The
Sorcery! series is a four-gamebook epic which, although it is
clearly Fighting Fantasy, doesn't have the FF logo on it anywhere. The whole thing is one quest chopped up into significant chapters, and in the spirit of post-Tolkien fantasy, the first three chapters are mostly just 'getting to the actual quest destination.' That... sounds more boring than it is in practice. One of its notable features is how later volumes have call-backs to content from previous ones. Most are just set-up one book ahead, but not all of them; there's a set-up in book 1 that doesn't pay off until book 4.
It is also notable for featuring what seem suspiciously like expies of previous FF titles. Khare, the Cityport of Traps, is at least a close cousin of Port Blacksand. Mampang Fortress, lair of the Archmage, is like the big bad brother of the Citadel of Chaos.
Also like in Citadel of Chaos, your character is a magic-user. I mean, the option is there to not be, but piss off, there's so much magic-user-only content, going mundane is the sucker's route. But I'll let the game explain itself.
There is also a cost for choosing to be a wizard in the first place, and it hits you right where it counts: -2 SKILL. Also, there's the whole thing where you have to memorize the spells. I appreciated this as a bit of immersion, but I have a pretty good memory and I'm sure it was a deal less fun for people who had more trouble with that side of things. In any case, there was little to stop anyone from actually cheating, so while I recommend at least
trying to memorize the spells as an exercise, I'm just going to leave the Spell Book's contents here in the first post (unless I have to take them down for bandwidth reasons or something) and you can cheat or not as you like.
Later printings relegated the spell book to an abbreviated form in the back of the book, but the original was an actually separate volume in the same slipcase as book 1, with sweet illustrations and all. There are, I shit you not,
forty-eight of these things. Fortunately the three-letter abbreviations are somewhat-to-very mnemonic. Somewhat harder is remembering the crazy material components some of them require.
Cover and Intro:
The First Six:
The Next Six:
The Six After the Next Six:
The Six After That:
Another Six:
Six More:
Six Even More:
The Last Six:
<Whew.> Actual start with briefing, map, and such coming up.