Choose your own adventure – Page 4

Revenge of the Vampire

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. The sinister count has risen again, and it’s up to us to prevent the REVENGE OF THE VAMPIRE!

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 dear. Here we go.

I wanted to like Revenge of the Vampire. When I was a kid, I wanted to love it. I mean, Vault of the Vampire was my first Fighting Fantasy book, and without a doubt it’s my fave of all time. But, Revenge? I had a copy of it when I was a kid, and cared so little about it that I spilled some fruit over it and it smelled of kiwi for years to go. Aside from that, it was utterly un-memorable, certainly nowhere near as cool as Vault. It’s just so utterly packed full of errors and continuity problems, it’s clear that it wasn’t playtested properly. It’s damn near unplayable at some points.

And don’t expect that it will be easy to get a copy of this book, either. It’s the rarest Fighting Fantasy book around, selling for about £200 on ebay. My copy cost me £40, and only because it is a former library copy and has stickers and stamp marks all over it.

Count Reiner Heydrich is one of my fave vampire characters in fiction, based on these books. And that’s a list that includes Count Strahd von Zarovich, Eli from ‘Let the Right One In’, and the Vampire Hunter D. It’s a weird list, I admit. But either way, Heydrich has risen from the grave (again) and it’s up to me to go and put an end to his nefarious deeds. So, off we go!

The adventure begins in a tavern, just like 99.7% of all fantasy adventures. My character is sipping his ale (which he evidently must have stolen, as I don’t start this adventure with any money) when he catches sight of a frail old man at the fireside. After talking to him, he tells me that he is on a journey. Not wanting him to fall victim to any thieves over night, I keep an eye on him and check that he is alright in the morning. Instead it seems that he was killed during his sleep.

Checking his belongings, I find that he was an old vampire hunter. His life’s mission was the destruction of Heydrich, and he has been working with a scholar-monk called Sewarth in order to accomplish this. I travel to Sewarth’s monastery, without pausing to steal the old man’s belongings, only to be informed by one of the monks called Endrell that Sewarth has left on an important journey.

I stay at the monastery overnight, and the text makes it very clear that Endrell is rather evil. The book continually asks me things like “Have you uncovered Endrell’s evil plot” and “Have you killed Endrell” etc, so I opt to play along with it and confront him about what’s going on and where Sewarth has got to. So yeah, this entire segment could have been put together in a far more subtle and intelligent manner, is what I’m saying.

So that night, I search Endrell’s bedroom and find a book on the history of Mortvania (the Fighting Fantasy version of… well, take a guess). I confront one of the other monks, Marcus, about this and he tells me that the only reason the monks know that Sewarth is away is because Endrell told them. Not suspicious at all, then. Marcus suggests I search Sewarth’s room and the library.

I do this, and find very little. There’s a note in Sewarth’s room which tells me that he’s hidden something in the areas beneath the monastery (which is probably where I’d have gone anyway), so I wasted a blood point to find this. Oh yeah, the blood points. In this book, if you waste a lot of time doing pointless things like spending your whole afternoon reading gamebooks, you lose blood points. Think of it like being a measurement of how much time you’ve wasted. I mean, sure, they could have called them ‘Time’ points, but that would be too sensible.

Anyway, I go to the library and pass a ‘spot skill’ test (which is exactly the same as passing a skill test, using the same statistic and done in exactly the same manner, but it’s called a spot skill test because of shut the hell up) which tells me that someone has been researching the undead… I’d have never guessed that. Anyway, I head over to the other wing of the monastery hoping to find something of any use, when I see a scared monk running screaming out of a tunnel. I head into that same tunnel, and slay a Ghoul Monk, in the hopes that this will give me some kind of clue to make the three ‘blood’ time points I’ve wasted thus far actually meaningful in some manner.

For my efforts, I get sod all. Of course. I stumble around the monastery for a while, until I find the kitchens. I find a trap door leading down into something, possibly a wine cellar, when I hear Endrell toddling along the hallway. I decide that I’ve had enough of this nonsense, and leap atop him, chopping him into pieces. See, this is what happens when you lead me on a wild goose chase.

