Is That Absolutely Necessary?

Some readers will already have heard that the Mongoose Publishing reissues of the Lone Wolf gamebooks have been discontinued. That's not very likely to have much of an impact on this blog, though the likelihood of my being able to get the already published ones I lack has diminished, so I'm probably going to have to miss out some of the mini adventures. Given that the plan is for another publisher to pick up where Mongoose left off, it's possible that I'll be able to play through the whole of the planned 32-book run, but it's too early to tell how that will pan out. Regardless, it'll be at least November before my schedule is affected by any of this, and the availability (or not) of as yet unrepublished books won't matter until next summer at the earliest.

Lone Wolf's involvement in book 4 starts when he's asked to investigate the disappearance of the men who were investigating the disappearance of a convoy of gold from the mining province of Ruanon. In the mini adventure accompanying the Mongoose reissue, James M. Stuart's Ruanon, I play the leader of the troops whose disappearance prompts the King to call in Lone Wolf. Not the most promising set-up, but my character, Captain D'Val, sounds familiar, and not in a 'Scott of the Antarctic' way, so this might not be the sort of prequel that shows how everyone in it died to help set up the story it precedes.

Character creation is simple enough: roll up the usual stats, pick three abilities from a list of five, wonder how the publishers missed the fact that the Action Chart is the wrong variant. I get:
Combat Skill 13
Endurance 27
Given that abysmal CS, I'd better take Expert Swordsman as one of my abilities, as it gives me a much-needed bonus. For the other two, I'll try Master Tactician and Combat Sense.

My mission starts with a briefing from the King. The shipment of gold and gems is overdue enough that if it had been held up, a messenger would have brought news of the delay. Suspecting this to be the work of bandits or remnants of the army that invaded back in books 1-2, he orders me to take 100 troops to Ruanon, find the missing shipment and wreak a terrible vengeance upon the parties responsible.

Section 1 ends not with a decision, but a direction to another section. I don't like it when gamebooks do that. There are better ways of bulking out the section count to a round number. Maybe it's partly on account of my mild annoyance at being needlessly shunted around, but I take an immediate dislike to the Sergeant introduced in the next session, who pilfers food and may have head lice. At least this section has a choice in it, though not a very good one: visit the armoury and possibly get a weapon with a bonus, or leave immediately. It might be a different matter if checking out the armoury caused enough of a delay to affect subsequent events, but that doesn't appear to be the case, so the first choice in the adventure boils down to 'do you want stuff that will improve your chances of winning, or would you rather needlessly make things harder for yourself?' With my sub-par CS, I'm taking the Shield and every healing potion I can fit into my backpack.

I then join my troops, we set off, and I get sent to another section. A few uneventful days pass, we reach the more lawless part of the route, and again I'm shunted to a new section. And at last I get a meaningful decision/ability check. You know, the royal briefing could have been turned into a 'Background', the visit to the armoury covered in the 'Equipment' section of the rules, and the sections covering the early stages of the journey combined into section 1, and then the adventure would still have a number of sections divisible by 5, but there'd be a sense of getting into the adventure straight off rather than dragging things out.

My Master Tactician ability convinces me to send scouts ahead of the main force. Got your red shirts, men? The ability also determines my response when two of the scouts return bearing news of bandits lurking in ambush, but the outcome is still somewhat less than desirable. A well-organised group of thugs, larger than my army, advances on us, while other villains move to cut off our retreat. A side turning offers a possible way out, but I'm suspicious enough to suspect that it might be a trap. So I guess we fight.

More sections that only lead to other sections. Some of these may serve to link together disparate paths through the encounter, but I suspect that there's more number-padding at play here. And after a bit of combat, I see bandit reinforcements approaching (are bandit groups this large plausible?) and am forced to withdraw my troops onto the side turning. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Along the way I am compelled to rescue Sergeant Cheesethief-Headscratcher from a couple of bandits.

We are pursued, realise that the bandits will catch us up before we can get through the mountains, and find somewhere to make our stand. The pursuing force is around three times the size of the group that initially engaged us, and I start to suspect that this is no ordinary clan of bandits. Plenty more choiceless sections. I have to fight a bandit champion, but get the option of pulling back after three rounds of combat. Except that he dies in the third round, even though my Combat Skill has only been raised to 'average' by the bonuses I picked up, so there can't be many remotely competent players who'll need to decide whether to disengage or fight on.

I catch sight of the enemy commander within firing range, but have no bow. Still, I do have Master Tactician, which alerts me to the fact that single-handedly charging into enemy ranks would be dangerous, but eliminating their leader could be helpful. Also, water is liable to be wet. Considering how little choice I ultimately had about taking that side turning, I wouldn't be surprised to wind up having to attack him no matter what I decide, so I'll just get on with it.

It would appear that the General Melchett school of military tactics has not yet been introduced to Magnamund, as the bandits aren't expecting me to just charge into their midst, and I manage to kill everyone who stands between me and the bandit commander before they can react. He's a little more alert, though, so I have to properly fight him. Still, he's no better a fighter than the champion I killed earlier, and dies just as quickly. His death causes momentary confusion and disunity among the bandits, but then they get organised again.

By now around half my troops are dead, while enemy numbers continue to increase. Will a change of tactics help? Do any of my decisions here actually make a difference? We break through enemy lines, presumably to return to the road where we were originally attacked, and I lose my sword along the way. Good thing I didn't take a bow, as that would have forced me to discard my back-up weapon, which would mean a hefty Combat Skill penalty. As it is, the next bandit I have to fight also perishes before enough time has passed for me to be able to disengage from the combat.

The bandits don't appear to be pursuing us. I take stock, realising that a) I've lost about half my men, b) I've also lost my sword, and c) the author is restating already established facts for no good reason. Replacing my sword would restore the bonus I got from my Expert Swordsman ability, and we're heading back to the road where my troops and I first fought against the bandits, so there's a strong probability that there'll be some dead men with swords they no longer need just lying around there. Naturally I don't have the option of stopping to pick one up.

Some time later we stop, and I take stock of the situation, noting that roughly half of the soldiers who were accompanying me have died, those were no ordinary bandits, and the author keeps repeating things he's already stated. I decide to press on to Ruanon in the hope of getting there before the next reminder that half my troops are dead and I no longer have a sword.

After a couple of hours we reach the forest surrounding Ruanon. We won't be able to move so quickly in there, so there's a distinct possibility that the bandits who didn't appear to be pursuing us might catch us up. Naturally, this is just the time to think about making camp. Or leaving the road altogether, because 50 armed men on horseback will be so much stealthier walking on the fallen twigs that carpet the forest floor. I opt to stay on the road.

As we continue, I become aware that there could be bandits hiding behind the trees. Mere hours later, I catch a glimpse of a man in red (masters of the art of camouflage, this lot), and then ambushers spring out from behind bushes and leap from ditches and basically turn out to have been hiding pretty much everywhere but behind the trees. An arrow hits me in the arm, and we gallop away from the bandit archers while they're waiting for the author to point out that one of them shot my arm, that I sustained a wound to the arm from a bandit's arrow, and that my arm was injured when a bandit fired an arrow into it.

At last we emerge from the forest and reach Ruanon. Which is abandoned and partially in ruins, the Baron's castle burned to the ground. There are a few dead people there, but most of the population have just disappeared. I order my men to fortify our position and wait for the King to realise that something is afoot and send reinforcements. Several sections go by without a whiff of a decision. I get my wounds treated, we finish preparing our defences, destroying the buildings outside our perimeter so the bandits won't be able to use them for cover, and the text points out that we'll have to wait for the King to send more troops to investigate our disappearance.

