To Choose Another's Form and Make It Thine

I'm getting out of the pretty dismal state I've been in for much of the year. It's unlikely that I'll be able to get back to the 'three posts a week' routine that used to be standard, but this should be the point at which updates to the blog start to become more regular again.

For around a decade after moving away from Swansea, I continued to visit it quite frequently. During one of these visits, there was an afternoon on which I found myself at a loose end. I'd done the rounds of the local charity shops and found little of interest in the book sections, and those of my friends who still lived there had jobs, and were at work, so I couldn't interact with any of them until evening. Then I remembered the little library on Bernard Street (which Google Street View reveals to no longer be a library, alas). I'd been a regular customer there during the year after graduation, and in the course of my visits I had often spotted a copy of one of the FF books that came out after I stopped collecting the series. Back then I'd always left it on the display stand, as that was one of the periods when I was most strongly 'off' gamebooks. Nevertheless, the cover image, depicting sinister pumpkin-headed figures stalking through the rain, had lodged in my memory, and by the time of this visit, my interest in the genre was waxing again, so I decided to fill at least some of the time I had on my hands by going back to the library to see if the book was still there.

It wasn't. I don't know whether it had been withdrawn or just borrowed by a member, but either way, it had left the building. Indeed, I never did get my hands on a copy of that particular book until the discovery that got me back into gamebooks big-time. But tucked away in the little alcove where they kept the children's books, there was one book with a spine of that distinctive green, and it was one I'd never seen before, so I took it, found a chair, and spent until close to closing time investigating Keith P. Phillips' sole contribution to Fighting Fantasy, Siege of Sardath.

I attempted the book (without dice) twice, on both occasions falling victim to a flock of the villain's winged minions. I also flicked through the book in search of particularly juicy-looking deaths, and was none too impressed to find that there were a lot of very similar-looking bad endings. It wasn't a bad book, and it enabled me to fill that afternoon, but it didn't grab me enough to make me want to find another copy and play until I beat it, and I pretty much forgot about it until I wound up deciding to collect the whole series.

Siege was actually the FF book it took me longest to acquire once I'd begun collecting in earnest. In the end, it was the online gamebook trading network that enabled me to get a copy of the book. I got it from someone in Australia, in exchange for a copy of Steve Jackson's novel The Trolltooth Wars, and received it 50 weeks (to the day) after I bought the seven FF books that got me back into the series in the first place. I have yet to win it (it has a decidedly narrow 'true path'), but I have been making gradual progress towards finding out what needs doing. Mind you, my previous online attempt at it was something of a shambles.

I'd be interested to see my character's CV, if such things existed on Titan. An adventurer (as usual), but also a councillor. Skilled in forest lore (handy, as the town of Grimmund, where I fulfil my civic duties is right next to the Forest of Night), and a friend of the local Elves. The adventure starts with a dream that has me fleeing a malignant forest and reaching a mountain that splits open to disgorge a vast army of dark soldiers. This is, of course, significant - dreams in gamebooks (and fiction in general) are rarely just the sort of random strangeness that goes on in most people's heads while they sleep.

A Council messenger wakes me with a summons to an emergency meeting. A traveller from Zengis, by the name of Morn Preeler, has just arrived bearing ominous news. Apparently the Forest has become hostile, cutting Grimmund off from the city of Sardath. The paths have become overgrown, or blocked by Giant Spiders' webs, while the aquatic Slykk and unspecified monsters have made passage by river impossible. The rest of the Council wish to respond with fire, but I protest, citing the balance of nature and expressing my conviction that the source of the threat is from elsewhere. Preeler suggests that he can convince me of the truth of his claims with a more detailed account of his experiences, and the two of us adjourn to a separate room where he can recount his tale at length. As it turns out, he doesn't have a lot to say, but it does end the background section on a magnificent cliffhanger: 'When I was travelling through the Forest, I was accosted and killed by a powerful creature. He then assumed my form and came here in order to kill the only person left in the Forest who had any chance of thwarting the plans of his people!'

So what does the only serious opposition to the villains look like, stats-wise? I shall be allocating dice because I know of one rather nasty fight that I shall have to get into if I want even a shot at winning.
Skill: 12
Stamina: 15
Luck: 10
If I'd taken the dice as they fell, Skill and Luck would have been the other way round. When (if) I get to that fight, I'll keep an eye on the rolls and see how it would have panned out for a character 'as rolled'.

Preeler's killer/impersonator grabs my Council ring, the one thing on me that he wouldn't be able to duplicate, and starts to transform into a bat-winged, dark-taloned monstrosity. Every time I've attempted this book before now, I've fought the impostor, but earlier this year I learned that fleeing is apparently the better choice, so I'll try that for once. I dash back towards the Council Chamber, the fake Preeler gives chase, and the fall of the dice determines that he catches up with me and I have to fight anyway. Great.

Because I ran and he pursued me, we grapple rather than use weapons, and the initial round of combat inflicts no damage, but determines who gets the advantage. My higher Skill prevails, enabling me to break free choose what to do next. Running would mean another roll like the one that went so poorly, so I try to capture my opponent. That too involves a round of damage-free combat (two, in fact, as the first is a tie), and I successfully subdue him for long enough to get my sword at his throat. I invite him to surrender, and he takes his own life to prevent interrogation.

Examining the corpse, I note that it is like a Dark Elf in some regards. I retrieve my ring, and search the impostor's pack, finding three bottles with numbered labels, each obviously a component of something magical. Their precise function is unclear, but as two of them have been taken from the bodies of creatures with powerful natural camouflage abilities, it's almost certainly something to do with impersonating others.

I return to the Council Chamber to point out the flaws in the faux-Preeler's argument, and explain that I'm going to have to seek out the real enemy single-handed because it is the gamebook way. I then get some rest and, as the passage of time has a part to play in the outcome of the adventure, update the 'Day of the Week' check. As I prepare to set off, the leader of the Council gives me a four-leaf clover for good luck (also providing a non-obvious way for the book to check on whether or not 'Preeler' is still alive and able to impersonate me).

Before leaving town I call on my old friend Liam Astromonius, the local astrologer. He has been unable to discern anything about my future, but mentions that he has yet to try one hazardous ritual, which no non-magician has ever witnessed and survived. Sounds like a laugh, so I tell Liam to proceed. Though displeased at my risk-taking, he invites me into his spell chamber, where he uses a silver sceptre to knock on a mirror three times. Rather unimpressive, as dangerous rituals of great power go. Still, it works, summoning a divine messenger known as a Suma, who advises me to seek a tomb in the Forest, and warns that I will need an amulet. In the accompanying illustration, he's wearing an amulet like the one I seek, which for some strange reason hangs down at a weird angle. For years its positioning relative to the frame of the mirror (combined with its roundness) made me think it was a door-handle, but then I noticed the chain it was on. And remembered that mirrors don't generally have door-handles.

As I'm leaving the village, a horse-drawn wagon emerges from the Forest, and the driver asks if I want to buy any of his potions. Considering the trouble people have had getting through the Forest of late, I find this suspicious, and tell him I'm not interested. He gets desperate, admits that he only pretended to have just come through the Forest to give the impression that his wares were fresher than they are, and offers me a free gift if I'll buy something from him. I accept this offer, and he hands over a large bottle of a mystery potion - even the trader doesn't know what it actually does, though he is aware that it's harmful, and advises me to throw it at something hostile.

Turning my attention to his wares, I notice that a couple of substances are numbered according to the same system as the bottles I acquired from the late not-Preeler. Indeed, one of them is identical to the contents of the first bottle. The other, Powdered Pegasus Feathers, is not cheap, and doesn't look likely to be of use in an instant disguise potion, so I disregard it in favour of phials of Snapperfish Oil and Sleeping Draught. I could also afford a potion or two, though most of the ones in stock are different strengths of Love Potion, numbered according to potency. The strongest variant is number 5 (not 9), but if I get number 2, I can also afford a Potion of Fortune, which may be useful if I wind up needing to use Luck a lot.

Once I've made my purchases, I carry on to the harbour, which shows serious signs of neglect. My boat is still in usable condition, so I set off along the River Sardath. Someone has cut down the rope bridge across the river, but I have no trouble navigating around the remains. When darkness falls, I stop at a handy clearing and settle down for the night. This leads to one of the more annoying aspects of the book - a decison (and not the only one) that shouldn't be offered, as my character knows the best course of action. But the choice is still there, and picking the wrong option will lead to mockery and punishment. Having learned from past errors, I now know as much as my character as regards these shouldn't-even-be-a-choices, but the whole 'Why did you do something you know to be so stupid?' thing just makes me want to ask the author, 'Well, why did you suggest I might want to do it if I knew it was such a bad idea?'

While preparing to make camp, I see two winged creatures landing somewhere to the south-west. I think this is a point at which the narrowness of the 'true path' through the book kicks in: I will need to go to where they've just landed, but if I do so right now, I suspect that I'll miss out on something important or essential, so I just turn in.

During the night, I wake to find that a Giant Spider is approaching me with hostile intent. Will shooting an arrow at it help at all? Not really, as this is a Giant Spitting Spider, and my taking time to draw, load and fire the bow gives the Spider an opportunity to spew a mass of web at me. My Skill is high enough that I'm not immobilised by the web, and can extricate myself in time to fight off the assailing arachnid, but it's a little tiresome that my detailed knowledge of the Forest's fauna failed to alert me to the Spider's capabilities back when it would have been useful to know.

Continuing on my way the following morning, I see signs that I am being watched by amphibians. My boat's rudder gets tangled in weeds, which my forest lore skills enable me to recognise as River Bloodweed - just after I stick my hand into the water and lose about an armful of blood to the vampiric vegetation. The suggested ways of dealing with the Bloodweed include at least one more 'as you are well aware, that is an idiotic thing to do' option, but I think that may be the last one.

A little later I become aware that I am being watched again, but the creature spying on me fails to notice that I've noticed it. I could try shooting at it, but as I have yet to see any clear signs of hostile intent, I think attacking would be premature. My watcher submerges, and I carry on until I reach undisputed Slykk territory, at which point several of the batrachian humanoids surround me. Their leader indicates to the others that they should not attack (yet), and makes gestures that could be interpreted as either a desire for non-hostile interaction or a challenge to a duel. I go for the more diplomatic response, and a Slykk seer named Rurkk uses his limited grasp of my language to translate the ensuing dialogue. It transpires that their tribe was also infiltrated by one of fake-Preeler's kind, which Rurkk was able to identify as an impostor. Rurkk gives me the one item they found on the body, a leather-wrapped bundle, and the Slykk all depart.

