DEAD OF NIGHT
Jim Bambra and Stephen Hand
Reviewed by Mark Lain
All-out Horror
FFs are few and far between. The only ones that could really be said to qualify
as Horror as opposed to Fantasy (or Sci-Fi, of course) are #10 House Of Hell, #38 Vault Of The Vampire (and its bug-riddled sequel
#58 Revenge Of The Vampire), and this
book, number 40 in the original series.
This book is
easy to accidentally overlook for two reasons: 1) The title is hardly inspiring
and doesn’t have the usual luridness and sense of inevitable doom that many FF
books’ titles have; 2) The cover picture is pretty insipid and gives no
indication at all of what lies within. And these two factors are a great shame
as otherwise, this is a great effort and really injects some much-needed design
originality and energy into the series after the fairly routine nature of many
of the books that appeared in the 30s part of the series.
Unusually for
FF, the plot here is largely personal. Yes, you also have a secondary residual
task of saving the world (for a change), but your primary driver is to rescue
your parents from the Demon Lord Myurr with whom you have had a long-running
feud. He has now abducted your parents and wants to use them as the sacrifice in
his demonic ritual to unleash himself and his nasty hordes on the land and
generally ruin everything for everyone, and you have to travel from the South of
Gallantaria to the North, passing through areas that show increased evidence of
demonic infestation, to ultimately find Myurr’s stronghold and try to save your
parents/the world before it’s too late. Even more unusually, YOU even have a name
(or more of a title really: Demon-Slayer.) Yet more unusually, the plot works
really well, flows logically and all makes sense. YOU are a specialist
demon-hunting Templar which means you have quite a starting arsenal of kit and
tricks to help you on your way, including a horse (that either runs off or dies
at the half-way point depending on which route you take), holy water, a cross
(all very logically Templar-esque pieces of equipment), and a sword called
Nightbane. All this stuff proves variously useful or useless (depending on the situation
you are in) and adds layers of realism and depth to your character as you try
to decide what to use and when. Most importantly (in terms of characterisation)
is that you have special demon-hunter-type Talents: Banish Undead, Dark Veil,
Heal, Holy Circle, Meditation, Sense Demon, and Speak Demon. You get a choice
of three (and, in a couple of neat later plot twists, you can gain a fourth one
or even lose one and be reduced to only two Talents) that can be used as
substitutes for combats, help you gain clues as to what is on the cards, ingratiate
you with the locals (normally in return for goods and services like Gold Pieces
or free food/board), or just generally give you an option other than brute
force by which to progress. I really like to see this idea used in FF books and
it makes those books that feature the concept of using character-type-specific
special abilities stand out (some other excellent examples of special skill
deployment to enhance gameplay are #20
Sword Of The Samurai and #56 Knights
Of Doom.) It is very important that, in cases where a ”pick from a list of
skills” option is offered, there is not an optimum combination (which is a
problem with the use of this feature in #29 Midnight Rogue where you are screwed if you don’t have particular skills) –
this adds re-playability (to see what happens if you have other Talents) and
removes the problem of losing before you’ve even started simply by making a bad
choice of useful or interesting-sounding abilities that actually turn out to be hopeless. In Dead Of Night, there is no perfect combination of Talents – each is
handy or otherwise in certain scenarios, but there is always an alternative
option should you not have a given talent or it doesn’t seem right to use it and
there are some occasions where using the wrong one is bad news, especially
Meditate, although common sense will often tell you whether using a Talent
seems sensible and adds to your feeing the character, as a trained demon-hunter
would surely know how to use his/her own talents to best effect.
Comments have
been made by some reviewers that the plot just seems to be a series of
unconnected cameos, but that is surely not the case. In the South people are
growing concerned due to rumours of demon infestation, but the further North
you go the worse it becomes. The Midlands are in the midst of fending off an
ongoing demon attack, and the North itself is already lost to the demons. This
makes perfect sense and really makes you feel that you are gradually entering
the eye of the storm. Admittedly, each location you visit involves a cameo of
sorts, but each is part of the overall plot concept and it would hardly be much
of an adventure if nothing happened anywhere you went. Even the weather gets
worse the further North you go and it really does start to feel oppressive as
you make your way through the book, with sudden heavy rainfall, deep mud to
wade through, and increased attacks from increasingly powerful types of demon.