Days pass. It becomes clear that the 'bandits' are some kind of invading force from Vassagonia, and the missing villagers have been captured and forced to work in the nearby mines. Every so often, one escapes, and is killed by snipers hiding out in the buildings we destroyed to prevent the Vassagonians from hiding out in them. Then, one evening, a villager breaks out of the mines and manages to avoid attracting Vassagonian attention for long enough that my men are able to bring him inside our defensive perimeter. It turns out that he's the Baron, and he's in a pretty poor state both physically and mentally.

I have one of the rooms in the watchtower made ready for him to stay in. He babbles names and recites an ominous-sounding verse, which might possibly create a sense of mystery but for the fact that it obviously refers to the big 'twist' from Lone Wolf book 4, which at least 99% of this adventure's readers are already going to know about by the time they get around to playing Ruanon. The author restates things again.

More time passes. Supplies begin to run low. The author finally decides to have Combat Sense do something, so one night I wake with a bad feeling. Soft footfalls from behind the door alert me to the fact that someone is creeping around in the watchtower. Either a Vassagonian assassin has slipped through the defences, or that thieving Sergeant is on the way to the larder. In case it's the former, I hide behind a tapestry.

The door opens, and in comes a man in the most stereotypical assassin costume imaginable. There's been no mention of my leaving something in the bed to make it look as if I'm still there, and if I had done, the author would probably have reminded me of it twice already. It can't be long before my black-clad, dagger-wielding intruder figures that I'm not asleep and starts knifing likely hiding places, so I attack before he has time to spot that the bed is vacant, observe that I'm not in bed, and realise that I'm somewhere other than the bed.

The assassin notices that the bed is unoccupied, which puts him on his guard enough that I fail to kill him on the spot, but I do wound and disarm him, and the resultant fight is over soon enough that I don't get to find out what would have happened if it lasted longer. Given that, moments later, a group of my men burst in and find out that I've already seen to the intruder, I suspect that they'd have come to my rescue if the fight had taken longer, but as it is, I didn't need their help.

My wounds are treated, and it becomes apparent that the assassin killed two sentries and mortally wounded another two on his way to my room. More days pass. Still no opportunity to get a new sword. Then there's some commotion. Lone Wolf comes into view, heading for our encampment. There are Vassagonians pursuing him, though, and his prospects look grim.

Back when playing through the original Lone Wolf series in the nineties, I lost at least two Lone Wolfs when reaching the point in book 4 that corresponds to this sequence. Now, as Captain D'Val, I am asked if I have a bow. If failure is guaranteed by my not having selected one back before we even set off, I will be most displeased.

But it's not that bad: I just grab a bow and some quivers that happened to be lying around, and then hurry into the no-man's-land between our barricades and the Vassagonian encampment. Catching sight of a sniper in one of the inadequately demolished ruins, I try to shoot him before he shoots Lone Wolf. It all comes down to a roll... and I hit the jackpot. Whew! I empty both quivers, taking out a Vassagonian or one of their war dogs with every arrow, then grab Lone Wolf and carry him to safety.

Once recovered, Lone Wolf makes sense of the Baron's ramblings (and now the text operates on the assumption that the reader has already played the main adventure enough to know the Vassagonians' plan, as it's not explained here). Then the Vassagonians attack our fortress, using Ruanese villagers as human shields and inflicting minor wounds on us with boiling oil. Battle rages for a while, though I don't have to play out any actual fights. Somewhat anticlimactically, Sergeant Still-Alive-After-All reports the death of the enemy leader, and the Vassagonians retreat.

It transpires that the dead leader wasn't the actual leader leader (making the fact that I had nothing to do with his defeat even more anticlimactic), and Lone Wolf will have to thwart his schemes. My remaining troops and I stay in Ruanon, because that's how it happened in book 4.

Time passes. I send men to forage for food and supplies (but still don't get to pick up a new sword). While I'm making plans for storming the mines and notifying the King of what's afoot (two separate actions), a guard bursts in, tells me I need to see something, and hurries up to the watchtower roof. Why couldn't he give some indication of what's so important? And no, 'it's in a different section, and details would spoil the surprise' is not a valid reason.

From the roof, I see the King leading an army towards us. We join him, and prepare to go after Lone Wolf. The Baron joins us. By the time we reach the location of book 4's climax, Lone Wolf has already saved the world (and the Baron's daughter), but he points out that I helped save the day too. Yay.

So that's it, and I have to say that that was an abysmally-structured endgame. Here's a breakdown of how things went after I rescued Lone Wolf. Each bullet point represents a new section.

• Get back to safety.
• Lone Wolf learns the truth. The bandits attack.
• Vassagonian tactics revealed. What turns out to be the final choice in the whole adventure: fight or hide up on direct troops from the top of the tower?
• Battle sequence with no actual combat. Enemy leader reported dead, Vassagonians routed.
• Actual enemy leader still at large. Lone Wolf sets off.
• Make plans. Guard is needlessly vague.
• It's the King. Follow Lone Wolf.
• The world has already been saved. But thanks for the rescue.

Playing the adventure took me through 67 sections, only 21 of which actually included any kind of branching option. Even allowing for 'bottleneck' sections that allow for diverse paths to reconverge, that's still a lot of not-getting-to-make-decisions. Ruanon is 150 sections long, but I strongly suspect that it could have been pared down to 100 without reducing the reader's autonomy in the slightest.

I wouldn't have paid what I did for the Lone Wolf reissues if I wanted them to fail. But based on the quality of this mini-adventure, and certain other Mongoose exclusives, I have to say that my reaction to the withdrawal of the publishers' license to the range is not so much 'What a pity' as 'No great loss'.

Not a Pastime at Which I Excel

During the Christmas break of the 1986/7 academic year, a few people from my school's RPG group got together at one member's home. We played the Fighting Fantasy mass battle scenario from Warlock issue 12 (with no real fight, as it turned out: the Orcs dawdled, and failed to reach the bridge before the Dwarfs destroyed it), and did some other stuff that I no longer remember, and one of the group gave bundles of gamebooks to everyone else as presents.

The books I received consisted of two unimpressive Endless Quests, and three of the Wizards, Warriors and You series, which I enjoyed enough that I got another in the set when the opportunity presented itself, and more recently reacquired a load of them. The earliest of the WW&Y books I was given was the third in the series, Who Kidnapped Princess Saralinda? by Megan Stine and H. William Stine, and that's the one I shall be replaying today. (I've never actually owned or played book 2, and with no nostalgic attachment, I'm not all that fussed about it, which is why I've jumped from 1 to 3 here.)

As I start reading section 1, memories come flooding back. A banquet is under way, to celebrate the imminent wedding of King Henry's daughter, the eponymous Princess. Marlayne, the groom-to-be, conducts an 'As You Know, Bob' dialogue with his brother to bring the reader up to speed, but this exposition serves a dual purpose: among other things, this adventure is a mystery in the 'criminal gives himself away with a verbal error' genre, and it's here that little brother Balfore makes the slip of the tongue that will ultimately lead to the exposure of his villainy (provided I don't get my character killed prior to the dénouement).

