The Way of the Tiger is a series of adventure gamebooks by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, originally published by Knight Books (an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton) from 1985. They are set on the fantasy world of Orb. The reader takes the part of a young monk/ninja, named Avenger, initially on a quest to avenge his foster father's murder and recover stolen scrolls. Later books presented other challenges for Avenger to overcome, most notably taking over and ruling a city. The world of Orb was originally created by Mark Smith for a Dungeons and Dragons game he ran while a pupil at Brighton College in the mid-1970s. Orb was also used as the setting for the 1984 Fighting Fantasy gamebook Talisman of Death, and one of the settings in the 1985 Falcon gamebook Lost in Time, both by Smith and Thomson. Each book has a disclaimer 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 were released, the fate of Avenger and Orb was unknown. Mark Smith has confirmed that the cliffhanger ending was deliberate. In August 2013, the original creators of the series were working with Megara Entertainment to develop re-edited hardcover collector editions of the gamebooks (including a new prequel (Book 0) and sequel (book 7)), and potentially a role-playing game based on the series. The two new books plus the six re-edited original books were reprinted in paperback format by Megara Entertainment in 2014, and made available as PDFs in 2019. Books and publication history The original series comprises six books: Avenger! (1985) Assassin! (1985) Usurper! (1985) Overlord! (1986) Warbringer! (1986) Inferno! (1987) The sixth book ended on a cliffhanger, which was not resolved until 27 years later. Interviewed in 2012, Mark Smith explained: "Our publishers Hodder and Stoughton originally had signed for seven books but they cancelled the last in a fit of pique, which is why Inferno! ends so unsatisfactorily – they re-wrote the end themselves to kill the series. The story here is that the then CEO of Hodder, Eddie Bell, left to become CEO of Harper Collins ... He took us with him so that we could write the