#18: Rebel Planet

 REBEL PLANET

Robin Waterfield

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Previous attempts at Sci-Fi FFs to date had been miss-able at best. The first two were terrible (#4 Starship Traveller, #12 Space Assassin), the third was a novelty Max Max 2 rip-off (#13 Freeway Fighter), and the fourth was irrelevant (#15 The Rings Of Kether), so expectations were not high when FF #18’s forthcoming release under the far from inspiring title of The Aliens Of Arcadion was announced in Warlock #5. Thankfully, by the time it appeared on store shelves it had been re-titled to the better-sounding (but not actually very accurate in terms of what’s involved) Rebel Planet. This is Robin Waterfield’s first of four FFs and his only Sci-Fi outing in a similar writing progression to Luke Sharp, in fact, who also wrote a Sci-Fi FF and then three medieval ones. Waterfield’s books are, generally, very good - he penned the very tough and interesting #23 Masks Of Mayhem as well as the excellent and very ambitious #28 Phantoms Of Fear, and I’m pleased to say that Rebel Planet is no exception. This was the book that made it seem that Sci-Fi was not a lost cause in the world of FF and was the first Sci-Fi FF that I can actually say I ever genuinely liked. I kind of feel sorry for The Rings Of Kether as it’s all but forgotten and is not a bad book, and Freeway Fighter, whilst pretty enjoyable, is so unoriginal that it’s little more than filler in the series, but neither of these could be described as necessarily any good in real terms. Rebel Planet, on the other hand, works on many levels and is very good indeed.

On opening the book, the reader is presented with a lengthy section describing the backstory that has led you to be given your mission and some nice descriptive material on the different species of the enemy alien race (Arcadians), along with some historical detail covering the universe that forms this book’s setting as a whole... and it’s all very interesting and does make you want to visit the various planets and meet the various Arcadian types, so things seem promising from the outset. The rules follow this (unusually) and it’s pleasing to see that there are not endless pages of rules to deal with different types of weapon combat. Weapons are by definition banned by the ruling Arcadian Empire, so no need to cater for these. Your character possesses an illegal laser sword (a rather too obvious nod to light sabres in Star Wars), but this works in the same way as a normal sword, meaning combat rules don’t change if using this. As your character is highly trained in martial arts, there are special rules for unarmed combat but these simply involve rolling a die to determine who has hit who. In addition, unarmed combat allows for instant KOs if you roll a six at any point which, whilst linking neatly into the concept of you being a space ninja, makes it seem that your hands are far deadlier than your (normally pretty lethal, you would have thought) laser sword, so this doesn’t really make sense. But at least you don’t have to get your head around loads of extra rules that inevitably hardly ever play any part in the adventure, as is normally the case with Sci-Fi FFs.

The plot itself involves YOU being deployed (under the guise of a merchant) to track down three rebel cells dotted about on three occupied planets, get secret codes from each of them, then travel to Arcadion itself (the Arcadians’ homeworld) and destroy the super-computer that controls the Arcadians. The Arcadians rule your galaxy with an iron-fist and are part of a Borg-style collective mind that is guided by the queen computer that you need to destroy, thus rendering the Arcadians all purposeless and freeing the enslaved human race. The story moves along logically, with you having pre-defined cover missions as you move from one planet to another. These missions rarely come into the plot much (barring the final stage between the third and fourth planets) and the focus is on you landing on each planet, then locating your contact(s) as quickly as possible without attracting the attention of the authorities. For the most part it all makes sense and even the book acknowledges that the oddest moment (on planet #3) leaves you having no idea what just happened.

The differences between the planets themselves, along with the subtler variations in the behaviours of each of the three Arcadian species, are the real plus-points in this book’s design. The first planet (Tropos) is a very oppressive Police State and you do feel constantly under surveillance, as you get followed and watched wherever you go. There is a claustrophobic and grim feel to Tropos and you really do want to leave it as quickly as possible. A generally more pleasant experience, the second planet (Radix) is fairly laissez-faire (although there is still an Arcadian presence that can cause you problems) and seems more developed than any of the others in this game. The human inhabitants are either decadent capitalists or intellectual right-on students and the cityscapes are high-tech and advanced. By stark contrast, stop-off point number three is the planet Halmuris, which is still in a creation stage, being a fairly barren and foreboding rock with appalling (and potentially lethal) night-time weather and primitive animal inhabitants. The only human presence is still at the researching stage and this is effectively Pluto to Radix’ Earth, I suppose. Finally, you visit Arcadion itself which gets hardly any descriptive coverage and seems to just be a building with a computer in it – this fourth stage is the least well-presented and it seems that the adventure was running out of steam by this point and this planet functions purely as an end to the mission. It would have been nice to get some insight into the Arcadians’ home planet, but this never comes, presumably as, if you’ve made it this far, you are pretty eager to face the final showdown. Tropos and Radix are very well designed and the feel of each of these worlds comes across very well as you move from the dictatorship of Tropos to the relief of exploring the far nicer Radix. Halmuris is, on one hand, dull and little effort has gone into making it interesting, but on the other hand, a pre-evolved planet is hardly going to be very exciting or hospitable so there is something to be said for its lack of party atmosphere.

The three Arcadian variants seem to almost mirror the design of the planets, which is a subtle but clever touch. Northern Arcadians are primevally psychotic and stupid (= Halmuris), Southern Arcadians are mildly pretentious and talk in arty riddles (= Radix), whilst Central Arcadians are arrogant and semi-bureaucratic (= Tropos). Each type can be found on each planet, but they each consistently follow their species’ traits adding interest and variation to what can happen if you encounter them, whilst also demonstrating the level of thought that has gone into ensuring consistency in terms of how the global universe of this adventure functions, which really does make it work very well.

There is little doubt that the first two planet visits are far more stimulating and offer far more playability than the final two, but this does make sense in context, even if it makes the adventure seem lop-sided and there is a feeling that it loses steam half-way through. The Halmuris section in particular seems little more than an outdoors go North, go West, go South, etc path-following plod and there is hardly much to do other than keep dying horribly as this part is pretty tough. The Tropos part (assuming you can get past customs safely), whilst feeling dangerous, is almost impossible to fail as there are various ways to find your contact – it is the design of this part that makes it work so well. Radix is light relief after Tropos, but is intentionally misleading as it is fairly tough and one wrong move can lead to failure by not finding your contact quick enough. As for Arcadion, the challenge with this final section is in surviving the trip on your own ship as you have to deal with a rather tricky incident involving two Arcadians travelling with you. Plus, if you haven’t got the codes you need to access the computer building, you’ve had it anyway, so this final part is a case of either you crack the code or you fail at the final hurdle, as it is possible to get right to the end, only to discover you don’t know what you need to know.... or, more to the point, you simply can’t figure out how to use the codes even if you have them, which is a big aspect of this book’s difficulty level.

Clever construction and planning pervades this book and the key to beating it lies in picking up subtle hints as well as getting the all-important codes from the rebel cells on each planet. The intro section mentions that Arcadians only have two digits on each hand/foot which makes binary an ideal means of communication. If you pick up on this, you can make the connection between the codes being nothing but ones and zeros (bar the second part which requires you to ignore some twos thrown in to muddy the waters) and the Arcadian use of binary. Assuming you manage to acquire all three codes (the first is impossible not to acquire as such but you do still need to decipher the poem it’s hidden in, the second is in a picture and you have to find it visually, so that all adds challenge) you still need to fathom out a table that matches the code itself to various paragraph numbers, ignore the sections that link to zeros, and then add the one-linked numbers together to reach the paragraph that gets you into the computer building. It took me several attempts to even understand the instructions for this, let alone actually work the answer out and I refuse to believe that children (as these books are fundamentally aimed at children) could ever work this out (and I doubt too many adults could, either.) This is one of the most intricate and original ways of winning ever included in a FF book and, whilst undeniably complicated, it is a great bit of gamebook design.