The Northern sections themselves are the highlights of the book. There is a
plague town (Astonbury) that adds conceptual atmosphere but is totally unreachable,
but the final third or so of the book is where the imaginativeness and
superbly-handled atmosphere really kick in hard, especially in the towns of
Axmoor (totally swallowed-up by a living demonic unpleasantness called a Land Blight)
and Dunningham (protected by an illusion and watched-over by the eye thing from
Mordor.) The Axmoor episode is one of the most warped concepts in any FF ever,
mixing steampunk ideas with body horror and something out of a Jeunet-Caro movie.
It is also brilliant in its execution. When you first arrive in Axmoor you are
offered two ways into the “thing” you are faced with – either through the “door”
or, hilariously, via a hole in the ground that turns out to be its arse (I kid
you not.) If you choose the arse route it is possible to die from fart
asphyxiation (although the book phrases it more subtly) and eventually either
route results in travelling through the creature’s innards including a prison
containing the captured locals who will fuel the Land Blight and a heart room where
you need to turn the correct dial to cut its heart’s blood supply off and kill
it. This is a key moment in the book which rewards you very well. The
Dunningham section starts with you being “helped” by a character who gives you
conflicting information from which you need to extract the truth. There is the
option to play dress-up and infiltrate an Orc base, but the main task here (and
the second key event) is to put out the deadly Mordor eye that looks out from a
bell-tower. Either from (or on the way to) Axmoor you can also visit the
village of Stamford which is in the thick of a major demon infestation. Help
the local family to defend themselves and you are, again, rewarded richly. This
adds even more plot logic and depth as you can see more of the demon scourge
taking hold, but there is also a glitch here (even if it is one that can be exploited
to your advantage) as it is possible to go between Axmoor and Stamford an infinite
number of times, gain hundreds of Skill and Luck points, and render yourself
immortal ready for the final really tough showdown. Not a problem if you are a
cheat (or realise that you’ve already been there once), but it does detract from
the challenge somewhat.
The subject
of difficulty level is always a thorny one in FF books. More often than not the
really good ones are extremely hard to complete or some that have good design
turn out to be too easy. Dead Of Night
is not really all that difficult in real terms, but it is also far from simple as Myurr's tricks and traps are everywhere. The combats are not too tough
and combat can be used very sparingly by substituting battles for use of your Talents
(you are a holy man of sorts, after all.) There is one seemingly impossible
combat with a group of Moon Demons (Sk 11 St 24) but circumstances intervene
after a couple of attack rounds and you don’t have to see this one out to its
conclusion. Double-figured stats are used very sparingly and you can count on
one hand the number of extra tough foes you have to fight and they are all in
very key moments of the book so seem to suit the plot when they appear. It is
more in the use of Talents and the making of certain bad decisions that the
tougher aspects of this book show through. You have an Evil stat which reflects
any deeds you do that might be more akin to a Demon than a Templar. It starts at
zero and only increases on rare occasions so the feeling that some FF books
give of inevitable failure due to a potentially lethal stat increasing every
other paragraph is not present and will only ever increase if you use Talents
that include a “demonic” act (Dark Veil, especially) or if you walk away from
locals in obvious peril and leave them to die (ie mostly by not helping them to
defend themselves in some way.) At critical points (again, used very sparingly)
you are asked to Test Your Evil which works in reverse to how Skill or Luck
tests work – ie you want to roll OVER your Evil score, so the lower the Evil
the better. Fail the test and you will normally be seduced by the dark side. This
adds an element that the player can really dread happening and that seems all
the more important on the rare occasions that it is used. In the more
traditional sense of FF difficulty, the number of instant deaths is very low
(only 25) and they all seem very logical and fair when they happen (eg: straying
too far into an obviously dangerous quagmire or trying to ignore the advice not
to go to the plague village), plus they are described in such juicy and graphic
detail that it is worth going the wrong way just to find out how you die next!
There is nothing obviously arbitrary anywhere in this book and it is very well
designed and all the more enjoyable to play for this.
