FF1: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

Here is the complete graph of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

Tl;dr:  The idea here is to use directed graphs to provide optimal walkthroughs of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks; in this case, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.  Check out the beginning of the Deathtrap Dungeon post for tips on how to read the graph.

Overall Impressions

It only makes sense to go back and try graphing the first FF book to provide something like a baseline to compare the rest of the series against.  I didn't own Warlock as a kid, so all my impressions of it have come from the blogosphere and from finally cracking it open yesterday.  I didn't expect much more than a fairly generic dungeon crawl, and for the most part that's what I got.  It's your bog standard subterranean lair populated with refugees from Tolkien, the Brother's Grimm, and the Bronx Zoo.

The first thing that struck me about it was that it seemed thinner than any other FF book.  Most of the sections offered little more than a selection of corridors to choose from.  The second thing that struck me was the relative lack of instant-death sections:  a mere three, less than 1%!  That's a far cry from Deathtrap Dungeon's 31 (my current record holder).  That doesn't make it much easier to win in the end, as we'll see, but might make it easier to make progress through most of the story.

There were some nutty game mechanics that made it annoying to graph, like having to collect various keys stamped with numbers then summing the numbers on three such keys to "use" them.  It initially resulted in more than a dozen orphaned sections, so accounting for all of them took a bit of doing.  More on that later.

I've pieced together what I think is the optimal walkthrough.  The latter part of the story has quite a few threads, so the episodes listed here don't necessarily occur in the given sequence in all cases.

Episode 1:  The Start (1) to the Iron Portcullis (303)

Your first goal is to retrieve the Dragonfire spell and first of the three essential keys.  The key is bronze, surprisingly close to the entrance, and stamped with the number "99."

At the cave entrance, you immediately hit the first Fighting Fantasy's iconic T-junctions.  Go west (71).  You'll encounter an ORC and will have to Test Your Luck to avoid fighting him.  Regardless of what happens, you wind up at a door (301).  Press on northwards (208) until you reach another door.  It opens to a room with a table that's hiding a wooden box (397).  Open the box (240) and fight the SNAKE inside, disregarding that in real life you'd surely throw the box and snake across the room, and that any small snake, following its instinct, would surely try to flee from you or at least hide in a dark corner.  But this is FF, and treasure requires a blood sacrifice.

After you dispatch the snake, you notice the bronze key with '99' stamped on it (145).  Pick it up and proceed down the hall.

Oddly, this episode has one of two true orphan sections in the book:  Section 320 has no antecedent and simply says that you slam the door on something and run up the hall to 363.  My best guess is that it's a vestige of the ORC encounter in the next part of the story:  Section 370, in which you stumble on the ORCS, gives you the option to "slam the door quickly and run on up the passage," but it directs you to section 42, not 320.

At 363, you encounter a closed door that's doing a bad job suppressing terrible singing.  You bust it open (370) to find the aforementioned ORCS.  You put them to the sword for their lack of talent (116), search the room, and find a box marked "Farrigo Di Maggio" (378), evidently the name of one of the realm's more powerful wizards.  You open it to find the incantation for the Dragonfire spell (296) which, to clarify and avoid embarrassment, does not produce dragon fire but instead protects you from it.

Proceed to the next T-junction (42) and go east (113), northward (285), walk past both doors (314 > 300).  Each of these forks offers a mini-adventure to collect more items, none of which are essential.  You finally arrive at the iron portcullis (303).

Episode 2:  The Iron Portcullis (303) to the River (218)

The goal of this episode is to get the second of the three essential keys.

Pull the right lever (128) to raise the portcullis, enter, and go east (58).  

Eat some food if you want and proceed through 367 > 323 > 255, arriving at a door.  Open it to discover a metal statue with a single jeweled eye.  Try to take the jewel (338).  Predictably, the IRON CYCLOPS comes alive and attacks.  Once you kill it, pry out the jewel and discover a small key stamped with the number "111."  This is the second key.

Next is a straightforward fight against a BARBARIAN.  Dispatch him to find a mallet and stakes (hmm, vampires?).  Proceed to a nicely-furnished room (189) and examine the paintings (25).  One is a painting of Zagor, the eponymous Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and it's enchanted to mesmerize you.  "Fight" him by showing him the CYCLOPS's jeweled eye (31).  It will turn his gaze and earn you another SKILL point.  (This is called foreshadowing, kids.  Keep that jewel handy.)

The rest of this episode is inconsequential and inevitably herds you to the river.

Episode 3:  The River (218) to the Dragon (106)

This is a huge, tangled mess that takes up half the book and includes Warlock's infamous maze.  We'll navigate through it to pick up the third and final key.  To do that, we first have to find the boat house key.

First, we have to get across the river.  The easiest way is to pay the ferryman three gold pieces (218 > 3 > 272 > 7 > 214).  Take the passage to the northwest (271) and proceed through the door (336).  You're going to have to kill the dog (249) and then the man, who turns out to be a WEREWOLF (304).  Only then will you discover the boat house key.  Take it and go south to 66.

Head east along the river (99) to the boat house (383).  Of course, you have the key, so use it (80).  The SKELETONS will bum-rush you.  You have a 1 out of 3 chance to avoid a fight by pretending to be their new boss (SKELETONS are dumb).  Otherwise, you'll have some sort of altercation.  Regardless, when you get a chance, check their tools more carefully (34) to find a silver chisel and a mallet (you're really set against a vampire -- too bad we won't see one), then proceed to the next corridor (96).