Combat and encounter-wise, there are few real challenges. Combats are rare (which makes sense if you are trying to avoid drawing attention to yourself) and almost always lead to your being followed and/or retribution coming later on. The third planet involves lots of instant death situations, but its harsh environment suits this, plus you would expect the book to get tougher the further through it you get. There are many Luck and Skill tests throughout the book and Skill and Luck of less than 9 gives you little chance of survival. There are also several arbitrary single die rolls that can result in success or failure peppered throughout the book that can seem a little like the cards are stacked against you, but this does make sense as, in real terms, the likelihood of a resistance mission to destroy the heart of the occupation actually succeeding is incredibly low, so this is both logical to the plot and slightly unfair to the player.

Run-ins with the Arcadians themselves are frequent and range from police/customs harassment (that you can normally con your way out of, as the aliens involved tend to be stupid), gladiatorial contests (literal and psychological), or just social interaction in the form of pandering to their egos and showing you empathise with the gibberish they talk. A very interesting element linked to this is the way the book rewards you (with Luck bonuses) if you either behave honourably by not murdering fellow humans, or if you demonstrate understanding of the importance of empathy in surviving under the Arcadian Empire. A little pompous maybe, but still an intelligent bit of game design.

In a similar approach to FF #27 Star Strider, there are some nice elements of humour included in this book, including a trip to the Fission Chips, a night at Porky’s, and the opportunity to attend a boring University lecture that you fall asleep during. Needless to say, two out of three of these take place on the light relief planet that is Radix, but subtle humour is a nice touch all the same.

Unusually for a FF book, the art seems almost irrelevant (except the all-important picture that contains the second clue) as the depth of backstory and description creates much of what you need to know image-wise in your head. Consequentially, you could be forgiven for not taking any notice of it but it is actually highly effective with vertical sweeping organic cityscapes and, let's face it, would you be able to visualise the different Arcadian species accurately without Gary Mayes' detailed images of them? The cover is however not particularly inspiring with its white lettering on a black background showing a far more aggressive-looking Arcadian than any of the ones shown in the book, facing off against what I can only assume is YOU. The only real intrigue with the cover is the fact that the “dragon” cover version reverses the picture.

Whilst this is a very well designed and eminently playable gamebook (and it will take many attempts to beat it), there are a few elements that don’t quite gel, but these can go un-noticed due to how good it is overall:

• ·         Laser swords are surely more powerful than human hands?
• ·         Why don’t each of the cell contacts all just rendez-vous somewhere, share their parts of the code with each other, then send a volunteer to destroy the computer?
• ·         Why is the third “human rebel” contact a sort of shape-changing ethereal wind that trades information for decorated wooden staffs?
• ·         And finally, how is it that, if Arcadians are all a collective entity, they seem to show so much free will when you meet them?... and, given this, why are they so lost when the computer is destroyed?

On a lesser note, the title is a bit misleading as there is no “rebel” planet. Each of the three you visit has rebel cells on it (Radix’ student population in particular seems close to revolt), but there is no one inherently rebellious planet - the rebel is YOU, surely?

In spite of these final slight niggles, this is a superior gamebook and is easily the best Sci-Fi FF ever (not that there’s much competition!) It is extremely well put together, generally consistent to its conceptual creation, and very varied in terms of the places you visit along the way. Its solution is excruciatingly complicated, but it makes a nice change to just killing something/someone at the end or putting the right keys in the right sockets to get to the treasure. A definite contender for re-issue by Wizard considering that they re-released Starship Traveller!

Maelstrom

MAELSTROM

Alexander Scott

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Puffin’s Adventure Gamebooks series included this one-off full RPG rulebook set roughly from the 15^th to 17^th Centuries (although the system is freely adaptable for any historical era) which, whilst not particularly well-known when published in the early 80s, has developed something of a cult following in recent years with a re-release plus various add-on modules and adventure scenarios published by Arion Games from 2008 onwards.

In an era when RPGs were quite expensive (I remember each of the Dungeons & Dragons Rule Sets costing £9.99 each in the mid-80s), not to mention requiring multiple purchases of expansion sets to continue games into higher levels, an entire RPG in one single book was a very good idea, even though you needed to invest in some specialist dice (and some miniatures/environments should you wish to add a visual element) etc to be able to play this, but dice were hardly going to break the bank and if you were into role-play chances were that you already had some anyway. But this is a different approach to RPGs from the usual monsters, dragons, treasure, etc of most game systems, in that it is a historical game set in the real world (medieval England is presented in the book, but the system is usable in any country) where you assume historically-accurate characters from nobles, through priests, rogues, thieves and assassins, various types of traders and craftsmen, travelling players, etc and you must behave appropriately to your chosen character type. There is scope to also be a mage in conjunction with another trade as, given the superstitions of the era, publicly using magic would be pretty suicidal, so you have to be under cover.

The way characterisation is handled in this game is both a massive success and a big problem in that it would be hard to play a character accurately and also get something out of the experience if the player was not actively interested in the history of the era and, probably more so, have at least a passing knowledge of the period. Indeed, to referee this game would require a fairly in-depth knowledge of the period of play, otherwise adventures would either be fairly dull and one-dimensional, or factual gaps would be filled with impossible fantasy elements that could annoy the players who want to play a historical game, as opposed to an all-out fantasy game. In many ways, this is almost the sit-down table-top version of things like the Sealed Knot and similar battle recreation groups that, again, make no sense unless you are very into the history you are re-enacting and know plenty about it to understand the motives and ideas behind what you are doing. For a group of keen historians, this RPG system is probably the most in-depth and realistic of any RPG I have ever seen. Character types follow strict rules of behaviour and approach, and many stats exist to determine success or failure. For example, should a priest wish to escape a situation by preaching to his assailants, a saving throw is made against his Persuasion stat to determine if his preaching has had the desired effect. The game mechanics are largely based around similar saving throws being made against various other realistic stats with the added possibility of critical successes or failures with either over-the-top or disastrous results – again, this is very realistic. The combat system is equally realistic, allowing for modifiers based on weapon used, combat prowess, armour (and whether the body part hit is covered with any), etc which is way beyond what many systems can cater for. Likewise, unconsciousness, exhaustion, loss of limbs, and the amount of time wounds take to heal are also taken into account (including the option for months of bed rest making wounds heal faster, but that would hardly make for a fun adventure). On the one hand, the sheer number of saving throws involved in this game can make it seem that all you ever do is make saving throws, but it is balanced out against creating a very real feel to the game. As with traditional RPGs in the D&D vein, Experience Points are gained allowing characters to develop over time, rather than existing for a moment in time that lasts as long as the adventure in hand (as with FF) which can be unsatisfying and remove the feeling of “being” a character. Age also comes into play, along with periods of training/apprenticeship, meaning aspects of slowing over time etc can be incorporated, as well as limits being set on stat levels dependant on age, plus older characters are more vulnerable to disease. Again, this is very realistic.

