Title | : | The Shamutanti Hills (Fighting Fantasy: Sorcery!, #1) |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | 0140318070 |
ISBN-10 | : | 9780140318074 |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Paperback |
Number of Pages | : | - |
Publication | : | First published October 27, 1983 |
The Shamutanti Hills (Fighting Fantasy: Sorcery!, #1) Reviews
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Maybe I'm jeopardizing my online banking security questions here, but in my hometown growing up we had a wonderful used bookstore called Drummer & Thumbs. You already know the place: Mountains of yellowing paperbacks. Jumbles of jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces. Stepladders leaning against walls to reach the higher shelves. And saturating the scene always that intoxicating used book smell. Drummer & Thumbs was a place out of time, hoarding mementos of the literary past while speeding towards obsolescence as the Internet marketplace mushroomed around us. It was magic. It was a place where a kid who pocketed the daily quarter he was supposed to buy cafeteria milk with could go at week's end with a buck-twenty-five and come out with a portal to another world.
Drummer & Thumbs taught me a lot, starting with what an ampersand is and ending with how to check the local library before dropping coin on a new title. They went out of business, with great fanfare and community grief, the year I got my driver's license. What a way to hammer home childhood's end.
The main floor couldn't have been more than 800 square feet, but towering blockades of bookshelves created a crazy honeycombing maze of seemingly infinite size. Tapestries and curtains were hung strategically to offer privacy for browsing. Closets were enlisted for overflow stock, their doors removed to allow access to rummagers. Even a former bathroom was tastefully redone, stocked floor to ceiling with books, the water having of course been shut off first and the dry commode converted into a centerpiece holding plastic flowers.
Step inside, turn left. Make your way to one corner, find the nonfiction. Make your way to another and find romance. Walk past the cashier's counter and see the rare books collection: first editions, signed copies, misprints and oddities—the only merchandise kept under surveillance, though never under lock and key. Pass the horror, pass the plays, pass the college textbooks. There is only one room you really ever come to browse: science fiction. Three-fourths space exploration and a quarter fantasy. An Asimov pile. An entire pile dedicated solely to TSR. And one fateful day, perkily propped in a featured items display, this guy right here:
What the...?
There's more?
Flip to the front - this is how much? Two bucks?
What a find.
I must have played through this gamebook hundreds of times. I played it solo. I read it aloud on walks to and from school with a 5th grade friend so he could play, I the DM to his PC. This is how I spent New Year's Eve, 1997. This is how I fell in love with Final Fantasy, with Dungeons and Dragons, with sidequests and character sheets and many-sided dice. This is magic.
5 stars. I later found, in a stroke of wildly good fortune, books 2, 3, and 4 of the series (priced only a quarter each!) at a used book sale hosted by our local library. Part of me wants to be buried with these books. Part of me wants to will them to my children. Most of me knows the right thing to do is to release them back into the wild one day, by donation bin or garage sale or public school drive, so the next generation of readers can discover firsthand the real value of yellowing pages dug out of a cardboard box marked "EVERYTHING $1" -
Man these books were popular when I was a youngster. If you like a book/role playing game where you are a wizard I recommend these books. Before Harry Potter but equally as good.🐯👍
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I remember finding this first volume of the fopur part 'Sorcery!' series on the shelf of a small local bookshop more than two decades ago. It was in a cardboard slipcase together with the 'Sorcery! Spell Book'. This was the big twist, this gamebook series allowed the reader to play as a sorcerer. The snag was that the spells had to be memorised from the book, and each had a cost to cast. It added a whole new dimension.
Wizardry wasn't the only innovation with this series. Penned by Steve Jackson, one of the co-creators of the Fighting Fantasy series, it was intended to be read by older readers. The four books in the series were larger than the other gamebooks of the time (and grew positively huge by volume 4) and they were all linked. Decisions and items carried on from one book to the next, and all manner of moral questions faced the reader with no necessarily right or wrong answer. Resources such as rations have to be carefully husbanded. If the reader doesn't eat, he will weaken. And money is required to sleep in the safety of an inn.
