Gamebooks – Page 10 – Cybe's Website

Daggers of Darkness

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Let’s get our hands on the Daggers of Darkness and see who we can stab!

In 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, founders of Games Workshop, released the book ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’. Intended as an introduction to tabletop role-playing games of the era, the book’s choose-your-own-adventure format mixed with simple dice-based combat proved massively successful, giving rise to a full series of books – Fighting Fantasy. With over 65 books in the series by a legion of authors and illustrators, the series’ legacy continues to this day. Come along with us as Cybe and co play through each one – with no prior knowledge, no hints or walkthroughs and no cheating!

Before continuing, please be aware that all of this content is made possible by the goodwill and support of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy the work on this site, please consider supporting the creation of more content like this by clicking the button.

Daggers of Darkness is a fairly standard FF adventure. Let’s check and see what’s new with it, before I start my playthrough. The most stand-out thing about this book is the cover. It is the best cover of any FF book of all time, because it shows a mongolian barbarian who seems to be wielding a death-mace-whip weapon of some sort, and his trusty eagle companion, jet-skiing across a river by means of standing on top of two saber-toothed tigers. There is simply nothing better than this image. Compared to jet-skiing tigers, Game of Thrones falls flat on its face. “Oh, you have dire wolves? Can I jet-ski on them? I don’t think so!”

Well, the formula of the adventure seems standard. A villainous warlock (or in this case, the vizier Chingiz) is trying to usurp power in Kazan, and I need to go and stop it, or something. Aside from the usual stats, the book also has a poison rating. Well, not so much a rating, but it’s a little drawing of a man with his body parts blocked out into seperate areas. As you go through the adventure, you fill in more and more of the body, until the poison takes over and you die. Charming. So already the book is devising new ways to kill the player.

So how do you get poisoned in the first place? What are the plans of the evil vizier? What are my starting stats for this game? Let’s find out! Well, stamina’s a lowly 15, but skill’s a decent 9, so it looks like we might do okay this time.

The adventure starts as an assassin is trying to stab me to death. So, not fooling around, then. The last time I started an adventure by almost being stabbed, I wound up being accused of being the false prophet (wow, an Ultima reference? I’m feeling very retro today!). He barely manages to scratch me with the titular dagger of darkness, but in doing so I have been intoxicated with the poison that will slowly try to claim my life.

I was rescued by a drinking buddy, who turns out to have been a wise wizard all along. Kinda like Cliff the mailman in ‘Cheers’, but without the uniform. Anyway, he tells me that I’ve been targeted by the assassin because I’m one of the ‘Select’, a group of people who may compete to claim the distant throne of Kazan. There’s a whole history as to how this comes around, it’s a very complicated and involving story which adds a lot to the general atmosphere of the book, but it essentially boils down to this – if I want to become the ruler of Kazan, I need to find some amulets that are guarded around the land. That’s the only way I’ll be able to confront the vizier, get a cure for his poison, and kick him in the knee for being such an evil plonker.

With Cliff’s advice still ringing in my ears, I head out on my travels. Before long, I find another of the Select, who is laying dying with one of the daggers of darkness embedded in his chest. He manages to tell me which way the assassins went, so I opt to head in the opposite direction. I don’t have the chance to rob the body though, because the full force of the poison that flows through the poor victim causes his body to crumble to dust – along with ALL OF HIS POSSESSIONS as well! How does that work? Seriously? Did the gold coins in his bag get poisoned too? Damn, I don’t stand a chance with that kind of poison in my system! I’m lucky that plants don’t just die as I walk past them…

I follow the dying man’s advice and head in the opposite direction from the assassins, but it’s not before long that I hear riders on the road up ahead. Taking the advice of Frodo Baggins, I decide to get off the road and hide. I’m sure that I find a really nice hovel under a tree to hide in, hoping that it’s neither assassins or Nazgul that are on the road. Whoever it is, they’re a bit smarter than Nazgul though – rather than falling for my trick, they just unleash an eagle on me which pecks me until I stagger out of the hiding place. I hope Sauron is taking note of this tactic.

It seems that the riders weren’t assassins, because when they confront me and I tell them that I’m one of the Select, they greet me with praise and respect and offer to take me along on my journey. They even give me a horse to ride on. An old gray mare (which ain’t what it used to be), and before long I’m making really good progress.

