?’

“We said, off the cuff, ‘Rather than write a book about the hobby… could we write something that lets people actually experience the hobby?’ And we sent her the concept of a stripped down role-playing game, with the book itself replacing the Dungeon Master, offering the reader multiple choices. But we didn’t want it to be just about choosing paragraphs, we wanted a dice-based game system. So we came up with SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK, trying to keep things as light as possible so people weren’t bogged down with the complexity of the game. Geraldine was massively enthusiastic, but apparently the head of Penguin Books laughed so much he banged his head on the table. He thought it was a ridiculous idea – why would anyone want an interactive book? Books are linear, end of story. It took at least another year before anyone said ‘OK, let’s do this…’

“We finally got published nearly three years after that initial meeting with Geraldine. Even then, Penguin didn’t know what they were doing with the book. We argued about the covers: they wanted very ‘safe’ art for a younger readership, with toadstools and gnomes and butterflies. And we wanted covers from Games Workshop artists that threatened to rip the faces off the readers! We thought children would like having their imaginations ignited by amazing artwork. But to their credit, they eventually let us do our thing. So we commissioned the art, and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain came out in August 1982.”

Ultimately handled by Puffin, the children’s imprint of Penguin Books, the book still feels potent and powerful. Ian and Steve split writing duties evenly, the underground river at the adventure’s halfway stage a literal dividing line between their respective contributions.

“Steve thought my bit was far too easy!” laughs Ian. “It was difficult to collaborate, and we wrote the next books separately”. And while Peter Jones’ impressionistic cover artwork hints at the dark magic within, it’s the interior illustrations of Russ Nicholson that truly “rip the faces off”. A Giant Sandworm crashes through the banks of an underground river; a raging, lion cloth-clad Minotaur guards a trove of gold coins; the semi-decayed corpse of a hollow-eyed Ghoul jolts into life and lumbers from the darkness. But the book also boasts a sense of reflective, gentle humour: a magical shopkeeper selling strange, blue candles; a lycanthropic ferryman complaining about “inflation”; an enchanted carved bench with an alluring epithet: “Rest Ye Here, Weary Traveller”. The foundations of a publishing sensation were laid here.

“We were really excited, but we thought the book would be a one-off,” says Ian. “I remember going into WH Smiths and seeing it on the shelf with a great sense of pride! And then hanging around waiting for someone to come along and buy it. I stayed about half an hour, and nobody did. I thought ‘Oh, this is terrible… it’s never going to sell’. We’d phone up our editors and say ‘How’s it going?’, and they’d say ‘We’re not sure… the sales people don’t know much about it’. They just didn’t know how to market it, they’d only worked with linear books. But it started to take off in schools, and word-of-mouth was the virality of the day. You can’t get any better recommendation. Once that happened, it just spread like wildfire.”

As autumn turned to winter, imaginary portals to Firetop Mountain began opening in playgrounds all over the country, and the national media took notice. “Radio 1 was a big help in creating a spike,” remembers Ian. “We got invited into the studio, and ended up reading paragraphs out on air, with people phoning in saying ‘Go left, go right, fight that monster…’. That gave sales a real boost. Then our editor called up and said ‘We’ve reprinted The Warlock of Firetop Mountain eight times now, so we’ve decided we definitely need two more’. That was great… not least because it meant we didn’t have to write together again!” He laughs. “So Steve wrote The Citadel of Chaos, and I wrote The Forest Of Doom.”

The latter book, I am intrigued to spot on Ian’s handwritten manuscript, was originally titled Doom in Darkwood Forest. “Bit of a mouthful,” he smiles.

By Spring 1983, the duo were spearheading a literary revolution. Role-playing games, once the esoteric interest of a whiskery minority, had become a national obsession for a generation of youngsters. After that slowburning start, those first three Fighting Fantasy books – incredibly – toppled the previously unassailable Roald Dahl to occupy the top three positions of the Sunday Times’ children’s bestsellers list. TV appearances followed: Ian recalls appearing on BBC1’s monolithic children’s programme Saturday Superstore, where a bemused John Craven asked if the duo planned to ever write a “proper book”.