The ultimate quest is to recover the stolen Crown of Kings from the Archmage, but at this stage of the adventure such considerations are far distant. The first book is a surprisingly gentle introduction as the reader leaves the safety of his home and travels through the poisoned lands of the Shamutanti Hills, heading for the great port city of Khare, the gateway to the even worse lands beyond.
A very good job is made of describing the journey and the passage through the hills and woods, encountering all manner of creatures and poverty stricken villages. One refreshing thing was that I found very many encounters could be avoided with a little thought, and some of the creatures didn't necessarily attack unless provoked. Knowing when to fight and when not was a useful skill to acquire. It was atmospheric, interesting, and there were a large number of alternate paths through the countryside and choices to be made, increasing replay value enormously.
I had little difficulty until I met the manticore pictured on the cover. This shredded me twice before I finally laid it to rest. Shortly thereafter, I found myself outside the gates of Khare, ready to begin book 2... -
There was an old man in a tree
Whose plight was distressing to see;
For the Elvins who stowed
Him up over the road
Couldn't find their remarkable key.
If the Minimite friends you, beware.
He won't go, you'll be filled with despair.
Maybe helping the Svinns
Could relieve you of him?
Or Black Lotuses, quelling the air? -
I remember thinking these books were just so darn cool when I was growing up - I had purchased the second and third off the shelf on a whim from a used bookstore. I sold them and regretted the decision almost instantly, so I was excited to be able to request the first book in the series through our library's new Outerlibrary Loan service.
I "played" a full game through and remembered why I liked the books more as a concept than in practice: I'm terrible! I always get the plague or run over by a boulder because I think I may be able to figure out a clever way to save my skin (I'm no Indiana Jones)! The "interface" is very ingenious - how perfect to have a printed, randomized set of die at the foot of all right-hand pages to make the game playable out of the box. The story is creative, and I love the interactivity. Next-level Choose Your Own Adventures. -
Round up all minimites and ship them to camps, it's the only way. Avoid Jan and the game becomes much easier.
I also thought very unamusing Mr. Jackson's fondness for fake magic codes only one letter off from the real configurations. I did not submit to the rules in these cases. You can't make me attempt to memorize 20+ spells and then pretend it's fair to place as a choice YAB instead of YOB. Memorization is fine as a game element, but the challenge should be in remembering what each spell does, not what words comprise a spell in the first place.
But hey, I'm not the game expert. -
The first of a series of 4 gamebooks called Sorcery!, and by far the best in the genre. Great magic system with 48 different spells at your disposal. Great plot and subplots, good writing, pretty hard to finish but that's also part of the fun!
OLIVIER DELAYE
Author of the SEBASTEN OF ATLANTIS series
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This was an innovative combo of choose your own adventure and RPGs in a cohesive fantasy series. Really loved it as a kid, to the point of contorting my body to roll dice on the floor of the plane in economy on my my way to Wisconsin for Christmas one year. Good fun!
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I never read the Fighting Fantasy books when I was young, didn’t even know they existed. I first learned about them in the last three years as I’ve been digging into RPGs and narrative games. For plenty of game designers, these solo adventure books were early inspiration, and having finally read one of them, I can understand why. I decided to start with the Sorcery! series because I didn’t intend on reading a lot of these books and I remember reading about this particular series on Vincent Baker’s “anyway” blog when someone in the community brought it up in a discussion about magic systems. When someone brought it up again the other day, I decided it was a sign to dive in.