Well, we make good progress until we’re attacked by orcs and my entire party is scattered or killed during the night (although I’m sure a couple manage to scramble into Fangorn Forest and are probably eaten by Ents). I chop up a few of the orcs, but I’m left stumbling in the dark. From somewhere in the shadows, I am assailed by a ‘dark warrior’, who I have to assume is one of the vizier’s assassins. I take a skill penalty due to the darkness, but I’m still able to overwhelm my enemy and push on.

Leaving the ruins of my comrades behind, I head into the unforgiving snow. The snowstorm begins to get wilder, sapping both my stamina and spurring on the poison in my system. In the midst of the storm, a sinister magical force of unspecified origin (I have to assume the vizier or his assassin’s hands are involved, because the book doesn’t really tell me otherwise) coaxes me to lay down in the snow and wait for death. But I draw on my strength and, seeing an image of Cliff the mailman shimmering before my eyes like some kind of celestial Obi-Wan Kenobi, I push onwards!

By this point, the poison’s already starting to really build up and it’s close to taking a full third of my body. I haven’t found any of the medallion/talisman/amulet things as of yet, and I’m rather certain I should have come across one by now and simply missed it. Maybe my luck will change soon, because it’s not long before I’m rescuing a fellow adventurer from a pack of goblins. He seems a trustworthy sort, so I tell him that I’m one of the Select.

It turns out that this is a good idea, because he teaches me how to fight in the dark. Which would have been really useful a few sections ago when I was fighting the dark warrior, but I don’t mind. We head to a nearby tavern, where I have a quick meal. It seems that things will be settling down for a while…

But of course, me and ‘peaceful’ don’t co-exist in the same general area. After a couple pints of ale, a group of mercenaries burst into the tavern and throw a net over me. They knock me out, and I wake up later on in a dingy caravan where I’m informed that I will spend the rest of my life in the fighting pits. Oh joy. Does this mean that I will one day rise through the ranks, only to be released and seek my revenge against the evil Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones) and his snake cult? I certainly hope so, and to prove it, I challenge my cruel slavemaster to a duel.

He knocks me around the arena for a while, beats me in combat, I no doubt pee myself, and he leaves me in a pool of my own embarrassment. Strange, this didn’t happen to Conan.

Anyway, it seems that my willingness to stand up and make myself the center of attention has caught the notice of one old man, who tells me that he has been watching for the Select, and he can tell that I am one. Being one of the traditionalists, he wants to see the old rituals of royal ascension maintained, so he hurries me to my freedom. We journey to his home city, where I am plied with food and wine (and I chug down my Stamina Potion now so that my health is maxed out) and I’m told about the trials that stand before me.

In order to win my first medallion, I need to win the test of chance. To do so, I need to make my way from one side of a chamber to the other. There is no floor, only a series of pillars which I need to walk over the top of. Several of these pillars hold vicious snakes. So in short, it’s like the movie “The Golden Child”, if you remember back when Eddie Murphy made good films (oh, so long ago)…

But more deadly. And more random, because your movement direction is determined by the dice. You roll 5/6 to move up or down, 3/4 to move left or right, and if you roll 1/2 then you stay where you are. You cannot go back, I assume because the pillars you’ve just stepped off will crumble into the pit beneath you once you step away from them. And if you’re bitten by a snake, you lose three stamina. If you’re bitten by three snakes, you die.

Oh, and if you can’t move on any given turn (either because you’re unable to move in the direction that the dice indicates, or because it rolled 1/2), you lose one stamina point… I don’t know why. I assume that there’s a group of men standing at the entrance who throw rocks at you or something. It’s the only logical reason, because as it plays out, I wasn’t able to get across this pit. Eventually, only one step from being all the way across, I rolled a 2 and my stamina hit zero. Because the book doesn’t tell me WHY it is that I died, and because my ‘men throwing rocks at you’ idea sounds too sadistic even for this type of test, I’m going to just assume my character died from a bad case of death.

Not a bad book, the atmosphere is very thick and you get a real sense of history and fantasy environment from it. It’s a lovely escapist piece, because it gives a very unique feel to the area and culture you’re travelling through. But the downside, it’s one of those very difficult books. It often feels like the author was trying to make sure you couldn’t get through some parts without vast amounts of luck (actual luck, not the stat).

