Rogue Mage

ROGUE MAGE

Graeme Davis

Reviewed by Mark Lain

With its Nikita-style second-chance-to-redeem-your-fallen-self-by-being-given-a-choice-that-isn’t-really-much-of-a-choice plot idea, Rogue Mage initially gives the impression of potentially being a genuinely juicy hunter-killer dungeon trawl adventure. The lengthy intro section sets the scene well as, instead of being either executed or maimed, you are forced into accepting an assassination mission from the Guild of Magicians to locate and despatch the rogue mage of the title, a certain Galthazzeth. Sadly, as soon as you start playing, it quickly becomes blindingly obvious that this is justifiably considered by many fans to be the weakest of all the short subjects published in Warlock magazine.

Essentially you start at the dungeon entrance (Galthazzeth’s lair), fight a Goblin gnawing on a human bone (which immediately provides you with some of the key items you might need), then enter the dungeon proper, taking various inter-looping paths before quickly and easily finding Galthazzeth’s inner sanctum, fighting him, then chasing him a bit and finishing him off effortlessly, before entering a maze where his life/power source is hidden, destroying this, then rather suddenly and anti-climactically facing your final challenge (a Luck test, rather lamely) before reaching paragraph 200 after a very short amount of playing-time has elapsed.

The first problem, then, is obvious – this gamebook is way too short and appears to amount to rather less than its 200 sections should suggest it will be. On my first playthrough I somehow took the shortest possible path and found Galthazzeth far too quickly for it really to make much sense why. I had very few items, but still managed to defeat him, then I had similarly little difficulty in reaching the win outcome. Very unsatisfying. So I tried a different, and curiously possible, approach whereby I literally took every tunnel and turning and went basically everywhere in the dungeon, before finding the exact same outcome. I had all the items, but this made very little difference other than making my victory all the simpler. So then I tried it with rock-bottom stats (Sk 7, St 14, Luck 7) to see if there was any challenge to this at all and suddenly things got a bit harder as a major design element became massively apparent – there are so many Skill and Luck tests in such a relatively short amount of space that anyone with Skill sub-10 and Luck (literally) sub-11 or-12 is going to struggle. Or, rather, they would if it wasn’t for the overly-generous availability of Potions. You start with the standard-issue single option from Skill/Strength/Fortune, but this adventure uses the WOFM rule (common in Warlock magazine’s short FFs too) where each bottle contains TWO rather than one dose. Yes, there are several Skill penalties along the way, so a Potion for this is justified, but you can find a second one along the way, meaning you can restore your Skill THREE times as you go along. Likewise, there are an incredible TWO additional Fortune Potions to find (raising your Initial Luck to ridiculous levels if you think to use them quick enough), plus two doses of a low-impact Strength Potion that each restore 6 St points. If you find all these, along with the two doses of whichever one you choose to start with, only the Skill tests are likely to really present a challenge. But, I’d suggest the brevity of the dungeon is the challenge here as you are unlikely to find the time to actually consume all these potions before you reach the rather sudden ending (although subsequent playthroughs might make this rather more obvious!)

A little more challengingly, death by Stamina loss is of course quite possible as the familiar Warlock FF error of the rules telling you you have 5 Provisions that you can only eat when told to in the text - a text which never actually allows you to do so - could scupper you somewhat. Indeed, many of the combats in this book are with tough foes which increases the likelihood of dying in battle. Galthazzeth (understandably as he’s the focus here) has Sk 10 St 15 and various spell-casting attacks whenever he wins two consecutive ARs, a Giant Beetle has Sk 9 St 16, the Slithering Horror has Sk 10 St 14 (x two, as you fight each tentacle with the same stats), and Galthazzeth’s right-hand man-monster the Clone Slime has Sk 4 St 30 and makes you fight two Slime Figures every 3 ARs (although killing these costs it 10 St per Slime Figure so you won’t have to fight many of them!) These stats all do make sense in the context of the foes and, in that respect, this element is well-designed and quite balanced. The remainder of combats are with Goblins in the early section of the dungeon and Antmen in the later parts, both of which form Galthazzeth’s guard minions and are easy prey for YOU. The Goblins seem to exist mostly to supply you with items to make the Galthazzeth showdowns easier although the second one just lets you kill him without a fight either way.

For a short (no, VERY short) subject, there are many items to find, along with the abundance of potions and some money (that you never need), but none of them are actually essential to victory. An Ian Livingstone dungeon, this is not, instead the items just make certain parts a bit easier. As I’ve said, the bulk of the items come in the early sections and these areas of the dungeon loop about and inter-connect in a seemingly impossible way. Add to this the fact that you can endlessly backtrack and re-trace your steps before finding Galthazzeth’s badly-hidden hiding place and you may quickly get bored with wandering around aimlessly constantly re-visiting the same unexciting locations. It could be that the maze-like nature of the dungeon is meant to make this seem deceptively long but, by mapping it, you will quickly find the inner areas that you are looking for. And the back-and-forth routing reveals one huge problem with this adventure – the reset button. Be prepared to suspend disbelief as creatures you have killed illogically come back to life if you return to their locations and you end up carrying loads of each item (including, in fact, even more Potions!) If the dungeon in its basic form is not boring enough, re-treading it infinite times will make it seem all the more unbearably uninteresting. You do have the option of varying your approach here and there by taking one of the many options to listen at doors instead of bursting in on things, but this only ever tells you either nothing whatsoever or that there are sounds coming from inside that suggest life. How exciting, NOT! At least this uses up some spare paragraphs to get closer to the full 200 being employed. Likewise, a few cut-and-paste alternative approaches eat up a few more precious sections that could be put to better use making the adventure longer and more satisfying. Even one of the “alternate” possibilities where you might not have met a Goblin Shaman gets cocked-up when it just appears out of the blue, but the text refers to it in such a way that it thinks you know about it.

Structurally, then, and plot-wise (what there is of it after the compelling introduction), this is quite shoddy, and to add insult to injury the common Warlock typing-pool gremlins have been at this adventure in a big way. There are many typos and rogue full-stops in the middle of sentences which make reading this a frustrating experience at times. In particular, “eat” is always written as “cat” and “east” is always “cast”, for some reason. The fact that going “cast” or finding Goblins that “cat” human flesh is pretty common here will amplify this even more.

