Credit where it's due

Originally published in 1985, Dragon Warriors returned in 2008 in a deluxe hardback edition. Here is my foreword to that volume:

As Dragon Warriors is coming up to its quarter century, it’s now almost as venerable as those classic original role-playing games—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, Traveller—in whose company it was once a cheeky whippersnapper.

Those who enjoy Dragon Warriors respond to something unique about it. Which sets us to wondering: what is the essence of Dragon Warriors? Most certainly that essence doesn’t lie in armour bypass rolls or other game mechanics. Indeed, the best Legend campaigns we’ve played in have used the GURPS system. And the rules mean nothing to those who live in the Dragon Warriors world, for whom ‘mystic’ and ‘warlock’ and ‘sorcerer’ are all interchangeable shorthand for a guy you really should steer well clear of.

So, is DW then defined by the world of Legend? We think not. Some of the great role-playing games are completely identified with an entire fantasy sub-creation. Tekumel and Glorantha spring to mind. The world of Legend, on the other hand, was always intended to be this world—only skewed.

Some parts are closer to the 10th century, others to the 14th, but the point was always to create a backdrop that would be recognizably and convincingly medieval. It was never about creating a place that was alien and strange. The familiarity of Legend is what gives players freedom to create their own stories there.

Not rules nor setting details, then. From a personal perspective, the important thing for us has always been the flavour. That, for us, is the essence of Dragon Warriors. Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme-park taverns, comedy dwarves and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made Legend as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with a European folktale sensibility. The flavour of what fantasy ought to be.

In Legend, faerie creatures are as amoral as cats and as heartless as children. A goblin in the rafters can spoil a whole night’s sleep, while a troll under the bridge ahead is reason to change your travel plans. And these creatures are rare. Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.

This is a world in which human emotion is just as strong as magic. The scenario ‘A Box of Old Bones’, which originally appeared in White Dwarf magazine in 1985 and which is bound to re-emerge before long, makes it clear that the miracles associated with holy relics are sufficiently rare and vaguely manifested that a fake relic can go unnoticed for years, getting by on the strength of its placebo effect and the willingness of clergy and believers to collude in seeing evidence where they want to see it. Our rule was never to evoke magic if a non-supernatural plot point would do.

Fantasy games like D&D—or, these days, World of Warcraft—belong to the George Lucas or Chris Columbus branch of role-playing. Dragon Warriors would be a movie by Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton. In literary terms, if D&D is Eragon, then DW is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Now that the righteous passion of youth is mellowed somewhat, we see that neither approach is right or wrong. Fantasy has room for all flavours. Take your pick.

Turning now to thanks, regrets, and reminiscences… Dragon Warriors owes its existence to Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, whose brainwave was to see that role-playing could be smuggled into bookshops. We were never that interested in solo gamebooks, but as soon as we saw the first Fighting Fantasy book we started planning the pitch for Dragon Warriors.

The game system too owes a debt to Livingstone and Jackson, interestingly enough. We had self-published a little RPG called Mortal Combat in the late 1970s. This came to the attention of Games Workshop, with whom we discussed a UK rival to D&D. Workshop’s working title for this was ‘Adventure’. The deal never happened, but it gave us an excuse to focus our role-playing sessions towards creating a set of rules and a world (in fact, several worlds) that ultimately evolved into Dragon Warriors.

With hindsight, there are things we would do differently. Oliver always argued strenuously against polyhedral dice, but Dave resisted a pure d6-based system—wrongly, as he now admits. As the whole point of Dragon Warriors was to be accessible to everybody, the low price-point of the books was pretty much invalidated when you had to go searching for twelve-sided dice. Democratization of the dice supply would also have helped to break the authority of the GamesMaster—a term we abhor, preferring ‘umpire’ or ‘referee’ as more indicative of the group story-creation that we feel good roleplaying should be.

Philippa Dickinson, our editor at Transworld, recognized that role-playing broke the normal publishing rules about age groups. That’s why the original DW books showed no sign of being targeted at 11-15 year olds, even though those were almost certainly our main market. We played it ourselves, after all, and our friends—and we were twentysomethings, as I hope were many of those who bought the books first time round.

