Lieutenant by Jim Webster - taking inspiration from a tiny forgotten gamebook

With the arrival of a hospital bed, my mother has now moved into the room I've been using as an office. In the course of moving various books and papers out of the room, I found this tiny little gamebook that came free when I bought a copy of Miniature Wargames in (I believe) 2002. I can't remember the issue it came with and no amount of google searching has revealed anything more about it. I wonder if anyone else can shed any light on it - mine can't be the only extant copy, surely?

I don't remember ever playing it at the time, so to try and get into a more relaxed mood for Christmas I played it through a few times today.

It's set, broadly speaking, in the Napoleonic era, and you're a Lieutenant of Horse in an unspecified regiment of the English army. You allocate points to a range of abilities, spanning the range of what an "Officer and Gentleman" should do: Dancing, Horsemanship, German Language, French Language, Leadership, Long firearm, Pistol shooting, Polite Conversation, and Swordsmanship. The game mechanic is pretty simple; at certain points in the game you're asked to roll a d6 against a particular ability in order to perform tasks.

The introduction states: "Your regiment is stationed in the Low Countries, the army is besieging a town of some note and the cavalry are of course providing a screen to cover the army and detect any relieving force. Somewhere to the North there are allied forces which are supposed to be marching to your aid. Your regiment is thrust out some distance from the army and is supposed to be covering a probably axis of the enemy advance. Understrength, as always, the troop is down to a bare 50 men commanded by the Captain, able seconded (or so you like to think) by your good self. The Captain is somewhat indisposed, nothing worse than a stinking head cold, but enough to ensure that when he wants a patrol to head out on a miserable afternoon, it is your good self that will lead it. He wants you to take a Corporal of Horse and nine troopers and head South East to check that there is still no sign of enemy forces in that direction." You make a number of choices that determine the success (or not) of your mission.

Weighing in at only 16 pages and 40 paragraphs (42 if you count the introduction and end, which are properly speaking part of the game), it's a tiny gamebook. Considering this, it has remarkable replay value, as depending on the choices made, it's quite possible to have discovered very different things, to have returned to camp completely misunderstanding the situation, or ideally have achieved one or more distinct strategic objectives (or blundered through and failed miserably). It's written in such a way that you can think you've done something truly heroic - until you return to camp and discover the extent of your cock-up. Which is quite an achievement for Jim Webster to have squeezed all that into such a micro-adventure.

I actually played it 4 times through. Using the simple skill allocation system, each time I generated a distinct personality of officer to try and adopt a different mindset when making decisions.
Stephen the Scholar: a young man with the benefit of a classical education, and who had been on the path towards Holy Orders until circumstances took a very different turn. A talented linguist, but cautious in the face of the enemy and even more cautious in the presence of the ladies. His caution meant that he didn't blunder and completely misunderstand the situation, but neither did he see much action.

Sebastian the Seducer: living on charisma and not much else, he tries to talk himself into, around, or out of any concievable situation. And he managed to talk himself into his Captain's good books, just about.

Samson the Sportsman: brash, rides like he's with the boxing day hunt. Rode straight into danger and damn near got himself killed.

Samuel the Sharpshooter: a master of the pistol and rifle, but solitary, finding it easier to commune with his weaponry than communicate with his men. This was to be his undoing.

At the end of the 4 playthroughs I had pretty much exhausted the available pathways through. Looking at the final page which gives you the information to evaluate how well you've done, I found myself wondering whether something's broken because it seems impossible to achieve the best combination of outcomes (unless I'm very mistaken - which is quite possible - the pathway to one strategic success seems to preclude the other). But even so, there are a range of outcomes and it's an interesting opportunity to walk in the boots of a Napoleonic-era junior officer.

As somebody who enjoys the narrative and roleplaying aspect of wargames, it really got me thinking about how little I reflect on the personalities of junior officers in the games I play. It's all very well being the big general and taking a omniscient overview of the battlefield, but will the cavalry really press home their charge under the leadership of the bookish Stephen? Will Samson forget that he's not on the playing fields anymore and unwisely decide to throw caution to the wind? So this little adventure has definitely offered me some inspiration. I look forward to experimenting a bit more with unit leader's personalities in the next big game I play.

Happy Christmas, and may your stamina never fail!

Been very busy with work-writing once again and so games with teeny tiny toy soldiers have had to take a back seat. But nice to have a break for Christmas, and especially nice to receive a couple of gaming-related prezzies

Dragon Rampant rules and a Wood Elf Glade Guard box from my parents. Always difficult to "guess" what kind of toy soldiers someone might want for a present, but it can be rewarding too to get something you hadn't specifically had in mind... Now I'll be honest, the plastic wood elves were never really on my radar, and left to my own devices I'd never have bought them. But some of the pieces in this box set are fantasic converion fodder - it even includes little woodland sprites on the sprue! Love it! The banner poles and cloaks and leafy bits are brilliant and very useful, and the heads are just what I need for headswaps. One of the things that's held me back from doing more conversions has been lack of bitz, so a plastic set like this is a godsend.

