MASTER OF CHAOS
Keith Martin
Reviewed by Mark Lain
At first
glance this book seems like a very conventional “go find the baddie and kill
him” outing, but it would be very unlike a KM book if it were to be as facile as
the premise seems. As soon as you start reading the Rules and the Intro
section, however, it becomes apparent that there is going to be rather more to
it than just a hunter-killer concept.
YOU are engaged
by the wizard Amberon to travel from an otherwise indeterminate location
somewhere on Titan to Khul where you must locate the Master Of Chaos
(Shanzikuul) and retrieve a Staff of Power that he intends to use to unleash
Chaos-based mayhem on Khul. Nothing new there, but the fact that the wizard has
arranged for you to be secreted into the city of Ashkyos by pretending to be a
captive on a slave-ship suggests that this is not going to be a Business Class
journey. The opening slaver gambit is slightly far-fetched but does suggest the
idea of covert secrecy, so I can accept this (just about.) Once you reach Ashkyos
you then have to scour the city for goods and services, before setting off
across a desert via the rather smaller and grimmer town of Rahasta (the name of
which changes to Rabesh at one point), and then onto the Ruins of Kabesh (which
was completely destroyed by the forces of Chaos during The Great War) to find
the hidden entrance to the Chaos Pits where Shanzikuul is hiding-out. A simple
plot but the extra added elements are what makes it a bit different to similar
FF books in this vein. Firstly, you start without any weapons, armour, shield
or provisions. This makes perfect sense given that you start out on a slave-ship
and it creates a sense of urgency once you reach Ashkyos as without any of
these you are unlikely to live very long. To add an extra dimension of realism,
for as long as you are weapon-less you can only use your fists to fight, which
will only do a foe 1 Stamina point of damage. Similarly, having no armour or
shield will make you vulnerable to attack, meaning you fight with a -2 Skill
penalty until you can find these items. The lack of food naturally makes your
ability to restore lost Stamina impossible so, again, it is imperative that you
acquire some pretty quickly. As is often the case in KM FFs, encumbrance sort
of comes into play here in that you are limited to only being able to carry a
maximum of 12 Provisions at any one time (or only 4 if you have no backpack to
put them in) but, in a very neat twist, if you can get your hands on a camel,
you can double this to 24 (which incidentally you really will desperately need
in the desert section!) KM is always adept at adding aspects of realism to his
books and MoC is no exception thanks
to these features, although they are demanding on the player and involve a lot
of remembering to factor these in in the more free-form RPG style of gamebook
design that is a KM trademark. Two additional mechanics are also included: a
Notoriety stat and several Special Skills. The Notoriety stat is a reflection
of how much attention from the authorities in Ashkyos you are drawing to
yourself – kill someone and it will go up, likewise cause trouble and it will
increase too. It starts at zero and, should it rise to 8 or more, you have to
get out of town immediately regardless of whether you have finished exploring
or not. This stat works really well, adding to the sense of urgency whilst also
making you take extra care in behaving yourself and you do feel under pressure
to get what you need to do done before you have to quit town. Sadly, the
Special Skills are far less successfully deployed. The main positive is that there
is no optimum combination, although certain Skills will save your life in some
specific situations that can be avoided by taking other courses of action. In essence,
they are a means of steering you out of lethal moments that you should not
really be in and/or a means of acquiring useless or fairly obvious information
that you have no real necessity to know. It occurs to me that the generally
unappealing naming-conventions of the Skills do kind of suggest that they are a
non-vital afterthought: Acute Hearing (for eavesdropping, basically and, even
then, not very often), Animal Wisdom (useless – just states the obvious a lot),
Blindsight (sounds handy, but rarely gets any use), Climbing (will save your
life at least once and is of generally more use than most of the others, if
still far from essential), Move Silently (self-explanatory and can be
substituted by buying Boots of Stealth), Tracking (again, adds very little of
value to your progress). The adventure would be no worse off without these
Special Skills but they do at least give the impression that you might need
them, even though you can win just as easily without using any of them. It is
often the case in FFs that, if two extra mechanics are included, one will work
far more effectively than the other but rarely is the difference in deployment
as stark as it is here.