The exposition continues, revealing that the impending nuptials will cement an alliance and avert war, and there are some who would be only too pleased if the wedding were to fall through, and battle be joined. It's around now that it becomes apparent that the Princess has been kidnapped (the clue is in the title). There's no way she could have been removed from the castle, but parts of it have been abandoned for a long time, so there are plenty of places where she could have been hidden. The Wizard and the Warrior start to search for her, and I must choose which of the two I am to play. For a variety of reasons, not all related to this book, I'm going to be the Warrior. (Mind you, if I'm right about this being the WW&Y in which it is possible to fail on account of having been born on the wrong day, that's reason enough not to pick the Wizard.)

So, weapon selection. The sword is automatically selected, and for the three I get to choose, I think the Triple Crossbow, the Morning Star and the Dagger should cover most bases. And they'd be my choice even if I didn't remember that the Battle-Axe has been stolen and the castle is apparently in the grip of a bureaucracy so powerful that, having made my selection, I cannot change my mind should it somehow prove non-viable. The discovery of the theft of the axe is handled poorly: I look for it and then yell PG oaths when it's not there, regardless of whether or not I'd picked it. But I didn't, so I'm not forced to embark on the adventure one weapon short.

A peculiar map of the castle is provided, jumbling elements of 3-4 different levels together, and in places giving helpful labels like 'darkened room', 'cursed room' or '???'. Frankly, the map of Bristol in the back of the University prospectus at the tail end of the eighties was more helpful, and that one got me lost enough that I had to take a bus to get back to the train station.

This being a rather slim book, I only get to choose from three rooms, none of them particularly close to the one from which the Princess was taken, but two are vaguely sensible choices on account of not being far from the Weapons Room, while the third... seems just random. I'll try the servants' quarters, in case there's any pertinent gossip to be heard.

No, not from servants who've been murdered by a one-eyed rogue with Freddy Krueger gloves. He claims to have been ordered to kill them by Cimmerian, a Knight known to be wanting a war rather than the marriage. Probably a trap, but the alternative to checking out Cimmerian's chamber is taking the killer to the King, which brings its own risks. Still, I'm not in a trap-entering mood, so I'd better take the mass-murderer to see my King.

Well, I am at least competent enough to ensure that the killer attempts nothing regicidal. The King recognises him as squire to Brookhaven, Marlayne's father, and is all set to have the would-be-groom executed, but I point out that we could do with some more evidence before taking actions certain to provoke war. So we get sent to Brookhaven's castle to ask him if he's being treacherous.

News of the kidnapping has already leaked to the King's subjects, some of whom intercept us as we leave the castle, blaming Marlayne and demanding blood. A particularly fervent citizen leaps up onto my horse to cause trouble, but I'm able to knock him into the moat with the blunt end of my dagger (two other weapons were equally viable options, so at least the book isn't being overly narrow on that front (so far)).

At Brookhaven's castle, we are attacked by a knight in silver armour. The Wizard turns us invisible, so we can get past him without bloodshed, and the spell lasts long enough for us to get into the room where Brookhaven and his wife are discussing their delight at the imminent marriage, and their sorrow at how it has caused Balfore to become consumed with jealousy. It doesn't last long enough for us to get out again, though, and we find ourselves surrounded by armed guards. Explaining the situation seems the wiser option - and it is. Brookhaven guesses that Balfore is behind the kidnapping, and agrees that he must be thwarted, by any means necessary.

Back at King Henry's castle, things take a turn for the railroady. To paraphrase:
Warrior: We will search the whole castle for the Princess. Even the Cursed Room, if necessary.
King: Entering the Cursed Room is supposed to mean certain death.
Warrior: Okay, to the Cursed Room we go.

There's only one entrance to the Cursed Room, and it's in the room allocated to Marlayne. Not that giving him a bedroom next to the chamber of unspecified horrendous doom could in any way have been taken as unwelcoming, right? Marlayne goes into something of a superstitious funk, and tells of how he heard strange noises coming from the Cursed Room not long before a poisonous spider turned up in his bed.

Fortunately for the Princess, Marlayne doesn't have much else in common with Bond.

Undeterred, we enter the Cursed Room, finding the skeleton of a long-dead king, which wears the ring that Balfore made the mistake of mentioning back at the start of the adventure. Before dying, the late King Praetus carved a message into the floor, revealing the curse to have been invented by his treacherous cousin Ethawn in order to keep anyone from learning that Ethawn imprisoned Praetus in the room. It also mentions the way to activate the secret door into the Sealed Crypt, which the castle map shows to be right next to the Princess' room.

Using all my deductive skills, I make my way to where the Princess is being held, a hiding place far too deviobvious to mention here. She's not alone there: guarding her is a four-armed knight, wielding a different weapon in each hand, including the stolen axe (dramatic chord (or not)).

I have four weapons, too, so I win the resultant fight. To be fair, a player who picked the axe isn't automatically doomed on account of falling behind in the arms race: provided they made the right choice for one of their other weapons (and there are two that count as 'right' in this instance), they're able to tilt the playing field in a more favourable direction.

With the Princess safe and free, I launch into a Poirot-style explanation of 'ow I know Balfore to be ze guilty man, for the benefit of Marlayne and any reader too slow to have put the clues together. During my monologue, Balfore escapes from the castle, possibly to return in a sequel (though not one that was published here - there are three times as many American WW&Y books as British ones). But who cares about having the villain get away when there's a Royal Wedding on, eh?

Maybe I should have played as the Wizard after all - the book gets much madder in his investigation. Particularly the bit where he goes insane as a result of having been gnawed on by a rat while disguised as a piece of bread, and may be brought back to his senses by having the Warrior shoot him in the heart with a poisoned arrow. That's the kind of inspired lunacy that enables me to retain a certain fondness for this series despite its undeniable flaws.

I've Never Walked the Gangplank, and I've Never Owned a Parrot

I got Andrew Chapman's third Fighting Fantasy book, Seas of Blood, not long before another family holiday. While I don't remember taking the book with me when we went away, I can place my acquisition of it so close to the holiday because of other memories. It must have been the 25th of July 1985 when I bought the book, possibly from Boots, as I put my first attempt at it on hold in order to listen to the first couple of instalments of the problematic Doctor Who radio serial Slipback. The following week, I was unable to hear how Slipback continued on account of being on holiday.

Seas is unusual for FF in that it has the reader playing a villain. I'm one of the two most infamous pirates on the Inland Sea, engaging in a contest against my rival Abdul the Butcher to see which of us is the better buccaneer. To give it its due, the book doesn't try to make out that pirates are heroic, but the more unsavoury aspects of their lifestyle are largely glossed over: slaves are just treated as a commodity which can be exchanged for gold, with no acknowledgement of the suffering involved in the trade.

On my first try at the book, I made it through to the climax (which convinces me that I can't have been using dice), but didn't have quite enough gold to win. I went into a little more detail about it in my previous playthrough, which also includes some ranting about some of the stupid things which have been said about the book.

A bit of fudging at character creation is essential: as well as my own character, I need to roll stats for my crew. If they're bad fighters, we'll get slaughtered in battle. If they're weak, we're unlikely to make it to the end. Conveniently, I get a decent selection of rolls: nothing lower than 3, and a preponderance of 5s, which can be distributed to create the following:
Skill 11
Stamina 19
Luck 11
Crew Strike 12
Crew Strength 16
Still plenty of potential for failure, though.