The trick of this specific set of five books is that you play a sorcerer (surprise!) with a spellbook of 48 spells, only it is unsafe to bring the spellbook on your journey, so you have to have your spells memorized when you play. Each spell has a three-letter name, which is related to the nature of the spell, some closely related, other more obscurely. The fireball spell, for example, is HOT, and the lightning bolt spell is ZAP. DOZ lets you slow down an attacking creature to one-sixth its regular speed. Of course, you might forget and think it’s a sleep spell. Some spells don’t require anything other than your stamina (one of your character’s stats in the game), while others require a general or specific ingredient. One spell, for example, requires sand, while another needs a Bracelet of Bone. The Sorcery Spell Book lists all 48 spells roughly in order of relevance, each with a picture; the name of the spell; a description of the spell, its limitations, and any ingredients required; and the cost to your stamina to cast it. It’s a simple, but nicely designed book. While it sucks that you have to shell out the extra money for it if you want to play a wizard in the regular game books, it’s a neat little artifact and makes it easy to not cheat, if you want to follow the rules of the book.
When you come to an entry in the game books in which you are asked if you want to cast a spell, the book gives you five of the three-letter titles, but not all of the options are real spells. So you need to know, which spell you want to cast, what it’s called, if you have enough stamina to cast it, and if you have any ingredients necessary for the casting. When you make a wrong choice, you have to spend the stamina anyway, so it can be costly to make a mistake. If you choose a spell that doesn’t exist, you lose more stamina than any actual spell option, and sometimes the time you waste can cost you in injuries or even death. The game books are designed to be played even if you don’t have the spell book, so there is always a non-magical option. They were kind enough to flag the six most common spells, so that if you memorized nothing else, you can know those six spells, two offensive, two defensive, and two that manipulate other creatures. Those spells are the most flexible, but also the most costly, so if you can remember more spells, you can gain advantages, but you never suffer penalties if you don’t. All these elements together create a clever design that doesn’t punish you for being lazy (or not caring), rewards you for putting in the effort, and has a sliding scale for how much you can memorize so that it is challenging without being daunting no matter what your skill. I made a few mistakes that cost me (I forgot the levitation spell required a jewel-studded medallion!), but never fell for a spell that didn’t exist, and felt damn clever about it.
The adventure itself, The Shamutanti Hills, is really well done. I was expecting something close to the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I did read plenty of when I was a kid. I enjoyed those books, but I was often frustrated by the drastic turn that harmless decisions could make. (All I decided to do was talk to the old man and I somehow ended up dead?!) By introducing stats and die rolls, the Fighting Fantasy books avoid these surprise catastrophic twists (for the most part) because there are ways for the reader/player to absorb the danger and decide which risks are worth taking. The entries themselves are pretty short, so you get the fictional details and are given a set of choices. Each step is pretty incremental so the story doesn’t take large leaps very often. And when danger comes, you have a Skill stat, which tells you how good you are at fighting, a Stamina stat, which lets you measure how much you can endure before exhaustion and death, and a Luck stat, which lets you take chances and push your luck to a greater effect at a greater risk. It surprised me how much was gained by including these simple stats to the game.
Skill goes up and down rarely. You use the stat for combat, and if you lose your sword (which I did), your Skill might be drastically reduced until you can replace your weapon (it cost me my character’s life when he got into a fist fight with a wolfhound in the night), but other than that, it’s pretty steady. Stamina is a kind of Hit Points, and it goes up and down a lot. In this particular game book, you are on a journey and you have to keep track of your provisions and rest. If you go a day without eating, it takes a toll on your stamina. If you go a night without sleeping, that too hurts your stamina score. Getting hurt in combat and casting spells also reduce the score. Eating, sleeping, and healing methods can increase your stamina. My favorite stat, mechanically speaking, is Luck. You begin the game with a d6+6 of Luck (so 7-12). Every time you “test your luck,” you roll 2d6. If you get your luck score or lower, you succeed in the test and get whatever benefit you’re looking for. But after each test, you have to reduce your luck score by one. It doesn’t take long to take a decent Luck score to become a true gamble, and I love the simplicity of the mechanic and the curve of difficulty. You’re probably safe for the first couple rolls if your stat starts high, but soon, you sweat it.
