Exploring Titan 6: Island of the Lizard King

Island of the Lizard King, the seventh installment in the Fighting Fantasy series, continues the trend started in the previous book: the establishment of a shared world.  The sixth book, Deathtrap Dungeon, had the hero begin his adventure in Port Blacksand, the place where the fifth book, City of Thieves, was set.  Island of the Lizard King goes it one better, as the hero begins his journey at the site of Deathtrap Dungeon, then travels through Port Blacksand in order to begin the adventure.  It's not likely that the hero of all three books is the same guy.  After all, the hero of City of Thieves isn't about to make his way back into Port Blacksand, and any character that beats Deathtrap Dungeon should be enjoying his well-earned fortune rather than embarking on another dangerous quest.  The hero's identity is less important than the shared setting being created, and the sense that all of the adventures so far have been linked in some way, even if it's just geographically.

Island of the Lizard King is not one of the more notable additions to that setting, but it does introduce a number of places: the village of Oyster Bay and the titular Fire Island.  Neither is revisited much in later books, but they both bear some further scrutiny.

It's established at the outset that Oyster Bay is a quiet fishing village about sixty miles down the coast from Port Blacksand (does "down" in this case mean south or north?).  It's at the end of a long peninsula and accessible only by a steep, winding path, so it's mostly cut off from the dangers of the "hinterland". (Note that Livingstone describes the village as being populated by "fishermen and their wives." Hey it's the early 80s, gender essentialism was all the rage.  I can't talk, I'm constantly referring to the book's hero as a male.)  The hero is described as journeying south from Fang, and deciding to head for Oyster Bay.  It says that it takes him two days to get there, but there's no indication of how far south of Fang he was when the urge to visit Mungo came over him.  The distance remains ambiguous.

The village is described as a cluster of stone cottages nestled between the foot of the cliffs and a jetty, where a dozen fishing boats lie at anchor.  A rough estimate of the population can be made from this; with only a dozen boats, there can't be more than a hundred people living here, surely?  Even if some of the boats are out at sea the population can't be much higher.  Their cuisine is predictably high on seafood: the hero eats a meal of lobster and salad while preparing for the adventure.

The people are friendly, peaceful folk, with no gold or material wealth. The only one who is notable as a character is Mungo, an old adventuring partner of the hero.  Mungo is angry that the young men of Oyster Bay have been kidnapped by Lizard Men, and is determined to sail out and rescue them. He's otherwise friendly and talkative, and quite a lovable fellow. It doesn't seem at all implausible that he'd get out of the adventuring game and go live in a peaceful village somewhere.  (It should also be noted that his father was a circus strongman who died while attempting the Trial of Champions.  It's a fairly pointless addition, but it gives Mungo some background and serves to further tie the setting together.)

That brings me to Fire Island, seemingly less than a day's sailing west of Oyster Bay.  Years ago it was established as a prison colony by one Prince Olaf, who wanted to rid his land of undesirables.  (Yet another reference to royalty.  As usual, I will chalk it up to the kingdom of Salamonis unless given better evidence.)  Olaf paid a tribe of Lizard Men to act as his prison guards.  (Why Lizard Men?  Were they native to the island, or was it a case of Olaf trying to use guards adapted to the tropical environment?).  It turned out that Olaf just had too many ne'er-do-wells in his kingdom, and couldn't afford to maintain the island.  When the pay dried up, the Lizard Men took over in a bloody coup, led by a former guard who declared himself the Lizard King.  The Lizard King set the prisoners to work in his mines, but with the original prisoners being worked to death he has sent raiders out looking for replacements.

The Lizard King is also rumoured to be a practitioner of "voodoo and black magic", and is conducting genetic experiments to create an invincible race of Lizard Men.  The experiments have yet to work, but some of these grotesque mutants have survived.  The potions used in the experiments also found their way into the water supply, mutating the local flora and fauna into man-eating plants and giant beasts.  (To be honest, most of this sounds more interesting than the adventure we got in this book.  A greater focus on the Lizard King's experiments could have been really cool.)