As this is a traditional (if underwhelmingly short) dungeon trawl, we would expect traps, challenges, memorable foes, and moments of bravura imagination and originality. Granted, there are several original encounters here (the clone species and a Scitalis/Treasure Snake add some interest), but GD has to fall back on Livingstone-isms to get the few available surprises into the proceedings – the Scitalis idea is good but is basically just an illusional treasure trove gimmick, whilst the Imitator disguised as a door is straight out of Baron Sukumvit’s far better-designed dungeon. Luck-testing is a given in surviving dungeon trawls, but here there is far too much reliance on testing Luck (as well as Skill) and this primarily governs how the plot pans-out for you, especially with finding items. For an adventure as short as this, a lot less leaning on stat testing would make it flow far better. Also, very unusually for a dungeon trawl (or a gamebook in general), there is only one instant death in the whole thing and that is caused by, surprise, surprise, running out of Luck and getting irretrievably lost in a maze. The presence of a maze might make you think that there will be some lengthy wandering trying to get out but, instead, you just test your Luck or get straight through it with a map. Not much challenge there then!

Other than an interesting background gambit and a few unique encounters, for the most part this is an uneventful, excessively short/boring, relatively easy, and badly proof-read adventure. So, why the hell was this chosen to be re-printed in the 10^th Anniversary Yearbook that appeared in 1992? I would take any of the Warlock shorts over this one any day. I don’t know who Graeme Davis was talking nicely to but surely this did not deserve a second outing. However, its re-publication did allow for the typos to be eliminated so this version reads far slicker and more professionally. In fact, for the eagle-eyed, there are actually several differences between the two printings:

• ·         A few section numbers have been moved around (for what difference that makes)
• ·         Two of the already pretty weak “sword-fodder” foes have had their stats further reduced so they die even quicker (although the tough ones all remain as per the Warlock version so these are no easier)
• ·         Almost every paragraph has had slight wording tweaks and paraphrasing
• ·         The introduction (the only good bit, really) has been truncated and also heavily edited to remove any of the more graphic references to hanging, cutting hands off, and ripping still beating hearts out of chests (sorry, is FF not meant to be graphic, then?)
• ·         The Guild of Magicians has had a re-brand and become the Guild of Wizards (the difference being....?)
• ·         All art is removed (the original only had three large images – the exterior of the dungeon, a Ghost, and Galthazzeth himself – along with a few incidentals, but these are all well-rendered and do help us visualise at least some parts of the adventure)
• ·         The adventure now has a setting specified, the town of Wolftown, where the original existed in a nameless void with no location or context being given
• ·         All references to Dungeons & Dragons rules are gone

The lack of errors/typos is welcome, but I’m not sure that any of these other changes really amount to much other than saving space for the necessary page format of the 10^th Anniversary Yearbook.

The excising of any D&D mechanics was probably essential as the original version was published in the very brief two-issue era when Warlock’s mini-adventures catered for gamebooks to be played using either FF or D&D systems. It has to be said that, of the two, Rogue Mage utilised D&D rules far more effectively than The Land Of Changes did and the nuances built into the FF rules as regards stat manipulation/penalties are also felt properly if you play using D&D rules, so there is some potential for system-flexing. Sadly, this does not take the focus away from the over-riding dull-ness of Rogue Mage as a game.

It is worth noting that the cover of Warlock #10 (where Rogue Mage’s first iteration appeared) does actually feature a wizard of some sort, but he is not Galthazzeth. Instead he is the result of John Blanche re-working a reader’s competition-winning entry to design the “Warlock” of the magazine’s title. Still, there is a connecting theme with the mini-adventure and this is a good thing as, by this stage, Warlock’s short FFs were usually unrelated to the cover images of the magazine. As for the cover, JB’s bright evocation of the Warlock bristles with energy and is one of the magazine’s more animated and colourful cover images and I like it a lot. For historical completeness’ sake, Citadel Miniatures released a Limited Edition metal miniature of the Blanche Warlock which is now quite collectable (mine was painted for me by a certain Mr Steven Leicester who you may remember from another post on this Blog!)

In summary, Rogue Mage is a weak and uninteresting short adventure with the emphasis on the word “short”. Little of any consequence happens, it is rather too easy (notwithstanding failure by loss of Stamina or Luck), Davis offers little in the way of description or immersion in his text to give an image of the environment we are in, and its best feature by far is the introduction which, as I said earlier, really does grab your attention and make you want to play this massive disappointment of an adventure. The use of the words “gripping solo adventure” in the strapline is, well, a lie, and I struggle to believe that this is from the same mind that gave us the wonderful Midnight Rogue (other than the re-use of the “rogue” tag, of course!) Take my advice - just don’t bother with this.

#20: Sword Of The Samurai

SWORD OF THE SAMURAI

Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Samurai culture has always fascinated me, be it Akira Kurosawa’s classic samurai movies, my ex-house mate’s worrying collection of katanas, or the various museum exhibits of armour and weapons. There is just something very elegant and dignified about it all, along with a lethal efficiency and the importance that honour plays too. The ubiquitous duo of Smith and Thomson have released a vast number of gamebooks together, as well as each of them individually having penned several others, and, for this, their second entry into the FF cannon they present us with one of my favourite gamebooks of all time.

I’d imagine many peoples’ initial reactions to this title would be confusion over just how feudal Japan fits into Fighting Fantasy and the simple answer is that it does not. Instead, the basics are uplifted and deposited in the region of Hachiman, an area cut off completely from the rest of Khul that has, coincidentally, developed in exactly the same way that Japan did. OK, this may seem like a point is being stretched but there is no real reason why this could not have happened and it avoids MS/JT’s second FF having the same problem as their first (#11 Talisman Of Death) in having to be set somewhere other than Titan, making it not quite fit with the bulk of the series. In fact, the “orphan state” nature of this second book actually works in its favour and makes the setting all the more plausible. The plot is the real glue that binds this alien setting to the overall Titan concept as it fuses Japanese samurai concepts with the standard FF plot of retrieving a key item from an evil uber-baddie who intends to wreak havoc with it (oh, and killing him too, of course.) The baddie here is Ikiru (also the title of a non-samurai Kurosawa movie, incidentally), the Master of Shadows who has nicked the sword of power (the dai-katana, Singing Death)  and taken it into the Pit of Demons ready to unleash all hell on everyone. You are the Shogun’s Champion (that old FF chestnut of being the elite version of something-or-other) and you are despatched to retrieve said sword. At face value, this is fairly straightforward, but the execution of this book makes for something much more involved and involving.

