Can You Be a Hero, Or Do You Always Give Up Hope?

Now that my character in Steve Jackson’s Secrets of Salamonis has finished training as an adventurer, it’s time I got started on a proper sub-quest. Rather than listing the available options in the text, the book depicts the Quests Board outside Adventurers’ Guild HQ, and has the Guildmaster obscuring my view of one of the posted notices. I wonder if the unreadable one is going to prove important at some later stage…

For now there are seven listed missions that I can see, so I’ll pick one of them. They include accompanying a caravan to Shazâar, a city to the west of the Forest of Yore, and as I already have experience of similar work, it seems like a good first choice.

The Guildmaster explains that the merchant Luquin Garreau is transporting a valuable cargo to the Southern Plains, and wants experienced fighters to guard it during the weeks that it’s on the road. He’s already engaged the services of a Strongarm Captain to lead the security detail, so the armband I received from Nanoc should suffice as evidence of my suitability for the job even if the Strongarm heading up the squad isn’t my recent comrade-in-arms and trainer.

None too surprisingly, the veteran in charge is Nanoc, and he’s delighted to see me again so soon. Garreau pays half our wages up front, and stresses that the cargo must be delivered as quickly as possible. While working at the Guttery I learned that its clients are based in Shazâar, so I wonder if we’re transporting a consignment of their special rancid animal innard sauce. Wouldn’t want that to spoil in transit, now would we?

A couple of days into the journey (so according to the tracker on the Adventure Sheet it is now Fireday), Nanoc seeks my advice. We can cut short our travel time by taking a short cut through the foothills of the Craggen Heights, but that region is inhabited by Trolls and Goblins and other such ‘bad guy’s cannon fodder’ species, some of them in service to lucifugous demi-sorcerer Balthus Dire. Should we prioritise caution or speed?

Considering how insistent Garreau was that we get the job done quickly, I advise taking the riskier route, hoping that this lack of caution won’t cause me to end up an imprudent dead ‘un. The next day (Earthday by the local calendar) we enter a pass with steep, rocky sides, which Nanoc notes to be ideal territory for an ambush. I could offer to scout ahead, but that might just lead to my being cut off from the rest of the guards. Or it may provide intel that helps us avoid an otherwise lethal trap - when Steve Jackson is the author, cautious behaviour is sometimes rewarded, and on other occasions it gets penalised.

I stick with the caravan, and nothing untoward happens. For some time, at least, and our wariness gives way to boredom until the arrows start flying. A mob of Hill Goblins, mounted on Dire Wolves, rides to the attack, causing some of my companions to panic. Will Spelling help here? Yes, it enables me to conjure a protective barrier into existence, protecting us from the arrows and gaining me a point of Amonour.

We pick up our pace, hoping to outrun the Goblin Wolf Riders, but they catch up to us and battle commences. Though the term ‘Brawling’ implies punch-ups and disorganised combat, the Special Skill turns out to encompass techniques like wielding a sword while riding a horse, giving me a slight advantage as I endeavour to fight off a couple of our assailants. I take one wound in the fight, but kill both Goblins, and the rest of the bodyguards take down half of the attack party. The surviving Goblins retreat, and I take some cash from the two I slew.

Resuming our journey, we encounter no further trouble in the Craggen Heights, and by Seaday (two days later, for those of you unfamiliar with the Allansian week), we reach the fringes of the Southern Plains. This region is arid and windswept, and a Luck roll determines that my horse is startled but does not throw me when something erupts from the sand. We have been ambushed by a group of desert-dwelling reptilian predators known as Gretch. This could be a nasty fight, as their claws do extra damage when they land a blow, but my slight Skill advantage enables me to prevail without losing an Attack Round. At one point I had the potential to use my Instant Death ability again, but by then the Gretch was low on Stamina anyway, so I chose to risk fighting on, and beat my enemy the conventional way in the very next round.

The rest of the party dispose of their opponents just as efficiently. The condition of the bodies suggests that these Gretch have been short of prey for some time, and attacked us out of desperation. Even so, it may be worth searching the area for past victims, so I do a little digging, finding the skeletal remains of a human. On one finger is a brass ring, which I risk taking: rings have often proved beneficial in Steve Jackson’s books (though not always).

Several days later (why was I instructed to keep track of when in the week it is if the book’s going to give imprecise measurements of time like that?) we reach our destination. Elsewhere, Shazâar is often referred to as the City of Madness, and the sight of the architecture and the locals’ bodily adornments (plus what I already know of their culinary habits) suggests that this epithet is not undeserved.

The caravan comes to a halt in the hexagonal plaza known as Star Square, and while we are unloading, a female Hobbit beckons me over to an alleyway. She says that her master is willing to pay a good price if I’ll transport something for him. Could be a trap, could be a legitimate solo commission. I risk sneaking away from the caravan to find out more, and the Hobbit leads me to a house occupied by a Lizardine. While taxonomically accurate, this name indicates little about the nature of the species: based on an encounter in another book, they would seem to be intelligent traders, not hostile (except to shoplifters). This one gives me a pouch of money to take a parcel to a sage in the tower on Brightstar Street when I get back to Salamonis. I wonder if making this delivery will get me a point of Amazonour.

I rejoin the caravan before anyone notices my absence, and we travel back to Salamonis without further incident. For the first time since accepting this quest I am specifically instructed to update the day of the week, so I guess my earlier calculations weren’t necessary after all, and it’s Fireday again.

Now I have a parcel to deliver, but the book has my curiosity get the better of me, and I sneak a peek at the contents, finding a significant quantity of the rare herb known as Medusa Grass. I have the option of keeping it for myself, but I have no desire to join the ranks of the couriers who fail to make their deliveries (my gamebook collection is smaller than it should be because of a couple of online purchases that never reached my mailbox).

Proceeding to the address I was given, I am greeted by a Chervah (a ‘little people’ species that sort of featured in Steve Jackson’s FF novel), who leads me up a flight of stairs to a cluttered study occupied by a Hamakei scholar (benign vulture-headed humanoids). The Hamakei thanks me, comments that he’d foreseen my arrival in his scrying glass (so even Titan has courier tracking), and gives me some of the Medusa Grass as the glass also revealed that I’m liable to need it in the near future.

The sun is setting as I leave the tower, and the fact that this detail gets its own section has me wondering if it’s a textual cue pointing to a hidden section - Steve Jackson has used such mechanisms before now. Well, even if it is, I don’t have the relevant lead, so I just have to sort out where I’m going to spend the night. And a calendar check indicates that what happens next depends on whether or not today is Fireday. Sundown is usually a while before midnight, so I guess it still is. I wonder if that’s a good thing…

A couple of guards are heading towards me, but as I have no codewords identifying me as a lawbreaker (probably because I paid that pesky tax collector), it turns out that they’re just walking down the street, and our paths cross without incident.

Paying a gold piece to spend the night in the Half-Darned Sock enables me to recover the Stamina I lost in the Craggen Heights, and another calendar check establishes that this is neither of the days of the week on which something time-specific occurs at this point in the narrative.

In the morning (Earthday, not that I’ve been instructed to update that information) I set off to Guild HQ again, pausing along the way to see if there’s anything worth buying at the Bazaar. Another check ensues, and I have neither the item nor the affliction mentioned. Thus, as I browse at the adventuring supplies stall run by the Bruise Brothers, a shady-looking duo who make the mildly disconcerting claim that they’re not going to forget me, Pinchpenny approaches, now accompanied by an intimidatingly big dog. Again my not having assaulted or fled from him keeps me from getting into serious trouble, but does not avert the issuing of a demand for a cut of my recent takings. Hoping that he turns out to be up to his neck in something villainous enough to provide me with a valid excuse for putting him out of circulation one of these days, I pay the new tax and receive a token confirming that I have done so.

Returning my attention to the stall, I buy some Chainmail that adds to Initial and Current Skill, and also purchase a brass instrument in the shape of a Dragon’s head, as weirdly specific items like that usually wind up proving useful or essential. Elsewhere in the Bazaar I also buy a couple of portions of Provisions, a length of rope, a bag of salt, some nose plugs, and a copper armband for the ‘no idea what it’s for, but it may save my life’ pile.

Nothing has changed on the Quests Board by the time I get back to Guild HQ. I think now I’ll see if I can survive the job that brought my previous two attempts at this book to an end: acquiring supplies of Cauldronweed for the Witches of Dree. This will require me to head north to Bu Fon Fen, a swampy region inhabited by Toadmen who get a bit proprietorial about the vegetation that grows in it.

It takes me a few days to reach the fen. Making my way through towering reeds, I enter a clearing from which two new trails lead. Webbed footprints on the path leading north-west suggest the presence of many Toadmen, and as I don’t have an expendable Half-Orc companion with me, I think it advisable to steer clear of them and head north-east.

A Swampsnake attacks me, and despite having a 5-point Skill lead, I still take a little damage in the fight. Not as much as the snake, though, and I take its skin, hoping to be able to sell it to an alchemist. Continuing along the trail, I draw near to a riverbank, and a couple of bushes catch my eye. Circumstances will, of course, prevent me from taking samples of both. The first time I played Secrets, I made an educated guess as to which bush was more likely to be Cauldronweed. On my second attempt, my training included some data acquisition which backed up my theory. I will, thus, be picking clumps of the same plant as before.

Once I’ve stashed the leaves in my backpack, a Toadman leaps to the attack. This is the fight I didn’t survive when I first had a go at the book, but this time around I win without incurring any damage. Anticipating that more of his kind will soon follow, I hurry back the way I came until I reach an unexpected fork in the path. The last time I got this far, I picked the turning I thought should lead back towards dry land and encountered many more Toadmen (the collective noun for toads is a knot, so I’m tempted to call it a tangle of Toadmen), who overpowered me and dumped me in a sinkhole to decompose. So, did I get confused and head the wrong way, or did I get surrounded on the way out of the marshland, and if the latter, will heading deeper into the fen actually prove any more survivable?  While Steve Jackson has on occasion created detailed areas in which all decisions lead to defeat, the book mentioned opportunities to sell the snakeskin on Brightstar Street and in the Bazaar, which suggests that there is a way of getting out of here alive.

