I Am the Danger

Game publisher Judges Guild brought out some Tunnels & Trolls material in the early 1980s, at least initially with the approval of the people behind T&T (I'll say more about this when I move on to the next JG adventure). The first of these was The Toughest Dungeon in the World, by prolific T&T author Ken St. Andre, illustrated by Kevin Siembieda, whose RPG Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness provided my school's gaming group with a variety of ways to get freshly-generated characters killed at high speed.

TTDITW has been reissued more than once, but my copy is a first edition, which means that it's got its fair share of errors (though the accompanying errata sheet does point out that they would make it rare and collectable if it were a postage stamp rather than a gaming product).

Most significant is the fact that, owing to miscommunication between author and publishers, the paragraphs haven't been scrambled. This makes it obvious that this is another adventure with unnecessary transitions - section 1 leads to section 2, which leads to section 3, which leads to section 4, which leads to 5, 6, 7 and 8, but as 4 is a hub and three of the sections to which it leads relate to returning after a non-lethal foray into the dungeon, it's necessary to pass through at least five different sections before getting to make any decisions. Given that most of these sections are all on the same page, and in the right order, this is not as annoying as having to repeatedly jump back and forth through the text, waiting for an opportunity to actually do something, but it's not a good sign when you know that the adventure is only less tiresome than it could have been because of a mistake.

Actually, the section padding does serve a bit of a purpose here. I need to eat and sleep every so often, and must keep track of the number of sections through which I pass to determine when lack of food and/or rest starts to have a harmful effect. Having the opening broken up the way it is means I'm that bit closer to suffering from hunger pangs and fatigue by the time I get to do anything, but no character should have to pass through that chain of sections more than once, so it's not that big a deal.

So, what of the adventure itself? It takes place in the protected caverns of Hael', purported to be the location of a lost Dwarven city containing a great treasure. In fact, by now the bulk of the treasure that can be found in the caverns was brought in by adventurers who sought the lost city and died, but loot is loot, regardless of whether it used to belong to the ruler of the Dwarves or a Warrior who failed a crucial saving roll. The point is that it's down here, and I need a substantial quantity of it.

By the way, I'm not an adventurer. I'm one of the denizens of the caverns. A Troll, to be precise (certain other 'monster' species are permissible, but Troll is the default option, so I might as well start with that). And why do I need to amass ten thousand gold pieces' worth of treasure? Well, that would enable me to relocate to Khazan and bribe my way into a cushy post in the Officer Corps, rather than being stuck down in a dank, dismal cave subject to repeated raids by parties of adventurers.

The rulebook includes two different sets of modifiers for creating 'monsters' with a full set of stats, but section 2 says to use the set that provides bigger bonuses to Strength and Constitution, which is fine by me. How much that helps is still subject to the whim of the dice, of course, and I get:
Strength 63
Intelligence 14
Luck 12
Constitution 84
Dexterity 8
Charisma -14
Speed 7
The negative score in Charisma is because I am a 'monster'. The further from 0, the better, and I treat it as a positive integer for the purpose of saving rolls. I don't get any starting gold or equipment, but my hide provides a degree of natural armour, and my claws are as good as a short sword in battle.

It being the start of the adventure, I must leave my lair and wander the caverns in search of adventurers and other creatures to fight and rob of their valuables. Stepping around the large stalagmite that conceals the entrance to my cave, I head along the tunnel and pick a side turning at random (as in, where I go is determined not by player whim but by the roll of a die).

Before long the scent of rotting meat alerts me to the proximity of another creature's lair, and I find the way in behind a big stalagmite. As Luck would have it, the occupant is currently out, doubtless looking for heroes and monsters to kill and plunder, so there's nothing to prevent me from helping myself to whatever cash and shinies my neighbour has saved up. Which turns out to be 200 coins. The type of coin should be determined by the level of the dungeon on which they're found, but since the text didn't specify anything more informative than 'deep within the caverns', I'm going to assume that they're gold.

Taking my ill-gotten gains, I return to the warren of passages, and find one that leads home, so I head back there to stash the money somewhere safe. A reasonably productive first excursion, but I'd better head straight out again, because I haven't yet found anything edible, and I will require a meal before long.

Heading out again, I find my way to a large grotto, which has been turned into something of a maze by walls of limestone. I wander around for a bit before finding an exit, which slopes down to end at the bank of a subterranean stream. It's not too deep to wade through, so I turn and splash downstream for a bit. For around a couple of hours (which, referring to the rulebook, seems to be roughly equivalent to 12 section transitions for the purposes of timekeeping - pity the text didn't specify) I follow the flow of the water until it disappears into a hole through which I cannot pass, forcing me to turn back and take one of the side passages I ignored on the way down.

A wide ledge overlooks the tunnel I enter, making it a good place to prepare an ambush. Climb up, wait for something edible or wealthy or both to wander below, leap to the attack. Or, as more randomness is likely to determine what happens next, possibly climb up, waste a few hours waiting for prey that never turns up, get that bit closer to starvation. Maybe even start to climb up, get surprised by some other monster that had the idea first, fight it at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, I shall give it a try.

There's no ambush awaiting me, but there are additional hunger penalties to be had if I spend 4 or more hours lurking without any prospective victims passing by. As luck would have it, I'm only up there for two hours before a party of adventurers comes by. Assorted rolls on tables determine the size and make-up of the party, but every new adventurer generated this way (including future encounters if I survive that long) is a little bit more powerful than the previous one, so the toughness of the adventure increases the longer it goes on.

As for this party, a male Rogue leads the way, armed with a spear and wearing no armour. Behind him come two Warriors, the man bearing a mitre and a shield, with a steel cap on his head, while the woman has full mail armour and wields a scythe. Bringing up the rear is an Elven Rogue, also equipped with a scythe, but wearing only leather armour. Neither Rogue knows any magic, which is a good thing for me, but also illustrates the problem I have with the character class: until they make enough money to start learning spells, they're just inferior Warriors, and considering how lethal most T&T adventures are, I can't see most Rogues surviving long enough to make use of their potential sorcerous capabilities.