Opening the bundle, I find it to contain half a dozen ivory squares with patterns carved on them. They're represented in an illustration, as figuring out the correct way to fit them together is a puzzle. I recently scanned the relevant page, as removing it from the book and cutting out the squares would deprive me of section 277, which may be an important one. With the help of a little three-dimensional thinking, plus a spot of image-rotation in Paint, I manage to line up the carvings in the right way, and some of the shapes formed look a lot like numbers, so I turn to the section indicated.

The shapes also resemble letters, and my character says the word that they spell out. This is, incidentally, the name of one of the big bads from an epically cheesy fantasy saga I read back in my teens, and I can't help but wonder if Mr. Phillips read it too, as the entity summoned by my speaking the name is a similar sort of creature - though constrained to assist me, rather than being something I have to fight. He's invisible to everyone but me and Demons, and will fight alongside me in any combat unless I tell him not to. Given that:

1. He takes a set amount of damage every time he aids me in battle
2. He cannot be healed, and 
3. I failed my most successful attempt at this book to date on account of not having his assistance

I think I'll try to keep him out of all but the most dangerous fights. No point in wasting him on a bunch of Skill 6 no-hopers.

At this point I think the wisest course of action would be to leave the river and start heading towards where the winged creatures landed last night. Along the way I find some healing herbs, which I add to my inventory. Towards dusk I reach the Elf-path through the Forest, which leads to the village of Ash Cleeve. Knowing how Elves tend to react to incursions into their territory, I stop and wait to be met. While waiting I think about Sorrel, the Elf who taught me archery and forest lore in return for swordfighting lessons, in the course of which he acquired a scar. I can only guess that either he wanted a scar in order to look tougher or I was about as good a sparring partner as he was a teacher of how to recognise Giant Spitting Spiders and River Bloodweed, because there's no real need for training in swordplay to result in a gash across the eye.

The anticipated reception committee arrives, headed up by Sorrel, who accuses me of being an impostor and has the others aim their bows at me. Except that the illustration shows the scar to be over the wrong eye, indicating to any attentive reader that Sorrel is no more Sorrel than Preeler was Preeler. Convincing the other Elves of this could be tricky, though, so I decide to simplify matters by shooting fake-Sorrel right in the giveaway. While slow to react to the sight of me getting out my bow, loading an arrow, and firing at their leader, the Elves respond pretty much instantaneously when the wound causes not-Sorrel to revert to his true appearance, and in seconds he's dead. Apologies follow, and I'm given a Snake Ring with a doubtless significant number of coils as compensation.

Another two of those flying creatures, named Black Flyers by the Elves, swoop down into the Forest, and tonight I do investigate. After a while I come across them attempting to force open a stone door set into a mound. Up close I can see that they look a lot like not-Preeler did when he shed his disguise. I remember from past attempts at the book that if I spy on them for a bit, they'll attempt to blow the door open with some kind of explosive, only to have it backfire and spread them across the clearing. But is there anything useful or important to be gained by attacking them before they can save me the need for combat? There's only one way to find out... FIIIIIGHT!

Even without the assistance of my monstrous companion, I have no trouble defeating them. Alas, as the second one hits the ground, he breaks the explosive he was carrying, and I only just have time to get out of blast range, so there's no loot to be had from this fight. At least I know for next time.

An engraving on the door indicates the mound to be the tomb I was advised to seek, and warns of a dire fate for intruders. On account of the Suma's message, and the fact that the Black Flyers have made more than one attempt at breaking in, I try to get in anyway. Rather than waste time searching for a secret entrance, I simply bash on the stone door a few times, thereby inadvertently performing the same rite that Liam did back in his spell chamber, which happens to be the way of getting the door to open. Believe it or not, that's actually the least ridiculous way of finding out how to gain access to the tomb!

Inside I find an upright sarcophagus with no lid, containing the mummified body of the seer Khornu Wych, dressed in ornate robes and wearing an amulet. Not the amulet I saw on the Suma, but I have to take this one in order to be able to get the one I actually need. As soon as I remove it, the body crumbles to dust and Wych's ghost begins to appear in its place. Through the translucent form of the manifesting spectre I catch sight of the outline of a secret door in the back of the sarcophagus, but at the moment I can't get to it without coming into contact with the ghost, which would not be good for my health. Lacking a weapon capable of inflicting damage on such an entity, I retreat to the tomb entrance, which has closed behind me. Gloating, the ghost advances on me, and I dodge around it and into the now vacated sarcophagus, pushing open the secret door.

As I step through, part of the tomb collapses behind me, blocking off  the way back. The good news is that that somehow prevents the ghost from coming after me. The less good news is that there are no other exits from the chamber into which I have stepped. Better news is that the chamber does contain Wych's real treasure: two goblets of liquid, a shiny silver shield, and a golden amulet engraved with an image of a Brain Slayer on fire. That's the amulet I need, so I take it. It's made of solid gold, and consequently rather heavy, and wearing it carries a Skill penalty. Oddly, just carrying it in my backpack circumvents the penalty, but the amulet's effects only work when it's worn, so if I survive to the endgame, I'll have to try and guess when I've had my last fight/Skill check, so I can don the amulet before the confrontation in which I need it.

Incidentally, I had to succeed at a Skill roll in order to spot that secret door, and only passed by a narrow margin. Apparently, if I'd already been wearing the amulet when the ghost turned up (yes, I know that I couldn't have been because of the sequence of events, but that's irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make), I would have been unable to make out the outline of the doorway on account of the weight hanging around my neck.  Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Enough ranting. time to get back to the treasure. As I recall, the contents of one goblet are beneficial, while what's in the other will harm me. Can I remember which is which? Yes, I get the right one, which restores the Stamina I lost to that weed way back at the start of the day. So, ignoring the unhelpful drink, that leaves only the shield. Which is so shiny that there's a Mirror Demon in it, and as soon as I reach for the shield, she is summoned, emerging from the reflective surface to attack.

Being a Demon, she can see my otherwise invisible companion. Who apparently has another number associated with him, apart from the one that helped me to acquire his services, as there aren't enough sections in the book to use that one in the calculation that will identify the section to which I should be turning at this point. Oh well, at least I know where to look to find what I must have missed... Ah, he's 'the Twelfth and Last of the Veiled Guardians'. That detail could and should have been made less easy to overlook.

The Demon attempts to persuade the Veiled Guardian to abandon me and side with her, but it turns out that the only way he can be released from his exile is to die in my service, and he attacks her. I'm okay with his getting into this fight, as it's the nasty one I mentioned earlier - if I were her opponent, she'd only need to win one round of combat to defeat me. And as she does win the third round of her fight against my proxy (who, coincidentally, has the same Skill and Stamina that I do), only his having taken my place prevents the adventure from ending here.

When the Demon dies, the shield shatters, revealing a tunnel that leads out of the mound. The rest of the tomb starts to collapse, so I make a rapid exit, having to knock three times again when I reach the far end of the tunnel, and emerging into the Forest just before the whole structure caves in.

I spend what remains of the night asleep, but nightmares about Colrhyn, another friend, keep me from getting much rest. Suspecting that he is in some kind of peril, I spend the whole of the next day heading towards his home, only covering about two thirds of the distance before it starts getting dark. Considering how hostile the Forest is supposed to have been made, travel through it has been mighty low on incident.

Anyway, I make camp for the night, sleep better, and wonder if the nightmares were not premonitions but a consequence of the run-in with the ghost. Having come this far, I keep going just in case, and have a run-in with a Giant Wolf Spider. It's okay, Veiled Guardian, I can handle this opponent myself. Right? Right - I take one wound, but nothing serious.

Further along I reach a fork in the path, and the map in the front of the book indicates which turning one leads to Colrhyn's home, so I go that way, musing on my friend as I go. I'm distracted by the sight of something red, which turns out to be mould on a log. Then a sound behind me alerts me to the approaching Mould Zombie. Observant readers are likely to notice a distinct similarity between the figure depicted in the illustration for this section and the description of Colrhyn provided when my character started thinking about him.

This is definitely a fight in which I do not want any assistance: in a rather nasty twist, defeating the Zombie too quickly (which is only possible if I have help or use Luck) has lethal consequences. I hit the thing a couple of times, and then discover that the Mould is starting to spread up my leg. Time to see what that Mystery Potion the trader gave me does. I throw the bottle at the main cluster of Mould, which withers where splashed by the contents. What remains of the Mould retreats, not only from me, but also from the Zombie. None too surprisingly, the man revealed by the departure of the Mould is Colrhyn, in a pretty poor state, but still alive, and no longer compelled to attack me.

I give Colrhyn some healing herbs, take him to his cabin to recuperate, and seek his assistance in my quest. He tells me that Corianthus the Storm Giant, the greatest scholar in the region, should have some idea of what is going on. To identify me to Corianthus as a friend, Colrhyn gives me his key to the Giant's library. Before falling asleep, Colrhyn also tells me to help myself to his stuff, so I take a rope and more herbs, and refill my quiver.

Returning to the main Forest trail, I remember the mountain from my dream, and head away from the Forest and towards mountainous territory. It's getting dark by the time I reach the Fangthane Road, so I make camp for the night. In the morning the sound of an approaching wagon wakes me. The driver is a Fangthane Dwarf, on his way to Sardath. I advise him to find somewhere less hazardous to do his trading, and explain some of what's going on in the region. In return, he gives me an Encyclopaedia of Subterranean Flora, just in case I ever need to go underground, and draws my attention to the page on dangerous fungi. Slightly oddly, one of the fungi listed on the page is only actually harmful to Rock Grubs and Giant Spiders, two species not renowned for literacy. They other type mentioned is at least lethal to Dark Elves, but conspicuous by their absence are the sorts of fungus that I should avoid for the good of my health.

I leave the road and make for the mountains, and it is about here that my knowledge of the book becomes hazardously patchy. Up ahead is a steep ridge, so I must detour around it, and going the wrong way is liable to prove fatal in the long run. I'll try west. This path eventually leads to a landing-stage by the River Sardath. Many rafts are moored there, most of them in too bad a condition to be usable. I don't think I even want to risk taking the one exception, so instead I follow the other path leading away from the landing-stage. This leads to a junction, and one of the paths leads to a storm-lashed mountain that I'm pretty sure I need to visit at some point, so I head that way.