In addition to those stats, as I said, you’re keeping track of other things. This particular book has you on a journey through wilderness, so keeping track of your provisions is important. You also have a supply of gold which you can use in the various towns to get a safe night’s sleep or buy new provisions, and sometimes equipment too. You also keep a list of your supplies, so you know if you have spell ingredients or things to bargain with. In addition, you have a box on your character sheet for keeping track of “bonuses, penalties, curses, etc.” I was surprised what this little box did for a solo adventure game. Because you can keep track of things, the fictional events in the book can easily have lasting repercussions. At one point I entered a town suffering from the plague and contracted the disease. As a result, every morning I had the disease, I had to reduce my stamina by 3. So even though the entries of the story never brought up my disease, I had to face it in the fiction in my head. How cool is that? The book didn’t have to do all the work because there were stats and a place to keep notes.
The last little mechanical thing that is really cool is that you are allowed one bequest from your god, Libra. At any point in the story, you can call on your god, even if the entry you’re at doesn’t give you the option, to revitalize all your stats (put them all at their starting value) or remove a curse or disease. Moreover, at certain points in the book, the list of options includes praying to your god for a miraculous escape from an impossible situation. But you can only use the bequest once, so choose wisely. It’s a neat get-out-of-jail free card and it made the game more enjoyable to have that in your pocket. I used mine when I was in the climactic labyrinth and found myself about to drown without recourse. I had forgotten about it when I was suffering from the plague, but I was glad I didn’t use it before I really needed it!
Those are the simple mechanics, and they raise the Fighting Fantasy books so far above the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I can’t even see them from here.
The story structure is well done too. In Shamutanti Hills, you are heading on the first part of your quest through the titular hills. The journey takes (not that you know this at the beginning) five days, and the narrative is structured by those day breaks, so that no matter what adventure paths you take, all readers will be at the same place at the end of the third day, the end of the fourth day, and the end of the adventure (assuming they survive, of course). Each day has a number of paths so that you will have one major encounter no matter what path you take, and how much you want to engage in that encounter is mostly up to you. Sometimes you’re in the thick of it whether you want to be or not, but usually when you play it safe, the book lets you have low stakes in your adventure. Of course, the rewards are commensurate with the risk, but the option is always yours.
I particularly love that there are separate adventure paths even within paths so that you can play the adventure many times and have radically different experiences. If, for example, you end up in the Goblin caves (instead of the Elvin village or running into the Headhunters), you may encounter an ogre, or a goblin boss or a cave-in. When you finish that particular encounter, the story puts you back on the road to your journey, so there is no way to see everything. The only way I know about all these possible paths is that I made a chart of every path because I was curious to see how the game was structured. As you would think, the possibilities are great at the start of the game and narrow as you work your way toward the end, so that everyone end up in the same climactic scene no matter where they go (assuming again that you survive).
To make your specific path meaningful, the designer put in a bunch of referential items and passages so that you can have these Aha! moments. For example, if you buy an axe from a merchant in the first village, you can find the creator of that axe in the fourth village and return it to him for information and gifts. Or you can find a key in the goblin caves and find the cage that it opens later in the adventure. Cooler still, because the book was written as part of a four-book series, your specific adventures here in book one will affect things in book two! For example, if you spare the assassin his life, he’ll offer you something special in the city you are headed to, and you are given an entry number to check out once you arrive in that city in book two to meet up with the assassin and get his assistance. Or a character might tell you to call on his friend when you get to the city and give you his three-letter name, so that when that name appears in a spell list in the second book, if you choose it, you call on his friend. These little moments, simple as they are, make the world feel large and full of life.
As you can tell, I was impressed by my experience. I played the book more as a study than for play itself and found myself having a great time and tickled by what the art form could do.
The writing is direct and descriptive, which is just about perfect. Nothing too flowery, but I could always get a sense of space and environment.