Taking the turning that should take me away from the river, I find that that is the way I went last time, so at least I know that my past self didn’t get mixed up. As before, I find myself hemmed in by Toadmen. However, on this occasion I have Spelling, which enables me to raise a thick fog, causing the batrachian bunch to lose sight of me. Evading them, I flee south to the Windward Plains.

After a while I reach a path, and a signpost shows the way to Dree. Heading in the direction indicated, I reach the witches’ village (so either that wasn’t the misleadingly rotated signpost that features prominently in Creature of Havoc or this is before it got turned around). Not a particularly pleasant part of the world, but it’s where I need to be to complete this quest. Unless I got the wrong plant, in which case I’m liable to end up marranghaed into something that Doctor Moreau would consider an abomination. No, as indicated by that passing mention I spotted on my previous attempt at the book, my inference was correct and I did get some Cauldronweed. A crone says she’ll pay me 3 gold pieces for it, but other locals are starting to take an interest, so I could try to get a bidding war going.

The fact that I gained Amonour on the caravan to Shazâar implies that acquiring it remains relevant even after I raised my stats with what I gained in the earlier stages of the adventure, and I think raising my profile by auctioning off the fruits of my expedition into the fen is more likely to gain me another point or two, so I opt to have a go at selling the Cauldronweed on DreeBay.

Attracting more attention is easy enough, but as I didn’t go back to Rodriguez for advanced training in manipulating people, a Luck roll determines how I fare. Fortune is not with me, though, and the hag with whom I first spoke threatens to do something adventure-ending if I don’t accept her offer. Concerned that her idea of giving feedback might involve relocating my mouth to between my shoulder blades, I hand over the leaves and receive the scant payment. The harridan indicates her willingness to become a repeat customer if I ever have any other spell components to sell, netting me another point of Amonour. I risk offering her the Swampsnake Skin, but she’s not fussed about it, offering only a gold piece and not caring if I hang on to it in the hope of getting a better deal elsewhere (which I do).

Trekking back to Salamonis, I am again instructed to track the passage of time. Just over a week has passed since the last official update of my calendar, so it’s Earthday again. As before, a night’s rest in the Half-Darned Sock is all I need to return to full Stamina, and in the morning I set off to the Guild again

Along the way I check out the Bazaar, encountering the same check that prefaced my previous visit. This time I do have the item in question, so I’m spared another run-in with the taxman, but don’t get to revisit the Bruise Brothers’ stall either. Then again, I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford anything, considering the negligible profit I made on my last quest. Still, I’m not as hard up as some: in the crowd I find someone sufficiently desperate for cash to be willing to work at the Guttery. Before proceeding to the Quests Board I buy a Potion of Luck and sell the snakeskin for twice what the hag offered me.

For my next quest I think I’ll try and get rid of whatever is interfering with local mining operations. Several of my other characters have fared quite well at adventures involving mines. Not all, mind you… The Guildmaster tells me that the silver mines are located to the north of the city, and the excavations have disturbed an as yet unidentified ‘something that would have been better left alone’. It happens.

While the mines aren’t far from Trolltooth Pass, home of assorted Trolls, Goblins and the like, their output is valuable enough that plenty of soldiers have been posted to guard the approaches. And it would appear that none of them are the sort who enjoy throwing their weight around, as I make my way to the mine workings without incident.

A Half-Ogre appears to be in charge, so I show him my Adventurers’ Permit, and he asks if I’ve come for the pest control job. For some reason I have the option of denying it, but I can’t see any benefit to be gained by lying, so I confirm that that is my current quest. He explains that work in the western galleries has ceased owing to an infestation of Rock Grubs. What a bore!

The Half-Ogre gives me directions to the relevant part of the mines, and says I’ll get a gold piece for every Rock Grub I kill, though I will have to bring evidence. At each junction along the way I’m given a choice of which way to go, and while sometimes not heading straight to the right part of a mine can prove beneficial, right now I’m not going to risk straying. Especially as someone has inscribed a picture of a skull at the mouth of one of the wrong turnings. The correct path has been marked with what appears to be a representation of some vicious-looking fangs, which isn’t a lot more encouraging, but I’m not going to gain anything by fleeing the first hint of danger, so in I go.

This tunnel starts to show signs of not having been created by miners, and then I encounter a Rock Grub. These pests have a pretty low Skill, but a lot of Stamina, so there’s a good likelihood of one getting in the odd lucky blow in the course of the fight. Indeed, that is what happens here: while I do prevail, I take a wound along the way.

Taking the Grub’s head, I head back the way I came. On my way in, I thought I heard footsteps coming from one of the wrong turnings, and I am again given the opportunity to investigate. As the alternative appears to be leaving the mine with a single trophy and making less on this quest than I did getting ripped off by a witch, I think now I will take a look.

Moving quietly so as not to alert whoever I heard in case they’re up to no good, I reach another junction. This time there are no hints. Well, this book isn’t by Ian Livingstone, so I don’t go in his favourite direction. It leads to a cavern where I find a Jib-Jib, a harmless fuzzball on legs, with a formidable-sounding roar that tricks predators into thinking it’s much bigger and more vicious than it really is. Startled by the light from my torch, the Jib-Jib bellows and scurries away. Still not ready to leave the mine, I give chase, but once the little critter stops making a noise, I lose track of it. To reduce the risk of my also losing myself, I down that Potion of Luck.

The passage I’m in joins another and leads on to the lip of a massive crevasse, spanned by a rope bridge. On the far side is a scruffy-looking man, hunched over and shivering. I am about to step onto the bridge when the man turns and yells at me to stay away, putting a knife to one of the ropes that hold the bridge up. I halt, but the risk of falling from a severed bridge isn’t the only peril here. A horrendous shrieking noise issues from the fissure, and I have nothing with which to plug my ears, so the noise costs me a point of Skill. Then I see what’s causing it: a swarm of Shriekers, which are basically undead winged piranhas. Not being equipped to deal with them, I try to flee, but a Stamina roll determines how I fare, and the damage I took from that Rock Grub is enough to make the difference between success and failure. Still, having the Shriekers catch up to me isn’t an Instant Death: I merely lose a randomly determined amount of Stamina, which turns out to be just over half of what remains to me.

I do at least make it out of the mine alive, and while I only have a single gold piece’s worth of trophies, I still gain 2 Amonour for my efforts. Trudging back to Salamonis, I am instructed to advance the date by one day. I eat some Provisions to recover some of the Stamina I lost, and then lose another point by spending the night on the streets, as paying for a room would deplete my already negligible funds.

Another calendar check follows, and as it’s now Windsday, something happens. It’s another dream, in which I find myself at the entrance to what FF veterans should recognise as Firetop Mountain. This must be a lucid dream, as I get to choose whether to head inside or turn away. Well, Secrets was written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of TWoFM, so I might as well check out the nostalgia-fest.

An instruction to take note of my current stats suggests that any harm incurred during this dream might not carry over into the waking world. Apart from that parenthetical directive, the section repeats the final paragraph of the first section of TWoFM word for word, right down to the section numbers given at the west-or-east choice with which it concludes. This duplication continues as I investigate: the boarded-up door to the east (which I don’t risk charging down in case I’m wrong about dreamed Stamina loss not persisting into reality), the dozing Orc guard (though, doubtless to avoid having to pay royalties to Russ Nicholson, there’s no illustration of him)…

The clip show goes on. My dream-Luck suffices to keep me from waking the snoozing sentry, but lets me down when I try to steal the box belonging to his napping associate in the closest room. That Orc wakes, but my dream continues, the text in Secrets only deviating from the original insofar as it provides an additional section number to turn to if I should lose the ensuing fight. I win, claiming the coin inside the box (and the rather more useful Luck bonus that comes with it) and releasing the dead Orc’s pet mouse.

Advancing through the déjà vu, I kill the snake-in-a-box in the next room, and take the accompanying key. No picture, added instruction in case of fight loss, and ‘turn to’ has inexplicably and inaccurately become ‘return to’ in the direction for leaving the room. The inebriated Orcs in the next room also lose an illustration and gain a ‘However, if you lose the battle…’, and while the original text mentioned me facing them in combat, the Secrets variant has them facing me (a trivial alteration, but the odd thing is that it should have been made at all).

The book guarded by the Orcs differs from the one in TWoFM in two regards, and while the change of ‘Dragonfire’ to ‘Dragon Fire’ is no big deal (beyond suggesting that Steve Jackson has bowed to the tyranny of the spellchecker), the fact that the spell for killing evil Dragons has been replaced with instructions for lifting a curse must have some significance. Perhaps I will be able to make up for unintentionally hurting Dog by restoring him to humanity.

Resuming the rerun, I reach the junction, meet and kill the Orc Chieftain and his seemingly masochistic servant. As usual, no picture, added note of where to go if killed in battle (or by the booby-trap on the treasure chest). In other minutiae, the (redundant by Secrets rules) opportunity to eat Provisions remains in the text, and in one paragraph there’s a whole new comma. All this comparing of texts is making me want to sneak a peek at section 291.

The trap doesn’t kill my dream-self, but it does bring his Stamina uncomfortably low. Still, the loot in the chest is as before. The section describing it is on the same page as the one to which any in-dream character death leads, making it easy for the curious or careless to learn the outcome of such a fatality.

Continuing through the copy, I proceed to the next junction and take a calculated risk. If fighting the quintet of squabbling Orcs still brings the Stamina bonus it did in TWoFM, it’ll leave me in better shape than I was when I entered the dream. Unless I lose a couple of Attack Rounds, in which case I’ll be dream-dead, but nothing ventured…

Flawless victory. A pity the Shrieker-induced Skill loss was to Initial as well as Current, or the originally superfluous bonus awarded for the victory might finally have come into play. But my dream-Stamina is now more than twice what it was before I fought this mob, and the dining room still contains the Giver of Sleep, so I should be thankful for the benefits gained from this encounter. Anyone not yet bored by the ongoing textual comparison will doubtless be pleased but not surprised to learn that there’s no picture, but there is a direction to the dream-death section for anyone who fares less well than I just did in the fight.

