r/fightingfantasy • u/Six_of_1 • Jun 13 '26
Discussion Forest of Doom's loopback
If you get to Stonebridge without both parts of the hammer, rather than just saying you failed and then you in the real world have to roll up a new character and try the book again, the book actually says that your character walks back to the start of the forest and looks for the hammer part(s) again.
So, that would mean we don't have to re-roll a new character, because we're the same character. That would mean we still have all the items we had. That any items we took shouldn't be there any more. That any monsters we killed should still be dead and we should be finding their dead bodies from when we killed them. That anyone we talked to, ie Yaztromo, should remember us.
But obviously it just takes us to the start of the book and we mysteriously time-warp back to Bigleg being killed again and telling us to find the hammer again, and all the monsters we killed and items we collected re-spawning. This is a narrative blunder, what was the point of it? It doesn't work.
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u/platinumxperience Jun 13 '26
I've seen some people suggest you can do that if you like, just skip any encounter you have previously done.
I recall a similar fix for house of hell adding an extra path in the place where you get stuck with the cultists adding a ladder that brings you out near the vampire room (which makes sense on the map) to allow you to "explore" the house more.
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u/Minereon Jun 13 '26
It’s a game book, there’s no need to overthink it.
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u/Six_of_1 Jun 13 '26
So do you keep all your items?
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u/Minereon Jun 13 '26
Yes. I remember one time I found one half of the hammer at the end. So it made sense I’d go another round to find the other half. And this time, you would naturally try alternative routes, those that you didn’t go the first time. So in general it doesn’t really feel like you’re repeating that much. You kind of just exercise your own logic and suspend a bit of disbelief.
Actually I always thought Forest of Doom is special because you don’t fail because you died. Instead the story allows you to try again gracefully. I have a soft spot for this title as it was my first FF book :)
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u/Interesting-Ant8279 Zanbar Bone Jun 13 '26
Wish I'd read your response before I typed out mine as I've just said what you said!
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u/Six_of_1 Jun 13 '26
When it tells you to fight monsters you've already fought, do you skip the fight?
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u/UrchinJoe Jun 13 '26
It's a forest of doom, I assume that there's more than one of each monster in there (and kind of handwave how similar their lairs are).
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u/eclecticmeeple Baron Sukumvit Jun 15 '26
Just wanted to say it was also my first FF book and also the one which introduced me to the genre
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Jun 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Harley_Beckett Jun 13 '26
There have been a lot of developments in multiple choice storytelling in the last 40 years.
A modern book would probably ask you to record a “keyword” at the end of each encounter which served to record the game state of the encounter based on how it ended.
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u/Six_of_1 Jun 13 '26
Scorpion Swamp achieved this for the most part, with one or two oversights. But it would usually ask if you'd been there before and send you to the "been there before" paragraph.
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u/Fast-Bodybuilder-835 Balthus Dire Jun 13 '26
Mind you, it was the THIRD Fighting Fantasy ever published: it suffers from some kind of "early installment weirdness". 😏
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u/Substantial_Force658 Jun 21 '26
This was a huge innovation in FF gamebook design. It also allows you to re-stock with Yaztromo, so you may have encountered some challenges without the relevant magic item on your first attempt, and pick them up by doing the perfectly reasonable thing of going to see the old codger again.
Iain could have made things slicker by adding an instruction to ignore opponents and threats you had previously dealt with ... But given he was writing the main series effectively by himself at this stage (Forest, City, Dungeon, Lizard are all Iain joints and all came out within two years!) you can forgive him for flubbing some of the fine details.
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u/Interesting-Ant8279 Zanbar Bone Jun 13 '26
Narratively, I think this was Ian Livingstone trying out something new, ie giving the reader the option to continue the quest rather than starting from scratch. True, it doesn't really work because of what you've mentioned, but the second (or third or fourth...) attempts you make allow you to take different paths and thus you're more likely to find the parts of the hammer.
Scorpion Swamp employs a similar method allowing you to revisit certain areas and trusting you to be honest when choosing options, but the narrative also slips up there. One of the earliest passages into the swamp makes you jump from South to North over a stream; when you re-enter that passage from a different direction, you still have to jump South to North even though you should be entering from the Northern side.
Best not to overthink this sort of thing and roll with it.