We're in Cities at Night and We Got Time on Our Hands

Back in the mid-1980s, when I would habitually look at random pages of gamebooks on store bookshelves, one series that frequently got me to sneak a peek but never grabbed me sufficiently that I chose to add any of it to my collection was Plot Your Own Horror Story. The variety of nasty endings appealed, but I was put off by the lack of stats and the fact that some of the decisions determined not what my character did but what happened next.

As far as I can tell, the series is not particularly well-regarded within gamebook fandom. The books skew towards the Schroedinger end of the spectrum, and the resultant lack of consistency can affect tone as well as plot. To be fair, I have also seen it argued that they should be considered a separate subgenre within interactive fiction, using the gamebook formula to create a crude simulacrum of cooperative storytelling rather than 'an adventure in which you are the hero'. The series title supports that reading, actually.

One quirk of the series is that each page mentions the number of the page from which you just came, which is something of a bonus for the sort of reader who likes to leave a finger marking the previous section in case they chose poorly, or for those who enjoy searching for gruesome death paragraphs and take an interest in the sequence of events leading up to them. This feature also makes it a good deal easier to confirm if you've made a mistake and turned to the wrong section, though it doesn't help much with trying to remember where you just were so you can figure out where you should have gone.

A while back, in the course of browsing for second-hand books, I found a copy of book 2 in the series, Hilary Milton's Nightmare Store, which jogged my memory. While some of the other titles in the series turned up all over the place, I only ever came across a brand-new copy of Store in a bookshop near the end of Tunbridge Wells High Street. And browsing through it for inventive demises had led me to an ending that created a more powerful sense of unease than I got from most of the horror stories I read when going through that phase of my teens.

I'm not going to describe it here, because those recollections led to my buying the book with a view to blogging about it here, and as I'm just about to embark on my first ever proper attempt at the book, I might end up reaching the ending in question. I hope to find a route through the book that doesn't end badly, but one other detail I remember clearly is that the choice that leads into that particular ending has no good outcomes, so if I do wind up at that particular 'doomed if you do, doomed if you don't' section, I'll pick the option that so troubled my younger self.

My character hails from a small town in Mississippi, but I'm currently visiting relatives in Atlanta. This goes well until the day when both my uncle and aunt have commitments in the evening. Rather than leave me (their) home alone, my uncle suggests that I spend the evening in Wallenberg's department store, and gives me a little money to buy something for myself and a gift for my little brother. The store seems to be bigger than all the shops in my home town combined, and after spending some time exploring it, I sit down on a recliner in the TV display area. Having worn myself out, I doze off, and nobody notices me at closing time (hey, it was the eighties).

Waking to find myself in a deserted store with minimal lighting, and checking my watch to find that it's a good three quarters of an hour after my uncle was due to collect me, I react in a commendably level-headed manner. First I head to the office, hoping to be able to phone my aunt from there, but it's empty and locked. The phones at the counters are all dead, which alarms me until I conclude that there must be a master switch that cuts them off when the building is (supposedly) empty of people. The front door is also locked, and when I attempt to push down on the locking bar, it causes an unpleasant buzzing noise. My worry that it could be part of some security set-up that'll give me an electric shock if I don't let go seems a little fanciful, but maybe there's a sub-clause to the right to bear arms concerning the right to fry intruders.

Remembering having seen a telephone booth on the second floor, I decide to look for that, which is when things start getting odd. The escalators have, understandably, been shut down for the night, but as I ascend one, it starts moving. In the opposite direction, of course. I increase my pace, since going the wrong way on an escalator isn't that tricky, and the escalator accelerates to match my new speed. Eventually I give up, and just let it carry me down. And when I get close to the bottom, it reverses direction and speeds up again.

Once I'm almost at the top, I take the chance of leaping up the remaining distance, doing so just before the escalator starts to descend again, so I make it to the second floor. Disconcerted by this experience, I get to make my first decision: try to find a fire exit and use that to get out, or just settle down somewhere comfy for the night.

Better to be proactive than passive, I think. Suspecting that the fire escape will be situated in the rear of the store, I head in that direction. This takes me through the women's clothing department, and I am startled to catch sight of a woman staring at me. My alarm fades as I realise that she's just a mannequin (though if I were a little more genre-savvy, I'd know better than to be reassured by that).

Continuing on my way, I bump into a mirror, and hear a noise I can't identify from the left. Moving right, I reach a point at which I can again head for the rear, and catch sight of a sign that I think indicates an emergency exit, though legibility is poor in these conditions. Opening the double doors beneath the sign, I find myself at the top of a flight of stairs. The doors slam shut, and cannot be opened from this side.

A faint light at the bottom of the stairs is all I have to guide me down. As I descend, I become aware that the steps are getting narrower, which strikes me as being poor design. And then I realise that they weren't built that way: one of the walls is moving, and if it continues to do so, I risk being crushed. I need to get off these stairs, and fast. I'm about a quarter of the way down, so turning round and heading back up should take less time than trying to get to the bottom - at least in a manner that won't break a limb or my neck.

Taking the stairs three at a time, I get to the door just as the moving wall makes contact with my shoulder, and the run-up gives me enough momentum to be able to burst through the doors. Phew! Nevertheless, there is something seriously amiss here. The misbehaving escalator was bad enough, but walls should definitely not move like that.

Now I get one of those controversial fourth wall-breaking moments, as I have to decide whether or not I make a new discovery. If I do, it's not likely to be anything good, but just continuing to seek an exit probably won't be significantly safer. Let's introduce an unexpected development!

And... I'm not back in the women's clothing department (yeah, I chose not to go with that gag). The doors have led me into an empty room, which smells of gas, and what meagre illumination it has is flickering. Also, the walls are shaking. Catching sight of another door, I pull down on the locking bar, and the door opens for just long enough to let me through.

I'm outside! Close to the parking lot. Which makes no sense, but we've not exactly been at home to Mr. Rationality since the escalator's shenanigans, so I'm not going to argue with a topographical absurdity that's enabled me to escape from the store. There's a telephone booth close by, so I call the relatives, and within an hour I'm back at their place.

In the morning there's a report on the radio concerning the collapse of a wall in Wallenberg's department store. That's pretty inconclusive. Preferable to a report about the discovery of my corpse under the collapsed wall, though.

So, I survived. As a venture into the mildly creepy and weird, that wasn't bad. Different decisions might have led to something more preposterous, or to a much nastier ending. Talking of which, I'm still not going to describe the ending that so perturbed teen-me, because I'm a little curious about the sharedness or otherwise of my experience. Is there anybody reading this who remembers playing Nightmare Store when they were younger? If so, was there any ending that particularly troubled you? And should the answer to that question also be yes, that leaves just one final question: what was that ending?

Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers in That Quiet Earth

My 'how I first got hold of the adventures' anecdotes hit a new low as I progress to the first mini-adventure from online FF mag Fighting Fantazine. Maybe if the forum where I learned that issue 1 was out hadn't been deleted some years back, I could give some kind of context, but as it is, all I can say is that I saw the announcement and downloaded the issue.

That defunct forum is also where I wrote up my first attempt at the adventure, 'zine editor Alexander Ballingall's Resurrection of the Dead, so I can't link to the write-up. I remember that, as my character started the adventure unarmed, I tried to acquire a weapon, which turned out to be a very effective means of remaining unarmed, getting penalised for my lack of eagerness to confront hordes of undead with my bare hands, and then being torn apart once the adventure forced me to seek out the army of the living dead and endeavour to slap them into submission. Mr Ballingall attempted to justify the Luck penalty with which I got slapped by saying that it was necessary to take away Luck early on so that the reader would appreciate getting a Luck bonus later on. With that kind of policy, it's a good thing that Fantazine contributors don't get paid for their articles.

I'm not sure how balanced the adventure is, so I shall take the risky step of accepting the dice as they fall during character generation. And promptly regret it, as I wind up with:
Skill 7 (currently reduced to 4 as I have no weapon)
Stamina 17
Luck 10
Well, I'm almost certainly doomed. At least the rules do indicate that the 'no weapon' penalty should be disregarded if I have to make a Skill roll: lacking an item designed for harming others does not lead to increased clumsiness or mental enfeeblement, no matter what the NRA might say.

I return to my home town of Bandur Green following a successful trading expedition, and am disappointed to find none of my friends in local hostelry The Frantic Rat. And I was all set to spend the evening telling them my new haggling anecdotes. Nobody's in when I try going to my friends' homes, either: some have even boarded up their doors and windows, and my good friend Karl (who would have loved to hear about how I got that trader to pay 7 gold pieces for goods worth only 6) appears to have abandoned the place entirely.

Eventually I bump into fellow merchant Forvin Louve, who invites me back to his home, but he's so busy talking about recent strange goings-on that I never get the opportunity to regale him with the tale of how I sold an alabaster polecat for almost one-and-a-half times what it cost me. Apparently there have been strange lights and 'odd things' glimpsed on the heath (plus some people have apparently seen haunting noises there, though that could just be sloppy sentence construction), a farmer went missing, as did most of the search party sent after him (the two exceptions having respectively been fatally mutilated and (in the case of Karl) gone mad). Oh, and there was a break-in at the Merchants' Guild just before all this started, but that's undoubtedly completely unrelated to everything else, correlation not equalling causation, and all that... Louve only really mentioned it on the off-chance that it might be helpful for me to learn that all these incidents of which I was unaware happened just after something else about which I knew nothing, even though they're surely not linked in any way...

