City of Thieves by Ian Livingstone

City of Thieves Reviews

• 
  Leo .

  I played these game books as a kid Brilliant These books helped my imagination growThree wizards A dark one A good one A neutral one Which will you pick to aid you on your uest?The City Of Thieves is one of my favourites Deathtrap Dungeon too What great films these books would make Come on Peter Jackson these books were made for you And while your at it let's make my book into a film tooI already know some of the actors who will star in my film adaption of my bookHa Ha He HeTom hardy what a great actor he isIn this world of films and showbizAn author too no end to his talents it would seemWill Tom play the Character Rockwood? From my bookone can only dreamMaybe one day it could be a film a box office hitIf Tom Hardy Cillian Murphy and Benedict Cumberbach was in itAnd Peter Jackson added it to his fantasy CVOh Man that would make Leo very happy🐯👍How much fun Fighting Fantasy the books that playA uest you are the character you choose which wayThe door to the left? The door to the right? You chooseOr the one in the middle holding the cluesRaise one's skill level defeat a foeBut diminish one's stamina scoring gets lowA healing potion a magic spell now one is restoredReady for the Orc the Troll the Barbarian's SwordA labyrinth a dungeon a forest of ElvesA Wizard a treehouse a parchment and stacked high shelvesA ship in a harbour a City of Thieves a Warlock and a mountainA Citedel of Chaos a Forest of Doom a portal a fountainA mutant in a cave a half man and half bullA suit of magical chainmail and a scary horned skullA Snow Witch a Yeti another uest another missionAn Orc frozen in ice peril and attritionA House of Hell spooky which door to chooseThe cellar the side door is it all a ruse?These books these RPG's took up most of my youthAnd I still love them now decades later now I am long in the tooth👍🐯
• 
  Gianfranco Mancini

  Best Fighting Fantasy gamebook by Ian Livingstone Loved the atmosphere of Port Blacksand the twists and the storyline a thrilling rogue style adventure that gave me hours of fun and a death count of 15 just because I tried to end it without cheating
• 
  Paul Christensen

  ‘City of tea leaves’ is uite the cesspitTwisted little streets called ‘Clock’ and ‘Key’Lead one eventually to the garden of Leaf BeastsWhose honesty box is somewhat out of keyWith the penny pinching denizens of its surroundingsLike Fatnose and Sourbelly two sallow trollsOr the various vagabonds who give you a poundingOr two eerie crones still playing at dolls
• 
  Veljko

  This one is really driving me nuts I have played it on the Kindle and after easily getting through most of the story I am getting stomped by some fights at the end of the book that just seem to reuire a lot of luck to get throughI have a suspicion that skill scores are off in the kindle version I know in the paperbook version 'skill' was capped at 12 It is capped at 11 on the kindle Even if you get items to help towards the end of the book you have to engage in some fights were even under the best scenario odds are stacked against you It's frustrating having to rely on sheer luckSaid so the gamebook is pretty interesting A different setting this volume takes place in a town which is a welcome change from the dungeon crawling of the early FF books And some surprising turns and twists For the most part it's fun searching for the items you need For the most part But the ending sections of the book are just an exercise in frustration relying on sheer luck
• 
  Michael

  This simply represents the pinnacle of the choose your own adventure genre It doesn’t get any better The structure creativity humor and dramatic tension are perfect Moreover this is one of the few that really succeeds as a puzzle to be solved The puzzle aspect is interesting enough to hold the interest of adults my mother borrowed it for about a week in the 80s until she had solved it as well as the younger target audience The “Fighting Fantasy Gamebook” series were all very good but this was the best of them In them you roleplay an experienced warrior who has to solve a uest of some kind This distinguished the series from the “Endless uest” series of TSR because except for the first one in that series you always had to roleplay a kid on their first serious outing which for me defeats the purpose of roleplay because you presumably were a kid reading the book alreadu so you weren’t imagining yourself as someone else In “City of Thieves” your mission is to find the necessary materials to defeat an evil sorcerer who is terrorizing a town In order to do this however you must navigate the dreaded Port Blacksand a place in which humans and demi humans thrive on crime piracy and exploitation There are several paths through Port Blacksand and as you play and re play the book you will meet many charming and bizarre creatures some of which will help you others annoy and many attack you either frontally or with stealth One of the things I want to mention is the artwork of Iain McCraig which to me is perfect for this story; it is fantastical whimsical and just a bit dark with many delightful details for the attentive viewer to pick up I especially like the illustration of the gate of Port Blacksand near the beginning and the wonderful image of the Goblin like Bays playing Bays’ Ball at entry 40 The entire book is delightful in the same sense as that image and it’s a great find for anyone who enjoys fantasy roleplaying or solving puzzles
• 
  Michael Kelly