My ship, the Banshee, sets off, and I decide to take a chance on heading east to Lagash. At this point, it's actually more advantageous to fail the Crew Strength roll, but the odds of my doing so are not good. Indeed, we make the trip that bit too quickly, consequently encountering a couple of Lagashian warships rather than the more promising target that will be in the area a day later. Still, the crew don't let me down in the resultant pursuit, so we only have to take on one of the warships. We overwhelm its crew, slinging the few survivors into the hold, and I decide to see if the pickings are better on the isle of Enraki.

Again my crew make good time, and I leave them aboard ship to rest while I head up to the fortress of the warrior priests who have made their home here. Posing as an emissary from Lagash, I gain an audience with the abbot, and get down to business. "You have a nice monastery here, Abbot. We wouldn't want anything to happen to it."

Not being on the same page as I, (I'm on 102, he seems to be on 44), the abbot activates a trapdoor beneath me. Four doors lead out of it, each bearing a different symbol, and the vagaries of memory make this bit dangerous. Two doors unleash threats which, should I escape them, will provide a way out of the pit. The other two activate traps, one avoidable but unhelpful, the other inescapably lethal. I can only remember what one of the symbols signifies, and it's the one that's least useful to know.

Thinking about it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the crescent may indicate the more hazardous of the ways out. If I'm right about that, avoiding it (and the one I know not to be worth opening) would give me a 50% chance of selecting Instant Death. I don't like those odds, so I'll take a chance on having remembered correctly: if it is the one I think it is, I'll only have around a 1 in 12 chance of getting killed.

Yes, a large and vicious beast comes through the door. Way beyond my capability to fight, but if I can dodge it for long enough, I can use its back as a springboard to get out of the pit. Oh! No dice involved. As long as I know the correct procedure (which I do), opening that door is actually the safest way out of the pit.

The abbot and his attendant haven't yet noticed that I've survived his trap (probably busy watching the pantomime horses fighting), and after consulting the errata I manage to run the attendant through before he can react. The abbot then defends himself, but I outclass him, and return to the Banshee with a reasonable amount of money and his rather nifty sword. It provides a Skill bonus, which would be mildly annoying except that this is one of the few FF books where the rules don't forbid exceeding Initial Skill, so I can claim the bonus after all.

There are major trade routes to the south, so I give the order to patrol them. After a few days we sight a heavily-laden merchant vessel, and soon catch up to it. One of the passengers knows magic, and summons a Shade to attack me, but my new sword helps me to deal with it. Fearful of repercussions, the merchantman's crew tie up the magic-user and drop him overboard, then offer me their gold. I take it, and a couple of the passengers, and we head south: by now, more than a quarter of the time available for completing this challenge has passed, and there's no telling what delays we might encounter before the end.

A vicious squall convinces me to temporarily turn back, and we encounter a merchant ship that appears to have taken heavy damage in the storm. We attack it, and the Captain turns out to be a bad loser, who scuttles the ship and leaps overboard with all the money.

Not to be used as a flotation device.

'Rescuing' the remaining crew, we then make for the island of Trysta. I know my mythology well enough to dissuade the crew from slaughtering any of the cattle we find there. The King of the Four Winds sends a herald to invite me to dine with him, and I know better than to refuse. However, I keep quiet about what I'm actually doing, as my crew are good enough that I can do without the help the King would offer if he knew, and I'm not convinced I can afford the cost that comes with it.

We head on to the Island known as the Roc, named after the giant birds that nest there. One of them attacks the Banshee, killing a few of my men. The rest of us explore the island, and I am separated from the crew when the dead bird's mate returns. Forced to take shelter in a subterranean passage, I ignore the bodies lying in it, and am attacked by something invisible. Far from invulnerable, though, and I'm soon on my way again.

While descending a flight of steps I catch sight of a group of Troglodytes with a heavy chest, and hide behind a boulder. Knowing how boulders love rolling down slopes, I give this one a hand on its way. The noise I make while doing so attracts the Troglodytes' attention, and they come to investigate, which makes it all the more difficult for them to get out of the way once the boulder starts moving. They get squished into interesting shapes, and I take the contents of the chest and continue on my way. Emerging from the interior island, I am reunited with my crew, and we set sail once more.

Our next port of call is the port of Shurrupak, where we offload our 'cargo'. That atrocity concluded, we make for the trio of islands referred to as the Three Sisters. One of them has orchards on, but I don't think those are cherry trees. As I recall, two of the islands aren't really worth visiting, so I have us drop anchor by the palm-covered one, where we encounter some other pirates digging a hole. They're no match for my crew, and it's not their treasure that winds up buried on the island.

We set off towards our final destination, and another storm blows up. Despite Roc-instituted depletion, my crew are able to keep the Banshee under control, and we arrive almost a fortnight ahead of the deadline. Well, we would, but I can heal Stamina by idling, and knowing what awaits me, I'd rather be at full health and just a week earlier than necessary. Abdul is already here, either way, and I know that I don't have enough gold - should have made some more detours. Still, while defeat is inevitable, I might as well try to make it past the final obstacle.

The thing is, to reach the actual rendezvous point with Abdul, I have to fight the 'keeper', who turns out to be a Cyclops. And this is no ordinary fight: instead of the usual dice-rolling, I have to get tactical. Every round, I'm given a choice of attacks to make, and depending on what I do, the Cyclops gets hurt, I get hurt, or we both get hurt. Being a pirate, I don't exactly bother with Queensberry rules, and by mostly targeting joints (and going for the eye when the opportunity presents itself), I make it through the fight almost unscathed. Funnily enough, it was the dirtiest tactic I employed that got me injured, a boot to the groin having no noticeable effect on the Cyclops, but giving my ankle a nasty sprain.

Nevertheless, I am the victor in that contest, and proceed to my meeting with Abdul, who boasts of his exploits like someone gloating about having acquired both Park Lane and Mayfair in their first circuit of the Monopoly board. Unsurprisingly for someone so conveniently lucky, he wins.

It would be remiss of me to conclude this blog entry without providing a link to Per Jorner's superlative review of Seas of Blood. In addition to being highly amusing, it makes a number of highly pertinent observations, which is all the more impressive when you consider that the author had not actually had the opportunity to read the book beforehand.

Don't Let the City Steal Your Soul

For many years after leaving Swansea, where I'd gone to university, I maintained strong ties with friends there. Not being a driver, I had to use public transport to visit those friends, and going by coach meant almost an hour's wait for a connection in Birmingham. This was made more bearable by the fact that there's a rather good second-hand bookshop around five minutes' walk from the coach station, and there used to be a gaming shop called Dungeons and Starships. D&S closed down some years ago, but it provided some good browsing opportunities before then. And it was there that I acquired my first copy of the T&T solitaire adventure City of Terrors. It was the bowdlerised Corgi Books version, which I'd never bought back when I was first into the series because I'd only ever seen it cellophane-bound with the Complete Rule Book and Game Guide, of which I already had a copy, and I wasn't prepared to pay for a duplicate copy of the CRBaGG just for the sake of acquiring CoT. The copy in D&S was on its own, so I bought it and spent some of the next leg of the coach journey flicking through it.

Some years later I tracked down a copy of the Flying Buffalo edition on eBay. It's from the third printing, and mentions minor changes having been made between the first and second editions. I'm guessing that they don't include the escape option added by Ken St. Andre in the situations where he thought author Michael Stackpole was being a bit too harsh, as that strikes me as more than just a 'minor' change, but cannot speculate on what those changes might actually have been.