The following morning I decide to do something about these peculiar happenings, since my skill in getting a good bargain is obviously just what's needed to sort out whatever menace proved more than a match for a group of twelve men. To start, I decide to see if the landlord at the Frantic Rat has heard any useful gossip. Or would like me to tell him about the profit I turned on a cask of Cragrock Cider. The tavern is pretty quiet at this early hour, and I'm surprised and a little concerned to find the text asking if I've gone looking for a blacksmith yet. I don't remember anything worthwhile having come from blacksmith-seeking on my previous attempt, so I hope this is a sneaky way of ascertaining whether or not I've actually wasted half the morning.

Barnock the barkeep is an old friend, so I start by asking what he knows about Karl's misadventures. Being such a good pal, he charges me money for the information, which is delivered in a syntax so changeable as to hint at multiple personality disorder. It turns out that the men who found Karl brought him to the pub, where he scared off half the clientele by babbling about the dead. Given the unfortunate man's constant harping about dead people, the local militia have formed the conclusion that Karl and the party he accompanied were attacked by Trolls. So the defenders of law and order in Bandur Green are the equivalent of the racist cretins who post comments on Yahoo! news.

Any other local news worth paying for? Not really, but I have to cough up to find out. Apart from things I've already learned from Louve, and gossip about which I don't care, all Barnock has to tell me is that someone attempted to defile the grave of local war hero Narron the Steady, and whoever perpetrated that break-in that has nothing to do with anything else seems not to have stolen anything.

Maybe the retired locals seated at a nearby table will have something useful to tell me. Nope, apart from reiterating a few things I already know, they just start arguing over minutiae, and I wind up getting hit in the face and losing a point of Luck (blasted sometime later Luck bonus - none of this misfortune would be happening if not for you). Well, visiting the pub has been a strong argument in favour of teetotalism.

Leaving the tavern, I'm presented with a variety of options (including going back into the Rat if I've already tried everything else, which raises questions about the structure of this adventure). Someone has set up a stall on the common, so I go there to see if that's where weapons can be acquired. No, it's a gambling booth run by a gypsy. The author should be commended for going against harmful stereotype, as there's no cheating going on here, but a gambling establishment (even on as small a scale as this one) that doesn't give 'the house' even a marginal advantage is not going to be economically viable. I win back almost as much as I paid out in the pub, and quit while I'm ahead.

Next I try checking out the cemetery. After the obligatory visit to my parents' grave, I am presented with several things to try. The site of the attempted defilement is an obvious choice, but I may be compelled to leave once I've been to it, so I'll try looking at headstones for comical epitaphs useful information first. I do not find anything I feel to be relevant, but the text goes into very specific detail about just one of these irrelevances, so I shall not be surprised if the late Cowyn Thrawn and his unexplained dispute with Narron turn out to have significance after all.

Now I head for the crypt mentioned by Barnock, finding that the stone urn at the foot of Narron's bier has been smashed. This is not massively informative in itself, but the crypt has a convenient back door, so I have a nose inside. Which leads to the discovery that this is one of those adventures where you have to visit lots of places but in the right order, as I have not yet had the opportunity to procure either of the items that could be of some use here. This is particularly tiresome as they seem to be all that might provide some protection against the Wight that is lurching towards me.

The subsequent encounter goes about as well as could be expected. By which I mean that the crypt gains a new occupant, who isn't actually a member of the family that owns it. Still, I'm rather too dead to care about any scandal that might ensue.

This attempt at Resurrection has been frustrating in a different way from the previous one, as I can see hints of what may be a decent mystery here - the 'unrelated' break-in, the destruction of the urn, the rift between Narron and Thrawn... But depending on how closely the reader has to stick to the 'correct' route through the adventure, finding out the truth that connects these disparate elements with the undead menace may involve a tedious process of trial and error to figure out the right order in which to visit places. One of the things I like about the Webs of Intrigue gamebooks is that clues generate leads, enabling the reader to make informed decisions about what to try following up next. Being able to infer that you should have gone someplace else first, but only on account of being asked if you've been there yet, or owing to an item check that's the first hint that the object in question is even available, as in this adventure, does not compare.

Oh, and not having the option to at least try and look into the break-in at the Merchants' Guild (or, if it does become possible at some stage, needing to jump through assorted yet-to-be-identified hoops before getting the option) is irritating. Less of an annoyance than arbitrary Luck penalties thrown in just to make the reader feel grateful when the author deigns to provide a crumb of bonus, but still bothersome.

The amount of experience I have of the different Fantazine mini-adventures is variable, to say the least, and I've only had one attempt at more than half of the rest of the run. Some of those attempts were far too brief for me to be able to fairly judge the quality of the mini-adventure in question, but I can say with some confidence that this is not the worst of them. Subsequent blog posts should help me ascertain which of the potential candidates is the worst, so I shan't start ranting about some of the less fun stuff to come just yet.

What's In a Name?

This is my 300th post here (though, for various reasons, not my 300th playthrough - that won't be for a while yet), and as my 100th and 200th posts weren't playthroughs, this won't be one either. Instead, I intend to spend a little while waffling on about the titles I give to my posts.

If the topic doesn't interest you, feel free to skip to below the asterisks near the bottom of the post, where I'm seeking input on a completely different matter. As far as I can remember, there's only ever been one comment on the title of a post, so they may be of negligible significance to most readers. Then again, stats have indicated that one of my playthroughs got a lot of additional traffic as a consequence of people googling the proverb I'd quoted in the title, so they do have some effect. And whether or not anyone else cares, they matter enough to me that I take time choosing them (possibly more time than it takes to play and write up some of the more lethal adventures), and some of the things I intend to say here have been cluttering my head for so long, it'll be a relief to finally get them out.

As you may well be aware, the titles are quotations. Mostly. There's the odd paraphrase (some intentional, others on account of the vagaries of memory), and very early on I did once slip into the mindset I had when posting Proteus reviews to a Yahoo! group, coming up with a vaguely pithy phrase of my own devising. Oh well, consistency is for sauces.

Quotations from what? Songs, popular idiom, TV shows, essays, poems, novels, proverbs, plays, computer games, films, historical figures, comics, short stories... Even a gamebook, on one occasion. Every so often I'd arbitrarily come up with a rule restricting the possible sources. Every time I've played a superhero-themed gamebook, the title has come from a comic. Not only do all my attempts at J.H. Brennan's Horror Classics take their titles from the book which inspired the gamebook, but they're quotations from the character I am playing in that specific playthrough. And as I quote Doctor Who so frequently, I made a point of not quoting it when writing up attempts at gamebooks based on the series.

While it might not be obvious in some instances, the title always has something to do with the content of the post. Sometimes the connection is blatant, sometimes there's a bit of lateral thinking involved, and on a good day I find something that works on more than one level. Here, for instance, the title obviously relates to my failure to avenge my fellow slaves, but the name of the song from which I took it (Johnny Cash's Hurt) is also relevant, as my character's death was caused by a Gauntlet of Pain. (And yes, I am aware that the song was a cover version, so NIN fans needn't feel obligated to correct me).

When I pick a title varies. Sometimes I have it in mind from the outset (which doesn't always work out: I didn't get anywhere near far enough through Creature of Havoc for my planned title to be relevant, so I found an alternative, and am saving the original idea for a more successful attempt). On other occasions I've wound up with a completed write-up that lacks a title, and had to delay posting it until I could find something apposite. Once I even forgot I had no title, and had to edit one in after posting. If you are able to correctly identify the post in question, you should probably find a more productive use of your time.

There has, to my memory, only been one title directly influenced by current events in the real world, and even that wasn't planned as such. After the death of David Bowie, I decided to listen to one of his albums as a tribute, and one of the lyrics I heard while doing so struck me as being as appropriate to the playthrough in progress as the title I had selected, so I changed to that one.

Incidentally, while most of the song lines used as titles can be found on albums that I own, there are a few that just lodged in my head on account of having been near-ubiquitous on radio at some point, and one or two others that I dug up online because some other factor had led me to believe that the singer might have come out with something vaguely fitting at some point. Any artist who's been quoted in more than one title is definitely represented in my music collection, but there are still a few groups who have a significant presence on my shelves, yet have not so far had their output mined for this blog. Their time will come. Probably.

I'm not sure that anything much has come of these reflections. Still, now I've raised the issue, if anybody wants to know the source of some particularly obscure quotation, or precisely how one of the more cryptic ones relates to the post to which it is attached, you're welcome to ask. And this post has been easy enough to write that it shouldn't hold up the next proper attempt at a gamebook.

* * *

Talking of which, the subject of my next playthrough will be the mini-adventure from issue 1 of Fighting Fantazine. Now, some readers may be aware that I am the author of one of the Fantazine mini-adventures, so there is a question regarding what I should do with my own handiwork. Several options suggest themselves:

1. Just play it like any other gamebook. I've played gamebooks I know very well before, and the fact that my familiarity with this one comes in part from having created it shouldn't matter.
2. Play it like any other gamebook, but add an 'author's commentary' explaining inspirations and other points of possible interest.
3. Get a guest writer to play it.
4. Use a guest writer for the playthrough and add my own author's commentary as in option 2.

If you have any opinion on the matter, or alternative options to add, or favour option 3 or 4 and wish to volunteer to be a guest writer, please comment here to let me know.

It's Time We Quit This Hoping and Expecting

In all probability I got Proteus issue 17, Ken Bulmer's Black Crag Castle, from the newsagents near my school. I remember reading part of it in one of the classrooms where we did French, and as the sequence I was reading occurs near the beginning of the adventure, I can't have spent much of the walk to school looking at the magazine. Then again, it was February, so I might have been prevented from reading en route by filthy weather.