Whilst we are
on the subject of starkly contrasting elements of this book, the overall design
of the adventure itself is very unbalanced and changeable. The initial section
on the slave-ship just seems to exist simply to try to reduce your Stamina by
as much as possible thus making you all the more reliant on food once you start
to get hold of it. At the very least, you have to lose 5 Stamina points in this
short episode, but it is possible to lose up to 22 if you make the wrong
choices meaning all but the most powerful of characters will be dead before
they even reach Ashkyos and the adventure proper. This seems very unfair and,
whilst it is obviously designed to make you pay attention to your actions and
to learn from previous failures, it also seems very harsh and does not give a
good impression of how much hope you have of getting through the rest of the
book. However, once you land at Ashkyos the interest level and the fairness
change dramatically. Ashkyos is a very eventful and varied city with much to
explore and lots to do, notwithstanding the limits placed on you by allowing
your Notoriety to increase (although you can get around it all without getting
ejected as long as you are careful.) This is the best bit of the book by far
and I really did not want it to end – I could quite happily have spent the
entire book in Ashkyos. As is common with KM FFs, you are free to roam around
the city in any order, re-visiting areas as you may need to, until you either
get thrown out or decide you have done everything you want to. The non-linear approach
of this part of the book allows cause-and-effect mechanics to come into play
and there are lots of side missions should you choose to accept them. You can
of course acquire lots of useful equipment, including sword, shield and armour
(to eliminate any combat penalties), money, lots of food, a helpful talking
mongoose sidekick called Jesper, and a camel (amongst other things.) Make the
wrong choice and you can also be robbed of everything here!
The
impressive and fun Ashkyos section leaves you waiting for something climactic
or equally varied to happen later on but, unfortunately, it never really does,
making the post-Ashkyos section seem inferior and rather flat. Indeed, the most
dull part by far (and also the most wildly unreasonable in terms of difficulty)
comes when you leave Ashkyos and head into the desert, thus embarking on a
relentless catalogue of eating and/or Stamina loss that is so repetitive that
you start to wonder if this is the same book! There is some realism in this section
as your Provisions can go rancid in the heat plus trying to get through on foot
is suicidal but, either way, if you have not found a Ring of Endurance you have
little hope of making it. Plus, you cannot survive at all unless you have at
least one of either a camel or Jesper with you. This demonstrates the
importance of completing the Ashkyos section properly but it makes a non-linear
freedom to roam book into a straight line death-avoidance slog. The difficulty
spikes dramatically again here and this part is even tougher overall than the
slave-ship. You have the option of hiring a boat but it misses out some key
items rendering the easy route redundant.
Next comes
the uneventful hell-hole that is Rahasta which you hardly even notice you are
in, then you head for Kabesh and the final showdown. The Kabesh section is
another free-form exploration but you are limited to only visiting certain parts
of it once so this section is quite linear and must be explored in a certain
pre-determined order which is a shame after the RPG feel of Ashkyos. There is
enough variety to the ruins to carry this part but each element literally only uses
about three or four paragraphs with not much really happening other than a few
consequences of your actions in Ashkyos (at least we have ongoing plot
functions) and you get the impression that KN used up all his best ideas in
Ashkyos then just rattled through the rest of the book as quickly as he could
to get to the end. You do have the option of helping some nomads (and they will
help you in return) to add a bit of interest, but this is not essential to victory.
Finally you find the Chaos Pits (which are blatantly easy to find and leave you
with no feeling of achievement from locating them) which amount to no more than
a couple of choices (with a few instant deaths if you are really stupid)
followed by finding the end baddie himself.