It's not clear exactly how long ago all of this happened.  It's recent enough that Mungo knows the story well, but long enough ago that Fire Island had almost been forgotten until the recent raids.  One of the prisoners, an elf, was captured at least four years ago.

Here's a helpful map to lay out the geography of the island:

The hero and Mungo could have saved a lot of time and grief by sailing around the south of the island and landing near the prison colony.  Gotta fill those 400 entries though, am I right?  It takes a couple of days for the hero to get from one side of the island to the other.

There are a lot of monsters and characters on Fire Island. They can be divided into a few different categories.

NATIVES, NON-MUTATED
A number of the creatures encountered are almost certain to be native to Fire Island, and unaffected by the Lizard King's experiments: the tarantula, the rattlesnake, the bear, and the crocodile.  We can also add the headhunters in here, as well as the pygmies: they are probably the indigenous peoples of the island.  It's not known how they relate to each other, but given the hostility of the latter and the friendliness of the former, it's not hard to extrapolate.  The Shaman gives no indication which of these peoples he comes from, or is affiliated with.  In all probability he is a hermit, and has contact only with those who specifically seek him out.  (Pygmies can also be found in Darkwood Forest, in the book Forest of Doom.  It's possible that those came over from Fire Island, possibly to escape the Lizard Men.)

NATIVES, MUTATED
As mentioned above, the Lizard King's experiments mutated much of the flora and fauna of the island.  Those most likely to be in this category are: the vine that tries to strangle you, the giant leeches, the giant wasp, the giant crab, the giant lizard, the giant dragonfly, and the giant watersnake.  There are a lot of other monsters that are almost certainly native to the island, but may or may not be mutated: the grannits, the hydra, the razorjaw, the black lion, the spit toad, the styracosaurus, the hill troll, the ogre, the slime-sucker, the sabre-toothed tiger, and the marsh hopper.

A lot of these could just be regular monsters: after all, there's no mutation excuse for why the mainland is full of such nasties.  Island of the Lizard King does pack in a lot battles for one island, though; we can chalk up the density of monsters to the Lizard King's chemicals.

I'm not sure if the Black Lion is mutated or not.  It could just be a regular old panther, but the Lizard King seems like the kind of guy who would experiment on his pets.

As for the Styracosaurus, I'm only half convinced that this guy is native to Fire Island.  I'd gotten it into my head that this book was full of dinosaurs, but on closer inspection I see that it is the only one here.  Perhaps it's more likely that the Lizard Men brought it with them to the island.

Grannits are a new monster, resembling coconut-sized rocks with eight legs and a mouth full of razor sharp teeth.  They're described as "armadillo-like man-eaters," although due to their size they aren't very strong.  They are amusingly susceptible to rattlesnake venom.

A hydra has appeared before (in The Citadel of Chaos).  This one here has fewer heads, and is far less deadly.  Presumably it's in its natural swampy habitat.

The razorjaw that is encountered has just hatched from an egg in a sulfurous pool, but it's unsettling enough: an eyeless green worm with a mouth full of fangs.  It's described as "a hideous creature that has evolved to kill all other species", which is perhaps overselling things a little. It's first instinct is to go for the neck, though, which gives me the heebie-jeebies.  I would never go adventuring without neck armour.

The spit toad, another new monster, is simply a big toad that sits in an algae-covered pond and spits a blinding poison at anyone who gets too close.  It has fangs and will try to eat its victims.  They mustn't be too rare, because the hero is well aware that they never share their ponds with other creatures.

The slime sucker lives in the swamp, and might be the goofiest-looking Fighting Fantasy monster yet.  (No wait, the wheelies).  In the text it is said to resemble a "hideous octopus-like beast with dark green lumpy skin", and to have six arms/tentacles.  It's MO seems to be to hide underwater and rise up when prey gets near, and there's not much more to it than that.