After a while the ascent becomes difficult, but I persist until, with a particularly impressive burst of lightning and thunder, a figure in black robes appears in front of me. I show respect, and the being identifies herself as Thyra Migurn (referring to herself in the third person, which is an ominous sign if ever I saw one). She disapproves of my being here, but I risk asking what she knows about the Black Flyers. This causes her temper to flare up, in a burst of lightning that atomises the robes and comes close to injuring me. It turns out that she really dislikes Dark Elves and, upon learning that I oppose them, she provides me with a Lightning Sphere to use against them, then warns me to leave before she gets really annoyed. I descend, and follow the first track I find until I reach another junction. One way probably leads back to the river, and there's an item check on the other path. Could be a 'have you already been this way and taken certain actions?' check rather than an 'if you don't have the Red Gem, you die' one, so I'll investigate.

Well, nothing terminal has happened just yet. I see a cave, with inexpertly concealed tracks leading into it. Possibly left by Dwarfs, though I'm not sure what would make Dwarf tracks easily distinguishable from the tracks of any other footwear-using humanoid race. In any case, I check them out. The cave turns out to be a mine entrance, and I use the crude lift at the back to descend into the shaft. At the bottom, three passages lead on, two of them marked with signs warning of poisonous fungi. The two types listed in the book, handily enough. I think the Dark Elf-proofed tunnel might be worth investigating. The fungi release spores as I pass through them, but I am unaffected.

A couple of Dwarf guards are waiting at the end. They're pleased to see someone from outside, and take me to their leader, Lokimur. He gives me a Red Gem (so I was right about the purpose of that item check) and asks me who I am. I explain my quest in some detail, and he explains that he's gathered the mining community together for mutual protection. They still suffer nocturnal assaults by Black Flyers, and daily attacks by Toa-Suo. I ask him what he knows of Corianthus, and get directions to the Giant's home. There's time for one more question, so I ask about the Toa-Suo. These creatures are from further north, but have been brought here by the Black Flyers, attacking in large groups that can easily overwhelm individual opponents.

A Dwarf brings news of a fresh attack by the Toa-Suo, and I decide to see if I can help repel them. The Dwarfs don't have many archers, so I'll add my bow to their ranks. They have plenty of spare arrows, and I kill an impressive number of the attackers. Towards nightfall, the lead archer has me follow her back into the tunnels. I am advised to stay here until morning, as Black Flyers patrol the region at night, and offer to help keep watch. The duty officer adds me to the rota, and I get a little rest before my shift.

I reach my post just as the guards are welcoming in a near-dead Dwarven refugee. Suspicious, I quietly tell the closest guard about the impostors I've encountered, and he asks the newcomer a few questions. Judging by the way he follows up the questions with a swift warhammer in the face, I'm guessing that that Dwarf was no Dwarf. Either that or he's the viewpoint character of the Dwarven edition of Siege of Sardath, and answering the questions is one of that book's 'present the reader with a choice even though the character would just know what to do' moments.

There's a time check here, but I haven't wasted any time, so when morning comes I am able to resume my adventuring. A Dwarf takes me back to the surface, and I follow the directions to the mountain where Corianthus lives. It's a nice straightforward journey, up until the point at which a Giant Eagle swoops towards me. Colrhyn mentioned that Corianthus' best friend is a Giant Eagle, so I wave the library key at the bird to deter it from attacking. Rather awkwardly, the Eagle indicates that it will carry me to where I want to go, so I ask to be taken to Corianthus.

The Eagle carries me to the roof of a massive castle way up on the mountain. Once I'm on solid ground, the Eagle starts scratching at a trapdoor and screeching. Unfriendly voices from below challenge the bird to come back at night and suffer its master's fate, from which I deduce that things have gone badly for Corianthus, and the beings occupying his castle don't like sunlight. The second of my deductions is confirmed when the Eagle triggers the opening mechanism for the trapdoor, letting light into the room below, and the taunting gives way to shrieks of pain.

I risk taking a look at the suffering intruders, and they're too busy fleeing the light to send any projectiles my way. They are Dark Elves, and one leaves the room by a door to the left, several others going right. I tie my rope to a battlement and climb down. The room turns out to be an observatory, with a telescope pointing at the trapdoor. There are three doors leading out, two of them with signs on them. The lone Dark Elf went into the Games Room, while the others went through the unmarked door, suggesting that the Library is locked. Not a problem, as I have a key. And I'll try the library first because that's probably the best place to learn things.

Being a Giant's library, it has large furniture. I have to climb onto the chair in order to reach the top of the table. On which I find a book, a sheet of paper, and a dish of mercury. The paper is an unfinished letter, from which I learn that the dish of mercury is a method of communication, and Corianthus recently acquired a device to help him create transformation potions. The last paragraph mentions a strange noise from the laboratory, which Corianthus was going to investigate. I'm not sure why he felt the need to note that he'd be away from the page for a bit, as he could just have resumed where he left off when he got back (if he hadn't fallen foul of Dark Elves), with no apparent interruption. This blog post has been written over the course of several sessions, and I'd be impressed if anyone were to successfully guess where I stopped writing last time and started today. Still, 'I'll just go and check' is preferable to the sort of 'Oh no, they've just burst through the door and are coming for me!' nonsense often found as the last line of fictional letters interrupted by the arrival of someone or something nasty.

The book has one page marked, so I turn to that and find instructions for using the Triplex Potion Concocter. I imagine it will be useful to know which ingredient goes in which aperture when I want to make my own potion.

When I focus my attention on the mercury, the pool goes dark and two eyes appear in it. A voice sounds in my head, asking me to whom I wish to speak. I name the leader of the Elves I met in the Forest, and his face appears. When I speak, he hears me, and once the confusion has passed, I explain what has happened since our last encounter, and he reveals that a group of the Wood Elves has reached the mountains, ready to attack the Dark Elves. He advises me to try and get into the Dark Elves' base and free their slaves. The ring I received at our previous encounter changes its size in response to Elven magic (and to indicate that I've had this conversation).

I try using the pool to contact a few others, with varied results. Colrhyn is fast asleep and unreachable. The leader of Sardath's armed forces reports that they're holding off the attackers, but will need help. Corianthus is still alive, but using all his strength to try and resist a Sorcerer, so chat is not an option. To speak with Liam I must pass an item check to establish whether or not I defeated pseudo-Preeler, but this turns out to be the most worthwhile call: the astrologer has been researching the amulet the Suma told me about, and has learned that it absorbs mental attacks, and can be modified to reflect such attacks on whoever made them. When we conclude our communication, I make the necessary changes to the amulet.

The library has two exits - the door by which I entered, and one marked 'Laboratory'. I've not yet seen any instructions stating that I can't return to a part of this castle that I've already visited, but the lab could be a point of no return, so I shall delay entering it until I've done a bit more investigating. I'm not sure exactly how many Dark Elves went through the unmarked door, but the prospect of being outnumbered does not appeal, so I go back through the observatory and follow the lone Dark Elf who went into the Games Room.

My opening the door causes sunlight to stream into the room, forcing the Dark Elf to flee into the shadows. He distracts me with some blather about formal greetings in the Dark Elf tongue, and throws something at the door to close it, after which he attacks me. It's another fight in which I need no assistance. Searching the room, I find lots of gaming paraphernalia of no relevance to the adventure, and a mathematical puzzle that hasn't quite been completed. While it uses higher numbers than usual, it's just another Magic Square, and filling in the missing number causes a secret door to open.

The secret door leads to a storeroom. The Dark Elves might not have been able to open the door, but they still got in by making a hole in a wall, so the room's been pretty thoroughly looted. Not quite completely, though: there's still an intact bottle containing another numbered potion component, and it's one I don't yet have. So now I have four of the things, though (as the 'Triplex' in the title of the Potion Concocter implies) I only need three. Still, the instructions I read narrow down the number of possible combinations to just two possibilities, and one of the substances between which I must choose looks a lot better suited to a transformation potion than the other.

After reclosing the secret door by removing the solution to the puzzle, I return to the library via the observatory and try the door to the laboratory. A hole in the wall leading to a tunnel suggests that the noise which distracted Corianthus was the Dark Elves breaking in. Predictably, the Potion Concocter is here. A previous owner of the book has written component numbers on the machine's funnels in the illustration (okay, so the book suggests doing so, but that doesn't make it any less annoying that it happened), and it looks to me as if the guilty party took at least four tries to get the correct combination. When you figure in the (probable) red herring ingredient available from the trader outside Grimmund, I can see how four different mixes are possible, but it's impressive (and not in a good way) that my predecessor seems to have got every wrong one first. Especially as the names of the different substances provide hints as to their relevance to a transformation potion, making this less of a blind choice than the recipe for Anti-Zanbar Formula.

I put the most likely ingredients into the appropriate funnels, and get a potion out. Drinking it causes me to feel uncomfortable and itchy, and parts of my body try to change shape, but there's no lasting effect until I return to the Games Room, at which point I change to look like the Dark Elf I fought there. I then hide his body in the library, the sunlight in the observatory making me uncomfortable but doing no real harm as I'm still basically human.

Now it should be safe to follow the other Dark Elves. Except that there are at least ten of them in the room just beyond the unmarked door, and while I no longer look human, my having come through the sunlit observatory unscathed enables them to figure out that I'm not what I appear to be, and they attack anyway. Against that many, not even the Veiled Guardian can help me.

A slightly frustrating ending, but I've learned a fair bit about what to do (and a couple of things not to do), so as long as the dice don't let me down, I should be able to get further on my next try, whenever that is. Maybe not much further, as I haven't a clue as to the correct sequence of events beyond the point I reached this time, but I've never made it to the castle before (for some stupid reason I opted to have the Eagle fly me straight to the Black Flyers' base the only previous time I got to show it the key), and I did more right than wrong in the castle. It just so happened that when I did go wrong, I did so in a manner that proved fatal to me.

There Is Too Much. Let Me Sum Up.

Apologies for the continuing low level of activity here. Life stuff is getting in the way.

On more than one occasion I've mentioned the time in the 1990s when I played through the first 12 Lone Wolf books in order, going back to the start every time I failed. I also commented on the 'condensed' version of Flight from the Dark that I created to reduce wear and tear on the book, and said that I'd have posted a scan of it if I knew where it was. I have now found and scanned it, so I'm posting it here. It's not as legible as I'd hoped, but then, it was written in pencil two decades or so ago.

Having found my preferred route through the book (by no means the only viable one, nor even necessarily the best one), I took it as read that I'd make the same decisions every time, and just noted down whatever would still require action on my part on each subsequent attempt at Flight - combat, healing, amendments to my inventory and random number checks. Doesn't look like much when you pare it down to those details, does it?