In the cellar I find Sewarth’s notes, in which he states that Heydrich cannot be killed due to the power of a Soul Gem, and that we’ll need to destroy that before we can finish this game. I’m attacked by a vampire bat as I leave the cellar, and I decide to leave the monastery altogether. As I do, I see a horse-drawn carriage in the courtyard, into which a mysterious figure is climbing. I rush over to halt the figure, but he simply knocks me down and rides off.

So I follow Sewarth’s notes, heading north until I find a small village. I ask around to see if anyone has seen the carriage, and I’m given the option of asking around to see if anyone in the town knows much about magic. I can bribe some villagers for information for the cost of one gold, or spend an entire day working manual labour to earn one gold if I don’t have any at hand. But if I spend that whole day working, it costs me one blood point too. And here’s another real issue – searching a monk’s room for an hour costs me two blood points, but hauling farm equipment for a full day costs me only one? There’s no consistency in this book!

Anyway, I eventually hear about a chap called Sandor who lives near town and knows a bit about magic. I go to see him, and find that he has a zombie in his stables. I don’t know why, the damn thing ignores me because my faith score is rather high. Inside, I find Sandor, and he greets me by trying to stick a dagger in my face. This is the usual method of saying hello to someone if you live in Manchester, I should mention.

I rip his weird mind-possession necklace off, which restores his own mind. He explains that the necklace that the Count put on him was controlling him. A bunch of zombies then stroll into the house and attack us, these ones don’t seem to be at all repelled by my faith score however, they just try to attack me. Not sure where the consistency is there, but I kill them anyway. While Sandor recovers, I find that the Count has stashed a coffin in this house. I kill the imp that was sitting inside it, and smash up the coffin, which nets me a few blood points back.

Sandor tells me that it’s quite important that I check out a mountain called Crab Point. But he doesn’t know where it is, and neither does anyone else in the whole village. At all. Nobody has ever heard of a mountain called Crab Point. Tsch, whatever. I leave town and head in the direction of Heydrich manor, hoping to find something along the way. En route, I am attacked by giant ravens, and told that my horse has run off during the fight… wait, I had a horse? No, I didn’t have a horse, the book just tells you that whether you had a horse or not!

In fact, there’s a lovely bug in this book which means that, if you buy a horse early in the book, it will cost you ‘every gold coin’ you possess. Only a few paragraphs later, you’re asked to pay for a room at an inn. There’s no chance to earn any gold between these segments… and according to reports on the Fighting Fantasy wiki, the correct price for the horse was meant to be 8 gold coins . How on earth do you get from ‘8 gold coins’ to ‘every penny you possess’? (edit Turns out that the wiki says NOTHING about this… I can’t remember where I heard that it was meant to be 8 gold, and perhaps I even just imagined it! Shows how reliable my memory is…) The bugs on this aren’t just minor bugs – they’re gigantic, rampaging, ravenlous bug-blatter beasts of Traal!

I stumble through the mist for a while, my high faith score sustaining me, and slay a mist bat. It’s a supernatural monster that takes less (not zero) damage from non-magical weapons, and that’s a bit of a relief to see this for a change. Normally if a segment involves combat and magical weapons, it’s only to tell you that you’re screwed. Emerging from the mist, I arrive in the town of Farleigh and I’m given the option of talking to the merchant whose life I saved. If you’re thinking ‘what merchant?’, then… yeah, I didn’t meet any merchant… remember, no real editing in this book.

Just to remind you… £100 for this book if you want a copy.

I ask around town to see if I can find anyone with useful occult knowledge, and eventually do find a merchant who promises to be useful, if I come to see him the next day. When I turn up at his house, he’s been murdered by the Count. No surprise there, another chance of finding this elusive Crab Peak shot in the knee. I’ve given up much hope of being able to get there by this point, so I simply push on to the count’s mansion, stopping only at the market to arm myself with a silver stake and mallet.