The odds slightly favour the party, but if I can get in a lucky blow at the start and kill one of them straight off, that should give me the advantage. And maybe I miscalculated, because things go better for me than I expected. By the end of the third round, I've killed the Rogue with no armour, and though I haven't managed to penetrate the armour of any of his companions, seeing him die is enough to scare them into retreat. Slightly disappointingly, the dead Rogue has no valuables on him, but he's edible, and that spear is a better weapon than my claws. I just have the Dexterity required to wield it, so I'll be better equipped in my next fight.

Dragging the corpse back to my lair, I have a good meal. Since I took no damage in the fight, I get to increase my Constitution by 1 point. There's no need to rest just yet, so I go out in search of fresh victims. However, I haven't got very far before I am attacked myself.

My assailants turn out to be more adventurers. Only two this time: both Dwarven warriors, one with a poleaxe and leather armour, the other wielding a broadsword and wearing chainmail. Still, this duo presents a greater threat than the party of four I previously fought, and they inflict the first wound. I don't fancy my chances here, so even though flight will at best enable me to survive until my next, doubtless worse, battle, I'm still going to try and get away while I can.

Unexpectedly, they can't see in the dark (so how come I didn't spot their light source before they attacked me), and I have no trouble getting away from them. Rushing through the darkened tunnels, I wind up in the vicinity of another creature's lair, and creep in. This one is occupied, but at least whatever is in there is the first monster I've encountered: like the adventurers, the other creatures inhabiting these caverns get progressively more dangerous.

Unfortunately for me, I've blundered into the lair of a Liche. It only slightly outclasses me, but lucky rolls enable it to hit me three times before I can (and indeed must) run away. This time my flight takes me back to my own lair, so I think I'll see if resting will enable me to recover any health before I go out in search of tougher opponents. I know it would make more sense to seek easier prey, but the way this is structured, that just isn't an option.

Thanks to a good Luck roll, my slumbers are untroubled. However, it turns out that sleep can only restore Strength, not Constitution, so my rest leaves me no better off (except that I'm that bit further from any risk of fatigue-induced stat deterioration). Consequently, I need to head out and hope for some very favourable rolls the next time I encounter something hostile, as I need to eat even though I'm still some way away from triggering the hunger-based penalties.

Spotting another ledge suitable for ambushing, I climb up on it, but after a couple of hours nobody has come by, and I'm getting close to the point where I'll take starvation damage if I leave it for another hour, so I climb back down and start proactively searching for prey. I scent another lair, and have the good fortune to fail the Luck roll which determines whether or not the owner is at home. Yes, I have a fight ahead of me, but if I somehow survive, I should be able to eat.

This time I've found some Cave Lizards, which are nowhere near as dangerous as that Liche. Indeed, I slaughter them in a single round of battle. Somehow the Lizards have treasure - I'm assuming that they dragged the bodies of victims here to snack on, and there's money on some of the corpses. 300 coins, in fact. I take them and the dead Lizards back to my own lair, and eat them. The meal only restores a tiny fraction of what I lost in battle, but it does avert more serious Constitution loss, and by taking another nap straight afterwards, I get a small boost to my Strength, which will fractionally improve my chances in the next fight.

And back to the grind. Soon after leaving my lair, I see torchlight. Looks like more adventurers. I could do with the dice making it a lone human Rogue with no armour or magic and a rubbish weapon, but I doubt that I'll be that lucky.

I charge at the party, and have to roll against my Dexterity. I can see how that could make sense, but the consequences of my failing the roll are not 'you stumble and make yourself vulnerable to attack' but 'the adventurers are not intimidated', so a Charisma roll would have been more appropriate. And it would appear that I'm expected to have memorised the section number for determining the make-up of a party of adventurers, because I've not been directed there yet this encounter, but am now being asked about the presence of magic-users.

Having found the relevant section myself, I determine that I'm up against a lone Dwarf: a Warrior armed with a crossbow and a scythe, using just a shield and protective headgear for armour. The adventure appears to lack rules governing use of ranged weapons by hostile adventurers - if the Dwarf were a Wizard, he could fire a spell at me while I make my approach, but loosing a bolt from the crossbow is apparently beyond his capabilities.

The crossbow requiring two hands to operate, the Dwarf cannot use both it and the scythe against me simultaneously. Damage-wise, the crossbow is the superior weapon, but reloading it takes a round, which is a pretty serious disadvantage in a one-on-one fight. Most of the RPG players I know would, in a situation like this, try to use the crossbow in the first round of the fight and then switch to the scythe, vehemently dismissing the possibility that changing weapons mid-battle would in any way inconvenience their character, so I'll go with that scenario here. Or rather, I would, but even allowing the Dwarf to use his better weapon in the first round, I still purée him with one blow.

Despite allowing for encounters with lone adventurers, the adventure only covers two possible 'kill a foe' set-ups: kill one, scaring off the rest of the party, or massacre everyone and receive an experience point bonus. I guess I'll have to take the bonus, even though the 'magnificent slaughter' I just enacted wasn't actually that impressive. I also get to take the Dwarf's weapons (not sure if the crossbow will do me any good, but I can dual-wield the scythe and the spear I looted from the Rogue) and treasure (just 60 coins, but that still brings me a little closer to my target), and drag the corpse home for a meal and a snooze.

After waking, I go out again, and find another (or the same) stream. Will investigating upstream prove any more fulfilling than downstream? Well, it's less time-consuming, at least: I take slightly less than an hour to reach a waterfall. Side passages lead up and down, or I can check for hidden openings behind the waterfall. On this occasion there's only solid rock on the other side of the cascading water, so I must investigate a side passage.

The descending tunnel to the left has a section number that can't be reached from just outside my lair, so I check that out. It leads down to the shore of a massive black lake. Don't think I'll touch the water just yet, but I will explore further rather than turning back.

Unseen hostiles throw spears at me. Saving rolls determine that five of the seven spears thrown graze me, but even if my natural armour provides no protection, the damage done is still negligible. Then the mob of Goblins I have encountered charges to the attack with more spears. Weight of numbers, combined with the overly generous attribute increase for each Goblin after the first, and the lack of any escape option, leads to my death by attrition.