Firstly, you can be one of four different kinds of samurai by choosing a Special Skill. You must pick one from Kyujutsu (archery), Iaijutsu (fast draw), Karumijutsu (heroic leaping), or Ni-to-Kenjutsu (fighting with two swords). Thankfully there is no optimum choice, meaning the book can be completed using any of these and each allows for huge re-playability as they have different effects on how certain moments in the book will play out. My personal favourite is the archery option as you get a bow and four different types of arrow in addition to your standard equipment, and each behaves differently, although sneaking around picking off opponents rather than stepping bravely forward and fighting them with a sword can affect your honourable samurai status at times. I am also rather fond of the two sword combat skill as this gives you both a longsword (katana) and a shortsword (wakizashi) (normally you only get the long sword/katana) and allows you to act like the cover image and also to stand rather more chance in combat, especially if you have a Skill of sub-10. Fast draw is handy for getting auto-hits in combat but you have to remember it’s there otherwise it will do nothing so this one is a bit of a sleeper. Heroic leaping plays a big part in certain plot instances but it is just not all that exciting to be able to jump around when what we really want from a samurai book is fighting with samurai swords!

The second key feature in use here is the extra stat of Honour. This exists to force you to play out the role of a samurai – act honourably and your Honour increases, do something dishonourable and your Honour decreases. Very logical, really, but there is more to it than that as, should your Honour drop to zero you are forced to commit ritual suicide (sepukku) to eke out one last honourable act from your fallen existence (is this really meant to be for kids, out of interest?) There are a small number of key moments where your Honour score is checked, although these will rarely lead to failure, rather they will just make you do a bit more to progress. In a neat opening gambit, whichever direction you initially choose will lead first to a scenario where your ability to play the samurai role is tested. This is good to see as it really brings you into your character and gives an indication of what is expected of you in this book.

Interestingly though, only one route (the easier one) really develops your actual Honour score, the other takes a more situation-based approach and it is this difference which adds the third important element to this book – there are two, wholly distinct, paths through to victory. Head west and you will first have to deal with the rise of a rival opportunist Shogun (this is avoidable but most options will lead to him) who has seized power, followed by a trek through the Forest of Shadows, then on to your target (the Shios’ii Mountains) where the entrance to the Pit of Demons lies. Going east takes you through loyal territory which is blighted by a nocturnal problem with Undead, followed by a tricky episode at a river inhabited by Kappa, then into either the dangerous Spider Fens or the somewhat dream-like (and very dangerously linear) Enchanted Garden. The westerly route is the easier of the two, although it does involve a short-lived (and rather ambiguously-allied) companion, a tough riddle-solving moment with a Tatsu (wingless dragon) that I defy anyone to fathom out, then a brilliant cameo with the Zombie Samurai and river full of animated skeletons from the cover (which does take a bit of nowse and/or item-holding to beat.) The harder eastern path is longer overall and requires you to have decent stats otherwise you will struggle, although it does generally exploit your skill selection more effectively. If you can find the map that allows you to access it, the Enchanted Garden is probably the toughest (albeit non-essential to victory) part of this book as any false move will kill you but it does add an extra challenge once you’ve beaten all the other parts. Once you’ve taken your chosen path, both routes converge in the mountains where you are faced with The Hub and things get weird, but this is actually one of my favourite parts of this book as it really is totally unexpected and it makes sense of the seemingly disparate and unconnected encounters and item collecting that both paths will present to you. The Hub is effectively a waiting room with eight doors, each leading to a different plain of existence, bar the eighth which takes you to the penultimate showdown of the book, the Tourney of the Planes (sic.) You can visit as many or as few as you wish in a bid to get allies to help you face the four opponents that you have to deal with in the Tourney itself, but which allies will help you depends a) on which route you took to get here, and b) on which items you have or actions you chose on the way. This is really clever as it stops this part from being so easy it becomes academic whilst also meaning each playthrough can, in theory, produce a different outcome here. Having made some allies you can then decide that it’s time to go to the Tourney and fight four opponents, all “specials”. As this is a book with a great variety of potential plots, you can survive with just one ally (the first opponent can only be defeated with an ally) but you need the right allies to beat the right opponents, otherwise you have three very tough battles to contend with here. Beat this part and you then reach your final goal, the Pit of Demons, and your final showdown with Ikiru himself (a toughie with Sk 12 St 12.) As with the rest of the book, there are numerous ways to tackle him (the easiest is by using Singing Death, assuming you have found its secret, of course), ranging from straight combat to outright killing of him with a successful Luck roll (although this is only possible if you have Singing Death.) If you don’t have the dai-katana this fight is much harder and Ikiru gets the Luck advantage in that if you fail a Luck roll he can kill you instantly. The latter is rather more akin to a FF final baddie battle and it does make the end more climactic as well as much harder, even if it does mean you don’t retrieve Singing Death until after Ikiru is dead and removes the plot mechanic of using his ill-gotten gains against him.

What is probably becoming apparent from all this is that this book is not particularly difficult and is more of a book to re-play to freshly discover all its different plot-threads rather than a book to try to unravel a solution, given just how many there are here, and ample re-playability is one of its big plus-points. None of the routes are unpassable (bar one sub-route that gives you loads of warning not to take it) but it must be said that most combats (especially those on the easterly path) are actually quite hard (Skills of 10+ are generally the norm), but the four different approaches to combat dependant on your chosen Special Skill do take the edge off this to an extent. What I find odd is that any Samurai you fight (notwithstanding a fairly strong Ronin who hates you) are by far the weakest opponents you will take on – are they not supposed to be elite warriors, or is this designed to imply that Hachiman is a really lethal place? Even the rogue Shogun, Tsietsin, is not that hard to defeat and I do struggle with this idea. Similarly, key checkpoints are just the “do you/don’t you” choice type and nothing other than the Tatsu riddle episode really tests whether you are cheating or not, which makes this all the easier.

The sheer variety of different versions of certain routes and episodes leads to a necessity to have a lot of cut-and-paste paragraphs but this does result in every option making perfect sense and aids continuity enormously (Tsietsin’s castle, in particular has several variations on a theme/approach to discover.) A curious by-product of all the possibilities you have is that only certain specific options will lead to you seeing the art for creature encounters (and most here are unique, given the setting), which, again, demands that you re-play if you want to know everything there is to know here and, as this is the only FF to be set wholly in Hachiman, you definitely will find yourself wanting to know as much as you can about the region. This book is our only resource on Hachiman, and it thankfully allows you to travel around most of the region, seeing its unique and original monsters, and being immersed in its fundamentally Japanese idiom.