I have already explained that the relatively short shelf life of the magazine motivated me to get the issues as they came out even when I wasn't particularly motivated to play the adventures, and that issue 16 was the last one to which I gave negligible attention at the time I bought it. It's possible that by the time this one came out I had already rekindled my interest in gamebooks by buying Midnight Rogue. Or it could be that the Proteus adventure helped get me out of the gamebook doldrums. Either way, I had a proper go at it, and subsequently took the time to figure out how to beat it. Which wasn't easy, as Mr. Bulmer proved quite devious in places.

Mechanically it's not that different from your average Proteus adventure. Most of what needs to be found along the way is information rather than items, and there's one 'hub' region that allows a little more freedom to explore than the majority of issues, but overall it follows familiar patterns structurally. The writing is another matter. It's a bit quirky (nowhere near as wacky as Grailquest, but doesn't take itself as seriously as the preceding adventures (with one exception)) and has, for want of a better word, attitude. I remember being a little surprised to read my character using a naughty word at the end of the brief introductory passage. Mild cussing, by today's standards, but my upbringing was such that 'd*mned' still constituted strong language in my eyes.

Such an utterance is understandable, given that the introduction has my character (in flashback) discovering my home village in ruins, my parents dead or dying, and the family's most precious possession stolen. All I know is that the perpetrator of these outrages is a pirate with one ear, and I intend to make him pay for his crimes, and to recover the Talisman he has taken, as the survivors of the massacre will have no hope for the future without its protection. Not that it did much to help them against the one-eared villain, but my character is too furious to make picky observations like that.

For a Proteus adventure I need to know more about my character than just 'too angry for quibbling'. I remember that there are a couple of nasty fights in this one, so I reserve the right to allocate dice if doing so would avert a 'fat chance' Dexterity and/or an unhealthily low Fate. And a minor tweak gives me:
Dexterity 12
Strength 21
Fate 11
That should give me a reasonable chance, as long as I don't forget anything important.

I have never visited the nearby town of Alfanzar because of what I've heard about it, but those same tales make it sound the sort of place that the pirate I seek might frequent, so now I go there. Finding a tavern named the Blue Anchor, I bide my time until a mob of pirates enters. Their leader, addressed by his companions as Panash, removes his hat to reveal that he has lost an ear. That'll be the man I want, then. But attacking him right now, while he's surrounded by comrades, would not be all that clever. Also rather less than smart is the sloppiness that has me learning Panash's name a second time while waiting for a more propitious moment to deal with him.

Eventually they leave the tavern, and I discreetly follow. While trailing them through the streets, I hear Panash mention the location that, for them, is home - the first of the nuggets of information that I must note down if I'm to have any chance of success. I also learn that I'm not as discreet as I think, as some of the pirates abruptly round on me and promptly render me unconscious.

I come round in the gutter outside the Blue Anchor, down two Fate points (an unavoidable loss). The tavern is closed, so I have to choose which way to head along the street. I'd forgotten about this choice - wonder if it's a fake one.

Proceeding to a jetty, I learn that Panash and crew have already set sail, and am advised to see Tiny Matison at the Boiled Lobster. The Boiled Lobster turns out to be another drinking establishment, and I arrive outside it just as a large man is sweeping out the debris from last night's festivities. A vigorous swipe with the broom leaves a mound of broken glass and other mess (including a dead ginger cat) piled around my feet, and the man responsible laughs at the sight. Again suppressing the urge to resort to violence, I ask to speak with Matison, and the man with the broom becomes enraged and attacks me.

This fight won't be to the death, but it could take a while, as my fists and Tiny's broom only do half the damage of most weapons. Fortunately for me, despite Tiny's size, he's not much of a fighter, and I pummel him into submission without incurring any damage myself. I demand information on Panash, and Tiny reveals that the one-eared pirate killed his cat because he can't abide them, and mentions the name of the villain's galley. That's as much as he can tell me, but there are two vital hints in there.

What I've found out isn't much to go on, and I've started to attract attention. Exactly how much attention only becomes apparent when an unseen assailant delivers a hefty blow to the back of my head, causing me to black out for a second time.

Regaining consciousness, I find myself chained up, in the company of several similarly immobilised and unhappy people, and subject to another two-point Fate penalty. Somewhat disgracefully, players are guaranteed to lose between a third and just over half of their Fate (depending on what was rolled during character creation) during the early stages of the adventure. And yes, there will be at least one unavoidable Fate roll with fatal consequences for failure.

A new arrival, wielding a whip, orders us onto a jetty, where we see the galley that is to be our new place of work, and most Proteus readers have the word 'coffle' added to their vocabulary. As we're being herded aboard, I get an opportunity to attack one of the crew, but there's no way anything good can come of doing so. Swallowing whatever remains of my pride, I go where I am directed, and am chained to an oar alongside a few other unfortunates. Following a brief tutorial on the basics of galley-rowing, the ship departs from Alfanzar, propelled by me and my fellow-slaves. Sneakily, there's an essential clue concealed within the description of my predicament, though at this stage of the adventure there's no indication that calculating how many oars the galley has is an essential step along the way to not getting sliced into little bits.

A quarter of the galley slaves die over the course of the next week. I should probably be thankful that there's no randomised chance of being among their number. As the galley heads for land in order to 'recruit' replacements, the somewhat deranged slave next to me on the oar reveals that he and another slave intend to make an escape bid tonight, and asks if I wish to join them. Their plan is too poorly-plotted to have much chance of succeeding, so I decline.

After the would-be escapees have failed and been fed to the sharks, I decide to start work on a properly organised escape plan, and begin discreetly recruiting reliable slaves and weakening chains. Our chance comes a week later. The ship passes by a rock inhabited by a trio of... well, they're subsequently revealed to be mermaids, but the initial description mentions no tails, leaving the impression that this is either a very select nudist colony or some uncharacteristically non-predatory Sirens. Anyway, while the crew are busy gawking at the preening beauties, my co-conspirators and I break the weakened chains and rush up to the deck.

A fight breaks out, and I seize a cutlass from a downed seaman. The Captain attacks me, and as I parry his initial blow, a conducted tingle indicates his blade to be Blessed - which may explain the high Dexterity. Not high enough, though: I take a few blows, but kill him, at which point the rest of his crew surrender. The other escaped slaves choose me as their new Captain, and I get one Fate point back, plus use of the late captain's Blessed sword.

Another of the slaves is dragged before me, and my comrades reveal that he tried to raise the alarm when we broke free. They want him made to walk the plank, but I decide there's been enough bloodshed for one day. Accepting my judgement, my new crew content themselves with a few kicks before herding the old crew down to the oars to take up our former posts. The liberated slaves decide to become pirates, and as that's not a career path that particularly appeals to me, I ask if they'd mind dropping me off at Panash's base of operations before they start plying their new trade. At this point, any reader who failed to make a note of the location mentioned by Panash just before the first knock-out is in trouble... unless their gaze strays to the section below, which has him naming the place, and thus makes cheating remarkably easy.

I remember the name anyway, so my allies take me there. During the voyage I recover all lost Strength and prepare some Rations. We pull into a cove during an ominous sunset, and the sight of the fortress overshadowing the island convinces the rest of the freed slaves to stick with their original plan. As I step ashore, Maltby, the collaborator I spared, expresses his gratitude by revealing that he once knew Panash, who revealed the location of the safe entrance to the castle while drunk one night. While telling me about this entrance, Maltby also mentions the name of the Necromancer who was the previous occupant of the fortress, which would be another essential datum if not for a bit of careless game design about which I'll say more later.

I head towards the castle, which is on the other side of a chasm spanned by a drawbridge. Ignoring the bridge, I turn to one side and keep walking until a clump of thorn bushes blocks the path. A quick search reveals the trapdoor under one of the bushes mentioned by Maltby, and I raise it, revealing a flight of steps. Lighting my lantern, I see a rusting handrail against the wall. The steps are so creepy that I lose the Fate point I only recently recovered.

Descending the steps, I see a green glow to the north. A dishevelled man carrying a skull approaches, and I greet him. He introduces himself as Amdi and seems unimpressed at the sight of me. Apparently everyone he's seen come through here, other than Panash, has met with a nasty end. It is possible (and advisable) to work out from his rambling account how long he's been working here, though that can easily be missed owing to the more obviously helpful revelation that Panash always heads east whenever entering the castle this way.

I go east, and the passage changes direction a few times, leading through a subterranean graveyard and down more steps. By the time I start heading up again, I'm confident that I'm past the chasm. I wind up in a tunnel heading west, and then see a side passage branching off. This is one of the areas where I could fail the adventure: somewhere in this warren of tunnels there are two facts I need to learn graffitied on the walls, and I don't remember the route that takes both in.

The side passage leads to a dead end, but then the wall rotates, and I find myself standing at a corner of a passage that glows purple. Heading south, I get into a fight with a giant spider with an alarmingly high Dexterity. It only wounds me once, though, and doesn't seem to be venomous. Continuing through the maze, I next encounter a Shambler, whatever that might be. Easier to defeat in battle, at least. And then, to my annoyance, I reach the chamber I know to be the way out of the maze. Well, I'm doomed. Still, might as well go as far as I can before my ignorance undoes me.

I've just entered a torchlit hall containing an imposing-looking black marble mausoleum. Set into its base are two doors, but of more concern right now is the giant snake's skeleton coiled around the plinth, as an eldritch glow has started to illuminate its eye sockets, and those bones are moving.

The Giant Skeleton Snake attacks me, of course, and I kill it with ease before turning my attention to the mausoleum. Beneath a sheet I find a set of scales and a sack of pebbles, and when I give a slight push to one of the pans on the scales, a panel in the plinth slides open to reveal an inscription. The writing outlines a simple mathematical puzzle for determining the correct number of pebbles to put in the right hand pan, thereby opening the doors.