So, I failed. Hardly surprising, given that the author admits to never having won it himself during playtesting, and the principal other playtester proclaimed it 'too tough'. To be honest, this adventure has felt so uninspired that I've been hoping for a lethal encounter for some time, and now I'm free to reshelve TTDITW and play something more enjoyable.

Not the Territory

As Proteus 2, The Mines of Malagus, has just been reviewed at Gamebook Odyssey, and one of the biggest complaints in the review regarded the difficulty of mapping the eponymous mines, I thought I'd weigh in on the issue.

I agree that it's trickier to map than your average gamebook subterranean complex of tunnels, largely because of an authorial gimmick that adds to reader confusion and paragraph count. Whereas in, for example, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain's notorious Maze of Zagor, one particular T-junction is section 52, regardless of the direction from which you approached it, a similar junction in Mines has different section numbers based on which way you are going when you reach it. If you're going north, the junction is at 156, but if you're heading west, it's section 138, and it's 179 if you're travelling south. This, combined with the lack of any details of distance covered, makes it that bit harder to recognise when you're returning to a junction you've already been across.

Nevertheless, the layout is internally consistent, and can be mapped (which is more than can be said for the crimes against cartography perpetrated by some adventures). Back when I exhaustively played Mines in order to review it, I persisted with trying to map the place, and eventually produced this:

Doesn't look much like a mine, to be honest.

The adventure through which I am currently slogging for my next playthrough is unmappable by design (so much randomisation), which makes me that bit more appreciative of the fact that, while the author of Mines made mapping more challenging than necessary, they did at least play fair and create something that a sufficiently stubborn player could draw.

Life's Rich Demand Creates Supply in the Hand

The Fighting Fantasy playthrough contest I set up to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launch of the series has entered its final phase. For the readers who enjoyed my earlier list of outcomes to the books I'd played by the time I posted about the challenge, here's how I fared in the remaining titles (leaving out the ones I have yet to play here). As before, adventures I won on this blog but failed this year are highlighted in blue, while yellow indicates success at an adventure I didn't beat here.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain – Won
Deathtrap Dungeon – Killed by the second Flying Guardian (again)
Scorpion Swamp – Killed by leeches after assorted fights wore my Stamina down
The Seven Serpents – Killed by the Moon Serpent 
The Crown of Kings – Poisoned by a Mucalytic’s toxic breath
Temple of Terror – Missed one Dragon artefact, so the villain (who missed the other four of them, but obviously wasn't playing an adventure written by Ian Livingstone) succeeded in his quest and went on to wage war against my homeland
The Rings of Kether – A bureaucrat hit me on the head with a paperweight
The Dark Chronicles of Anakendis – Killed by the Astromancer
Appointment with F.E.A.R. – Was destroyed by lasers along with my home city for not knowing the date (seriously, I was in the right place at the right time, but since I didn't know which day it was, I failed to spot the villains and thwart their scheme)
Rogue Mage – Killed by the Scitalis
Deadline to Destruction – Cut the wrong wire while trying to defuse a bomb
Clash of the Princes: The Warrior’s Way – Killed by a Werewolf
Masks of Mayhem – Blundered into a chasm in the dark
Star Strider – Was forced to play Russian Roulette and got unlucky (again)
Midnight Rogue – Killed by an Ogre
Chasms of Malice – Something furry killed my cat and clawed my face off
Slaves of the Abyss – Got locked in a cell and never released
Daggers of Darkness – Trapped by rapidly thickening ice, suffocated and frozen
Dead of Night – Got a sharpened pendulum in the frontal lobe
Spectral Stalkers – Was electrocuted on a staircase after getting Fibonacci and prime numbers mixed up
The Crimson Tide – Imprisoned and tortured or worse by the king’s adviser
Siege of Sardath – Failed to spot the exit, and got killed by a Ghost I lacked the wherewithal to fight
Return to Firetop Mountain – Dematerialised by a Doppelganger
Night Dragon – Fake pilgrims cut my throat while I was sleeping
Knights of Doom – Killed by Mummers
Eye of the Dragon – Killed by Cyclops
Howl of the Werewolf – Killed by Werebear
Stormslayer – Killed by Naiads
Night of the Necromancer – Got trapped in the floor for not knowing how my usurper self-identifies
Prey of the Hunter – Won
Vengeance at Midnight – Killed by the last two of six criminals
Blood of the Zombies – Killed by Attack Dogs (but not while wearing a suit of armour this time)
Starhunt: Void Slavers – Killed by Sump Monster

To my surprise, a few people joined in more than two thirds of the way through the challenge, some of them expressing the hope that I'd run another one in 2023. I hadn't been planning on doing so, but since nobody else was willing to take up the baton, I've now organised a new one here, to start on January 1st. Learning from some of the things that proved awkward this year, I've made a few minor changes to the set-up, but in essence it's the same: play through one or two adventures a week, and see how you fare compared to other people attempting the same titles. It'll be interesting to see how much of a difference the amended rules make: even among those who played every week, there's a wide range of scores.

Best wishes for 2023 to all my readers.

Whichever I Choose, It Amounts to the Same

The adventure I'm currently playing is proving something of a slog, so to keep the blog ticking over, here are some tangential musings I've been intermittently working on this year.

A while back I found a post at the Gamebook Reviews blog which got me thinking about 'unlosable' gamebooks. I made a comment there, but subsequently it occurred to me to post something on the topic here because:

1. I thought of more to say.
2. Not that many people were likely to read a comment made on a blog post that was already months old.

In case anyone is unclear on what I mean by 'unlosable', this is nothing to do with gamebooks like Starship Traveller and the Virtual Reality Adventures series, where you can be certain of succeeding at the adventure so long as you take the correct route through the book. I'm talking about gamebooks that don't have any 'fail endings'.

There are different types of gamebook that fit into this category. For now I'm focusing on the books which only have one ending and one basic plot, which unfolds more or less the same way regardless of the decisions you make (though I do intend to waffle on about the other sort at a later date). 