Alan Langford’s art is the perfect complement to MS/JT’s to-the-point but very thorough writing style and this book oozes with Eastern atmosphere. Langford brilliantly captures exactly how the mind’s-eye interprets the descriptions and some of the art is truly phenomenal in its combination of horror and exoticness. Take the Rokuro-Kubi group image or the attacking Undead Samurai as cases in point, although almost any illustration from this book could be cited as perfectly suited. The Eastern horror sense is countermanded with the awe-inspiring nature of certain creatures, especially those intended as allies in The Hub and/or the almost “deity”-level opponents such as the three Demons in the Tourney of the Planes. Likewise, Peter Andrew Jones’ cover is phenomenally good featuring, as it does, one of my favourite foes from the book (even if you only meet it on the Westerly “easier” route, but I guess that’s another thing to discover on subsequent playthroughs!) Mel Grant’s reinterpreted cover picture for Wizard’s Series 1 re-release takes a more horrific and “modernised” approach to the Undead Samurai image but the excessive use of red (the river is red, but so is the sky) does not work as well for me as the darker Puffin cover. Still, Wizard’s cover is pretty good and is far better than most of their botch-jobs.

On the subject of the Westerly route, it is interesting to note that you can amass a massive amount of money, none of which is of any use to you. Is this a clever deceit to remind us that this book is about Honour not Wealth, or is it an awkward oversight? I’d prefer to plump for the former and give another mark for excellent design as MS/JT don’t really drop the ball at any point with this book, notwithstanding its ease which is impossible to ignore but does work in the re-play and multiple possibilities stakes, and the rather jarring Tatsu riddles section.

Needless to say, I rate this book very highly and everything (even the relative ease) works and holds together thematically and contextually really well. Thankfully, Smith and Thomson’s FFs were re-issued in Wizard’s first iteration making this book all the more findable for those who don’t have it, although it is one of the later issues which are tougher to locate so you are more likely to pick up a Puffin original which is worth it as the Puffin version has the better and more suited cover to complete a quality package.  Essential reading/playing.

#19: Demons Of The Deep

DEMONS OF THE DEEP

Steve Jackson (II)

Reviewed by Mark Lain

The fact that the Atlantis myth has not been exploited very much in the world of gamebooks is slightly baffling as it has considerable potential, assuming the execution is done right. Steve Jackson (the American one) obviously saw the concept’s mileage, moved the legendary lost city to Titan and set his second FF gamebook there, in the process creating a unique and very original gamebook experience.

The plot is simple. YOU are the sole survivor of a pirate ship’s attack on your vessel and, to reward your staying power, the pirate Captain (the crappily-named Captain Bloodaxe) kits you out with a load of heavy food and throws you into the sea where you sink to the ocean floor, only to land in a magical pentagram that gives you gills meaning you can breathe under water and go off in search of your revenge on the pirates who got you into this predicament (and maybe steal all their booty and become rich into the bargain too.) There is a snag, though – if you surface and/or dusk settles, your gills will disappear and you will not be able to survive under water any longer. So this is essentially a race against time revenge outing, but the beauty of it all is in the exploration itself.

One thing that quickly strikes you is how difficult this is to map and it is indeed quite labyrinthine in the way that various sections inter-link with one-another but that is because it uses an ingenious multi-levelled 3D structure to make the most of your being under water and therefore able to rise and dive at will. In places, you can get sucked into under-currents and head down watershutes, as well as being able to pass over areas from an elevated position. As confusing as this is on paper it really does give the feeling of being under water and adds massively to the (literally) immersive nature of this book. What is very important to understand, though, is that this being a SJ (II) adventure, there are multiple paths through as well as numerous different endings, so mapping is not especially essential to victory as such, given that you can blunder around and get sucked into or ejected out of various areas without it necessarily meaning you are going to lose. Granted, there is what seems to be an optimum ending where you defeat the pirates and become super-rich, but there are many other less successful but still acceptable end results which adds hugely to re-playability. Equally, there are several ways to defeat the pirates and, in fact, to get to where they are hiding-out, as well as there being several ways of finding the clues that can help you locate them (although you can of course just guess by simply picking the right option when you are prompted as well.) Unusually for a SJ (II) book this one is linear in that you cannot double-back or revisit previously explored areas, but you do have the standard SJ (II) option of exploring just about every option at each juncture, or at least until you pick the best one at which point you are sent to the next stage of the mission and can disregard the “lesser” options. Similarly, paragraph 400 is just a normal game section making it less obvious which outcome is the intended definitive one, if there even genuinely is one.

Furthermore, as is also the case with SJ (II)’s FFs, this book is very easy unless you surface too soon (and you can die two paragraphs in if you do this) or one of your stats gets reduced to nothing and the multiple paths/outcomes make it even easier as there is no true path to hunt for. Instant deaths are quite rare, although there are at least two moments where your Stamina can be instantly reduced to 1. That said, there is a plethora of opportunities for your Initial scores to increase, your Stamina to rise by 10(!), and/or your Attack Strength to rise a lot, and there is even one moment where you can quite literally become a “new person” and are made to re-roll all three of your stats (which could be good or bad for you, depending on how you started out, of course), so this is definitely a book that can be completed with rock-bottom starting stats. Add to this the fact that finding key items and NPCs is not that hard (you can even gamble gold pieces and black pearls to an infinite level) and you have a book that is not going to take much defeating, but that’s not the point – the idea is to explore and re-explore as you find all the various paths and outcomes with each playthrough. This is a book that allows you to discover fresh moments over and over again, rather than the sometimes frustrating usual FF approach of either find the one well-hidden route and win, or die trying.