Completists may wonder what other DW books are out there. We used Legend as the setting for our Blood Sword series of gamebooks (Knight Books, 1987-88), where we elaborated the end-of-time storyline that hangs over the world as the year 1000 approaches. Later, some of the story threads in Blood Sword were used for three novellas called The Chronicles of the Magi (Hodder, 1997). We’re still not sure if we consider Blood Sword to be canonical— or whether the year 1000 would really pass in Legend with much hysteria, and not a little magical mischief, but maybe sans the direct intervention of God Almighty. The flavour of DW can be grim and horrific as well as whimsical, but such grimness is usually on a personal level. A character’s soul can be in peril, lives can be threatened by treachery, individuals can be torn by loyalties and inner conflicts. And yet, in a Legend campaign, it is not usually the fate of the world that hangs in the balance. Not merely the fate of the world, at any rate.

At the risk of evoking comparison with Robert E Howard’s estate, whose discovery of new stories seems almost to have dwarfed Howard’s output while alive, there was also an entire world of DW rules and adventures, much more extensive than in the original six books. This is the Invaders & Ancients book, which was to have been incorporated into Chaosium’s Questworld project. When that deal failed to come about, we reworked the material into a massive sourcebook, called Ophis, that would have comprised some of DW books 7-12.

If you’re interested, a little glimpse of that continent of Ophis features in Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig (Insight, 2008). But that is all there is, alas, as in those days we did our work in nonelectronic form. The manuscript may have taken the train to Dumfries or been used to lay the cornerstone of a church or used to light a fire on an especially cold winter’s night—all those fates that the one and only copies of things are wont to suffer. But, like life, the loss is what makes the rest of it so precious.

For the resurrection of Dragon Warriors we particularly want to thank James Wallis, who needs no introduction as one of the great luminaries of gaming. We are honoured that Dragon Warriors is appearing as one of the first publications of Magnum Opus Press, and grateful to James for lavishing such attention to make it a truly mouth-watering edition. We also must thank Ian Sturrock for editing, revising and improving our original material into a new edition for a new era of gaming.

And we are most grateful to have such excellent companions in our ongoing exploration of Legend— in particular Steve Foster and Tim Harford. Steve has been with us from the very beginning, designed Mortal Combat and in fact originated several of the most colourful characters of the Dragon Warriors world including Tobias of the Knights Capellar and arch-wizard Cynewulf Magister. Tim has woven some of the eeriest, most exciting and most affecting campaigns of Ellesland and enhanced it immeasurably with his ideas. Along with them, we are privileged to have adventured with Aaron Fortune, Paul Gilham, Frazer Payne and Tim Savin—heroes of Legend, dear friends, stalwarts all.

Returning to it another seventeen years on, what would I add? First I'd have to reiterate my thanks to James Wallis. He had the idea of bringing Dragon Warriors back, assembled the very best team of writers, artists and editors for the job, and produced a stunningly beautiful series of books. Without him, DW would probably still be languishing in semi-oblivion.

I'm grateful to Lee Barklam for keeping the flame alight with his Cobwebbed Forest site, where you can find maps, scenarios, source material and links to other DW resources. Likewise profound and profuse thanks to Shaun Hately not only for The Library of Hiabuor but also for his contributions to DW lore as a writer. Along those lines, Red Ruin Publishing have continued James Wallis's work as a labour of love, producing Casket of Fays (not fey, please note; one is a noun, the other an adjective) and a number of fine scenarios and solo books (of which The Horned Ram by Paul Partington is the latest).

And I mustn't miss out the folks at Alkonost, who are not only bringing Dragon Warriors back in a French edition (Les Terres de Légende, that is) but are also publishing two all-new volumes. With more focus on the social and political aspects of the game than on old-style dungeon bashes, we can really say Alkonost are ushering DW into the 21st century.

Published game sessions, both audio and video, have helped spread awareness of Dragon Warriors, and I'm particularly indebted to Grim Jim Desborough and Roger Bell-West for making their games available online.

It would be remiss of me not to thank the artists who have brought Legend to life. I'm convinced that Jon Hodgson has visited Legend often; his illustrations seem to have come direct from my and Oliver's dreams. In the early days we benefited from the work of Bob Harvey, Leo Hartas, Russ Nicholson and Alan Craddock. And here is an especially beautiful map of Legend by Patrick Crusiau. There are many others, and we salute them all.

