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| Fighting Fantazine Issue 5! Cover illustration by Natalie Roberts. |
The fifth issue of Fighting Fantazine - the Fighting Fantasy fan magazine - has finally hit the web! Editor Alex Ballingall has really been burning the midnight oil putting this incredible package together! Among the many amazing features included inside its bumper 104 pages:
- An astounding cover by Natalie Roberts.
- An interview with John Sibbick, illustrator for Fighting Fantasy, Games Workshop, and many excellent dinosaur and extinct prehistoric animal books. Includes never-before-seen pencil roughs of some classic FF book covers.
- Bones of the Banished - a 274 paragraph Fighting Fantasy adventure written and illustrated by Brett "Jediboyy" Schofield. Brilliant stuff!
- Results from the previous Fighting Fantazine survey, including extensive essays on the ten best Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. (I've contributed a piece on Steve Jackson's Creature of Havoc).
- An interview with Graham Bottley, writer of the revised Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG system, due for publication soon by Arion Games.
- Guillermo Paredes' Omens and Auguries, featuring all the latest gamebook news.
- Jamie Fry gatecrashes the lair of notorious Fighting Fantasy author Ian Livingstone.
- Dan Satherly attempts the infamous Sky Lord by Martin Allen - the final science-fiction adventure in the Fighting Fantasy series.
- Part 2 of the Adventure Game series, where yours truly talks about how to plan the structure of your own Fighting Fantasy adventure.
Love your pieces in the new Fantazine - your Creature write up was much more impressive than my Kharé one, which was done in too little time with too little thought (due to the pressures of The Real World®). And your discussion of creating adventures was spot on, and an excellent read. Looking forward to the rest of that.
ReplyDeleteHey, the whole issue is amazing and I particularly enjoyed reading all the essays! I liked your mention of there being no end-boss in Khare - that used to bug me as a kid as well. "Where's the big bad guy at the end of the adventure?"
ReplyDeleteAs for the Real World, I know exactly where you're coming from! My Uni courses start in a week or two, and I'm really not looking forward to them. Time will be at a premium!
It was great to read all of the essays and I liked your article on how to write a gamebook. It was also quite fortuitous as I was reading about magic matrices on the Tunnels and Trolls website and I had no idea what one was until I read about it on your article.
ReplyDeleteThe essays were great and one of my favourite parts of this issue! Now I just have to play Bones of the Blessed...
ReplyDeleteMagic matrices are an interesting way to handle spell options in a gamebook. They add a bit more complexity but are a space-friendly way to handle a lot of options.
The other option I favour would be a mini spellbook tacked on to the back for magic-using characters, sort of like what Steve Jackson did with Sorcery!
cheers
Andy