The sorcerer from the flaming mountain
The sorcerer of the flaming mountain (English original title: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain ) was an early game book developed by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson . It was first published in 1982 and was very successful commercially. The success led to numerous successors and the establishment of the game book genre. In the English-speaking world it appears in a collective series with the collective name Fighting Fantasy .
action
The player goes into a fantasy world in the mountain in which the eponymous sorcerer lives. He can make decisions, the respective short text sections (the book consisted of 400) then refer to other text sections. The player or reader walks through the Flaming Mountain according to the alternatives he chooses, until he meets the sorcerer and duels with him.
development
Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson began selling game material for pen & paper role-playing games in 1975 , in particular for the game system Dungeons & Dragons . Its game system, like other game systems of the time, seemed too complicated to them. The concept of a solo adventure in role-playing games existed even before the sorcerer from Flaming Mountain - Ken St. Andre had developed a solo adventure for the Tunnels & Trolls game system and published it in 1975. Playing through such adventure game systems, however, required the possession of the very comprehensive and complicated sets of rules.
Livingston and Jackson simplified their system to such an extent that with the help of two dice and extremely few character traits, the book could be played through for a single player or reader. They first offered the concept of the book to Penguin Verlag in 1980 , at which point the concept still provided for numerous illustrations . For reasons of cost, however, the publisher urged a stronger text orientation. In 1982 the sorcerer appeared .
Commercial win
The book sold very successfully , according to a radio report on BBC One in the UK . Rights to the book were sold internationally. Thienemann-Verlag acquired the rights for the German-speaking countries and called the book a Fantasy Adventure Game Book and launched it in Germany in 1983. There, 80,000 copies were sold in six months alone. The book was even more successful in Japan , where the Shakai Shiso-Sha publisher sold 250,000 copies in the first year and sold a total of two million copies.
The character of the warlock, later named Zagor , became one of the most famous characters in the fighting fantasy world. He also appeared as the main antagonist in the anniversary volume Return to Firetop Mountain (vol. 50) as well as in Legend of Zagor (vol. 54) and the derived four-part novel series The Zagor Chronicles , written by Ian Livingstone and Carl Sargent (first published in 1993). In the supplementary volume Titan , which describes more detailed information about the history, geography, peoples and customs of the world of Fighting Fantasy, Titan, a short biography is given in which Zagor is described as a human; in the Zagor Chronicles, however, he is retroactively described as the descendant of a female demon.
Adaptation
In 1987 the Schmidt Spiel + Freizeit publisher brought out a board game for 2 to 6 players, ages 12 and up. Conceived by author Steve Jackson, it appeared under the same name " The Sorcerer of the Flaming Mountain" . The game plan and the actions (encounters, artifacts, treasures, keys) in this deduction game are based heavily on the book.
Web links
- Konrad Lischka : Printed Gameboy , Spiegel-Online from August 4, 2009
- The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1986) on BoardGameGeek , accessed May 23, 2018