The most basic examples of this would be the 'CYOA for toddlers' series Your First Adventure, a set of optimistically fatalistic micro-adventures with just one decision, both choices leading to the same favourable outcome. I'm too far removed from the mindset of pre-preschoolers to have any idea what sort of appeal such books would have to the target audience, but so much is said about young children's love of repetition, it wouldn't surprise me if most tots exposed to these books preferred making the same decision every time. Which, let's be honest, is good practice for a lot of the more 'one true path' gamebooks for older readers.

Today's youngsters may have encountered David Glover's Maths Quest gamebooks. Practically every decision in these is not a choice in the normal gamebook sense: instead, the reader is presented with a mathematical problem and a small selection of possible answers. Pick the correct answer, and you progress to the next stage of the adventure. Get it wrong, and there's trouble afoot. It's not the first time such a formula has been tried - the Be An Interplanetary Spy series had a bit more variety in the types of puzzle used, but essentially worked the same way. Except that in BAIS, getting it wrong usually meant death or some other form of failure. MQ, by contrast, hints at some terrible fate that is about to befall you, but then averts the threatened doom, usually via the intervention of the book's designated mystery sidekick. It's like Bullseye's evil twin - "Come and have a look at how you would have died."

There was a subsequent series of Maths Quest books by different authors, and similar books released under the History Quest and Science Quest banners, which went a step further. Pick a wrong answer, and the book just tells you why you didn't get it right, and sends you back to the question to try again. Not even a narrow escape, making these books rather less 'thrilling' than their blurbs assert them to be.

An earlier series of gamebooks that worked similarly to Maths/History/Science Quest was Martin Waddell's The Mystery Squad. Decisions were mostly puzzle-based, and getting a wrong answer led to your being told you were wrong (and often pelted with custard pies for your foolishness) and sent back to the puzzle section for another try. Still, those books did require the reader to keep track of how many times they got pied, and used that figure to rate the reader's performance at the end, so there were at least consequences to making mistakes in those books.

Much the same kind of rating system (using red herrings rather than custard pies) features in Mary Danby's The Famous Five and You books. It's a long time since I read any of the Enid Blyton books on which they're based, but the point (such as it is) of the gamebook adaptations appears to be to reproduce the original narrative as closely as possible. The first decision in the first book regards whether the children should travel by train or by car, and if you don't pick the 'right' one (determined, as far as I can tell, by what happened in Five on a Treasure Island), you get a redirect and a red herring. These books (yes, plural - there were apparently half a dozen of the things) aren't about finding new takes on 'classic' children's adventure stories, they're disguised trivia quizzes based for the most part on dull minutiae. I think I may have a new least favourite gamebook series here.

A not-so-obvious variant is Harry Harrison's misleadingly-named You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat. Play it once, and it's a moderately entertaining adventure in which you're a rookie in the Special Corps, sent to a prison planet to find a certain mad scientist. Play it again, and you soon discover that the decisions you make are meaningless. For instance, at one point you get to take one of three weapons with you. Immediately afterwards, you encounter an opponent against whom the weapon you chose is of no use. The nature of that opponent varies depending on which weapon you picked, but the plot beat is always the same: you chose 'poorly', and get robbed as a consequence of not having selected the 'right' weapon. 

Almost every fork in the narrative is like this. Faced with a binary choice, one option leading to success, the other to disaster, your selection always takes you to the outcome the author has already chosen. And it's not just decisions. Flip a coin (renamed an amphisibenic bipolar determinator in the text because jargon) to determine who wins a contest - the result for heads is identical to that for tails. When captured by the Star Beast, your freedom depending on how well you answer its riddles, wrong answers leave you no worse off than correct ones.

There are a couple of sort-of exceptions, where picking one option leads to being told something like, 'No, doing that would be stupid and doom you. Go back and choose the alternative course of action, you idiot,' but that's not exactly an improvement. The book's interactivity is illusory, and the decisions you make are irrelevant.

Most of the Back to the Future mini-gamebooks given away with breakfast cereal in the mid-1980s are similarly railroady. Follow the course of events that played out in the film, or don't - you end up in the same place regardless. Except for in the second and sixth 'books' in the series.

I only ever read book 2 once, decades ago, so I don't remember it clearly, but I do know that it makes it possible to avoid causing the paradox on which the movie's plot hinges, at which point the gamebook narrative rather fizzles out because the author didn't have the space to develop the concept. Book 6 has more diversity of outcomes, but in the end they all boil down to either a variant of what happened on screen, or words to the effect of, 'Oh well, you have a time machine. Better go back to the start and try again.' Obviously there are limits to how much you can do for a cereal packet freebie, but there are other examples that provided more challenging adventures over breakfast. 

Three Men in a Maze, published as part of the Tracker Books series, is a slightly different sort of interactive adaptation of a novel, based on an anecdote from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. As a textual simulation of what it's like to get lost in Hampton Court Maze under the guidance of a buffoon who thinks he's a lot smarter than he is, it's not bad, but you'd probably derive more entertainment from reading the book on which it's based.

I shan't say much about the pseudonymous Jak Shadow's F.E.A.R. Adventures, as I've already played most of them on this blog. Still, they merit a mention here. As in the Glover Maths Quest books, you can make 'bad' decisions, but never actually face the consequences of your 'error'. Instead you get sent back to the start to try again - which I consider a failure, hence my covering them in the blog, but the books themselves shy away from demoralising their readers with that f-word. Instead, they demoralise you by disregarding logic and reality, and punishing sensible decisions, but I've ranted about that elsewhere.

I never really got into Bantam Books' Time Machine series, but given that it lasted for over 20 books, it must have found a decent audience. In any case, at least some of them merit a mention here, though they're a bit of a special case. As I understand it, the point of these books is to find the chain of decisions that leads to the ending, with poor choices causing you to loop back to an earlier point in the narrative. That might make them sound like the F.E.A.R. Adventures, but while F.E.A.R. uses the looping back to cop out of having the viewpoint character come to any harm, Time Machine is more like attempting to navigate a textual maze (only with options more varied than choosing a direction at each junction).

