Titan

Titan is the world underneath the gamebooks — the one that had to be drawn properly once too many readers asked where Firetop Mountain actually was. Allansia in the west with its frontier towns and the pirate sink of Port Blacksand, the Old World across the sea, Khul away to the east; gods with grudges, an economy that runs on adventurers, and a map obliged to hold together because thousands of people are wandering about on it with a pencil and two dice. What is collected here is the reference and the fiction rather than the adventures themselves. Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World is the atlas that fixed the geography; Dungeoneer and Blacksand! turned it into a role-playing game; The Riddling Reaver is the campaign that came with it. Then the novels — The Trolltooth Wars, Demonstealer, Shadowmaster — and the Zagor Chronicles, which finally give the series' recurring warlock a story of his own. The flavour is British fantasy of the early eighties: pulpy, lethal, cheerfully overstocked with monsters, written for readers who wanted to know the rules of the world they kept dying in. Start with Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World for the map and the history, then The Trolltooth Wars, which is the novel everybody remembers — or Dungeoneer, if you would rather run the place yourself.