This is the first T&T solo to be set in an urban environment rather than one big dungeon (or equivalent) or complex of micro-dungeons. St. Andre's preface says that there are 23 possible adventures contained within it, and if I remember rightly, the text allows for more informed choices - no rolling three dice to see where I end up, or arbitrarily choosing between functionally identical doors. Which probably just means that I get some small say in how I wind up dying - the likelihood of surviving is as low as ever (Mr. St. Andre claims that his escape option turns a 100% chance of death into just a 95% likelihood of perishing).

It doesn't help that I got below-average rolls when creating my character for this adventure.
Strength: 12
Intelligence: 7
Luck: 10
Constitution: 13
Dexterity: 13
Charisma: 6
Speed: 6
I'd wanted a Wizard character, as I think there's one instance where I need to be one to acquire an important item, but this chap just isn't smart enough. I could boost his IQ by making him an Elf, but that would take a hefty bite out of his Constitution. Oh, and his starting gold is abysmal, too. All the more so when the adventure obliges me to give the hotel clerk a hefty bribe. I think my best option is dual-wielding daggers: a Misericorde and a Katar together are slightly more effective than the best weapon I could buy using my full starting gold, and leave just enough change for clothes, footwear and the obligatory ten-foot rope.

For no very good reason the adventure starts on page 33. I'm in the city square, near the hotel, and can either leave the island on which the city of Gull is situated (which would be a little premature at this stage) or go exploring. I think this counts as an intersection of roads, so I have to encounter a Wandering Person (Gull is too civilised for Wandering Monsters).

Great. Zaarg the Vampire. Who attacks on sight, and is just powerful enough that I have precisely zero chance of injuring him, and a 1/279,936 chance of taking no damage each round. It should come as no great surprise that I lose the fight. To add insult to injury, my character now becomes one of Zaarg's vampiric minions, and joins the Wandering People list, with enhanced stats that make him almost as lethal as his new boss. Any time I return to this adventure, at every major junction my new character will have a 1/11 chance of being attacked by the minor killing machine that started out as one of my weakest characters.

Not as successful a trip as the one on which I got the book, then.

Incidentally, I shall be playing a rather unusual T&T solo in four weeks' time, and it's one that could benefit from other people's input. If you'd like to contribute to what could be my strangest adventure ever, drop me a line within the next couple of weeks.

Oh Dear, This is Getting Monotonous

One consequence of my getting involved in online gamebook fandom was that I started trading books with fellow collectors. Because of this, I began keeping a look out for books that didn't hold any great appeal to me, but were sought by someone I knew, who might be able to provide me with something I did want in return for them. So when I was visiting friends in Swansea, and came across a copy of Treachery in Drakenwood, the first of Paul Vernon's Fatemaster books, I bought it for an acquaintance in America. Aware that second-hand books aren't always as complete as one would wish, I had a good look through it, thereby discovering that there was a page missing, and managing to acquire a scan of the missing page from another collector before sending it off.

As time passed, and my gamebook collection grew, I started to take an interest in some series with which I hadn't been bothering. Inspired in part by my memories of looking through that second-hand TiD, I added the Fatemaster series (if you can call two books a series) to the list, eventually tracking down an acceptably priced Treachery on eBay. This will be the first time I properly attempt to play it.

My character has only just arrived in the region, seeking fame and fortune. Fortuitously, the tree in which he opts to spend the night happens to be within earshot of an altercation between two members of a passing band of kidnappers, as a result of which he learns that they're working for Sir Roderick. In the morning, searching the corpse of the loose-lipped (and subsequently loose-innarded) man, he finds a gemstone worth enough that he can buy himself a weapon and some armour. Local gossip fills in all the essentials of the plot:

1. Lady Arowen has been kidnapped.
2. The Baron of Drakensfeld has been accused of the kidnapping.
3. The Baron's brother, Sir Roderick, recently conspired with a Necromancer to murder the Baron, but failed.
4. Arowen's father has threatened to wage war against the Baron if she's not back by the end of the week.
5. Her father and the Baron are both offering substantial rewards to the man who brings her home.

Unsurprisingly, I decide to try and be that man, and it's not utterly implausible, given that I roll up the following character:
Strength 11
Agility 10
Power 8
It turns out that I also know some magic, which makes it a little less absurd that I was on the hunt for adventure despite being weaponless and unarmoured. But now I can afford a short sword, light armour and a shield, so I'll be able to put up more of a fight.

I have the option of reporting what I know to the local Seneschal. While I must admit to a little curiosity about the precise nature of the contrivance that will make this a fruitless course of action, I'm not willing to waste whatever time, Power or other in-game resources it would cost me to do so. What might be worth doing is seeking rumours, which I can only do on my first attempt at the adventure. Doing so involves rolling a die to determine which paragraph I check, so if I go by the rules, there are five sections in the book that I will never be allowed to read. No, not quite - it turns out that after learning a rumour I have the option of turning back to the 'roll for a rumour' section. But given that it takes a whole day to find out just one of them, reading the lot would guarantee failure. But that's still 1% of the book going to waste.

Investigating the scene of the abduction will take twice as long as returning to where I was when I saw the kidnappers and following their trail, and I can't afford to waste any more time. But an arbitrary roll of the dice determines whether I'm able to find where I was, and I don't manage it. So I can waste a day, waste a day in a different manner, or just blunder into the forest and hope to find a way into the Drakenstooth, the mountain revealed by the kidnappers to be Roderick's base of operations, before I forget how to breathe or fatally concuss myself walking into trees.

I've been hacking my way into the forest for a bit when I hear some eerily beautiful singing. Bound to be a Siren or equivalent. I can head for it, try to take a detour, or squander further time by backtracking to the road, whence I can seek the crime scene or return to the town or crouch down and rub gravel into my hair. Probably futile, but I'll go for the detour. Yup, the singer is not so easily evaded, but I panic and spend the rest of the day running to somewhere random.

By the time I recover whatever I have in place of wits, I'm deep in the forest, the Drakenstooth towering in the east. A random encounter occurs, three Goblins riding a Giant Stoat (or Weasel - evidently my character never learned the rhyme that aids in distinguishing mustelidae) into the clearing. I hear their approach in time to hide behind a tree, but the beast gets my scent, so I fire off a Slumber spell. It takes out the Stoat/Weasel (the illustration doesn't show the end of the creature's tail, so I still can't identify it), but I have to fight the Goblins.

One oddity of the combat rules is that if I score a sufficiently good hit, I get to strike another blow immediately. That could make sense in one-on-one fights, but the likelihood of my hitting a Goblin so hard that neither of his friends can attack me either seems a little low. It happens once, though. Would be twice, except that the second time is as I deliver the coup de grace to the final Goblin. The various Defence bonuses I have, plus the Goblins' own ineptitude, keep me from taking any damage in the fight, though one of them did almost manage it. I relieve my attackers of their money and a horn trumpet, and head east.

Before long I find myself at the foot of the mountain. The cliff face is too steep to climb and too big to search for secret doors, and I have to make another random encounter check. Great. Another party of Goblins on a Giant Stoat/Weasel, and this lot spot me immediately. I blow another 2 Power on a Slumber Spell, and again need only fight the Goblins. Ten rounds of tedious dice-rolling later, the Goblins are dead and I am unscathed. They even have identical treasure to the last lot.