Beyond the doors another flight of steps leads down, ending in a tunnel that heads north. When I descend, a huge block of basalt drops down, blocking off the way back. The tunnel leads to a flimsy brick wall, which I manage to break through on my second attempt. On the other side is a slope leading up, and I ascend for a while before realising that at times water flows down the slope. A lot of water, by the sound of it. Catching sight of a small opening in the ceiling, I make a leap for it, and succeed at the Fate roll required to catch the edge.

Once the water has thundered past, I decide to investigate the opening more carefully. It leads to a room containing the skeletal remains of a Warrior Woman. By her side is a sword with precious stones set into its hilt. Taking it, I discover that it has more powerful magic than the blade I took from the Captain, which will give me a bonus in combat. Saluting the spirit of the Warrior Woman, I receive a Strength boost that heals what damage I took fighting the Spider and breaking down that wall.

Returning to the slope, I continue up, eventually coming to a choice between a side passage and a ladder set into the wall. I don't remember which way I should go here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that one option is the way forward and the other is a detour that will provide another essential factoid. This sort of thing is the reason why it's worth carrying on even when failure is guaranteed: I now have a chance of establishing what I should do at this stage, reducing the risk of making a fatal error on my next attempt.

I ascend the ladder, and go through a trapdoor into a well-lit room with one exit. Probably the way I should have gone second, then. The exit leads to a location I remember well from previous attempts at the adventure: a hall decorated with the proceeds of innumerable pirate raids, from which lead another six doors, each one with an animal carved above it.

This is the hub I mentioned earlier. One of the doors leads on to the next stage of the adventure, one leads via a series of ultimately irrelevant choices to unavoidable death, and at least three of the others lead to areas in which something helpful but non-essential may be obtained. And there are assorted perils to be faced behind almost every door.

On this occasion I think I'll skip the optional doors I know to be of potential assistance, so I can cover them in a future playthrough. There's no point in trying the invariably lethal one, so that just leaves the one I'm not sure about and the eventual exit, and I'm not entirely sure which is which. I'll try the Lion door.

Behind it is a long hallway, its walls adorned with weapons and shields. Lion pelts are strewn on the floor, and as I advance along the hallway, I think I see one or two of them twitching. Nevertheless, I reach the doors at the far end without incident. The door I choose leads to a square chamber, but I only get a glimpse of it before something falls over my head and shoulders. This turns out to be another lion pelt, and its claws scratch me as I struggle free of it. Not wishing to loiter, I take the other exit from the chamber, which leads back into the Hall of Animals through a door that cannot be seen or opened from the other side. Well, that was fruitful.

The text says nothing about only being able to go through an animal door once, so I could try the Lion one again and see if the other exit from the hall leads to anything more useful or hazardous, but I think I'll try the Tiger door instead. The hallway beyond this one leads to a trophy cabinet, and the floor is decorated with tiger pelts. Three of them come to life, so I grab a spear from the wall and hurl it at the lead tiger as it bounds towards me. A successful Dexterity roll means that the spear kills that tiger, so I need only fight the other two. The rules governing fighting both simultaneously are a little less clear than they should be, but I definitely kill both tigers, and the only question is how much damage I take along the way. It's not likely to matter.

As I recover my breath, a red-faced individual enters the room and asks if I have the Captain's spyglass. When I indicate that I don't, he makes a snide comment and hurries off. I leave the scene of the fight, and another one-way door takes me to the Hall of Animals again. So I was right about the non-exit big cat door leading to nothing of note, and have now identified the unnecessary one. Time to try the Lion door again.

The alternate exit from the preliminary lion hallway takes me into another hall with lion pelts on the floor, though this time they completely cover it. And come to life as I approach the far door. A Fate roll determines whether or not I get to the door before the animated rugs get to me, and I fail this roll and am shredded.

Unless I am very much mistaken, the best case scenario requires the reader to score 8 or less on two dice to pass beyond this stage of the adventure. There are certainly worse odds to be had in some gamebooks, but that's still an unnecessarily high chance of getting killed.

Lucky, Lucky, Lucky

If you missed the start of my attempt at The Castle of Darkness, the first of J.H. Brennan's Grailquest gamebooks, you can find that here. Otherwise, or if you're happy to join the adventure in medias res with no explanation of what has gone before, read on.

Now that I have the Luckstone, I think I can risk checking the remaining two passages leading from this crossroads. I remember at least what can be found along one of them, and know that a dice roll determines whether or not I have a chance of surviving the trap that brings some reward, so being able to influence the outcome will decrease the risk. And it's quite possible that what I've forgotten in the opposite direction will also become less hazardous now that I can raise or lower the outcome of some or all rolls. Those ambiguities I brought up in the previous post are still a pain, though. In another encounter I remember, they could make a big difference.

Anyway, for now I think I'll see if I'm right about the traps I remember being to the east.

I'm wrong.

But what I discover along this passage does jog my memory. There's another door at the end of this corridor, but something has smashed through it, so it hangs from one hinge. According to the text, it's unclear whether the thing that broke the door was coming out or in. The positioning of the debris in the illustration suggests out, but that could be illustrator John Higgins exceeding the brief. Especially as I can hear something breathing in the darkened room beyond.

My torch does nothing to dispel the darkness. Something strange is afoot here. And, for the first time, I notice that this section includes one of the typographical errors that mar the early Grailquest books. Never having been so intimidated by the preternatural darkness as to want to turn back, I hadn't previously spotted that the wrong number has been given for the retreat option. Programming the content of the book into my gamebook manager tends to enhance my awareness of section numbers, though, so now I'm aware of the mistake, and giving it more attention that I did the arguably more serious incorrect section number that comes straight after the fight with the Skeleton that I avoided.

But I digress. I'm not afraid of the dark, even when it refuses to respond to illumination as it should (in gamebooks, at least: I'm pretty sure I'd be at least a little disconcerted to experience something like this in real life), so I advance past the remains of the door. The sound of breathing grows louder, I ask who's there, and silence falls. Followed by a tension-building section transition.

Something savages my ankle. Considering the boost to my Life that I received in the previous encounter, the damage done is nowhere near lethal, but it's not pleasant either. Fighting an opponent I cannot see carries a substantial penalty to rolls - even with the Luckstone, my chances of hitting are significantly diminished. I could try for a Friendly Reaction, but that's a situation in which the Luckstone ambiguities come into play. At the very least, the odds go up from 5 in 432 to 37 in 432, but if the modifier can be applied to single die rolls made on behalf of my attacker, they improve to 52 in 171. I think I'll try to avoid the question for now by seeing if one of my Firefinger lightning bolts will light up the room.

It works, enabling me to see that the anklebiter is a Leprechaun. Invoking a national stereotype in a manner that would be frowned upon these days, the book now gives me the option of offering to buy him a drink. If I don't do so, I'm probably going to have to fight, and most of the people who'd condemn me for exploiting the stereotype would consider killing the little feller at least as bad a course of action, so I'll take the non-violent route.

In another instance of authorial failure to consider all the routes by which the reader might come to a section, the darkness vanishes again, providing me with a second opportunity to discover that the occupant of the room is a Leprechaun. Disengaging his teeth from my ankle, the Leprechaun apologises for attacking me, saying that he thought I might have been a monster or the Wizard Ansalom. To make up for the damage done to my ankle, he hands over a leather purse before vanishing. Inside the purse I find some money, including a double-headed copper coin, and a scroll. Dice decide what I find on the scroll. And in a rather surreal editorial blunder, the list of sections corresponding to different rolls ends with the 'Go to 14' direction that's missing from one of the sections covering the consequences of knocking the wrong number of times on the Fiend's coffin.

Also on the blundering front, 1 is again included in the list of possible rolls. And while the Luckstone does make it possible to get a score of 1, the lack of options for -1, 0, and 13-15 makes it unlikely that the gemstone's possible effect was being taken into consideration. As I recall, the 1-2 option is the worst on the list, so the unlikelihood of getting it is less of an issue, but the inaccuracy still bugs me.

I score 10. So I could make it 7 or 13, but as there's no option for the latter, and I think I remember what's on the scroll when 7-8 gets rolled, I shan't modify the roll. Not that the 7-8 outcome is a bad one by any means - I'm just curious. And I get a Hypnotism spell, which, if cast successfully (and with the Luckstone I cannot fail) can enable me to avoid one opponent altogether.

There's nothing else of note here, so I must return to the crossroads of no pit traps. Unless my memory is even worse than I think, process of elimination means that the chamber I expected to find in the east must be to the west. I don't really have to go there, but I might as well.

Yes, this is what I expected. A circular chamber containing a statue of a Wizard (though I'd forgotten the odd detail that in one of the statue's hands is a sack from which protrudes a pig's head). As I step into the chamber, it rotates, blocking off the entrance. There's no other obvious exit, though I can see a wooden chest, a lever set into the floor, and an inscription on the statue's base. The inscription is a poem - not very good, but still better than the Fiend's work - which indicates that I will need to exercise my brain if I wish to get out of here, and points out that 'curiosity killed the cat'. The last two lines appear to be gibberish, but very basic codebreaking skills reveal them to be an explanation of how to escape. I remember that nothing good can come of pulling the lever, so my choice narrows down to following the encrypted directions straight off or checking out the chest.

I'll try the chest. Which turns out to be more dangerous than I'd thought. Thanks to the Luckstone the poison gas released when I lift the lid doesn't kill me (just), but I do lose half my Life. Checking the chest for a false bottom prompts another dice roll, and I find a hidden compartment containing some gold and a mouldy clove of garlic. Written on the true bottom of the chest is a piece of free verse,  declaring that the writer left in the chest something 'more precious than gold' for which I may find a use in a Guard Room on a northern corridor.