The only disappointment in the book is the horrible racist portrayal of the headhunters. They are bad, bad, bad, and I would love to see them stricken from the book. -
When I was a kid, I used to take a bunch of Fighting Fantasy books and play through the lot of them with the same character. Same rolls, same gear, even the same spells... then occasionally I would go on ahead and "cheat" in a book, because I got an item that could totally get me out of a bind in this one, or because I trained under the Grand Wizard of Yore and can throw a fireball at the obstacle! Once I grabbed the Advanced Fighting Fantasy rules, I further exaggerated this by giving myself experience points, and a bunch of skills to further get my way through adventures. Such improvisation may or may not have helped me by teaching me skills to use in later group roleplaying games, I wouldn't know, but it was a lot of fun.
Anyway, Sorcery! is the first set of books in the series that allow me to do this kind of a thing without it being a cheat... well, mostly. I probably shouldn't bring my guy here straight from Citadel of Chaos or anything.
That gimmick alone is all very well, but the book on the whole is very well-designed. There's not much in terms of plot coupons to be found here - something I never liked much - and you're allowed to take whatever path you like to the end, each being more or less equally valid. The encounters on the way are suitably challenging and very memorable. And the writing and the artwork both do a great job weaving a new and rather alien setting, very much different from the up until now rather medieval-fantasy-centric world. Just writing about it now makes me taste the goat milk, the honey, and that weird bread.
The spellbook was great too. An awesome gimmick, if a little easy after a couple playthroughs. It's been a couple years since my last time, but I'm confident I could dive right in and play a wizard without ever looking at the book at all, even at the beginning - I still remember the spells!
Oh, and speaking of which, there really isn't any reason to play a fighter. All the sorcery just offers an infinity of possibilities, fun and inventive ways of approaching problems, not to mention giving you any use at all for half the items you find in the game. Their minor Skill penalty soon becomes an all but null, as well. So that's a minus.
I think I will indeed pick it up again. Great stuff. -
This is a nice diversion from the standard Fighting Fantasy scheme, in which the player has to memorise three-letter codes for magic spells and is then asked which of them he knows: but there are nonsense codes mixed in that lead to certain doom. For instance: “Will you cast a spell: SUS, HUF, DIP, FOF, SUD” where DIP and SUD don't exist, and HUF cannot be cast in the present situation. This creates a strangely effective atmosphere, as the player learns more spells and becomes more confident in using them.
It's amazing how many meaningful encounters still fit in 456 sections, given that a whole lot of them just describe how a spell is non-existent or won't work right now. -
The shortest and least challenging of the 4 Sorcery books but still very entertaining. I haven't played any of these games for so many years I'd almost forgotten how enjoyable they are, a perfect change for when my brain gets too overwhelmed with French and Japanese learning.
I went through this 4 times, picking different ways each time and I'm sure I've figured out the 'best' path. Excellent fun :-) -
I remember being offered a tattered old copy of this oddity by a troubled kid at school. I remember voraciously reading it from cover to cover, again and again, year after year. I remember reading it lying on my stomach in a hotel room in Singapore. I remember having goose bumps from the air conditioning and the wickedness of Alianna.
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Great spell system. I love it. Defiantly a step up from early fighting fantasy. I like the way you have to struggle to remember the spells much like a wizard should lol. Remembering what ingredient works with which spell as well. If you like the idea of been a wandering wizard with spells for every situation then this is highly recommended.
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read/played this on google play. enjoyed it a lot. the story was surprisingly well done. I didn't expect a whole lot from a choose your own adventure book from the 80's but it was well worth the read and my time. I will get back to the others at some point.
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Read this series as a teenager, loved the fighting fantasy series. Happy memories.
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I loved these books as a kid. Must go back and re-read them to make a proper review. But just look at that art work too... amazing!
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Un petit coup de nostalgie avec la lecture de ce premier tome de la série Sorcellerie !
J'ai joué le jeu de la mémorisation des sorts, et m'en suis pas trop mal sorti. J'ai (bien sûr) triché sur les combats aux dés, et je ne me suis raté qu'une seule fois (satané champ de lotus).