Well, that's how the earlier ones work, at least. Reviews suggest that there are also books in the series where progress towards victory is inevitable regardless of the choices made, and a couple in which it's possible to get trapped in a loop on account of having chosen the wrong item at the outset. So, not every entry in the series is 'unlosable', though the exceptions may be that way owing to authorial or editorial errors rather than a deliberate change from the norm.

Anyway, those (and arguably the Marvel Super Heroes book that helped inspire this post) are all of the 'reach the same victory ending no matter what you do' gamebooks of which I am aware. Readers are welcome to mention any I've missed, correct errors, or just make their views on the subject known. But please don't say anything about 'unlosable' gamebooks with a variety of different plotlines and/or endings, as I'll be covering those in a separate blog entry.

The Vultures Circle Overhead and Pray for My Demise

I explained how I acquired the first four of Tracey Turner's Lost gamebooks in my playthrough of the first one. One thing I didn't mention about Lost in the Jungle of Doom was that it ended with a brief teaser for the second book, Lost in the Desert of Dread. The teaser vaguely implies continuity of character between the books, but the scene-setting passage in Desert makes no mention of my having previously wound up stranded in a jungle, so I could be playing a different individual. It's not that big a deal, but if this were explicitly the same person every time, by about the fourth book I'd expect my character to have been blacklisted by travel agents and transport providers worldwide.

Anyway, I'm in the Sahara Desert. I hadn't realised how massive it is until I saw the map of Africa at the start of the book. Just... wow.

I was on a camel safari, but became separated from the rest of the party during a sandstorm. Exactly what happened after that is a bit vague, but the adventure starts as I wake and throw off the sand-covered blanket under which I was lying. It's day, it's hot, I can see a vulture overhead, and I need to find help. Having been one of the group's water carriers, I have a few bottles of the stuff with me, but they'll only provide what I need for a day or two. Other useful possessions include a spade, matches, an aluminium mess tin, sensible clothing, and sun cream. 

As in the previous book, the intro is followed by a little information about the environment in which I find myself and some of the perils I am liable to face there, followed by a short list of survival tips. Amusingly, the list concludes by pointing out that in circumstances similar to my character's, the best option is probably staying put, doing what you can to attract attention, and waiting to be rescued, and then goes on to ask, "But where's the fun in that?"

So, do I immediately start searching for water, or wait in what little shelter from the sun is available, and travel when it's cooler? A look at the water consumption chart near the back of the book reveals that, depending on the temperature, exertion could potentially double the amount I need to drink, so I'll rest in the shade for a while. That does require me to find shade first, but I can see some boulders up on a ridge, and what could be a building a bit further away. The sidebar on finding shelter mentions that there are some abandoned buildings in the Sahara, so I'll investigate that.

It turns out to be a partially-collapsed mud hut, but the part that's still standing provides the shelter I need for today. Towards sundown, noises alert me to the proximity of a pack of jackals, apparently feeding on something dead. I have the option of trying to scare them off and seeing if I can scavenge any food from the corpse, but that seems a bad idea for a multitude of reasons. The jackals could turn on me, chasing them off will involve a fair bit of exertion even if they don't attack, and the book's already warned me more than once that eating will increase my need for water, so I'm probably better off going hungry for a while.

As I rather fortuitously have an analogue wristwatch, I can use it as a crude compass. The book explains how to do so (and lists some alternate options for people who've gone digital), but the text describing my actions doesn't follow quite the same procedure, and the accompanying illustration doesn't match either (unless the face is askew so that the 12 is not at the top). Based on where I was when we entered the desert, I need to go south or southwest, but working out which direction is which gets that bit more complicated when I'm pointing the wrong part of the face at the setting sun and the picture seems not to even be showing that.

Well, I know that in this hemisphere the sun sets in the west, so if I'm pointing the 12 at the setting sun, south should be in the direction of the 9, right? The book gives me the option of heading in the direction of the 6, 9 or 10, so I think I should go for one of the latter two. I'll go with 9. This takes me across an arid plain towards some sand dunes, which doesn't look massively promising, but depending on how deep into the desert I was when I got lost, there could be a lot of inhospitable terrain even on the best route out.

I've been walking for a while when a hissing sound brings me to a halt. There's a snake on the ground close by. Perhaps more dangerously to me as a reader, the body of the paragraph and the choices available don't entirely match up. There's a not insignificant difference between 'ignore' and 'step around', and 'back away' isn't the same as 'run away'. A sudden movement could startle the snake into attacking, so I try being more cautious - and that's the wrong thing to do. The saw-scaled viper bites me in the ankle, and its venom proves painfully lethal owing to the lack of medical facilities in the vicinity.

A not-so-convenient sidebar across the page from the section describing my death says enough about the temperament and behaviour of the species to make it obvious what I should have done and why (the snake was warning me away, so I needed to back off), but it's too late for that information to do my character any good.

I had a couple more goes at this book between making the failed attempt outlined above and posting this entry. Though I took a slightly different route second time round, I still wound up encountering that saw-scaled viper, but at least by then I knew the appropriate course of action. At every other point where I had to make a choice, the more sensible-seeming option (often suggested or backed up by advice given earlier in the book) had a non-lethal outcome, and I made it to an oasis and civilisation.

My third try suggested that non-suicidal routes through the book might converge in a manner which makes it impossible to win without passing through the 'using the watch as a compass' sequence and the run-in with the snake. If so, it's a pity that the unnecessarily confusing bit and the part where important information is withheld until after the reader could have used it to avert death are unavoidable, but most of the time the book does seem to be playing fair. Not quite up to the standard of the first book in the series, but still pretty good overall.

I Am My Own Bad Luck

Time for the third part of my playthrough of Ian Brocklehurst's Starhunt: Void Slavers, the gamebook equivalent of a 1990s straight-to-VHS sub-Steven Seagal action film, with slightly less interactivity than one of the more tediously linear Lone Wolf Magnakai books. Well, that's my opinion of the mini-adventure so far: some critics haven't been so positive about it.