To those of us whose imaginations were now firmly rooted in the Fighting Fantasy universe, such drearily adult reservations were entirely irrelevant. By 1984, I felt as much an inhabitant of Darkwood Forest as I did my native Teesside. My thoughts were no longer dominated by schoolwork, bike rides and boring family outings. Instead, they were pre-occupied by my quest to negotiate the tangled woodland of The Forest of Doom, finding the magical warhammer that would aid the Dwarves of Stonebridge in their battle against the Trolls. The farmer’s fields around my house became the Vale of Willow from The Citadel of Chaos, and the cobbled high street of my sleepy North-eastern hometown became the seething, crime-filled Port Blacksand from City Of Thieves. These immersive adventures – now established by spin-off magazine Warlock as taking place on the continent of Allansia – bled through into everyday reality. I was largely unable to navigate the streets of my neighbourhood’s ever-expanding housing estates, but I spent the entire summer of 1984 drawing detailed maps of Deathtrap Dungeon. Towards the end of that endless, sun-baked school holiday, I was genuinely convinced I’d seen a determined party of Dwarves marching armour-clad through the local playpark. Ian chuckles at these recollections.

“Thinking you were in Darkwood Forest or Port Blacksand? You’re not an isolated case!” he smiles. “I still get people sending me tweets and photos. If they see a bench in a forest, they’ll say ‘Rest Ye Here Weary Traveller’. Or ‘This tree looks like one of your Treemen… and look at the fork in this path, it’s like The Forest of Doom!’. So people all around the world are still venturing through lots of Darkwood Forests, wherever they may be. And long may that continue”.

There were occasional departures from Allansia and its parent world of Titan. Steve Jackson’s Starship Traveller was a sci-fi adventure sending unsuspecting readers through the “Seltsian Void” into a bubble universe; Ian’s Freeway Fighter was set in a post-apocalyptic USA. But it was traditional swords and sorcery that became the defining characteristic of Fighting Fantasy. The immersive nature of the books, however, brought an unexpectedly dark twist.

The rumblings began in local newspapers, with the front page of the Reading Evening Post from 6th March 1985 making for fascinatingly lurid reading. “Mother calls for ban on ‘devil worship’ books in schools,” screamed the headline. “The 23-year-old Sunninghill mother, who wants to remain anonymous, believes they are unsuitable material for children and has burned the Fighting Fantasy adventure books. She is prepared to put up a fight to get the books banned, and is planning a petition. She said other mums were also concerned about the books, which she said describe devil worship, witchcraft and voodoo. She claimed that her son, aged 11, came out in pinprick marks after reading them. Mr Nicholas Holmes-Clough, minister of Bracknell Pentecostal Church, told his congregation on Sunday: ‘Anything of the occult is evil. We want to keep it well away from our children’.”

A week later, Holmes-Clough had stepped up his efforts, claming to have delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street. “I’ve had lots of phone calls from parents, saying how their children had been mentally affected by such books,” he told the paper. “Children go back to bed-wetting and start having nightmares at the age of nine or 10…”

“The word ‘gamebook’ just seemed to send people into an apoplectic fenzy,” sighs Ian. “In their minds, a ‘game’ should be trivial. But park your prejudices about some of the creatures in the books and just think about what’s happening cognitively when you play them… kids are problem-solving, doing critical thinking in an algorithmic way. They’re not punished for making a mistake, they can fail and start again and still feel good about it. With Fighting Fantasy, everyone can be a winner over time. Thinking creatively, and being empowered by choice. So I’d argue that Fighting Fantasy gamebooks are actually a very good thing. A contextual hub for learning.”

