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Star Strider

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now it’s time for a game in which YOU are the monster! Let’s head out into the galaxy in Star Strider!

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!

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Oh god no, not another sci-fi one! It’s not a secret that I’ve grown to dislike the sci-fi Fighting Fantasy adventures with the rampant passion of a thousand dying suns. But god damn it, I’m going to get through this.

The book opens with a quote explaining that a Star Strider is a skilled bounty hunter… in space! I am then immediately informed that the President has been kidnapped by the romulans – oh wait, no, sorry, that’s the Gromulans. Totally different. Another evil space empire entirely. As is standard in these games, instead of sending along a giant army of death-robots, they send one lone nutcase with a gun. Jack Bauer would be proud. And now I have the mental image of Keifer Sutherland beating up Romulans.

It’s also occurred to me that this is one of the rarer “rescue mission” type of quests, as opposed to the standard “there is an evil wizard over there, go and kill him” ones.

I start out the adventure onboard a shuttle to earth, where the President is being held hostage ‘somewhere’. Great intel, guys! We have narrowed the search down to an entire planet! Aboard the shuttle, the waitress robot offers me some snacks, which I accept. The food cubes (that sounds vile! What is the obsession in bad sci-fi that all food should be done in multicoloured cube form?) restores one stamina point… which is still at maximum because the adventure has just started and I’ve not had the chance to lose any OH GOD THIS ADVENTURE IS GOING TO BE STUPID!

The shuttle reaches a dingy old docking station and I catch a bus to Madrid. FUTURE MADRID, that is! On the way, two GromPol grab me and throw me into a box or something. I’m not actually certain what GromPol are, I assume that they are some kind of police force. Working on that assumption, the police use a strange telepathic illusion in order to scare me. This adventure has a fear rating, for some obscure reason. So here’s the thing – other Fighting Fantasy books, like House of Hell, have had a fear system because they were themed around horror. Star Strider isn’t. I’m not sure what it’s doing here. It barely has any impact on the adventure, and serves no real purpose other than to give me something else to roll against. In this instance, the police give me the illusion of being sealed in a small box, which is apparently quite scary.

Once they are finished, they ask me who I am and what I’m doing, and then promptly drop me back on the bus without any further concerns or worry.
If you’re confused about what just happened… yeah, makes two of us! I really have no idea why these events occurred and what possible reasoning there is behind this. Have I mentioned that the sci-fi Fighting Fantasy gamebooks weren’t particularly good?

Anyway, the bus stops and I get off in Future Madrid. The book takes the moment to tell me that the place is a mess and is only used as a stop-off for people en route to London, which I think is a bit dubious. I mean, if you have a space shuttle, why not just set a port up in London? And I’ve been to London, I doubt that Future Madrid could be any more of a mess! Either way, a robot walks up to me and ‘pings’ me. I’ve no reason to want to jump at the chance to make friends with a random robot, so instead I follow it down the hallways until I find out that it’s actually working for the Grom.

I’m wondering if the Grom are actually the Gromulans that were mentioned in the intro to the story. Maybe they shortened the name and didn’t bother to adjust the rest of the book (this is stupid). If so, I would retroactively assume that the GromPol are basically their stormtroopers… which means that the Gromulan Empire has captured Earth? And are holding the President hostage for… why exactly? I really think that this would make a lot more sense if the writer had set the adventure on the Grom(ulan) home planet – but hey, if they did that then we wouldn’t be able to go to Space Madrid.

So, with no real clue what I should spend my effort on, I just follow the robot around the ruins of the old city, until I wander into a Grom ambush. Something akin to a billion drone fighter jets descend on me, and I’m quite happy to choose the ‘run like hell away’ option. Honestly, that’s just overkill at this point!

I am promptly saved by a group of sewer-dwelling criminals who assume that I’m one of their friends. Immediately one of their other friends, a big nasty chap, starts punching me for no apparent reason. I wonder if that’s how they treat all of their new friends… Naturally I hit him back, at which point everyone in the sewer-dwelling criminal gang realises that I’m a bounty hunter and murders the shit out of me. So, having no interest in dying in such a pointlessly stupid means (an instant death, I should point out), I roll up a new character (two less stamina, one more skill on this one) and make all the same decisions in order to get right back to this point in the adventure, purely so that I can let a man punch me for no good reason and without any warning.