Disease and its cures are incorporated in the context of the era the game is set in. In other words, various quack medicines and herbal remedies (some still correct eg poisons and some discredited centuries ago) play a large role in treating both disease and wounds. Again, this is made as realistic as possible, with seasonal variations on availability and price of herbs from sellers, as well as variant effects (eg coma or madness if not used correctly), plus the added element of particular remedies rocketing in price in times of heavy demand (and epidemics were pretty common in the eras of the game, so this is a nice touch as well.) The herblore appendix is based on an actual treatise on the subject from the era, making it as realistic and as contextually arcane as is possible and there’s every chance that this has had more than a passing influence on the herblore that plays a large role in FF #53 Spellbreaker, as there are definite similarities.

Putting the era of play into context is key in the successful design of this system, be it through the medical theories of the time, the inclusion of town guilds/reputations and the like to direct how character professions can or cannot behave, the influence of religion and superstition (priests can be either very powerful or hunted down as heretics depending on the pervasive view at any one time), and beliefs in such things as magic (the use of which can be lethal) and such fantasy beings as changelings, witches, fairies, etc. Again, the supernatural is handled very well and it is possible to actually warp reality when casting dangerous spells (the Maelstrom of the title) with various unpredictable results.

Magic is an interesting aspect of this system as no list of spells is included as would normally be expected, the idea being that anything is possible by using magic (again, very in keeping with the beliefs of the era.) The referee is left to judge on the achievability level of a spell that a player may wish to cast and then determine whether they are a) experienced enough to cast it, and b) what the outcome is. Basic things like use of the equivalent of Jedi mind tricks are not too difficult (especially as many people in the era would probably be easy to fool into believing just about anything anyway), whilst inconceivable things (which were of course perfectly conceivable at the time) such as raising the dead, changing the weather, flying, etc are much harder and therefore unlikely to be pulled-off by anyone other than very experienced characters (again, more realism, which balances the era’s fantasy that these things were fact with the reality that they were not.)

Whilst this system is exceptionally well-designed and therefore as realistic as it could get without making it so reliant on dice-rolling and planning that you would never be playing anything and having any fun, the option for adventuring seems a little limited to either daily activities (if the everyday professions such as traders or people who make things are used) or acting out actual historical events, some of which would be far more interesting than others, of course – court intrigue, whilst well-documented and it makes good TV drama may not be very exciting to play, but witch-hunting or assassination is probably quite fun, if a bit repetitive after a while. This is where I maintain that this game is best enjoyed by those with an active interest in and knowledge of the era of play. Understanding the motives of an adventurer in a regular RPG is easy enough as time and place are purely conceptual, but thinking like a real historical character type in a particular century is much harder unless you understand what made people tick at the time. To make it easier to envisage how to play this game, two sample adventures are included. The first is a standard move from one section to another solo scenario of 160 paragraphs helpfully entitled A Solo Adventure (that seems to be the blue-print for FF #29 Midnight Rogue) where you are hired as an assassin to sneak into a rich merchant’s house and poison him. It all turns out to be a big ruse to prove your worthiness just like in Midnight Rogue and there are even unreachable paragraphs to prevent cheating just like in that book, plus trying to play with anything other than an assassin results in you immediately arriving home and nothing happening, followed by being instructed to actually roll-up an ASSASSIN this time! Other than meeting a few NPCs, finding various keys, and getting caught in the rain/mud in a maze, there isn’t really much to do, but the atmosphere of night-time, mystery (and rain) are all laid-on thick and this is a fun, if short, introduction to how to handle one of the more playable and potential-filled character types. The inclusion of a lot of unreachable paragraphs (and several “you are an idiot”-type instant failure sections) makes it seem like there’s more to this than there is, but it’s still a nice introduction and is a good way of filling a spare half-hour or so. Further into the book, we get the second adventure, imaginatively named An Adventure, which is a full multi-player RPG scenario and much more representative of how Maelstrom is intended to be played – there is a lot of travelling, a lot of incidental encounters with everyday life, plus a few bits of skulduggery (as would be expected in the era) to give you something to actually adventure through. In some ways, it’s a sort of Canterbury Tales affair where a mixed-bag of character types (all with different motives) are travelling together through Hertfordshire to London. The main aim is that of several of the players who are taking someone to London to hand him over to the authorities (which gives the referee a NPC to play throughout as well.) Various minor things happen along the way, but nothing that has the “meat” of a fantasy adventure, which, again, gives the impression that history buffs would get more out of this system than traditional fantasy gamers.

Both playing and refereeing this game would be quite demanding (until you are used to the more commonly-used rules) and the first read-through of the book can leave your head spinning, especially the optional Advanced Rules that are mind-boggling in places, but that, again, do add much-needed realism and depth. Oddly though, two aspects of life are conspicuous by their absence – no mention is made of firearms which were very common at the time, especially flintlock pistols and field cannons (and siege weapons if you are playing in an earlier Medieval period), and animals are similarly absent which is a bigger surprise considering that characters will often have horses and dogs were very common pets/guards. Likewise, cats were witches’ familiars and, whilst it specifically states that you cannot play a witch, these would be common as NPCs. The latter problem was resolved by a supplementary article on animals included in Warlock #6 covering real and mythical creatures (as many fantasy animals such as satyrs, unicorns, dragons, etc were still believed to exist) for inclusion in Maelstrom games. Firearms (gunpowder weapons) were finally added by Arion Games in 2008 in their 161-page expansion book The Maelstrom Companion, along with the less noticeable, but still very setting-pertinent, omitted subject of alchemy, meaning that pretty much everything you’d need to know for the era to be complete was now included. It does state in the original rule book being reviewed here that it is up to the referee to add or remove rules and ideas as they see fit, so there’s no reason why these missing elements couldn’t just be added anyway (it often refers to the need to write your own rules into the rule book itself), although gauging the equivalent damage done by ballistics compared to a sword may not be particularly simple and is easy to over- or under-estimate, given that a miss-hit from a sword can cause a minor graze, whereas a cannon ball explosion will at least maim if not almost always kill outright. Perhaps firearms were excluded because they are so dangerous and were often very unpredictable to even use at the time, the user being as likely to be killed by a backfire as the intended target would be of being hit.

Arion Games, as part of their 2007 resurrection of the Maelstrom concept helped to address the question of just how to go about creating interesting enough adventures to use this system, by producing several add-on adventure/concept modules (like D&D did umpteen times) covering topics such as tournaments, beggars (which would never be simple to write a “mission” for as such), taverns, a more fleshed-out road trip like An Adventure but more interesting, and an investigative mystery adventure scenario. These make the system go much further as we now have a superbly designed historical game system that also has scope for playability beyond the abilities of a referee to extract enough material from real history without straying into standard fantasy RPG territory that would not fit in.

To summarise, this is as realistic as a RPG can get without becoming over-reliant on dice-throwing or so complex that no-one can understand it (and it’s certainly pretty complicated as it stands!) History buffs and/or those with a decent understanding of the era being played in would benefit much more than a casual gamer or fantasy RPG fan, but there’s no reason why, given an exciting and varied enough adventure (that doesn’t stretch the boundaries of reality beyond what was understood to be “fact” at the time, of course), that this could not be enjoyed either way. If you ignore the often baffling rules and bombardment of instructions about saving throws and stat adjustment and just read this as a book, this makes an excellent insight into how the era in question functioned both socially and structurally and Alexander Scott is to be congratulated for the sheer depth of research and information that has gone into creating this RPG. Just how playable it really is I’m not certain, but it is definitely a fully fleshed-out system that attempts to do something different by applying role-playing to the real world.

