Cub Scouting

Over the 70+ volumes and counting the series currently comprises, the Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks have allowed you to fight just about every type of monster you might care to think of. Since the series launched in the 1980s, it should come as no surprise that one of the most recurrent monsters that crops up is werewolves -- a staple of horror movies at the time (tip of the hat to Rebecca, whose journey through lycanthropy in the eighties inspired this post). But do they use the 'were' part to its full potential, or is that just set dressing?

Well, if you've read the 2007 book Howl of the Werewolf, you'll already know that the answer to the question of potential is an unequivocal "yes" -- Howl casts the player as an adventurer who is bitten by a werewolf and seeks a cure for their lycanthropy before the condition becomes irreversible. Boasting a huge number of optional sidequests, locations you'll only find on certain playthroughs and different ways of fighting the book's endgame, it's about as close as a single gamebook will ever get to being a Wide Open Sandbox. Tragically, Howl was only briefly in print during the tail-end of the series' time being published by Wizard Books, and used copies now command truly ridiculous prices rising into triple figures. But do one-off encounters in earlier books bring the same problems as they do to the player character of Howl? How do the books use lycanthropy as a game mechanic when it's not the book's main focus?

The Forest of Doom by Ian Livingstone (1983)

Werewolves and other were-creatures appear in several other early titles of the series, but they're either just to add a bit of colour to monster encounters or, in the case of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, a way of presenting an NPC as harmless before their transformation. The third book in the series, The Forest of Doom, is an exception.

You have been asleep for about an hour when the noise of deep growling wakes you up. You stand up without making a noise and grab your sword. You wait and listen. There is a full moon in the sky and the light casts eerie shadows all around. You hear soft footsteps and sniffing followed by another low growl. Then a shape which looks like a man steps out of the shadows to your right; as he gets closer you see that his chest, arms and face are covered with thick brown hair and long teeth protrude from his mouth. He is a WEREWOLF and you must fight him.

If the werewolf (SKILL 8, STAMINA 9) inflicts any hits on you, you need belladonna to stop the transformation; if you have no belladonna, you need to successfully pass a Test Your Luck roll or, failing that, cut out the wound (all three courses of action come with further STAMINA penalties).

Crypt of the Sorcerer by Ian Livingstone (1987)

You can again encounter a Werewolf in the night here, with the exact same statistics as the one in Forest, although a Moon Ring will allow you to bypass the combat. If you don't have the ring and the Werewolf hits you even once in the ensuing combat, a Crystal of Sanity will grant you immunity to the disease; otherwise, you need a candle to search the forest by night for belladonna, and you need to be successful on a Luck roll to find it. (Crypt is a famously difficult and unforgiving book, if it wasn't clear.) No candle and no luck and it's game over:

Within an hour you become feverish and then to your horror hair starts to sprout from your upper body, head and arms. Your face distorts and changes dramatically until it is completely lupine in appearance. You are condemned to a double life, hunting, when the full moon rises, the very people who were once your friends.

Armies of Death by Ian Livingstone (1988)

The werewolf encounter here is, once again, remarkably similar: it happens at night (although in this book you play the leader of an army and the werewolf initially ambushes one of your men), it has the exact same statistics (probably just Livingstone being consistent -- these statistics are used in the 1985 bestiary Out of the Pit), and if the werewolf hits you even once you need belladonna or a successful Luck roll to escape infection, but if you have neither you're not so lucky as you were in the forest:

An hour later you are shaking uncontrollably in the grip of a raving fever. Hair begins to sprout from your cheeks and arms and your face begins to change shape until it resembles the Werewolf that bit you. Watching in horror, your troops make the anguished decision to put you out of your misery. Their leader dead and morale gone, your army abandons the crusade against Agglax.

Vault of the Vampire by Keith Martin (1989)

By this point in the run, many of the range's writers were trying more ambitious and complex gameplay, and Vault features lycanthropy as an actual game mechanic. When trying to get to Heydrich Castle, one of the possible routes there sees you come across two wolves you have to fight, and if the larger one (SKILL 7, STAMINA 8) should bite you:

You feel a strange venom from the bite of the larger wolf affecting you. With horror you look down at the furry body and see that it is changing, in death, into a half-human shape! This was no wolf, this was a Werewolf, and you have been bitten by it! Record Lycanthropy in the Afflictions box on your Adventure Sheet.