Actually, the pared-down Flight is even less than what's on the paper shown above. The rather wobbly horizontal line about two thirds of the way down the page marks the end of the first book (as could probably be inferred from the word 'Succeed' that precedes it). Below the line is the start of a similar summary for the second book in the series, abandoned on account of the random encounter that occurs at an early stage. With five different incidents that could occur, most if not all of them featuring further random elements, noting down all the different permutations would have been more work than I was willing to put in. So I just reread the actual book from that point onwards. Which almost certainly required me to make more effort in the long run, but that's not how it felt at the time.

Thinking about it, this is pretty much an early ancestor of the gamebook manager I created in the last decade (and have continued to modify and expand since then). That also contains a condensed version of Flight from the Dark (and around half a dozen of the subsequent books in the series), though the newer version isn't quite as 'simplified' as the original.

Progress.

These past few days I've been quite low-spirited regarding what I've achieved (or not) in my life. This has actually cheered me up a little.

A Mass of Incandescent Gas

As I recall, I had a bit of trouble getting hold of The Dying Sun, book 5 of Smith and Thomson's Falcon series. Unlike most of the preceding volumes, it never turned up at the Book Exchange, so I had to buy a brand new copy, and I'm pretty sure that it was the last one in the series that I acquired - if so, that means I came across and bought the last book in the series before I got this one, and I wouldn't have got them out of order if I could have avoided doing so.

Having more or less successfully returned from a trip to the future (taking in visits to alternate timelines, a different book series, and the interior of a large coconut along the way), Falcon now faces a new kind of challenge: interviewing trainees to pick a replacement for Agent Bloodhound, who has vanished into the next book in the series. Though the selection process is just a prelude to the actual mission at hand: dealing once and for all with Agidy Yelov, the ex-TIME operative who's been a persistent annoyance since turning out to be a villain back at the start of the series. He's now joined up with a criminal organisation known as CYBERNET, and got a few of its members to act as henchbeings.

In other news, completely unrelated to the main plot, contact has been made with a hostile alien civilisation in the 1743 star cluster. They've destroyed several of the Federation's probes, but how am I supposed to worry about the possibility of war with another species when I have dossiers to read? And so many, too - files on the interviewees, records on Yelov's new partners-in-crime, reports on current staff... It's like getting to play a solo version of Bureaucrat: The Paperwork.

As I'll be doing the interviewing before anything else, I start by finding out more about the people I'll be considering. I shan't go into detail about their academy ratings and biographies here, but one thing that did catch my attention is that the different skills and capabilities tested at the academy include deadliness. I'm not sure I want to know too much about the practical assessment aspect of that course.

Next I look up the new villains on the block, as knowing what my team is going to be up against might help me figure out who's best equipped to help deal with the opposition. No point in choosing someone who suffers from anatidaephobia if they're likely to have to face Desmond the All-Seeing Duck.

No duck, though there is a hawk-headed humanoid called Dark Star, who hates humans and has a pet genetically engineered killing thing. Oh, and she escaped from Chicago, which is apparently one big prison in this enlightened era. I wonder why Smith and Thomson didn't make it New York for a hat trick of John Carpenter references, what with their earlier homage to The Thing. Accompanying Dark Star are a human who's become host to a parasite that feeds on the suffering of others and uses psychic attacks to create that suffering, and the only representative of the Thaccoid species (sort of giant predatory spiders with lizard-style heads) in Federation territory. So psychopathic that diplomatic immunity has been waived in favour of a 'kill it with fire' directive. Nice bunch.

While I'm at it, I also check the profiles of the agents under my command. Bloodhound has lost two fingers since I last saw him (just like his counterpart in the alternate reality I visited in book 4), and has since gone missing. Lynx is in hospital after a run-in with Yelov at the Battle of Gettysburg. Chameleon is an inscrutable non-human who can change his appearance at will. Leopard is a human who lost the use of his body in a war, and had his brain transplanted into an android body. Sparrowhawk is from the same planet as Yelov, trained under him, and was very fond of him, but there's no way she could be harbouring any resentment against me for lasering half his face off at the climax of book 1, right?

And now I have to decide which of the three potential candidates I get to add to this crack team. One of them has yet to arrive, so for the first interviewee I must choose between Yellowblades the Rigellian (big blue-skinned guy, scored highest overall at the academy, more limited than the others as regards powers of the mind, but what he does have is stronger) and Sosquilla the Ardann (anthropomorphic squirrel-being, most intelligent candidate, but scored very poorly at unarmed combat and deadliness, has emotion-manipulating powers, doesn't really want the job, but is applying out of a sense of duty).

The Ardann get stressed easily, so I'll interview Sosquilla first: in my experience, pre-interview nerves are worse than waiting-for-results uncertainty. As I'm showing her to a seat, the third candidate arrives. I'm not sure that being 'fashionably late' is a particularly clever thing for a potential TIME agent. Mind you, my character is more concerned about the diplomatic repercussions of this first interview.

What I overheard of Sosquilla's dialogue with Yellowblades suggests that she doesn't think she is the best candidate, so my questions in the interview focus on her confidence and suitability for the job. I finish off by telling her of my most recent adventures, then reading her mind to find out how she reacts to the prospect of such terrifying experiences. Obviously the account I give her is a little different from my playthrough, partly because Falcon wouldn't make the in-jokes I do, partly because 'I climbed out of a big coconut and then broke up a bar fight without endangering myself' isn't really the sort of hair-raising stuff that will help determine whether or not she's psychologically prepared for the dangers of being a TIME agent, and partly because ending up with 'and then my counterpart from an alternate timestream shot me in the face and killed me' would raise all sorts of awkward questions. This 'test' is ultimately inconclusive: Sosquilla is perturbed but not traumatised, and it's not clear how she would react to experiencing such things rather than just hearing about them.

Next I interview Yellowblades, who is discussing the academy's combat simulator with the third candidate when I call him in. He thinks he may be the best fighter in the galaxy, but isn't so sure of himself when it comes to diplomacy. Indeed, interacting with other people seems to be one of his weak points: he prefers weapon practice to socialising. At this point the book presents me with a choice between insulting him and insulting him, so I pick the option that he's likely to find less offensive - while calling him 'an oversized killing machine' is overly dismissive, accusing him of being a spy would be a slur on his honour, and I'm not that desperate to get a demonstration of how he scored 9/10 on deadliness. He calmly replies that there's more to him than just a killing machine, and the rest of the interview is sufficiently uneventful that the authors don't cover it in any detail.

The third candidate is a human known only as 'the Bounty Hunter'. His origins are unclear, but I suspect that he's the product of an experiment to create the ultimate edgy eighties action movie hero. CYBERNET put a hefty price on his head seven years ago, and, well, he'd hardly be attending this interview if any intergalactic low-life had managed to claim the reward, now would he? Maybe he was slightly late for the interview on account of having been ambushed by a gang of cyborg ninjas on the way here. Oh, and he's completely invulnerable to mental attacks because he's Just. That. Hard.

Unlike the other two candidates, he doesn't hesitate to declare himself the best candidate when asked. More surprisingly, he doesn't appear to have a problem with taking orders - I was expecting the old maverick, loose cannon, if-City-Hall-don't-like-it-they-can-shove-it attitude. He seems okay with teamwork, too. The book then has me put some pressure on him, and as with Yellowblades I turn down the more insulting approach, instead suggesting that he might be too dangerous for TIME, and reading his mind to see how he reacts (his invulnerability to mental attacks evidently not blocking non-aggressive telepathy). He's not offended by the suggestion, but just wants an opportunity to prove himself.

That's the interviewing over - now I just have to decide who gets the job. The book warns me that 'The fate of the Federation may hang on your choice', and my memories of a couple of the authors' other books suggest that that's not just hyperbole. I can think of at least three in which not making the right decision at one point guarantees failure at a later stage. No pressure, then...

I'm picking the Bounty Hunter. That invulnerability to mental attacks is liable to come in handy, what with one of the villains specialising in psychic assaults. And it's just possible that the target that CYBERNET have painted on his back might distract one of their operatives at a crucial moment. He's a little surprised, but only for a moment, and then tells me I won't regret my choice.

Can we get on with the adventuresome stuff now? As it turns out, no. Because there's a solar yacht race on soon, and I wind up spending some time watching the preparations rather than getting on with my mission, even though I am never, ever going to participate in such a dangerous sport, ever. On a slightly more relevant tangent, the TIME equivalent of Q Branch has come up with some nerve gas grenades, wrist-mounted mini-lasers, a backpack with a built-in harpoon/grapple launcher, and some homing tranquiliser darts for me to try out.

The head of the Monitoring Section contacts me, and I get a bit short with him when he asks me how things are rather than immediately reporting on situations requiring attention, because this is important work and we don't have time to waste on pleasantries or social niceties (I did remember to switch off the sports channel before telling him off, right?). Anyway, there are disturbances in the timelines at the siege of Troy and deep space in the 27th century. Also, an undercover cop in Cybernet (presumably in the lower ranks of the organisation, where they're not notorious enough for ALL CAPS) reports plans for a raid on a polybdenum warehouse, presumably to procure fuel for Yelov's stolen Time Machine. I need to attend to one of the temporal incursions, and send agents to deal with the other and the impending raid.

The first time I played this book, I went to Troy, which turned out to be something of a red herring (well, there is villain activity taking place there, but nothing that significantly impacts history as I recall), and the agents I sent to Deep Space 2665 weren't able to resolve the situation there, leading to changes in the timeline that brought about the extinction of humanity. I think I'd better handle the space crisis this time. I send Chameleon and the Bounty Hunter to Troy, and give the task of preventing the polybdenum raid to Sparrowhawk and Leopard.

Having presented me with that array of gadgets, the book now limits the number that I can take with me, because picking potentially life-saving equipment is so much more fun when you have no idea what you're likely to need, right? The reason given for the restriction only makes things worse - I only have time to pick up three items (and with the tranquilisers subdivided into types for use against four different series, that's a bigger limitation than it might at first seem). Two sections back I was forced to waste several minutes watching pre-sport blather, and now I can't afford the seconds it would take to grab an extra tranquiliser or two. Based on what I can remember of the situation I shall be tackling, I take the harpoon/grapple-launching backpack, a homing tranquiliser suitable for use against insect species and a wrist laser.