As it turns out, Mr Punchy is actually ‘testing’ me to see if I’m happy to tag along with their plan to rob the hacienda. I have no idea why he would have thought that just randomly punching a new recruit would make them want to join them in their criminal enterprise but whatever. I trudge along to this and am promptly dumped alone into the hacienda with no backup. God dammit.

So do I even need to point out that I have not strode a single star thus far? Anyway by this stage, I am haemorrhaging Time points, which is another of the things that this book seems intent on subjecting me to. Why? I don’t know. They make a lot more sense than having Fear points, at least! Y’know, in an adventure in which I’m meant to be rescuing the President, and instead seem to be breaking and entering. Geez… right, anyway, the book tells me to sneak across a courtyard filled with laser beams. “Throw one dice, this is where the beam is” says the book, in possibly one of the worst explained examples of writing I’ve yet to see. So the laser beam is either at number 2, or the laser beam is on the table in my living room, I don’t know which. Was this published from a first draft??

Once I get inside the hacienda, I find a random robot wandering around. I’m quite keen to get some revenge on one of them for all of the suffering that I’ve endured due to robots thus far in this adventure, so I beat it to death. Turns out it was just a butler robot, but I still feel satisfied. A small kid walks out of a nearby room looking for the butler. It’s a Grom kid, which means that it has those weird psychic illusion powers. When she sees me, she asks if I want to play a game. I agree, knowing better than to refuse to play a game when a kid with crazy psychic powers. She promptly tells me that her game is to pick the lock of her dad’s computer terminal… sigh.. which I do through the course of a tedious maths puzzle. Not just one tedious maths puzzle – two of them! I didn’t buy a book of maths puzzles!

Eventually I get access and find out that the president is stored in a warehouse in sector 169A. Oh gosh, I’m sure that number won’t be at all important later on! And also, damn, this entire breaking and entering subplot wasn’t entirely without purpose after all – it just felt like it!

I flee the place and get back to the bus, where I’m told to deduct a few more Time points for the journey out of Madrid. The way that time is applied in this game is utterly abstract, I could lose two time points by undergoing a long bus ride, or lose two time points for leafing through a book in a shop. There’s no definite guide as to what a time point is worth, they’re just applied haphazardly and urgh forget it. Moving on.

We arrive in Roma, which I’m assuming is Future Rome. I find what I assume to be a future bed & breakfast, and during the night I catch sight of someone who looks ‘familiar’ in another room. The next day I follow her like a crazy stalker, and eventually figure out that she’s a fellow bounty hunter. Together we plan to search for info, and she suggests that I check out a local abandoned unused cinema.

I find the cinema, which I out-of-character quickly name ‘Paradiso’, and explore around it for a while. In one of the rooms I find a large angry-looking man, but I’m able to calm him down and he agrees to help me. He escorts me outside, and we are just about to head off to meet his contact when a swarm of Grom ships swoop down on us. I am asked if I want to help the big strong dude fight them, and when I say that I do, I am greeted with yet another instant-death segment where the Grom capture us both with a net and take us away. I have no interest in playing through this again, so I officially consider this book ‘done’.

This adventure is a mess. The descriptions are sloppy and unstructured, without anything approaching a feeling of atmosphere. The choices you’re given are often muddled and unclear, and I had quite a few choices which I was unsure what the difference between both options actually were. The entire thing feels unpolished, as if it needed some sharp editing to bring the work into focus. Sadly there just wasn’t any done to this book, and I am not surprised that it’s never been republished. This is the kind of Fighting Fantasy book you give to your kid if they have been naughty and need some kind of suitable punishment.

Cause of death: Captured by Grom(ulans)

Crypt of the Sorcerer

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. So let’s find our way out of the Crypt of the Sorcerer!

So yeah, when I first had these Fighting Fantasy books as a kid, one of the ones I never got around to playing was Crypt of the Sorcerer. I’m not sure why, but I suspect that the cover may have something to do with it. It had a fine enough cover back in the day, but something about the original’s image of a hunched and decrepit old man that looked as if he was about to fall over and break his hip, just didn’t really inspire you to grab a copy in the same way that a vicious dragon or a bloodthirsty vampire would. The later versions of the cover were certainly more energetic. Although, when I look at them as an adult, I really do appreciate the original’s atmospheric colouring and moody shadows. But anyway, let’s get on with the adventure.