There are
some moments where this book is exceptionally generous in how it rewards you
for passing key plot tests. Notwithstanding the accidental Axmoor/Stamford
cheat, it is also possible to gain 4 Luck points for defeating a Necromancer,
plus Stamina bonuses can be found in many places (normally for doing the things
that you’d gain Evil points for not doing, so there’s a double-incentive to
properly play as a Templar and “be” your character.) There are also some very
clever twists along the way, in particular a stage where, by using the secret paragraph
reference you can have discovered earlier in the book, it turns out that it was
a trap and that you have walked straight into it by accessing the hidden
section. You do not see this in gamebooks very often and it is a refreshing
change to the usual FF approach where you cannot win without finding whatever
secret references you need to reach – it is almost as if the writers are trying
to deconstruct a standard (and by book #40, pretty tired) FF concept here.
In terms of
design, we have already covered the logical flow and overall well-planned
plotting of this book (especially well executed as it was written by two
people) and almost all of what is included is original (except for the blatant Lord Of The Rings rip-off in Dunningham),
interesting, and well-paced to give a sense of urgency to your mission. Once
you reach Axmoor and then Dunningham it becomes apparent that the writers are
not just aiming for atmosphere and coherence of theme, but that they also want
to really make this book stand out as highly original in terms of what it
throws at you. As the book progresses, it moves from voyage of discovery (in
the South), through survivalism (the middle part in the rain when you lose your
horse, then come up against evidence of demons quickly taking over), then into very
dark horror territory (the North.) Having survived the Land Blight and the
Mordor eye thing, the book switches into another even darker mode entirely with
a series of twisted puzzles for you to make your way through. First comes a
house that keeps teleporting you back to its front door if you take a wrong
turn, followed by a trial/test involving a Sorcerer who has been duped by Myurr
into thinking his intentions are all for the good. Successfully convince him
otherwise and he helps you, fail to put him right and he makes you undertake a
very tough (in fact, it’s the hardest part of the book by far, but it is
avoidable) test involving negotiating a MC Escher stair network. Following this
comes a manic almost Vincent Price-esque moment where you have to deal with an
insane (and evil) musical instrument called (and I love this name!) a Demonic Pandemonium.
Next comes a maze of doorways that is confusing but doesn’t go on so long as to
get irritating (like The Maze Of Zagor does in The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain) and then an encounter where you
must fight Myurr’s final guard using combat only. This is quite interesting as
it forces you to not always avoid combats by relying on your talents and
reminds us that this is still FF. Finally comes the very climactic and elaborate
showdown with Myurr himself. Being the final baddie he is very strong (Sk 14 St
25) but this is one of the best designed and most involved final combats in any
FF book and easily equals the superb wizard battle at the end of The Citadel Of Chaos. You have various
options in each attack round (including traditionally hitting him with a
weapon, if you have the correct magical one, that is) and can substitute
fighting for throwing holy water at him or trying to find his Achilles’ Heel by
smashing up the objects in his chamber. It’s tough, but it is also the final
showdown so it needs to be tough, given the mess he’s managed to make of Gallantaria, and demonstrates how powerful an adversary he really is. With the number of
stat bonuses you can have gained (even without going backwards and forwards between
Axmoor and Stamford) and the fact that combats can often be avoided by using
your Talents, this combat is less unwinnable than it may initially seem and
there is a lot to be said for the various choices/options you have during this
battle.
The book as a
whole has a very dark Horror tone to it and this comes through very well in the
writing. In addition to this, the art by the always brilliant Martin McKenna
emphasizes the atmosphere even more and the overall “feel” of this book comes
across particularly effectively. The cover, on the other hand, shares little in
terms of theme to the contents but, with a book this good, the cover could just
as easily have been a blank white page. In some ways, the brilliance of the
book itself is a welcome surprise and the cover could even have been
deliberately misleading!
All things
considered, bar the jarring Lord Of The
Rings steal (which doesn’t fit in well with the otherwise original and
imaginative material presented here), and the uninspiring cover, this is a brilliant
entry into the series and the all-out dark horror genre approach works very
well. This book and #38 Vault Of The
Vampire were the beginning of a return to form that would be apparent in
many of the FF books released going forwards. This is one of the as-yet unre-released books from the original series that desperately needs to be re-published.
