Fighting Fantasy: City of Thieves

The Fighting Fantasy series mixes Choose Your Own Adventure–style storytelling with a dice-based role-playing element included within the books themselves. Each Fighting Fantasy gamebook requires the reader to create their character, randomly assigning scores to three statistics (skill, stamina, and luck). These, in conjunction with rolling six-sided dice, are used to resolve skill challenges and the combat sections. Some titles use additional statistics or conflict resolution mechanics; most also require the reader to keep an inventory of items.

City of Thieves is a fantasy adventure scenario for a single character who the village of Silverton hires to defeat Zanbar Bone, lord of the undead; the character will need to go to Port Blacksand to get help the magician Nicodemus to succeed in saving the village.

The player takes the role of an adventurer on a quest to find and stop the powerful Night Prince Zanbar Bone, a being whose minions are terrorizing a local town. Hired by a desperate mayor, the player must as the adventurer journey to the dangerous city-state of Port Blacksand (the titular "City of Thieves"), and find the wizard Nicodemus, who apparently knows of Bone's one weakness. What follows is a series of challenges as the player must locate certain key items, escape Port Blacksand and eventually confront Bone.