Making the time-jump, I find myself not adrift in the void between worlds but in a dusty hangar. CAIN (my time machine's AI) identifies my location as the Ark, a colony ship full of cryogenically preserved humans sent off in search of colonisable worlds in the M43 star cluster. Only someone has changed the settings, so it's now heading for the territory of that hostile alien race that was oh-so-casually mentioned back at the start of the adventure. Prematurely attracting the attention of aggressive non-terrestrials by dumping several thousand deep-frozen telephone sanitisers in their lap-equivalents is not likely to go well, so I need to put the Ark back on track. There's a time limit, as the ship is moving away from the timehole that brought me here, and once we're out of range, there'll be no way of returning to my own time. Even so, that shouldn't be too much bother, unless whoever it was that tampered with the steering is still around, but what are the chances of that?

Gamebooks, like most TV shows and films (and Windows downloads), measure countdowns in Variable Units of Time. They might describe them as more conventional units such as seconds and minutes, but the duration of a VUT rarely matches the length of any real-world measure of time (nor even other VUTs in the same countdown). I have 11 VUTs before the Ark moves too far and I'm stranded in 2665.

11... Wearing my environment suit in case the ship's hull has been punctured anywhere, I head along a corridor lined with tanks of would-be colonists, eventually reaching a crossroads. Up ahead, the corridor ends at an unmarked door. In corridor networks, the shortest distance between two points isn't necessarily a straight line, but I decide to see if it is on this occasion.

10... A section of the floor is smashed open by the Thaccoid lurking beneath it, and the creature lunges at me. I manage to dodge out of the way of its forelimbs, and it makes a clicking noise that my translator interprets as something along the lines of, 'Oh, ******!' Scuttling backwards, the creature prepares to leap at me again, and I fire the homing tranquiliser. It hits its target, to negligible effect. Having eight limbs rather than six, the Thaccoid is an arachnid rather than an insect, and the tranquiliser is that bit too specifically targeted to interfere with its motor functions. Stupid taxonomy! The Thaccoid attacks again.

9... I manage to dodge it a second time. Drawing my blaster, I open fire - but not at the Thaccoid itself. Instead I shoot the bulkhead behind the alien, creating a hull breach (which raises some questions about the layout of the ship, what with this being a central corridor - I could understand there only being the one wall between me and space if I'd gone to the right or left, but as I went down the middle, I'd expect there to be a whole load of spaceship infrastructure in the way). The atmosphere rushing through the hole drags us both out into space, but while the Thaccoid confirms that explosive decompression is a reality in this universe, I am safe on account of being in my environment suit. Oh, and having a handy harpoon/grapple-launcher strapped to my back, which I can use to attach myself to the ship and climb back in rather than being swept out into the void.  While the ship's Maintenance Droids start repairing the hull breach, I resume my approach to the unmarked door.

8... Behind it is a shaft leading down to the Engineering Deck and up to the Systems Control Deck. I climb the ladder, reflecting that the Thaccoid can't have come here alone, as it lacks the capability to pilot a Time Machine. But has whoever brought it here gone again, or could they be waiting in ambush? I can afford to wait for a couple of VUTs.

7... This ship has many floors. If it were transporting a certain type of fish instead of humans, that would make it a multi-storey carp-Ark.

6... Suddenly Yelov shouts from inside the Control Room, warning 'Thak' that it's almost time for the Symbiont to get back here in the Time Machine. Muttering what the Thaccoid might well consider a racist slur, Yelov steps out to try and find out what's delaying his psychopathic pal. Resisting the temptation to make a weak pun about the Thaccoid's demise, I fire at my nemesis. It's too early in the book for me to kill him, so he spots me and dodges back into the Control Room in the nick of time. By repeatedly firing through the door, he is able to deter me from entering until his ride home arrives, and he taunts me as he does so. Only once he's inside the Time Machine does he stop shooting, and by the time I get to the doorway, he's dematerialising.

5... Checking the ship's instruments, I find that, in addition to redirecting the Ark towards a dodgy neighbourhood, Yelov has also slowed it down, wasting a significant amount of fuel. I need to set the ship back on a course that will take it to the originally intended destination despite the depleted reserves. I can remember which of the three suggested courses is the correct one, but I'm not convinced that one of the wrong options is as non-viable as the authors make out. There's time to check.

4... I was wrong: Smith & Thomson did think it through properly. The most direct route doesn't work because the ship's systems don't have a separate power source to the propulsion unit. At the current speed, the remaining fuel won't suffice to keep the cryogenic tanks, maintenance droids and in-flight movies operational until the Ark reaches M43. And increasing the speed would use up more fuel, so that wouldn't work either.

Programming in the correct course doesn't use up any VUTs, so the countdown no longer matters. The solution to this quandary is to program a course that slingshots the ship around a few suns along the way, thereby accelerating it without expending as much fuel as it would take to boost the ship's velocity without the assistance of a bunch of conveniently located gravity wells. So, having minimised damage to the timelines, I return to my Time Machine and head back to the 31st century.

For some reason, TIME HQ is located a significant distance from the Time Machine parking facilities. It takes half an hour by hovrail just to get to the terminus (and the background section states that 'the longest journey need take no more than an hour', so it must be possible to travel at least a quarter of the way around the planet in the amount of time it's taken me to get part of the way crosstown), and the hovrail for the second leg of the journey leaves from a different level. The lift has just broken down, so I'll have to use the stairs.

The stairs are not enclosed, though there is a low wall on either side to reduce the risk of falling off, and my descent provides the authors with an opportunity to show the readers some of the city of the future. To the left is a Maintenance Droid walkway leading to a hospital, and there's a hovcar landing park to the right. Ahead and up above I can see Highway 1232, and close by is a CYBERNET sniper with a laser, who just drilled a hole in the concrete by my foot.  A careless shot, especially as it only takes the police seconds to respond to any discharge of an energy weapon. Still, it would be possible for the would-be assassin to get off several more shots in those seconds, so I ought to take some evasive action.

What with that wall, and my having seen the blast, the shooter must be somewhere overhead, so running down the stairs or ducking would be unlikely to help me much. There's not a lot of cover on the Droid walkway (and I don't know how the Droids are programmed to deal with trespassing humans), so I think the hovcar park looks like the best place to take cover. Vaulting the wall, I see sunlight reflecting off the sniper's gun, way up on a nearby Communication Tower.

An explosion from the stairwell draws my attention to a second killer, heading up from a lower level. He hasn't yet spotted me, but the first one knows where I am. Time I was elsewhere. But I botch my Evasion Roll, and take a shot in the thigh as I leap behind a hovcar. Further shots from the Tower-based sniper fail to penetrate the hovcar, but they do get the attention of the other guy, whose weapon is powerful enough to blow the entire vehicle away. I try to incapacitate him with a psychic attack, but a second flubbed roll means that I don't succeed, and there's no time to pick up the dice a third time before he opens fire, blowing up the hovcar and incinerating me in the blast.

Oh well, at least the next time I attempt this book, I can gloss over the admin and get straight to the action.

Nothing Vanishes Without a Trace

Apologies for the recent lack of activity here. I still intend to continue with the blog and cover the hundred plus suitable gamebooks I haven't yet attempted here. Life has been busy of late, and I'm struggling to engage with the book I'm currently attempting, which makes me less motivated to make time to press on with it. Sooner or later I'll get back into the right frame of mind.

In the mean time, some of my lost Fighting Fantasy playthroughs have resurfaced. They vanished last year as a consequence of the unexpected deletion of the FF forum on which I started posting playthroughs, and while a few could be salvaged thanks to the Google cache and the Wayback Machine, the majority just didn't exist online any more.

The other day I was doing some file management, and while going through a small stack of floppy discs (yes, I still have some, and a functional drive), I discovered that one of them had a file on it entitled 'FFinorder'. Scarcely daring to hope, I opened it, and found that it contained a back-up of the first sixty of my playthroughs from the deleted forum. Including duplicates of most of the ones I'd been able to salvage anyway, but over half of the ones in the file hadn't been recoverable online. So I've been reposting them at the active FF forum.

To give you something to read while I'm still out of the zone, here are links to ten of those playthroughs, all of which are more substantial than the appropriate entries here. They assume more familiarity with the books than my posts here do, but even so, they ought not to be impenetrable to anyone new to the book.
Steve Jackson's Sorcery! 4 - The Crown of Kings
Here I didn't make it into the Archmage's fortress. I got a lot further there.
17 - Appointment with F.E.A.R.
Here I only made it to about the second fight. I survived to the climax there.
19 - Demons of the Deep
Unlucky rolls brought my adventure to a rapid end here. There, despite several sub-optimal choices, I lasted to the end of the day.
20 - Sword of the Samurai
Here I took the more difficult path, and paid for it. On the easier route, I got a good deal further.
23 - Masks of Mayhem
Not just a rapid failure here, but also one of the most unimpressive endings in all gamebooks. I covered more ground (and ranted some more) there.
26 - Crypt of the Sorcerer
I died in the very first encounter here. I didn't get that much further there, but a playthrough containing almost a dozen encounters still has a fair bit more content than one with just one in it.
27 - Star Strider
Here I only reached the second of the four cities that must be visited. There, I got to all four.
29 - Midnight Rogue
Overconfidence led to early defeat here. An early (non-lethal) botched roll made me more cautious there, and cautious rogues tend to last longer.
30 - Chasms of Malice
As spectacular a failure as book 26 here. Even the rapid and shameful way in which my adventure ended there is an improvement.
43 - The Keep of the Lich-Lord
Even worse rolls than in book 19 truncated my attempt here. The bad rolls were more widely spread there.

I'll try to get another new playthrough up before the end of the month, but can't promise anything.

Things Which Act Against Everything We Believe In

Black Vein Prophecy wasn't the only Fighting Fantasy book to wind up on the sale table in Brown's Books. On another visit to the shop, I saw a reduced copy of Moonrunner, the last of Stephen Hand's FF books. I didn't buy it, though, as I'd not had any related curiosity simmering away in the depths of my mind for more than half a decade, and the cover illustration was not sufficiently enticing to make me want to look inside.

Around five years later, when I'd properly got back into collecting gamebooks, I started using eBay to try and track down the ones I was most keen to acquire. I came across a listing for Spectral Stalkers, which was one of the FF books I most wanted, so I bid on it. The seller had also put up a job lot of the Sorcery! series, but I'd already got one of those books, and wasn't interested in getting an extra copy, so I didn't place a bid on the set. My bid on Stalkers was successful, and nobody bid on the Sorcery! books, so I asked the seller if he'd be willing to sell me just the titles I wanted. He agreed, and also sent me a list of his other spare gamebooks in case there was anything else he could sell me. There was a copy of Moonrunner on the list, and as I was now committed to getting the whole series (by then I'd already added Sky Lord to my collection, and that ranked a lot lower in my estimation than any FF book I merely hadn't read), I asked for that as well. The whole sale went via eBay, so I wasn't breaking any rules against off-site purchases.