And that leaves the third prezzie... what's the pile of papers? Well, now that's something REALLY special. The missus and my son have been plotting and scheming for the past month or so working on a top secret project and they've written me a whole new Fighting Fantasy Fleeing Fantasy adventure Town of Terror (or, Forest of Pies). I've been going through some of the Fighting Fantasy books with my son - Forest of Doom, City of Thieves, Island of the Lizard King (I skipped Deathtrap Dungeon because it's a bit too... errr... Deathtrappy for him at his age). He's clearly taken them to heart, and his long-suffering mother has clearly internalised enough of it from hearing us go through them over and over again until we reach those magical words "Turn to 400.." because the adventure they've designed for me is pitch-perfect. It's about 280 entries in total, though I couldn't help but notice that the final entry (in true FF style!) is numbered 400. Here are some of the first few pages...

Surely this is the best Christmas present an oldhammerer has ever received???








...that's the first few pages, I won't scan them all because I want to get back to playing it. I don't deserve them really, do I? Happy Christmas, and may your stamina never fail!

Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

This is the start of an occasional series of musings about the Fighting Fantasy books. I'm going to be playing through them in turn - at least, through those of the series set in Titan, seeing as fantasy settings are my primary interest. I'm not going to type up playthroughs (because that would be boring and involve spoilers), and I don't want to write these as book reviews exactly. What I want to do is take inspiration from each of the books, and to jot down the ideas that they give me for future gaming.

Starting, of course, with the one that started it all, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingtone's The Warlock of Firetop Mountain from 1982.

The real beauty of the book, for me, lies in the illustration. The cover by Peter Andrew Jones is nice, but above all I'm talking about Russ Nicholson's drawings inside the book. The work that Russ Nicholson does here is truly amazing. I firmly believe anybody interested in old school gaming should take some time to study the atmospheric depth of his pictures. To pick up on the theme of technique vs imagination, here's somebody who's a master of his craft - the draughtmanship is exquisite - but whose primary goal is to give us pictures that our imaginations can drink from. With a lot of fantasy art, the effect can be limiting: "oh, that's not quite how I imagined it" or "oh, so that's what it looks like. I guess I don't have to imagine it anymore". What's wonderful about Russ Nicholson's work is that it doesn't do that, it leaves enough mystery in there that you still need to figure it out, and there's always that question: "what lies beyond the next corner". He's not doing the work of imagination for you, he's feeding your imagination, and that's his great achievement.


Ok, onto the text. Love the topographical description in the first entry. Topography is a big part of setting the scene, but all too easily overlooked.

This is a classic dungeon crawl, hacking and slashing your way through, moving steadily onwards and thinking with your sword. Nothing wrong with that, although I guess a bit more depth would be nice, but this was only the first book in the series. Some people have complained that the construction of this kind of classic dungeon is a bit haphazard; all kinds of enemies thrown in with no explanation of what they're doing there, and seemingly random encounters. Why is there a shopkeeper? Why is there a boatkeeper? How does he make his money - who's actually going across this river? Of course, the need to try and give the dungeon some kind of reason is what led to the classic "The ecology of the..." series in Dragon magazine. You can't just stock a dungeon, there has to be a reason to it, an ecology, an economy, and so we get these somewhat bizarre "The ecology of the vegepygmy", "The ecology of the beholder" articles. But I have to say, in defence of the seeming randomness of dungeon encounters in this book, I rather like it. Why do we move from a cavern to a splendidly decorated room with a polished marble floor and portraits? Why is there a little old man in a rocking chair? Why does the Warlock leave the very things that can destroy him lying around? I can't answer all those questions, but I think that realism is just one tool in fantasy narrative. Not everything has to be completely realistic, and at its best these kind of encounters meld into something like a dream sequence... I call this dream realism, a narrative that looks to capture something of strangeness of the dream, with all of the unconscious connections and segues and symbolic wierdness you get in a dream (or a nightmare), rather than being slavishly chained to the "real world" of logical causality.


Then, in the second half of the book (the half written by Steve Jackson - the two authors split the labour between them), you get to the labyrinth. Bloody hell, what a boring sequence of entries!

"You arrive at the junction and this time turn northwards. Turn to 262"
"Some way up the passage you reach another junction where you may either go eastwards (turn to 199) or turnnnnnnnnn zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..."

And yet... and yet... I have to say I actually got lost. Very lost. Completely and utterly disoriented, ended up going around in circles, and it took me ages to get my bearings. It was a frustrating gaming experience, but it was certainly an immersive gaming experience. Really felt like I was going around in circles in a dank tunnel. I'm not suggesting that boredom should be part of the toolkit of narrative gaming (or am I?) but this section, because of the sparseness of the text, because of the circularity of the movement, and above all because of how frustrating it was, really gave me a sense of disorientation that I don't think I've experienced in gaming before. Disorientation and frustration as narrative tools...

The big boss baddie at the end was too soft and easily dispatched, and I was left wondering on more than one occasion why I was so set on killing him in the first place. But the idea of killing him in order to replace him, to become him... and to wait for somebody to come and kill me to replace me and to become me... that's an interesting one.

"The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain."
- Thomas Babbington Macaulay, The Battle of the Lake Regillus; recalls the legend of the priesthood of the Goddess Diana at Lake Nemi. The only way to hold the honour was to slay the prior incumbent in a trial by combat. And then to wait...