If you should then come into contact with moonlight at any point in the Castle, or stare too long at a magical portrait of Count Heydrich, the change advances (with a surprisingly graphic description) to the Major Lycanthropy Affliction; if the same thing happens again the transformation completes itself and you come under the Count's control. (It is possible to cure yourself by paying the Alchemist; retrieving some herbs he needs from elsewhere in the Castle; or returning the Healer's book to him, which allows you to cure any one affliction you currently have.)

Spellbreaker by Jonathan Green (1994)

A remarkably familiar encounter with a Werewolf with SKILL 8, STAMINA 9 who ambushes you in the night; if he gets any hits on you, you need belladonna or you transform and your adventure is over.

Revenge of the Vampire by Keith Martin (1995)

Martin revisits the idea for his sequel to Vault; if the Werewolf (SKILL 8, STAMINA 9 again!) reduces your STAMINA to half of what it was when the battle started then it afflicts you with Lycanthropy. (In a rare case for the range of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, however, you can't search for belladonna yourself since you're not a botanist and have no idea what you're looking for.)

The affliction will stop you from taking the magic sword Imperator, and there is a penalty to your SKILL and STAMINA for not having it cured by a certain point, but oddly the transformation will only take place if the player deliberately goes out of their way to try and cure it: Doktor Verrukte and the apprentice healer in Mortus Mansion can cure any afflictions you have, but if you search for a healer after receiving the aforementioned SKILL/STAMINA penalty (instead of choosing to go directly to the Mansion in the hope of finding a cure there or on the way) and are Unlucky three times in a row, you transform into one of the Count's servants. One presumes there was meant to be another check for if you have any afflictions after leaving the Manor that was accidentally left out.

Howl of the Werewolf by Jonathan Green (2007)

So, yes, unsurprisingly by far the most sophisticated use of lycanthropy as a game mechanic comes in the book entirely dedicated to it: in essence, you have to keep track of your CHANGE score, which will increase throughout the adventure, and can be further provoked by certain actions, but temporarily kept at bay by others. On occasion you will have to test your CHANGE score by rolling two dice to decide what happens next: notably, if at the endgame you fail this roll, then the transformation becomes irreversible and the game becomes unwinnable. In addition, at certain points in the game you not only gain bonuses to your SKILL and STAMINA scores from the transformation, but special abilities from the following random table (roll one die, re-rolling if you've already gained that ability):

1. Call of the Wild -- reduce Attack Strength of any opponent by 1 (does not affect magical, undead or artificial creatures)

2. Red in Tooth and Claw -- ignore any penalties you would usually incur from fighting unarmed

3. The Quickening -- gain an additional SKILL point

4. Unnatural Vigor -- automatically restore half the STAMINA points you lost during a combat at its end, reduce any damage incurred in non-combat situations by 1 point

5. Night Creature -- if told you need a lantern to explore a particular route, you can ignore this instruction if you don't have one

6. Cursed Bloodline -- lose 4 STAMINA points and gain 1 CHANGE point

For the sake of completion, the werewolf that actually infects you right at the start of the book is SKILL 8, STAMINA 9; you can reduce it to SKILL 7, STAMINA 8 by charging it before it can attack you, but the combat is railroaded so that it will end before the wolf can be killed. There are many other werecreatures throughout the book, including a Werebear, a Wererat, a Werebat, the Werebeast (whose transformed form is too monstrous to pin down to any one creature but from its illustration most closely resembles a very large bear), Werewargs (werewolves who died in their wolf form and were resurrected as zombies "trapped in a decaying semi-lupine form"), the Wolf-Were (a man who was attacked by a werewolf and had the condition treated before the next full moon, but now transforms into a wolf-like creature with the proportions of a human), and the book's final boss, the Arch-Lycanthrope, the source of the strain of lycanthropy you are infected with, which came from being possessed by a Wolf-Demon (accounting for how differently this book treats the condition).

So, in one or two cases you might quibble with turning into a werewolf = game over, but in fairness, it's not like that was the book's main focus. But Howl is truly something special indeed, and we can only hope that Scholastic reprint it in the not too distant future.

Regards to Ed Jolley for his help with this article