Time for the third part of my playthrough of Ian Brocklehurst's Starhunt: Void Slavers, the gamebook equivalent of a 1990s straight-to-VHS sub-Steven Seagal action film, with slightly less interactivity than one of the more tediously linear Lone Wolf Magnakai books. Well, that's my opinion of the mini-adventure so far: some critics haven't been so positive about it.
Anyway, it turns out that things aren't quite over on Aquatine. The Starhunt collects me, and Kraven-8 informs me that security ships have been launched in response to my unauthorised departure, but my encyclopaedic knowledge of the capabilities of different models of ship reassures me that I'll be gone before they can catch up to me. Besides, a run-in with the law could result in decision-making, and that's just not what this mini-adventure's about.
Before my not-remotely-thrilling escape is concluded, Arthur contacts me. Showing signs of having been in a pretty nasty fight, he provides me with the information he was able to track down: a mixture of stuff I learned by eavesdropping and new information. Though Rhea Mosa is behind the kidnapping, her ship has developed a fault, so the captives are being transported by Collo, the former gun-runner. Arthur also gives me details of Rhea's ship and where she's having it repaired, which I dismiss because Collo's obviously the person I need to focus on now.
Incidentally, my character is confident that Mosa's ship, The Siren's Fury, will be no match for the Starhunt, even though my ship's capabilities are as randomly determined as my own. Now, that could just be an indication of my character's arrogance, or it might be a 'fact' in-story. If the latter, I can think of four ways it could have been handled:
- The Fury has rubbish stats, so even if I roll nothing but ones during vehicle generation, I have a decent chance against it in a straight fight.
- The Fury's stats are determined relative to the Starhunt's, so regardless of how good or bad my ship is, I will have the edge. That trick worked for Fang-Zen in Deathmoor.
- The author has assumed that the readers will cheat and automatically give themselves and their ships maximum stats, so the Fury is designed to be not as good as the best ship dice can build, and honest players who don't roll high are likely to fail for not matching the stereotype.
- The Fury's stats don't come into play because the author thinks punishing the person actually responsible for my sister's suffering is irrelevant, so going after Rhea is not an option, or at best a one-way trip to failure.
Arthur points out that it might be worth seeking Rhea out first in case she can be 'persuaded' to provide me with some useful information. This might lead some readers to think that I could make an actual decision here, but that is not the Brocklehurst way, so instead what happens next depends on what I did earlier. And my not having interacted with the crooked cop means that I leave planetary gravity without incident.
Kraven-8 confirms that the star-drive is ready, and I establish that it will take a minute and a half to reprogram it if I want to go after Rhea rather than Collo. Is that enough time for the Aquatine security forces to catch up with me, or just another of the irrelevant details with which this adventure is crammed? I'll risk the detour in case that's the only way of acquiring some vital data.
Taking the extra time has no adverse consequences, and I arrive at the asteroid belt where the Fury is so quickly, the author didn't even have time to tell me that I'd started to travel there. My ship's sensors pick up signs of Kalithium leakage, a probable consequence of the malfunctioning star-drive on Mosa's ship, so I follow the trail of particles. Kraven-8 advises scanning for traps before I enter the asteroid field, and I have to choose whether or not to do so. Wow. Two decisions without any intervening runaround. This second one seems a bit of a no-brainer, as the text gives no indication of why I might want to ignore the robot's recommendations, but that makes me suspicious. Nevertheless, I shall do the sensible thing.
Well, that's sloppy structuring. Choosing to do the scan has me voice the concern that taking the time to do so might give Rhea time to escape. Why not at least have me consider that possibility before making the decision, to make it slightly less blatantly 'do you want to be careful or suicidal?' As Kraven-8 points out, the fault on the Fury prevents Mosa from making a run for it, so smart players would have had a chance to figure out that there was no need to worry about her getting away, but there would at least be a reason to consider the more reckless option.
Scanning reveals weapons mounted on two nearby asteroids, a trick that is apparently common enough to have gained its own nickname, 'the old ion-plasma one-two'. Destroying both cannons is too easy to involve any activity on the reader's part, but continuing into the asteroid field requires me to roll against my ship's Manoeuvrability, so I do need to generate those stats after all.
Manoeuvrability 10
Weapons System 11
Deflector Shields 18
Hull Integrity 21
All decent scores, for what it's worth.
I successfully manoeuvre around a spinning asteroid and into a fresh chain of decision-free section transitions. A message comes in on the communications system, and an unidentified woman warns that I'm not going to leave here alive. Then the Fury attacks (while there was never any real doubt that the woman was Rhea, the jump from lacking confirmation to being certain is clumsily handled), and it has average stats, which means that Mr. Brocklehurst seems to have gone with option 3 from that list. I do indeed outclass Rhea's ship in every regard, but only because I was lucky enough to get high scores when determining its capabilities. Anyway, time to check the rules for ship-to-ship combat.
So, we take it in turns to fire at each other. Every shot hits, but my Deflectors absorb almost half of the damage inflicted by the Fury, while Rhea's Shields don't help her at all. Even so, I lose more than half my Hull Integrity in the course of bringing hers to zero. Wait, no, it's not quite that bad: sub-optimal formatting of the rules makes part of one step appear to be an aside. It turns out that with my first shot I did some flukey extra damage, so the fight ended one round sooner than I'd thought, and I can disregard Rhea's final shot. So I lost just under half of my Hull Integrity. Still a pretty hefty proportion. And according to the rules, winning a fight automatically means that the opposing ship explodes, so interrogating Rhea could be tricky.