#21: Eye Of The Dragon

EYE OF THE DRAGON

Ian Livingstone

Reviewed by Mark Lain

After 20 straight re-issues of material we already had, Wizard Books finally bit the bullet and offered FF fans a new book. With “Brand New Adventure” proudly emblazoned across the cover, when this appeared in 2005 it was an exciting release - the first new FF book since the original series’ swansong #59 Curse Of The Mummy came out 10 years earlier. Even more importantly, this was not a “Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone Present” effort, but was written by series co-creator (and my personal favourite FF author) Ian Livingstone, had a great cover image of a smoking dragon’s face in close-up, and impressive-looking internal art by the always good Martin McKenna. So this promised a lot at first glance. I eagerly took a copy from the shelf in Waterstone’s, took it to the cashier, handed over my hard-earned, and darted home to play this wonderful-looking book. I played it. I closed it. I put it on my FF shelf and I tried to forget about it.

This adventure is a very traditional dungeon trawl in the style of the very earliest FFs and it must have come across as a retrograde step when it appeared as the 21^st in the first Wizard series, given the sheer variety of adventures that had preceded it. The original series developed progressively, with the more involved and idea-stretching books coming further into the series. As the Wizard re-issues started with most of Steve and Ian’s books many of the more “out there” ideas had already been seen with books like House Of Hell, Creature Of Havoc, Armies Of Death, Legend Of Zagor, and Appointment With FEAR all already available. There is nothing wrong with old-school dungeons, but this book actually manages to be derivative of its own series, makes the FF concept seem genuinely tired, and reads like all the outtakes and alternate takes from The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain and Deathtrap Dungeon have been swept-up off the cutting room floor, stuck together, and bound up inside a cover with the title written on it. TWOFM is seminal in that it was the first FF ever and did something never really seen before up to that point. Deathtrap Dungeon is probably the most inventive, varied and exciting dungeon ever created in FF. EOTD is the FF series’ answer to cheap exploitation movies like Peter Sellers’ Trail/Curse Of The Pink Panther or Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death where every last inch of available footage was chucked together with some filler scenes to attempt to create something new that was fooling no-one with any sense of irony or taste. There are actually several moments lifted directly from TWOFM and Deathtrap Dungeon including (spiked) pitfall traps, seats that give you energy, helmets made of different metals that you can pick from to wear, rooms that speak to you, an inexplicably-located shop, numbered keys... the list goes on.

The actual plot is as ridiculous and far-fetched as any of the more illogical FF plots are. You are in a pub in Fang (just before the annual Trial Of Champions) where you meet Henry Delacor who tells you about a dungeon under Darkwood Forest that contains a very valuable gold dragon with two emeralds for eyes. The emeralds are hidden somewhere in the dungeon and trying to take the dragon minus its eyes will kill you. He has already tried to find it, but, as he found only one emerald eye, he couldn’t remove it safely. He challenges you to take his emerald, find the second one, retrieve the gold dragon, and bring it back to him to sell and divide the spoils between you (he somehow knows it’s worth the rather randomly precise figure of 335,000 gold pieces – does he already have a buyer then?) However, there’s a catch. To make sure you don’t rip him off and steal the lot he forces you to drink a slow-acting poison so that you have to return to him to get the antidote. Is this not the most biased insurance policy ever? Surely any hardened adventurer would just nick the emerald and go it alone and the apparent stupidity of the character you play here is quite awe-inspiring. There then follows a name-checking trek to Darkwood where you note Firetop Mountain and Stonebridge en route to a woodcutter’s hut deep in Darkwood that you presumably never seemed to notice when you played The Forest Of Doom. What follows is a frankly tedious and dated meander up various largely featureless corridors, being offered the chance to open different kinds of door (some on the left, some on the right, just to add a bit of totally unexciting variety), open some chests, or turn left or right at various junctions. Fascinating stuff (not.)

It quickly becomes apparent that you are going to spend a lot of time writing items down that you have found and the amount of stuff you end up carrying around with you is genuinely ludicrous. Of course, as this is an Ian Livingstone book, the shopping list of items you need to succeed is quite lengthy, but I did end up wondering how you still manage to fit a huge gold dragon in your backpack at the end. Do you just dump everything else once you’ve found the main thing you’re looking for? To be honest, there’s no point in even picking half of it up as it often never seems to have a purpose.

Unusually, especially for IL, this book is not particularly difficult once you’ve found the correct route. Even more unusually, there is more than one way through the dungeon as long as you find the main parts as you go. Additionally, it is very easy to bluff your way through two key moments rendering the main challenges of the game meaningless. Firstly, to avoid being crushed by a moving wall shortly before you find the second emerald you need to recite the Hole In The Wall Spell. If you select “Yes” to the question of whether you know it, the book gives you a choice of three lines to pick from, giving you a one in three chance of just guessing irrespective of whether you have genuinely found the spell or not. It would be more normal for a numerical cheat-proof solution to be applied here. Secondly, to open the door to the gold dragon room you need to remove five weapons from the wall in the correct order. Get any one wrong and you are dead. To enable you to do this, the wall also has five metal doors behind which are five clues telling you the order to pull the weapons out. The little doors open with matching metal keys (gold, silver, bronze, etc) that are hidden around the dungeon. This time each key does have a numerical reference, but you only need a maximum of four to win given that a process of elimination will tell you what info is being the fifth. Sadly, this is handled very badly as success is not dependant on having any keys at all, given that you can simply guess the order. Correctly guessing the first four in a row is undeniably tough and requires plenty of luck, but it is always possible.

It is no real surprise that the usual lie about being able to win through regardless of your stats applies here and only characters with mega-high stats have any real hope, if only because there are many Skill and Luck tests, although only a small number are potentially fatal if you fail (in fact, for IL, there are comparatively few instant deaths full stop.) There are lots of Stamina penalties along the way, but by far the toughest part (and probably the only really hard part as even the Hell Demon can be simply run away from, whether you have a kris knife or not) of this book comes with two combats that you cannot avoid if you want to win: a Sk 12 Gigantus that does you 4 Stamina points of damage each time it hits you, and a Sk 10 Doppelganger that you have to fight with a -2 Attack Strength penalty. It is possible that you can find yourself in a third (even harder) combat if either you don’t have the elven boots or you fail a Luck test due to having a clumsy sidekick when you are trying to sneak past a Black Dragon that, if awakened, has Sk 14 St 18 leaving you pretty much toast by that point. An unusual (for IL) balance exists here though as there are also ample ways of increasing your Stamina by drinking various potions that you find along the way (which is made a little trickier as there are also several poisons to catch you out), plus you start out with 10 Provisions. There are similarly several Skill-boosting discoveries including one that awards +1 Skill so early on that you can’t possibly have lost any Skill yet. Are we in that case supposed to ignore the rule that says you cannot exceed your Initial Skill? Either way, something has gone wrong in the planning, which is a bit shoddy – badly play-tested FFs are always frustrating and whilst this is a minor oversight compared to books that are literally rendered impossible due to bad editing (#58 Revenge Of The Vampire probably being the worst culprit), it is still irritating.