Khan say fairer than that

When I wrote the second Heroquest book, The Screaming Spectre, there was a fellow at Hasbro whose job was to liaise with me and Corgi Books, also publishers of Dragon Warriors and Knightmare. He didn't like what I was writing -- right from the first page of the manuscript, which bore the title The Singing Skull.

"Singing isn't very threatening," he complained.

"Maybe it is a little, when a skull does it."

"And there's that. How can a skull sing?"

"Er... You know this is fantasy, right?"

You can see our working relationship was off to a good start. His list of objections to the book, which included not enough references to Chaos, clothing descriptions not being "gothic" enough, and too much insistence on magic not being about lists of spells, ended with the doomful words, "It is difficult for me to see how this book could ever be made publishable."

Philippa Dickinson, who ran Corgi, called me up. "What are we going to do?" I told her I'd have a revised version of the manuscript ready in an hour or two. We sent that off and the Hasbro chap decided that it was all okay after all. Which just goes to show that if you're hit with what seems to be a multi-megaton criticism warhead, keep calm and carry on. Most likely your critic is just getting themselves in a panic over nothing much.

By the time I was working on the second book, Games Workshop had dashed in and changed my map of the Heroquest world to something more like their Warhammer map. It wasn't actually the same as the Warhammer one, but it had a lot of place names in common (including the curious "Trullheim" - did they know what a trull actully was?) and also made no sense in relation to the events of the first book, The Fellowship of Four. Go figure. Anyway, if you saw my sketch map of the original Heroquest world, here's the detailed version I did while writing Fellowship:

When I got to the third Heroquest book, The Tyrant's Tomb, which is this year's Xmas freebie, I knew to ladle on the Chaos references, objectionable though it was to have to go along with the lazy Chaos-as-evil theme of the Warquest, or do I mean Herohammer, series when I knew that in Mike Moorcock's original concept it was all so much richer, stranger and genuinely nastier.

Only one part of The Tyrant's Tomb fell afoul of the Hasbro liaison guy. I had a sequence in the novella where the barbarian hero has had to smash his way through a stone wall with a mallet. A serpent rears up and his arms are too weak after all that to wield his sword. So he headbutts the thing, smooshing it against the wall. "This doesn't seem credible," scoffed our man; "what if he kills the serpent with a flying kick instead?"

The headbutt was a sort-of homage to Conan biting a vulture's head off. I don't know about you, but the flying kick just doesn't seem as personal. Nor really what I expect Norse-type barbarians to be doing. So this time, sick of pandering to every whim, I threw my hands up. "We'll just cut that entire scene from the book," I told Philippa. It left the fourth chapter a bit short, but along with the novella you were also getting a 193-section gamebook adventure for your money. Or in this case, entirely free. Grab The Tyrant's Tomb here - and happy Christmas.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I'm mostly famous, insofar as I am famous, for writing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles books back in the early '90s. Because of them I was the bestselling author in the UK. I had the fan mail to prove it - cartloads of letters every week from all over the world. If you wrote and didn't get a reply, apologies. I set aside a day a week for writing to readers back then, but it wasn't enough to clear the backlog of TMNT mail.

My editor was the marvellous Philippa Dickinson, who also published Dragon Warriors. When a new TMNT book was being commissioned (the publisher usually contracted for two or even four at a time) I first of all had to produce a treatment (they're not just for movie scripts, whatever Wiki says) outlining the story. This one, Get That Ghost!, never got used - but if you're interested in the process of creating a franchise book, this is step one. Oh, and happy New Year!

GET THAT GHOST!

After an arduous night training exercise in Central Park, Splinter agrees that he needs to lighten up his ninja teaching and make it more fun. He sets the Turtles on a very unusual scavenger hunt to test their initiative.

The last item on the list to be scavenged is “a spook”, and the Turtles all independently wind up at a reputedly haunted house near the park around midnight. They get inside and are nervously exploring when an eerie sound makes them all jump—

“—And just a glimpse of a shadowy figure at the top of the stairs – particularly because the moonlight was visible right through it – sent us running like startled rats,” Leonardo breathlessly explains to his master when they reach home.

Splinter winces. “I believe you will find the proper expression is ‘startled cat’, Leonardo,” he says quietly. “Now, there are no such things as ghosts, my sons,” he tells them.