In a weirdly non-interactive bit, you evade some more SKELETONS by hiding in a niche in the wall.  Then you encounter what turns out to be a sleeping WIGHT, evidently a deep sleeper since the clattering SKELETONS didn't wake him.  Test Your Luck to pass him without a fight.  Either way, you'll wind up in the next passageway (360), skipping quite a bit of useless narrative as you run down a staircase into a chamber containing three dead bodies (89 > 286).  You can search the first body (294) to pick up a few gold pieces, then split (107) to avoid disturbing the other two, which happen to be GHOULS.  (This must be the Undead District.)  Press onward to 197, where another portcullis drops behind you, cutting off your retreat.

And so, we enter the maze:

This is a ridiculous bit of highly-tangled narrative that plenty of other FF bloggers have rightly complained about.  I have to think that Ian Livingstone wrote this only because this was his first gamebook and he had little idea what readers would be willing to put up with.  It's reminiscent of Zork's notorious "maze of twisty little passages," but is actually quite a bit more complex.

The Zork maze map from www.deblauweschicht.nl/retrogaming/

Zork's maze has fewer vertices, just 20 or so, depending on what you count.  Warlock's maze has about 70.

An interesting mechanic in this part are the WANDERING MONSTERS.  Periodically, a section will tell you to flip to 161 to roll up a random encounter, have your fight, then flip back or to some other section.  To simplify the graph, section 161 only appears in the comments for sections where this happens.   For example, sections 14 and 234:

There is nothing to gain from these random fights, so we'll avoid them.

Press forward and go east (48 > 391).  Go through the passage in the east (52), then north (354), west (308), north again (54), and through the door (179) into the room with the MINOTAUR.  You'll have to kill him (258) to collect a few gold pieces and a red-colored key stamped with the number "111."  This is the third and last of the essential keys.

Backtrack to 54 > 308, and this time go south (160 > 267), south (246), north (329), east (299), north (359), west (385), and up (398).  Feel around the rock face to find the button and push it (364), climbing through the door that appears (373) and down to the crossroads (85).

Congratulations, you've made it out of the maze.  Go north to meet the DRAGON (106).

Episode 4:  The Dragon (106) to the End (400)

This is the endgame.

Obviously, you want to take the offer to hunt around in your pack rather than attack the DRAGON directly (126).  There's nothing in your pack, but it buys you time to remember the incantation for the Dragonfire spell (remember, the words magically disappeared from the piece of paper you found them on).  You cast the spell in time, of course, repelling the DRAGON's fire attack.  Rather than try a different attack, like stomping you into a thin paste, it opts to run away.

Shrugging, you proceed to the room with the "old man" (26 > 371 > 274).  Whatever way you approach him, he'll reveal himself as the WARLOCK and will assume his impressive "fighting stance" (358).  Again, fighting is senseless when you have magical artifacts, so look through your pack for a weapon to use (105).  If you're sharp, you'll recall that his portrait wasn't too fond of the CYCLOPS's jeweled eye, so pull it out (382).  Sure enough, it somehow fries the WARLOCK on the spot.

Firetop Mountain is seriously lacking in the boss fight department.

But not so fast:  To win, you have to break into the WARLOCK's treasure chest.  Fortunately, you collected the three keys that will do the trick: The one marked "99" and the two marked "111."  To "use" the keys you must sum their markings and turn to that section.  NASA assures me that the sum is 321, so go there and finally open the treasure chest (169 > 400).  Congrats, you've won.

Let's take a closer look at this part of the graph:

Pretty cool, isn't it?

This is a fairly sophisticated game mechanic, especially considering this is the first FF book.  The situation breaks down like so:  There are six numbered keys throughout the narrative, stamped "9," "66," "99," "111," a second one stamped "111," and "125."  The chest has three locks, each taking one key.  Mathematically, a selection from a set of distinct members is called a combination.  If you have some number n of things and want to choose a smaller number k from them and order doesn't matter, you have the case "n choose k" and the number of combinations is given by the formula

where the exclamation point represents the factorial function.  A factorial for some number x is just the sum of all the positive integers equal to or less than x; for example, 4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24.  So for our case of "6 choose 3" there are 20 possible combinations.  Here they are, just for fun:

You may notice a few of the sums in the rightmost column are duplicates.  This is due to the fact that twe have two keys inscribed with "111."  Removing the six duplicates gives us 14 unique sums, each of which nicely correspond to one of the "solution" sections in the book:

The book is at least kind enough to let you know if you've gotten one or two correct (198 and 182, respectively), though if you get none correct you're killed (200 > 387), and if you have fewer than three keys the story simply ends with you sitting down and having a good cry (not a joke).

So, the winning sum is 99 + 111 + 111 = 321, which leads to 169 > 400, but you might notice another winning section on the graph, 192, marked in purple:

192 is the other orphaned section; it has no antecedents.  Why is it here if none of the key combinations sum to 192?  It's probably a mistake, but if we want to be charitable we can suppose Ian Livingstone added it to make cheating a wee bit more difficult.  A kid trying to trace references backward from 400 might get to 192 and waste a lot of time trying to find keys that sum to it, only to get fed up and put an actual physical book down in favor of playing Atari or watching Saturday morning cartoons.  Gee, thanks, Ian!

Final Thoughts

Warlock is a tedious and derivative book in many ways but it set the standard and tone for all that was to follow, so any self-respecting survey of FF books can't afford to ignore it.

Much of the story is inconsequential.  The only items you really need are the three correct keys, but it's helpful to avoid boss fights by having the Dragonfire spell and the CYCLOPS's jeweled eye.  Everything else is gravy.