I follow the cliff to the north-east, and catch sight of four Goblins guarding a door. I have the option of blowing the horn I acquired from the first lot of Goblins. Of course, it might be for summoning reinforcements. But if it were, wouldn't the Goblins have used it to call for help once I KOed their Weasel/Stoat? You'd think so, but based on the calibre of what I've played of this adventure so far, I wouldn't bet on it.

I keep quiet and just charge at the Goblin guards. Another tiresome fight, enlivened only by the note to 'ignore any reference to a Giant Stoat' in the instruction on where to turn should I be overcome by my pathetic opponents. One of them does actually manage to wound me during the fight, but apart from that it's the usual grind. If it turns out that I can't get through the door, and should have surrendered in order to be taken into the mountain, I will be displeased.

One of the Goblins has a key, so I may be all right. The ground outside the door is covered in the tracks of Goblins and rodents of unusual size (neither Stoats nor Weasels are rodents, Mr. Vernon). And the door isn't even locked. Beyond it is a passage, with a branch to the south leading to a room where another three Goblins are too engrossed in a game of dice to have noticed me. I can try looking for secret doors here, and I hope that that's just an opportunity to attract the Goblins' attention, because if I have to find hidden tunnels to make any meaningful progress, this is going to be even more bothersome.

For an experiment, I attack the Goblins. One of them wounds me twice, but I do prevail, so there's no need for me to pay no attention to that Giant Stoat behind the curtain. After the fight, I can search for secret doors (yay), pull the almost-certainly-not-attached-to-an-alarm-bell rope dangling by the east wall, read a parchment on the table, or return to the main passage. I check out the parchment, which turns out to be a magic scroll, though the Goblins were just writing their scores in the dice game on the back. I cast the Healing spell on it straight off, and then try checking for secret doors. There are none, but I attract attention. Goblins, thousands of 'em.

Regaining consciousness the next day, I discover that I am now in a mine, with nothing but a loin cloth and a pick axe. Mind you, the 'if this has already happened to you on more than TWO occasions' direction fills me with more foreboding than the actual situation.

There are seven other prisoners, none of them remotely communicative. After a while, two Goblin Guards arrive bearing scraps of food. Time for another Slumber spell. It works, and my fellow captives shred the sleeping Goblins. One of them has a key, which I take once the other inmates have used it to gain access to the stores.

There's only one way out. It leads to a Goblin-filled hall with five other exits. The 'sneak through' option looks a lot like the number for 'get surrounded and knocked out, and wake up a prisoner', and I'm not convinced I'd manage a particularly good bluff at being a messenger, what with the 'loin cloth and pick axe' ensemble, so it's going to have to be an Invisibility spell. And I have to make an Agility roll to not get bumped into and discovered, but I successfully reach the closest exit clockwise, which leads to a locked door. The key fits, and the door opens into an armoury, but before I can equip myself afresh, the source of endless joy that is the Fatemaster random encounter system has three Goblins enter the passage from the other end.

To conserve Power, I try to hide. They spot me, but owing to the book's use of one-section-fits-all encounters, the noise of the fight won't attract any attention. I've not had time to rearm myself, and the Goblins get some good rolls, so I wind up overpowered. But since I didn't use magic, they don't know I can, so rather than slitting my throat while I'm helpless, they just club me senseless and sling me back in the mine.

Sleep restores Power, and being knocked out has a similar effect, so when I come round again, I'm able to cast Healing a couple of times. When the food arrives today, I risk straightforward violence rather than another spell. My striking down one guard inspires the other prisoners to tear the other apart, and I soon have my freedom and another key.

Back to the hall. Invisibility again. I sneak to the closest exit anticlockwise. Two doors lead from this passage. The first opens into an untidy room containing a bed and a chest. I take a chance on forcing the chest, and find some money in it. Dare I risk napping to replenish my Power? My chances of success are negligible by now anyway, so I give it a go.

Not the smartest thing I've ever done. The room's owner, the biggest Goblin in Drakenstooth, comes home for a rest, demands to know who's sleeping in his bed, and then spots that I've eaten his porridge stolen his treasure. Next thing I know, it's tomorrow and I'm locked in the mines again. This is my last chance.

More Healing. Attack a food-bearing Goblin and let the other prisoners do the rest (you'd think by now that the Goblins would have started sending larger parties, or the prisoners wouldn't need my lead). Invisibility. I fail the Agility roll in the hall, and get recaptured again. This time I come round chained to the wall in a torture chamber, and I'm guessing that the man preparing for my return to consciousness is that Necromancer.

Needless to say, things go rather downhill for me from here.

To be honest, I think if I'd tried playing that first copy of this book rather than just leafing through it, I'd never have wanted to acquire a copy of my own. There may be some good stuff in there somewhere, but on the playability front it's just a turgid slog.

Kids! Say No to Drugs!

I'm back in SF territory today, as Andrew Chapman's second Fighting Fantasy book, The Rings of Kether, concerns the adventures of an Investigator from Federal Central (Vice) as he (this is one of the few FF gamebooks in which the viewpoint character is explicitly identified as being male) takes on the drug traffickers operating in the Aleph Cygni system.

It was not long before a family holiday when I originally acquired Rings. I vaguely recall being in my room at home while trying to make sense of the description of a hotel as 'a dive' (having only encountered the 'jump head-first into water' version of the word until then), but by the climax of my first attempt, in which I found out how ludicrously easy it is to remove the shielding on the reactor in the drug dealers' base and cause the whole place to explode, I was in our chalet at whichever Pontins camp we were visiting that year.

My current copy of the book is in good condition for ex-library stock, but a previous user has underlined the section number for what they considered the optimal choice at every point along their preferred route through the book. Even when there's no actual choice: sections ending in a straightforward 'turn to [number]' still have that number underlined. In the unlikely event that the guilty party is reading this, I give them a glower and a disapproving tut.

I contemplated fudging character creation again for this adventure, though it's not my character but my spacecraft that I'd be optimising, a low score in Shields almost invariably leading to a failure such as I experienced on my previous playthrough. In the end I opted to take the dice as they fell, winding up with:
Skill 8
Stamina 18
Luck 11
Weapons Strength 11
Shields 4
So I wound up with reasonable Shields, but a sub-par Skill. Probably not as harmful as the other way round.

The quantity of the illegal drug Satophil-d coming out of Aleph Cygni suggests that local law enforcement is corrupt, so I'm working undercover, pretending to be an ordinary trader. I arrive in the system and head for its one planet, Kether (the eponymous rings, in case anyone was wondering, are in the sense of drug rings rather than Saturn-esque). The customs officials at the starport are not interested in my cargo, but they do confiscate my spy ray, whatever that is. Seriously, it wasn't mentioned before now, this section provides no explanation of what it does or why I have it, and the fact that it doesn't cause the customs men to assume that I'm an undercover Investigator suggests that whatever law enforcement-related applications it may have are not immediately obvious.

I decide to have a look at the state of the local police, who are known as proctors. There's a nice touch in the writing here, travel by flying car being such an ordinary aspect of everyday life in this universe that my arriving on the roof is taken for granted, and it only becomes apparent owing to the mention that I have to descend to the 49th floor to get to the Vice department. The overweight man I meet there confidently informs me that there are no local drug rings - at most, a small-scale operation running on the moon.

