House of Hell

House of Hell

The original cover of House of Hell illustrated by Ian Miller

The Wizard cover of House of Hell illustrated by Nicholas Halliday
Outline
Location Earth
Publication details
Author(s) Steve Jackson
Illustrator Tim Sell
Puffin
Cover illustrator Ian Miller
First published 1984
Number 10
ISBN ISBN 0-14-013831-3
Wizard
Cover illustrator Nicholas Halliday
First published 2002
Number 7
ISBN ISBN 1-84046-417-8
List of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks

House of Hell (House of Hades in the United States) is a single-player adventure gamebook written by Steve Jackson, illustrated by Tim Sell and originally published in 1984 by Puffin Books. It was later republished by Wizard Books in 2002. It forms part of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series. It is the 10th in the series in the original Puffin series (ISBN 0-14-031831-3) and 7th in the modern Wizard series (ISBN 1-84046-417-8).

Contents

Creation

A short version of the adventure was first published in Warlock: The Fighting Fantasy Magazine. It was made up of 185 references. The adventure was modified and expanded for the final book, but a few of the original references were removed.

The United States version of the book, published by Dell Laurel-Leaf, was titled House of Hades as the word 'Hell' can be considered a profanity there.

Story

House of Hell is a horror themed book, and the only Fighting Fantasy book set on modern day Earth. The player's car breaks down during a rain storm, forcing the player to seek shelter in a nearby mansion. Though this is the only Fighting Fantasy book to employ this type of setting, books such as Beneath Nightmare Castle use the horror theme in the more common fantasy setting of Titan.

The player's quest to escape the mansion is hampered by the presence of Satan-worshippers and various demons, though not all are entirely hostile. Much of the gameplay involves searching a series of rooms, most of which bears an obscure religious or satanic titles, including the Shaitan room and the Mammon room. If the reader is to be successful, he must recover a hellfire-forged kris dagger and survive an encounter with the house's Master.

Trivia

  1. One of the rooms in the upstairs hall of the house has a nameplate with the word ‘Balthus’ written upon it. This name is a direct reference to the main antagonist in the earlier Fighting Fantasy game book The Citadel of Chaos, also written by the same author; Steve Jackson.
  2. When you sleep in the Erasmus Room and wake up after the hunchback entered to place a drink, there is a reference that takes you back to the time before the hunchback arrived. (book ref: #23 and #158)
  3. When you pass through the magical mirror portal in the Reception Room, on the ground floor, you can return via the portal to the same room. However, the text then incorrectly describes it as the Drawing Room instead. (book ref: #113, #160 and #349)
  4. When you're searching the cellar for secret doorways, there's a reference that describes you as spending 15 minutes searching the walls. The last word of the first sentence contains the spelling error 'hall' instead of 'wall', which doesn't make sense within the context of what you're doing (book ref: #276 and #253)
  5. The picture for game book ref #264, illustrating devil-worshippers performing a ceremonial sacrifice at an altar, appears and disappears in different print runs of the title. The illustration isn't included in the earliest 2002 or the latest June 2010 versions, but was added by the publisher and appears in at least one print run in-between.
  6. By and large, House of Hell follows the standard Fighting Fantasy system, with a twist. This comes in the form of the Maximum Fear attribute, which you determine in character generation by rolling one six-sided die and adding 6 to the result. As the game progresses, you accumulate Fear points when you encounter frightening things; if you hit your maximum, you literally die of fright. This mechanic is clearly inspired by the sanity mechanic in the Call of Cthulhu RPG, which is unsurprising because Games Workshop printed and distributed a version of Call of Cthulhu to the UK market.[1]

Rules

House of Hell uses a Fear score in addition to the usual scores. Every time the player encounters some particularly disturbing event, he must add between 1 and 3 Fear points to his total Fear score. Once the character reaches their maximum score, determined at the beginning of the game, he will quite literally die of fright.

As the book is set on modern day Earth, the reader is unarmed at the start of the book and suffers a Skill penalty until he finds a weapon.

In other media

In 2010 Superteam Productions announced they are in Pre Production of a motion picture based on the book, the motion picture is co-written by Steve Jackson. Along with the motion picture there will be an interactive version for Blu-ray and the internet, the official website for the movie is houseofhellmovie.com

See also

References

  1. ^ Ferratbrain: The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 4)

Further reading

External links