Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Retrospective: Steve Jackson's Sorcery!

I've opined before that the Fighting Fantasy series of solitaire gamebooks must have been very successful for both Penguin/Puffin Books and creators Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Between 1982 and 1995, fifty-nine FF books appeared, penned by many different authors (including a few, as it turns out, by Jackson's American namesake). I read and enjoyed several of them upon their initial release; they were a great way to pass the time when I was unable to get together with my gaming buddies in person. Consequently, I generally looked on the series as a "diversion" rather than a "real" game (something that it arguably didn't become until the publication of Advanced Fighting Fantasy in 1989).

That said, the publication of the first book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! in 1983 certainly got my attention. Though not explicitly marketed as part of the Fighting Fantasy series, it nevertheless used the same basic game mechanics and format. This made it very easy for readers already familiar with the main FF line to make use of it without too much trouble. However, Sorcery! introduces a number of innovations that set it apart from its predecessors and convinced me that I should give it a go.

To begin with, the story Sorcery! is presented in four different books. Each volume is theoretically playable without reference to the others, but, taken together, the four books forms a continuous narrative that builds on what came before. Rather than rolling up a new character for each book, as one did in other Fighting Fantasy books, the reader of Sorcery! can use the same character from book to book – assuming he survives, of course. This continuity of character might not seem like a big deal, but, at the time, it certainly was. I don't believe any other Fighting Fantasy book did this and the Lone Wolf series, which was quite similar to Sorcery! in this respect, would not appear until 1984.

Another innovation of this series was the capacity to play either a warrior or a wizard. A warrior character was in no way different from the character one typically played in FF books. A wizard, meanwhile, was a rather different experience, thanks in no small part to The Sorcery Spell Book companion volume. The Spell Book describes forty-eight different spells for use with the gamebooks. Each spell had a three-letter name, such as ZAP, which created a lightning bolt or SIX, which created a mirror image of the caster. Spells cost Stamina to cast, limiting the number a wizard could use in the course of a book, since Stamina doubles as your character's hit points. 

More interestingly, the player of a wizard is expected to study the spell book and commit as many of its three-letter spell codes to memory as possible before playing through any of the other books. Referring to the book during play or writing down any of the codes is tantamount to cheating. It's an interesting and immersive way of balancing the use of magic in Sorcery! and I must say I thought it was quite clever when I first encountered it (though I will sheepishly admit to having peaked at the Spell Book occasionally in my initial playthroughs). 

In addition to the Spell Book, Sorcery! consists of four gamebooks: The Shamutanti Hills, Kharé – Cityport of Traps, The Seven Serpents, and The Crown of Kings. Together, they present the situation in which the reader's character finds himself. An evil archmage has stolen an ancient magical artifact known as the Crown of Kings. The Crown grants its wearer supernatural charisma. The archmage intends to make use of it to unite a lawless region under his control and then launch an attack against the civilized nations of the Old World. The reader's character sets out to stop him; his journey takes place over the course of the four books of the series, with each one presenting another portion of it before he finally confronts the archmage in his home territory. 

In terms of its story, Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is nothing special – a salmagundi of fantasy tropes and clichés that we've all seen many times before. However, their presentation is strangely evocative, helped in no small part by the moody artwork of John Blanche, who'd later go on to define much of the world of Warhammer for Games Workshop. Indeed, there are places here and there in Sorcery! where you can catch glimpses of Warhammer before the fact, so the series is of lasting interest from a historical point of view as well. Of course, it's also fun as a gamebook, too. Almost forty years on, I still look back on it very fondly. 

18 comments:

  1. Sorcery! was made into an excellent videogame series by Inkle, it's available both for Apple and Android devices. If you can't get your hands on the gamebooks, or you can and want to experience them in a different way, I thoroughly reccomend it.
    If more videogames worked like Inkle's take on Sorcery! I would play a lot more of them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I second this! The game series (one episode per book) is my daughter's favourite and she's 13. It's just become available on Nintendo Switch as one full game for all four books, so playing it large on your TV is possible. There's still a fair bit of John Blanche art in it too.