For the most part, you are required to move around Atlantis hunting for useful items and allies to help you get your revenge, although some allies are more trustworthy than others and the sly Sea Dragon will certainly make you work for your victory if you choose to use its “help” (incidentally, several times the book sneakily tries to convince you that this is a wise choice, which adds a bit of unpredictability to the proceedings.) Nothing’s help can be got without you having certain items, but the different options remove the “true path” aspect that can often be soul-destroying in these books. If you want to use the Dolphin’s help (far safer than the Sea Dragon) you literally have to fight for the right when a Shark attacks it and this combat highlights a very noticeable feature of this book – physically strong, but technically useless foes resulting in long but easy fights with enemies that have low Skills but very high Staminas. As you are under water, the encounters are often unique whilst being perfectly-placed within the undersea environment, and many of them are animal types which, whilst acting largely on instinct, are quite big and tough. The vast majority of the fights here are with enemies with Staminas in excess of 10, with the logically toughest two being the legendary Kraken (Sk 10 St 30) and the Sea Dragon (Sk 10 St 24), although neither of these are necessary for victory. Many foes are fish or crustaceans and, in an interesting touch, fights with the “stupider” creatures can be avoided by feeding them, whilst fights with more “evolved” types (Water Elemental, Merman, etc) can be avoided by simply bribing them not to hurt you or by doing them services. To emphasise the Atlantean concept, numerous Mermen and at least one Mermaid come into the mix, as do some sea versions of familiar fantasy fare such as the fishy-looking Sea Ogre, the Muck Demon, and the Deep Ones (sort of frogmen with delusions of grandeur.) To add a nice fantasy twist to familiar Earth species, we meet a Swordfish (which thinks it’s Cyrano de Bergerac and really is an expert swordsman!), the cathedral appropriately houses Angelfish as well as Devilfish, and there is even a Lionfish which has a lion’s head and can roar! If that isn’t enough to get the undersea world message across, the Mermen use various species of Toolfish (as can you), which reminds me somewhat of all the different animals that are used as household tools in The Flintstones!

The various creature types show both a clear focus on the setting as well as some wry humour and there are other moments where this book does not take itself too seriously as well, although it never lets itself down by seeming trivial in the way that the satirical FFs such as #27 Star Strider often did. We meet a Deep One Champion called Sharkspear, the tight-arsed Sea Dragon refuses to lend you two gold pieces if you ask it to, you have to kiss an ugly female Deep One to raise her from her slumbers, Cyrano the Swordfish is pretty bonkers (although the stat rewards for fighting him are well worth having), and there is a location called Gorblimey Rocks at one point too. These moments of humour are strangely suited to the generally very other-worldly feel and tone of this book, although there is a curious moment where a Merman asks if you are a Deep One and expresses relief when he finds out you are not as they are at war – a war which he presumably has only heard about otherwise he would know that a human and a Deep One look nothing like each other, but we can forgive this one inconsistency in what is otherwise a very well-designed and controlled concept.

One encounter worthy to be singled-out is that with the Bone Demon. Whilst this is not a unique creature and is certainly not restricted to an undersea locale, the encounter is memorable for two things: firstly, you have to fight three parts of it as three different foes, and secondly, it is the creature featured on Les Edwards’ cover. When this book first came out (and still now if looked at from a certain distance) I genuinely believed this cover had been rendered by photo-manipulation, it is that real-looking. The cover also perfectly suits the location with its sea blues, green seabed, and even air bubbles rising from the Bone Demon. This is probably one of my favourite FF covers due largely to how well it fits with the book, as well as its eerily realistic appearance. Sadly, the internal art is by Bob Harvey, a man whose work has never quite done it for me, but he does actually do a better job here than normally and his Mermen and buildings are especially effective, although I’ve never liked the way he draws people. Thankfully, the writing is so atmospheric and SJ (II) captures his atypical locations so well in the text that the art is almost incidental to the prose itself, rather than being a function of the overall experience of the book.

I briefly mentioned black pearls above and acquiring these is essential if you want to achieve the revenge-plus-riches ending. The search for these is more akin to the traditional Ian Livingstone style of gamebook where you quickly realise that you need to amass a certain volume of one recurring motif or another. Black pearls can only normally be found by defeating the toughest foes (killing the Kraken will yield the largest haul of three in one place) and, if you can find out how to use them (and the person with the info is not that hard to find) you will reach one of my favourite parts of this or any other FF gamebook where for every two black pearls you can create a Skeleton Warrior to fight the end pirates for you. OK, I admit it, I’m a huge fan of Jason And The Argonauts and this has been blatantly plagiarised from that movie, but the image of Ray Harryhausen’s Stopmotion skeleton army always comes to mind when I reach this point of the book and, that alone, is enough to make this one so memorable for me.

In terms of gamebook design, there is nothing unusual here other than its complex multi-level game map, and it avoids any special mechanics, relying instead on superb exploitation of its theme and concept. The multi-path/multi-ending approach is uncharacteristic for FF in general, but is standard fare for SJ (II) and I think it is all the better for its lack of gimmicks. Likewise, the revenge plot is very simple, leaving the player to focus on the unique world that SJ (II) has created in this book.

This is a fantastic gamebook which has a certain dignified elegance to it which is often missing from the generic stalk-and-slash “ultimate hero” FF books. It makes excellent use of its atypical setting, and its unusual and imaginative encounters and locations are perfectly matched to the writing and ethereal atmosphere. For these reasons, along with the Harryhausen steal, this is one of my favourite FFs. It’s a little too easy, but that only increases playthrough scope. I highly recommend this for something a bit different.

#41: Master Of Chaos

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.

#45: Spectral Stalkers

SPECTRAL STALKERS

Peter Darvill-Evans

Reviewed by Mark Lain

At face value this book has little appeal. By that I mean that its cover does it no favours and is amongst the worst FF covers ever: a purple gargoyle is confronting a green humanoid bug in a wizard’s hat whilst gold-coloured sheep-grubs graze in a pasture with a Germanic fairytale castle standing on a cliff-face in the background – look a little harder and you’ll see a vague spectral outline behind garish yellow splatter-letters announcing this to be “Spectral Stalkers”. Oh dear, this does not look promising. What madness is this?

Open the book, however, and the interior seems rather more interesting – a colour map of a maze with a poem, Tony Hough artwork depicting a vast array of material from Medieval Fantasy through to what seems to be Sci-Fi, very long paragraphs (almost always at least half a page in length), and loads of creatures that we have hitherto never heard of in FF. Intriguing enough to want to give it a go I’d say. After all, FF #28 Phantoms Of Fear has an abysmal cover but is well worth reading/playing, so hopefully we are in for a pleasant surprise with Spectral Stalkers too. And indeed we are!