  A superb gamebook Port Blacksand the titular city of thieves is a fascinating place for exploration and skullduggery It comes across as a well developed coherent environment uite amazing for such an early entrant into the series It is so well developed and ceaselessly entertaining that it shames those that came before and most of those that came afterThis is one of the few Fighting Fantasy books where it's uite easy to find everything you need for a successful completion as long as you explore thoroughly Though having said that there's one unwelcome instance where if you stop to do one thing the book doesn't then allow you the chance to duck down a side alley you had noticed a moment before This isn't an issue with most other encounters and since this alley leads to one of the needed items it's an unfair ployThe exploration of the city is also pretty balanced Even someone with mediocre scores would find the encounters fair and there's plenty of healing to be found and opportunities to restore LuckWhen you leave the city and travel toward the tower of Zanbar Bone for the climax the difficulty suddenly and drastically spikes and anyone with a Skill score less than 11 need not bother as you'll never get through This doesn't wash The worst idea in the book and possibly in any FF book ever comes right at the very end where you have to make a choice out of three You're given no clues it's simply a case of eeny meeny miney mo and if you choose wrong you're dead So you've trawled all the way through the book to find you have a totally random 2 in 3 chance of failing for no fault of your own Bollocks to thatI've still awarded 5 stars because Port Blacksand itself is so intriguing and evocative and the bulk of the book is magnificent the very best a gamebook can be But the ending sucks gorilla balls
• 
  Arial Burnz

  OMG I LOVED THESE BOOKS Jeez I devoured these when I was in high school I loved DD but didn't have a group to play with so these were the next best thing LOVE choose your own adventure I think I'll need to write some of these one day
• 
  David Sarkies

  Time to teach a big bully a lesson19 July 2012 The fifth book in the series and from what I remember one of the better ones To me it seems that the books Forest of Doom City of Thieves Deathtrap Dungeon and Island of the Lizard King were to me the memorable books in the series The first one was obviously experimental as was Starship Traveller and Citadel of Chaos but it feels that with the books that I have got to now the writers had settled down on a style that seemed to work However the ones that came after I have little memory with the exception of Scorpion Swamp In this book you are a seasoned adventurer who has arrived in a small town that is being bullied by an evil undead warlock named Zanzar Bone You are approached by the mayor and asked to go and find a friend of his who lives in the city of Port Blacksand the city of thieves that the title of the book derives its name However there is a little twist because when you do find Nicodemus he simply tells you that he is too old to go off adventuring so he tells you how to kill Zanzar Bone and sends you on your way While the majority of the book is set in Port Blacksand it moves away from the other books slightly in that the end game begins once you have left Port Blacksand Zanzar Bone does not live in the city nor is he the ruler of the city rather your adventure in the city is simply one of locating somebody who then tells you what you need to search for to be able to defeat your enemy It is actually a reasonably easy book and while they talk about a one true path it is uite easy to find it However there are a number of other objects that you need to collect such as the Skeleton Key which will make your uest significantly easier The one item I could not find though I suspect that it is located somewhere near the start is the merchant's pass One could suggest that this is another assassination job though it is clear that Bone is a bully and needs to be taught a lesson and of course you are the one who has to teach him a lesson One of the interesting things is that these books tend to be very black and white particularly with the fantasy ones In a lot of fantasy novels I note that the settings are generally black and whiteL the good hero goes out to fight and kill the evil villain I guess it is reflective of our desire to see and compartmentalise the world into black and white as opposed to the shade of grey that exists in I guess it is also something pushed down upon us from above so that we will always see our country as being the white and anything opposed to our country as black Unfortunately it is not necessarily the case because there are instances where an immoral government uses this concept to bring the population on side I want to finish off with something about undead In many novels the undead are always protrayed as evil I suspect that this may have something to do with our Christian heritage as the Bible clearly puts necromancy into the realm of evil That may be the case but what about the idea of animating corpses? Is that necessarily evil and is animating a corpse generally evil? Personally I think it comes down to our attitudes towards the dead To a culture that sees a corpse as nothing than a diseased shell to be destroyed with the spirit being disconnected from it then maybe it is not However to a culture like ours that while believing that the soul breaks away from the corpse our treatment of the corpse reflects our attitudes towards that person in life The Greeks would defile or respect corpses depending on where they wanted the dead to land up A defiled corpse for an example see Antigone would wonder around the Earth as a half man for eternity while a properly disposed of corpse would return either to Hades or any other realm that the deceased achieved in life Personally it really comes down to culture and what the culture does with the corpse really is what that culture believes I uestion the right that we have to insist that an alien culture treat a corpse as we expect it to be treated
• 
  Edwin McRae

  It was wonderful to revisit Port Blacksand after all of these years but I'm afraid I have to be that kid who points out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes Whilst thoroughly enjoyable City of Thieves isn't the sharpest tool in the Fighting Fantasy shed Arbitrary choices abound and I was a bit gutted to be presented with a truly tiny and pedestrian 'Congratulations' paragraph once I finally did slay the notorious Zanbar Bone Come on Ian I worked really hard for that Oh and then there's the fact that I needed to spend most of my time breaking into people's houses and then often killing then when they uite rightly protested my flagrant pilfering of their stuff And why am I always given the option to attack innocent shopkeepers with my sword? Not very heroic Ah wellgood times nonetheless and the experience has left me curious about Ian's latest return to Port Blacksand 'Port of Peril'
• 
  Paul Gibbons

  Great book You've not lived till you've had a walk round port Blacksand and had a fisty cuffs with Zanbar Bone Some really memorable parts in this book