Incidentally, this has just alerted me to the existence of an arguable mistake in Return to Firetop Mountain. If the hero of TWoFM takes the Giver of Sleep from here, they take ‘the bow, arrow and case’ (my italics). But if, while playing RtFM, you come in here and kill the Orcs’ animated skeletons, you find the empty case.

But I digress. Back to the last junction and north. Secrets ditches the mention that the right-hand wall is to the east, and adds the inevitable ‘where to go if you die’ direction in case anybody should sustain lethal damage while trying to break down the door behind which a man is screaming. It’s not as formidable a door as some, and I release the captive. No picture, same advice as in the original adventure.

I can’t be bothered to go through all the faff associated with breaking into the armoury and acquiring the marginally helpful shield. However, I do go into the torture chamber, which has gained an illustration. The text has also been trimmed a little, though the basic scenario (two Goblins stabbing a captive Dwarf, who expires as I enter the room, options to fight, flee, or stab the corpse and go "Muahaha!" in a bid to look villainous) remains unchanged. The fight includes the usual addition, but it’s only the Goblins who expire.

At the portcullis, my dream-self automatically identifies the bogus lever as a fake and pulls the correct one, proceeding to the junction beyond. Despite this deviation from the core text, the section numbers for moving on are as before. So, do I go the way I would need to go if I wanted a shot at success in the original text, or the way I would need to go if I wanted a shot at success in the Warlock magazine edit? Stick with the original true path.

The passage leads me to the 'Rest Ye Here Weary Traveller' bench (the text gaining a few commas), but this is where the recapitulation of TWoFM ends, as seated on the bench is the small man I encountered towards the end of the dream with which Secrets opened. He congratulates me on having got this far, and says it’s time to wake up, sending me to the section to which I would have had to go if I’d ever died in-dream.

I wake with a start, wondering what the dream was. Well, from one perspective it was around 10% of the book’s sections being partially or wholly recycled material. And unless there was a radical edit that I missed, the Orc Chieftain’s room was the last part prior to the awakening that mattered - everything in between provided neither gold nor Secrets-relevant information. Maybe Steve Jackson has some issue with fictional Dwarfs – his previous FF book opened with a set-up that made it impossible to avoid murdering a Dwarf, and now this one has a score or so of (gameplay-wise) redundant sections that allow for the inclusion of a picture of a Dwarf being tortured to death. Unresolved childhood trauma related to a viewing of Disney’s animated Snow White, perhaps?

My stats have, as I expected, reverted to what they were when I turned in, and the items I collected in the dream have disappeared, but the money remains with me, and I get a Luck bonus that would have come in very handy if I hadn’t downed that Potion in the mine.

It’s time to head back to the Quests Board, but I think along the way I’ll do some more shopping before Pinchpenny can come running after me for payment of ‘Dreams of Wealth Tax’. I think that can wait for another blog entry, though, as the end of the month is looming, and between quests seems like a good point at which to leave things hanging.

Why Everything Turned Around

Resuming my playthrough of Steve Jackson’s Secrets of Salamonis, I wake to find a couple of rats snuggling against me. Not very pleasant, but they do nothing to harm me when I shoo them away.

On the way back to the Adventurers’ Guild I encounter someone desperate enough to seek employment at the Guttery. The advertising board outside the building has a new notice on it, announcing the discovery of a backpack, prompting me to hurry inside in case the pack is mine. There are plenty of adventurers inside, many of them chatting, and I overhear fragmentary conversations suggesting that this adventure precedes the events of Temple of Terror and possibly the novel The Trolltooth Wars (the latter implying that a few other adventures (and sequels) also have yet to take place).

I make my way to a counter where someone official is on duty, and explain that I think the backpack which has been handed in might be mine. The man behind the counter asks me to describe its contents to prove the validity of my claim, and I list my possessions. Most of them are fairly generic, but there is one particularly distinctive item: a copy of my favourite book, the compendium of legends that fuelled my ambition to become an adventurer.

Conceding that the pack may be mine, the man says I’ll need to pay a gold piece to get it back. This is why I chose not to pay for a room in the Half-Darned Sock – while lacking the money isn’t an automatic game over, I’d need to succeed at a Luck roll to persuade the man to waive the charge, and the dream and the incident with Dog have cost me enough points that I really don’t fancy my chances with that roll.

Handing over the money, I receive my pack (which also contains a money pouch with 12 gold pieces in it), and also gain a point apiece of Luck and Amonour. The man then introduces himself as Guildmaster Jeskan Stover, and mentions the Guild registration fee, so I hand over some of my regained cash in return for an official permit.

Stover recommends getting some training before I undertake any quests, and I ask him for recommendations. There’s a little suboptimal gamebook design here: even though I already have some leads that could help me get some training, I have to seek Stover’s advice if I don’t want to skip training altogether, and as the book limits the number of times I can train, it’s possible (depending on what skills I choose to prioritise) to wind up asking what he suggests for the sole purpose of gaining the option of ignoring him and going my own way. Not yet having played Secrets often enough to have explored every available avenue of training, I don't know which are the best skills to go for, but it may well be that consulting and then disregarding Stover is the optimal course of action. It’s certainly what I shall be doing on this occasion.

Stover mentions the local library, a Guild member who runs a course on avoiding tricks and traps, and a temple that teaches skills which ought to be unteachable. Now that I have the option, I reflect on the contacts I’ve made that also open up opportunities for training. The book slightly obfuscates matters, not asking for the names of potential trainers or the fields in which they could instruct me, but checking to see if I recognise something mentioned during my previous encounter with the relevant contacts. It’s a rather flawed approach, as it penalises players who don’t memorise trivia there’s no obvious reason to focus on. A reader who knows of a map vendor who can teach magic shouldn’t effectively be barred from seeking him out just because they forgot an unrelated name-drop from the conversation they had with him. Secrets isn’t the only gamebook to pull such tricks, but precedent does not equal justification.

Perhaps thanks to the closer attention I pay to the text when playing a gamebook for this blog, I do recognise all the references that open up additional avenues of instruction. And then things get a bit messy. Confirming that I recognise a textual cue takes me to a section where I seek out the relevant contact and learn more of what they can teach me, also being given a section number where I can embark on that course of training before being sent back to the section from which I just came. The problem is, that section has no instruction to move on to any training course – just the list of leads and directions on where to turn if none of them mean anything to me, so I’m technically stuck here. All right, so there’s nothing to stop me from just turning to one of the section numbers I was given when the training options were elaborated upon, but there’s also nothing to stop me from turning straight to the last section of the book and claiming an unearned victory.

Still, despite the lack of a clear direction to turn to one of the sections I’ve been told are available starting points for training, I do have an implicit option to do so, and choosing one of them does seem like the best way of getting out of this inadvertent textual trap. So, do I want to learn magic from Ulsen, join Nanoc as a guard on a caravan and learn advanced combat skills along the way, or pick up further tricks from Rodriguez? Leaving Salamonis and signing on at the training ground in the Forest of Spiders is also an option, but the training ground was a ‘fail no matter what you do’ zone back in Creature of Havoc and I wouldn’t put it past Steve Jackson to have it work the same way here.

To start with, I pay Ulsen for instruction in the mystical art of Spelling. He takes me to a tavern, where the ale restores some of the Stamina I’ve lost. In gameplay terms, using the magic he teaches me requires me to solve a riddle and convert the letters in the solution into numbers, using a grid at the back of the book to find the numerical values rather than going with the standard a=1 set-up. Ulsen demonstrates how the magic works by conjuring himself a free refill, and gets me to demonstrate my understanding of it by having me sorcerously light the grate. Successfully doing so nets me some Amonour and Luck as well as giving me the relevant Special Skill.

There follows a thinly disguised check to see how much training I have done, the book asking if I have a Holy Symbol. There is no such item in my inventory, so I’m told that it’s now the Holy Day of one of Titan’s deities, and while watching a procession to mark the event, I am gifted a Holy Symbol, incidentally gaining another point of Amonour and a superfluous Luck bonus.

I can now seek further training, so I think I’ll take advantage of the opportunity afforded me by Nanoc’s marital troubles and sign on as a guard on the trade caravan for which he’s providing the security. This job lasts several weeks, during which I gain a hefty Amonour bonus, the Special Skill of Brawling, and a couple of limited-use abilities that will enable me to reroll dice (I wonder if the use of the plural indicates that, should the book instruct me to roll a single die, the Second Chance Roll may not be employed) and inflict the occasional killing blow regardless of enemy Stamina.

Towards the end of the return journey, the caravan is ambushed by Brigands, and I must make a Skill roll. The odds are slightly unfavourable, as I’ve not yet had the opportunity to boost my stats, but I just succeed, thereby avoiding falling victim to a surprise attack. I still have to fight against a Man-Orc with a Skill higher than mine, though, and only survive because the one time I win an Attack Round, I do so with a roll that permits me to use my Instant Death ability.

Nanoc and the rest of his men have prevailed against their opponents, so we continue on our way and reach Salamonis without further incident. There I receive payment for the job, and Nanoc presents me with an armband identifying me as a Strongarm.

It’s a good thing I didn’t start by signing on with Nanoc, as successful completion of the tour of duty with him leads straight to the ‘that’s enough training: now get on with some proper adventuring’ section. As I head for Guild HQ, I note that it is Stormsday, and the skies are appropriately grim.

It is now time to use my Amonour to boost my stats, and while improving my Skill and Luck should probably take priority, adding a point to my Initial Stamina will enable me to return to full health, and as I’m currently hanging on to life by a thread, I can’t really afford to pass up that opportunity for healing. Thus, I settle on going up to:
Skill 10
Stamina 13
Luck 8
Not as good as average rolls would have given me under standard FF rules for character creation, but significantly better than at the start of this adventure.