Anyway, it turns out that things aren't quite over on Aquatine. The Starhunt collects me, and Kraven-8 informs me that security ships have been launched in response to my unauthorised departure, but my encyclopaedic knowledge of the capabilities of different models of ship reassures me that I'll be gone before they can catch up to me. Besides, a run-in with the law could result in decision-making, and that's just not what this mini-adventure's about.

Before my not-remotely-thrilling escape is concluded, Arthur contacts me. Showing signs of having been in a pretty nasty fight, he provides me with the information he was able to track down: a mixture of stuff I learned by eavesdropping and new information. Though Rhea Mosa is behind the kidnapping, her ship has developed a fault, so the captives are being transported by Collo, the former gun-runner. Arthur also gives me details of Rhea's ship and where she's having it repaired, which I dismiss because Collo's obviously the person I need to focus on now.

Incidentally, my character is confident that Mosa's ship, The Siren's Fury, will be no match for the Starhunt, even though my ship's capabilities are as randomly determined as my own. Now, that could just be an indication of my character's arrogance, or it might be a 'fact' in-story. If the latter, I can think of four ways it could have been handled:

1. The Fury has rubbish stats, so even if I roll nothing but ones during vehicle generation, I have a decent chance against it in a straight fight.
2. The Fury's stats are determined relative to the Starhunt's, so regardless of how good or bad my ship is, I will have the edge. That trick worked for Fang-Zen in Deathmoor.
3. The author has assumed that the readers will cheat and automatically give themselves and their ships maximum stats, so the Fury is designed to be not as good as the best ship dice can build, and honest players who don't roll high are likely to fail for not matching the stereotype.
4. The Fury's stats don't come into play because the author thinks punishing the person actually responsible for my sister's suffering is irrelevant, so going after Rhea is not an option, or at best a one-way trip to failure.

The second of those options would be best, the first would be acceptable, and I suspect that the adventure will go with one of the others. But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Arthur points out that it might be worth seeking Rhea out first in case she can be 'persuaded' to provide me with some useful information. This might lead some readers to think that I could make an actual decision here, but that is not the Brocklehurst way, so instead what happens next depends on what I did earlier. And my not having interacted with the crooked cop means that I leave planetary gravity without incident.

Kraven-8 confirms that the star-drive is ready, and I establish that it will take a minute and a half to reprogram it if I want to go after Rhea rather than Collo. Is that enough time for the Aquatine security forces to catch up with me, or just another of the irrelevant details with which this adventure is crammed? I'll risk the detour in case that's the only way of acquiring some vital data.

Taking the extra time has no adverse consequences, and I arrive at the asteroid belt where the Fury is so quickly, the author didn't even have time to tell me that I'd started to travel there. My ship's sensors pick up signs of Kalithium leakage, a probable consequence of the malfunctioning star-drive on Mosa's ship, so I follow the trail of particles. Kraven-8 advises scanning for traps before I enter the asteroid field, and I have to choose whether or not to do so. Wow. Two decisions without any intervening runaround. This second one seems a bit of a no-brainer, as the text gives no indication of why I might want to ignore the robot's recommendations, but that makes me suspicious. Nevertheless, I shall do the sensible thing.

Well, that's sloppy structuring. Choosing to do the scan has me voice the concern that taking the time to do so might give Rhea time to escape. Why not at least have me consider that possibility before making the decision, to make it slightly less blatantly 'do you want to be careful or suicidal?' As Kraven-8 points out, the fault on the Fury prevents Mosa from making a run for it, so smart players would have had a chance to figure out that there was no need to worry about her getting away, but there would at least be a reason to consider the more reckless option.

Scanning reveals weapons mounted on two nearby asteroids, a trick that is apparently common enough to have gained its own nickname, 'the old ion-plasma one-two'. Destroying both cannons is too easy to involve any activity on the reader's part, but continuing into the asteroid field requires me to roll against my ship's Manoeuvrability, so I do need to generate those stats after all.
Manoeuvrability 10
Weapons System 11
Deflector Shields 18
Hull Integrity 21
All decent scores, for what it's worth.

I successfully manoeuvre around a spinning asteroid and into a fresh chain of decision-free section transitions. A message comes in on the communications system, and an unidentified woman warns that I'm not going to leave here alive. Then the Fury attacks (while there was never any real doubt that the woman was Rhea, the jump from lacking confirmation to being certain is clumsily handled), and it has average stats, which means that Mr. Brocklehurst seems to have gone with option 3 from that list. I do indeed outclass Rhea's ship in every regard, but only because I was lucky enough to get high scores when determining its capabilities. Anyway, time to check the rules for ship-to-ship combat.

So, we take it in turns to fire at each other. Every shot hits, but my Deflectors absorb almost half of the damage inflicted by the Fury, while Rhea's Shields don't help her at all. Even so, I lose more than half my Hull Integrity in the course of bringing hers to zero. Wait, no, it's not quite that bad: sub-optimal formatting of the rules makes part of one step appear to be an aside. It turns out that with my first shot I did some flukey extra damage, so the fight ended one round sooner than I'd thought, and I can disregard Rhea's final shot. So I lost just under half of my Hull Integrity. Still a pretty hefty proportion. And according to the rules, winning a fight automatically means that the opposing ship explodes, so interrogating Rhea could be tricky.

My character gloats over Rhea's destruction before realising the flaw in plan 'reduce the slaver to her component atoms and then question them'. Kraven-8 then reveals that he was able to intercept a message she attempted to send to the starport whither Collo was bound. We are unable to make sense of it because it's written in Super Secret Slaver Code, but we do at least have the precise location of the intended recipient, which should narrow down the search once we head over there. Also, Collo doesn't get the benefit of whatever information Rhea was sending (not that she could have told him much beyond 'There's an unfamiliar spaceship here, and I've attacked it but am getting shot to scrap').

I have to make another Manoeuvrability check to get back out of the asteroid field, and narrowly succeed. Just as I'm about to set off for the starport, I receive another communication, this one a distress call purporting to be from a damaged transporter. Could be a trap, could be legitimate but a failure-ensuring waste of time, could be the only way to acquire some crucial plot token, could even be pure padding. Given what's been established about my character, I might be required to do the 'hard man making hard choices' thing and abandon them to their fate, but then again, the adventure might go down the moralistic 'you did something inhumane and must be punished with ignominious defeat' route, and if I'm going to fail, I'd rather fail for doing the right thing than for being callous.

