City of Thieves (Fighting Fantasy)

Product Information

Though having said that, there's one unwelcome instance where if you stop to do one thing, the book doesn't then allow you the chance to duck down a side alley you had noticed a moment before. I feel future entries in the series will struggle to match City of Thieves for atmosphere, playability and excitement.

The paragraphs with a full page illustration were: 1, 17, 27, 31, 40, 62, 80, 88, 113, 135, 148, 171, 178, 182, 203, 224, 239, 250, 265, 271, 292, 307, 319, 329, 344, 349, 356, 370, 385 and 398.

Once again, read in the currently available Scholastic edition, with artwork vastly inferior to the originals. It was later republished by Wizard Books in 2002 and 2010, and again in 2017 by Scholastic Books with new illustrations by Vlado Krizan. An action-packed, twisty-turny Fighting Fantasy novel set in one of that world's most notorious cities - Port Blacksand, a place that makes inner city London look like the Bahamas. Trading spells and chasing Balthus Dire round his office, or that wily red dragon at the end of Talisman of Death - now those are satisfying boss fights.

Unfortunately, when we got to the tattooist we were ONE GOLD SHORT of affording the white unicorn in a yellow sun forehead tattoo we needed to carry forward. This time along we are whisked into a shady town of Port Blacksand with the mission of defeating the evil sorcerer Zanbar Bone! However, there are a number of other objects that you need to collect (such as the Skeleton Key) which will make your quest significantly easier.It is actually a reasonably easy book, and while they talk about a one true path, it is quite easy to find it. I guess it is also something pushed down upon us from above, so that we will always see our country as being the white, and anything opposed to our country as black. Rowland reviewed City of Thieves for the January 1984 issue of White Dwarf, rating the title 8 out of a possible 10. Deciding that it’d be a good idea to head to the market district, I took a path leading through some narrow alleys, and was attacked by two thieves.

So you've trawled all the way through the book to find you have a totally random 2 in 3 chance of failing for no fault of your own. To a culture that sees a corpse as nothing more than a diseased shell to be destroyed, with the spirit being disconnected from it, then maybe it is not. I took just the correct amount of time on it so the book did not overstay it's welcome and putting everything you learned together to complete a final run is always awesome. One of the interesting things is that these books tend to be very black and white, particularly with the fantasy ones.

I got way too invested in this for several days and second only to almost getting hit by a car on my bike in the dark. Unfortunately it is not necessarily the case because there are instances where an immoral government uses this concept to bring the population on side. This is a solo outing from Ian Livingstone, who devised some of the series' best adventures, and it's another winner. Stopping in at a local clairvoyant (who, in FF books, are legitimately able to see the future, and not simply hucksters skilled in cold reading like they are in real-life), I was told that it’d be useful to look under the nearby bridge for Nicodemus. I had only two things left to do – get into the sewers so that I could kill a hag and take some of its hair, and get a stupid tattoo on my face.

There's also the one little detail of the recipe kill the final boss being wrong - you have to select two out of three items and there is no way of knowing which two.I've still awarded 5 stars, because Port Blacksand itself is so intriguing and evocative and the bulk of the book is magnificent, the very best a gamebook can be. Having to pick the right mixture after Nicodemus' senior moment adds uncertainty but it's just a guess.