As I recall, my first attempt at the book ended when my attempts at pursuing an assassin led to my winding up trapped in a carriage that drove into a river, where I drowned. That's not the only trap that claimed the life of one of my characters: the villain of Moonrunner is a sneaky so-and-so.

I don't think high stats are as essential to victory here as in most of the later FF books, so I'm taking a chance and not customising my character. And I wind up with exactly the set-up I'd have picked if I'd allocated dice, namely:
Skill 12
Stamina 15
Luck 9
That's not necessarily a bad thing - if either of the Stamina dice had wound up going on Skill, I might have had cause to regret taking the dice as they fell.

In this book I also have Special Skills, and can choose four from a list of nine. I'll go for Con, Disguise, Lock Picking and Tracking. The last time I played this adventure online, lack of Tracking caused me to pick the wrong gate and get killed by something nasty and invisible, and I don't want to make that mistake again.

The adventure starts with a clandestine meeting, at which some surprisingly awkward info-dumping takes place. Awkward because my character is a veteran of the War of the Four Kingdoms, who has since made a name for himself by tracking down and capturing war criminals, and yet Guard Marshal Bennet, who is employing me because of these facts, tells me all about the War and the greatest war criminal of all, and I just sit there while he tells me stuff he knows I already know. Surprisingly so because in his previous FF book, Mr. Hand used quotations from in-universe reference books to provide the reader with background detail that would already be familiar to the character, so why not use the same trick here?

Anyway, Bennet has called me in because Karam Gruul, the worst of the war criminals, alleged to have been killed in the Last Battle, has resurfaced. His precise whereabouts is unknown, but he's somewhere here in the town of Blackhaven, and he must be up to something serious to have come out of hiding at all. I accept the job of bringing him to justice without hesitation, as I have personal reasons for wanting to see Gruul pay for his crimes. Personal reasons which will go unexplained until a dramatically appropriate moment, but their existence is established from the start.

Bennet goes on to explain that Gruul is probably involved with a secret society known as the Cabal of the Werewolf. He suggests a few leads to follow up: Matra Ouspenskaya, an inmate at the local asylum, claims to have been a member of the Cabal, there's a tavern where they're purported to hold meetings, and paid informant Silas Entador is likely to have heard if Gruul is in contact with Blackhaven's criminal contingent. Bennet also mentions that he thinks one of his men may be a traitor, so he hasn't told any of them about me. He mentions some things for me in his desk drawer, but is interrupted by a dagger in the back. Someone must have thrown it through the window - which is quite a feat, considering how many floors up we are.

From a certain perspective, Bennet's dying wish was for me to have the letter and money in the drawer. I choose to honour that wish by heading straight for the desk and using my Lock Picking ability to bypass the elaborate puzzle lock on the drawer. In addition to the gold and the letter identifying me as a relative of Ouspenskaya, there's a page from Bennet's diary, mentioning that Entador has identified a Guard named Conrad Zaar as a spy for the Cabal.

The door bursts open and three Guards enter. Predictably, they assume that I'm responsible for Bennet's death, and from their Captain's words I gather that Zaar has set me up. Since Bennet didn't tell any of his men that he was calling me in, I won't achieve much by identifying myself, but my Con ability saves me from having to fight the Guards, who are on the same side as I, if only they knew it. I claim to be in pursuit of the 'Vampiric Shapeshifter' that killed Bennet, and warn the Guards that it could now be disguised as one of them. This shifts each Guard's attention from me to his companions for a moment or two, which is enough of a distraction to enable me to make my getaway.

I think it's time I had a little word with Mr. Zaar, and head for his home. He lives in a mill, but isn't much like Jonathan Creek. Except for his aptitude for devising tricks, such as the portcullis that blocks off the entrance just after I go in. I have a look around, finding some food and a leaflet issued by a group called the Eternal Fraternity of the Rosy Chalice. Either there's a message hidden in the text, or it's been written by the local equivalent of the Time Cube man. Still, the mad blatherings include the name of the tavern mentioned by Bennet, so there may be something of significance buried in there.

If there is, it's too well-buried for a quick analysis to dig it up, so I head down into the cellar, which contains a gargoyle. Not the sentient kind found in some parts of Titan, but this isn't just a bit of ornamental stonework either. Its eyes light up, and a voice commands Zaar to report. I say nothing, and whoever is speaking begins to suspect that I'm not Zaar, but if I say anything, that may confirm their suspicions, so I climb back up to ground level.

The portcullis is still there, so my only remaining option is to check out the loft. It contains nothing of interest, but there is a door leading out onto a balcony. This balcony is right behind the mill's sails, and Zaar is waiting for me on it. He attacks, but isn't much of an opponent, and soon plummets to his death in the mill workings. Lightning blasts through the mill roof, hitting his body and bringing it back to life. Donning a facemask in recognition of his new status as slasher movie-style nigh-unstoppable homicidal maniac, he arms himself with a machete and starts to climb back up. I try to knock him off the ladder with a thrown lantern, and merely succeed in setting him and the mill on fire. A sudden gout of flame consumes the ladder, and Zaar plunges into the inferno below. It's high time I was somewhere else, and there's only one remotely safe-looking way down: to jump from the balcony and try to catch one of the mill's sails on its downward sweep. This tactic works, and I hurry away before the blazing mill collapses.

Following that lead wasn't massively helpful, so I try another, and head for Craven Asylum. Charmingly, this is one of Blackhaven's primary tourist attractions, and it's rumoured that, for the right price, the proprietors will waive such formalities as checking that a potential inmate is actually insane before admitting them. The warden who opens the door to me is a Troll, who pretends he can read the letter and takes me to see deputy director Crabb.

Crabb reads the letter and explains that his superior, Doktor Welsch, is unable to see me himself because he's so busy. I make note of the fact that the trouble that's been occupying the Doktor's attention is in Cumbleside - there may be something worth checking out there. I ask to see Ouspenskaya, declining the offer of refreshments (I'm at full Stamina as it is, and the design on the medallion Crabb wears looks enough like a wolf (or, more to the point, a werewolf) to make me wary). Crabb warns me that Ouspenskaya is paranoid and delusional, apologises for being unable to accompany me, and tells me to follow the signs marked 'Nosh'.

I proceed from his office into a hall. It has five exits, each bearing a sign. There is one marked 'Nosh', but one of my earlier attempts at the book failed because I went straight there and missed a helpful encounter from elsewhere in the asylum, so I'll try another door or two first. 'Wipefeet' is the door through which I just came, and 'Big Trubbull' may well be exactly what it says, so it comes down to a choice between 'Big Laffs' and 'Fat Maggots'. I've never actually investigated the latter before, so this time I'll take a chance and check it out.

Now that's impressively bad taste - it leads to the asylum graveyard. Which is haunted. The ghost tells me to avenge the dead and free the insane, then disappears. I return to the hall and try 'Big Laffs', which leads to a vestibule with a barred door. Beyond that door is the vault that houses the asylum's inmates. Given the conditions here, they'd actually be better off under Care in the Community. Four of the closest ones attack me, but I have no trouble fighting them off. The other inmates cower away from me - except for one very lucid-seeming young man who gives me a locket containing portraits of himself (in better days) and a woman, and asks me to find the woman and give her the locket.

Returning to the hall (without barring the door behind me), I now turn my attention to the reason I initially came here. Behind the 'Nosh' door is a spiral staircase leading down to a cell, which contains the dying Ouspenskaya and something so horrifying that the author can't bring himself to say what it is. A couple of possibilities occur to me, one inspired by the sign on the door, the other by what I know of the final encounter to be had in the asylum. Neither the sort of thing I want to dwell on at length.

I tell Ouspenskaya who I am, and tend her wounds to the best of my ability. She tells me that the Cabal are all war criminals, and the Fraternity is a front for them, then expires with the word 'tavern' on her lips. Turning to go back upstairs, I see Crabb and a large group of armed wardens. Either Crabb is a member of the Cabal, and not pleased to have me investigating, or he's really strict about enforcing the 'no non-family members outside visiting hours' rule, as he has the Trolls drag me upstairs, where they lock me into a darkened, but not unoccupied, room.

As the sound of dragging feet draws closer, a man with a lantern enters from an adjacent room. The light reveals that I'm in a laboratory, but doesn't immediately show who - or what - was moving towards me. The man with the lantern introduces himself as Doktor Welsch, says he hopes I wiped my feet before coming in, and then raises the lantern in order to show me the laboratory's other occupant - Doktor Kauderwelsch. Sort of. After she was killed by some tax-dodging troublemaker, her son, cunningly concealing his true identity by using the pseudonym Fronkensteen Welsch, saved her brain. He has housed it in a new body built from the remains of assorted inmates, but now intends to transplant it into my much more fit and healthy body.

Unlike some, he knows when to abandon a long-standing project in favour of a superior new option.

The Kauderwelsch monster attacks, and while I am engaged in what the book marvellously describes as 'a life-or-death struggle for [my] cranial capacity', the door bursts open to admit a horde of disgruntled inmates, who dismember Welsch's creation. Unconvinced that the inmates will make much of a distinction between friend and foe when they turn their attention to the living, I flee as Bates Welsch attempts to salvage bits of his mother, pathetically exclaiming his filial affection.

Bennet, the Fraternity's leaflet and Ouspenskaya's dying words have all pointed me towards the Last Octopus tavern, so that's where I head next. The sun is starting to come up by the time I get to the docklands area where the tavern is located. Probably a good thing, as this is the part of Blackhaven where a mysterious nocturnal killer known as the Shocker prowls the streets, blowing raspberries terrifying people to death. At this point I have to check for code words, and since the two on the list that I do have were gained as a consequence of attracting the gargoyle's attention at the mill and unleashing bedlam at the asylum, this is clearly where I pay the penalty for being less than discreet in my enquiries.