The story begins with your character being given a fairly hefty monologue from your wizardly buddy Yaztromo, who I pretty much imagine looks a bit like Dumbledore. He tells you that long ago, an evil sorcerer was slain by a heroic adventurer. It seems that now the sorcerer has got bored sitting around in his tomb, so he got up and decided to come back to the world of the living and cause some trouble… I kinda imagine being dead as a large waiting room for these wizards, where you sit and read magazines until you’re called back to bring havoc on the living. Maybe they even have a little ticket machine that reads out your number. “Now resurrecting ticket number 7.” Curiously, I imagine that this waiting room is also used by superheroes in comic books when they ‘die’.

Either way, to kill the sorcerer again, I need to pick up the sword from the adventurer who slew the sorcerer in the first place. The only problem, that adventurer is living quite a distance away near a local lake, and is a skeleton now for some reason. Right. Well, no point sitting around, off I went.

I’d rolled up some fairly decent stats – not ‘Conan the Barbarian’ good, but not ‘keel over and die if a goblin sneezes on me’ poor either. Discount Dumbledore gave me a healing potion with enough for five solid gulps, and the advice that I should look for magical amulets. In FF games, that’s always a clue. “Look for keys”, “Look for dragon’s teeth”, “Look for magic amulets”. It basically translates into “If you don’t find these items, you may as well just start over again, because you’re screwed if you don’t find them.”

This adventure didn’t seem especially punishing or unfair, but a lot of the encounters I stumbled across felt rather disjointed. I’ll explain this as I go. The first problem I came up against was a swarm of tracker-jackers that assaulted me near a river. Okay, so they’re not exactly the little insects from The Hunger Games, but I want to pretend that I’m Katness for this part of the adventure. It’s more cool that way. I was very lucky with my dice and managed to only suffer a few small scratches that were of no huge concern.

I hurried along past the next potential distraction, and came across a dying dwarf, whose hut had been attacked by generic wandering monsters. Like a noble warrior, I gave him my remaining health potion and nursed him back to health… nah, just kidding, I robbed him. The only noteworthy possessions he had were a knife, and a pendant of sanity. Remembering what Discount Dumbledore told me, I figured that this pendant would be very important later, so I felt proud of myself. Yay.

Also, pendant of sanity. Best item over. Who needs mental health treatment to cure your PTSD or anxiety when you can wear a magical necklace? One of these days, I’ll set up a stall on the seafront and sell pendants of sanity to tourists.

I killed a few chameleons, and painted myself with their blood. No, really, the book gives me the option to do that. It’s explained that their blood had magical powers, but when I tried it, I found that I was immune to their blood. For some reason. Well what a massive waste of time that was. Either way, I was now a man running around with chameleon blood on my face, waving a pendant of sanity around. For some reason I don’t think the pendant is working.

In a boneyard, which I imagine looking something like the bone ship from the movie ‘Alien’, I met the Bonekeeper. I’m not too sure what a Bonekeeper is, I picture a lanky man with wild-looking hair. I kinda imagine him looking something like John Cleese (I don’t know why, I suspect my brain just made a Monty Python reference that I didn’t quite consciously grasp). I gave him my knife, and he gave me a ring that kept werewolves away. I did not encounter any werewolves for the rest of the time I possessed the ring, so I can only assume it worked. That… that is how things work, right?

Leaving the boneyard, I was attacked by a few goblins. Sadly it doesn’t look like the magic ring keeps goblins away. Having fended off the green menaces, things were looking very positive for a while until I caught sight of a figure in the distance darting into a forest. I quickly followed the figure, hoping that it was the fabled adventurer skeleton dude, only to find that he was a ‘black faerie’. A black faerie. I checked the illustration, and sure enough, he had dark skin. Black faeries are, according to the book, “the most evil of all faeries”. He also had a gang. Who mugged me. Yeah…. So I’m forced to remember that these books were written in a very different time, but… yeesh.

Racial overtones aside, the black fairies stole everything I had, including my pendant of sanity. Although as it turned out, the item that I would soon be needing most of all would be a simple healing potion. I escaped from the assailants, set up camp, and that night I was was attacked by fire beetles.

Now seriously wounded, I staggered onwards out of the forest, hoping beyond hope that I would soon reach my goal, when suddenly a woman riding a gryphon flew down and killed me.

