Fighting Fantasy on the table top

The original 1986 cover of Titan

When I was growing up my oldest brother was a huge Fighting Fantasy fan. Throughout the initial publication run from 1982-1995 he collected all of them, as well as the wider background books and role playing expansions. Many years ago he moved to the US and they were left to languish in boxes at our parent's house. That is until recently when I rescued them. And I am so glad I did because they are as wonderful as I remember and, for me, they hark back to a simpler pre-internet age where imagination was king. 

I remember I particularly used to enjoy reading Titan, the first of the background books. Up until the publication of Titan, the wider world of the Fighting Fantasy novels was only referenced in the various game books and associated maps. There was wan't anywhere that brought this all together until Titan and thumbing through the book enabled my imagination to roam across the great continent of Allansia, the location of the majority of the Fighting Fantasy books, as well as the settled and more peaceful continent of the Old World, and the chaos wasted continent of Khul. 

Fast forward to 2020 and I was reading the excellent gaming blog Somewhere the Tea's Getting Cold during the height of the COVID lockdowns. On the blog there was a brilliant series of entries relating to a campaign that re-fought the Trolltooth Wars on the tabletop. The Trolltooth Wars was the first novel set in the Fighting Fantasy world and centred around the conflict between the long established Kingdom of Craggen Rock of Balthus Dire and the rising power and ambition of Zharradan Marr’s undead empire. The ensuing war promised to see the victor’s army overrun both the Vale of Willows and the noble city of Salamonis. Only the combination of intervention by Chadda Darkmane and the destructive nature of Dire and Marr ensured that the war would end with both protagonists banished from the earthly plane and a peace of sorts restored to northern Allansia. The creation of this conflict across the wargaming table really sparked my interest in bringing the world of Fighting Fantasy to the table top and I began to think of doing something similar.

My first task was to think of a setting and I once again reached for my copy of Titan. There was a particular illustration which I always used to love and that was of Queen Perriel on the ramparts of the besieged city of Vymorna. Vymorna, so Titan tells us, is an ancient city in Allansia on the banks of the river Vymorn. Once a prosperous trading port, over the years it has increasingly become isolated and, at the time of writing Titan, is besieged by the inexorable forces of the Lizardman Empire spreading northwards from the Swamplands of Silur Char. I decided that this would be the basis of my campaign and I would wind the clock back to the point at which the Lizardmen armies crossed the river Vymorn and see if the defenders could prevent the fall of the city.

As this was going to be my first table top fantasy campaign I needed to find some suitable rules. This was quickly solved by picking up a copy of the generic fantasy, and miniature agnostic, Dragon Rampant rules by Daniel Mersey. These are published by Osprey as part of their Wargames series and are available here in physical or digital copies. Dragon Rampant, whose author also cites Fighting Fantasy as an inspiration, allows the gamer to design units from a list of troop types and then further customise them by adding characteristics and abilities. The gaming mechanics themselves are both simple and elegant and require minimal rulebook consultation in game which is definitely a plus for me!

With both the setting and the mechanics identified I went about designing the campaign, defining the units that would be involved and then, the really time consuming element, collecting and painting the miniatures. And there is more to come on that!