The final
showdown with Shanzikuul is a very typical KM end battle in that he is very
powerful (Sk 13 St 16) but with the right items you can potentially have Sk 15
yourself by this stage and he will conversely have Sk 11 in that scenario which
makes him less deadly than he seems. Furthermore, the usual KM trick of
allowing you to briefly perform some actions in the battle’s interval before it
resumes happens here before you fight him again with slightly replenished
Stamina. And it would not be a KM climactic battle without a third consecutive
combat, this time with a Dark Elf who is on the same mission as you are, but
only one of you can win. Naas the Dark Elf is presented as your nemesis
throughout the book (assuming you meet him in Ashkyos, otherwise he just bizarrely
appears out of the blue at the end), and this is one aspect of brilliance
within the plot flow of the book. Equally, you can end up with TWO recurring
foes if you choose to tangle with a Necromancer who also first appears in
Ashkyos. Logical plot flow and recurring motifs really add to the experience of
a gamebook and their inclusion here raises the post-Ashkyos sections above just
being anti-climax after anti-climax.
Anyone
familiar with KM’s books will be aware of his perpetual fixation with magic
swords and, unsurprisingly, in this book you cannot win without finding one.
Thankfully, what he does manage to deploy far more efficiently than normal is
the maths-based cheat-proofing that his books contain. Mechanisms to make
cheating impossible are always welcome and, for once, there are only a couple
of examples in play in this book which means the balance between gaming and
number-crunching works far better than it often does in FFs where numerical clues
determine the true path.
Another
Martin-ism is his prose technique where he addresses the player directly as if
he were a GM. In MoC his conversational
tone is a bit more informal than usual and there are injections of humour that
aren’t generally seen in the normally very darkly toned KM gamebooks. In
particular the moment where you have to let Jesper go and get laid by a female
mongoose before you leave Ashkyos is very cheekily amusing. Indeed, this book’s
tone (especially for a Chaos-themed effort) seems lighter throughout than KM’s
books usually do which can help it to seem less weighted against you which,
overall, barring the slave-ship and the desert, it is not.
Martin’s FFs
are notorious (with the obvious exceptions of his first two, #34 Stealer Of Souls and #38 Vault Of The Vampire) for being very
difficult and MoC is wildly
schizophrenic in this aspect as most of it is actually quite easy. Yes, the
desert is insanely hard and the slave-ship prologue can be if you are
particularly unlucky, but the rest of it is pretty much plain-sailing.
Acquiring most of the essential items is easy enough, the Ashkyos section is
very forgiving and you can explore every corner of it as long as you avoid the
authorities, and the Kabesh/Chaos Pits final parts are hardly going to be a
challenge if you have done the right things in the earlier sections. The
increasing linearity as the book progresses guides you on the right route and
you are unlikely to take more than a few play-throughs to beat this book. Even
the glaring error (in the black dragon editions, at least) where you are told
in section 229 to use the non-existent inside cover map of Ashkyos as a compass
to help you navigate around has no impact at all on whether you win or not. Better
use of the Special Skills could have made this much more challenging but would
also have put too much emphasis on blind lucky choices rather than on the
gaming experience itself.
A great feature
of MoC is David Gallagher’s internal
art which is varied (some light, some dark images) and quite threatening. This
is a little at odds with Martin’s informal writing but you are meant to feel
under pressure and out of your depth and the art really does highlight this fact.
Les Edwards’ cover image has taken some abuse over the years (apparently even
he admits it is his least favourite FF cover) but it does show a key moment
near the end so credit should be given for this as so many FF covers show
incidental moments of little import. I will happily admit that the picture
itself is pretty poor (Gallagher’s internal image of the same creature is much
better) but you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, as they say!
In summary
then, this is a mixed bag. The Ashkyos section (with its mixture of making
money and getting equipment vs increasing your Notoriety) is far better than
anything else in this book and thankfully takes up a large chunk of the
adventure. From there onwards the material is much flatter and is a bit wanting
in terms of something equally impressive needing to happen late on (that never
does) to balance it all out. Similarly, the difficulty levels are all over the
place and you often wonder where you stand with it all. All the same, Master Of Chaos is a decent gamebook as
its better parts over-shadow its failings and KM controls his game mechanics deployment
well. Overall, though, this seems like a hangover from the generally so-so 30s
part of the series to me.
