Creating a Fighting Fantasy Adventure, Step by Step part 1

Part 1: Setting up the Book and Creating a Character

This is a guide to creating an adventure using the fightingfantasy.net online system.  It assumes you have some familiarity with the ideas behind ABML but does not assume you have any SEL knowledge.  It uses the SEL system at the time of writing this article so be warned this may change.  The ABML *should* remain constant however.  It also assumes you have experimented with making a basic ‘turn to’ only adventure as shown in the ‘Creating a Simple Adventure’ article, and are familiar with the Adventure/Book Editor.

Step 1:

In the Adventure Creator, Create your Book (I shall not detail this here).

Note – there is now an option in the book set up to create a Fighting Fantasy adventure that will do the steps outlined in this page for you and more!

Step 2:

In the SEL Editor, find your book in the ‘Your Book SEL Files’ List and load it.  Once the editor has loaded this file (the main text box will be empty), scroll down to the 4 boxes for Included/Excluded SEL Libraries.  In the box in the Excluded column/Hosted row, highlight ‘FFLib’, and scroll back up and hit the Save button.  The library ‘FFLib’ should now have moved to the ‘Included’ column.

Step 3:

In the book editor load the reference ‘Character Sheet’ in the box on the right.  Once it has loaded place the following ABML in the main text box:

<script script="&display_core_character;" />

Hit the Save button

Step 4:

Decide what reference you wish the reader to have their character rolled up/generated in, make it up if necessary.  Unless you have some significant pre-amble to your adventure this will probably be reference 0, load or create the reference as necessary.  In this reference place the following ABML:

<event event="&generate_core_character;" />

… and Save it.

Note that <script> should not be used here, since if this page is reloaded for whatever reason (not browser reloaded, but by clicking on an <option> tag for example) a script tag would re-roll all the statistics.  If you actually want to allow re-rolls, use an option tag instead like so:

<option option="&generate_core_character;" count="infinite">Roll your statistics</option>

And that is pretty much it for setting up your Fighting Fantasy adventure.  If you start your adventure now a basic Fighting Fantasy character will now have been rolled up and displayed in the character sheet.  However you now will need to know how to use the functions that are now available to you, such as &testluck, the combat routines, how to create and use items such as provisions etc. which I will detail in the subsequent chapters of this series.

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