I think I'd have been better off leaving the chest and just claiming the Experience Point for decoding the inscription. Well, what's done is done, so I do the necessary to rotate the chamber back to its original position and return to the crossroads, though on this occasion not to the "No pit traps today, mum!" section.

Having already explored to the north and east, I now need to go back south. Which is not given as an option, but the Hints section did say to include section numbers on my map, and that I can return to anywhere that hasn't been blocked off, so I have no trouble heading back to the room before the hall with the dead Zombies in. Incidentally, I suspect that applying those hints may be the only way to make Brennan's Dracula's Castle playable, so I shall bear them in mind if I ever get around to replaying it again.

Anyway, back to that other room, which (you might recall) has a flight of steps leading up to a door that I have yet to check out. Well, actually it doesn't, because the top two thirds or so of the flight is an illusion, but the only way to get to where I need to go is to fall into this trap (a trick Brennan will reuse in an even more tiresome manner later in the series). And since there's more trouble to be had just after I fall, I shall try and heal first.

Sleep, and I dream again, this time of having to escape from a tower by climbing down the outside wall. The dice determine whether or not I fall, and an additional roll or rolls would determine the outcome of a fall, but I succeed at the first one, so I needn't worry about them. All right then, I'll use another dose of potion. And that almost restores me to full health, with a little help from my Luckstone.

Actually, I'm going to try a little online research. Back before the end of the paragraph... No definitive ruling, but I have found something approaching a consensus that the Luckstone bonus can be applied to single die rolls, but not to opponents' rolls. So I'll go with that unless anybody can point me to an authoritative source that says otherwise.

So, steps. Walk up, fall as soon as I tread on one that isn't there. The fall does a tiny amount of damage (would have been more but for the Luckstone), and causes my torch to go out, so I'm back in the dark. Still, the book elides the amount of faff actually involved in using a tinderbox, so I relight the torch without difficulty.

I tell a lie. The book just waits until the next section before telling me that relighting the torch is tricky and takes a while. Still, what matters is that I manage to light up my surroundings before the giant Spider in the pit reaches me. Welcome to the 'more trouble' I mentioned four paragraphs ago.

Upon seeing the Great Dane-sized arachnid creeping in my direction, I draw EJ, who shrieks upon seeing what I intend to wield him against. Perhaps I should try for a Friendly Reaction from the Spider instead. The text calls me a lunatic for even trying, and the dice do not produce the desired result, even with the Luckstone. Nothing for it but to fight, then. Predictably, the Spider is poisonous (sic.), but I won't be affected until the third time the Spider hits me, and with EJ's bonuses surprisingly unimpaired by his terror, plus the damage bonus provided by the Luckstone, I manage to render the Spider unconscious before it can launch its third attack on me.

The book assumes I killed the Spider, but even a non-lethal battle could have cost my opponent a few limbs, so the description of the aftermath can be made to fit. I shall now search the pit, as I was about to do before the no longer eight-legged pest so rudely interrupted me. And I find a Snake, with tell-tale skull and crossbones markings indicating that its bite is a one-way trip to section 14. The Luckstone gives me the first strike, and my attack roll is good enough to win the fight in one blow even before applying any bonus. Phew!

Search. A. Gain. And this time I find a secret door. The text acknowledges that it's hidden in 'an extremely sneaky place', though the profusion of nasty opponents in the pit should have been a hint that there was something of note down here. Now I just have to roll to determine whether or not I can open the thing. And I don't even need to use the Luckstone to succeed.

The two Guards on the other side of the door are taken by surprise, so I get first strike. It is theoretically possible to try bribing one or both of them, but there's no guarantee that the bribe will work, and even if I throw in that magical ring, I could only afford to have a go at paying off one of the Guards. In any case, the Guards' armour is no proof against the combination of EJ and the Luckstone.

Beyond the secret door is an anti-room (sic.), from which a corridor leads north. This part of the castle feels more lived-in than the areas through which I've been before now, so I should stay alert, and maybe not risk searching for any more secret doors unless it proves essential. After a while the corridor ends in a T-junction, and I have no idea which way I should go from here. In view of the writing in the chest with the gas, I need to head further north, but the options here (apart from looking for another secret door) are east and west.

I head east and reach a crossroads. Straight ahead a flight of steps leads down, and the passages north and south end in doors. However, the door to the south has a couple of guards in front of it, and while they haven't spotted me peeking round the corner, they cannot fail to notice if I go any further. Might as well simplify matters by drawing EJ and charging south. Surprise gives me the first strike, which is enough to lay out one of the Guards. The second takes a little longer to deal with, but fails to land a blow on me, and dies rather than just being knocked out.

The room they were guarding is packed with arcane clutter, and one of the few clear patches of floor has a circle drawn on it, inscribed with mystic sigils. I remember what happens to anyone fool enough to step into the circle, so I steer clear of that while searching for anything useful in the midst of the sorcerous gubbins. Perhaps unwisely, I use the Luckstone to influence the outcome of the roll that determines the outcome of my search, getting the least likely option, which turns out to be a crystal ball. This shows me a vision of Queen Guinevere in a dungeon, but provides no indication of the way to said dungeon, so I'm not really any better off as I leave the room.

North may well lead to my goal, so I'll check out the steps east first. They are less well-lit than this corridor, but I can see that they end at another door. The difference in lighting levels would probably make it easy for the Guard outside the door to spot me, were he not fast asleep. I decide to try and help myself to his keys, and roll such a good result that I couldn't fail even if I decided to use the Luckstone to make things harder for myself. Taking the keys, I unlock the door, which leads to a dungeon, though not the one I saw in the crystal ball. This one doubles as a torture chamber, but is not currently in use, so I make my departure before the Guard can wake and get any ideas.

Unless I want to return to the previous junction and see what's in the west, it's time to go north. I can't remember any other noteworthy encounters apart from the endgame and what directly precedes it, so I'm tempted just to try the north door. Okay, so I couldn't remember the Leprechaun until I saw the broken door, but still...

No dragging things out. North it is. The door opens onto what is obviously a Guard Room, with a variety of weapons in racks, plus the sort of furniture and other trappings you'd expect to find where mooks spend their off-duty hours. So how come there are no Guards in it?

Additional doors lead east and north, so I head for the east one. And a soft voice whispers the explanation of the room's apparent lack of occupants: I failed to spot the Vampire that Ansalom considers an adequate Guard-substitute. This is another opponent I could try bribing, but unless there's an absolute fortune that I missed to the west, the only way to have enough money to even attempt it would be to have provided the Fiend with a poem the size of The Canterbury Tales. Time for that past-its-prime garlic to demonstrate its worth. And it doesn't just repel the Vampire: it causes him to disintegrate, leaving only dust, grotty clothes, and a valuable but non-magical ring.

The east door leads only to an unoccupied dormitory. It makes sense for there to be one adjacent to the Guard Room (or would if regular Guards used it), but there's nothing of note to be found here. This nod to realism reminds me that a later Grailquest adventure is one of the few gamebooks to feature any kind of toilet facilities. Sewers crop up a good deal more frequently, now I come to think about it. Make of that what you will.

Better try the north door, then. A little ominously, it swings open of its own accord as I approach. Beyond it is a throne room, with a colour scheme that's heavy on maroon and black. On the throne sits the Wizard Ansalom, dressed in about as stereotypical an 'evil Sorcerer' costume as you can get, with two savage-looking black Hounds at his feet. He calls me a 'little person' and sets the Hounds on me. Bizarrely, they also can be bribed, though I'd have had to provide the Fiend with something on the scale of the collected sonnets of Shakespeare to afford their price. Time to show Ansalom what a real put-down looks like.

I knock one Hound out and kill the other. Ansalom either has quite the sense of fair play or is mighty slow to act when things don't go as he expected, as I have time to down a couple of doses of healing potion and make good all the damage I've taken since the stair that wasn't there. Then he gets angry at my having killed the Hounds, and the final battle is on. Could be quite nasty, too, as he has his own brand of Firefinger lightning bolt. Not 100% accurate, but there's a possibility that he could zap me to death with them. So I make use of the fireballs that Merlin gave me for just this sort of eventuality, and even though Ansalom manages to get me with two lightning bolts, I incinerate him in return.

A sound from behind the throne alerts me to the presence of a secret door, which opens onto a flight of steps leading down to the dungeon I glimpsed in the crystal ball. Mission accomplished.

The 'Pip Triumphant' section describes the return of Queen Guinevere to Camelot and the related honours given to me, as witnessed by a raven which is subsequently revealed to be a shape-shifted Merlin. Mean Jake apologises for the fight at the start of the book, asks if we can be friends, and then steals all the treasure I found after defeating Ansalom (which is more than enough money to bribe a dozen Hounds), just in case I was getting a little too hubristic. Merlin turns up, initially in raven form, and tells me off for thinking he's a blackbird (on the grounds that ravens are noble, whereas blackbirds are obsessed with people's noses) and for showing off to Mean Jake. Though he does then compliment me on a job well done, before telling me it's time for my consciousness to depart from Pip's body and return to my own time. At least until someone valiant and resourceful is needed to save the day again...

Well, that was fun. Flawed, but entertaining. And I shall be able to retain some of my acquisitions for the next adventure, even if the money has gone. It will be a while before I return to Grailquest, even if I manage not to go off-blog again in the interim, but I'm quite looking forward to it.

It Is a Silly Place

First impressions are not always reliable. Back in the early mid-eighties, when assorted publishers were doing their best to grab a share of the market opened up by Fighting Fantasy, and new gamebook series started fighting for shelf space in the local bookshops, I would often take a quick look at non-FF gamebooks in the shop, fail to be impressed, and reshelve them.