This book is without doubt one of the most high-concept and hugely inventive of all the FF series. YOU begin by having your fortune read (Darvill-Evans always loves to use the “start in the middle of something” approach to throw you straight into the action, rather than providing a context-setting intro) which does not bode well for you as you draw a blank card that does not actually exist in the deck and the fortune-teller tells you to prepare yourself for a destiny that does not lie “anywhere in this world”. Dark clouds then ominously approach and you encounter a wounded giant human lacewing thing that gives you a sphere and tells you to “beware the Spectral Stalkers”. What then follows is a truly bizarre trip through Darvill-Evans’ fertile imagination starting with a visit to the Library In Limbo (with its bespectacled Dragon receptionist), followed by numerous dimensions within the Macrocosmos that the Aleph (the ball the dying lacewing gave you) contains. The Aleph essentially contains all that has ever and will ever exist, meaning that possession of it gives the holder total power over absolutely everything, something the baddie of the piece (the Archmage Globus) wants so he has sent out the Spectral Stalkers of the title to track it down and bring it to him. YOU need to get to Globus and stop him from becoming Overlord of Everything. And that is the plot in a nutshell: avoid the Spectral Stalkers, find Globus, defeat him, save the Multiverse, return home to Khul and live happily ever after. Unusually simple for a book in the quite densely-plotted 40s part of the series, but what really carries this one through is the variety of worlds/dimensions that you can find on the way. It is, of course, possible to cut to the chase by going straight to the Ziggurat World where Globus lives (and very unusually you can still win by doing this) but you will miss out on all the fun and not really see the point of how the Aleph works and the huge impact it has on this adventure. Plus it will seem very short too!

The Aleph itself uses (for the most part) two mechanics to determine how the trip progresses. The less common one is effectively your desire influencing it (Do you want to go home to Neuburg? Do you want to get straight to the point and go to the Ziggurat World? Will you place yourself at the mercy of the Aleph? Do you want someone to explain what all the stuff you’ve collected might be for?) but, more often than not, you move from one place to the next by rolling a dice. An even number sends you one way, an odd number another. This then opens out further along where any number from 1 to 6 can send you off in any of six possible directions. Which brings us to the first important feature of this book: there is no true path and it would be grossly unfair if there was one given that you have very limited control over your dimensional route, instead you can go in basically any direction and still have a chance of victory. Plus, even in the slightly more linear final section on the Ziggurat World there are still two routes through, both of which can lead to winning. It’s always nice to be given freedom to explore in gamebooks rather than analysing the map to find the author’s one true path and this is a welcome approach. Conversely, this also means that there are no essential items or information to find - although most items will make it a bit easier for you, you will not necessarily fail without any of them. Furthermore, the randomised nature of how the Aleph works means that no two playthroughs are ever likely to be the same and with 14 worlds to visit (including the Ziggurat World) there must be thousands of possible different routes through. This is clearly a very unique gamebook.

Another feature of this book is that it is very short on combats (assuming you do not decide to kill everything you meet, of course, as the option is there if you want to take it) and it is even possible to complete it without a single fight and/or by curtailing many of the fights if you do get into them. The idea of putting the overall concept over the tradition of fighting being essential to role-play is a mixed-bag and, on the one hand it is a refreshing change that makes you focus more on the ideas being presented, but it can make this feel like it isn’t really FIGHTING Fantasy as such. Whichever way you look at it, it’s different and new ideas were needed by the 45^th book in the series so it is still a good thing. In a similar vein, the final showdown with Globus involves no combat at all, instead you need to use your cunning to defeat him based on a piece of detail that you can pick up along the way. Of course, you can still stumble across the solution without knowing the info by just picking the right option so, again, this can be completed whether you find the info or not.

Equally, this is one of those rare FFs that can genuinely be beaten even with rock-bottom starting stats. The lack of combats helps this a lot, although I would suggest that a low Skill could cause you more of a problem if you take a more perilous route on the Ziggurat World as there are several Skill tests (and some combined Skill+Stamina tests that can involve rolling six or even seven dice in logically unlikely to be survivable moments) on certain paths at that stage. There are, however, very few Luck tests which also helps your progress. There are even quite a few bonuses to be had to your Skill, Stamina, and Luck which will make it even easier for you, especially if you have a weaker character. As with all later books, we have a new stat in the form of Trail, but it is unlikely to really cause you any problems unless you are taking the psychotic approach. It starts at zero and only increases if you draw attention to yourself too much (which makes sense as you start to leave a trail of where you have been) and testing it involves rolling THREE dice, a test that you only fail by rolling UNDER your Trail, which means that failing a Trail test is quite an unfortunate achievement. If you do fail, the Spectral Stalkers will get you and take you to the end of the book (rather than killing you) where you have as much chance of still winning as if you had not fallen foul of them. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but it seems to be a missed opportunity to scupper careless players – any sighting of the Stalkers can give you a frisson of terror, but once you know that they don’t do anything to you, you kind of stop being bothered about them. Globus wants the Aleph, not you - you just happen to be its custodian right now, so in that sense it just about works. Generally, Trail does not really add much, but it does allow the Stalkers to play a recurring role and also adds a slight element of fate to the proceedings.

It is fairly obvious then that this is an easy book to complete (it may initially seem harsh that you only start with 2 Provisions but that is hardly a problem either), although there are individually challenging moments to add meat even though they don’t really have any bearing on your ultimate fate. In particular, the Maze World is almost impossible to get through without having all seven Sigils which are other spheres (and one wheel arch that for some reason Elves are afraid of) that are scattered about various dimensions. Given the completely randomised nature of your route it is unlikely that you will find them all, plus there is a continuity error in the Maze where you can be sent to the wrong linking section on at least two occasions, so this part is not a huge success. Also, the human chess game requires a lot of concentration and analysis of the two-page board and rules to get right, not that the outcome matters much overall so, again, this is a missed chance to add a bit of difficulty. Indeed, many of the worlds you visit yield very little in terms of useful equipment, most are just cameos to show the sheer enormity of the Aleph’s infinite possibilities and also the vastness of Darvill-Evans’ invention.

What really makes this book work so well and come alive is the various dimensions that range from fantasy to Sci-Fi:

•      Neuburg 400 years into the future – which seems just like Neuburg now and basically involves you avoiding a potential murdering by an unscrupulous innkeeper
•      A world where skeletal beings are fighting a war that you get caught in the middle of
•      A dune planet with a Golem problem
•      A human chess game being played so that the giant girl being that is playing can avoid being forced to get pulled by her opponent giant boy being
•      A vampire circus (with a main protagonist with a rather transparent anagram name)
•       A futuristic alien specimen hunter’s ship (where Robbie The Robot can be shorted-out with a fire extinguisher)
•      A world where funny little things called Felitis seem to think you’re their God or something
•      A redneck Elf witch-hunt world
•      A world with giant shape-changing hunters
•      The home of a talking musical instrument that is being ruled by evil pig beings called Zwinians
•      An eerie haunted Toy Museum/Castle world
•      A mapmaker’s Sci-Fi world (who looks like Davros)
•      The complicated Maze World mentioned above (although it’s worth negotiating if only to meet the hilariously bizarre Logic Dog)
•      And the linear Ziggurat World where Globus has his lair

Some of these are more fleshed-out than others whilst some just form very brief cameos and some can just be avoided completely in terms of getting to the end, but the enjoyment is to be had in exploring each of them to see what weird and wonderful ideas are in this book. The longest and most exploited by a long way is the Ziggurat World which (whilst it should be big as it’s the climax of the piece) is a bit of a pity as it’s easily the least interesting of the bunch. The Crystal Garden is curious and the narcissistic talking doorway is a laugh, but too much time is taken up on climbing hills and dealing with a couple of alien races that live there for this to be interesting compared to the rest. Other than this one, all the other possible dimensions/worlds are very imaginative and the world-hopping section of the story mixes Dr Who motifs with Terry Gilliam’s films and the Quantum Leap idea of body-swapping to create a really varied, intriguing and entertaining adventure experience.

