Your Quest is Over

In 1982, the first Fighting Fantasy book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, was written, marking the birth of a series that would popularise the concept of adventure gamebooks in the UK. The book was co-authored by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone; this was accomplished by literally having Livingstone write the first half of the book and Jackson the second. After the two sides were bought together, Jackson noted that, quite by chance, there were 399 numbered sections in the book in total, and quickly added in an extra section to bring it up to a more aesthetically pleasing 400. This number immediately became the standard for all future books in the series, more or less, with the phrase "turn to 400" becoming synonymous with victory for readers.

Section 400 of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain has one more interesting thing about it.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is no more and you are now the owner of the Sorcerer's riches. At least a thousand Gold Pieces, jewellery, diamonds, rubies and pearls are in the chest. Hidden under these you find the Warlock's spell book and as you leaf through the pages, you realise that this tome is probably more valuable than all the treasure. Instructions are given for the control of all the secrets -- and the creatures -- of Firetop Mountain. With this book, unlimited power is yours and the safety of your return to the village is assured. Or, if you would prefer, you could remain as master of the domain of Firetop Mountain...

TWoFM has a relatively simple storyline compared to even the ones Jackson and Livingstone came up with for the second and third books in the series. It has often been theorised that it was only when writing the ending that Jackson realised that the titular Warlock didn't really do anything evil and the player character basically just came along, broke into his home, murdered him and stole all his treasure, and came up with a somewhat ambiguous note -- the possibility that the player takes up the now-vacant post of Warlock of Firetop Mountain -- to end on to try and redress things.

Section 400 of any Fighting Fantasy book very rarely ends with any hint of ambiguity after this one, if at all; a hook for a potential sequel or an "and the adventure continues" moment, at most. The second book, The Citadel of Chaos, can end with a minor one after you have killed the substantially more three-dimensional villain of the piece, but even that's debatable:

[You] consider your own escape. Do you have a Levitation Spell left? If so, you may cast it and float out through the window to the safety of the ground below. If not, then you will need to recall your reserves of skill and cunning to avoid the guards and dangers of the Citadel on your escape. But that is another story...

As the range progressed, the books' storytelling and gameplay became more and more ambitious, to the point that some books were arguably more aimed at adults than children, but 'golden' endings were never anything other than unambiguously happy. Most famously, the authors of #32 Slaves of the Abyss (Paul Mason and Steve Williams, responsible for some of the most complex titles in the series) originally planned for a successful conclusion to the book where the player character would make a heroic sacrifice and remain in the titular Abyss for all eternity to allow the titular slaves to escape, but this was vetoed. As succinctly described by Jonathan Green in his book on the history of the series, You Are the Hero:

Mason claims that this did not go down well with Steve Jackson who thought that the hero should walk away from the adventure with lots of money and treasure at the end, so Mason changed it, providing the hero with godlike powers instead.

Other books had multiple endings (beyond 'game overs'), but would (nearly) always have one that was clearly preferable to all the others. Mason and Williams also wrote one of the most challenging and complex books in the series, The Crimson Tide, which offered multiple non-standard endings such as giving up on your quest for revenge to become a monk. In Vault of the Vampire by Keith Martin, there's an ending where you can free the village girl abducted by the Count and safely return to the village with her, but not actually defeat him, as you have failed to locate all the necessary resources to slay him. If you don't have enough STAMINA left come the final encounter of Jim Bambra and Stephen Hand's Dead of Night, you save the world but die in your parents' arms.

There are exceptions, which mostly come early on in the series. One of the sci-fi titles, The Rings of Kether by Andrew Chapman, has a successful ending housed at section 400 as usual, which requires you to defeat and capture the leader of the titular drug rings, but there is another successful ending elsewhere in the book where you destroy the drug-runners' base, rendering their operation worthless; it's possible Chapman intended this as an Easter egg or a way of increasing replay value and considered the ending where you arrest the leader the better one, though. (Chapman had previously authored another science-fiction entry in the series, Space Assassin, which contains one of the all-time great 'non-standard' endings: You accidentally unshield the spaceship's reactor core and get out in an escape pod before it explodes, ruining the mission -- including killing the guy you were sent to capture -- but escaping with your life.)

The only other author who can really be argued to have included multiple totally successful conclusions to an adventure is the American game designer Steve Jackson, who contributed three early entries to the series, and even then at least one of his books has an obvious optimum ending. (To wit: Scorpion Swamp offers you the patronage of three wizards who need you to retrieve something from the titular swamp, the good wizard Selator, the evil wizard Grimslade, or the morally ambiguous Poomchukker; Demons of the Deep requires you to avenge yourself against a group of pirates, but there are various different ways of fighting the endgame, including not being able to track them down and having to settle for escaping the predicament they left you in with your life, although the various endings where you attain vengeance have varying amounts of treasure attached to them; and the only true exception, Robot Commando, which offers several entirely different ways of winning the game by defeating the invading forces.)

For what it's worth, many early books in the series included a hints page which featured another of the series' most famous lines: some variation on there being "one true way" through the adventure. Scorpion Swamp amends this to there being one true path through each of the three available quests, and Robot Commando says there is "one best path", involving the minimum of risk, to victory. (Kether lacks it entirely due to having a specially written 'mission briefing' replacing the usual page, which was true of many of the sci-fi books.)

Some books also don't have the successful reference as the very last one, such as Deathmoor by Robin Waterfield which has a maths puzzle as the book's final problem (requiring you to turn to the section number which is the same as the answer), but the rules about endings that were laid down early on have been pretty rigidly followed over the series' 43-year history.

This has been the 400th post on Ludicrously Niche, and I'm just worried I've been a bit too subtle with that point.