Lone Wolf is one of the few series that I retained when I got rid of the bulk of my gamebook collection back in the nineties, and yet it failed to grab me when I flicked through Flight from the Dark in WHSmith's. I've previously mentioned what finally prompted me to give the books a proper go and got me collecting them, so I shan't go into that again here. I only bring up the subject at all because I'm about to start replaying the other gamebook series that got off to such a rocky start with me, only to become so beloved that I never even contemplated disposing of the set. I'm pretty sure that I was even in the same shop when I first looked at a copy of The Castle of Darkness, book one of J.H. Brennan's gloriously silly Grailquest series.

As with Brennan's later Horror Classics books, as well as The Legends of Skyfall and one other series (about which I will say more at a later date), it was my friend Simon who got me interested in Grailquest. I played his copy of Castle while visiting his house, neglected to avail my character of the healing available at an appropriate moment and, as I recall, took my first trip to section 14 (where Grailquest characters go when they die) after losing a fight against an animated compost heap. Soon afterwards I bought my own copy, along with the second book in the series, after which I went on to buy every subsequent release at the earliest opportunity. I think there's only ever been one other series that I collected with such zeal (and that's another story for another blog post).

The series name is informative, up to a point. Insofar as it is evocative of an Arthurian setting, it's accurate. And the potential implication of Pythonesque absurdity is not far off the mark either. Still, while most of the books do involve some kind of quest, the Holy Grail is never actually the item sought.

I've spent a chunk of today tinkering with my gamebook manager to get it to handle the Grailquest rules (well, the basic set-up, at least - the additional rules introduced in book 2 can wait for another day), so I'm ready to give the first book a try. It purports to be a spell cast by Merlin, which will transport the reader's consciousness into the body of Pip, a youth living in Merlin's time.

The Grailquest system only has one randomised attribute, namely Life Points. To determine them, I roll two dice three times, pick the best result, and multiply it by four. That's a bit more straightforward than the character generation process Brennan came up with for his next gamebook series, and a lucky double six gives me a total of 48 Life.

Following a quick explanation of the combat rules and a short list of hints on play, the book launches into a scene-setting passage, retelling the background of the Arthurian legends (and providing a few indications that these books are not entirely serious, such as the author's going out of his way to contradict the 'many' people who insist that King Arthur invented cricket). This section ends by focusing on a farm near Glastonbury, home to a freeman named John, along with his wife Mary and their adopted child Pip, who lives a quiet, peaceful life.

Cue ironic jump to a series of OTT threats of violence. I have been left guarding Freeman John's cart in the market square while he sees to other business in town, and now local bully Mean Jake has turned up with the avowed intent of decapitating, dismembering and otherwise terminally inconveniencing me. This is the prelude to an introductory fight which, despite Mean Jake's bluster, ought not to end in a fatality. If I'd been incredibly unlucky when rolling up my Life, there would be a slim possibility of Pip's not surviving the encounter, but anyone with stats that abysmal is going to be doomed anyway, so now's as good a time as any for getting rid of a hopeless character.

The punch-up with Mean Jake includes an additional rule, which I don't think it worth taking advantage of. Should I choose to target Mean Jake's nose (which involves a trickier roll than the standard 'to hit' one), I could do extra damage, but the increased difficulty makes it five times as likely that I'll do less damage than I would fighting normally. In this instance it makes no difference anyway: a couple of lucky rolls on Mean Jake's part give him a decisive victory, regardless of whether I went for the easier target or the harder one. Even so, the beating I've taken cost me less than a quarter of my Life, and the book clearly states that on this occasion I'll heal all the damage by the end of the day, so while this is not the most promising start, it's no cause for concern.

Indeed, life goes on, with a brief narratorial shift from second to third person. The most noteworthy event in Pip's life following his recovery from that fight is that Freeman John buys some chickens. Elsewhere in the Kingdom, the Wizard Ansalom is becoming a nuisance, inflicting misfortune on people as the mood takes him. When asked to deal with him, the Knights of the Round Table tend to suddenly remember prior commitments. All except King Pellinore, who at least agrees to try and thwart the Wizard, but gets lost on the way to his castle.

And we shift back to second person narrative as a group of men-at-arms turns up at Freeman John's farm, seeking Pip. After establishing my identity, they indicate that I should get on the spare horse they have brought and accompany them. Refusal is not an option. Well, actually it is, this being a gamebook, but I remember that turning to the relevant section merely delays the inevitable, so I just go with the men-at-arms. After a while we enter an unfamiliar forest, and towards sundown we arrive at a log castle. No, that's not a typo: the structure is a small castle, complete with moat and drawbridge, but made of logs rather than stones. Inside the castle we are greeted by a limping hunchback named Igor, and the men-at-arms make a rapid departure once they've dropped me off.

Igor leads me to a study and transforms into Merlin, who explains that the disguise is because someone of his standing is expected to have servants, but he can't afford the wages. Following a brief detour back into third person to address the question of how demented Merlin must be to think that a local farmhand could be housing the consciousness of someone from the distant future, Merlin explains that Ansalom is going to kidnap Queen Guinevere, and I shall have to rescue her, so I need to be prepared for the mission.

For starters, Merlin provides me with a magic sword, Excalibur Junior (who prefers to be addressed as E.J. - yes, my sword is sapient, self-aware, and able to talk), as well as a suit of dragonhide armour and a few bottles of healing potion. He then draws pentagrams on both of my palms and asks me if I can read a piece of parchment that has 'FIREFINGER 1' written on it. This is one instance where it pays to be a pedant: saying, 'Yes I can read it, thank you very much,' rather than just reading out the words keeps me from wasting one of the spells that I have just been equipped to cast (and almost setting the place on fire). I am now able to fire lightning bolts from my forefingers (five per hand), and to hurl fireballs (only one per hand, but they do a lot more damage if they hit their target).

A commotion outside indicates the arrival of messengers bearing news of the kidnapping of the Queen, so Merlin shifts his shape back into the form of Igor and heads out to greet them. Again the narrative focus shifts, to provide the reader with a rather witty account of the circumstances surrounding the kidnap, the response made by King Arthur and his knights (I love the understatement of the observation that Lancelot "was really a bit too fond of the Queen for his own good"), and the sequence of events that lead to "a very nervous and confused young person, equipped with a sword that looked suspiciously like a sawn-off version of Excalibur" being left on the outskirts of Ansalom's demesne. The humour takes on a slight dark edge when the knights subsequently realise that nobody thought to ask for the name of this unlikely-looking hero: "The oversight caused much general annoyance. As Percival remarked, they would have nothing to put on the tombstone."

Back in the second person, I find myself in the forest surrounding the Dark Castle of the Wizard Ansalom, checking the contents of the backpack provided by the Quartermaster General. My gamebook manager is going to need a bigger inventory section. The list of additional equipment includes a couple of anachronisms - the rope is in metres (unless you want to argue that sloppy workmanship just happened to make what should have been a 50-foot rope almost 9½ inches too short), and my lunchbox contains bully-beef sandwiches - and deviously downplays the significance of one item that will prove very important towards the end of the adventure. I was never caught out by the trick, as Fighting Fantasy had already reminded me of a certain non-culinary use of garlic by the time I read The Castle of Darkness, but even my mid-eighties self could appreciate the sneakiness.

The path leading into the forest forks, and the turning I take leads me to a clearing containing the ruins of a building, possibly an abbey. Inside the ruin I come face to visor with a forbidding figure in jet-black armour, who could be the Black Knight, second only to Ansalom in the 'local villain' stakes. As it turns out, he's just King Pellinore, still lost in the forest, and likely to remain so for a while yet. After he rides off, I find an exit from the clearing and proceed to an oddly-structured section that provides the option of exploring a side turning before giving away (in hard-to-miss capital letters) the fact that the main path leads to the Wizard Ansalom's Dark Castle. Okay, so exploring 'insignificant' diversions often turns out to be essential in gamebooks, but this is one instance where it's not, so I shan't.

The Castle looks forbidding, and has a reputation to match, but I am not deterred. The book recommends that from this point onwards I draw a map, and as navigation in Brennan's books can be tricky, I shall take that advice.

Across the drawbridge is a tunnel leading to an open portcullis. I can either hurry through or proceed with caution, and I'm pretty sure the latter option is the wiser one. Yep, going slow enables me to notice the murder holes and stay out of the way of the boiling oil that gets tipped through them.

Beyond the portcullis is a courtyard, and I can still remember every mistake I made here when attempting this book at Simon's, so I can now avoid taking damage several ways. The chickens ambling around in the courtyard are a lot more vicious than your average chicken (and, having had to look after my neighbour's chickens while she was on holiday, I know that even an ordinary chicken can get nasty), and the battlements are populated by projectile-firing insects, so I'm best off staying away from both of them. That leaves heading straight across to the double doors in the north or heading east to investigate an assortment of carts, crates and barrels. I go east, not because there's anything worth having among the clutter, but because heading for the doors from there is the only way to avoid falling through a surprisingly well-camouflaged hole in the middle of the courtyard.

The doors open onto a second courtyard, this one paved. It has a skeleton manacled to a whipping post in the middle, and there are several buildings around the walls. I remember that the skeleton is animated (and, in the unlikely event of my getting a Friendly Reaction, proves a little informative), but my memory of what can be found in the different buildings is unhelpfully vague (even though I must have read the relevant paragraphs a little more recently than I did the ones relating to all the harmful encounters in the first courtyard).

The bolted door suggests that there may be something hostile in the structure to the west. I think the one near the east wall is where I find the sneaky old man, and as he may have something useful, I'll risk checking. Yes, beyond the door I find an elderly Watchman eating stale bread and mouldy cheese, who pleads with me not to harm him, and then goes for me with a concealed dagger while I'm reassuring him. Thanks to my armour I take negligible damage in the fight, though I may still incur a minor case of blood poisoning that'll cost me a little more Life.