After I've made my decision, the text has me observe that that kind of ship has no reason to be in this region, but head in their direction anyway. This is not good design: if I had such suspicions, they should have been made clear before I was asked what I wanted to do. Failure to provide relevant information, and then penalising the reader for not acting on what they weren't told, is a dirty trick, and doesn't become any less reprehensible just because other authors have been guilty of it before.

It is a trap, and the next time I try to contact the ship, they respond with a blast of sound that renders me unconscious. It does not, however, affect the competent member of the Starhunt's crew, so I now have to play out the fight between Kraven-8 and the space pirates who incapacitated me. Their ship's stats are worse than the Fury's, and we only take minor damage before my long-suffering robot atomises the scurvy bunch.

When I come round, Kraven-8 explains what just happened. Given that the reader already knows, there's no real need for the text to cover the explanation in as much detail as it does, but maybe the author thinks that saying more than necessary here compensates for not having said enough prior to the decision that got me embroiled in the encounter. It doesn't.

Anyway, we reach the starport. Restrictions here aren't as tight as they were on Aquatine, so I can carry a blaster, but it'll have to be my second-best one, as my unauthorised departure from that planet meant that I never got to retrieve the blaster I had to hand over to the customs droid. I had been wondering if Mr Brocklehurst would remember that I'd been forced to leave the first one behind. Still, whatever credit is due to him for not forgetting and creating a continuity error is largely wiped out by the fact that my having a replacement available renders the whole business with the loss of the first gun irrelevant. Unless you value the character insight provided by my being more concerned about weapons than people - the fact that Arthur's enquiries on my behalf earned him a beating didn't bother me anywhere near as much as the loss of that blaster.

It would appear that not chasing after Rhea was an automatic failure, as the adventure proceeds on the assumption that I have the location to which she attempted to send her final message. Inconveniently, that location turns out to be off-limits to anybody who doesn't have clearance from the ISRFA, the local association for no-holds-barred fighters and their fans. Consequently I resolve to head for a gibberish-named bar where shady stuff goes down, and see if I can get myself registered as a fighter.

As I approach the bar, a couple of security guards drag an unconscious man out of it and barge past me. Odds are, that's just more padding, to add in yet another gratuitous section transition. Mercifully, the text does elide the next half hour of chatting with people, and people who know people, and people who know people who know people, skipping to the meeting with the ISRFA rep who asks me why I want a career in beating other people to a pulp. Figuring that 'I want to find one of your honoured guests and rip appendages off him until he tells me where he stashed my sister' might not go down too well, I claim to need the prize money as I have unpleasant debts to large people. Or maybe the other way round.

Orlando the rep takes me to a medic to ensure that I'm in good enough health to fight. There's not even a perfunctory Stamina check, so I'd be approved even if I were in a condition where a kick to the shin could kill me. And then I have half an hour to prepare for a bout against Jonah Quayle, the Painmaster, undefeated champion of 27 fights. The reward for winning is more than enough to cover my imaginary debts, so regardless of the outcome, this will be my only licensed fight.

Once Orlando has left me to get changed, I use my earpiece to contact Kraven-8 and bulk out another section that serves only to fill the gap between one non-choice and another. Then Orlando returns and takes me to the cage where the fight is to take place.

Combat starts with a Skill check as the Painmaster charges at me. I succeed at the roll, thereby taking just 2 Stamina damage from his opening flurry of blows, after which I get five rounds of combat in which to inflict 6 Stamina damage on him, or I automatically lose. Though I have a 2-point Skill advantage, I've had a higher Skill than every previous melee opponent this adventure, and lost a disproportionate number of rounds every single fight, so this could be game over.

As it turns out, I take just four rounds to hit him enough times, after which he loses a point of Skill and this becomes a regular 'to the death' fight. Except that I now have a fifth of the Stamina he does, so he need only get in a couple of lucky blows to finish me off. He wins the first round, I try using Luck to reduce the damage and prolong my existence that bit longer, and an inconvenient double six enhances the effectiveness of his blow and ends my life that bit sooner.

So, I'm dead, and my sister faces a worse fate. But on the positive side, I can stop playing this tiresome mini-adventure now.

Well, actually I now have to play it again for the FF 40th anniversary contest I mentioned here, but at least for the replay I can use my gamebook manager to skim through all that wearisome padding.

Nothing's Gained and Nothing's Lost

Today is the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the book that got me hooked on gamebooks, and I've done more to celebrate this one than I did the 30th.

Since the start of the year I've been running a Fighting Fantasy playthrough contest at the Fighting Fantazine forum. Each week I use a randomiser to select two FF titles - one that was published or reissued this century, and one that only came out last century. There's almost a 50/50 split between the two categories, and once the new books scheduled for release next month come out, there will be exactly the same number of titles in each. I am including the Fantazine mini-adventures (except for the one that only came out today, about which I shall say nothing for now). And the ones from Warlock magazine that aren't variants of full gamebooks. Plus Clash of the Princes and The Adventures of Goldhawk.

Anyway, there are currently 104 titles on the list, and by the end of the year it should be at least 106. So two a week would have got through the lot in one year, and since a year is 52 weeks and one day, that extra couple can theoretically be squeezed in at the end.

The random order was for a bit of variety. I made a start on playing through FF in publication order (more or less) at a no longer extant FF forum, and after that forum ceased to exist, I did so again at its successor (which has also vanished to section 404). This blog, thus, represents the third time I've done the series in order, so I felt like shaking things up a bit for the contest. Sorcery! still gets played in sequence, since it's possible to carry things over from one book to the next in that series, and a couple of the books would become a lot trickier if played in isolation, but the randomiser still determines when a Sorcery! title comes up.