“Then what do you call those creepy, wispy things that glide around haunted houses scaring the pants off innocent turtles, master?” retorts Raphael.

“It was doubtless a trick of the moonlight, Raphael – perhaps reflected in a mirror. A good ninja does not hastily jump to extreme conclusions. Also, none of you wears pants.”

“I don’t get it,” says Michaelangelo. “Didn’t your list say for us to find a ‘spook’, Master Splinter?”

Splinter looks a touch embarrassed. “My handwriting is not always very readable, I know,” he admits. “I’d actually written ‘spoon’.”

Raphael instantly grabs a spoon from the sink. “I win the scavenger hunt!” he announces.

However, when the Turtles tell April about their weird experience the next day, she isn’t so skeptical as Splinter. “A reporter has to keep an open mind. My boss would say I’m crazy, but I say, if ghosts do exist then we ought to find out about it. Who’s for a return visit to that house tonight?”

The Turtles are none too keen at first, but they can’t let April down. They show her back to the house and take her to where they saw the apparition. Suddenly a ghostly figure walks right out of the wall beside April, and they all beat a hasty retreat. April keeps hold of her video camera, though, and when she later plays the tape back they get a closer look at the ‘ghost’. The face stirs a hazy memory with April, who checks the files at Channel 6 and comes up with a file on a Professor Crankel, who was a brilliant but eccentric scientist. The file says he died many years ago when a ray-gun that he’d developed backfired on him.

“So he must be a ghost!” cries Michaelangelo.

“Maybe, maybe not,” says April. “Would a ghost show up on video tape? I really think we’d better go for another visit.” She looks at their none-too-keen expressions and laughs. “Is this my intrepid band of heroes? You’re never afraid to face a hundred of Shredder’s soldiers. Surely one little bitty ghost doesn’t scare you?”

“Of course not,” snorts Leonardo. “A ninja is never afraid.”

“I’m a turtle, not a chicken,” says Raphael.

“Count me in,” adds Donatello.

“Uh, guys...” says Michaelangelo. “I’d love to come, but I don’t want to miss the midnight horror movie.”

“Relax,” April tells them. “We’re not going at midnight. There’s no time like the present.”

“Three o’clock in the afternoon?” says Donatello. “Aren’t ghosts usually asleep then?”

“Don’t argue with her, you dope,” whispers Raphael as they follow April out. “Do you want to be there when it’s awake?”

They return to house, but this time sneak in and manage to surprise the ‘ghost’. In fact Professor Crankel turns out not to be a ghost at all. He explains to them how the accident with his ray-projector years ago partly transferred him to another dimension, so that ever since he has been ghost-like and unable to touch anything solid.

“Like the ray-projector that Krang uses to teleport troops from Dimension X,” says Michaelangelo. “It must be a hard life.”

“That’s why I live as a recluse in this old house,” says the professor. “I can’t mix with normal people anymore. I can’t touch anything. I can’t even put on any clothes apart from what I was wearing when the ray struck me.”

The Turtles are sorry for him, but then they have a lucky accident. While Leonardo is making some tea, Michaelangelo starts playing with the ray-projector and inadvertently fires it at the teapot. That, too, turns intangible and none of them can pick it up – until the professor saunters in and absent-mindedly pours himself a cup.

“You can touch anything else that’s been treated with the ray!” Donatello realizes. “All you have to do is turn it on anything that you’re going to use, and then you’re okay.”

As the Turtles and April leave, the professor thanks them for their help. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything the first couple of times you came round, but I was so startled and you ran off before I had a chance. I hope I didn’t scare you fellas too much.”

“No way,” replies Raphael. “There’s only one thing that scares us, and that’s missing our dinner. See you around, Prof!”

A fresh start for the Year of Wonders

I resisted Facebook for the longest time. It’s not that I don’t like tech, I just don’t care for people that much. (Only kidding. I like people just fine. It’s the pet photos and soccer chat I wanted to avoid.)

Finally I’ve had to succumb, and the reason is that Leo Hartas and I needed to set up a Facebook page for our comics saga Mirabilis: Year of Wonders (If you need a this-meets-that, try Tintin hunts Fantastic Beasts with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman).