In the Market Square I am accosted by the tax collector of whom I was warned shortly after arriving in Salamonis. He demands that I pay Job Seeker’s Tax (don’t go giving the politicians ideas, Steve). The second time I played this book, I opted for tax evasion in the literal sense - that is, I ran away - and received a codeword hinting of subsequent trouble with the law, though my character died before experiencing the consequences of having that codeword. Attacking the pest will probably have even worse consequences, and I can afford to pay, so I hand over the money and continue on my way while he seeks further prey.

No further incidents take place before I reach the Guild building, where I can now pick a quest from the board. This seems like a good time to pause the narrative and update the blog with my progress in the adventure, so that’s what I’ll do. Mind you, if my first quest as an accredited and trained adventurer goes no better than on my previous attempts at the book, my next blog post is likely to be one of my shorter ones. Time will tell, soon enough.

Several Different Crimes

While Ian Livingstone has written several new FF books to mark noteworthy anniversaries of the original publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Steve Jackson didn’t contribute any similarly celebratory titles to the range until 2022’s Secrets of Salamonis. This book came out at the same time as Ian Livingstone’s Shadow of the Giants, but series numbering places Secrets before Shadow.

I purchased both books online, from separate sellers as it worked out cheaper that way, and actually received Shadow first. Still, in the forum challenge for which I made my first attempts at both books, the randomiser selected Secrets first, so I did play them in the ‘correct’ order.

Character creation is handled differently from usual – no rolling, just a set of baseline stats that start out lower than what is normally the minimum, and will be increased at a later stage (as long as I make it that far). This is because my character is not yet a seasoned adventurer, and spends the early stages of Secrets attempting to learn suitable skills and acquire a quality known as Amonour, which can be converted into additional points of Skill, Stamina and Luck when I have completed my training.

Amonour was introduced in the short-lived series of FF novels that came out in the late eighties and early nineties. Protagonist Chadda Darkmane, one of the least likeable fictional heroes I’ve ever encountered in a book, was obsessed with it. It’s to do with reputation, and the rules suggest that it measures how heroically and honourably the player has behaved, though actually playing Secrets showed that to be misleading. Indeed, avoiding obviously ignoble and disreputable courses of action during my first attempt at the book led to my gaining so little Amonour that even after boosting my stats, my character was still far too puny to survive for long.

That’s enough reminiscing for now: time to get started on this attempt at the adventure. When it commences, I find myself in a cave, overhearing discussion about what is to be done with me. Cautiously investigating, I discover that I am in the lair of a two-headed Ogre. Well, Ogre/Ogress, as one of its heads is female. The two heads disagree about whether or not to eat me, start insulting each other, and get into a full-blown domestic argument.

My captor(s) is/are between me and the cave mouth, but there is a wooden door set into one wall. I know from my second attempt at the book that beyond the door is the squabbling couple’s child (which raises some questions best left unasked), so I think on this occasion I’ll leave it alone and wait to see what happens if I just left the argument run its course.

A slap-fight breaks out. The male head attempts to go for a weapon, but it appears that both heads exert an equal amount of control over the legs, and their conflicting mental instructions cause a lot of stumbling around until, worn out, the whole creature falls asleep.

I could leave now, but I’m going to risk searching the cave just in case there’s anything to be gained here. And it turns out that the debris cluttering the cave does include a treasure chest, but inside the chest is only a human skull. Discouraged, I make for the exit, and tread on the inevitable dry twig. Thanks to my sub-par Luck, the Ogre wakes up (which is a bit sloppy, as I know from my first attempt at the book that attempting to sneak out of the cave while the heads are arguing leads to the same Luck roll, and it is thus possible to wake the Ogre even when it’s not sleeping).

In the ensuing fight I’m at a Skill disadvantage even before the Attack Strength penalty for having somehow misplaced my sword comes into play. I do manage to strike one blow against my foe before sustaining enough damage that the book has me flee. At the cave entrance I pass a small, pointy-eared man with orange hair and green clothes, who grins disconcertingly and waves to me.

Outside the cave is a forest. I hear a distant screeching, and the little man warns of approaching danger (using a quote from Macbeth). The sound draws closer, and I ask the man for clarification, but he has disappeared. As the volume of the screeching continues to intensify, I am overcome by fear, and start running again, hitting my head on a low branch like a pre-Mongoose Kai novice.

Regaining consciousness, I find myself on a boat, and realise that the whole business with the two-headed Ogre was a dream (though the Stamina and Luck I lost in the encounter are still gone), and the collision with a branch was inspired by my having been hit on the head by an oar. Memories return: I am on the final stages of a journey to the city of Salamonis, seeking to train as an adventurer and find fame and fortune. So far things haven’t gone particularly well for me: my backpack, containing everything I own bar the clothes I’m wearing, went missing when I boarded the boat, and I’ve not been able to afford food for days.

The boat reaches its destination mid-afternoon, mooring at a busy port. I disembark along with my fellow passengers: a barbarian named Nanoc and a herbalist who calls himself Healing Hans. A man in robes approaches and offers to sell me a map of the city, and I explain that I have no money. He takes pity on me, introduces himself as Ruznik Ulsen, and offers information free of charge. The book provides a choice of five questions to ask, and I know from my previous attempts that I’ll get to pose two of them.

I start by asking where I might find work, and Ulsen recommends checking out the Adventurers’ Guild, also advising me to try and avoid the tax collector, Odious Pinchpenny, who has a habit of overcharging people in order to supplement his wages. My second question is about local centres of learning, and I’m a little surprised to realise that I never raised this question on either of my previous attempts at the book. Ulsen tells me of Salamonis’ renowned library, and goes on to mention the school of magic in the Forest of Yore, and the Training Ground reputed to be in the Forest of Spiders (slightly stretching the definition of ‘local’, as they’re both a fair distance from the city). He also suggests that signing on to protect a merchant caravan should provide opportunities to learn fighting skills from the Strongarms, and casually reveals that he could teach me some basic magic.

An unexpected consequence of finishing with that question is that I am directed to a different section from the one to which I turned after asking my second question on my earlier attempts at Secrets. Both times I played before, Ulsen gifted me a map and mentioned a place where I could get some (rather disgusting) work and earn a little money (and some Amonour), but on this occasion he just moves on in search of a paying customer.

I could now proceed into the city, but for the moment I’ll stick around at the dock and see if there’s any way of raising a little cash here. While wandering around, I catch sight of an urchin carrying a backpack that looks a lot like my own, and pursue him, but run into a couple of guards. They warn me to watch where I’m going, and I try telling them about my pack. As usual in gamebooks, reporting stuff to the authorities doesn’t really help, but on this occasion there is an indirect benefit to be gained. After one guard expresses his apathy for my loss, the other one pushes me over, and I find a trinket on the ground. I also see assorted feral cats and dogs fighting over scraps. A wounded dog swears as it runs away and, my character evidently being a bit clueless about some aspects of this world, I assume that I only imagined that I heard the mangy cur speaking.

Nanoc the Barbarian speaks disparagingly of the guards, and we get into conversation for a bit. He’s been working as a Strongarm for the past five years, and now intends to settle down with his wife. He asks if I’m heading for the Adventurers’ Guild, and I confirm my intent to join them. The two of us head into the city together until we encounter Nanoc’s wife Tabatha and a young lad whom she introduces as his son. As the three of them head off, I hear the boy telling Nanoc that he’s four years old. I guess it’s possible that he was conceived just before Nanoc commenced his tour of duty - or maybe… Regardless, I gain a point of Amonour for having associated with an adventurous type.

Heading along the main street, I observe the decorative statues and fancy shops, and think about the amazing innovation of having the sewers underground. Either that’s another indication of how much of a hick my character is, or everybody involved in the creation of this book forgot that even the urban abscess that is Port Blacksand has a subterranean sewage network.

Catching sight of a man with a backpack like mine, I opt not to go after him, as I know from my first try at the book that nothing good would come of it. Instead, I continue on my way to the Bazaar, which is now closing for the day. One of the buildings on the outskirts is the headquarters of the Adventurers’ Guild, and outside it I see a board advertising available quests, along with a warning that only registered Guild members may undertake any of these quests, and registration costs 2 gold pieces - 2 more than I currently have.

Though a sign on the door indicates the place to be closed, I knock, attracting the attention of a stallholder who advises me to seek employment at the Slime and Swine Guttery - the same place that Ulsen would have mentioned if he’d given me a map. He also tells me where the Guttery is, so I decide to go there.

Along the way I check with passers-by that I am heading in the right direction, and am puzzled that they are so amused to learn where I’m going. Then the wind changes direction, alerting me to the fact that the place absolutely stinks. Nevertheless, I keep going, and the proprietor, a porcine-looking man named Snouter, asks if I want a job. I agree, and discover that work at the Guttery involves processing the decaying innards of dead animals to produce a foul slime that is considered a delicacy some way over to the west.

Randomness determines how well I get on with the work, and on this occasion the nausea induced by the stench of the fish guts I’m sorting is mild enough that I’m able to persevere until the end of my shift. Snouter pays me and asks if I’m looking for long-term employment here. When I decline, he comments that he needs more staff to help with a big order, and offers a small finders’ fee for anyone I manage to recruit for him. I also gain a couple of points of Amonour for doing work that even a third-assistant-rabbit-skinner would consider beneath him.

Returning to the city centre, I have the option of returning to the docks or to the Guild HQ. Going to the docks would put me into a loop, so I head back to the Guild, thereby discovering another lapse of internal continuity, as the text has me leave the docks even though I wasn’t at them.

I then get asked if I have a trinket, though not because of anything to do with the item itself. It’s just a tried-and-trusted gamebook mechanism for determining whether or not the player has had a specific encounter without making it obvious to readers who haven’t. In this instance, possession of the trinket confirms that I heard a dog speak - and now that same dog wants to talk to me.

He tells me that, despite appearances, he is in fact not a dog. He’s a human, transformed into a dog by a short-sighted Cursewitch whom his brother had insulted, and trying (with some difficulty) to raise funds to have the curse lifted. I tell him that I have no money myself, and he suggests that we work together to scam somebody. He will menace an approaching mother and children, I ‘rescue’ them from him, and we split the reward. I agree, because I need as much Amonour as I can get, and somehow trying to con a few innocent females can net me a couple of points.