A man calls to me from an alley. He wears long robes and a veil, and offers a substantial reward if I join him and cease interfering in his plans. A rather obvious trap, which means there's probably a not-so-obvious trap prepared in case I try pretending to fall for it in the hope of surprising him, so I walk straight past and carry on into the tavern. A little awkwardly, just before I go in, the book tells me that if I have the appropriate Special Skill and have found the right costume, I can disguise myself as a noble from Brice, the Kingdom from which Gruul and the Cabal come. As I haven't found the costume, it doesn't matter, but if I did, would it not have made more sense to disguise myself before heading to the tavern, rather than trying a quick-change routine on the doorstep? Especially as I'm hurrying away from the suspicious character in the alley, who could potentially make things terminally awkward for me while I was fiddling with buttons.

Despite the early hour, the place is busy. There's a game going on at one table, so I attempt to join in as a way of mingling with the crowd. It turns out to be a shell game, only instead of the usual walnut shells and pea, it uses thimbles and a gold coin (must be big thimbles or a tiny coin). Wondering if my Con Special Skill will help me see through the trick, I wager a couple of coins. No, it's Sleight of Hand that would eliminate the random element here, so I must rely on Luck. I succeed at the roll anyway, and thus avoid losing sight of the correct thimble. The old man running the game packs up in disgust, but the onlookers are delighted to see someone beat him. I've not exactly been unobtrusive, but at least the impression I've made is a good one.

Moving to the bar, I strike up a conversation with the landlady, and name-drop the Fraternity. My Con Skill comes in handy here, enabling me to convince here that I'm an incognito Brician noble. She gives me a brooch depicting a chalice on a rose, and tells me to leave now, but come back at midnight. Sticking around now she's said that would be counterproductive, so I make my exit, and am immediately accosted by a woman with a monocle. She says I've endangered both of us by going into the tavern, then tells me to accompany her, claiming that now we're together, we should have a better chance of evading Gruul's lackeys. Her willingness to use his name suggests that she's not working for him, so I do as directed.

When we reach her lodgings, she insists that I get some rest. Once I've recovered from the night's activities, the woman (indicated by the illustration to look a lot like Margaret Rutherford) gives me some food and money, and introduces herself as Professor Van Heldenghast, a fellow Gruul-hunter. She explains that our mutual enemy uses a mystic art known as Notura, which has enabled him to live for at least three centuries and would, if fully mastered, provide him with the means to conquer the world. However, half a dozen Notura-steeped artefacts that were recovered from his Tower of Inquisition following his previous defeat are now scattered around Blackhaven, and could provide me with protection against his powers. I have nine hours in which to collect as many of them as possible.

Past attempts at the book have taught me that there's no sure-fire way of knowing which of the items I seek I'll need, and that some of the different kinds of harm they can avert are a lot more serious than others. If I need but don't have the one that can be acquired in Gallows Square, failure is a certainty, so my first port of call is pretty obvious.

As the name suggests, Gallows Square is where Blackhaven's criminals are hanged (when they're hanged rather than given positions of authority). Those who are executed are left on display as a not-very-effective deterrent to would-be lawbreakers, and one of the most recent batch to be executed has the item I seek: the wooden hand he had fitted to replace the hand he lost the last time he got caught stealing. I can't simply take it, though, as there are a couple of Man-Orc Provosts in the square, supposedly protecting the corpses from ghoulish souvenir-hunters, though right now they're more interested in tormenting a beggar. I could try taking the hand while they're distracted, but I think I'd rather rely on the gift of the gab than the quickness of the hand. Besides, my interrupting the Provosts' 'fun' enables their victim to get away, and thwarting bullies is usually a good thing to do. The Provosts don't see it that way, of course, but when I claim to be the City Physician, here to collect a specimen of an impressively advanced case of Bone-Rot, they conclude that interfering with me could be bad for their health, and retire to a safe distance while I help myself to the hand.

Mind you, that's only the first stage of what I must do to get the artefact. The hand still needs activating, and to get that done I shall have to visit Mawn Pretoragus the Necromancer. He lives on the perpetually misty Divil's Lane, in a house that seems to fidget. There is no response when I knock on the undulating door, and when I try the grotesque handle, the door won't open. My lock-picking talents are untroubled by the building's nebulous nature, though, and I soon step through into a darkened area.

A Vincent Price look-alike looms out of the darkness, announcing that Van Heldenghast has offered knowledge in return for the service he will provide. Inserting a flaming wick into each finger of the wooden hand (which he just has - I hadn't even taken it out of my backpack), Pretoragus warns me not to follow him through the Door Beyond, and goes away. I keep very still until he returns, looking drained. Giving me the Hand of Glory, he tells me to go, and I don't hesitate. One item down, but acquiring it has taken up three of the nine hours I had.

Next I head for the Wayside Shrine of Belthegor to try and retrieve the marble mask that's embedded in one of the walls. Unspecified unpleasant fates have befallen everyone who's tried and failed, but the Professor thinks that the cryptic runes on the Shrine may provide the solution. The route there crosses a busy bridge, and in the midst of the hubbub, someone presses a note into my hand, summoning me to an urgent rendezvous in another part of town on Cabal-related business. The lack of a signature makes me suspicious, so I continue on my way.

At the Shrine, my Tracking Skill draws my attention to the fact that five sets of fresh footprints lead to the mask - and none lead away from it. Ominous. More ominous, in fact, than not having Tracking and wondering what I've failed to notice on account of lacking it, as happened one of the previous times I played the book. Not that I shall be sharing the fate of the people who left those footprints, as the runes are a pretty straightforward substitution cypher - and the fact that the name 'Belthegor' includes the letters 't-h-e' makes decryption that bit easier. The first time I got to this part of the adventure, I'd already decoded around half of the message by the time I realised that there are clues to make it even easier in the incomplete magic squares (well, that's what they looked like until their true function became apparent) carved around the mask. Solving the puzzle enables me to get the Mask, but the trip to and from the Shrine has taken up another two hours.

If the distances between locations made any difference to the amount of time it takes to acquire items, I might vary the order in which I collect the next however many I can fit into the remaining hours. That's one complication Mr. Hand chose not to have in the book, though (and having experienced some of the headaches that can result from trying to keep track of such factors while working on my unfinished gamebook The Great Blacksand Robbery, I don't criticise him for making that choice), so I'll let other factors determine my choice of third item.

Gustav Hollmann's Chamber of Horrors is a wax museum dedicated to the macabre, and it seems that in among the replicas of the nasty and notorious there's one genuine item, the Angevin Shroud (a name which suggests that Mr. Hand might not have enjoyed covering the English monarchs of the second half of the 12th century in history lessons). There's a large crowd of morbid thrill-seekers trying to get in (perhaps in part because the Asylum isn't running the usual tours today). Trying to sneak in without paying the entrance fee looks like a lot more trouble than it's worth, so I join the queue and pay the 3 Gold Pieces.

The tour is not particularly enjoyable: the proprietor (who'd almost certainly have been played by Michael Ripper if this adventure had been a Hammer film) and his exhibition have both seen better days, and there's one annoying tourist who keeps boasting about how he'd be a match for any of the fiends who inspired the wax effigies. Eventually we reach the shroud, which is purported to have acquired miraculous powers after being used to wrap the decapitated corpse of a Necrophage. Mind you, Hollmann is obviously sceptical, so I'm able to buy the 'worthless piece of tat' from him for a reasonable price once the show is over.

As I'm heading for the exit with my new acquisition, I hear a scream, and smell charred flesh. In the foyer I discover that some of the others who took the tour with me have had far more of a thrill than they anticipated. Remember Conrad Zaar, the near-indestructible maniac guard last seen plunging into the flames at Weathern Mill? Well, the 'near-indestructible' aspect means that he survived the fire, and now he's out for revenge. He's a better fighter than he was before I first killed him, but the Hand of Glory helps me out a little, inducing drowsiness in my opponent. It drains a little of my Stamina to produce this effect, but nowhere near as much as I'd have lost fighting a clear-headed Conrad.

Once I've felled Zaar, the non-slaughtered tourists rush into the room, some of them congratulating me, others calling for the guards, and that braggart claiming that he could have beaten the maniac with just a lump of wood. A claim that is immediately put to the lie as Zaar revives again and buries his machete in the arrogant twit's back. The other onlookers are dumb enough to attack the unstoppable killer en masse rather than making a swift departure, as I do. If Hollmann survives this, he's going to have a whole new attraction for lovers of the macabre.

All that only took an hour, so I can continue to add to my Notura collection. I head north to the remains of the Olde Gaol. The 'invincible' Demothrax Argolis was buried alive there, bound with a magical chain, three years ago, shortly before the earthquake that destroyed the place. I need to find a way of getting the chain without unleashing Argolis to cause mayhem (and research tachyonics), and the only help I have for figuring out how to do this is an obscure rhyme.

The end of the chain is sticking out of the ground. I give it an experimental tug, and a high-backed chair erupts from the floor, with Argolis chained to it. Her invincibility evidently doesn't prevent decomposition, though her semi-decayed condition doesn't appear to make her any less powerful. Nevertheless, I pull the chain again, and it comes free - as does Argolis. She's one of those ungrateful entities that choose to try and kill whoever frees them, and at this point I have a slight issue with the writing of the book. According to that rhyme, now Argolis is free, I should 'Turn not your face/Nor bind, nor strike,' and I am now offered a choice between turning and fleeing, trying to bind her with the chain again, or attacking. How I'm supposed to fight the Demothrax without striking her is unclear, but that's not quite as self-evidently impossible as turning and fleeing without turning, or binding her without binding, so attacking is the least bad option here. As in the last fight, the Hand helps me, and I manage to subdue Argolis for long enough to hurl her back into the pit from which she emerged. It promptly closes up, and the weight of earth on top of Argolis proves just as effective a restraint as the chain did.

I still have one hour, so I finish off this phase of the adventure by paying a visit to Kiennar's Curiosity Shop. When I mention who sent me here, Kiennar nervously produces a phial of dried blood - all that remains of one of the Vampire Lords of Vannan, with whom my character has some sort of history, mentioned in passing in the book's Introduction. Despite being nervous about the phial's contents, Kiennar smirks as he mentions how much he wants for it - a fair bit more than the money Van Heldenghast gave me. I can afford it, though, so I hand over the money. Kiennar then offers to sell me a cross and a stake for protection, and I have more than enough cash left for both, so I buy them too.

That's my nine hours up, so I return to Van Heldenghast's. She gives me a meal, tells me to spy on the Fraternity meeting at the Last Octopus, and lets me know that she's leaving Blackhaven, as she's done everything she can to help. I set off to the tavern, and hear yelling from close by, indicating that the Shocker has struck again. Investigating could take long enough to cause me to miss what I'm here for, so I stay close to the tavern.