Au niveau de l'histoire, c'est assez plaisant car on avance bien, le monde est assez intéressant, et il n'y a pas de gros blocages ni de labyrinthes de remplissage. -
Not a big fan of the pictures in this new edition. I think John Blanche (former illustrator) created part of the world with his excellent pictures. This is the plainest book of the saga but started one of the most exciting jouneys i have ever made. A must read if you like fantasy or interactive fiction. I would really love have 12 again and start the Journey one more time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
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The Beginning of an Epic
22 January 2023 - Manly
Yeah, it’s been quite a while since I read this one, and it seemed not to take all that long to get through. Actually, come to think of it, unlike the other Fighting Fantasy books that I have encountered, this one seemed to be pretty straight forward. Basically you are making you way across the wilderness from your kingdom to a city of thieves. In fact, I managed to get through to the end without finding myself stuck (though I did get myself killed a couple of times).
So, the story goes that there is this crown, the Crown of Kings, that is passed around between four kingdoms every four years. Anyway, the kingdom in which you live has possession of the crown, and the kingdom that has possession will prosper. However, the crown is stolen by a enemy who lives in a chaotic waste land, and he intends to use the crown to organise this land and invade the kingdoms to the south. Of course, an army can’t make it (which makes me wonder why, considering that an army is disciplined, so they could cross this wasteland without to much trouble, though come to think of it there is the issue of logistics, and moving an army is quite slow) so they ask you, and individual, to make the quest.
The quest is divided into four books, and I remember from when I read these books last time, the first one was quite easy, but I suspect that things you do in the earlier books become important in the later books, which means that if you miss an important item in the later books then you pretty much can’t complete them. Okay, they do tell you in this book if the item is used in a later book, so that helps, but I guess you have to find them first.
The other thing is the magic system, and the thing with the magic system is that you have to memorise the spells. When I say memories, I mean you have to commit the name of the three letters, and the effect, to memory because you aren’t supposed to refer to the spell book during the adventure (as if they players don’t, but then again I haven’t been doing combat, namely because, well, I’m just reviewing these books, since I actually played them years ago). The other thing with a number of spells is that you can’t cast them unless you have a specific item, and not surprisingly some of these items aren’t available in this book.
Look, I have to admit that it wasn’t too bad, and as I mentioned, it is rather easy. I suspect that later books get quite a lot more difficult, but I’m not quite there yet. -
Capitolo introduttivo breve e piuttosto semplice. Raro riscontrare particolari problemi, ad eccezione del segmento con i cacciatori di teste e dell'impennata di difficoltà finale dovuta alla manticora con annesso piccolo labirinto; perfetto esempio dei rigidi vincoli jacksoniani. Ambientazione nella media, arricchita dalla presenza di diversi villaggi ben caratterizzati. Bestiario sottotono. Gameplay ottimo, a patto di affrontare l'avventura nei panni del mago. Ho giocato con le seguenti stats:
- abilità: 8
- resistenza: 20
- fortuna: 9 -
Sorcery!: Shamutanti Hills v.1 (Fighting Fantasy) (Vol 1) by Steve Jackson (2003)
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Have this as part of the Sorcery! boxed set.
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Better than i remember from when i read this as a kid!
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Curios as to what this is like now to my aged self, with respect to how much i enjoyed the quadrilogy when they first came out. The application you can download is very good.
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Notslagia
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Short enjoyable adventure from childhood very easy, it's not too improbable that you can die in selecting your choices it contains items which can be used in the later books in the series
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Non avevo mai letto un "libro game" e sinceramente non sapevo cosa aspettarmi da questa tipologia di storia e scrittura, a dirla tutta ero molto dubbiosa se potesse piacermi, ma devo ammettere che è stato divertentissimo!
Non dimenticherò facilmente la mia prima morte per colpa di una trappola degna di dark souls...