YMMV / The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

• Designated Hero: Unlike villains from later books such as Balthus Dire, Zagor the Warlock isn't despicted as a villain or a threat to the world; your character's motivation for going after him is trying to get his treasure, making him look quite greedy.
• Designated Villain: As noted above, the hero is not given much, if any reason to kill Zagor other than sheer greed for his treasure. Even the prisoners in his dungeons seem to be adventurers who had come to rob him rather than peasants plucked from the countryside. The Trolltooth Wars (which draws a lot of material from Warlock) pushes this line even further casting Zagor as at worst an Ambiguously Evil hermit who is rightly paranoid about thieves and who just wants to be left alone. This is probably why later books make a point that Zagor was a true Evil Sorcerer with ambitions of immortality and conquest.
• Once Original, Now Common: The first book of the Fighting Fantasy series and the one that kickstarted the peak of the gamebook craze in the 1980s and 1990s. However, nowadays, it definitely has shown its age with its non-existant story, standard gameplay, and various examples of Early-Installment Weirdness making it clear this book was an exercise in figuring out how to use the system they'd devised.

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