Ian Livingstone often cannot resist giving us a NPC to travel with (usually regardless of whether we want them or not) and this adventure is no different in that respect when you discover the Dwarf called Littlebig (who is later revealed unsurprisingly to be related to Bigleg from The Forest Of Doom.) It is possible to go past the room where Littlebig is being held prisoner but if you do the book makes you turn around and go back to get him in another example of FF making decisions for YOU when YOU are supposedly in the driving seat. Unlike almost all other NPCs, Littlebig does not immediately die, run away, or try to murder you for no apparent reason and Littlebig will always survive for as long as you do. He is actually quite useful as he can share combats with you, meaning some tougher foes can take double damage where you only get hit once (and Littlebig is seemingly impervious to damage), plus he can read dwarven runes and there are lots scattered about later in the adventure that can help you find the safe route, but he also suffers from verbal diarrhoea (which does at least liven things up), is ridiculously cheerful, and is annoyingly clumsy so can get you into trouble here and there. He is also a key plot driver as he was also searching for the emeralds and the gold dragon and now wants revenge on his captor (someone called Sharcle.) Once you’ve found the dragon and taken it, there is an actually quite neat plot twist (if you aren’t bored rigid by the tedious drudgery of the dungeon by this time) where Sharcle turns out to be Henry Delacor who turns out to be a thief and tries to rip you off so you kill him. This leaves you with the slight problem of having no poison antidote so you head for Stonebridge where Ian Livingstone’s favourite (and ever-annoying) wizard Yaztromo tells you that you never were poisoned and it was all a big scam to get you to do all the hard work. This is a nice twist that ties the whole storyline together, but you really won’t care by this time.

Within the context of the FF cannon, there are many links to other books in the series: Darkwood Forest, Fang, Bigleg, Yaztromo, Stonebridge, Firetop Mountain, plus if you choose to search the hut right at the start before descending into the dungeon below you find an axehead with something strange inscribed into it. Could this be a link to the Stonebridge dwarfs’ weapon you need to find in The Forest Of Doom? As it serves no purpose at all in EOTD it can only be some sort of linking feature within the series. Whilst inter-relation between entries into the series is a feature I always like to see, there are so many here that it seems like a desperate attempt to validate this book’s relevance to the cannon as a whole. Plus, I still fail to understand why the hut and its vast underground dungeon aren’t found in The Forest Of Doom. Has it been subsequently built? Also, given the sheer amount of things that seem to live down there, the presence of a shop, various rooms with complexities such as artworks or creatures working on weapons etc it seems that this dungeon is a deliberate creation intended as a challenge in the same vein as the Trial Of Champions or Shaggradd’s Hives Of Peril. The design of the dungeon is certainly no accident and this is where the concept becomes a) totally illogical and b) appears to exist for the sake of writing another FF book.

The awkward nature of this dungeon’s existence for existence’s sake could be tied back to the adventure’s origin which brings us to another major issue here – this is NOT a brand new adventure. Yes, in this format it might be new and, yes, it had not been issued as a FF book, but the dungeon design and plot itself (albeit in reduced form) originally appeared in Ian Livingstone’s RPG primer Dicing With Dragons published pre-FF in 1982 as the first adventure scenario for Ian’s planned Fantasy Quest system that would be adapted and morph into FF once he merged it with Steve Jackson’s ideas. The art in the original was by early FF artist Russ Nicholson (a favourite of mine whose work really seems to epitomise FF as it started so early in the series) and this was clearly the blueprint for Martin McKenna’s art in the FF version – in some case he has very closely “adapted” Nicholson’s work, but, that said, I do think McKenna’s work in EOTD is very effective, being well-drawn and very complete in its look and certainly far better than the adventure itself. The cover is equally good and gives nothing away about the plot, leading you to think the dragon is a physical creature which adds some intrigue (although any interest quickly fades when you start playing!)

Unfortunately, the tedious slog through the fairly unexciting dungeon and the stupid plot premise are not the only areas where this falls flat as the encounters themselves are uninteresting and hardly anything new is offered up. When you consider that this was the 60^th “new” FF book to be published, you’d have thought that IL could have come up with some interesting and unique encounters given what some of the later books had brought to the table. On a positive, I really like the Gigantus (and McKenna’s illustration really hits its imposing and horrific appearance home), but most of the creatures are bog-standard Orcs, Ghouls, Zombies, a Vampire, a Gremlin, Spiders, some Skeletons, a Troll, an Ogre, etc etc yawn yawn. There is a fairly complex show-down with a Snake Witch that is probably the only well fleshed-out and thought-provoking encounter you ever have here, but for the most part the creatures you meet are either very basic or there’s just no rational explanation for why they are there. Why would something as “sophisticated” as a Vampire or a Hell Demon be dossing around in an underground tunnel network? In many cases getting away from encounters is not difficult (bar the two tough and unavoidable ones mentioned earlier) and the worst offering by far is described simply as an Evil Wizard. He does mention his name at one point, but he’s mostly referred to (the combat sections included) as “Evil Wizard.” For someone like Ian Livingstone who has demonstrated great imagination many times in the past, this is a frankly desperate state of affairs.

This adventure’s dated and dull design overshadows that fact that, as always, Livingstone’s writing is actually very vivid and descriptive and the atmosphere is well created here. Sadly, this also works against it as too much information can reveal the failings and that is certainly the case here. The descriptions make it all too abundantly clear just how unoriginal and empty this adventure is.

I doubt many people will play this more than once or twice as there is so little of interest to encourage repeat playing. The fact that it is not linear could add some re-playability, but there is little here to fire the imagination in what is simply one of the most boring FF books ever. It makes no sense, offers nothing new (especially coming so late in the series), and is well below the standard we expect from Ian Livingstone. The most interesting thing about this book is that it has a rather random total of 407 paragraphs (and 400 is still the victory one.) 

Depressing. Let us never talk of this again.

The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain (ZX Spectrum)

THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN

Crystal Computing

Reviewed by Mark Lain

The sudden runaway success of FF coincided conveniently with home computers experiencing the same boom, in particular the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. It’s hard in retrospect to grasp the concept of a computer with 48K of memory (or a monumental 64K in the case of the Commodore!) being the pinnacles of achievement in personal computers to date, but that was the case in 1984 when the ZX Spectrum arcade adaptation of the first FF book appeared on the shelves in high street stores everywhere. I remember this game coming out. I also remember having no interest in it at all at the time in spite of being an avid Spectrum user. I was a purist - FF came in book form and shouldn’t be messed about with, but I did succumb a few years later and borrowed the Spectrum version from a friend. As with all Spectrum games, this came on cassette and you had to sit through the “bleurgh, blip, bleurgh, gizza, gizza, gizza” sounds accompanied by the epileptic-fit inducing dancing coloured stripes up the side of the loading screen for the customary few minutes and then wait and see if it instantly crashed as soon as you started playing it. Surprisingly, this game was unusually reliable as Spectrum games went and rarely packed-up on you as you tried to play it.

The cassette inlay features a cropped version of just the dragon from the cover of the original book as well as the original text font so you can comfortably expect this to be a faithful adaptation of the book but in arcade form. A pretty exciting idea, although you do wonder how 48K of memory, about twenty-odd different BEEP command sounds, eight colours, and only one possible on-screen text font will ever possibly cope with what would have to be a pretty elaborate programme. As soon as you start playing, it becomes apparent that the programmers have addressed these obstacles by ignoring the book completely and attaching the title to a totally unrelated arcade maze that plays like a slightly better version of their earlier highly-acclaimed (and almost identical) Hall of the Things Spectrum game.

There are certainly some connections to the book, but these are no more unique to WOFM than to any other generic fantasy game. You have to work your way through a big maze, fighting orcs, spiders, and slime moulds (whatever they are), collecting 15 keys on the way. Eventually comes the showdown with the Warlock himself and then you nick his treasure. So at least the climax is the same, even if it’s dumbed-down to just a pretty tough fight minus all the card deck, old/young Zagor, etc interesting intricacies of the book version. As a slight variation, you carry a sword and a bow and can switch between these at will, which makes it possible to kill both up close and from a safe distance, which does add playability.