The dog tells me his name is Dog before circling round to not-quite-attack the woman and her daughters. I rush in, accidentally wound Dog while pretending to fight him off, and his ‘victims’ repeatedly thank me but give nothing more tangible. Asking for money would be a bit obvious, so I mention my lost backpack as a less blatant way of indicating my reduced circumstances. The woman gives her sympathies and her name, and goes on her way. Dog comes back to tell me that our partnership is not working out, and then departs once more, and this shambolic and slightly sleazy affair costs me a point of Luck but nets me two Amonour.

Again I see and ignore the man with the backpack, and then find myself back at the Bazaar at closing time. That’s a bit of a structural error, as the text again has me knock in vain on the Guild door before receiving the same advice as before from the merchant with whom I spoke previously. Still, at this point I’m only permitted to pick a decision I haven’t previously made, so further looping is not an option, and I have no choice but to ask the stallholder if he’s looking for workers. He explains that I’d need authorisation from the Tradesmen’s Guild to get hired here, so I leave, none too happy at the way things are going.

As I walk away, I am addressed by a man in faded finery, who asks if I’m interested in doing a little grifting. Introducing himself as Rodriguez, he suggests that we enter a nearby inn and entertain some of the clientele at the expense of someone tipsy enough to have an impaired sense of judgement, and I choose to accompany him.

Proceeding to a hostelry known as the Half-Darned Sock, we find the place packed with sailors. A brawl almost breaks out between a couple of patrons, but the intervention of a Strongarm bouncer quietens things down. Rodriguez bids me find a seat while he gets in the drinks, and I find and pocket a coin, slightly scratched, so the depicted King appears to have a scar.

Rodriguez brings a couple of mugs of mead, and explains that he intends to get some free drinks and possibly a room for the night with the help of a card trick. This turns out to be a proper card trick, not a scam involving sleight of hand, and after Rodriguez puts on a bit of a show to impress the landlord and the crowd around him, thereby securing the board and lodging he sought, he passes the deck on to me to see if I’ve figured out the trick and can emulate him.

Finding a group of Dwarf miners in a corner of the bar, I get them to agree to a wager, and by correctly identifying the cards picked by my ‘mark’ I win the equivalent of a gold piece and gain another 2 points of Amonour. The cash could cover the expense of a room for the night, but in view of what I've learned from previous attempts at the book, I can think of a better use for the money. Sleeping rough costs me a point of Stamina, but I survive the night.

This seems like a good point at which to pause the narrative, so I can more or less maintain my current rate of posting here.

You Call This a War?

My purchasing of the Tunnels & Trolls Adventurers Compendium (sic) also brought to my attention the (mostly) free online T&T fanzine TrollsZine, which includes solo adventures as part of its content. I have therefore acquired an assortment of issues in order to find out if their solos are any more survivable than most.

The solo in issue 1 is Tom Grimshaw’s The Blood War at Saxon, a title which appears a poor fit for the basic premise. While the adventure is set in a place called Saxon, ‘blood war’ seems a rather strong term for a long-standing dispute over the ownership of a field, and the plot has more to do with exploring an ancient tomb than participating in armed conflict between the two families who claim that the field is theirs.

This tomb lies beneath the field in question, and was only recently revealed, following a storm. The locals believe it to contain evidence linking the land to one family’s ancestors, and as none of those involved in the feud can be relied upon to accurately report back on what may be found within, the villagers have engaged the services of an outsider to seek the proof that should settle the matter. Which is where I come in.

I’m tempted to scrap the character I generate, as over half the stats are below average, but as regards innate combat adds, he’s actually better off than the sample character in the rulebook, so I’ll give him a go. It’s not as if he could fare much worse than some others I’ve played.
Strength 14
Intelligence 5
Luck 11
Constitution 7
Dexterity 8
Charisma 5
Speed 3
His starting funds are reasonable, enabling me to equip him with the best sword he can handle (that low Dexterity limiting his options) and reasonable armour.

The villagers provide me with a lantern, and I descend into the tomb, avoiding loose stones and misplaced commas. On the wall is a worn stone plaque, which I might be able to read if I succeeded at a Saving Roll on Intelligence, but I roll so poorly that I’d fail even if my character weren’t so dull-witted.

Passages lead to east and west, and I see that the eastern turning leads to a door, so I head for that. The door opens into an ornately decorated chamber, with carvings that might be writing on the walls. As I step into the room, the door slams shut behind me, and will not budge when I try to reopen it.

A mysterious light appears in the middle of the chamber. Figuring that my character is dim enough to try touching it, I reach out a hand. The light burns me (and on this occasion I’m glad to roll a low number, as I take minimal damage), then fades away. I hear ominous laughter, see a door to the north that I don’t think was there when I entered the room, and observe a superfluous ‘and’ in the text as I move towards the newly-revealed exit.

I step out into what is referred to as a T-junction, though as it only has passages running north and west, I think it’s more of a corner with a door set into one wall. The light of the lantern reveals nothing in either direction, but west would lead back towards the entrance, so I proceed north.

Before long I reach another junction, again offering me a choice of continuing north or turning west. A door is visible to the north, while to the west I ‘can only corridor’. I hope TrollsZine has obtained the services of a decent proofreader at some point since issue 1 came out, because the sloppy writing here is very distracting.

I’m starting to wonder if this is the kind of adventure in which it’s fairly easy to proceed directly to the endgame, but the finale can only be survived with the aid of assorted plot tokens acquired by taking detours along the way. Consequently, on this occasion I head west, winding up at a crossroads. Going south is not an option, as it would take me back to the entrance (via a corridor that didn't exist when I came in). East would mean going back the way I came, and section number recognition tells me that approaching that junction from this direction will not open up the way south from it (or even give any mention of its existence). That leaves north or west.

I’ll try west again. This leads to evidence of careless playtesting, as the section to which I am directed describes me leaving a room and reaching what must be another of those ‘corner with a door’ T-junctions. The more of this adventure I read, the more I appreciate the Proteus 2 approach to charting subterranean tunnel complexes – yes, having different sections to describe the same junction depending on the direction from which you approach it can get confusing, but at least it avoids continuity errors and doesn’t omit details.

Anyway, I can return to the crossroads or I can head north to what is currently a door. Might as well go somewhere I haven’t yet been. Beyond the door is a chamber containing cobwebs and a stone coffin, with another door leading further north. The coffin may contain something that will help me in my quest. Or possibly something undead that will kill me within seconds, but that’s the adventuring life for you. Let’s see if I can even open the thing…

Randomness occurs. The fall of the die determines that I see a heap of gold inside, but when I reach for it, the lid falls shut, injuring me, and jamming so as to become impossible to reopen. Displeased, I have no choice but to leave via the door to the north. Beyond it, directions suddenly turn from compass points to left/right, but if Mr Grimshaw has been paying any attention to what he was writing, the passage beyond leads me east to a door in the north wall.

This door seems to be sealed, and I guess that it leads to the crypt I was sent to find. The only way to get past it appears to be brute force, and even with Strength being my best attribute, the odds of my succeeding at the Saving Roll aren’t great. Somewhere in the odds of one in six, though T&T’s ‘doubles reroll and add’ mechanic almost always makes probabilities that bit fuzzier than in most gaming systems.

What I roll isn’t an automatic failure, but it is still a failure. Thus, I find myself unable to open the door, and must trek back through the tunnels until I reach the exit, report my inability to resolve the ongoing dispute, and leave this part of the world in shame, never to return.

Still a better outcome than in most of the T&T solos I've played here.

A Fighting Force of Extraordinary Magnitude

My 'shorter series' rota has cycled back to The Way of the Tiger, but today I'm not replaying Avenger! even though I failed both of my previous attempts at it. The thing is, I have several gamebook-related saved searches on eBay, and on a couple of occasions last year one or other of them proved indirectly helpful. 'Indirectly' because so far the actual searches have only ever turned up listings that are outside my price range, the wrong edition (in situations where the edition matters), the wrong book, or something completely unrelated to what I sought (mainly CDs and miniatures), but sometimes the notifications of unhelpful matches included a 'You might also like' section linking to other listings, which made me aware of different books for sale that caught my interest. One such listing was for a batch of gamebooks, more than half of which I'd never heard of, and none of which duplicated books already in my collection. I placed a bid, was not outbid, and thus gained an assortment of new-to-me gamebooks, which included Ninja!, David Walters' prequel to Way. So that's what I shall be attempting - for the first time ever - in this post.

As this adventure takes place before the first one in the series, I was expecting to be using a less developed character, but that's not the case. If the combat with which Avenger! opens might be considered the final of the latest series of Who Wants to Be a Grandmaster?, this book concerns itself with the semi-finals, and takes place just under a week earlier.

So, I have been transported to the Isle of Plenty along with four other contenders. Each of us must traverse the island from east to west in no more than five days, along the way doing no evil and obtaining flags from two of the five Daimyo who rule cities on the island. Each has only the one flag, and (assuming I have correctly interpreted the word ‘peer’ in the rules) we may not take flags from our competitors, so this contest will allow between zero and two of us to qualify for the final. Additionally, only two of the Daimyo are trustworthy enough to have been informed of the contest, so I guess we have to hope that the other three are sufficiently villainous that tricking, robbing or killing them in order to get their flags won’t count as evil.

As regards skill selection (the only part of character creation into which I have any input), I think I’ll stick with what I chose during my previous attempt. Thus, I pick Poison Needles (unusable until I find some poison, but I gather that my chances of surviving one of the subsequent books are negligible if I don’t have this one, and The Way of the Tiger doesn’t hand out extra skills for completing adventures as freely as Lone Wolf does, so I can’t just grab it at the start of the next book), Immunity to Poisons and Picking Locks, Detecting and Disarming Traps, and I automatically get Shurikenjutsu.