Participants only have to play one of the selected titles each week (though they are free to play both if willing and able, and then decide which one counts as that week's entry in the contest). Points are awarded to add a competitive element, but they're not really that important. What matters is that, because of this contest, I've played 70 FF adventures so far this year (not including the ones covered in this blog), and assorted other players have done in the region of 34-35. Some fans have revisited and reappraised titles they hadn't given a try in years. Others have played certain gamebooks for the first time ever (myself included). These replays and first plays have inspired fresh discussion of many of the adventures. As celebrations go, I think that's not bad.

You may be wondering how I did at each adventure I've played. If not, you might as well skip to the final paragraph. For those who would like to know, read on. Any that I won this year but failed when I did them for the blog are highlighted in yellow. Ones I won on the blog but didn't beat this year are highlighted in pale blue. 

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain – Not yet played
The Citadel of Chaos - Won
The Forest of Doom - Won
Starship Traveller - Won
City of Thieves - Won
The Shamutanti Hills – Crushed by a rolling boulder
Deathtrap Dungeon – Not yet played
Island of the Lizard King - Won
Kharé - Cityport of Traps – Killed by a Deathwraith
Scorpion Swamp – Not yet played
Caverns of the Snow Witch – Killed by an Elf Zombie
The Seven Serpents – Not yet played
House of Hell - Won
Talisman of Death – Won
The Crown of Kings – Not yet played
The Dervish Stone – Got hugged to death by a Bronze Golem
Space Assassin – Killed by Sentinels
Freeway Fighter – Got knocked out and had my car stolen
Temple of Terror – Not yet played
Dungeon of Justice – Took a crossbow bolt to the throat
The Rings of Kether – Not yet played
Seas of Blood – Killed by a Sith Orb (whatever that might be)
The Dark Chronicle of Anakendis – Not yet played
Appointment with F.E.A.R. – Not yet played
Temple of Testing – Killed by the Orcish Referee again
Rebel Planet – Got caught by an Arcadian search party
The Floating City – Was turned into a seal by a sorcerer who didn't like the present I got him
Demons of the Deep – Killed by a Devilfish
Fortress Throngard – Killed by a mob of guards
Sword of the Samurai – Killed by a Samurai Horseman
Rogue Mage – Not yet played
Trial of Champions – Killed by a fellow slave while fighting blindfolded in the arena
The Land of Changes – Won
Clash of the Princes - The Warlock's Way – Killed by a Thunder Beast
Clash of the Princes - The Warrior's Way – Not yet played
Robot Commando - Won by curing the sleeping sickness
Deadline to Destruction – Not yet played
Masks of Mayhem – Not yet played
Creature of Havoc – Caused the roof to cave in while searching for secret doors
The Temple of the Pharaoh – Killed by a Swarm of Bats
Beneath Nightmare Castle – Killed by Xakhaz
Crypt of the Sorcerer – Killed by the Harpoon Flies again
Star Strider – Not yet played
Phantoms of Fear – Killed by a Wild Boar
Midnight Rogue – Not yet played
Chasms of Malice – Not yet played
Battleblade Warrior – Killed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex
Slaves of the Abyss – Not yet played
Sky Lord – Killed by Pelhon Rangers (I think they're some kind of spacegoing busybodies, but given the weirdness of this book, they could just as easily be a football team)
Stealer of Souls – Killed by Mordraneth
Daggers of Darkness – Not yet played
Armies of Death – Killed by the Elite Fanatic
Portal of Evil – Killed by a bandit named Kran
Vault of the Vampire – Killed by the Baobhan Sith again
Fangs of Fury – Captured by Mage Warriors
Dead of Night – Not yet played
Master of Chaos - Won
Black Vein Prophecy – Biantaied a Polybleb (I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it turned out to be very bad for my health)
Keep of the Lich Lord - Won
Legend of the Shadow Warriors – Indefinitely imprisoned for being unable to pay my tax bill
Spectral Stalkers – Not yet played
Tower of Destruction – Killed by a Man-Orc
The Crimson Tide – Not yet played
Moonrunner – Absorbed by a large blob which Gruul conjured up
Siege of Sardath – Not yet played
Return to Firetop Mountain – Not yet played
Island of the Undead – Killed by the Greater Ghoul again
Night Dragon – Not yet played
Spellbreaker – Killed by the Piper
Legend of Zagor – Killed by a different Great Orc from the one that killed me on my last two attempts
Deathmoor – Killed with the Baron's poisoned sword
Knights of Doom – Not yet played
Magehunter – Killed by Bath-House Bouncers
Revenge of the Vampire – Killed by Igor
Darkmoon's Curse – Killed by the Banshee yet again
The Demon Spider - Won
Mudworm Swamp – Got drugged, robbed, and dumped in the swamp because drinking alcohol is bad, kids
Ghost Road – Won
Curse of the Mummy – Got crushed by a toppling statue
The Eye of the Dragon – Not yet played
Bloodbones – Killed by the Second Pirate
Howl of the Werewolf – Not yet played
Stormslayer – Not yet played
The Resurrection of the Dead – Killed by bad design a Xoroa Warrior
Shrine of the Salamander – Killed by a particularly vicious Tadpole
Night of the Necromancer – Not yet played
Prey of the Hunter – Not yet played
In Search of the Mungies' Gold – Killed by a large group of Mungies
Bones of the Banished – Fell off a cliff dodging a spear
Escape From the Sorcerer – Killed by a trio of Asura (intermittently invisible demonic pests)
Queen of Shades – Killed by ghostly Shieldmaidens
Vengeance at Midnight – Not yet played
Return to the Icefinger Mountains - Won
Blood of the Zombies – Not yet played
Hand of Fate – Killed by some Wheelies (disc-shaped creatures that throw knives, not a cycling stunt gone wrong)
Ascent of Darkness – Hit in the shoulder with a poisoned arrow
Starhunt: Void Slavers – Not yet played

As I haven't yet covered the more recent titles here, I shan't go into detail about the ones I've played (basically everything but Assassins of Allansia) until I attempt them for this blog. Suffice to say that they did not improve my success rate.

So, Happy Birthday to Fighting Fantasy. One of the playtesters for the impending new releases has made some encouraging comments about them, so things could be looking up for the range. Let's hope that there's a new renaissance under way.