In spite of its totally off-the-wall nature, this book still reads like a Peter Darvill-Evans adventure. It is “set” (or at least it starts and ends) in Neuburg in Khul which was the setting for PD-E’s first FF (#25 Beneath Nightmare Castle) and his repeatedly occurring fixation for acid and toxins comes back again here, particularly in the final part. This gives it a slightly unsavoury flavour but, assuming you’ve gone via the various worlds to get there, this may not seem too over-bearing in the way that it did in BNC. A big element of PD-E FFs is his inclusion of unique and original creatures and there are none as unique as those found in SS as, given that you jump through dimensions as well as time, literally anything is possible, be it variations on fantasy fare, futuristic ideas, horror imagery, and some stuff that is just wacky fun, but it all adds to the variety and inventiveness on show here. What Darvill-Evans also does very well in his books is laying on the atmosphere thickly with long explanatory sections and, particularly in-depth descriptions of creatures and locations that are genuinely believable in their detail, in spite of the bizarreness of it all. An interesting added element of SS, though, is the way that some material is truncated for the sake of pacing and avoidance of digression. For example, you are often told that you walk for hours to get to places which must make some locations pretty featureless, but it does add to the effect nicely. Also, unlike some FFs, certain moments of peril are presented efficiently such as an electric staircase that requires you to first decide which step is safest but then, rather than just repeating itself over and over in a bid to reduce your Stamina, the book decides that you have cracked the puzzle and lets you literally skip the rest. There could have been some extra challenge included in this part, but it does avoid too much focus on minutiae when you are really supposed to be exploring the Aleph’s possibilities, so I’m happy with this as it is.

Everything about this book is undeniably bizarre and Tony Hough’s very varied and weird internal artwork (with more than a hint of Whovian influence to be seen in places) is the perfect accompaniment to your brain’s attempts at getting your head around it all. It’s not necessary to have every slight detail presented graphically, but there is just enough of the main moments (every opening arrival section for each world has a picture, for example) for you to be able to switch between the worlds effectively. As for Ian Miller’s hideous cover, it is just that (hideous and garish) but it does present a major plot element so there is some saving grace to it.

Spectral Stalkers is a bonkers, but highly original and thoroughly enjoyable gamebook. It is unbalanced in that the less interesting second section is as long as the world-hopping part, is very very easy to beat, but its one-of-a-kind construction allows for ample re-play possibilities, and it is really good to find a FF book with as many paths through to success as there are possible combinations of routes. The lack of either combat or item-hunting may not be to everyone’s taste but there are so many things going for this book that it is hard not to recommend it. Almost, but not quite, brilliant, but unquestionably a tour de force of imagination and gamebook design. Well worth playing if you are looking for an antidote to the more traditional FF fare, plus it mixes fantasy and Sci-Fi in a fun way that few 100% Sci-Fi gamebooks ever could, whilst still being a Titan-centric entry. It probably makes rather more sense if you are off your tits, but who cares when there is this much fun to be had!

#36: Armies Of Death

ARMIES OF DEATH

Ian Livingstone

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Having wowed us with the brilliance of #6 Deathtrap Dungeon and then impressed us with its long-hoped-for sequel, #21 Trial Of Champions, a third visit to Fang’s designer dungeon would probably have been a bridge too far. Instead, IL chose to continue the franchise by expanding on the closing line of ToC that tells you that you decide to spend your winnings on assembling an army. Conveniently, we learn in the opening section of Armies Of Death that this comes at the same time as this week’s scourge of Titan surfaces in the form of the Shadow Demon Agglax. In a slightly forced-seeming backstory you learn of how a scavenger called Drek found a sealed bottle that, on breaking the seal, accidentally released Agglax who immediately headed off to assemble an army of death to destroy Allansia (well, we certainly haven’t had that kind of idea in the series before, have we?)

So, on the one hand, IL has not taken the simple way out and re-built Deathtrap Dungeon yet again which would have been fairly easy to do and would have been a crowd-pleaser, assuming it came out at least half-decently as no-one expects too much from a second sequel. However, on the other hand, and this is the biggest problem with this book, the whole construct seems tired and almost laboured. One thing that strikes you very quickly is how the encounters for the most part just seem to be a hodge-podge of creatures from very early FF books: Gark, Calacorm, Fire Imp, etc, plus a catalogue of monsters in particular lifted from #3 The Forest Of Doom (Hill Men, Fishman, Werewolf, Goblin, Shapechanger, even Yaztromo’s crow Vermithrax has a cameo!) Coherence in terms of creature habitat is always welcome and these have already been established as Allansian species in previous FFs, but it seems to me that IL could not be bothered to include many new ideas, preferring to simply re-use some more memorable creatures from the series’ past. His inclusion of the Shapechanger in particular should not be seen as a shock given his self-confessed fondness for it and, granted, there are still a few new monsters here (the Blog is amusing in restrospect lol), but it does all feel a little forced creature-wise. The incorporation of mass combat rules should be a positive attempt at introducing a whole new dynamic to FF books but the rules for Skirmish Battles where you get to “command” your army in combat do not feature much and are (oddly for IL) more often than not very weighted in your favour eg: a whole 10 Centaurs against several hundred of your troops is not particularly likely to cause you any problems. Particularly odd, given that this book is fundamentally supposed to be about ARMIES, is that the final showdown between yours and that of Agglax requires no Skirmish Battles and only involves select small units of your army and, even then, these are “do you have....?” checkpoints where your army acts as if it were items rather than warriors. This is a big problem that makes the end seem completely un-climactic and you do wonder what role your army was ever really meant to play. Add to this a very crap end baddie who takes very little defeating, along with the fact that it is practically impossible to fail any of the army SIZE counting checkpoints that feature here and there, and you end up with something that fails to live up to either its title or any expectation of an almighty showdown to save the world. It is of course possible to not have certain people in your army (and this will kill you) but getting them to join is easy as is finding them on your journey.