I don’t get much chance to use them. When I get to the manor, I break my way through the gate, being assailed by gargoyles all the while. I then opt to sneak through the western wing of the manor, running into a pack of ghouls as I do so. Bleeding quite heavily, I find my way into a room and… do you know what a grand revenant is? It’s an undead monster that just won’t die. I kill it, and it gets back up and keeps coming after me. So my heroic attempt to infiltrate the manor hits a slight snag, namely that I wind up barricading a door to stop a grand revenant from eating me, and limping weakly through the hallways while pouring blood all over the place. Fun times.

I start to hopelessly yank open doors in the hopes of finding something vaguely useful. In one room, I find a variety of jars and bottles, which I’m given the option of smashing. Naturally, I manage to choose the only bottle that explodes in my face when I smash it, reducing my health points to a single one. No doubt I’m clutching my own liver in my hands as I’m stumbling through the hallways now, until I eventually find my way into the Count’s dining room. It’s at this point when an invisible ghost decides it’d be fun to chuck the silverware at me, and I die from a most pathetic whack of a plate to the head.

Which comes as a bit of a relief, to be honest. But hey, it’s still a better book than Twilight.

This book really had so much potential, and it’s a damn shame to see that it wasn’t used to its fullest. It feels so clumsy and unpolished at times, and really deserved some stronger editing and a few more stringent playthroughs. It could have been so much more, and it’s just a damn shame it didn’t reach the promise of Heydrich’s previous adventure.

Oh well. At least you can make a pretty penny if you still have a copy of it, eh?

Cause of death: Cutlery. Yes, cutlery.

Magehunter

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Have you ever wanted to hunt some mages? Then become a MAGEHUNTER today!

So to start with, I want to thank Stuart Lloyd for this book. It’s the last of the books that are relatively tricky to find, so now I’m on relatively easy streets in terms of finding the last few remaining Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

In this book, you are a mage hunter. It is your task to hunt town wizards, using only your skill and guile. You then, upon finding someone suspected of witchcraft, extract a confession from them by means of brutal torture. Upon confession, the victim is then tied to a pyre in the town square and burned alive, screaming in agony. Y’know, I think I might know why this book wasn’t republished. There’s really just no way to make the gruesome torture and murder that hundreds of people suffered under the inquisition sound like a fun adventure for kids.

We start off this particularly jovial adventure at a funeral. No, really. You’ve arrived back in town, with a freshly-captured wizard in tow, to find that the Margrave of the realm has died and everyone is in mourning. The misery is disrupted when there’s a loud crash which shakes the castle.

Rushing to the dungeons, we find that the wizard has fled with the Margrave’s heir. The game tries to portray this as a kidnapping, but even at this stage, it’s clear that the Margrave’s heir has helped the wizard escape for some reason. We may find the reasons behind this later, if we survive that long.

Without any real direction, we head to the wizard’s lair, where we had recently captured him. Recovering and studying his spellbook, we uncover the spell that he used to escape the dungeon. I attempt to cast the spell myself, but it only causes a large heft of green smoke to fill the area, alerting the guards. I’m dragged before the lord of the realm who says “You tried to cast a spell, so you’re a wizard. We’ll burn you at dawn.”

So, let’s retry this adventure from the start, shall we?

This time, upon running into the dungeons to prevent the wizard from making his escape, I jump right after him into the big ol’ portal thing, and wind up standing on a mountainside. We see the Margrave’s heir running off into the distance, and the wizard laying on the ground unconscious. It’s pretty clear that the wizard has done an ol’ mind-swap with the Margrave’s heir, but just to be on the safe side, I lop the head off the wizard’s body and burn the remains. Fun, for kids.

The book then makes it very clear that I’ve got a completely different set of clothes, belongings and so on than before I stepped through the portal, leading me to assume that I’m actually in the Margrave’s heir’s body. Something tells me that it’s going to be one of those days… It then tells me that if my ankle hurts, I should turn to a specific page. That’s always one of those instructions that makes me wonder if my ankle should be hurting or not, and why it might be, and why it’s even asking…

After a while, I manage to arrive in an arabian-styled town. I stumble into the tavern (because there is always a tavern, no matter where you are) and meet a rather friendly chap who agrees to teach me the local language. In gratitude for this and for a few day’s bed and food, I offer him a ruby ring that I found up on the mountainside. Only, it seems that the ring contained a giant evil demon, who offers me a wish. I say an evil demon, because when I wish that it’d take me to the wizard, it takes me back to the mountainside (of course…) and attacks me. And this bugger is a tough fight.

