Roleplaying 1980's style - A Fighting Fantasy RPG one-shot

Fighting Fantasy the RPG

For those of you familiar with the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, you might recall the book Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-playing Game. This book and the follow-up books in the Advanced Fighting Fantasy series (Dungeoneer, Sorcery! and the rest of the books in the series) was were where I got my own creative juices going to build worlds and run games, even if these games were only for my little brother and a couple of close friends in those hazy days of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

For those of you unfamiliar here is a link to the Official Fighting Fantasy site with a blog about the book https://officialfightingfantasy.blogspot.com/2019/01/blast-from-past-fighting-fantasy.html

Following on from my time at Nergalcon, see the news article here, where the GMs used a variety of rules light systems to run their sessions, I had looked into rules light systems and thought about getting back into the Fighting Fantasy game rules to run something for myself.

Almost all of my book collection is in storage, so after a bit of hunting and a good rummage around, I was able to put my hands back on these gems. Nothing much happened after that except for a nostalgia trip reading through the books again, until early this summer when my regular gaming group was having a break for a couple of weeks.

It was just before this break, a couple of the members wanted to play something different in the off-weeks and I suggested running a Fighting Fantasy one-shot. Both players were familiar with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks so the premise and rules would be easy enough to explain. All I needed was some sort of cheat sheet to provide them (as I only had the physical books to hand and we were to play online) and some adventure idea to throw at them.

My character creation and rules summary can be found here

Fighting Fantasy One-Shot

For the one shot, I started them in a large town with rumours of mysterious goings on happening in a village a couple of days travel out of town. The basic premise of the game was a necromancer of sorts had cursed the village years ago looking for a magic item. The village was relocated to the other side of the stream in the same valley with the old village becoming overgrown. The necromancer of sorts is back in the new village to finish what they started and their reappearance had brought zombies and spectres into the village to terrify the residents. I didn't write anything down as this was going to be a free form one-shot with a couple of players – the premise being moulded by their actions (or inactions) as the session progressed.

After some investigation the players found an old woman who had been in the original village who relayed most of the relevant information about what had happened. They also found a jeweller who had come across a necklace whilst wandering through the abandoned village one day, and had set about dismantling it to make trinkets and other jewellery – which in doing so summoned back the necromancer. They did miss some of the more obvious clues about where the necromancer was hiding out, but they did come across his path (dressed as a travelling merchant – the uncanny resemblance to the merchant who attended the village years ago according to the old woman) near the abandoned village and set about dispatching the necromancer and freeing the village (both new and old) of their curse.

All in all it ran very well, and the Fighting Fantasy system is definitely something I would like to run again.

J