This confused me, because this encounter felt so unexpected and random that I first assumed I’d turned to a different page by mistake. I had no idea who this person was, what she wanted, or why she was even there in the first place. She literally just flew down and started thumping me with her gryphon – possibly swinging the poor beast by its tail over her head like some kind of angry fuzzy flail. Was she a bandit of the skies? A local mad woman who’d stolen some poor gryphon, tamed it and took it for a joyride? If she was a mad woman, would my pendant of sanity have helped at all? We may never know…

This was a rather difficult fight, and without the healing potion to recover from the fire beetles the night before, I knew I wouldn’t make it. Sure enough, I died.

Overall this is a pretty solid book and I definitely enjoyed trying it out. I’d like to give it another shot at some point. The environments feel suitably wide and descriptive, and the combat is paced well (not too much, not too little), although losing all your items is always a beast when playing these games. I can’t believe that nobody took the chance to modify the ‘black faeries’ description though…

Cause of death: A terminal case of Gryphon-to-the-head…

Beneath Nightmare Castle

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Let’s journey Beneath Nightmare Castle!

I wish that I could give this book a really epic introduction, complete with all the memories I had associated with it. But just like my last playthrough, this is a book I didn’t get to play as a kid. I remember seeing it plenty of times in shops, sitting on the shelf beside other FF books, but there were always others that inevitably caught my attention more.

So as a result I just kinda skipped past this one at all times, until now. I must admit that it looks pretty intriguing, with some horror elements and a Willpower stat that is very reminiscent of Call of Cthulhu’s Sanity system. From what I have read on my fellow gamebook blogger’s pages, this book has quite some strong Lovecraft elements to it.

As a result, I will play this very much like a Call of Cthulhu game, which means I will be running away as often as possible and will emphatically NOT be looking in any ancient books that I happen to find along my travels. Hopefully the plan to run away as often as possible will be wise, because I rolled a mere 7 in Skill. My scores for Luck was better at 10, and my Willpower (this book’s stand-in for the Sanity system) is 11, and a decent 19 for Stamina.

I don’t start with any items or provisions, instead I was on my way to the town of Neuburg in order to visit the Baron there, who is an old friend of mine. Showing the survival instinct that is typical of me, I immediately walk into a trap and get captured by a group of very suspicious characters.

What follows is perhaps the best example of my complete and utter inability to play these books with any level of success. I awake in a dark cellar. A mysterious voice offers to cut the rope that is binding me. I accept, and search the cellar. It seems that I took too long, because a group of cultists then toddle down the stairs to meet me. They chase me around the cellar for a bit, then knock me out. I wake up tied to an altar and being sacrificed by hideous abominations of nature.

So I restart the game. This time I choose to hurry out of the cellar instead of searching. I stumble into the main hallway, and look out a window to see that the city below me is deserted. I come to a door. I try to knock it down, but don’t roll well enough on the dice and attract the attention of six guards, who proceed to gradually beat my stamina points down to nearly zero. They then knock me out. I wake up tied to an altar and being sacrificed by hideous abominations of nature.

Restart. This time I tell the stranger in the cellar that I do not want him to cut me free. He does not, and leaves me there. Cultists come into the cellar and knock me out. I wake up tied to an altar and being sacrificed by hideous abominations of nature.

Restart again. I sense a recurring pattern here. This time, I manage to knock down the hallway door successfully. An entire squadron of guards do not come running. I leave the building, which appears to have been a local guard post, and head to the local tavern. The streets are deserted and the doors and windows of the houses are boarded up. Once I am inside I eat a hearty dinner, and speak with the innkeeper who tells me some friendly jokes. The book then tells me that I am starting to feel more relaxed, and states “Maybe you have been imagining things. How could anything be wrong in a quiet town like this?”

Yes… how could it? Nothing unusual here at all, nope. Nothing at all. It’s almost enough to make you forget about being kidnapped, beaten, and chained in a basement. Nothing odd about this city at all. Tra la la.

So, because it’s such a nice and lovely night, I decide to head out on a moonlit stroll. Hoping to perhaps discover the secrets of the town’s weirdness, I am very quickly attacked by a pair of Blood-Lickers. What are Blood-Lickers, I hear you ask? They’re what a ‘cute little puppy’ would be if they were designed by Clive Barker. The pair of them proceed to savage me down to a single remaining stamina point.

I somehow manage to survive enough to kill the beasts and cut one of their tongues out as a trophy (technically it’s a ‘sucker-covered tentacle’, but let’s not split hairs here). I head right back to the tavern, where I sleep for the rest of the night and awake to a big dinner the next day, recovering a few scraps of health.

My new quest becomes ‘get food, recover stamina’, so my first course leads me to the marketplace. It’s at this point when I start to discover just how sadistic the game really is, because I find myself being pickpocketed by a little 9-year old girl, who promptly stabs me. The book then forces me into a round of combat with this child, whose skill and stamina is utterly shockingly awful. Without any alternative, I whack the little street rat child, who is probably starving slowly to death, with my sword. That sound you are hearing now is my heart breaking, just a little.

Nevertheless I let her scurry away, and continue my quest to get my stamina up to double digits. I’m able to buy three meals, and walk through the marketplace stuffing my face for a while, until I come across a small goblin who offers to sell me a fork. Because I know that it’s useful to have as much junk in your backpack as possible, I buy this fork, only to discover that it is actually the head of an ancient spear. I expect that finding the rest of the spear is a large part of the adventure.

I head to the temple district, where I dump into an old man who tells me that he is a priest. I quickly recognise this man as the same one who rescued me from the dungeon earlier. He tells me that I am the chosen one, because into every generation a slayer is born and all that kind of stuff. And to show that he’s serious, he sticks a knife in my face, making damn sure that I don’t even think about running away and abandoning this quest. I’ll give it this, he’s one of the most colourful quest-givers I’ve ever seen.

The quest itself is a fairly simple one, but as per usual I’ll avoid the specifics in case you ever want to read the book and would consider them a spoiler. Isn’t it odd that, due to the internet’s general attitude towards spoilers, I’m hesitant to even name the villain in a 20 year old book. Spoiler for you all – Darth Vader is Luke’s dad, Frodo isn’t really dead, and Rosebud is a sledge! Anyway… There is an evil being who is going to be resurrected, and it is his influence that is tainting the city like a big ol’ smelly taint. So I need to go to the keep, find a magical talisman, and kill the evil thing. Easy enough.

But first, in order to receive the blessing of the gods, I need to complete an ordeal. Not a ‘test’, but an ‘ordeal’, which evokes a whole different variety of mental images. Never trust any god who insists that you undertake an ‘ordeal’ for them, because they’re secretly standing up in the clouds laughing about it with all their other divine buddies. My worries prove to be unfounded though, as the ‘ordeal’ is simply climbing up a tree.

Yeah, so technically the tree is several hundred feet tall and might be Yggdrasil or something, and I faint halfway through climbing it, but it seems that I passed the test and my initial stamina and willpower is increased – no mention of improving my puny skill score though. Anyway, the old mad priest tells me that there is ‘part’ of an ancient weapon somewhere in town that might be useful – oh hi there, spearhead in my inventory! I’ve pretty much done everything I want to do in town, so I bid the old man farewell and head towards the keep itself.

I’m not foolish enough to go to the keep’s main entrance, so I find a path leading to the main gardens. Hoping to find a way to sneak into the keep, I eventually stumble across a hole in the wall of one of the towers. This proves rather unhelpful, because the tower in question is not connected to the rest of the keep. Oh, and it has a small pool of water inside it, inside of which is a shoggoth. It takes a few rolls to be able to escape from the thing unscathed, but I resolve to be a little more careful when checking out the towers.

It’s not long before I find my way to a stairway that leads out of the garden and into the main keep itself. The book tells me that I take a break to have a meal, and it occurs to me that this is one of those books where I’m only meant to eat when directly told that I can – the instructions were not entirely clear on this, so I suppose that technically I shouldn’t have healed up quite so much at the market earlier, but we’ll ignore that because OH MY GOD THE MONSTER’S TENTACLE HAS EATEN MY MEALS AND IS NOW ENORMOUS AND IS TRYING TO CHEW ON MY FACE!!

Seriously, that actually happened, and I’m pretty impressed that it did. Normally these books treat the backpack as a nebulous space full of anything from spellbooks to shields to full silver dining sets, so this was quite a nice twist. I sneak into the main building through a window though, and there are two doors – one of which is barred from this side. I decide not to open it, on account of it being barred from this side means that they’d want to keep something on the other side out!

As I sneak through the servant’s corridors, I hear the sounds of shouting and eventually catch sight of a small, whimpering little goblin. The poor little creature tells me a sad story of his life carrying soup back and forth between the violent, abusive orc in the kitchen and a violent, abusive orc who’s guarding a door. I take pity on the poor creature, because I’m a lovely and kind-hearted person who would definitely never hit a little orphan girl with my sword.