The adventure proper commences as the ship transporting us enters the harbour. My competitors consist of Aiko (the token female, and the only other participant who’s trained as a ninja), Gorobei (the big guy who makes it through to the finals according to the start of Avenger!), Daon (my rival for the ‘most tragic backstory’ award, as the temple where he was raised was burned down during a rebellion) and Chigeru (the token senior).

We transfer to another ship, where we are greeted by a woman known to Gorobei from his previous attempt at the challenge. The very recently widowed Singing Wind explains that, following the assassination of her husband, a bandit has seized her home in a bid to assume control of the city, and she seeks our help, promising the flag to whoever recovers her late husband’s katana. Gorobei, Aiko and Daon all pledge their support, while Chigeru uses a metaphor to imply that she shouldn’t need any more help than has already been offered, and indicates that he’s off to a different city in search of its Daimyo’s flag.

Metaknowledge suggests that, regardless of who does most to help Singing Wind, it’s Gorobei who’ll claim the local flag, so it would be pragmatic to seek another one. Chigeru gives no indication of wanting me alongside him, so I opt to head to yet another city and seek the flag that’s there.

Initially I make good progress, but I pause to do some eavesdropping when a passing kabuki troupe mentions the monks of the Scarlet Mantis, followers of one of Orb's less pleasant deities. It transpires that five of them have stationed themselves at the bridge over the Ketsuiki River, on the look-out for any of my order who travel this way, most likely with the aim of making things unpleasant or lethal for participants in the challenge I am undertaking. Aware that the ‘lone martial artist prevails when significantly outnumbered’ thing tends not to work so well outside of films, I am seeking a safer way across the river when I catch sight of Aiko and Daon on the road behind me (already? Did I spend a really long time listening to talk of the Scarlet Mantis mob, or did Gorobei find some way of rapidly dissuading the others from accompanying him on the bandit-slaying sub-quest?), and feel obligated to let them know of the not-officially-part-of-the-challenge peril lying in wait at the bridge.

While Aiko favours evading the ambush as I had planned to do, Daon wants the other monks dead, and I figure that it would be helpful to learn how they knew to expect us, so we wind up devising a plan. Daon will continue along the road towards the bridge, getting the attention of the Scarlet Mantis lot, while Aiko and I stealthily approach via the river, swimming underwater and using our blowpipes as snorkels. All goes smoothly, and as Aiko and I start to climb the bridge, we hear our foes gleefully anticipating getting to kill the lone monk who’s heading their way. We launch a surprise attack that takes out two of the group, evening the odds, and each of us takes on one of the remaining enemies.

The bridge’s barricade was low enough that we could vault over it, so it’s potentially low enough that I might be able to flip my opponent into the river and potentially defeat him with a single attack. I thus open with a Teeth of the Tiger throw, but it turns out that that wouldn’t have ended the fight in one even if I’d rolled well enough for the throw to work. As it is, I miss, and my enemy gets to strike at me, but bungles his attack. I respond with a punch that lands and does a decent bit of damage, and his retaliatory kick just fails to connect. I try kicking him back, without success, and he delivers a painful punch to my kidneys. Having now ascertained that punching gives me the best chance both of hitting him and evading his riposte, I stick with that for the rest of the fight, and eventually I prevail, though I lose half my Endurance in the process.

My companions also overcome their foes, Daon finishing off his opponent with a vicious kick, while Aiko manages the ‘throw the enemy off the bridge to his death’ move denied to me by authorial fiat. It then transpires that the monk I fought was only pretending to have been reduced to -5 Endurance by my final blow (what have the readers done to incur the author’s contempt?), and attempts to flee, but a couple of well-aimed shuriken bring him down, at the same time rendering him too dead to interrogate. Daon does not have a problem with that, and gives me an Obsidian Bracelet he found on one of the corpses. The text compels me to take it, so I hope it’s less dangerous than some enforced acquisitions.

The three of us proceed to the city of Suma, observing a massive warship moored in the harbour. A little snooping establishes that the Daimyo is hosting a banquet for a Daimyo from another island, and that the flag we seek is kept under guard near the banqueting hall. Aiko observes that having ninja training will come in handy here, while Daon favours an open approach in case the local Daimyo is one of the two who are in on the contest.

I leave the two of them to get on with their own plans, and choose to try and get into the palace by disguising myself as a samurai. This involves non-lethally ambushing a real samurai and taking his armour, and I choose a member of the visiting Daimyo’s retinue, as the palace guards might become suspicious if they see a stranger wearing their colours.

The guard on the gate assumes that I’m running late because I’ve been sampling the city’s more dubious pleasures, but lets me in. However, he also calls a couple of samurai to escort me to the banquet hall. I’m not convinced I can knock them out along the way without an alarm being raised, though obviously I’ll attract a lot more attention if I reach the banquet hall and somebody realises that I’m a stranger. Still, if I can discreetly mingle for a short time and then unobtrusively slip away, I might just have a shot at getting the flag.

Alas, there are samurai from both Daimyos’ parties at the entrance to the hall, and I am identified as an impostor. Outnumbered, I make no resistance, and am taken to the cells, my ninja equipment confiscated, though my captors overlook the bracelet.

Also imprisoned here is a bruised and battered monk of the Scarlet Mantis, who reveals that the Daimyo uses ensorcelled chains to force his captives to fight to the death. Yaris, my fellow captive, had a bracelet that enabled him to resist the chain’s effect, but lost it in his last fight. He offers a temporary truce if I release him, but I’ve made no decision by the time a couple of samurai turn up and wrap a glowing chain around my neck. My autonomy is unaffected, so I’m guessing that the bracelet I wear is similar to the one that Yaris lost. As the samurai lead me away, one of them tells Yaris that he also will soon be fighting again.

The fact that he’s not being brought out along with me suggests that I’m going to be fighting someone else first. Given that the Daimyo’s tastes in entertainment imply that he’s a bad guy, I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself pitted against Daon, who is doubtless regretting his optimism. Aiko is also a possibility, if she fared no better than I at getting in unnoticed. Or maybe there is no preliminary opponent lined up, and the Daimyo just plans to subject me to a lengthy gloat before bringing Yaris in. Whichever it may be, things look grim.

The samurai lead me to the banqueting hall, where Daimyo Arai, dressed as a warrior, is practicing swordplay against a veteran samurai while, in the background, a courtesan sings about stuff that will become relevant in a few books' time. Arai expresses his outrage at the planned theft of his flag, and states that, having seen how the monks of the Scarlet Mantis fight, he now wishes for a demonstration of my order’s techniques.

More samurai bring in Daon, under the influence of a chain, and I observe that one of the serving maids is Aiko in disguise. I can use a hand signal to communicate with her, and may either ask her to try and find my ninja tools for me or send her to the cells to release Yaris. Well, the latter would be my intent, but as our sign language has its limitations, there’s no guarantee that Aiko would correctly interpret my gesture, and might not recognise that the imprisoned enemy could potentially be a short-term ally. And even if she does figure it out, the ambiguous and unconfirmed agreement between Yaris and me doesn’t cover anyone else, so he might attack Aiko if she frees him. All in all, I think there are fewer ways that regaining my equipment could go catastrophically wrong, so that’s what I request.

Aiko departs, and the Daimyo signals that the fight is to commence. I need to spin things out until Aiko gets back, and I don’t want to kill Daon (though the chain’s enchantment has removed any such scruples from his mind), so I must limit my attacks to throws. Based on the diagrams in the rules, the Whirlpool throw should leave me in a less vulnerable position than either of the others available, so I lead with that.

Regrettably, he is sufficiently familiar with that throw that he evades me with ease and delivers a kick that removes more than half of my remaining Endurance. That’s a bit harsh. Okay, the description of the end of his fight on the bridge did mention him using the Whirlpool throw on his opponent, but knowing how to carry out an attack does not automatically mean knowing the perfect defence against it. If that passage had had him dodging a similar technique before delivering the coup de grace, it would have been a reasonable hint for observant readers, but merely showing him performing it falls short.

Well, caution hasn’t helped, so let’s go for the ludicrously dangerous-looking end of the scale and try the Teeth of the Tiger throw. Daon isn’t as adept at countering that one, and I roll well enough for my attack to succeed, giving me time to prepare another throw before he can get close enough to retaliate. If I can survive one more round of this fight, something will change, so the only question is whether I repeat the Teeth of the Tiger or risk switching to the Dragon’s Tail on the off-chance that Daon’s Defence against that is weaker.

The likelihood of my succeeding with another Teeth of the Tiger throw is slightly above 50%, and the odds of my surviving Daon’s counterattack if it doesn’t work are a little lower. I’ll take a chance on trying the Dragon’s Tail in the hope of improving my chances. A smart decision, as his Defence is indeed lower, but the dice still let me down. Daon strikes back at me, and the roll for his attack is no better than my last one, so his elbow fails to make contact.

Incidentally, I can’t help but notice some sloppiness with the page layout in this part of the book, as the following section has its number right at the bottom of one page and the whole of its text on the next. And while I'm critiquing extra-narrative details, I will observe that every 'turn to' direction is underlined and has text in a slightly different colour to the rest, as if Ninja! started out as an online document with hyperlinks to facilitate navigation between sections, and the publishers couldn't be bothered to reformat the text for hard copy. It's not a fault, as such, but it does make the book look like an afterthought.

Seeing that Aiko has returned, I perform a flashy manoeuvre, removing my chain and transferring the bracelet to Daon’s wrist. Realising that he’s lost control of the situation, the Daimyo orders his guards to attack us. Alas, there are just too many samurai for the three of us to handle, and while the ensuing display of our fighting skills costs Daimyo Arai a good deal more than the one he had arranged, at the end of it he’s still alive and we get recycled as dogfood.

I never got as heavily into The Way of the Tiger as I did some other gamebook series, so I'm not sufficiently familiar with the 'house style' to be able to comment on how well Walters has emulated Smith and Thomson's authorial voice, but based on how I've fared at Avenger! so far, I'd say that Ninja! seems a decent fit as regards the difficulty and the nastiness of some of the endings. The spreadsheet I use to keep track of what gets played when for this blog indicates that it'll be a while before I return to The Way of the Tiger (possibly next year, if I can maintain a consistent pace of posting and don't wind up needing multiple entries to cover adventures), but when I do, I shan't be skipping this book in order to get back to the original series opener.