Cause of death: Uhhh… death.

Stealer of Souls

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. It’s time to tackle the dreaded Stealer of Souls!

Stealer of Souls is another book I never played as a kid. The cover shows an ominous looking figure standing in a dramatic pose, facing the reader. The same description applies to about 90% of the interior artwork, too. The story seems simple – an evil warlord/wizard is raising an army of bad things, and you need to go kill him. Oh, alright, the bad guy is called Mordreneth, he has a base on the Isle of Despair, and has kidnapped a nice wizard called Alsander too.

The inside cover has a map of the Isle of Despair, with such interesting landscapes as a swamp, a lake, a forest, some hills, and a bunch of mountains. No cities, no massive rips in the fabric of space and time, nothing like that. The book also boasts no additional stats or systems from the standard Fighting Fantasy set, just the skill, stamina and luck scores. Lastly, this copy I’m reading used to belong to a kid called Sam Rayner. Sam, if you’re out there, leave a comment and you can win a prize. (the prize is nothing).

The book opens with your character being given his quest by a big high muck-a-muck who tells you to go and fetch the kidnapped wizard, and then you’re packed off onto a ship to sail to the Isle of Despair, which I will henceforth refer to as The Isle of Somewhat Unhappiness. Mid-journey, a giant blackbird swoops down from the sky, which I promptly kill. Hope it wasn’t an albatross.

The ship arrives at the Isle of Broodingly Sulking, and I climb into a raft to row to the shore. I’m attacked by a giant crab, which leaves me alone when I chuck some food at it. Shortly thereafter, the crab’s owner, a sea giant, says hello and apologises for his pet’s behaviour, offering me a bed for the evening and a hearty meal in return. He also gives me an old scroll with a poem on it, which I dump into my backpack along with a jar of insect repellent that the ship’s captain gave me earlier.

The giant also gives me three meals to take with me, which makes me very happy (remember, each meal restores 4 stamina points, so that’s a lot), but the very next paragraph tells you that the damp has ruined two of them, rendering the entire gesture rather frustrating instead. The road then splits into two paths, and I pick the path that has less mud on it, because I don’t much fancy getting stuck in a swamp and eaten by Gollum.

We trudge on for a while until we eventually find a cave to sleep in for the night. While checking it out to make sure there are no horrible monsters, a poisonous centipede bites me. But it’s evidently not too poisonous, because it only causes 2 points of damage, rather than a lingering death or anything.

The next day as we journey along, we meet a lizard man asks me to go and kill a giant bird that’s been bothering him. I clamber up the cliff to the bird’s nest, fall off, and sustain only minimal damage before climbing back up again and killing the giant bird. The lizard gives me some generic loot (“Here, have some Generic Loot!”), which a forest imp tries to steal from me while I’m asleep the following night.

When I notice that the imp in question is trying to steal my Generic Loot ™, I’m given the option of just letting the imp go, or murdering him in cold blood. Which seems a bit harsh, even for my standards. I immediately have a moral dilema. Should I risk losing whatever reward the imp will give me for sparing his life, purely so that I can indulge my urge for mindless butchery? I decide to let the imp go, and he gives me some luck powder in return.

Soon I come to another crossroads, this one with a signpost. I follow the one which has a large deathly skull on its sign, which eventually leads me to a small cottage. There are two hobgoblins knocking seven shades of excreta out of each other in the garden, which causes me to do what any sane person would do in this situation – get some popcorn and enjoy the show.
Eventually the two monsters have murdered each other (for my viewing pleasure), so I head into the cottage and find an old man tied to a chair, he tells me that the monsters were fighting over which one of them got to kill him.

Questioning the logic of the hobgoblins is, of course, pointless, so I simply talk to the old man and he tells me that I should ask the local tribal leader about the scroll I found earlier. The book then guides me straight back to the signpost at the crossroads, and tells me in no uncertain terms to pick another path.

Heading south this time, I find the tribe of forest-dwellers that the old man mentioned. Their leader offers to sell me a few items in exchange for the Generic Loot I got earlier, so I hand over the Loot and get a key, rope, and some white oil. I talk to the leader about the scroll, and he explains that the poem written on it is about an ancient nasty monster thingy called the Stealer of Souls, and that if I hear it singing, I should avoid it. Hmm, good to know.