Unconvinced, and pretty sure from past attempts that there's nothing worthwhile to be gained from visiting the moon, I have little choice but to check out some local bars in the hope of finding a lead. I make my way to a tacky, flashy, noisy, humans-only establishment that sounds like a horrendous place for a night out but is, for the purposes of my investigation, 'very promising'.

Mingling with the crowd, I encounter a navigator who grabs my neck and mutters, 'Beware.' Could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He mumbles a barely coherent monologue about the 'Tau Cygni threat', from which I can only make out that he thinks there's something afoot on the moon, and the obese woman playing cards nearby is involved. Still don't want to go to the moon, so I check out the card players. The woman in question has all the wit and charm of your stereotypical ladette, but clearly has considerable authority over the men with her. Attempting to join the game will demonstrate that I possess all the diplomatic skills of a dazed mollusc, so I discreetly shadow her afterwards, thereby discovering that she's in the interplanetary import/export trade, and has the charming name of Zera Gross.

Spying on her apartment is liable to lead to a variety of interesting internal injuries, so I decide to look Ms. Gross up in the local library, as Kether doesn't have any kind of fanciful global computer network that would make it possible to look up almost anything within seconds. Or maybe the spy ray was actually a dongle, and its confiscation leaves me bereft of web access. At least the bulk of the media at the library are electronic. News files on organised crime may well have been doctored, so I try looking for statistics too dull to be considered worth suppressing. As it turns out, it's what has been suppressed that catches my attention: there seem to be some significant omissions in air freight records.

Proceeding to the State Computer File Centre, I find that the data I want to follow up is restricted under the hundred-year rule. Oh, well - sometimes you have to break the law in order to enforce the law. Returning after closing time, I pull a Mission: Impossible routine to get inside, and find lots of gaps in the records. There's no convenient 'undelete' function, so if I'm to find out more, I need somebody to lean on.

I pay a house-call on one of the Air-traffic chiefs. As there are two, it's possible that one of them might be innocent, and if that is the case, I have fifty-fifty odds of having picked that one. Consequently, I start with a friendly approach. The moment I let him know what I am, he panics and babbles a confession of having covered up flights from the islands to the asteroids. He claims not to have a clue who was paying him to do this, so I decide to see if the Gene Hunt approach will jog his memory at all.

Bad idea. He points me towards asteroid C230, which I know from previous attempts to be unrelated to the drug smuggling. Fun though it could be to drop in on the alien mind parasite-worshipping cult that lives there, I think I'll stick to the main plot, and pursue further enquiries regarding those flights. Returning to the starport,  I bribe a pilot, who also tells me to check out C230. Looks like I'm going to have to chase that wild goose in order to get back on track.

Discreetly landing somewhere out of sight of the dock, I don a pressure suit and enter the asteroid via a vent. Marvellous! I'm a cliché! Drifting through ventilation shafts (cheapskate cultists have no artificial gravity), I find a room containing a flaming pedestal. Closer investigation causes a scaly-legged serpentine figure (wouldn't the legs make it more like a centipede than a serpent?) with a woman's face, steel fangs and leather wings to appear and seize me. So I interrogate it. In Yoda-esque language it tells me to look into the Customs officials. It does reflect rather poorly on my investigative skills that I wasn't able to think of that myself.

I've been a bit blasé about the one in the book, but strange creatures with women's faces can be quite horrific.

Returning to Kether to follow this latest lead, I decide that as intimidation and bribery both led me on a false trail, I should try spying on the Customs officials. Concealing myself in a locker, I am displeased to observe an armed security officer carrying out a locker inspection. Not a particularly thorough one, so I might get away with hiding behind a greatcoat (the odds of the pin-up in the locker concealing an escape tunnel are pretty low). The officer gets to the locker in which I'm hiding... and a friend of his points out that it's beer-o'clock. Phew!

Time passes. A pilot arrives with a tonne of boxes. A Customs man eagerly tells his colleagues that the Satophil-d has arrived. His subsequent dialogue with the pilot is delightful:
C: Anything to declare?
P: No. Of course not.
C: Very good. Passed inspection. 

I burst out of the locker, blaster pointed at the pilot's head, and suggest that they might like to consider rewording that little exchange. The Customs officials direct me to the top floor of the Isosceles Tower, and the pilot mentions a communications satellite. From playing the book before, I know that going to the satellite will involve some Skill rolls, failing them could lead to my winding up drifting in space, and the optimal outcome of the visit would be learning that it's transmitting to the Isosceles Tower. So I think I'll cut out the middlesatellite, and head straight over to the Tower to see what their angle is.

The top floor turns out to be the office of Zera Gross' import/export company. Considering that I've known about them since day one, the fact that it's taken all this effort just for me to find their office suggests gross incompetence on my part. Especially as the office has been abandoned in a hurry, with document files and magnetic tape strewn all over the place (how retro). In fact, there are still two thugs shredding and incinerating in one of the rooms. A firefight ensues, in the course of which I deal substantially more damage than I take.

Helping myself to the automatic blaster wielded by the man who hit me, I discover that it does more damage than a normal blaster. Should that not have been mentioned back when I was being shot with it? Or did the thug somehow manage to convert the extra damage into a Skill bonus (his Skill was significantly higher than his buddy's). Musing on the oddities of Mr. Chapman's approach to weapon characteristics, I open another door, and a bureaucrat swings a paperweight at my head. I dodge it and apply a little excessive force, and he shows me the 'destroy this message' message giving the coordinates of the island to which the company is relocating.

I head out there and find two conventional entrances, one freight door, and an antigrav dray. And the underliner who had this book before me apparently never realised what fun could be had by driving the dray through the freight doors. The guards on the other side of the doors are prepared for uninvited guests, but not for an HGV in the sternum. The room with the squashed guards in also contains the body of a man who's been savaged by a savage beast or Kether's equivalent of Jack Bauer. He has some of the pills that serve as Provision-substitutes in this adventure (rather inappropriately named Pep Pills), so I take them from him and heal the damage I took back at the office.

Moving on, I encounter a robot that asks me a bizarre riddle. By now I know the answer, but I have not the faintest idea why it's correct. Still, there's another situation in the book where the text explicitly states that I make a completely random guess that just happens to be the correct password, so I don't think exploiting metaknowledge to arbitrarily come up with the appropriate response necessarily constitutes cheating here.

Beyond the robot I reach a junction that (as far as I can tell) serves only to help pad out the adventure to 400 sections. I soon reach a room that contains Zera Gross, a robot secretary, and no antlers to help distinguish when she's not dictating. Still, she manages to clarify the issue in time that the robot doesn't end up transcribing the subsequent exchange, which is something along the lines of, 'Zap! Missed, stupid narc! Pow! Aargh!' and more in that vein, eventually followed by the heavy breathing of a badly wounded Investigator, the death rattle of an extremely fat criminal, and the crackle of a blazing office.

Restoring myself to full health with a couple more pills, I make my way to the command room and manage to find out the location of the asteroid where they make the drugs. I return to my ship and fly up there, finding it protected by a minefield. Blowing it up will damage my shields, but a bad roll while trying to manoeuvre through it would harm me more, if I remember rightly. Nevertheless, I trust to the dice.

The asteroid also has phaser batteries, and while my ship's Smart Missiles can take out some of them, I still have to do a little fighting. This is where that Shields score makes all the difference, and the one I rolled today is high enough to get me past the asteroid's defences intact. Entering via an emergency airlock, I encounter a hostile arrangement of cubes, which is only slightly more of a threat than the Borg were by the end of Voyager's run.