The final section is at odds with the opening part where you are very much in command of a large body of fighters. You start with 100 Warriors, 50 Dwarfs, 50 Elves, and 50 Knights, and carry (an otherwise unheard of in FF) 700 Gold Pieces with which to buy more support along the way. Initially the book has you choosing whether to have them travel by boat or march, but, after a few “group” episodes, the book quickly reverts to a more conventional solo trek through Zengis (which takes up a large chunk of the adventure) followed by a brief solo dungeon in search of a key NPC called the Oracle (hmm, very original!) Then follows a reuniting with your army to head across plains in search of the big payoff that never really happens. If you take the wrong turning right at the start, the book can seem rather more like it really does just involve leading an army as you very quickly meet your opposing force, miss out most of the book, and fail miserably as you have missed all the key items/retainers which are on the solo route. No prizes for guessing then that this is a typically linear one true path Livingstone effort that requires you to amass a long shopping list of essential items and, as it comes post-Crypt Of The Sorcerer, a huge amount of incidental detail information too. But, this time some of the information is unbelievably granular to the point where you have to know how much gold you paid for two particular items (assuming you guessed right and bought them, of course, not that money is an object for once) and, in one outrageously obscure moment, you are even expected to answer a question the answer to which is nowhere in this book and you need to have read Titan – The Fighting Fantasy World to know it (although you do have a 1 in 3 chance of just picking the right answer from the choices, of course.) Similarly, characters with low Skill or Luck scores have no chance as there are many tests of both, and this book contains the single most brutal Skill penalty that I know of where you can be blinded for -6 Skill and -2 Luck – this can potentially leave you with no Skill at all! IL’s use of arbitrary dice rolling to determine your fate rather than any stat comparison is back again and it has to be noted that throwing a 1 is almost always disastrous so there is a predictability in the chance rolls that you don’t normally get in his books – again, this feels a little lazy. To further make the player suffer stat-wise you do not start with any Potions or Provisions and there are only two moments in the game where you can restore lost Stamina, which is very harsh. Unusually for Livingstone though, most combats (either solo or skirmish) are actually quite easy and you don’t need to have all that many battles to get through the book (and the end baddie is not insanely tough for once), although there are two tough fights just before you find him that you might not have much hope of winning purely due to your severely depleted Stamina by this stage. In a logical move, incidentally, if your army is wiped out you are assumed to have died in the melee too which is a realistic touch. Also, in a bid to keep tracking your army size manageable everything works in sets of 5 ie troops die, and are found, in multiples of 5. What makes less sense and, again, makes the whole skirmish/army concept work badly is that you can choose which units your troops have died from –and it does not take a genius to work out that Elves and Knights will probably have special talents that you are going to need, which means your Warriors tend to become sword fodder.

It is not just the execution of the overall concept that seems awkward in this book though, as very little of the army-based element makes much sense: Why does your army just stand around waiting patiently for you whenever you go off on a solo mission? Given the number of spies that Agglax has about the place, your troops are surprisingly loyal. Yes, I realise they join up to fight the demonic threat, but does this really make any sense, especially as you have a tendency to get them poisoned and/or killed at numerous points outside of battle? To expand on this slightly, as you travel through the region that is meant to be under attack from Agglax’ army, everywhere seems oddly peaceful and comes across as anything but under threat. Indeed, even on a one-to-one level, the questions the locals in Fang are asking you about the Trial Of Champions show a hell of a lot of insider information about something that is meant to be secret (ie the Trial itself) so this does not add up either. In fact, you could summarise this by saying that a lot of this book’s plotting makes no sense at all if you try to analyse it!

That said, there are a few very neat moments that can make this book an enjoyable experience in spite of its curiosities. There is a very clever run-in with an Elf which turns out to just be a Hag’s trap and you really do feel the tenseness of the moment when you think you are supposed to be avoiding springing a trap. There is a nice series link when one of your Dwarf troops mentions his time when he was working in a slave mine (a reference to #7 Island Of The Lizard King, presumably), a very clever moment comes where your army can contract malaria from the River Kok (a direct reference to Thailand, presumably), and there are several thematic carry-overs from the previous two Deathtrap Dungeon books (there are lots of traps to fall foul of, you can be robbed of all your gold by a Leprechaun à la DD, and it seems like almost every item you need to find is made of gold à la ToC) so you do still get a feeling of continuity in spite of the dramatic switch of theme.

Rather annoyingly, however, there are a few noticeable moments where IL seems to be boring us and/or being too preoccupied with newer interests than FF. I know it is intended to be a joke, but I find the pie-eating competition to just be childish (serious gaming has no place for a stat for Pie-Eating Skill), a seemingly potential-filled visit to a Gambling Hall produces nothing beyond one game (there isn’t even a choice) that is far from imaginative, and the ramblings on the subject of sailing from Obigee/Ian Livingstone may yield an essential piece of info but we don’t care about IL’s then fondness for yachting. OK, our patience is rewarded in this episode but it simply does not fit. Ditto, the hugely predictable Oracle’s cave “challenge” where you just know by FF intuition that you must drink from Libra’s fountain, and the two halves where right/left turns always lead to failure seem devoid of invention or design effort.

As Ian Livingstone’s FFs go this one is among his weakest, but it is not written any differently to his others. His text is typically colourful and atmospheric. It is the material content that lets this book down. Equally, the internal art by Nik Williams is very effective and the cover is excellent, as is only to be expected from Chris Achilleos. In spite of CA's great cover on the Puffin original, I do also like Wizard's reissue which is essentially the same idea but just made more modern and threatening-looking.

This should be an interesting idea that allows the Trial Of Champions cycle to open out considerably. Sadly, the final product is marred by illogicality, poor deployment of the intended concept of an army FF, a general feeling that perhaps IL was going through the motions, and repetitive info collecting. It is nothing like as hard in real terms as many other IL FFs but it is also nowhere near as good. Yes, the idea of commanding an army is fun but the focus moves away from this for far too much of the book. There is even a rather knowing closing line related to the by now way over-used lunatic of the week theme which says “how long will it be before a new peril threatens... Allansia”... and that just about sums up the feeling of being underwhelmed that this book leaves you with. It fits into the general “meh”-ness that was a feature of most of the 30s part of the series’ books, but IL has sold himself short with this one. Not bad, but by no means essential.