Finally, the Marsh Hopper is a new monster that borrows heavily from the myths of the will-o'-the-wisp.  Marsh Hoppers are small humanoids, with wide mouths, pink forked tongues, and sad eyes.  No creature is better at crossing treacherous marshland than they are.  They will indicate to travellers that they know a safe way through the swamp, but more often than not they will lure them into a predator's lair for the price of a few scraps of meat.

LIZARD MEN AND THEIR FORCES
There are a lot of Lizard Men in this book, both of the pure and mutated variety.  One of the mutants even has two heads.  I'm not inclined to classify the Lizard King as a separate race to his flunkies.  He's described in the opening as a former prison guard, so I doubt he's anything more than a very strong Lizard Man who dabbles in some black magic.  To round out their forces they have goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, a shape changer, and a cyclops.  Any of these could be native to the island, of course, but it's more likely that they came with the LIzard Man forces, or were perhaps taken from the ranks of Prince Olaf's prisoners.

PRISONERS AND NON-NATIVES
Several escaped prisoners can be encountered on the island, some friendly and some hostile.  There are a surprising number of dwarven prisoners working in the mines, as well as some elves.  They could be former prisoners, but are most probably the victims of more recent Lizard Man raids.

The pirates encountered on the island are of course not native, and have probably sailed out from Port Blacksand.

The cave woman is a strange one, in that she appears to be the only one of her kind on the island.  I'd be inclined to place her as a native, but her skin tine is markedly different than those of the headhunters and pygmies.  Cavemen and neanderthal types have been encountered in other books (notably The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Deathtrap Dungeon), but it's unclear how they relate to more civilised humans, so this cave woman remains a question mark.

The girl with the sabre-toothed tiger is almost definitely not a native.  The hero thinks that she might have been left on Fire Island as a child, and become as wild as the animals.  In lieu of a better explanation, this will have to suffice.

WILD CARDS
The water elemental is the first monster that is hard to categorise. No indication is given of where it came from, or why it's lurking in the river.  It's just there, perhaps the result of some long-ago magic. 

The gonchong is the other, perhaps the biggest mystery of the book.  It's described as a parasite that the Lizard King allowed to bond with him in return for power and immortality.  It appears as resembling a giant harvest spider, with a proboscis that connects it to the brain of its host; only severing the proboscis seconds after the host is killed can it be destroyed.  The host of a gonchong remains invincible, but it can be harmed by one weapon: a fire sword.  Where did the gonchong come from?  It's unlikely that the Lizard King had it before coming to Fire Island; he was described as a former prison guard.  Perhaps he had it shipped to him from his homeland?  Maybe the gonchong is an island native?  The Shaman is pretty surprised to hear that there's one on the island, so probably not.  My personal belief is that the Lizard King summoned it with his black magic, making the gonchong some kind of demonic or extra-planar entity.  It explains the Shaman's shock upon hearing about it, anyway.

That's pretty much it for Island of the Lizard King, except for a couple of magical items that can be found.  The first is the Horn of Valhalla, which when blown can bolster the morale of your allies.  The name has all sorts of connotations for the Fighting Fantasy cosmology.  Are the Norse deities real, and Valhalla the actual afterlife?  Or does this simply reflect the beliefs of whatever Viking-equivalent peoples exist in the FF world?  I'd go for the latter.

The last is Sog's Helmet, which causes fear in the enemy and grants to its wearer the ability to always win the first Attack Round. The helmet is over one hundred years old, and belonged to a fabled warrior/sorcerer.  Named Sog.  I guess he needed such a helmet to strike fear into his enemies, because "Sog" wasn't going to do it for him.

Next: I have Warlock Magazine #1 up next, which may or may not be correct.  I had to do some guess-work for the magazine dates, I'm afraid.  Wikipedia lists issue #1 as being released in mid-1983, while the indicia has a date of 1984.  I have it listed in March of 1984, but who knows where I got that date from.  If anyone has more concrete info on the release dates of the Warlock mags, I'd really appreciate the  sharing it.