This is part of our big push to get the Mirabilis project moving again. The story was originally serialized in weekly British anthology comic The DFC, published by Random House. When The DFC folded, our story was left unfinished but our rights were tied up in a complicated contractual tangle. It took me months of increasingly desperate negotiation to find a way out of that limbo, made all the more fraught by the fact that none of the people involved in the mess would even return my calls. Luckily I knew Philippa Dickinson, the original publisher of Dragon Warriors and one of the truly nicest people you could hope to work with, who by now had risen to be the head of RH’s children’s publishing division. She pulled strings with the powers that be and got me and Leo our rights back.

Thus unfettered I could stop chewing my nails, but it was still far from plain sailing. We secured a publisher for Mirabilis, but though they did a beautiful job of the production they failed to get copies into any shops. I had to lug a couple of bags stuffed with copies to the Gosh! Comics store in London – if you bought one of those, hang onto it like a Penny Black with Queen Vic in a hipster beard, because they were almost the only copies that ever saw the light of day. The rest, I hear, went astray between the printer (in Bosnia) and the distribution warehouse (in Lancashire) and may now be propping up wobbly café tables somewhere in Germany.

So, back to the drawing board. A comics publisher reached out, but the deal they offered was like a handshake from Don Corleone. We were expected to sign over all rights in perpetuity to them, even though there was no obligation for them to keep the book in print. After the epic struggle with Random House there’s no way Leo and I could accept terms like that. As a creator, all you have is your work. You can't let other people lock you out of it.

What about Random House themselves? Well, Philippa had retired by this point, and the mildest way to put it is that having escaped the clutches of the contract we didn’t really have a lot of friends there. We were in our gulag and, at any other time in history, there we might have stayed. But this is the 21st century, right - with social media and crowdfunding and shit. So Leo and I have spent the last few weeks getting ready for a full and concerted relaunch of this mighty fantasy saga. Our plans include:

• a Patreon page where aficionados can come and pledge as little as $1 a month to help fund new instalments. Pages of the comic go up there Mondays and Fridays with higher-level backers getting access to backstage blog pieces and other goodies.
• a new website where everyone can read the comic absolutely free – just a little way behind the paid-up supporters on Patreon, who also get higher-res versions of the art.
• the aforementioned Facebook page where you can get updates on Mirabilis and any other books, comics, movies or games that we thing might interest you.
• a Twitter account with daily instalments of the comic.

And we’re toying with the idea of a Kickstarter to fund a Mirabilis gamebook. Or app. Maybe a boardgame. Possibly all three and - I dunno, a roleplaying game too? The Patreon backers may get a say in that. The exciting thing is that it's a community where everyone gets a voice.

Here’s the thing. We could really use your support – which is, after all, the whole point and rationale of what we’re trying to do now. We’re bypassing the publishers and distributors and going straight to the people whose opinion and backing count most. That’s you, we hope. The readers. Already we've got backing from Jason Arnopp, the 21st century's Stephen King, from the Jedi Master of gamebooks Stuart Lloyd, and from musician, artist & game designer Frazer Payne, among others. Good company to be in, and an absolutely priceless vote of confidence when we're starting a new venture like this. Thanks, guys.

If you can spring for a few dollars to actually fund the work, then you’re our BFFs till the sun dies – but even if not, a like on Facebook costs nothing and can really help boost interest. You never know, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

In a dragon's eye

It was the early 1980s, and children's publishers really didn't know what hit them. For decades they'd been turning out nice cozy books based on their mental picture of a short-trousered scamp with a cap gun in one hand and a bottle of ginger pop in the other. In fact, even that view may be too generous. Hardly a single children's editor was male, or under forty, and mostly I think all those nice ladies just wrote boys off as not wanting to read books. Their ideal reader was sweet, quiet and mild as milk. So, not really like most girls at the time either.

They got a rude awakening. Boys did want to read books, and tomboys too - just not the books the publishers had been churning out. They wanted blood, guts, gore, mayhem, violence, and gutsy action. And most of all they wanted to be the hero.

