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Long ago, it took my mother serious effort to wean me off 'gamebooks' and start me on proper novels. I wasn't ready for stories where you turned the pages in order, there were no dice to roll, no mazes to draw your way through, nor multiple pathways and endings to explore via the time-honored cheating method of using all eight fingers and two thumbs to mark places in the book/adventure where you might die or survive.

That is to say, when Choose Your Own Adventure morphed into Be An Interplanetary Spy and Fighting Fantasy, I'd found my favorite childhood pastimes - wandering through works of the imagination as if the very narratives were geographies you could set foot in.

Now.

In addition to the Fighting Fantasy collection being the greatest books of all time, they also boasted the finest titles in history. The formula was airtight and magnificent. Examples include:

Forest of Doom
Armies of Death
Caverns of Malice
Masks of Mayhem
Portal of Evil
Master of Chaos
Tower of Destruction
House of Hell
Creature of Havoc

...and so on. You get the idea. Pick a threatening location or personage, stick an 'of' after it, and add an aggressive descriptor. It should come as no surprise that our very own F.O.R.G.E. (in the side-nav at right) was deeply influenced by such creative mastery as that leveraged to christen each volume of this landmark series.

Alas. Though I hold my favorite volumes of the Fighting Fantasy canon in high regard, they are not above loving ridicule. That's the best introduction I can muster for the following Photoshop tomfoolery that had me laughing so hard yesterday I almost saw my lungs for the first time - outside my body.

Commence fantastical mirthmaking:

























See the whole set here: Mightygodking Dot Com

And thanks to Dave for the link!