Nevertheless, by 1986, the campaign had escalated. Steve Jackson’s House of Hell, a Hammer-inspired quest to survive the night in a Borley Rectory-style haunted mansion, proved a tipping point. With its uncharacteristic modern-day setting, it brought Fighting Fantasy’s Devil-worshippers and psychopathic Skeletons closer to the real world than ever before. For some, that was a step too far. “OCCULT BOOK BANNED” blared the front page of the Burton Mail on 9th October 1986. “A ‘nasty’ children’s fantasy book which dabbles in the occult has been banned from library shelves. Church officials say Steve Jackson’s House of Hell is dangerous to children because of its supernatural contents and pictures. Now the book has prompted Leicestershire library chiefs to review the way they select children’s material…”

By December, one particular Christian group had gone into overdrive, publishing a newsletter entitled Danger – Children At Play and warning of the dangers of what they called “video nasties in print”.

“We were told about a booklet published by the Evangelical Alliance,” recalls Ian. “An eight-page guide warning about Fighting Fantasy and other role-playing games, saying that – because we had illustrations of ghouls and skeletons and were asking readers to interact with the undead – they were destined to effectively become possessed by the devil. We thought ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous…’. Because it’s just mythology. Fantasy tales and legends from ancient times had always had these kinds of creatures. So why pick on us? I think it was just because we were successful.

“But that led to petitions being sent into Penguin Books from worried parents claiming the imaginations of their children were likely to be harmed by the powerful descriptions and illustrations in our books. A local vicar threatened to chain himself to the railings of Penguin Books unless our books were banned, and there were magazine articles saying that kids would be better off reading Enid Blyton… as though using your imagination was a problem! I think it’s fantastic to use your imagination. But ultimately it never come to anything. And in those days, there was no such thing as bad publicity. It powered the sales upwards! A lady from deepest suburbia appeared on her local radio station claiming that, having read one of my books, her son had levitated. Of course, all the kids then thought ‘What, for £1.50 we can fly? We’ll have some of that…’”

Some of us were inspired to creativity, too. The Guardian Of Goblin Grotto was a DIY Fighting Fantasy book that my friend Ian Oswald and I wrote together in our final months at Levendale Primary School. Once again blurring the boundaries between the tangible and the imaginary, it featured twisted versions of our real-life schoolfriends, transmogrified into the evil denizens of Allansia. Sir Ian chuckles, appreciatively. “They really did encourage creative writing. And drawing. Kids invented their own creatures and places and storylines. So don’t tell me that’s a bad thing.”

As the success of the Fighting Fantasy books burgeoned, the workload became all-consuming. “It was all work and no play,” recalls Ian. “But it didn’t feel like a hardship. Games Workshop was still expanding, we were producing more board games and opening more shops, and it was really exciting. These were games that we enjoyed playing as well as making. So we’d do all that from 8am until 7pm, and then I’d start writing a Fighting Fantasy book from 8pm until 2am. I had a very understanding girlfriend at the time who typed up my handwritten manuscripts and took them to Penguin!

“But we just couldn’t keep up with demand. We did that for two years, at the end of which we were… not quite burned out, but certainly suffering. Meanwhile, Penguin wanted more and more books, because they were flying out. They wanted one every six weeks, and they said ‘Look – let’s get some help…’”.

By 1987, the bulk of the range was being penned by other writers. “We approved the synopses of the books, and the general overarching storylines, then just let them get on with it,” recalls Ian. “To be honest, I never read any of those books – because I didn’t want to be accused of plagiarism! So, other than approving the official synopses, I’ve never played them. I made it an absolute rule that I would never look at anybody else’s gamebooks.

“We had a good run from 1982 to the late 1980s. And then it slowed down. After 49 books, Penguin said to us ‘That’s it…’ So, in 1992, I wrote Return to Firetop Mountain as book Number 50 to round things off. Then they said ‘Hang on, only joking… the sales people think there’s still life in the series,’ and they published another nine books. But the new titles were selling in pretty small numbers and didn’t really justify us carrying on. So they went out of print in 1995 for five years, before the revival started. And it’s been growing again ever since – not in the numbers that we had in the 1980s, but with a steady uptake in popularity. I think a lot of parents have handed them down to their children, and they’re playing them together.”