The book then guides you right back to the crossroads yet again, and throws you down the only untraveled path. After travelling for a while, we find a house. Entering, I find an old man who is chained to a wall, but while I look around for traps, the illusion fades to reveal that the old man is actually a mad evil cultist who wants to stab me to death for no apparent reason. And I guess he was just waiting there for random strangers to come into his home, with this illusion spell in place and… eh, everyone needs a hobby.

Despite the house being decorated with skulls, alters to the dark gods, and generally looking like Ed Gein’s holiday home in the Algarve, I’m told that I need to sleep there for the night. My sleep is interrupted by nightmares (no, really? But it’s such a nice house!) which are so bad that they cause me to take three points of damage, somehow. Anyway, the next morning I find a trapdoor in the house, and follow the stairs down until I find the entrance to the Iron Crypt, the place I’ve been searching for on this island… wow, that was convenient!

I bend the bars of the doorway into the crypt, and chop up a few goblins as I stumble through the tunnels. At this point in the adventure, you might have noticed one thing that I’ve neglected to mention so far, and that’s how well I’m doing. Frankly, I still have plenty of provisions left, which means that my health is fine and dandy. In fact, I’m rapidly starting to suspect that this adventure is just a little too easy.

The book then decides to correct this by throwing me into a maze. Urgh. Think you all know how I feel about mazes. I stumble around blindly for a while, killing ogres and snakes and random generic skeleton monsters. This goes on for a while. Soon, I stop even noting down which tunnel I’ve taken, because they all blur into one another, such is the way of mazes in this type of book.

Having then deciding to completely screw me over, the book describes a chamber in the maze as having ‘sound’ coming from it, so I head in to investigate, and am promptly eaten by the Stealer of Souls. No, the description didn’t say ‘singing’, because if it did, I wouldn’t have gone in. It said ‘sound’, which could have been anything, from the sound of goblins marching around in circles, to the sound of a baby eating a cat.

This book was… it was definitely a book. It had a cover, and it had words, and the words were printed on paper, so it was definitely a book. That’s the most remarkable thing I can think to say about it, really. I wish I could say more, but there’s just so little to say. I’d suggest reading Michael Moorcock’s Stealer of Souls book from his Elric series, but I’m afraid that one would put me to sleep too. And if you want that, why not just watch the first Star Trek film? That’s guaranteed to put you to sleep! In fact, I think I’ll go and watch that right now….

Cause of death: Eaten because of ‘sound’.

Sky Lord

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Let’s get up into the air… I guess… and fight the Sky Lord! Oh geez this looks bad.

I had umpteen chances to purchase this book when I was a kid, and never did. Almost entirely because the cover is just simply so bland, with a strange alien thingy riding what appears to be a flying motorbike. There’s a laser beam and I’d guess it is meant to indicate that the creature is firing at someone, but the angle makes this difficult to tell for sure, and the background is a simple radiant yellow which simply screams lack of imagination. Really, with a cover like that, what kind of adventure is it selling? What lurks within?

It doesn’t start off well. You play as a four-armed alien knight thing from a planet whose name looks like someone’s cat walked across the keyboard. Your planet’s king summons you and tells you that he needs your service, because an evil Generic Bad Guy is doing Generic Bad Things. Our villain of the month is L’Bastin, whose foul plans involve tax evasion.

Let me clarify, L’Bastin wanted to get a whole load of money because he’s evil or something, but because the planet you’re living on hasn’t given anyone a pay raise in two hundred years (so, basically like Earth), L’Bastin asks for a loan. He’s turned down, and instead comes up with a plan to make himself rich. His plan is to replace his entire workforce by creatures grown in test-tubes, and keep their wages for himself. He learned of this idea from Amazon, I believe. The evil fiends other crimes include selling his flatmate’s possessions at the local pawn shop, and glueing a pineapple to the queen’s face. I wish I was joking here. I really do. Seriously, come back Balthus Dire, all is forgiven!

