How to Write a FF Adventure: Part II

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Steve: First a little background. You may have noticed that most FF adventures are exactly 400 references long. This was a complete coincidence. The first book, Warlock of Firetop Mountain, was written jointly; half each. Ian opted to do the first half, from the entrance to Firetop Mountain up to the River crossing. The river seemed to be a good place to end and hand over, and Ian ensured that all his paths ultimately lead to south bank of the Piranha-infested stream. I wrote the climax to the adventure, from the south bank onwards through the Maze of Zagor to the Dragon and ultimately to the showdown with Zagor himself.

Of course we were writing in parallel, not in series. So we actually had little idea what the other was dreaming up as we typed away - on our typewriters. No word processors in those days. The first FF book ever written using a word processor was The Trolltooth Wars. In fact it didn’t really matter as the two halves were pretty much independent of each other, apart from the Keys and one or two magic items which would be useful later.

When we’d both done our bits, it was then necessary to scramble all the references, and I foolishly volunteered for this exercise. Checking and re-checking the numbering was a nightmare, which took many hours until we were finally satisfied that there were no errors. And it was during the numbering of Warlock we discovered that, by pure chance, the total number of references we had written was 399!

So an extra reference was written in – a false key reference, I think - to make the total up to a round 400. Everything was neat and tidy. And that set the standard. There are a few books that used fewer than 400 references, like Starship Traveller and Freeway Fighter. And several that had many more, Like Crown of Kings where I got a bit carried away. But most of the adventures are exactly 400 references long.

Well of course, every book started with an original plot-line, just as a novelist might start his story. This basic plot was then transferred onto a huge sheet of paper – I preferred to use graph paper - with a circle at the bottom for the start, and another at the top for the end. That was the easy bit. Then came many hours of solo brainstorming to flesh out the vast blank wastes in the middle of the paper. One by one ideas would occur and be scribbled down on a notepad. I used to concentrate on what I hoped were interesting twists - things that had not been used before in previous Gamebooks.

Jon: You start and adventure with a spark of an idea. This can come from anywhere - a film, a throwaway phrase but often a piece of artwork. For example, I remember my adventure 'Spellbreaker' being strongly inspired by the cover art for 'Dungeoneer'. The image of the demon gave me the idea for the Kurakil and the rest developed from there, strongly influenced by having read far too many Brother Cadfael mysteries at the time. Alternatively I might have a particular setting/era in mind which then becomes a rich source of inspiration (see 'Curse of the Mummy' – Egypt - and 'Saga of the Stormchaser' - Vikings/Norse myth).

HOW DO YOU START? HOW DO YOU ARRANGE THE PARAGRAPHS?

One of the many challenges you will face as a Gamebook writer is how to overcome the urge to create as many choices as possible in each encounter. With 400 paragraphs you are quite obviously limited on the number of paragraph choices that you can provide a player at every turn, so careful planning needs to be taken to provide the most obvious and also the most interesting choices that will become available. A good rule when writing each encounter is to write the initial choices several ways, and then play-through these to determine which are the most interesting for the reader.

Encounters are one of the most difficult events to implement in any Fighting Fantasy adventure and to use them successfully you use colourful descriptions or hooks to grab a reader’s attention. As well as these you must use encounters sparingly, ensure battles are not too hard to defeat, and lastly ensure that you don’t bombard a reader with too many bonuses or penalties (like a -2 to Attack Strength for fighting in deep water etc). To successfully implement good encounters with any living or non living opponent here are some useful rules: