The Mechanics
Here are the simple rules to follow when participating in some nonsense Fighting Fantasy books;- Three stats: Skill; your combat ability; Stamina; your health, Luck; your luckiness. You determine your stats each time you play the book by rolling a d6. Your Skill and Luck stats are rolled with 1d6, while your Endurance is rolled with 2d6. When rolling your stats, you usually add 6 to your roll for your total Skill, 12 to your roll for your total Stamina, and 6 again to the roll for your total Luck but this may change from book to book.
- You will need at least a single d6 die, but it would make things a little easier to have two.
- Sometimes you’ll be called upon to ‘test’ one of your stats. To do this, roll 2d6; if the total is equal to or lower than your stat, you’ve succeeded. After Testing specifically Luck, you lower it by 1 afterwards regardless of if you succeeded at it or not. Your luck can eventually run out, so be wary.
- In combat, you roll 2d6 and add your Skill to it and do the same for the enemy, adding it to their listed Skill. Whoever has the highest total number deals damage to the other, then you repeat and keep going until it’s settled. You always deal 2 damage to an opponent's Stamina when hitting them, but they may do more to you as listed in their description when you encounter them. If you want you can Test Your Luck when dealing damage to a creature to double your damage on a success, but if you fail you deal only 1. You can also Test Your Luck when being hit by a creature to reduce it to only 1 damage on a success, but if you fail you take double instead. It’s a risky move indeed.
- You can eat a Provision (some books call them Meals) at any time as long as you’re not currently fighting something and you have Provisions left, and it will restore 4 Stamina for each one you eat. You usually start with 10 Provisions/Meals, depending on the book. In Rebel Planet, you actually start with 0.
- Some games also have gold or some money system to track, as you can sometimes spend it at stores at certain points or use it to bribe your way out of things. In Rebel Planet, you start with 2000 space credits.
- Don’t die.
Rebel Planet has actually quite a few unique little mechanics to it which was more than I was expecting, honestly. I’ve never played/read this book, so it’s all new to me as well. You have the potential to get different weapons this time around, and you start with a laser sword; no idea what inspired that idea, as it definitely wasn't a cultural milestone sci-fi movie franchise…
It doesn’t modify your Skill or anything from what I can tell, but potential weapons you find later could; we’ll have to see.
There is also an ‘instant kill’ mechanic for you when fighting unarmed. In a turn of combat, if you have a higher total roll than your opponent and are fighting unarmed, you roll an additional d6. If you roll 1-5, nothing special happens and the turn is done as normal. But if you roll a 6, you instantly defeat the opponent through ‘hitting a pressure point which will either kill them or leave them unconscious’, which is pretty ****ing rad, honestly. Makes me curious how much combat is going to be in this book.
You also have a limit to the amount of items you can carry this time around, being 6.
Alright, let’s get into it; time for the overly dramatic Octopus intro, inspired by the opening info of Rebel Planet.
The Intro
The buckle strap of the pilot seat clicks into place, and you look up into the black sea of nothingness in front of you. You know it’s not actually ‘nothing’, but it feels like it's all the same to you from behind the cockpit glass. Streaming coils of rolling space, drifting endlessly; the origin of your race's destruction…You clear your mind. The mission is too important to get distracted by wandering. It’s been harder and harder to focus as the mission grew closer, and now here, at the first stage, you can’t help but think of the Earth you’re going to leave behind, and your fam-. No. Focus. You can’t think of them now.
You flip the switch, and bring the flight computer to life. A holographic avatar flickers on top of its projector; human. Fitting, you think, that the Arcadians would leave the subservient guidance program in your image. They enslaved the real humans, why not the holographic ones too?
“Hello *Pilot Name*! Do you wish to hear how to initiate take-off?”
“Run pre-flight checks.”
“Do you wish to run the pre-flight checks, *Pilot Name*?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Do you wish to run the pre-flight che-” you tap the computer screen in front of you, bringing up the manual holographic controls. With a swipe of your hand, you begin shifting through the complicated menus.
“It seems that you are attempting to start the pre-flight checks, do you require assista-”
“No.”
“Very well. I will be here should you require any in the future, *Pilot Name*!” The avatar doesn’t power down, instead continuing to look at you with its wavy form in silence.
[Pre-Flight Checks: initialize>]
You lean back in the padded pilot’s chair. It’ll take a few minutes for the computer to check each system.
Can you really do this?
You’ve been training for months, learning every step of the plan as devised by the minds at SAROS. Honing your body through martial perfection, and sharpening your mind to a razors edge nearly broke you many times over but you held on through sheer refusal to fail. The fate of your species hangs on your actions, on your focus. Then why are your hands shaking now?
You close your eyes. Remember what you’re fighting for.
The Arcadians, discovered on their home planet over 150 years ago, have enslaved humanity. You’ve gone over the secret holos at SOROS HQ time and time again, seen the cruel reptilians decimate first Halmuris, then Radix, then Tropos; then Earth. The war only lasted 12 years, 12 years for your race to be invaded. And to make it worse, humans are the ones who gave them the weapons; alpha-ziridium, the key to space travel. You gave it to the at the time primitive Arcadians, and this is what you got in return.
You weren’t there of course. No, you were born a slave on a slave planet, given to the reptilians through no decision of your own. You, and many others, tried to resist. It comes to you like the burn of a ziridium engine, crashing through your memory. Your father, pushing you into the crowded vent as their claws clank on the metal grates around you, gibbering and screeching. You know what’s coming next as you’ve seen it so many times before, every time you close your eyes. His hand holds yours, his eyes never waver or blink as the men behind you pull you away. His eyes stay on you, until the smell of oxidized air fill your nostrils as their laser rifles flare like angry suns and-
You blink away the scene.
No. No more tears.
The plan SOROS has devised is a good one, you know. But even a good plan can fail. The Arcadians have recently decided to lift the ban on human space travel, if only in the form of subservient merchants. So that’s what you are; a merchant. You’re carrying wheat from Earth to Tropos, ziridium from Tropos to Radix, luxury goods from Radix to Halmuris, then an important Arcadian dignitary from Halmuris to Arcadion. This is a cover, of course, and your real mission is to find out the location of the infernal Arcadian supercomputer. This computer controls every Arcadian due to the computer-brain sync technology implanted in each and every one. When this is shut off, the hive-minded drones will simply power down, reduced to mindless husks. Ironic, that the ones who have enslaved you have enslaved themselves to a machine. But first, you need to find the 9 digit code to get access to the computer on Arcadion, and to learn that you must first find the rebel leaders that SOROS has stationed on each of the planets. It won’t be easy, and you know that any human you find may be an Arcadian agent, a traitor desperate to prolong their pitifully short lives by any amount they can.
“*Pilot Name*, the pre-flight check has concluded. Do you wish to register your name for my future use after wiping away your tears?”
You look at the dim ember of the virtual avatar. This may be the last trustworthy ‘human’ you find, the only one to know your real mission.
“Cool Tony, saviour of the human race. And I wasn’t crying.”
The Character
Cool Tony, saviour of the universe. Why is he cool? I don’t know, he just is. Maybe he has a cool eye scar or something. The intro for Rebel Planet is a particularly dry one, so I tried my best to make it at least semi-entertaining. Your character this time around is an afterthought in it, really only being described in the very last paragraph.Here are the stats that Cool Tony, saviour of the human race (you have to say it every time), started the winning run with; he has 8 Skill, 21 Stamina, and 8 Luck. Less Skill than our Vault of the Vampire run, so if there’s combat a plenty we may be taking some damage from it but, luckily, he has a really good Stamina this time around so he can take it. Again, I rolled a pretty low Luck this time around of 8, so if Rebel Planet is a particularly bull**** one Cool Tony (saviour of the human race) may not last long in this spacefaring world.
The Run
I cleared Rebel Planet in 8 tries. Jesus, this got very rough near the end.Rebel Planet has a hell of a lot of lore and world building to it, honestly. I really wasn’t expecting such the complicated setup that I paraphrased in the intro, or that depth of sci-fi goodness. It’s not just all fluff and background info either; it actually does affect the gamebook itself. Did you know Arcadians have only two fingers, and speak a form of binary because of this? It’s mentioned in the background section of the book, but did you know that it’s integral to solving the core puzzle code? Did you know that there are actually three different kinds of Arcadians, being the region they come from on Arcadion? And once again, this is integral to solving some of the situations you find yourself in? This is the first Fighting Fantasy book I’ve encountered that’s actually focused on the story line, and the first one where you actually need to read the paragraphs and descriptions instead of just looking at your options at the end of them. Sometimes you’ll encounter something that seems like it was a bull**** 50/50, but there was some clue to the right answer in the paragraph itself which then makes you feel like an idiot. Maybe that’s just me.