Anyway, I’m promptly shipped off to the bad guy’s space castle (a castle on a planet in space… some things never change, eh?) which is full of mutant cross-breed monsters of various types. So in short, I suspect, it’s going to be just like any other FF book, with nothing really major to differentiate it from the fantasy genre ones. If this pans out to be the case, that’ll mean that the best sci-fi one is Starship Traveller, as disturbing as that sounds… okay, let’s get on with it. The book asks me if I want to start off by making my ship time-warp or light-warp to the enemy’s castle.

I engage the time-warp drive, and after a few minutes of flight I’m told that I notice a ‘fuzzy purple blotch’ on the side of my ship. The text describes this as a space fungus, so I drop out of warp and try to get rid of it, when I’m suddenly attacked by a random space ship, which I’m able to shoot out of the sky without too much trouble. The ship leaves behind a droid robot, which I apparently take with me, before I crash into a random planet and sink my ship in a lake. Just call me Han Solo.

Stumbling out of the lake, the droid starts to toddle off on its own into the distance. I follow along after it, eventually losing sight of it. I walk along a random path, and find an alien spaceship which has landed on the planet. I attempt to board it, but two mutant monsters emerge and try to eat me. I defeat them both, but then apparently lose interest in the ship because I go in another direction entirely. I don’t know why, the book simply tells you that you do this. Frankly, given how many times I’ve said the word ‘random’ at this point, I’m not bloody surprised.

I manage to find the droid and save it from another generic mutant thing, and the droid is so thankful that it takes me to see its master, who lives in a nearby cave. The droid’s master tells me that the planet has been taken over by an evil sprite type thing and an army of mutants, and the droid was sent to save them all because it has some kind of mcguffin that can destroy the sprite’s ship.

The cave-dwelling madman then tells me that he’s just going to go and get my ship back, so he toddles off into the back of the cave. He then emerges a few moments later and tells me that he’s accidently destroyed my ship instead, and stranded me on this planet. The game then ends.

Ffff………

Let me make the record nice and clear though, I don’t dislike sci-fi. But good sci-fi is very hard to write well. I largely think that the age of really challenging sci-fi is a thing of the past now, that we’ve run out of Arthur C Clarkes and Philip K Dicks. Good sci-fi should make us stop and think about ourselves, question who we are and where we are going. Very few sci-fi products do that any more. This… is not one of them. This one leaves me feeling as if I’m standing in a cold dark room clutching my dog-eared copy of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’, hoping for better days.

But yeah, in short, I don’t hate sci-fi, I just think it’s very hard to do it well, and that’s why many writers struggle with it. But, god help me, I decide to give it another shot.

This time, my character reaches for the light-jump, which results in nothing much more than being attacked by a different random space ship. After defeating it, though, I’m informed that there’s a large space station nearby which I could go and visit. I decide to dock in it, and (after blowing up a rather unimpressive drone shuttle) I’m given the bewildering choice of whether I enter the airlock while its vertical or horizontal. There doesn’t seem to be any indication as to which of these might be a ‘wrong’ choice, so I just pick one at random. Horizontal. No obvious difference in my choice either way. Woo. Such a feeling of progress, there.

Once inside the station, I’m given the choice as to if I want to leave the room I’m in, or look at either a plastic tap or a glass tap. I look at the glass tap, and I’m told that I then decide that I don’t want to do anything so just leave the room anyway. Wow. I’m so glad that the book gave me this choice. It added so much to my adventure and WHY AM I DOING THIS? I could be re-playing City of Thieves right now, and enjoying myself.

I wander around the station for a while until I encounter a locked door, and I’m told that lockpicking is a skill I learned at space academy. Let’s consider this for a moment. First up, I studied at a place called Space Academy – not the University of Plegus 3 or anything, but Space Academy. Because we’re in space, don’t you know. Trite. But second, Space Academy teaches lockpicking. Because every student has classes on how to pick a lock, and probably also on general burglary skills. And third, in this distant space station in the far future, locks aren’t bits of computerised digital systems that are unlocked by keycards or anything, but CAN BE PICKED WITH ACTUAL LOCKPICKS I mean god why why why why why why why why why why why why….

So after I pick the lock of the door (urrrrgh) I enter a room with a set of space mopeds in one corner, a la the high-speed carts in the film Space Mutiny. “Put your helmet on, we’ll be reaching speeds of three!” But no time to think about that, because there’s an evil orange blob on the other side of the room. I get on the cart and drive towards the orange blob, hoping that it’ll put me out of my misery. Instead I drive right over it, through the door, and wind up in the hydroponics bay.