So, once it’s dead and I’ve trudged all the way back to the village again, I pick up a few supplies at the market and then head out of town, using my holy symbol to track down the wizard. As I sleep overnight out in the desert, I am awakened by…

Well, I don’t rightly know what woke me up. I wake up in a tent owned by a strange man who tells me that he wants to help me stop the wizard. For some reason, the Margrave’s heir is there too, and the stranger helps put him back in his body or something, I think, the book is not at all clear on this point. For a few paragraphs, the book reads as if it was spliced together at random from different parts of the story with no cohesive structure or anything, and then all three of the characters pile onto a magic carpet to fly off to another city.

At this point in the story, the adventure really feels as if it’s falling apart, with most of the ‘choices’ asking if I’ve got a ruby ring (we used that earlier) or a scar, or if I have a word written down. In short, instructions, not choices. Upon arriving in the city, I am given a variety of choices on how to track down the wizard, but… eh, I’ll explain.

The first choice I make is to try using my holy symbol to track him down. For some reason, this leads me into the local all-male bath house (“But I was only there in order to get directions on how to get away from there!”), where I get beaten up by two bouncers. The next lead takes me to a bazaar, where I track down someone who is entirely different instead. The book then takes pity on me, and just has the wizard walk up to me, give me my pistol, and walk off. So even the book itself realises that there’s no useful choices here.

By this point in the adventure I’m just getting a bit tired of being lead around by the nadgers, so I follow the wizard back to his tower. Unsurprisingly, he springs a massive trap and releases a horde of skeleton monsters on me the moment I step in the door. They proceed to trample over me and do whatever skeletons do to their prey. That’s a good question actually. I mean they don’t eat their victims, so… what do they do?

Anyway, that’s about enough Magehunter for today. As you may have noticed, this particular Fighting Fantasy book has a lot of attempts to evoke an ‘Arabian Nights’ vibe to it. This carries over to the artwork, and… well, most of the illustrations choose to not depict monsters, but humans. And, eh… most of those humans are drawn in a way that emphasises their racial connotations in a very, uhm… well, let me put it like this – the ones I’ve posted here on this page look the least like Jaffar as possible. There’s a LOT of problematic images here, a product of the cultural attitudes of the time.

Despite its somewhat questionable material, it isn’t an intrinsically poor Fighting Fantasy book, but it is very limited on the choices that you can make, especially as you get further and further into the adventure. Like I said, it’s not poor, but feels limited. Give it a try and maybe it’ll suit you better. Or not. I dunno.

Cause of death: Stomped by skeletons.

Knights of Doom

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Let’s don our armour (it has a ‘u’ in it, Americans!) and fight the KNIGHTS OF DOOM!

Knights of Doom casts YOU as a templar knight, pledged to uphold the peace in Ruddlestone. I admit that Ruddlestone hardly sounds like an especially dangerous place – the most deadly threat is Aunt Bessie’s Rhubard and Trout Pies – but that’s our holy task. At least it was, until we are called to the court of the dying King Raddor. You see, monarchy in Ruddlestone works on what we call the Excalibur rule – if something is wrong with the land, trees will wilt and the king promptly pops his clogs. So because the king is dying, we know something foul is afoot in Ruddlestone!

As it transpires, a portal has opened in the far north (as such portals tend to do) and disgorged a mass of evil Chaos Knights. Oh you silly portals, whatever will you think of next? King Raddor states that his advisers have said that they have a better chance of preventing disaster by sending in one lone warrior instead of a properly armed defensive military force, which we will call the Jack Bauer rule. My working theory is that the King’s advisers are poisoning him and are probably working for the Chaos Knights, but shhh, we’ll deal with them after the quest is finished!