In the meantime, there were other priorities. Looming over Ian’s desk is a six-foot model of Lara Croft, the strident archaeologist at the heart of the Tomb Raider games. She’s there as a permanent reminder that, as the original Fighting Fantasy range drew to a close in 1995, Ian became co-founder of world-conquering video game publishers Eidos Interactive. So was there ever a time when he thought Fighting Fantasy was no longer part of his life? 

“No,” he replies, unhesitatingly. “There was that gap between 1995-2000 when we had no publisher, but I’ve never given up. I was still trying to find a new deal, but they had to be out of print long enough for people to become interested again…”

Between 2002 and 2012, Wizard Books reissued a sizeable chunk of the original range and added a handful of new titles – including Ian’s own Eye Of The Dragon and the semi-mythical Bloodbones, Jonathan Green’s oft-rumoured “lost” 60th Fighting Fantasy book. In 2017, Scholastic Books took over the reins, and further new titles have appeared: 2017’s The Port of Peril and 2020’s Assassins of Allansia were both written by Ian; one-time Fast Show star Charlie Higson contributed 2018’s The Gates Of Death; and in 2020 Rhianna Pratchett – daughter of Terry – become the range’s first female writer with Crystal of Storms. For Fighting Fantasy’s 40th anniversary, both Ian and Steve Jackson have penned brand new gamebooks.

“Mine is called Shadow of the Giants, and Steve’s is Secrets of Salamonis,” beams Ian. “My book obviously features giants, and requires you to go back to Firetop Mountain. You think you’re going to be looting the Warlock’s caves again, but no… you find a cursed crown that unleashes four giants onto the world, hellbent on destruction. They have one vulnerability that you have to discover, and the journey takes you to a new place called Hamelin… nothing to do with the Pied Piper! It’s great to be back in Allansia, setting new tasks for readers and trying to lure them to their doom. That’s the satisfaction I get from Fighting Fantasy, knowing people are going to fall down a pit or be roasted by a fire-breathing dragon… and hopefully have a good time along the way.”  

And Steve’s book? It’s his first title for the range since 1986, but his lifelong friend is remaining tight-lipped. “Steve hasn’t told me too much about it!” laughs Ian. “What I do know is that you have to travel to Salamonis to make your fortune, and there are plenty of options. Join the Strongarms to guard the merchants, study at the Halls of Learning, or rid King Salamon’s mine of pests. And then there’s the Shivering Man… whoever he is! You’ll have to read the book to find out.”

The celebrations don’t end there: November 2022 sees the publication of Dice Men, Ian’s autobiographical account of the first ten years of Games Workshop.

We look again through that battered box of manuscripts, and all those old feelings flood back. Allansia bleeds through into the real world once again. Ian shows us his “games room”, the walls festooned with original Fighting Fantasy cover artwork: Iain McCaig’s extraordinary depictions of The Forest Of Doom, City Of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon. Ian and Steve still meet here once monthly for gaming sessions… and I, like millions of others, still love Fighting Fantasy. I’ve rarely felt as though I’m in danger of being possessed by the devil, and – despite the dire warnings of Nicholas Holmes-Clough – I’ve never gone back to bed-wetting. But being this close to the heart of this immersive world, to those timeless manuscripts and illustrations, is still beautifully overpowering. “Just pass your bags through the X-ray machine before you leave,” smiles Sir Ian Livingstone, as we put the boxes back.  

And, forty years on, a word for the middle-aged children of the 1980s who – like me – still find themselves drifting back to the House of Hell or the Island of the Lizard King?

“I’m just amazed and grateful that the books have survived the test of time and they’re still relevant today,” says Ian. “That’s really gratifying and long may it continue. I’ll never get tired of luring people to their doom…”

I turn to 400 and leave my empty mug on the kitchen table. My adventure is over.

Shadows of the Giants and Secrets of Salamonis are published by Scholastic and are available here:

https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/products/141705

https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/products/117710

Dice Men: Games Workshop 1975 to 1985 is published by Unbound and is available here:

https://unbound.com/books/games-workshop/

Heartfelt thanks to Sir Ian Livingstone for his time and enthusiasm, and to Angela Wheeler and Andrew T. Smith for further help and research.

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