Hydroponics bay exists purely to annoy me. I try to examine some of the plants, and I’m attacked by brambles. Brambles, and I mean ‘attacked’ as in they are alive and fighting me. Can you guess how many skill points a bramble has? You don’t have to guess, this book tells you. I’m feeling suitably underwhelmed, so after killing the bramble, the book asks if I want to eat a strawberry. Keen to have some slight sense of pleasure in my otherwise dreary mission, I chew on a strawberry. It was poisoned.

Spitting out the poisoned strawberry (and let me just ask WHAT KIND OF HYDROPONICS BAY IS FULL OF KILLER BRAMBLES AND POISONED STRAWBERRIES?), I decide to just leave, lugging a bag of weed-killer and a shovel with me, hoping that I can find a hole to bury myself in. Sorry, am I getting too bleak here? Let me make this very clear, this is not a good book. Fighting Fantasy has done far, far better. It’s even done better sci-fi books. Bleh. Right, leaving the hydroponics bay of pain, my character seems to decide that he would rather just leave the whole silly station behind. He loads himself into a shuttle and returns to his ship, without even leaving me the chance to decide if I want to or not.

The shuttle is inhabited by a survivor of the station, who is terrified of the orange blob, which has evidently ate all his friends. Like any kindly and noble space warrior, I butcher the terrified old man in cold blood. I take his box of cigars and revolver with me, because why not? And then I’m thrown into a fight with the orange blob. As a ‘fight’, it is actually fairly unique and innovative for this book, as I need to throw things at it, the blob then eats them and I hope that it gets full or poisoned or something. The entire innovation is kinda ruined because when I fail at this, I get a very generic ‘The blob catches up and devours you’ ending. Not even an imaginative description of it devouring your flesh. Feh.

This book is bad. It’s a bad, bad book. It’s not good. Have I made that clear enough? And you want to know why it’s bad? Because it’s lazy. The writing is just so lazy. It has some decent ideas though, deep down. I mean, take the very first choice, if you want to travel with time warp or light warp. That could be a pretty neat idea, a chance to really experience some strange and entirely new type of styles. Instead, the text just tells you that each holds different dangers, but doesn’t give any idea what those might be. Or the death with the orange blob eating you, it’s all presented in such a bland and dull manner.

In short, this book needed more. It has ideas, deep down, but it’s all just performed in such a lazy manner. As if there’s just no love or heart put into it. This book just reads as if someone was told to go and write it, and really didn’t care if what they had at the end of the day was going to be good or not. And if they didn’t care, why should I?

Cause of death: Gelatinous blob.

Slaves of the Abyss

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Let’s arm up and get ready to liberate the Slaves of the Abyss!

Ah, Fighting Fantasy 32. The thirty-second book in the series. With a cover that is more bewildering than anything else. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m even looking at here. If I was to guess, it’s a flat prison in space being guarded by a giant floating head?

By this point in the series, things had kinda hit a plateux. I do think that the series picked up in the 40s with a lot more atmosphere and experimentation, but it definitely wasn’t at the same heights of the earlier books. The 30s were kinda a bit ‘meh’ really, for the most part. I do think that’s partly due to just how samey all the storylines were.

So for this particular book’s storyline, Princess Caroline of some indescript backwater kingdom is afraid that a big ol’ army of gribbly doom will come and stomp down her city streets and poke the town’s puppies with sticks and so forth, so she asks me and few other idiots – erm, brave heroes, to go and help defend the useless nation in the place of an actual army of anything.

I roll up a character who has a phenomenally high skill (11), and a spectacularly low stamina (16) and volounteer to go and scout out the evil army of evilness, because the other possible options for how to defend the city don’t sound like much fun. While I get ready to head out on my journey, there’s a big kafuffle in the castle when some character runs into the kitchen and sets himself on fire. I’ve no idea why, and this doesn’t seem to have any impact on what’s going on, so it just leaves me confused.

As we saddle up to head off on our mission, one of the other adventurers who’ve been charged with defending the kingdom gives me a bag of herbs which keep me awake. This seems rather pointless, until you remember that this is one of those FF books with a time system, so being able to stay alert and keep moving during the night is going to be pretty useful. During my first night out on the trail, I’m attacked by evil elves, which aren’t too much of a threat.

