Lich Lord, Legend-style

Gamebook critic and writer Oliver Whawell writes to say, "I was the perfect age for Warlock of Firetop Mountain when it was released, and quickly became a fan of gamebooks. The Fighting Fantasy books developed alongside my reading age, but then they started to feel a bit immature - and along came Blood Sword: great writing and a challenging game, especially if you adhered to the rules.

"Inspired by the excellent work of Red Ruin Publishing (and a throwaway comment from Wayne Imlach) I wanted to see if Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors were compatible. It took a little while but I created a formula that would turn a warrior’s stats into a knight's, and an enchanter’s stats into a sorcerer's, and then applied this throughout. It worked for humanoid opponents remarkably well, so I just had to find modifications for animals, demons, and giants/dragons. I did cheat with a couple of extreme encounters in book 5; other than that the numbers don’t lie.”

The complete set of stat blocks that Oliver kindly provided for all five Blood Sword books is a bit much to reproduce in just one blog post here, so I'll release them in installments. To get started, though, Oliver also calculated the DW stats for The Keep of the Lich Lord, and you can download those here.

If you're a Fighting Fantasy fan, don't miss the latest issue of Casket of Fays, which is free on DriveThruRPG and has stats conversion from AFF, rules for Rhino-Folk (a critter from Out of the Pit, apparently), and the Volucreth as a Fighting Fantasy species, as well as Mercanian runesmiths and a complete town (I do love maps) in Outremer.