Way of The Tiger

Way Of The Tiger

The Way of the Tiger is the name of a series of adventure gamebooks by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson set on the fantasy world of Orb. The reader takes the part of a young ninja, Avenger, on his quest to avenge his foster father and recover the Scrolls of Kettsuin. Later books present fresh challenges for Avenger to overcome. Compared to other gamebooks such as those in the Fighting Fantasy series, The Way of the Tiger provided a more developed storyline and atmosphere, as well as three-dimensional characters.

The world of Orb was originally drawn up by Mark Smith for a Dungeons and Dragons game he dungeon-mastered while a pupil at Brighton College in the mid 1970s. The key characters were created as identities by long-term players in the game, which is why they have such depth. Orb was also used as the setting for the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Talisman of Death, again by Smith & Thomson.

Each book has a warning at the front against performing any of the ninja related feats in the book as "They could lead to serious injury or death to an untrained user".

The sixth book, Inferno!, ends on a cliffhanger with Avenger trapped in the web of the Black Widow, Orb's darkest blight. As no new books have been released, the fate of Avenger and Orb is unknown. It has been suggested by some gamebook fans that Smith and Thompson had written an unpublished seventh volume which would conclude the plotline, as in a column for gamebook magazine Warlock! Jamie Thompson said seven volumes were planned, and some seem to recall this book even having been advertised, but no hard evidence of this has come to light. Given the similarly downbeat conclusion of Smith and Thompson's Falcon gamebook series, and that uniquely amongst the books the words "The End" appeared after the final paragraph, it seems likely that the ending of Inferno! was intended. As the final paragraphs of the sixth volume speed Avenger through a number of layers of the Rift of Orb, it is possible that the putative seventh volume would have featured adventures through these layers leading to the same conclusion.