There are some nice touches to this game, considering it came early in the home computer era, so massive spectacle can hardly be expected. There is, after all, a giant leap for mankind in terms of technical achievement from Pong to something like Halo, and this game sits about 5% of the way in! Each time you restart the game, the maze is randomly generated so no two games are alike, which is a big advantage over the linearity of the books and makes replay an almost unlimited possibility. It also makes this game very difficult as you have to start totally from scratch every time and, with 15 keys to find, this is a lengthy undertaking akin to the big map Spectrum games where you had to find stuff like Atic Atac or Jet Set Willy (and even these don’t re-arrange themselves every time you start over.) There is a touch of realism in that the encounters don’t just shuffle from side-to-side along a line of pixels. They will actually try to attack you and will chase you around the maze, which is quite clever and realistic in the context of what was possible at the time. Plus, the creature combats are very difficult because, before you’ve had time to select your weapon, the spider or orc will have eaten up half your Health while you think about what to do and find the right button on the keyboard, and it’s with the keys that this game really becomes complicated. There are so many controls (all very close together on the keyboard) that you either need to be an octopus or have a second player helping you to stand any chance of being able to move, un-sheath your sword, fire your bow, open a door, etc and get your mind and fingers working in harmony enough to play smoothly. You know that when the control instructions fill the whole screen you are going to struggle a) to remember even half of them, and b) to be able to execute many of the moves to be able to get anywhere.

Another nice bit of programming is that the screen scrolls in all four directions, rather than being a screen at a time that jerks over to the next page when you exit stage left or right like so many games of the era do. Apparently, the programmers only had three weeks in which to code this game so, credit where credit is due, this is put together very well in terms of actual game mechanics and the limitations of the era.

The cassette’s inlay card proudly boasts that this is “a fantasy game with revolutionary graphics” but the fairly simple human sprites, spider sprites, and orc sprites, along with zig-zaggy red walls, on an otherwise featureless black background are hardly going to take the world by storm (even in 1984.) Frankly, the similarly-era’d Horace games actually had more impressive graphics than this and the on-screen appearance would remind me of the Spectrum game Tiler if it was set at night. Marketing has a lot to answer for and anyone expecting anything remotely resembling a computer visualisation of Russ Nicholson’s book art is going to be bitterly disappointed. Indeed, anyone expecting an adaptation of SJ and IL’s FF book will also be pretty unhappy with this game!

This was the only attempt to make a proper full FF arcade game for the Spectrum/Commodore, with all their future FF adaptations being more traditional text adventures with fairly perfunctory screen images to accompany the written words, so credit has to be given for trying something more interactive and playable, rather than just putting the book’s pages onto the screen which is a bit pointless really as you might as well just read the (better-illustrated) FF books instead. This game was available in just cassette form or in a “Software Pack” with the book also included so you could experience both the written and the arcade versions. This must have been a fairly weird experience as the two are so unrelated (other than the actual goal) that there are basically no connections in terms of environment, events, or encounters, other than the tenuous link that orcs and spiders (and Zagor) appear in both so the pack pretty much gave you two different games.

On the plus side, from the abstract angle of Spectrum games of the era, this game does have some functionality that was rare at the time. From the perspective of an adventure game, it is very different from the fall-back of just transferring text to the screen and, even if it is just a blank maze containing nothing more than doors, three types of monster, and keys, it is a welcome departure that suggested there was more to come - for many, the pinnacle of this concept would be Gauntlet which even came with add-on levels on further cassettes to keep the game and your character moving on in a more free RPG style.

Sadly, approaching this as a FF-related computer game, there is little to recommend as it could have been released with just about any other fantasy-style title and you would be none-the-wiser as to what it was meant to be. The first release in the Puffin Personal Computer Collection just comes across as a blatant cash-in on FF's success and is basically just a computer game that has nothing to do with FF whatsoever.

#42: Black Vein Prophecy

BLACK VEIN PROPHECY

Paul Mason and Steven Williams

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Initially one of the most surreal of all the entries in the series, this is a classic example of taking a potentially really good idea, starting it very well, and then turning it quickly into meandering drivel. From the writing duo that brought us, amongst other FFs, the wacky The Riddling Reaver, BVP makes that book seem fairly conventional to start with, but the main difference is that Reaver maintains its weirdness to mostly good and certainly entertaining effect, whereas BVP becomes pretty irritating after a while.

The start of this book is one of FFs most intriguing, even if the idea is a variant rip-off of Creature Of Havoc. YOU have no idea who you are, what you are meant to do, or anything at all, in fact. There is no introduction, just an Adventure Sheet, followed by paragraph 1 where you wake up in your own sarcophagus with a thumping headache and a dead bloke on the floor next to you. You haven’t even rolled any stats or been told you’ve got any equipment - you literally start from nothing and this is genuinely interesting from a playing perspective. Everything you see and do at the start is veiled in total mystery and there is no denying that what you can see is pretty damn bizarre, with stone statues guarding you that disintegrate into human skeletons, voices occasionally giving you instructions, networks of doors sealed with wax, and your occasionally finding random bits of equipment that could be useful to achieve whatever the hell it is you are meant to be achieving. Plus, your headache changes in intensity whilst you are in the tomb complex. This really does pique your curiosity and, the odder things get, the more you are drawn into the unravelling of the plot. Once you get out of the tomb itself, you find an inexplicably devastated city containing a fused talking horse-person creature that either gives you a useful skill or coaxes you into joining it as another fused talking horse-person for all eternity – a very sudden potential early ending and it’s not made entirely clear whether this outcome constitutes failure or not as, also unusually, paragraph 400 is not the ultimate goal (it’s just a conventional game section like any other) and various outcomes can be discovered along the way (although most of them are instant deaths which are rather more obviously failures) including being made very small and put in someone’s pocket (Is that a good or a bad thing? Presumably the pocket has no exit?) The book decides that the only way out of the city is to load yourself into a catapult and fire yourself over the wall into the sea (I’m not kidding), at which point you are rescued by a helpful NPC called Velkos who lets you ride in her boat to your next port of call. More weirdness ensues as the boat is attacked by prisoners in flying egg-sack spheres (just like the ones that catch escapees in The Prisoner), at which point you and Velkos can then travel together or you can go it alone. Unfortunately, from this point onwards this just becomes a tedious and very linear trek across various terrains, encountering more and more groups of people who may or may not be helpful and who mostly seem to know who you are but tend to articulate this through shock, reverence, or random swinging between liking and disliking you, with no actual suggestion of who you are until you meet a wizard that is made out to be evil, but that seems to be your personal biographer, at which point you can find out who you are, not that this bit is really all that clear and I have to admit that on the first playthrough I wasn’t really all that sure right through to the end, where I was still none-the-wiser but seemed to have become King all of a sudden. There’s no doubt that some parts of this book require pretty close and detailed reading, but there is a big problem in that, by the time really useful and relevant detail is coming out, you probably are losing interest and just going through the motions, which is a shame as, if handled more consistently, the supposedly intriguing plot could have been done far more justice and this could have been a fascinating adventure.