Knights of Doom uses the same core Skill/Stamina/Luck stats as most Fighting Fantasy books, but also has a few special abilities for you to select. Suitably for a paladin type of character, you choose one warrior skill, one priest skill, and the rest from either schools. I chose Riding as my warrior skill, Banish Spirit as my priest skill, and last two as Arcane Lore and Battle Tactics. You also have an Honour system, a la Sword of the Samurai – so hopefully I can live up to that! Enough talk, let’s go!

Before we can even leave the King’s court, our discussion of my quest is interrupted. Riding into the castle – straight through the front door, no less – charges a great skeletal steed, shining with a baleful light. It bellows “Beware, mortals!” and proceeds to demand a luck test. Right on the first paragraph, no less! This adventure doesn’t play around. I fail, and the horse kicks me for good measure. Oooph.

Thankfully, a quick cast of Banish Spirit sends the spirit vanishing back into the underworld. The King seems to recognise that this seems pretty serious, so tells me that maybe I should hastily hurry on to the armoury and grab some useful gear. Thankfully, most of the region’s holy relics are stored there, and I’m able to help myself to The Helmet of Ventarc (unlike the other pieces of armour, this one doesn’t have any stat bonuses, so I take it assuming that it has some other as-yet-unveiled relevance that the book will tell me about later) and Havgar’s mighty bone-crushing mace. I don’t know who Havgar is, but he had a nice mace. Who wants to bet that I’ve made some bad decisions?

On our trusty steed, we ride out of the castle’s gate, head down the road and run right into a band of angry, starving lepers. I… oh dear. Their leader announces that starvation and plague is rife among the region, and says that I, as a knight, am representative of the injustice in their society, riding around in splendour whilst they have nothing. Urm… I think maybe the biggest threat to Ruddlestone isn’t the Chaos Knights, but King Raddor’s poor treatment of his people! Nevertheless, I am given the option of attacking the ill peasants, running them over with my horse (Jesus Christ…) or just talking to them. Naturally I assure them that I am going to do what I can to bring balance to everything, and they let me pass.

That night as I make camp, the book informs me that I remember the legends of a mystical elven spear that may aid in my quest. The book goes on to tell me that this should be my first objective. Nice to know. Noting this down, I fall asleep, only to wake in the middle of the night to find myself being stabbed by a ghost. I… Okay, who was keeping watch on the camp? Oh right, nobody. A quick dose of Banish Spirit later and the ghostly assassin is dispatched, leaving behind their dagger. Huh. It seems that someone knows of my quest…

The book informs me to add one to my time score (yes, we have a time score to keep track of) and before long we are approaching the local ‘mystical forest’. It’s a good bet that the spear is located there, but, guessing that I am going to need some assistance in finding it, I opt to seek out a local sage in the town of Wendeford. It takes only a little bit of time before I am able to ride up to the sage’s cottage, where I find that the door is unlocked. Hmm, strange – sages are infamous for keeping their doors locked… oh no wait, it’s secret wisdom that they’re known for. Who is it that’s known for keeping their doors locked? Not this guy, that’s who! This sage is known for having the forces of darkness break into his unlocked door and murdering him in his sleep- oh. Bugger.

So I look around the sage’s hut and find the sage kept a pet owl, but without any means to communicate with it I’m out of luck. Instead, I scramble around searching the hut until I find a note. According to the note, it seems that the sage distrusted the local miller, suspecting him of being in league with a group of clerics who have been poisoning the local forest. Eh, this feels unrelated to the current situation, but let’s roll with it for now. I mean, the clerics might possibly be related to the Chaos Knights, right? Right? Anyway, I leave the sage’s hut, saddened that I hadn’t taken the Commune skill at the start of the adventure – I suspect that the sage’s owl may have seen the murder and could have given me a clue.

I head to the mill, and it appears to be deserted. I’m pretty convinced that Wendeford is just kinda a run-down mess of a village at this point. Still, I head inside the mill and am promptly attacked from behind by a fierce blow to the back of my head. However I survive – thanks to my helmet! See, I told you that it was the right choice! I fight valiantly against the assailant, and after a violent struggle I knock him to the ground and question him. “Curse you, templar!” he spits, and throws some sleeping powder in my face. Zzzzzzzzzzz…..