The goal in this book is to find three clues to the code needed to shut down the ‘computer queen’ that controls all of the evil reptilian Arcadians. Why did they make it so their supercomputer has an access code in the first place? Don’t question it, human.
**** you, Fighting Fantasy.
To find these clues, you need to find a rebel leader on 3 of the 4 planets on your path, with the final planet being the reptilian's home, Arcadia, which contains said supercomputer. It’s a cool set-up, and combined with the focus on sci-fi world building and the unique stylings of each of the planets, really makes Rebel Planet stand out compared to most of the other Fighting Fantasy books. How does it feel to play? Well…
The book’s lofty ambitions I think are more frequently held back by the usual Fighting Fantasy trappings than not. It took me 8 attempts to beat this, and only one failure was due to dying in combat. The other 7 were because of the usual nonsense ‘50/50’ decisions you often get thrown at you in these books, with the wrong answer equaling instant death. As I mentioned earlier, some of these do have some clue in the paragraph itself but more often than not they are pure guessing games.
Mhm, I’ll go right. I'm given no clue or context this time, so what's the worst that can happen between these two possible decisions?
**** you, Rebel Planet.
There came a point on the third planet, the inhospitable and underdeveloped Halmuris, where I honestly thought I’d stumbled into an inescapable death loop. Once you get out of the spaceport and into the wilderness proper on the planet, there’s a really dense series of directions you can head with multiple choices that branch off of them. The thing is, if you head north straight from the spaceport, there’s a pretty good chance that you won’t find an important bit of info and therefore every decision ends in death and/or failure. I failed the first time I met the rebel leader of that planet as I didn’t know the secret password, and some Arcadian guards captured me. So I went back one decision previous (I cheated, so sue me; it was out of pure curiosity), and that other decision resulted in death. Intrigued, I kept rewinding and taking the other option. Every single one was death. Dead Cool Tony's, saviour of the human race, everywhere.
It turns out that I had to go to another path about 5, 6 or 7 scenes earlier, go through a few specific decision points there, and give an alien light-based shapeshifter a magic staff I found in an alcove inside a rock buzzards nest in order to find out the password for the leader to be able to continue. The book gets a little wild, yeah.
This isn’t even mentioning the two consecutive ‘Test Your Luck’ moments leading up to you meeting the rebel leader, and on failure losing 4 Stamina each time. The odds of you succeeding this on the first try are very low, and it’s unfortunate that a book with this cool of a concept and an elevated storyline pulled this level of FF ****ery.
Oh, and that rock buzzard instantly kills you if it hits you once, because of course.
It’s not all bad, of course, and when the book’s unique voice and idea is on full display, I was having a blast. The first two planets, Tropos and Radix, are the highlight of the book to me. The well done non-linear nature of them as you investigate leads, with the descriptions really selling each planet’s unique aesthetic. Tropos is this grungy, low-tech planet befitting that most humans live on it. It’s also a planet of constant surveillance by the ‘Northern’ (the brutish, warlike subspecies) Arcadians, and the descriptions and situations you get in really sell this feeling of paranoia and the idea that you’re always being watched.
Goddamn Southern Arcadians, man; can never get a straight answer out of them.
Likewise, Radix is a futuristic utopia populated by artsy college kids and the Southern Arcadians, weirdos who speak in cryptic and prophetic sentences. It also has I think the only mandatory fight I encountered in the game, and the one that killed the very first Cool Tony as it’s ****ing brutal; the “Street Fighter” killer robot. Why’s it called this? I have no idea. The book is from 1985, so it's definitely not a reference to a certain Capcom franchise. You just bump into it on your first night on-planet when you’re going back to the hotel you’re staying at, and unfortunately there’s no rad art of it in the book. It shoots concussive force thumps to drop buildings on you, and the fight was absolutely brutal.