My character gloats over Rhea's destruction before realising the flaw in plan 'reduce the slaver to her component atoms and then question them'. Kraven-8 then reveals that he was able to intercept a message she attempted to send to the starport whither Collo was bound. We are unable to make sense of it because it's written in Super Secret Slaver Code, but we do at least have the precise location of the intended recipient, which should narrow down the search once we head over there. Also, Collo doesn't get the benefit of whatever information Rhea was sending (not that she could have told him much beyond 'There's an unfamiliar spaceship here, and I've attacked it but am getting shot to scrap').
I have to make another Manoeuvrability check to get back out of the asteroid field, and narrowly succeed. Just as I'm about to set off for the starport, I receive another communication, this one a distress call purporting to be from a damaged transporter. Could be a trap, could be legitimate but a failure-ensuring waste of time, could be the only way to acquire some crucial plot token, could even be pure padding. Given what's been established about my character, I might be required to do the 'hard man making hard choices' thing and abandon them to their fate, but then again, the adventure might go down the moralistic 'you did something inhumane and must be punished with ignominious defeat' route, and if I'm going to fail, I'd rather fail for doing the right thing than for being callous.
After I've made my decision, the text has me observe that that kind of ship has no reason to be in this region, but head in their direction anyway. This is not good design: if I had such suspicions, they should have been made clear before I was asked what I wanted to do. Failure to provide relevant information, and then penalising the reader for not acting on what they weren't told, is a dirty trick, and doesn't become any less reprehensible just because other authors have been guilty of it before.
It is a trap, and the next time I try to contact the ship, they respond with a blast of sound that renders me unconscious. It does not, however, affect the competent member of the Starhunt's crew, so I now have to play out the fight between Kraven-8 and the space pirates who incapacitated me. Their ship's stats are worse than the Fury's, and we only take minor damage before my long-suffering robot atomises the scurvy bunch.
When I come round, Kraven-8 explains what just happened. Given that the reader already knows, there's no real need for the text to cover the explanation in as much detail as it does, but maybe the author thinks that saying more than necessary here compensates for not having said enough prior to the decision that got me embroiled in the encounter. It doesn't.
Anyway, we reach the starport. Restrictions here aren't as tight as they were on Aquatine, so I can carry a blaster, but it'll have to be my second-best one, as my unauthorised departure from that planet meant that I never got to retrieve the blaster I had to hand over to the customs droid. I had been wondering if Mr Brocklehurst would remember that I'd been forced to leave the first one behind. Still, whatever credit is due to him for not forgetting and creating a continuity error is largely wiped out by the fact that my having a replacement available renders the whole business with the loss of the first gun irrelevant. Unless you value the character insight provided by my being more concerned about weapons than people - the fact that Arthur's enquiries on my behalf earned him a beating didn't bother me anywhere near as much as the loss of that blaster.
It would appear that not chasing after Rhea was an automatic failure, as the adventure proceeds on the assumption that I have the location to which she attempted to send her final message. Inconveniently, that location turns out to be off-limits to anybody who doesn't have clearance from the ISRFA, the local association for no-holds-barred fighters and their fans. Consequently I resolve to head for a gibberish-named bar where shady stuff goes down, and see if I can get myself registered as a fighter.
As I approach the bar, a couple of security guards drag an unconscious man out of it and barge past me. Odds are, that's just more padding, to add in yet another gratuitous section transition. Mercifully, the text does elide the next half hour of chatting with people, and people who know people, and people who know people who know people, skipping to the meeting with the ISRFA rep who asks me why I want a career in beating other people to a pulp. Figuring that 'I want to find one of your honoured guests and rip appendages off him until he tells me where he stashed my sister' might not go down too well, I claim to need the prize money as I have unpleasant debts to large people. Or maybe the other way round.
Orlando the rep takes me to a medic to ensure that I'm in good enough health to fight. There's not even a perfunctory Stamina check, so I'd be approved even if I were in a condition where a kick to the shin could kill me. And then I have half an hour to prepare for a bout against Jonah Quayle, the Painmaster, undefeated champion of 27 fights. The reward for winning is more than enough to cover my imaginary debts, so regardless of the outcome, this will be my only licensed fight.
Once Orlando has left me to get changed, I use my earpiece to contact Kraven-8 and bulk out another section that serves only to fill the gap between one non-choice and another. Then Orlando returns and takes me to the cage where the fight is to take place.
Combat starts with a Skill check as the Painmaster charges at me. I succeed at the roll, thereby taking just 2 Stamina damage from his opening flurry of blows, after which I get five rounds of combat in which to inflict 6 Stamina damage on him, or I automatically lose. Though I have a 2-point Skill advantage, I've had a higher Skill than every previous melee opponent this adventure, and lost a disproportionate number of rounds every single fight, so this could be game over.
As it turns out, I take just four rounds to hit him enough times, after which he loses a point of Skill and this becomes a regular 'to the death' fight. Except that I now have a fifth of the Stamina he does, so he need only get in a couple of lucky blows to finish me off. He wins the first round, I try using Luck to reduce the damage and prolong my existence that bit longer, and an inconvenient double six enhances the effectiveness of his blow and ends my life that bit sooner.
So, I'm dead, and my sister faces a worse fate. But on the positive side, I can stop playing this tiresome mini-adventure now.
Well, actually I now have to play it again for the FF 40th anniversary contest I mentioned here, but at least for the replay I can use my gamebook manager to skim through all that wearisome padding.