I awake to find myself tied to a large sacrificial alter. Oh great, it’s one of those mornings! A robed cleric stands nearby. He gives a speech, expositing that they are a cult of evil clerics who serve the Chaos Knights, and that they are working to weaken the enchantments on the mystic forest so that their masters can destroy it. Damn anti-environmentalists.

I struggle valiantly and free myself from the ropes before the evil clerics can sacrifice me. Realising that I’m more than a bit peeved at them, they quickly summon a powerful eldritch plant elemental. Right then! This looks like a time to whip out the ol’ Banish Spiri- oh. It doesn’t work on elementals. Well isn’t that charming! In that case, it’s time to smash it with my mighty mace an- oh. What do you mean it’s immune to damage? Sigh…

As I die at the hands (tendrils) of a giant plant elemental, I look back on my adventure with Knights of Doom and wonder at what a curious and unusual journey it’s been. It’s a nice little adventure with some gorgeous artwork and it uses a lot of the mechanics such as time and honour, but it never really gels together as strongly as it had the potential to. I would have liked to see this book with a tighter focus, perhaps a stronger oomph to it, but that’s just me. Have a look and see what you think, squire, and maybe some day you’ll become a knight of doom too.

Cause of death: Eaten by Audrey 2. This happens a lot in Fighting Fantasy books…

Deathmoor

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Who is up for a trek in the moors? Shame it’s the DEATHMOOR!

“The dagger held at your throat cuts deep. Your adventure ends here.” That’s section 400 in this adventure. I read ahead. Was just curious, you see. Something tells me that this book is going to be a tricky one, and not in a good way.

Physically, Deathmoor feels to have less pages than most Fighting Fantasy books. The system is basic, without any of the extra stats to keep track of. Having hit shelves right after Legend of Zagor, I get the feeling that this one may have been overshadowed by that. I don’t even think I seen this one in the shops.

The princess of some back-water kingdom in the arse-end of nowhere has been kidnapped by a group of nasty gits, who want all the gold in the kingdom for her return. But the quest isn’t given to the eponymous YOU this time, it’s been given to your rival adventurer, Fang-zen of Jitar! Oh well, he got the contract first. I’ll just sit back and wait for the next job to come in… oh no, wait, that would result in a very short adventure. Guess I’d better give chase and rescue the princess before he does, then.

I manage to roll up pretty much the most average stats possible for my stamina, skill and luck, and head off in pursuit of Fang-zen. And I stumble off into the wilderness, no idea where to go to find the kidnappers, and die in a gutter somewhere.

Re-roll character.

So now, rather than wandering off with no clear idea what to do or where to go (which is pretty much how most Fighting Fantasy books start until I stumble upon a tarot card reader or a sage who tells me what magic weapons I need to find), I instead hit the local pub. It’s there that I find Fang-zen, having a few drinks with some friends. What an odd coincidence. Almost as if the meeting was orchestrated by some author of some sort…

Anyway, I insult Fang for a bit and challenge him to that game in which people stab their fingers with knives, you know the game. I manage to not stab myself too badly, and Fang loses, handing over six gold coins and, on my insistence, the contract. It’s funny, I never really imagined that being a brave and heroic adventurer involved so much paperwork!

I wasted the rest of the night going to another pub and buying some ‘lucky’ heather from an old hag, which was a con as it was not remotely lucky. I had a random fight later that night with two fish-people who had a grudge against me due to some previous adventure, and the next morning I stopped in at the local market to buy some rope. Rope is always useful. Having wasted enough time, I read the details on the contract, and went off to the arranged meeting point with the kidnappers.

When I meet up with the kidnapper’s ogre colleague, he lets slip that he is working for Archanos. Yes friends, that is none other than the dread Archanos the Life-Stealer. Who, in case you didn’t know, is an evil dastardly fiend who is responsible for acquiring trade routes across the land, buying up gold mines, and arranging for the trade federation to blockage the planet of Nabboo so that the senate will pass a vote of no-confidence in Chancellor Velorum and allow Palpatine to seize control.