The inconsistency of storyline is paralleled with the unpredictable and often schizophrenic behaviour of some of the characters you can meet. Velkos herself swings between being a genuine ally and inexplicably trying to murder you, a bandit group you can encounter seem helpful but if you let them tattoo you with their mark they turn psychotic and kill you, the pivotal wizard is the passive opposite and will let you kill him as much as he’ll try to give you information and advice, plus you can meet a very irrational sort of proto-Communist revolutionary who spurts “free the people” psycho-babble and, again, randomly can be an ally or not. There is one argument that says that the odd reaction you get from NPCs adds to the mysterious atmosphere and the disorientating nature of this book. I am more inclined to suggest that it is just badly written and designed, and that the two writers either didn’t communicate with each other at any point whilst putting it together or were just making it up as they went along in an attempt to emulate surrealist automatism. Surrealism is clearly an influence on this book (far more so than the just general craziness of The Riddling Reaver), but the fascinatingly surreal opening just isn’t carried through beyond the first act and, post Velkos boat-ride, this just becomes a pathetic attempt at creating something a bit more off-the-wall.

As you would expect from a starting point of nothing, this book is very difficult, but not in a challenging and exciting “I really want to keep playing until I beat this” way. Rather this book becomes relentlessly harsh in its latter stages, with almost every false move leading to instant deaths. There are around 58 instant failure sections in this book which is an excessive number and there are often more than one on the same page which, when you notice them, should give out a warning of just how hard this is going to be. Add to this the lengthy shopping list of essential items, along with the list of special skills/magic powers you need to discover to survive the final show-down with (what turns out to be) your evil brother, and this is a fairly Ian Livingstone-esque ultra-difficult undertaking, but without any of his excellent plot ideas, well-designed environments, and atmospheric writing.

However, there are even bigger issues that make this book seem so unreasonably tough:

• You need to fail a Luck test right at the start to get a key item (or more accurately, a physical deformity) that you cannot win without. It could be said that this is a good device to make cheating impossible, or that as you know nothing at this early stage you wouldn’t therefore know whether Luck is on your side or not, but, if you roll a decent Luck score (which you will need for later Luck tests) you have hardly any chance from the get-go and can play through the entire book, only to fail because of something that went wrong a handful of paragraphs in.
• Several items’ identities change when it comes to needing them, so, unless you write them down exactly as the book will later refer to them (which is pure chance and/or your own interpretation of what a thing might be), you could fail purely because you don’t realise that what the book is asking for is something that you do actually have, it just has a different name. For example, I did not realise that a “Small Jar” and a “Small Jar of Orange Syrup” are the same thing so when the book asked for a “Small Jar”, I assumed I didn’t have what I took to be an empty jar – surely the orange syrup is the important thing here? Another example is a “Soggy Scroll” which I just took to be a “Scroll” that, granted, was wet when I found it, but just how long does it take it to dry? This all just reeks of bad planning and lack of logical interconnection between key episodes.
• There are at least five errors where you are sent to the wrong paragraph. This is an awkward issue that may go unnoticed in parts due to the overall bizarreness of this book so you could just put these down to weirdness making things seem to not make sense. Sadly, this is not the case and this book has not been thoroughly play-tested. The fact that one of these erroneous links is key to winning the book (it’s a reference about one of the special powers you need) makes this all the more frustrating to play.
• One of the numerous outcomes can send you (just one step from “victory”) all the way back to paragraph 1, where the book resets itself (just like The Forest Of Doom so annoyingly does) and you have to go back through the whole adventure, suspending logic and disbelief (even more than you had to when it was all fresh material) until you get back to the point you were at and pick the other option that lets you win.
• The lack of any stats at the start, whilst definitely adding to your lack of self-knowledge very well, is a waste of time as you are instructed to roll up your Skill, Stamina and Luck within half a dozen or so moves. Unless you have never played a FF book before, it is not the most surprising revelation when you roll a die, add six to the number, and write it in your Luck box. Ditto, rolling two dice and adding twelve for your Stamina. Rather more unusual is your Skill which, possibly due to your half-conscious state or, more likely, because much later on it turns out you can use magic and this does often carry some sort of combat stat penalty in FF, is calculated with 1d6+4 rather than +6. This all seems reasonable and the book does cleverly factor in a -4 Attack Strength penalty if you haven’t found a weapon, even though finding weapons is hardly hard here. By far the most unfair problem with your Skill is that, if you do not have a weapon and are fighting with the -4 penalty, it is actually possible to have a Skill in combat of 1 and, whilst few enemies have Skills above about 6 or 7 anyway, you are still at a serious disadvantage. To be fair, there are less combats than normal in this book and most foes are weak, but there are still some tough encounters with double-figure stat-ed enemies that are exceptionally hard under these conditions, weapon or no weapon.
• The horrible FF fall-back failure of dying due to an arbitrary die-roll that has no bearing on any of your stats or abilities can also come into play if you choose to handle your evil brother in a certain way. Roll one die, if you roll an even number, then you, er, die. A touch of the Luke Sharps here, I fear!

I have made much of the fact that this book does not hold-up to its excellent start and that the plot quickly degenerates into a linear roam through a landscape. The prose also has the same problem, as if the opening section was written by one of the two authors and the balance was written by his less-talented co-author. I don’t know who wrote what, but the atmosphere of mystery, dread and (initially) claustrophobia quickly disappears to be replaced with lengthy paragraphs involving meeting different people or groups and getting involved (or not) in their various unexciting machinations in a bid to find out a few meagre and one dimensional facts about yourself. Normally, long paragraphs means lots of detail and description to set the scene and make you feel part of the proceedings, but not here, as the book becomes more tedious and almost pretentious as it progresses, ultimately becoming a mine-field of instant deaths, pointless red herrings that are built up only to turn out to be nothing (the fruitless monastery visit, for example), and weird final act moments where members of your family go into explanatory soliloquies or their entourage act out inexplicable ceremonial routines. At one point late in the book you experience an expositional flash-back to your childhood but, as with much of this adventure, you may not even realise what is meant to be happening as it can just be put down to yet more pompous pseudo-surrealism.

On the subject of pomposity, the cover (by the usually atmospheric and very apt to fantasy art Terry Oakes) is another rare example of a poor FF cover image, looking, as it does, suspiciously like the cover of a 1970s prog-rock LP. Bizarrely, given the “you know nothing” opening gambit of this book, something original like a very vague outline or even a solid colour, might have made a more appropriate to the subject, if possibly too uninspiring to purchase, cover. The cover belies the actually very good internal art which I think works really well as fantasy art per se and, with its sketchy broken lines and slightly hazy appearance, really does suggest that you are emerging from some sort of comatose state.

This could and probably should (had it been better executed) have been a highly original and unusual entry to the cannon. As it is, this is probably one of the poorest FF books – in spite of its excellent opening premise it does not keep the player's interest, becomes dull, is far too unfairly difficult, suffers from serious design flaws, and is often incoherent and incomprehensibly weird, but not in a hip David Lynch way, in a “this is just a bad book and I wish it would end or put me out of my misery” way. A wasted opportunity to do something different with the FF format.

#17: Appointment With F.E.A.R.

APPOINTMENT WITH F.E.A.R.

Steve Jackson

Reviewed by Mark Lain

It was almost inevitable that a superhero FF would emerge sooner or later and it was equally inevitable that the series’ main boundary-pusher, Steve Jackson, would write it. It is more of a surprise that no further superhero FFs would be attempted (other than the short-form sequel to this book, Deadline To Destruction, that was published in Warlock #12) and opinion is certainly divided over how successful AwF really was. Indeed, my own opinion is torn between admiration and derision!