It's Some Time Since We Went A-Foraging

While the most noteworthy thing about 2022 as regards Fighting Fantasy was the publication of two new gamebooks by the series’ founders, the same year also marked the release of issue 17 of Fighting Fantazine, around five years after the previous issue had come out. As the zine was made available for download before the books hit the shelves, I shall now be playing the mini-adventure that appeared in it, Andrew Wright’s Barbarian Warlord.

While I enjoyed the author’s previous Fantazine adventure and what I’ve read of his earlier interactive works, and what feedback I’ve seen on Warlord from others has been positive, I do not like this adventure. The need for high stats, the repetitive gameplay, the inconsistent tone and the ‘gleefully destroy what other authors created’ premise combine to drag it down to the lower ranks in my estimation. Not the absolute bottom, but since having finished playtesting Warlord I’ve had no desire to return to it, and am only doing so now for the blog’s sake.

Before I go any further, please make a note (written or mental as you prefer) of three things that typically come to mind when you’re thinking about Barbarians. I’ll be coming back to this later

There will be no reminiscences about how I failed the adventure on my first go, because all the occasions on which I made an unsuccessful attempt at it have blurred together in my memory. Now I think about it, I’m not sure Warlord even has any deaths other than via combat or Stamina loss. There’s a ‘you failed’ section for the benefit of any players who might struggle to grasp that getting slaughtered in battle does not constitute a successful outcome, but unless I’m forgetting something, that and the ‘victory’ section are the only two endings in the whole adventure.

My character is the eponymous anti-hero, the chief of a tribe of Barbarians who reside in the Flatlands, about to embark on a campaign of slaughter and pillage because of a drug-induced vision in which ancestral spirits encouraged me to go off on a destructive rampage. I’d better generate some stats, for my army as well as myself, and I will definitely be allocating dice, as average-or-below scores for a couple of attributes pretty much guarantee defeat. In fact, I’m tempted to take advantage of the fact that the adventure includes an optional ‘roll to determine the name of your character and his tribe’ feature and use the name generator as a dumping ground for the lowest numbers.

So, here’s Krong the Strong…
Skill: 12
Stamina: 19
Luck: 11
Honour: 4
…and this is the Blood Axe tribe -
Horde Strike: 11
Horde Strength: 21
Gold: 1 talent
I did wind up using the name generator as a receptacle for mediocre rolls. Otherwise, it would have been appropriate to go with Crud the Inept, of the Anaemic Lemming tribe.

So, it’s time for us to demonstrate to the peoples of the surrounding regions that we’re not just ‘primitive savages’ by attacking them without provocation, slaughtering lots of their people, and looting and destroying their homes. And where should we go pillaging first? I think on my first try I started out in Trolltooth Pass, where randomness pitted me against an undead enemy I couldn’t fight because I hadn’t yet found a weapon that would harm it, and I got penalised for retreating rather than just letting it kill me like a real man would. So maybe try somewhere else first, eh?

I choose the Moonstone Hills, and now it’s time to go back to that note I asked you to make several paragraphs back. Tell me, does ‘travelogue’ appear anywhere on your list? The thing is, Andrew Wright has written for a variety of Advanced Fighting Fantasy sourcebooks, and while his work as a Titanographer has doubtless proved invaluable to many a player of the FF RPG, he’s not entirely managed to suppress the urge to educate and explain in less-than-suitable circumstances. Thus, whenever my army reaches some new location, there’s a brief lapse into guidebook mode to ensure that I am needlessly well-informed about the people we will be massacring and the land we are about to despoil.

On this occasion we’re up against a force of Hill Trolls, and I’m told that they bear a ‘bewildering array’ of arms. Only five different types of weapon are mentioned, all of which can be used to stab, so I guess it doesn’t take much to bewilder my character. It’s a good thing for me that they don’t appear to have any blunt instruments or projectiles, or my head might have exploded from seeing such variety.

Actually, this is not a good time to be mentioning variety, as almost every encounter with organised opponents in this adventure plays out the same way:
i) My troops fight two rounds of battle against the enemy.
ii) A leader steps forward to target me with a ‘special’ attack and I have to waste a point of Luck Testing to see if I can reduce the in any case underwhelming Stamina cost by 2 points.
iii) I then take on the leader in single combat.
iv) If I win, all hostile troops shrug and resume battle as if steps ii and iii had never occurred, their morale completely unaffected by the death of their leader.
v) If we win, plunder and admin ensue.
Hands up who put ‘predictable’ or ‘rigidly structured conflict’ on their list.

Anyway, our armies clash, a few Trolls die, and Nurm, King of the Trolls throws a boulder at me. (A weapon without a point or an edge! My mind reels at the prospect.) He misses and charges at me, belying his brutish appearance with a cry of ‘The price for entering the Moonstone Hills without our permission is death!’

He’s the one who ends up paying that price, though a series of bad rolls makes the outcome less of a foregone conclusion than the disparity in our Skill scores would have suggested. A few of my troops also die in the renewed hostilities, but ultimately the Trolls are massacred, and we add a little gold to the horde’s hoard.

It’s time to move on, so I pull up the map I made during playtesting. While the setting for this adventure is very familiar, and has been depicted in map form in quite a few FF books (and also appears on the back cover of Fantazine 17), travel between locations is subject to certain limitations, and it can help to know which journeys can be made and which cannot. If ‘strictly delineated transport network’ was on your list, well done.

Considering the amount of Stamina damage I took fighting the Troll King, getting some healing would be advisable, but I can only do that when the text says I can. It might be wisest to head back to the Flatlands and see if I can heal up a bit there before I go any further, but it seems a bit early to be reversing course, and I think there’s potential for things to go badly back on my home turf as well, so I’ll risk venturing on for a bit longer.

From here we could proceed to any of seven locations – over half of those featured in the adventure. I’ve already ruled out the Flatlands, and I’m still not equipped to handle that potential encounter in Trolltooth Pass, so I’ll pass on that option. Firetop Mountain and Darkwood Forest can also wait, as my low Stamina makes confronting the resident magic-users that bit too much of a risk, which leaves Zengis, Chalice, and the Forest of Spiders. My map shows that once I’ve acquired one essential resource, I’m liable to pass through Chalice and/or the Forest on the way to doing what must be done with it, and thus might as well leave them for later. Zengis it is, then.

One geopolitical info-dump later, my army is lurking close to the poorly-defended city. Nharog, my second-in-command, encourages me to attack, using an analogy I’d expect from a native of the frozen north rather than a fellow Flatlander. We emerge from cover, and a horde of militia and mercenaries emerges from the city gates to confront us.

After the requisite two rounds of mass battle, in which the defenders of Zengis take heavy casualties, I confront the city’s ruling Baron. This encounter deviates slightly from the standard pattern, as my Luck doesn’t come into play. Instead, the Baron uses a coin to summon a Golden Sentinel, which is invulnerable to any enemy who lacks gold. Having saved wisely (anyone put ‘prudent management of financial resources’ on their list?), I am perfectly capable of harming my new foe, and one swift goldbeating later, the Sentinel transforms back into a coin, now bent out of shape.

The massacre of the opposing forces resumes, and it would appear that the Baron attempted to flee but was betrayed by some of the mercenaries, as his body turns up some distance from the field of battle. Close by are some other corpses and a few ‘strangely’ bent coins (my character apparently being too thick to realise that they were most likely transformed into Sentinels that proved incapable of defending their master). Suddenly as incongruously eloquent as the Troll King, Nharog philosophises about the Baron’s fate while I decide whether to post a garrison in Zengis or just ransack it.

Leaving troops behind will reduce the size of my army (well, obviously), and I don’t think there’s any real need to return here, so in the absence of a ‘just leave and let the survivors get on with salvaging something of their lives’ option, I make the pragmatic-ish decision to thoroughly loot and pillage the place, thereby gaining a substantial quantity of gold and causing widespread death and destruction (so it’s a little incongruous to see the next section describing the region as picturesque and peaceful as we prepare to leave it).

I think it’s time I returned to the Moonstone Hills to see how the region has adapted to the slaughter of most of the resident trolls. Various lesser powers are in the ascendant, and redundancy lurks within the text, evading the editor’s Delete key. Luck determines that none of the groups vying for control of the region risk preying on my troops, and we proceed to the inaccurately-named Lost Lake.

It’s an eerie place, and only Nharog and I go to the water’s edge. A raft drifts towards us, bearing an animated skeleton which offers me a fancy sword. Nharog quotes Monty Python because memes apparently transcend the bounds between realities, and I take the sword, which is magical and does extra damage. The skeleton disintegrates, and we go on our way.

Now I think it’s worth heading for home. The first time I did that while playtesting, I thought that returning to the Flatlands might mark the end of the adventure, but there are actually some very specific conditions that must be fulfilled before a non-lethal game over can be achieved. What does happen when we head for home is that we rejoin those of our tribe who stayed behind, and our Shaman casts runes to determine whether or not my conduct to date meets the high standards of the spectral mob that urged me to cut a swathe of destruction across the western lands. The bloodthirsty bunch have been sufficiently entertained by the mayhem I wrought I have acted honourably enough that they approve.

Since this whole adventure requires me to behave in ways of which I would not generally approve anyway, I might as well pay a visit to the Ancestors’ Shrine. There, rumour has it, the sacrifice of powerful magic may reap great rewards. And as no heed was paid to a playtester’s suggestion that some clarification of what constitutes sufficiently powerful magic might be helpful here, I’m going to assume that the sword I acquired from the skeleton qualifies, and that ditching it here enables me to rid myself of the thing without suffering any of the consequences of the curse that comes with it.