So I offer to carry the soup to the orc instead, and give the goblin a sock so that he can be free from his life of slavery. I don’t have anything to poison the soup with, and I’m hoping that once I’ve given the orc its soup, it will be happy enough not to care. Instead, it glugs down the soup, then beats me with its axe until I’m dead. Here ends the adventure, death by playing butler.

This is a very neat adventure. It has a lot of very cool ideas, and offers a lot of new twists that weren’t yet standard in FF books at this point in the series. There are some moments of utter innovation as well. It is also, especially at the beginning, fiendishly difficult. This gamebook is an utter charm to read, and some real fun. Just… try to have a high skill point, okay?

Cause of death: I was axed some very hard questions…

Creature of Havoc

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now it’s time for a game in which YOU are the monster! Welcome to Creature of Havoc!

Creature of Havoc was the first truly massive Fighting Fantasy epic.It boasts over 450 segments – unheard of in the FF series at that time – and a whole new type of story in which you are NOT the hero, but a rampaging monster! It also ties very firmly into what was becoming established FF lore, with the inclusion of the villain Zharradan Marr.

If you’ve read my Warlock of Firetop Mountain playthrough, you may remember my story about the warlock Zagor, Balthus Dire and Marr studying magic together? That actually happened in the FF history. So this book was something of a cornerstone in changing the Fighting Fantasy series from a group of unconnected adventures and into a world setting in its own right.

Not bad for a book that looked so outwardly unremarkable. Or one which I never even got close to finishing when I was a kid, even when I was cheating. This is mainly due to one specific part of the adventure, which I’ll discuss when we get to that point.

Creature of Havoc begins with a short story. This is, to my knowledge, the only FF book to start like this – most will give a bit of background and history, usually no more than 4 pages worth. This one is almost 20 pages, therefore ensuring that most children will skip over it entirely.

It documents the history of the village in which Marr was born, his rise of power, hobby of creating monsters, and so on. It then describes the history of elven magical artifacts called Vapours, which Marr has stolen and is now attempting to wage war on the elven settlements in order to uncover the knowledge on just how to use the damned items.

The book then tells me that very little of this will help, and that most of it will be ‘lead you astray’. Oh gee, thanks for that!

The game starts with you writhing in pain. You struggle to open your eyes, and are soon getting to grips with the process of walking. The text is pretty evocative, feeling very much like a rebirth. It also tells me that I have ‘spines’, so it’s pretty clear that you’re not playing as a human being. I’m a monster, possibly the same monster on the later edition’s cover, I’m not certain. I’ve rolled a skill of 10 (which is decent enough), a stamina of 17 (a bit low) and a luck score of 12 (very lucky for a monster). The creature is able to automatically kill an enemy in combat if I roll doubles on my dice. So, not too bad.

I stumble around for a while and eventually find a prisoner, who seems to be terrified of me. This makes me think that maybe I used to be a prisoner as well, before some evil experiments changed me into a monster – but the text is tactfully coy about saying so outright. It gives me the option of how to react, but rather than talking to the prisoner, I instead wind up crushing him in my hulk grip. At this stage in the book, my choices are not controlled my reasoning, but by brute instinct. I do manage to recover a piece of leather parchment from the prisoner’s body (it is covered in some kind of coded writing).

I then start stumbling around the dungeon’s tunnels. Rather than deciding which tunnels to move down, my movements are determined by the dice. On the plus side, this does help you feel that your character is a beast which doesn’t have the ability to think and reacts on its own instincts – on the down side, the reader has no real input into what is going on. Almost as if to demonstrate this, I find a door. I start to smash my way through it to get to whatever is making noises on the other side, but I guess that I lose interest in this because halfway through I simply walk off in another direction.

Further down the tunnel, I find a group of adventurers – a knight, a wizard and a hobbit. Silly adventurers, who goes into dungeons without a cleric to do the healing? Well it doesn’t matter, because I kill the lot of them. Then I eat them. Yeah, just let that image settle in your mind for a while. This book doesn’t have provisions, so the only way to heal your stamina is to either find some food, or chow down on some hobbit. Wonder what hobbit tastes like? Not like chicken!

I eventually find another door, which my creature seems to like a bit more than the last one because he has no hesitation to break down this one. This room contained a few bodies, which seemed to be the end result of a scuffle between some adventurers and a group of orcs. Seems that this place has been quite full of the ol’ adventurers in recent days. A group of little carrion-eating goblins decide that they want to try some fresh meat, so I stamp on them until they stop moving.

The book then tells me that the creature tries to eat some orc flesh, which doesn’t taste nice, and then investigates the backpacks of the adventurers. Inside one backpack, I find a bottle which contains a vapour, clearly the same as the elven vapour artifacts mentioned in the opening. I break open the bottle, and the vapour is released. It forms a face in the air, speaks some words that I cannot understand, and then dissipates. The book then asks me to choose which door I want to use to leave the room. Yes, to choose which route I want to take. The book doesn’t indicate this change (and it’s all the more dramatic for it), but the creature is no longer ruled by the random control of a dice to dictate his actions – he can now think and decide for his own!

Sadly, the extent of those decisions at this moment are just “Do you want to go north or east?”

I am soon given the option of another decision, if I should eat from a dead body or not. Keeping up the game’s theme of eating things, I decide to do this, only to find that it is rotten and does me some significant damage. That’ll teach me for thinking like a zombie, eh?

Stumble around the tunnels a bit more, and I find a signpost. It has an arrow painted on it, so I follow the arrow into a tunnel with two rooms. The first room I break into is full of parchments, I assume it’s some form of library. I grab for one of these bits of useless paper, but when I do so a large rock monster starts to form in the middle of the room. The book goes to great lengths to tell me that the monster is far stronger than me, so I do the sensible thing – run like hell.

I charge into another room, only for a portcullis to drop behind me, sealing me off from the tunnels behind me. I roar in anger for a while, scratch myself, and then plod off to another room.

The room I enter swings shut behind me, and starts to fill with blistering hot steam. It seems that this entire room is a giant furnace. I wonder why this room even exists. Does Marr really need a microwave the size of an entire room? Does he feed his army with wooly mammoths? It doesn’t matter – the book asks if I have a pair of bracelets, which I do not, so I’m promptly roasted alive.

From what I remember of the later parts of the book, you encounter other vapours as you progress. The next one, if I remember right, allows you to read – by telling you how to decode all of the text that you’ve seen written down or spoken. It’d be interesting to go back over everything you’ve seen, done and experienced and see what the hobbit from earlier was saying before I ate him.

As promised, I’ll mention the part of this book that proved the most difficult for most players. At some point in the book, you find an amulet that allows you to discover secret doors. Specifically, the fightingfantasy.wikia Creature of Havoc page describes this as “(213) where a secret passage trigger phrase is needed to allow completion of the adventure, does not begin the entry as it was supposed to, leaving a player to guess whether the pendant works here, allowing the player to turn to (233). It says “You reach a dead end.” when it should read “You find yourself …” This was corrected for the first Wizard Books edition, but is present again in the Wizard “Series 2″ edition.”

I want to like Creature of Havoc, really I do. It’s such an innovative idea, and it’s full of nice unique moments. It cemented so much of Fighting Fantasy as we know it today. It should be everything I want.

But it isn’t. As I’ve mentioned twice already, the book hinges on finding the right items to use at the right times – the amulet, and the bracelets. Finding these items are rather remote, firstly due to the random nature of the initial opening of the book, and then due to the difficulty in simply getting your bearings inside this giant maze of tunnels. You feel as if you’re literally thrown into these tunnels, and have to stagger around blindly hoping to find the items that you’ll need to survive. And none of those items feel intuitive, and your character is too handicapped in terms of higher reasoning abilities to be able to determine what may be useful and may not.

At the end of the day, Creature of Havoc just feels like playing archery while blindfolded. It gives you so little to work with when you’re starting out, so few clues that are immediately helpful to the current situations, and yet still expects you to be able to hit the requirements. That’s really merciless, and there’s really no fair way to get through these without going for the good old ‘play it through over and over until you know exactly what you need to do and how to do it’. Damn shame.

This is going on my ‘replay’ pile, though, because I want to run it again for everyone. Oh, what’s my replay pile? Well, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I have won ONE gamebook so far. Two of them (Scorpion Swamp and Sword of the Samurai) were books that I did so poorly in that I want to replay them to see if I can do any better.

Stick around and you’ll see Creature of Havoc again soon. Until then, I think we’ll try out one of our other little surprises….

Cause of death: Did not find a mandatory item that’s required to not suffer random death.