The younger generation of editors understood this. Philippa Dickinson was twenty-six years old when she commissioned The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A few years later, when she was publishing the Dragon Warriors series, Oliver Johnson and I were keen to stress that the covers should not give the sense of being "you know, for kids" and Philippa agreed about that. Dubious as she may have been about the buxom babes in the Alan Craddock paintings we showed her, she got that boys at that age (they were, let's face it, most of them boys, our readers back then) didn't see themselves as little kids any more. As this post by @burnedfx puts it: "Which cover would appeal to kids and which one is grandma going to pick up for little Bobby?"

Before Dragon Warriors, Oliver and I had been published by Grafton Books. I appreciated our editors there - Angela Sheehan and Gillian Appleby - but they definitely belonged to the old school of kids' publishing. I managed to get artwork by Russ Nicholson for one book, The Eye of the Dragon, and we were mostly lucky with Bruno Elletori's cover paintings, but I've ranted about that puppyish dragon logo before. And don't even get me started on the covers we were given by Pacer Books in the USA. "For young adults," said their logo (and that wasn't a term you heard much in the mid-'80s) but look at that painting in the middle! A boy in a frigging skirt. Wearing tennis shoes. Holding a little blue ball. By Azathoth, why? Especially when you consider that the rest of the image is fine, and if only little Bobby wasn't there in his pretty little dress then it could have worked.

Now compare my two covers to what Ian Livingstone got for his own Eye of the Dragon book. Okay, his came out twenty years after the Golden Dragon series, but even so. The salt in the wound is that I bet his cover cost a lot less too. As so often, less is more.

As we're talking about The Eye of the Dragon, you may be wondering why it wasn't reissued along with the other five Golden Dragon books last year. No? Well, I'll tell you anyway. Reviews by Mrs Giggles, the aforementioned burnedfx, and on Demian Katz's site point out some serious flaws in the book. Most egregious of all, it seems that the big finale depends on a one-in-three guess. Ulp.

If that's really true, I owe an apology to an entire generation, as a random choice like that would be hard to justify right at the start of a book, but is criminally wrong at the end. And while I'm checking that, and fixing it if need be, I might as well tinker with the magic system and make a bit more of the protagonist's unusual background. So The Eye of the Dragon will probably come out later this year in quite a different form. And now that there's a Fighting Fantasy book of that name, I think I'll change the title to something more interesting too. And ditch the Dungeons and Dragons brand of fantasy setting while I'm at it. And...

On reflection, it could be next year.

All fired up

If you're a real gamebookwyrm (see what I did there?) you may be familiar with the cover below, but probably not the one on the left. It's the Danish cover for The Temple of Flame, my second-ever gamebook, published all the way back in 1984.

Oliver Johnson is co-credited but actually he had nothing to do with writing the book. I think the original plan was that he and I were to work together on both The Temple of Flame (for Golden Dragon) and The Lord of Shadow Keep (for the Fighting Fantasy series). Then, following a drunken evening in a Soho bar between Oliver and Angela Sheehan of Grafton Books, the Golden Dragon contract was extended from two to six titles. So I volunteered to write Golden Dragon 1 and 2 while Oliver delivered The Lord of Shadow Keep, then he and I would split writing duties on the other four.

Yeah, plans... What actually happened was that Shadow Keep got moved to being Golden Dragon book 3. I didn't know, and more importantly neither did Philippa Dickinson, the editor at Puffin in charge of Fighting Fantasy. The first I heard about it was an irate phone call. Luckily Philippa and I smoothed it over and went on, of course, to work together on Dragon Warriors, Heroquest, Knightmare, Captain Scarlet and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I prefer the Danish logo. The dragon actually looks dangerous and reptilian, in contrast to the cute li'l puppy look on the British version. But Bruno Elletori's cover painting captures the spirit of the text better than Peder Bundgaard's more comic-booky depiction of Damontir the wizard.

People say Temple is a tough adventure. I have tweaked a couple of the combats to make them less punishing, but the biggest bone of contention has always been the fight with the hero's mirror-self. Surely a fifty-fifty duel? Not if you're smart - and that's all I'm saying.

The Temple of Flame is being re-released by Fabled Lands Publishing as part of our big republishing program. This time we've kept all of Leo Hartas's original illustrations, which means extra pages and so a slightly higher cover price than The Castle of Lost Souls and Curse of the Pharaoh. But well worth it if you want a classic example of a "dungeon adventure" gamebook from the heyday of the genre. Of course, I would say that.