A bolt of lightning obliterates the sword, and a reanimated corpse erupts from the ground, introducing itself as Volgera Darkstorm. Back in the day, he trained (and was subsequently murdered by) three of Allansia’s most notorious evil wizards, and now he’s back, he wants to help me cause more mayhem. For some reason, entering into an alliance with an undead villain has no impact on my Honour score (though I remember from playtesting that recruiting the more disreputable kind of barbarian to replenish my troops would deplete it, so it seems that the social standing of my associates is more of an issue than their immorality - well done if you put ‘snobbery’ on your list).

It’s time to head west again and get back to wreaking havoc. Hoping that Darkstorm’s capabilities will suffice to deal with that undead pest if I encounter it, I now lead my men to Trolltooth Pass. The fall of the die determines that we do not run into the hostile Spectre: instead, we find an encampment established by a Dwarven merchant, who is willing to let me in and trade with him, but my army must remain outside.

If I’d plundered more places, or not sacrificed that cursed sword, I’d have the opportunity to sell something, but as it is, I can only buy some of what the trader has for sale. The Potion of Strength should restore the Stamina I lost, the Potion of Fortune will help counter the attrition of Luck that results from the way battles play out (even if it doesn’t work as well as such potions always used to in FF), and the horned helmet provides an Attack Strength bonus that should reduce the impact if the dice turn on me again in some future combat. Before moving on, I take a ‘not buying, just checking’ peek at the section covering acquisition of a soul-draining weapon, and I’m a little disappointed to see that, despite my having raised the issue in my playtester’s notes, wielding such an abomination would still have no impact on my Honour.

Taking my leave of the trader, I lead my men south to the Craggen Heights, domain of one of Darkstorm’s erstwhile students and killers. We march until we sight the Black Tower, and that merry japester Nharog calls Balthus Dire ‘impudent’. I order an attack, Dire and his troops come out to meet us (Balthus being carried in a curtained palanquin because of his vulnerability to sunlight). As we have Darkstorm with us, the battle does not follow the pattern I outlined earlier: the revenant mage takes on the demi-sorcerer, so I can ignore him and just focus on the conflict between the two armies.

Without Dire’s support, his troops are a pretty dismal bunch, and we rout them without taking any casualties. Meanwhile, Darkstorm has shredded the palanquin’s curtains, with fatal consequences for its occupant. We loot a decent sum of gold from the Tower, and it’s time to move on again. I’d rather not head back to the Pass, and it’s too soon to go to Salamonis, which leaves just the Forest of Yore.

This is the location of the School of Magic where three of Allansia’s most renowned good wizards (and the hero of at least one FF book) trained. Nharog wants to destroy the whole forest, and while doing so is not necessary (by which I mean that this location provides nothing essential for successful completion of the adventure), leaving the place untouched would not fit the character I’m supposed to be playing.

Around four years ago I started listening to a podcast in which someone played gamebooks (mainly FF) and recounted his adventures and misadventures, but I rather lost interest after the podcast reached Appointment with F.E.A.R. because the podcaster so resolutely refused to engage with the premise of the book. He was not a fan of superheroes, and had ethical concerns about vigilantism, and consequently was overly reluctant to even play at being a super-powered freelance crimefighter. Fair enough (though I don’t recall his having had anywhere near the same sort of qualms when Seas of Blood had him robbing, butchering and enslaving people), but listening to him repeatedly not even try to stop costumed miscreants from menacing the public until, inevitably, his inaction led to the annihilation of his home city, was just not entertaining - sufficiently so that I lost the motivation to keep listening.

Bearing that in mind, while I would be quite content to leave the Forest and its denizens unharmed and move on to somewhere the text does require me to loot and pillage, I recognise that Krong is more likely to share Nharog’s outlook, and ready my troops for another battle.

It doesn’t take long for the Forest’s inhabitants to gather a defensive force, and we are soon confronted by an army of Wood Elves, Half-Elves and trainee sorcerers, led by the Grand Wizard, Vermithrax Moonchaser, who reveals himself to be a disguised Gold Dragon (and a sneering elitist).

He’s about to try and immolate me when Darkstorm intervenes with a horribly misused bit of continuity. He snuffs out the flames Moonchaser was about to breathe at me by using an incantation that originally appeared in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. An incantation created specifically for killing evil Dragons, designed to destroy anyone who tried to misuse it. An incantation that was hidden by its creator just after he perfected it, and not discovered until some time after Darkstorm’s death. An incantation that contains its creator’s name, so it’s not even as if someone else could have independently have come up with it. I’d have no problem with Darkstorm’s using a similar chant, perhaps suggesting that the one in TWoFM was adapted from a weaker, less discriminating spell, but having him say the exact same one is wrong on many levels.

Anyway, having prevented me from being incinerated (well, mildly singed, as I vaguely recall from playtesting other ways the encounter can play out), Darkstorm transforms himself into an undead Dragon and goes for the Gold Dragon, leaving me and my troops to deal with the rest of the Forest’s defenders. We take a few casualties in the course of defeating them, but victory is ours, and before long my horde has razed the School of Magic to the ground and incinerated the contents of its libraries. (Really not enjoying this adventure.)

In addition to the Honour I gain for bringing an evil monstrosity to slay a powerful force for good and obliterating a centre of learning, I also get a little more gold and a randomly determined treasure, winding up with a Potion of Skill.

It’s time we were on the move again, and while I’d like to go back to the Craggen Heights, as something essential can only be acquired by returning there after eliminating Dire and his forces, that’s not an option. Apparently the road from the Black Tower to the Forest is a one-way street (anyone have ‘strict adherence to the Highway Code’ on their list?). This restriction on travel (the only such to be found in the whole mini-adventure) seems to exist solely for the purpose of making Warlord that bit trickier, as my querying it in the feedback that followed playtesting elicited no explanation or alteration to the text.

Anyway, thanks to that arbitrary limitation we can only proceed from here to Salamonis or Chalice. At this stage of the adventure, going to Salamonis would only lead to my being penalised, so Chalice is the only viable option. It would appear that Chalice suffers from an urban identity crisis, unable to decide whether it’s a town or a city – both terms are used to describe it at different points in the text. Or maybe the locals have some kind of scam going on, so to prospective tourists they present themselves as a city, with all the prestige that comes from that status, but when the taxes are due, they claim to be just a town, hoping to be charged at a lower rate.

Chalice seems more poorly defended than Zengis - indeed, when we attack, only a weak militia stands against us, their low stats contradicting the text’s claims about their efficiency. A quirk of the dice enables them to inflict a little damage on us, but we overcome them and kill their King. The crown Prince and the leader of the militia flee, and as I may need to return here later on, I think it might be worth leaving a garrison to guard against any attempt at restoring the old order.

Taking control of Chalice provides me with an opportunity to recuperate and regain a little Stamina, and I gain a little gold, some of which I spend on a night’s entertainment for my men. This nets me a little more Honour, and in the course of my carousing I encounter a Dwarf (judging by the name, one who came to an unpleasant end in an alternate timeline) who tells me that Salamonis is defended by a hero who can only be harmed with a weapon made from a type of metal found at Craggen Rock. While I remembered this from playing the adventure before, having my character learn it provides a decent in-story motivation for seeking to acquire such a weapon.

The most direct route to where I next need to go is via Darkwood Forest, so that’s where I take my rabble next. When we get there, Nharog speaks disdainfully of resident wizard Yaztromo and encourages me to lead my troops against the locals. I do as advised, and am soon confronted by Yaztromo and an army of Forest denizens.

When I ignore Yaztromo’s attempts to persuade us to leave in peace, he targets me with a ‘Volcano Spell’, boasting about the lethality of an attack that wouldn’t even kill an average Goblin. I remember when this guy had what it took to hit an inadvisably belligerent adventurer with one of the fastest ‘fail’ endings in all FF, and now he’s reduced to dealing out a meal’s worth of damage at best.

Not that I come to any harm at all, as Darkstorm intervenes again. Blocking Yaztromo’s already underwhelming volley, he retaliates first with mockery and then with a spell of his own. Up until now my undead associate has spoken like a bog-standard generic fantasy villain, but suddenly he starts spouting dialogue better suited to Gene Hunt or Al Murray’s Pub Landlord, tossing in a gratuitous reference to either Alien or the works of Joseph Conrad for bonus incongruity.

While the two magic-users exchange sorcerous projectiles, my horde takes on the assembled host of Wood Elves, Pixies, Woodlings and Sprites, taking a couple of casualties but annihilating the sylvan horde. By the end of the battle, Darkstorm has prevailed, obliterating Yaztromo apart from his glasses, which I crush underfoot just to make the adventure that bit more mean-spirited.

Once I’ve helped myself to Yaztromo’s gold, we are on our way once more. Nharog is keen to get away from Darkwood, finding the Forest’s atmosphere enervating, which contrasts quite significantly with the gung-ho bloodlust he displayed when we first got here. This change of attitude between arrival and departure would have occurred even if I’d chosen not to attack the locals, making Nharog look decidedly inconsistent (or an absolute yes-man), with dialogue that could be paraphrased as:
Nharog: The people here are pathetic. I say kill them all!
Krong: No, we shall just pass through.
Nharog: Good idea. I don’t like it here: it's creepy. Let’s get away, and quickly.

Anyway, from here we move on to Stonebridge. For some reason Darkstorm doesn’t get involved in our attack on the town, so after the Dwarfish army and my own have had a bit of a tussle, King Gillibran hurls his fabled war-hammer at me. One of the most famous weapons in all FF, and even if it had hit me (which it doesn’t), ‘a mighty blow’ from it would only have inflicted a measly 2 Stamina damage.

Single combat between Gillibran and me ensues, and the dice turn on me. In spite of my having a three-point advantage when it comes to determining Attack Strengths, my foe wins almost twice as many rounds as I do, and even with my using Luck to reduce damage in the later stages of the battle, I wind up dead.

The ‘you are dead’ section orders me to replay the adventure with a new character at once, but even if I had any desire to give Barbarian Warlord another go, I still have another three FF books that I’ve not yet attempted on this blog, and over 80 other FF replays to get through before I cycle back to it. That’ll take a while, so there might even be some new books to play by then. Possibly even another issue of Fighting Fantazine, if I slow down a little.