Actually, no, the last one of those is too boring and stupid for this book. But either way, Archanos’ plot to seize control of the gold trade by kidnapping the princess just comes across as being a bit too bureaucratic for a super-villain. Still, the ogre tells me to wait here for two days and he’ll come back with the princess. So naturally I follow him back to his lair instead. Across a region of the land known as the DEATHMOOR!!!

And no sooner have I set foot into the moors, than Fang-zen shows up and lobs a spear at me. I can’t say that I’m surprised at this, and frankly it’s quite nice to have this plot thread tied up. Having got quite tired of his silly antics, I beat him over the head my sword for a while, and loot the body. While I steal all the gold and silly sandals that he’s got, I notice that the ogre I’ve been tracking has escaped. I’m nowhere near skilled enough to keep tracking him, so I head to a small village outpost that’s aptly named Outpost.

The villagers there are slightly more friendly than the villagers at Khare, because they don’t shoot me with laser eye-beams or try to drown me with poo. But they do refuse to give me anywhere to stay for the night, all but one of them, who demands both gold and a free meal before he’ll even let me crash on his sofa for the night. He does mention that he doesn’t trust outsiders because a little old lady in a house nearby was murdered by a giant the night before… wait, that must be the ogre!

I hurry to the scene of the crime to investigate, only to find no clues whatsoever. And when I get back to the house, the man’s locked me out. Feeling very annoyed with the lack of hospitality in the village of Outpost, I settle down to camp for the night. During which I am attacked by a wolf. I cleave its head off, and grumble in annoyance as I promise myself that, one day, I will burn this village to the ground for their display of ill manners.I still have no idea why the ogre killed the old lady. Maybe he was hungry.

We trudge along through the moors until we get to a river, where we are attacked by two Blackhearts – creatures of mixed orc and dark elf heritage. Which makes me wonder how that pairing came about. Did an orc bonk a dark elf at some point? Is that a regular thing? Are they both physically compatible? Which one carries the child? Wouldn’t an orc be a little, erm, over-sized for an elf lady? And… y’know, I don’t know why I’m even thinking about this. I kill them both.

The whatever-they-are have a special amulet which signifies that they’re loyal members of Arch-thingie’s army of goons, and a map leading to their camp. The book then actually asks if I want to go to their camp, which seems like total suicide to me. So I do it. Sadly it seems that these two chaps I’ve killed were the camp’s only inhabitants, so after searching the place until I find bits of broken stones and rotten food (joy of joys), I decide to head south along the river.

I’m attacked by an acid-spitting snake, which I kill, and proceed to cross the river. Mid-way across I’m attacked by yet another monster, this time it’s a Granochin. The book doesn’t tell me much about what this thing actually is, so I have to work off the artwork, which indicates that it’s a kind of angry fish-thing with clawed hands or something, I dunno. By the time I get to the other side of the river, I notice that my stamina’s rather low and chow down on some provisions.

After camping up for the night, I head into a valley which seems to be littered with skeletons. They promptly come to life and try to attack me, causing me to flee into a nearby ruined farm house. The book tells me to roll dice to see if I can get into the house, but neglects to tell me how many dice I need to roll (yay for the editing!), so I’m going to just assume I make it to the house nice and safe.

Unfortunately, some stupid bugger built their house right on top of a Tantaflex, which is a giant shoggoth-type monster who has caused the skeletons in the area to come back from the dead. After I carve my way through four of the skeletons, the shoggoth awakens and gnaws on my lower intestine for a while. The book outright says ‘in the unlikely event that you survive’. But I do survive. Barely. I survive with one stamina point.

I promptly die while attempting to climb up the side of the ravine in order to get out of the valley, by losing one stamina point due to minor scratches and bruises from loose grit and pebbles. I’m the greatest hero in the known universe.

If Deathmoor was a cake, it would be low-fat lemon cake. It’s bland, but not criminally so. If you had the chance, you’d go for something a bit more tasty.

Cause of death: Pebble-dashed! Oh wait no, that sounds wrong…