Incidentally, this section has one of several poorly-placed illustrations, as the picture of the Watchman is on the other side of the page, next to the section detailing the nigh-unreachable conversation with the Skeleton. While taking a look at the illustration I noticed for the first time that it includes the dagger, though mostly hidden by the table rather than up the wretch's sleeve as in the text. I also inadvertently read part of the facing page, and was reminded that the Skeleton unsuccessfully attempts to impersonate Queen Guinevere if it doesn't attack. And there I was, thinking the hard-core daftness didn't kick in until about book 3...

But I digress. The outcome of the fight is slightly awkward, as I render the Watchman unconscious, but the text only gives section numbers to turn to for killing or being killed by him. Well, I'll just have to treat unconscious as equivalent to dead, because stabbing a helpless opponent is not right even if he is a treacherous front-stabbing rogue. The only noteworthy possession he has is a quantity of money, which I take. Not that it'll be of much use to me in this book, unless I want to try bribing an opponent, which is probably not worth it.

Still, the damage I took in the fight is low enough that I can risk trying to heal it by sleeping. Sleep is a risky prospect in Grailquest, as it carries a 2 in 3 chance of leading to Dreamtime, and dreaming can be harmful to the health, especially in the first couple of books. I get lucky, though, and am restored to full Life. A few of the dreams are amusing as well as dangerous, so I might try sleeping again at some point.

Returning to the paved courtyard, I now check out the cluster of buildings along the north wall, as I think they might be where I can potentially find a little information. They're stables, currently disused, and containing only rotting straw and manure. Or so it seems, but a thorough search reveals a scrap of parchment on which is drawn a map of the first courtyard, including the location of the trapdoor (not just a hole, then).

This is one of the places where having drawn my own map comes in handy, as the paragraph describing the discovery of the parchment gives the section number for safely lowering oneself through the trapdoor but says nothing about going back to the paved courtyard, which ought to still be possible: the hints section states that "You are free to wander about as much as you like just so long as you know where you're going and the way has not been blocked." And as the parchment is not the vaguely-remembered item I was expecting to find, I want to risk checking out the building with the bolted door.

I was right about it containing something hostile: two Hounds go for me as soon as I unbolt the door. But as I was anticipating trouble and had E.J. ready, I get the first blow. The Hounds do more damage than the Watchman did before I knock them out, but I'm still in pretty good health, so I might try sleeping again once I've searched the building. It contains a casket which holds a diamond ring, possibly magical. The dice decide... and yes, I can use it to heal a good deal of Life, or to give me an extra lightning bolt. If it were non-magical I'd have found a slip of paper with a possibly helpful hint on it inside the casket as well, but I think the magic is going to be more useful.

I do try sleeping again, and this time I dream that I'm in a banquet hall, forced to drink from one of two chalices. I'd riff on The Court Jester here, but now is not the time for poetry as bad as what comes to mind. Anyway, I choose poorly, and lose more Life before waking. All right, I'll try the Healing Potion instead.

Restored to full health, I return to the first courtyard and use the trapdoor to climb down to a damp, mildewed corridor, which leads to a cave. I head along it, and tumble into a pit trap with poisoned spikes at the bottom. I need to roll two dice to determine how I fare, and authorial or editorial sloppiness means that the possible totals are given as 1-3, 5-10 and 11-12. Not a big deal on this occasion, as I get 6, which means I miss the spikes and 'only' take 20 points of damage. Time for another nap: if I dream, I might lose enough Life to make it worth using the healing from that ring. But my slumbers are untroubled, so I regain some of the Life I lost. I'll use a little of the healing salve that came in the backpack, and while that won't restore me to full health, it should at least make me fit enough to survive the next encounter.

I'd forgotten about the cave to which the corridor leads. The floor is littered with bones, some of them human-looking. Searching the cave turns up no treasure or unpleasantness, and merely wastes a bit of time. Not as much as writing this paragraph did, though.

The cave beyond is more familiar territory, as it contains a Compost Heap (and Brennan's use of capitals is a bit of a giveaway). There's no way of avoiding a fight with this sentient midden, but as I recall, I can go for a more dangerous battle that nets me a little cash if I survive or a less hazardous combat with no reward. Money's not everything. And a quick section comparison reveals that the difference between the fights is negligible, but I've made my decision, so I'll stick with it. The Compost Heap does a fair bit of damage before I kill it, but I'd have survived even without that healing. Nevertheless, I take another tot of Merlin's potion before going any further.

A corridor leads north from this cave, soon turns left, and ends in a door. I'm offered three courses of action, but common sense tells me that charging 25 metres and then headbutting the door is not clever, the fact that another of the options is covered in the section directly below my current one makes it hard not to notice that knocking achieves nothing, so that really only leaves trying the handle... which causes the door to open. How's that for a twist, Mr Night Shyamalan?

Beyond is a torchlit room, with a flight of steps leading up to a door in the north wall and a ground-level door leading west. I wasn't expecting this room quite so soon. Remembering what can be reached from it, I swig down another dose of healing potion. And then risk sleeping. Bad idea, as I dream that while hunting boar I encounter an Ogre intent on devouring a young woman. Still, the Ogre's a slow mover, so I might manage to kill him with my arrows before he can pulp me with his club. Regrettably, only three of my shots are on target, but I also get to strike one blow at him with my bare hands before he tries to hit me. There's no way I can kill him with a single punch, but if I get really lucky, I could knock him out. I'm not that lucky, but the Ogre's first attack misses, and my second blow does the required damage, so the Ogre becomes unconscious and I get to wake up in no worse condition than I was. Arguably slightly better condition, as the rules don't say that fights in Dreamtime contribute no Experience points.

Still not happy about the state of my Life, so I drink more potion and use another application of salve. That brings me back up to 46, which I hope will be enough to get me through the encounter behind the door to the west. For that door leads to a hallway populated by Zombies. Half a dozen of the things. And Grailquest zombies are a pain, as they can only be killed by rolling 9 or above on two dice. On the more positive side, they're sufficiently slow-moving that I get to strike twice before the survivors hit at me en masse, but this has the potential to be a slow battle, and potentially death by painful attrition for me.

My armour is invaluable here: after two rounds of battle I've lost just 1 Life Point, but without the armour I'd have taken over 15 damage. And it's not until the third round of combat that I manage to kill my first Zombie. Another two bite the dust in the fourth round, and then there's just ineffectual slashing and clawing until I take another point of damage in the seventh round and kill another Zombie in the eighth. The fifth Zombie manages to hit me for another 2 damage before I kill it, and the sixth just flails ineptly until I'm finally able to deliver the coup de grace. That didn't go as badly as I'd feared, but was still a tiresome slog. Mind you, there are worse Zombie encounters in gamebooks (and one of these days I may come back to this post and add a hyperlink to that observation).

So, with the Zombies dead, I search the corpses, finding only a silver ring with an incomprehensible inscription. Without thinking (i.e. having the decision made for me by the book) I put the ring on. It tingles slightly, and the book makes no big deal about it. Yet.

Beyond a curtained doorway in the north wall I find another corridor, which leads to a crossroads. Enforcing learning from past mistakes, the book insists that I check for pit traps as I continue along it. There are none, and as I'm liable to be returning to this crossroads a few times, the 'No pit traps' at the start of the section is going to become increasingly redundant.

This crossroads is, incidentally, what I was expecting to encounter before the room that led to the hall of Zombies. I know what to expect along two of the passages I can take from here, but not the third, as it's not going to lead to the Zombies I've already killed. And as I now know my memories to be vaguer than I'd thought, I'm not sure how much I can trust the impression that the place I don't want to visit first is to the east. Still, the passage north leads to a door, which seems promising.

It's a dead end. The door vanished somehow while I was unnecessarily checking for pit traps. And while the existence of the number 4 is not ignored this time round, the roll to search for a concealed door still allows for the possibility of scoring just 1 on two dice. I succeed at the roll, and a section of the wall opens to reveal a stairway leading down.

The steps lead via a short corridor to a vast subterranean cavern containing a lake. It's so quiet I can hear my own heart beating. Until a voice starts whispering my name. It takes me a little while to twig that I'm being addressed by EJ, who doesn't like it down here because there might be spiders in the darkness. A faint glow out on the lake catches my eye, and as it gets closer I can see that it emanates from a small boat, moving with no obvious means of propulsion. The boat draws up beside me and, ignoring the book's insinuations that nothing good can come of this, I step aboard.

The boat pulls away again, taking me on a long journey to an island that appears moonlit (though the text acknowledges that having the moon underground isn't exactly likely). I get out, and the boat promptly departs. Close by is what appears to be a Grecian temple, but I opt to explore the rest of the island before approaching it.

There's not much else here. Lots of rock formations that look as if they could be hideous monsters until I get close enough to see that they are just rocks. And a cave mouth in a cliff to the north. Naturally I check it out, disregarding the slightly skull-like appearance of the cave. A narrow fissure leads to a cavern containing a rather incongruous signpost. Arms point to all cardinal points of the compass, though three of them just say 'NOWHERE'. The exception is the arm pointing east, which indicates the way to the Crypt of the Fiend, helpfully labelled as an ancient monument. And just three metres from the signpost is the door to the crypt, which bears a plaque confirming that this is the Crypt of the Fiend and requesting that I knock.