As an adventure, this often borders on the cringe-worthy with silly in-jokes (there are so many supposedly witty comic book and popular culture references that they become unbearable after a while) and barrel-scraping attempts at creating super villains to face off against. As all the good baddies had already been used up by Marvel, DC and 2000AD, Jackson is left to invent a crowd of villains that manage to sound like they are from classic comics, but that are actually far too crappy in terms of their concepts and make King Tut (easily the most desperate idea for a baddie that the ever-campy and inherently ridiculous 60s Batman series would conjure up) look like quite an intriguing and well thought-out idea. Only the main arch-villain, The Titanium Cyborg, is even remotely intimidating, and that’s more due to the mystique of his appearance on the cover as only the FEAR group actually really gets any proper coverage so that any kind of sense of foreboding surrounds them. Most of the villains just play support roles and give you something to apprehend as you hunt about for evidence of what FEAR are up to and how to track them down.

...Which brings us to the plot. You play Jean Lafayette aka The Silver Crusader, who due to being the product of a genetic experiment, has one of four special abilities (more on these later) to help you fight crime in Titan City (just to throw in a tenuous link to the FF series.) You have to make your way around the city, collecting clues as to the whereabouts of a top secret FEAR (the Federation of Euro-American Rebels) meeting so that you can capture the evil genius that is Vladimir Utoshki aka The Titanium Cyborg and thwart FEAR’s evil plans. And that’s pretty much it for the storyline. As it’s basically a comic book plot, anything can happen really, not that much does other than a few crimes being committed, your getting berated by your constantly fuming boss (very comic booky), a bit of optional shopping, museum visiting, going to the funfair or visiting your Aunt (again, a comic book cliché, but that actually fits in well and adds a bit of warm humour), with the occasional run-in with a super-villain from a list of fairly hopeless baddies that don’t really have many super-talents and are very easy to beat. The real point is that you are trying to find numerical clues (and you start with two from the outset) that you have to use your intuition when to use.

The clues are the crux of this book’s structure and, in spite of being fairly pathetic as an adventure, this book has one of the best and most intricately planned designs of any gamebook. Jackson expands on the ideas he introduced in #10 House Of Hell where you need to decide when to use the mathematical clues that you are given in return for defeating certain baddies. Sometimes the book drops hints, but more often than not, you are left to just guess when to do some sums and move to a secret paragraph that’s where you are plus 50 or some such number-crunch. Needless to say, this makes actually defeating the book incredibly difficult and you can be led into a false sense of security as a play-through literally only takes about 30 minutes leaving you none the wiser and making this also one of the briefest and most unsatisfying adventures to play as there just isn’t enough material of any substance here to keep you interested (another reason why it is so disappointing overall as a game.) You will find yourself often just going endlessly through the book trying to find something different from what happened to you last time, until, that is, you manage to beat it (or come close to beating it) at which point it dawns that there is something very unique about this book – it is actually four different missions. OK, none of them are especially involving and they are all over before they’ve started, but this is a brilliant piece of design that offers ample re-play options should you feel inclined.

The four different routes to success (each of which ends with the FEAR summit being in a totally different place – another bit of excellent design) are dictated by which of the four super-powers YOU have: Super Strength (giving you a permanent combat Skill of 13 and, less explicably, the ability to fly), Psi-Powers (self-explanatory, and Jackson is fond of ESP and mind-control as his books where you can use Magic demonstrate), ETS (the ability to build gadgets in a Batman-stylie), and Energy Blast (where you can fire a bolt from your hand, but it does come at a cost of 2 Stamina every time you use it so, whilst sounding good, is probably the least likely one you’ll pick to avoid killing yourself) and each comes with two clues out of a pool of six. The adventure plays out differently based on your super-power, but you still need to find the correct hidden path based on your clues and failure is highly likely as there are so many red herrings along the way such that this book is probably even harder to navigate through than the similarly-designed House Of Hell was. Granted, none of the other lethal obstacles are thrown at you (Fear, lack of weapons, etc) and staying alive is extremely easy (there are very few instant failure sections in this book), but finding the true path(s) is inordinately difficult as there is simply too much guess-work involved which, combined with the lack of anything to get your teeth into, results in a fairly poor playing experience, other than the possibility of replays via other routes (which you probably won’t find.)

Defeating FEAR is not the only written-in reason to play this book. The concept of Hero Points is included here where, in return for doing something heroic, you get what are effectively Experience Points. Whilst it is purely an aside, you are supposed to try to beat your previous tally of Hero Points to add extra playability, but this stat does nothing other than to make you feel good or bad about yourself. Your score has no bearing on anything – it would have been better if a higher Hero score made you more persuasive or allowed your reputation to precede you (like Nemesis points do in #52 Night Dragon, for example) just to make it meaningful. An interesting point of note on this subject is the fact that you are discouraged from killing any baddies by reducing their Stamina to zero. If you do, you lose Hero Points (not that you really care) and once an enemy’s Stamina has dropped to 2 or less they will surrender to you. This is very logical and fits the concept of this book, but, if you do kill someone, the book has no mechanism to deal with this and the baddie comes back to life and blabs some information to you. A bit more thought could have allowed you to turn people in dead or alive and the book could have penalised you for killing by not revealing a clue. As it stands, it makes no difference whether you kill baddies or not as the outcome is always the same either way. Plus, most of the encounters are fairly easy, bar The Titanium Cyborg himself who has Sk 18 St 20 (but you don’t fight him with those stats as success is dependent on a Circuit Jammer which halves his stats, instantly making him no different to any other slightly above average encounter) so combats are almost irrelevant here.

One very noticeable thing about this book is its sheer length in terms of paragraphs (440) which belies its briefness in playing terms, but, as so much intricate structure is built-in, as well as it being effectively four inter-linking adventures, the extra length facilitates this instead. Normally a very long FF book makes for a very long adventure (eg: The Crown Of Kings or Howl Of The Werewolf), but the paragraphs are used differently here, which is quite intriguing an idea, if ultimately an unsatisfying one in playing terms and you find yourself wondering exactly what all the sections are being used for (until you work it out, that is.)

Artistically, a decent attempt has been made to make you feel like you are in a comic-book, as all the illustrations are in multiple panels that show progress of a plot thread, which is a neat idea to create some (much-needed) atmosphere. Of considerable interest to me personally is the cover which is drawn by one of my favourite Judge Dredd artists, Brian Bolland, and really looks the part in trying to make this look like a graphic novel. The Titanium Cyborg is suitably evil-looking with his manic grin and bizarre super-villain outfit – it’s a shame Bolland didn’t do the interior art as well which is crying out for the depth of detail that his work always has, but I gather that Bolland takes a long time to produce his drawings so that may have caused problems with meeting publishing deadlines at a time when FF was commercial hot property and something of a cash-cow for Puffin. Incidentally, this is one of the rare occasions where Wizard Books chose not to change the re-issue cover for something wildly inferior, which speaks volumes about how good, not to mention still contemporary-looking, the cover is.

This was a wasted opportunity. In terms of its design this is one of the best books in the series with its four distinct true paths and its very complex and unusual mathematical, clue-based reader intuition structure. Sadly, it fails miserably by simply being a risible adventure with hardly anything to keep you interested, that is far too short and, worst of all given how little you get to do, ridiculously hard to figure out given how much unfathomable (and impossible) guesswork is involved on the players’ behalf. Yes, it’s certainly playable (unlike the worst FFs like #30 Chasms Of Malice or #12 Space Assassin that are so unbearable you aren’t likely to return to them even if you can be bothered to finish a first playthrough), but it leaves you baffled and short-changed by ending too quickly with almost inevitable failure. At one point your character can buy a copy of The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain as a peace-offering to your perpetually apoplectic boss – I’d suggest you do the same and get yourself a copy of WOFM as, as an enjoyable adventure, that book is a million times better than Appointment With FEAR which, other than being a novelty, is pretty forgettable.