      Delete
    2. @Jacobi72, it is an incredibly faithful adaptation of the gamebook experience

      Delete
  2. The inclusion of the sorcery spellbook, and the 'requirement' to memorise the spells, was brilliant.

    It was perfectly targeted at its school age audience.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great article James! Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World, published in 1986 (same year of WFRP), describes a world which can be rightfully considered the "father" of Warhammer's Old World, with much of the same interactions between the forces of Chaos and those of humanity. Also worth mentioning the work being dome by Graham Bottley (Arion Games), who is keeping the AFF RPG alive, with a slew of new products and reprints available in PDF or POD at DTRPG. I love the setting and the simple rules, the bestiary is great but I have yet to try at the table.

    ReplyDelete
  4. There is a loose continuity running through Caverns of the Snow Witch, Forest of Doom, and Temple of Terror; it's implied that you play the same character in all three books.

    Similarly, it's suggested that you play the same character in Trial of Champions and Armies of Death.

    In both cases, there's no mechanical support for transferring your character from one book to another, as there is in Sorcery!. I think they wanted to keep things simple, as the main FF series seemed to be aimed at younger readers than Sorcery!.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It's been a while since I've played the series, but I seem to remember that it's impossible to win the final book if you play as a warrior rather than a wizard. There is probably a workaround in the text that I've forgotten, as this seems like wonky and unfair design otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
  6. In fact, there are two items that you need to collect in order to complete the book as a warrior. Both of them are available in the fourth book as well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There you go! I only remember the wizard ending; looks like a good excuse to give the series another try!

      Delete
  7. hey, mild quibble, doesn't the Fighting Fantasy RPG book from 1984 count as a full rpg? sitting on my shelf, looks like one to me

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's why I hedged and said "arguably" in my parenthetical comment above. You're right, of course, that it probably does qualify as a full RPG, but it's not much more complex than the one presented in the FF gamebooks, is it?

      Delete
    2. It *is* simple, but requires a GM and players, AND had a book of adventures published for it ("The Riddling Reaver"). It was also the first game I ever ran - for my grandfather, little brother and best friend at the time (though not all together). Then I started high school a year later and found people who played D&D...

      Delete
    3. I think arguments about complexity counting as "real" rpgs are a bad path, allowing me to dismiss tons of games I do not like ;)

      Delete
    4. also, I had no idea the riddling reaver existed, and NOW I NEED TO HAVE IT!

      Delete
  8. Love the Sorcery books! We use the spell book to replace the magic system in our Tunnels & Trolls game

    ReplyDelete
  9. I loved these books, and the magic system felt fun and unique at the time. It was nicely balanced in that the more generally useful spells cost more stamina, whereas the spells with a lower cost typically had material component requirements and tended to be of more limited use, but more effective in their specific use case. The books tended to be longer and more difficult as well.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The whole Sorcery! series was converted to a multiplayer campaign for the second edition of Advanced Fighting Fantasy with all the original artwork by John Blanche, which you can buy as PDF or POD here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/191768/Crown-of-Kings--The-Sorcery-Campaign

    ReplyDelete
  11. It's interesting that both the Sorcery! series and Joe Dever's Lone Wolf gamebook series, which also - unlike the regular Fighting Fantasy books up to that point - features an overarching story throughout the books where you keep your character and his stuff from book to book, started coming out in 1984. To me, Sorcery! always looked kind of like Fighting Fantasy's answer to Lone Wolf.

    Then again, Lone Wolf features a level-up mechanism (you get a new special skill for each book you finish) that Sorcery! lacks, so perhaps it's more likely that either Sorcery! came first or, perhaps most likely of all, it was a case of parallel evolution.

    ReplyDelete