Behold, the destroyer of Cool Tony’s (saviour of the human race) and buildings alike. Seriously, why is it called a ‘Street Fighter’? Also, holy **** it killed me by dealing 9 damage to me in a single attack with that nonsense.
By looking at the 'instant kill on a 6' mechanic in this book you could think that it was priming you for a combat heavy affair, but that would be incorrect. Outside of the Street Fighter, I don’t think any other fights I encountered were mandatory. You don’t get any provisions to stockpile this time around, but the book was the most forgiving one I’ve encountered yet with handing out healing. It frequently gives you one-off healing food pretty frequently, and every time you get back to your ship after succeeding at a planet you get to heal half your current Stamina. It’s honestly kind of confusing why the game even has this instant kill mechanic given that it’s a combat light affair, but it did feel pretty hype when I managed to instantly kill an Arcadian in the first surprise round of combat with the mechanic. It's also weird that they make such a point of you wanting and needing your badass laser sword when you're actually better fighting unarmed considering this instant kill mechanic only works when your fighting as such.
Rebel Planet liberally employs a pretty standard ‘anti-cheat’ counter-measure that became commonplace in the Fighting Fantasy series going forward. If you “don’t know what to do” as the book puts it (read: didn’t encounter the specific instructions for how to find the right paragraph number), then you’ll fail, with no way to cheat unless you just know the answer from a previous playthrough already.
The book was pretty forgiving in most ways other than Halmuris, and I think this is a book you can probably fairly easily clear without high character stats. It had less focus on having the right items this time around (outside of that previously mentioned and never explained magic staff with the shapeshifter), and unlike Vault of the Vampire your success wasn’t entirely locked behind having a high secondary stat like that book’s ‘Faith’.
Cool Tony, saviour of the human race, wanting to be an inspiration to humans as he dies a free man. Also Cool Tony, saviour of the human race; got beaten up at a spaceport.
The last thing I have to talk about with Rebel Planet is in its central puzzle. The whole schtick of the game is piecing together the code to open up the supercomputer controlling reptile brains on the final planet, and eventually you do have to do just that. You get three clues to what it is, and it’s of course informed by the fact the Arcadians speak in organic binary; being that it’s in binary. I love the idea, and it was honestly a good puzzle once you figure out how you’re supposed to parse the answer and find out the paragraph it’s directing you to. It may have been a lot to ask of children (being the primary demographic of these books back in the day) to be able to convert binary into decimal, but the idea is a great one. Coincidentally, I learned how to convert decimals into binary. Thanks, Rebel Planet. It only took me a solid half hour to piece together the solution, and I’m an idiot; so you should do just fine.
Here’s two of your three clues to the final puzzle; good luck.
In the end, I want to like this book more. In the first half, I was diggin’ what the book was putting down. The well done descriptive work of the first two planets, the logical deductions you could make from them to figure a few things out; I was feeling it. Then, I got to Halmuris, and it became obvious the book ran out of steam very quickly along with that cool concept and vibe. Overall, I think it’s more of a positive experience than a negative, but it’s those negative aspects that prevent it from being something truly fantastic. Honestly, I was prepared to give Rebel Planet like a 9 in the first half, but I think the weaker second half has knocked the score down to a more average 7.5. It’s a shame, because the book could really have been something unique and astounding if it just kept to its unique non-linear design nature and focus on higher quality writing and retro sci-fi stylings, instead of becoming just another gauntlet of 50/50’s like many lesser Fighting Fantasy books.
I’m also not going to really deduct points for this one, but there also isn’t much art in the book compared to many others which I think is a missed opportunity for some rad 80’s sci-fi nonsense.
There’s some good art still, just not as much compared to some of the other books in the series.
Also, something that bothered me: why’s it called Rebel Planet? You never encounter a planet of rebels. You encounter rebels on planets, but never in numbers that would suggest they control the planet. You also see 4 different planets, so shouldn’t it have been plural in the title? “Rebel Planets”?
Cool Tony, the actual saviour of the human race. You have to say that last bit every time.
Bonus Round
You should know the drill; here’s some entertaining paragraphs presented with no context.
Cool Tony, saviour of the human race and gobbler of nuts.
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