Soon afterwards, several horse-drawn coaches arrive and unload passengers. One of these is the woman depicted in the locket the lucid asylum inmate gave me, so I do as the man requested. Upon learning that her husband was imprisoned in the asylum, she realises that Gruul has been misleading the Cabal, and tells me that he's gone to the ruins of his Tower of Inquisition, at a place named Hope's End. The Fraternity meeting is obviously just a distraction, or at best a sideshow, so I leave the tavern and set off to Hope's End.

Apart from the remains of the Tower, there's not a lot there - just rocky desolation and the occasional pool of steaming brown sludge. I'm only around a kilometre from the ruins when I hear a lot of horses drawing near. In case the riders are more of Gruul's followers, I hide behind a rock. Good thing too, as practically the entire Cabal troops past. Once they've gone by, I continue on my way, and as the ruins come into view, I see that a vast horde of zombies has been assembled to rebuild the Tower, under the direction of whip-wielding Orcs. The whips strike me as superfluous, as I'm pretty sure that zombies feel no pain, but I doubt that the Orcs would appreciate my input on the topic.

Giving myself a convincing pallor with some whitish dust, I impersonate a zombie in order to get to the Tower without attracting any attention. At lest, that's the plan. One of the Orcs lashes me with its whip and orders me to carry a large block of stone to the Tower. The exertion of doing as directed takes its toll on my Stamina, but at least I reach my objective without an alarm being raised.

Two gates lead inside. My Tracking ability enables me to spot which one the riders who recently came this way used, and I emulate their example - this is where not having Tracking got me killed on a previous attempt at the book, as I didn't (and still don't) have the item needed to defeat what lies beyond the other gate. A quick meal before I go through, to restore my Stamina, and then I head on in.

The Cabal members fill a hall. Up on a high balcony is Radu, a Magus I could have encountered if I'd followed a different route to get this far. Since I didn't, it's a little odd that I know who he is, but that's a pretty minor niggle. Radu is showing off Gruul's Ethereal Projector, a Notura-powered WMD which he plans to use to massacre the inhsabitants of my homeland's capital city. Needless to say, I do not approve, and start shambling towards the pillars supporting the balcony.

Somehow the landlady from the Last Octopus sees through my disguise, and alerts her fellow Cabalists to my presence, but not before I've got close enough to the balcony to spot the secret door beneath it. I hurry through and, finding no way of locking it, dash up the spiral stairs behind it. My pursuers aren't fast enough to keep me from reaching Radu, and I seize him and demand that he take me to Gruul. He laughs, swells up, and bursts, thereby revealing himself to be just a disguise that Gruul (who bears a regrettable resemblance to a Fu Manchu-style villain) was wearing. This twist might actually have some impact if I'd known of Radu for more than the past minute or so, but as things stand, it's all rather pointless.

Is it worse when the dodgy ethnic stereotype is the unnecessary costume?

Gruul now proceeds to use his Notura against me. As I have five of the six protective Wards, I shouldn't be in too much trouble here, but it depends on how the dice fall. Gruul starts by hurling a bolt of energy, which is deflected by the Shroud. As I move closer, he creates a Force Wall that keeps me from getting to him, but the Mask keeps me from being harmed by it. Things then get a bit awkward, as the book doesn't address the issue of rolling the same number more than once while determining Gruul's attacks. Does he recast spells that have already failed once? And are the Wards still effective against recast magic - both the Shroud and the Mask can be used to beneficial effect in circumstances other than this sequence, but each can only be used once, so does that mean that they can only protect me from one Notura-based attack? Well, regardless of whether he cast Force Wall once or three times, he expends his remaining Notura on a mental assault from which I am shielded by the Hand. Out of power, he goes for the Ethereal Projector, but as he activates it, I push him aside and turn the device on the Cabal, destroying most of them.

Taking Gruul prisoner, I drag him outdoors, tie him to a horse, and ride away from the remaining Cabalists and the zombies. Along the way, I explain why I'm so intent on defeating him: back in the war, I was captured by the Brician forces, and Gruul experimented on me to turn me into a nocturnal beast under his control. While a cure was found for the physical transformation, I still have nightmares about the experience. Upon learning that I was one of his 'Moonrunners', Gruul attempts to reactivate whatever conditioning he used on me, but I'm strong enough to resist (and the Hand prevented him from creating a hacker-style 'back door' in my mind), and give him a slap to discourage further such misbehaviour.

The remnants of the Cabal are gaining on us, but before they can catch up, we meet a patrol of my compatriots. The patrol are outnumbered, and the captain asks me to help, but I can't risk allowing Gruul to fall back into the hands of the Cabal. There's nothing in the text to say that I can't hand over any still-working Wards of Notura to help even the odds, though, so I'm saying that I let him have the chain, which can be used to immobilise one opponent - not much help, but better than nothing.

However the patrol's fight with the last of the Cabalists goes, I don't face any further trouble while taking Gruul to face justice. He is tried, found guilty, and sent to prison for the remainder of his wretched existence. My work done, I quit the bounty-hunting business and do my best to enjoy a peaceful retirement with my family. At least until Conrad turns up again...

For the most part, Moonrunner is a very enjoyable horror/fantasy adventure. There are plenty of viable paths through the book, and a number of suitably nasty-looking encounters I missed in this playthrough (including a trip to a plague village, a chance to go grave-robbing with the local equivalents of Burke and Hare, and a run-in with an anthropomorphic serpentine assassin straight out of The Reptile). Towards the end, though, the book does become weaker. I've already covered the potential irrelevance of the twist concerning Radu's identity, and the unclear rules on rerolled numbers during Gruul's Notura onslaught. Beyond that, the concealment of the 'Gruul turned me into a monster' aspect of my character's backstory until the very end of the book is a bit of a cheat, and while I can see the dilemma Mr. Hand was trying to create with the final choice - sacrifice some good men or risk allowing Gruul to escape and resume his destructive activities - it comes across as being rather anticlimactic in the book. And the lesser of two evils is still an evil, so for me, at least, the happy ending is soured by the necessity of abandoning the patrolmen to their fate.

By the way, if there is an actual concealed message somewhere in the Fraternity leaflet, and anyone has ever figured out how to find it, I'd be interested to know about it.

That's a Very Dumb Thing You Did Just Then

Another April 1st, another not-so-serious Tunnels & Trolls adventure. Rick Loomis' Solo for the Intellectually Challenged (aka Solitaire for the Intellectually Challenged aka Solo Adventure for the Intellectually Challenged aka Solitaire Adventure for the Intellectually Challenged - all four titles occur once within the book) is one of three adventures included in book 24 of the Flying Buffalo solo adventures range. As with every other post-20 adventure, I got it on eBay.

In the introduction, Mr. Loomis points out that most gamebooks penalise players who make stupid decisions, often with fatal consequences for the character. As this is liable to put off that proportion of the player base that likes making stupid decisions, he wrote SftIC to cater to them. Practically every option offered within the adventure is blatantly idiotic, and a lot of the fun of playing is in finding out how the outcome will be logical(ish) but nowhere near as catastrophic as you'd expect. The first time I played it, my adventure ended when I drank the contents of a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones, as a result of which my character was transformed into a pirate and went off in search of a more ocean-based adventure.

Not that it's likely to matter, but I'll roll up my stats anyway.
Strength: 9
Intelligence: 8
Luck: 11
Constitution: 9
Dexterity: 8
Charisma: 11
Speed: 4
Not a bad fit for this challenge, if not quite as sub-par as would be ideal.

My character is a sheep-herding peasant somewhere in the Blue Mountains. One morning I happen upon a cave, with a sign over it. It warns that there's a Dragon in the cave, and anybody who enters will die. This is clearly my chance to become a Great Hero, so I enter the cave. Someone has walled off its depths with rocks and mortar, but a rusty door is set into the wall. On the door is a glowing lock. I reach for it, and feel a strange tingle in my hand. The hairs on the back of my hand stand up, and the tingling grows in intensity as I get closer to the lock. There's clearly something very interesting going on here, so I grab hold of the lock to find out more.

It comes off in my hand. I pocket it, as there's probably a wizard somewhere who'll pay good money for metal that does such interesting things. The door opens with an appropriate creaking noise, and I see only darkness beyond. They (whoever 'they' are) say it's always darkest right before the dawn, so walking into the dark should make it get light, right?

I trip over a bone, quite fortuitously, as it turns out, since that causes the blow aimed at my head by some unseen assailant to miss. In the course of attempting to get back up, I manage to stumble into a hole in the ground, which turns out to be the mouth of a chute leading to a brightly lit cavern. The cavern is full of treasure, but after grabbing a few precious stones, I get distracted from the valuables by other features. There's the potion bottle I mentioned before, a rope with a sign reading 'alarm', and a scorched and bloodstained altar festooned with gargoyles and arcane runes, which looks as if it could be a handy stepping stone for getting the glowing sword with the letters 'E.V.I.L.' on the hilt that hangs above it.

An alarmed Dragon will probably get careless, so I pull the rope in the hope of improving my chances in the fight that must be imminent. But I have misinterpreted the function of the rope, which summons a yellow-skinned, blue-haired creature known as Larm, who offers to grant me a wish. Though tempted to laugh at his hairstyle, I decide that this is too good an opportunity to waste, and wish for a sandwich. Not just any sandwich, though. One with roast beef  in. Larm grants my wish (and takes my lunch).

Now that I have the sandwich, I clamber onto the altar and take the sword. A spark of static causes me to overbalance and fall off just before a bolt of electricity strikes the altar, and the sword falls beside me. A tall, muscular man with a beard and armour introduces himself as Edgar Victor Ichabod Lodz, and tells me to hand over his sword. I hand it to him, hilt first so as to keep him from thinking I'm attacking, and thereby discover that the blade is sharp enough to cut my hand.

Lodz tells me there's a bottle of healing potion behind me, but I ignore that and demand a reward for finding his sword for him. He offers to cast a spell that will give me good health for the rest of my life, but I have to close my eyes and turn round before he'll cast it. I tell him I'm not interested in such a dull reward, and he laughs and walks off.

Five guards with crossbows and spears burst into the cavern and call me an intruder. I offer to share my sandwich with them. It's got roast beef in, you know? They find this highly amusing - so much so that they forget to frisk me for stolen valuables before forcibly ejecting me from the cave. So I never did get to fight that Dragon, but I end my first adventure as this character sufficiently well-off that I can buy some decent adventuring gear and continue my endeavours to become a Great Hero some other day. You have been warned.