The door opens at my touch, revealing a chamber with a jet-black marble floor, walls draped in black velvet, and an ebony coffin on a dais at the centre. It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. Except maybe the silver plaque on the dais could be less shiny. Which would make it harder to read, and given the quality of the doggerel inscribed upon it, decreased legibility would be a positive. The poem, in lines of inconsistent length, indicates that the Fiend within the coffin is a poet, and if I solve the puzzle on the lid and praise his poetry, assistance will be forthcoming, while failure to do so will prove more than slightly lethal.

It's too late to turn back. A plaque on the coffin lid precedes the puzzle with a warning that if I fail to follow the instructions given, the coffin will explode, destroying the castle, all Avalon, the world, the universe, and probably me. No pressure, then. The puzzle essentially consists of a series of If... Then... Else...  statements that explain how many times I should knock on the coffin, followed by a warning that if I don't start knocking within five seconds, the coffin will explode anyway.

I spell doom for David Tennant's Doctor, and the coffin lid opens, revealing a tall, pale figure anachronistically dressed in opera cape and white tie-and-tails evening suit. His eyes are dark, and two elongated teeth jut fanglike over his bottom lip. He sits up, turns to fix me with his gaze, and speaks: "Hello, Duckie."

After complimenting me on not blowing myself up, the Fiend emerges from the coffin, asks me what I want, and then seeks my opinion on his poetry. I compare it favourably to the works of Milton, Keats, Shakespeare and Pam Ayres (though McGonagall, Thribb, Barron and Jeltz would be closer to the mark) and, while obviously unfamiliar with the names I mention, the Fiend is flattered, and improvises an ode in response. Most poems have metre: this is closer to 37½cm.

He then invites me to demonstrate my own poetic talents to him. Remember how, 19 paragraphs ago, I said that it wasn't the time for poetry as bad as what I came up with in response to my dream? It was because I remembered that this challenge came later in the book. But it's in my interest to come up with more than just a few couplets, so I've embellished my original idea a little. And now, for your questionable entertainment, I present...
The Dream
I stand alone and small
In a banqueting hall.
Inside this palace is
A pair of chalices.
One is a vessel
That's carved of crystal.
The other one's
Made out of bronze.
I have to drink from one,
But that might not be fun:
While one is full of wine -
To sup from it is fine -
The other contains poison,
Which is completely noisome!
Yet drink I must.
To luck I trust,
And take a sip
But become sick.
I convulse, shake,
And - phew! - I wake.

(What I wrote at this stage of the adventure back in the eighties was no better, though at that time I wasn't being self-consciously bad.)

Anyway, the Fiend loves the poem and gives me as many gold pieces as there are lines in the poem (which is why I padded it out so much). He then admits to being a little weak in the arithmetic department, and asks how many lines long the poem is. As it's more than ten, I get an additional reward, which the Fiend declares to be his most precious possession: a garishly painted wooden duck that looks as if it used to have wheels. Apparently it's magical, though the Fiend doesn't know what it actually does. Still, if ever imperiled by evil sorcery I can call upon the duck by reciting a short verse. After explaining this, the Fiend decides that he needs a rest, and shuts himself back into the coffin.

Time to investigate the temple, then. As I approach it, I catch sight of movement within the colonnade, and draw EJ as a precautionary measure. Reassuring me that I am in no danger here, a beautiful lady in white steps out of the shadows. I wonder if this could be the Queen I seek (royal faces not being so easily recognisable in this day and age) and, reading my thoughts, the lady says she is flattered, but I am wrong. She is no queen, nor even a mortal, and Arthur knows her as the Lady of the Lake. Though the island we're on isn't in the lake, just a lake.

She beckons me into the temple and stops in front of a white marble altar, on top of which are a jewelled chalice and a velvet cushion bearing a gemstone. The Lady then explains that this temple does not exist in the world as I know it - nor, for that matter, does the island, which will disappear forever as soon as I leave it. She has come because she is opposed to evil, and offers to aid me against the Wizard Ansalom. When I indicate acceptance of her assistance, she instructs me to drink from the chalice, which I do.

The chalice contains neither wine nor poison. The liquid within tastes of honey and blackcurrants, and not only restores me to full Life, but also provides 25 Life Points on top of my regular score, which cannot be replenished but will soak up damage until depleted, after which I go back to losing and (ideally) healing Life at the normal rate.

The Lady also gives me the gemstone, which she explains is a Luckstone. As long as I have it (and I can keep it as long as I avoid getting killed, even potentially carrying it into later books in the series), I can increase or decrease any dice roll I make by 3. Before I can join in with the fourth wall-breaking aspects of the book by asking "Does your use of the term 'dice roll' indicate that a roll made on just one die is unaffected?" or "Do rolls made on behalf of my opponent during combat count as rolls that I make?" the Lady, the temple and the island disappear, leaving me back at the crossroads with no pit traps.

It's been a week since my last blog entry, and this seems like a decent point at which to take a break, so I shall now post what I've written so far for this adventure, thereby indicating that last week's resumption was not a one-off.

They're Just Waiting for You to Resurface

Resuming (at long last) my latest attempt at Stormslayer, I head for the docks. As yet, Sturm's device has had little or no effect around here, so it's business as usual. Consequently, I pay a quick visit to the market before starting to look for a ship that can take me where I need to go. A rope and grapple will almost certainly come in handy, and I'm a little intrigued by the Wyrmskin cloak: it's a kind of armour, but not quite as effective as the chainmail that's available here for a lower price, which suggests that it may have other benefits that are less obvious. Well, there's only one way to find out if there is more to it than meets the description, and that's to buy it.

Proceeding to seek a ship, I find that my character was a little hasty in assuming Chalannabrad to have been unaffected by Sturm's shenanigans. The harbour is packed with ships, and there's not a vessel to be seen actually at sea. An old sailor with a wooden leg explains that the Captains are reluctant to set sail owing to the increased frequency and ferocity of storms and Great Eel attacks, and I spend most of the rest of the day searching for one who's insane courageous enough to go out to sea anyway. Eventually I find the renowned Captain Katarina, who agrees to take me in return for half of the loot I recover on my dive. The last time I attempted this book, I didn't find much in the way of treasure down below, so I suspect that she may be in for something of a disappointment.

We set off in her ship, the not remotely inadvisably-named Tempest, and the following day a thick yellow fog comes out of nowhere. Captain Katarina suspects that there's something sorcerous about it, and my sword becomes restless in its scabbard, which suggests that it agrees with her.

On all my previous attempts at this book, I picked a Hunting Horn as part of my starting equipment, and it came in useful here. This time I went with a different selection, leaving me with no choice but to draw Wyrmbiter and see if this fog is thick enough to cut with a magic sword. A face appears, and tendrils of fog lash out at me, but I defeat the Fog Elemental without difficulty.

The night passes without incident, and I wake to find that the Tempest has reached its destination. Down below is the Devilfish Rift, said to be the location of the Sunken Temple of Hydana, Titan's equivalent of Poseidon. Owing to the inadequate waterproofing of my backpack, I can't take all of my belongings with me when I go looking for the Temple, but I can keep my sword and two other non-food items. Not sure the rope or cloak will be of much use down there, so I'll hang on to the rest of my starting equipment.

After downing the Potion of Water Breathing, I step overboard and start to sink. The potion works, and I descend to the seabed unharmed. To my right is a wrecked galleon, and on the left is the rift. If there's any treasure on the wreck, I have yet to figure out how to get it, and on this occasion I'm not even going to bother trying. Instead I head straight for the rift. And then I make the same mistake I've made every time I've played this book so far, and investigate a cave. The assorted aquatic fauna that attack me are not the problem - I deal with them as easily as I did the Fog Elemental. No, the problem is that Jonathan Green remembers The Empire Strikes Back, and this is no cave. I narrowly succeed at the roll to get out of the leviathan's mouth before its jaws slam shut, but acquire a codeword that is sure to lead to unpleasantness on the way back up.

Further down the rift, I find what the scavengers have left of a dead Bullwhale, a creature so big that it could potentially have swallowed a ship. I might as well check it out, as doing so can't make things much worse than the error I've already made. Entering through a wound in the corpse's chest, I disturb a giant fluke worm, which attacks me. Talking of flukes, despite having a lower Skill than every other opponent I've fought on this voyage, this is the first one to actually harm me. I do kill it, though, and find a shield with a Red Dragon emblem in the whale's stomach contents.

Further down, I catch sight of what could be the Sunken Temple. And then up from the depths rises an aquatic horror like something Lovecraft might have dreamed after overdoing it at a seafood buffet. The fight is a tough one, and three times I get grabbed by a tentacle, which does only minor damage but also inflicts an Attack Strength penalty for the next round of combat. Nevertheless, I prevail, and swim on towards the Sunken Temple.

Inside, I find a huge jade statue of Hydana, depicted as a fishman and wielding a golden trident. On a plinth in front of it is a sea shell. The trident is probably there to distract the greedy from the real prize (I'd call it sucker bait, only it seems not to have attracted the attention of any of the octopoid denizens of the rift), so I go for the shell. As I take it, three female figures made of seawater manifest in front of the statue, accusing me of profanation and defilement. I explain why I need the shell, pointing out that Sturm's actions will eventually cause harm even down here, and the Naiads decide that I can have the Shell of the Seas after all.

This part of my mission accomplished, I start swimming back up to the Tempest, at which point that codeword comes back to bite me. Or rather, the Leviathan I disturbed earlier does. Skill-wise we're evenly matched, but my Stamina was lower even before I got wounded by the fluke worm and the Abyssal Horror, and as I wasn't able to bring any Provisions down with me, I'm still in a pretty beaten-up state. Consequently, even though I manage to win more Attack Rounds than the Leviathan, I still wind up becoming fish food. Just like on my first attempt at this book.

Maybe next time I'll remember not to go swimming into that 'cave'.