Riding through the next day, I decide to stay over at a roadside temple. As soon as I step inside, a group of priests try to mug me and take all my stuff. I don’t believe I just said that, so I’m going to read that section again…. Yes, the priests try to mug me. They demand all of the contents of my backpack, and when they don’t get it, a group of them surround me and I’m left dodging out of their way and fleeing the temple. Y’know, I’ve heard about tithing, but this is ridiculous!

I continue along my way, eventually encountering a begger who tells me a tall story involving an evil jester and a wicked curse (which kinda makes me wish I was taking part in that story instead) and asks me for gold, I ignore him and press onwards into the next village. Upon arriving there, I am surrounded by hooded priests – oh god, they’ve caught up with me! The priests proceed to beat me unconscious, and throw me into a cell without any of my possessions except for an old statue I took from the elves that I killed a few nights ago.

I wake up in a cell, and one of the priests eventually tells me that they’ve been ordered to let me go. I’m not given the option to massacre their entire order or anything, so I trudge miserably onwards until I come to another village, hopefully free from the tyranny of wandering bands of marauding clergy. The village is utterly abandoned, except for a strange man who is locked in a basement of one of the houses. Naturally this man drags me into a wine celler and tries to change the shape of my head with a vigorous series of punches, so I’m forced to run away yet again.

So yeah, at this point in the adventure I kinda have to admit to myself that things are a bit… weird? I guess. The book definitely has a strange vibe wherein repercussions don’t seem to have any correlation to the actions that preceded them. So for example, if you’re wondering if the point about the guy who incinerated himself in the kitchen or this random basement-dwelling punching man are ever brought up again… nah, not even slightly.

Seeking shelter in a nearby hut, I grab two suspicious sounding potions from a shelf, one labelled Arakh and one called Zazzaz. I plan to indulge my urge to taste possibly gross stuff with these potions. The hut also has some puppets in a corner, which I avoid like the plague because puppets are the scariest thing since clowns. Yeeks. Anyway, the next village I come across is similarly empty, leading me to suspect that the entire population has been abducted by aliens.

I try to press onwards, but this winds up with my character encountering an ending paragraph in which he stumbles in confusion across many featureless plains for all of eternity, causing me to have to restart the entire adventure. No, really, if you continue across the plains and don’t turn back then you just go on and on forever…

By the time I get back to this paragraph, I’m far less patient and quite happy to just give the entire thing a angry sigh and turn back the way I’ve come. Soon enough, I see the signs of the evil McEvilson army off in the distance. I’m so happy that I take a swig of the Arakh potion, only to find that it has no effect whatsoever. What.

I draw a bit closer to the army, sneaking nice and quietly. It’s at this point that I can see that the soldiers are not ravaging monsters of evil eviltons, but blank-eyed peasants. So at very least we know what happened to the villagers. I’m so surprised that I take a swig of the Zazzaz potion, only to find that it makes me pass out and lose consciousness. Just… what is the point of either of these potions then? When I come to, I get back onto my horse, who is promptly startled at the sight of the army, causing it to rear up and throw me off, which in turn makes me pass out and lose consciousness again. What.

This time, I wake up in a giant void full of imprisoned figures, swirling in a strange un-world type of space. That’s right, I’m IN THE FRONT COVER. And, yeah, the book kinda ends there. I assume that the giant floating head winded up getting a little bored and decided to have me for dinner.

This is one hell of a strange book. So, well, yeah. I’m sure there’s a lot more to Slaves of the Abyss, I suspect it’s a bit of a slow-burn kind of a book. I actually rather liked a lot of the atmosphere in it, which was occasionally a little “Shadow Over Innesmouth”ish. I’d give that point a recommendation, because it does play a bit of a mystery with the player.

The fantasy angle on it is a little dull, but overall I can’t really say it’s a poor showing. It does pose a rather nice little mystery, making you wonder just what’s going on, and I’d be interested to try it out and see if we can solve it and find out just what is going on with this army of villagers and who the big giant head happens to be (hey, maybe he’s William Shatner!) Give this one a shot. Just… try to do better at it than I did, eh?

Cause of Death: Enslaved. In the Abyss. Appropriate, eh?