Further on, I reach a cavern containing metallic spheres with handles and bulbous creatures with tentacles. My sub-par Skill causes me to blunder into a couple of the creatures, which have fang-filled maws with which they snap at anything that troubles them. The damage is easily healed, though.

Beyond the cavern is a laboratory suitable for manufacturing Satophil-d. I wreck equipment for a while, then spot two exits, and go through one of them. It leads to a room with gravity, where a narrow bridge spans a deep pit. The bridge is guarded by a trinocular triped with three arms and three weapons, which I discover to be an Arcturian Vanque when I start shooting at it. We both have pretty lousy aim, but I manage to hit the Vanque more often than it does me.

A junction leads me to a peculiar cubic room with red doors in all the walls and black buttons on the doors. If I'd taken Zera on with the noble art of fisticuffs and survived, I'd have learned the right thing to do here. Provided I recognised that there was a little concussion-induced unnecessary repetition in there. Of course, I went for the firefight instead, so avoiding all the traps between here and the climactic confrontation would require me to invoke metaknowledge.

Avoiding all the traps, I make it to the sumptuous living quarters of Ms. Gross' associate, 'Blaster' Babbet. Two of him greet me, and they misuse a line from Blade Runner as a threat. Refusing to be taken in by the trick, I attack the real Babbet, and am displeased to discover that the final fight is a punch-up, in which Babbet has the edge. If the book had the standard rules for using Luck in battle, I might have just managed to win, but it doesn't, so I wind up beaten to a pulp.

Winter Is Coming

For some reason I delayed getting any more Lone Wolf books after the first two - perhaps I was hoping to get them second-hand as well. Eventually I did get them brand new, but by then the series had already undergone its first redesign, so my copy of book 3, The Caverns of Kalte, has a salmon-coloured spine, and the cover depicts a tentacled monstrosity rather than a skiing Ice Barbarian. I initially went looking for it in a shop in Southborough, close to the school's playing fields (it was on a Thurssday, the day we had games that academic year), but the shop had stopped selling books by then. Or maybe it never did, and I was confused. Regardless, the fruitless detour delayed me, and actually getting the book in another shop added to my lateness. But that wasn't the only gamebook I bought at that time, so I'll save the rest of this story for when I get around to blogging about the other one.

This is going to be a new experience for me, as I've always previously played Kalte with a character carried over from the previous book in the series. As my playthrough of book 2 ended with my character getting fatally clonked on the head with a bit of wood, I need to create a fresh Lone Wolf here, which means no bonus Kai disciplines, and no equipment from other books. Given that the whole point of the preceding book was to acquire and use a +8 sword of Darklord-incinerating, which would remain in my inventory for the rest of the series, I anticipate finding this book a lot tougher than usual. Not that it's always been a walkover before now: as I recall, my first attempt ended during a fight against a brute that would fatally sting me if it inflicted any damage at all. Guess what: it inflicted damage.

This book is set around a year after the last one. The history leading up to it is largely the same, except that, presumably, Lone Wolf remained unconscious for much longer, and the Darklords' invasion was thwarted after their commander accidentally brutally cut his head off while combing his hair. Whatever my character did to earn the favour of the King in the aftermath of this mayhem involved a run-in with renegade magician Vonotar the Traitor, who was last seen (on this blog, at least) kidnapping another wizard and getting decked for his troubles. Loi-Kymar's belief that his daughter would pass on details of whence he had been abducted appears to have been overly optimistic, as it's not until traders bring news of a coup in Kalte that anyone in Sommerlund finds out that Vonotar is now ruling over the Ice Barbarians.

Anyway, public outcry has convinced the King that Vonotar must be brought back here to face justice, and I've been chosen to lead the expedition to apprehend him. Time to see what this version of me looks like...
Combat Skill: 13 (not good)
Endurance: 19
Kai Disciplines: Hunting, Sixth Sense, Healing, Weaponskill in... Quarterstaff, and Mindblast (provides a Combat Skill bonus against certain opponents).
If I remember rightly, in this book Mindshield is only really useful in dealing with the consequences of a bad decision, so I think I can make do without it.
The starting equipment list includes a Quarterstaff, so I'll take that. It feels weird to be paying any attention to the weapon selection.

The expeditionary team sets off in a (secretly) suitably equipped warship, but is blown around 30 miles off course in a blizzard. There's a pretty tight deadline on this quest, as the sea will be freezing over within around a month, so I decide against wasting a day sailing back to where we intended to moor the ship, and choose to start the land crossing from here. The guides mention two possible routes, one faster but more risky, the other longer but less hazardous. I'll take a chance on the latter.

One of the guides warns me about a mirage-like phenomenon as we commence the next stage of the voyage. We make good progress over the course of the day, and as we make camp for the night, my Sixth Sense warns me that we are being watched. Incidentally, comparing the two editions of this book, I have to say that this far the edits for the Mongoose version are less blatant, and do improve on the previous version.

The half-expected nocturnal attack fails to materialise, and the next morning the wind has died down and we're on section 291. Still not seeing any good reason why a cheat might have skipped to it. Another uneventful day's travel follows, and by nightfall we reach the shelter of the massive splinter of granite that the guides refer to as 'The Rock'. They have such a way with words.

The following day, the weather isn't so nice. Eventually we reach an ice shelf that shields us from the worst of the wind, and a trio of savage Baknar attack us. Thanks to my Weaponskill and Mindblast, I'm only slightly outclassed in the adventure's first combat. And thanks to the impressively skewed combat tables, I lose less than half my Endurance defeating the beast.

In the mean time, the guides have driven off the other Baknar with flaming torches. They then skin the corpse in order to get at the foul-smelling oil in its body, which is apparently great for keeping out the cold. I try some myself (though I do like the wording of the refusal option: 'If the thought of smelling like a vat of rancid cheese does not appeal to you...'), and discover that it also has the effect of blunting the sense of smell, so the stink no longer bothers me. Amusingly, the revised text adds a note pointing out that the effects of the oil do not persist beyond this book, doubtless to reassure all the LW readers who'd worried that subsequent adventures had the hero interacting with nobility while failing to realise that he still smelled like a yak latrine.

The next few days are uneventful, but then we get spotted by a party of Ice Barbarians. They outnumber us, they're better acclimatised to the conditions, they know the region better than we do, and if they catch up to us, we're doomed. I approve of the realism.

We hurry away, but Barbarian scouts on skis soon catch up to us. They all carry children on their backs, and the children are armed with bows and arrows. The writing keeps this from coming across as humorous, and within seconds my guides are all dead. One of the scouts levels a spear at me, and I find myself effectively jousting on ice. He knocks me down, but his momentum carries him past me, and I manage to get up while he stops and removes his skis. Thanks to the way the combat rules work, the Barbarian and I then kill each other.

While I did get a couple of very bad rolls in that last fight (and rolled a rubbish Combat Skill at the start), I have to say that I'm not convinced that the book manages to strike the right balance between being challenging for readers who've carried across a character from book 2 and being playable for anyone starting with this book. Peeking ahead, I see that if I had survived the fight, I would have had an opportunity to evade the rest of the Barbarians, so my Healing could have kicked in to bring me back from the verge of death before my next battle, so maybe my failure is down to bad luck rather than sub-optimal design. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I'll have much chance of winning the next couple of Lone Wolf adventures, either. At least there's a partial levelling effect due to come in with book 6...