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The Crimson Tide

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Can we stand firm against… The Crimson Tide?

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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I may have rented ‘The Crimson Tide’ from the local library once, as a kid, and don’t remember it making much of an impression upon me. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the time I’ve been doing these blog posts, it’s that the books may surprise me.

‘The Crimson Tide’ is a book I fully intend to get through without making a single menstruation joke. It has a very similar setting to Sword of the Samurai, so it’s likely to be quite a challenge. It has two new stat gimmicks, first being Ferocity. Ferocity apparently helps to fuel me in combat, in theory at least.

But after reading the rules, I can’t find any way in which it impacts on combat directly, which makes it feel a little pointless. Age, however, is a nice stat. As you age, it has a knock-on effect on Ferocity. I’d like to see this implemented in a more grand manner, with your skill points and stamina rising and falling as you grow into a full adult, and then slip into old age. That’s not quite how it works in this particular book, but think of the potential that it could have.

So let’s get stuck in. We start with out hero, a young peasant child in a rice field, witnessing his family being killed by evil samurai. This fills me with rage, so with a gang of other kids who’ve survived the attack (each of who, I am sure, will die off very shortly thereafter) we head off on a rip-roaring rampage of revenge. Or something.

The gang head out on their journey, and quickly make reference to the enemies being from the nearby nation of Hatchiman, which I remember from ‘Sword of the Samurai’. That’s a nice touch. We promptly wander off into a field, and get attacked by a giant mudworm, which is an odd creature because it’s stamina is about half it’s skill score, resulting in it being hard to hit but squishy once I manage to do so. Surprisingly, none of the companions are horribly killed yet, which I feel is a bit unusual. This is a Fighting Fantasy game, after all, so any companions I have should be very dead in the next segment or two!

I’m told that I remember that I have an uncle who lives around the area, who I decide to seek out. I’m told to record the word ‘art’ on my sheet, which seems rather random as it has no context. Is my uncle an artist? Who knows. Our entire entourage find a boarding house to sleep for the night, and I sneak out to go and visit my uncle. When I find his house, his wife gives me a bag of money and he tells me that I should go and train in the fighting arts. Nice that I have a family member who is suggesting I become a brutal vigilante.

I decide to sneak back to the boarding house to meet up with my friends again, and go to talk to the local magistrate, hoping that he’ll be a little more disposed towards sending out men with swords and axes whilst I relax a while and let him deal with it. The magistrate instead decides to laugh at me, whilst his guard thumps on my head with a stick for his amusement. Eventually I tell him that maybe he shouldn’t be such a corrupt git, and his guards thump me a bit harder. The magistrate laughs as his friends beat up the homeless poor person, which shows us all where David Cameron learned his hobbies.

I trudge back to the boarding house once again, and together we plan to head to the monastery in the north, where we will learn the secret arts of the kung-fu monks. I hope. To my surprise, none of my companions are dead yet, either. I’d expected that at least one of them would have exploded from spontaneous human combustion by this point, at least.

On the journey, we set up camp beneath a rather nice tree, and as I stand guard that night we are attacked by another giant worm. This worm is different from the previous one, because once I’ve killed it, it transforms into an old man. My entire party gather around and stare at it in confusion. “Who’s that guy?” they ask. I shrug. Y’know, I can’t help but imagine that I simply told all my companions that the old man was really a giant worm monster, to cover up the fact that I’d beaten an old man to death in the middle of the night by mistake.

We continue our travels. One year later…

Yeah, really. I’m instructed to add 1 year. You know what that reminds me of? The PC game ‘Grim Fandango’. It was one of Lucasarts’ later point-and-click adventure games, except it was keyboard-driven so not quite ‘point and click’. But a lovely game, and it was spread over a period of four years. I suddenly want to play it again. The way it handled the transitions between the times was amazing, and gave the entire game a sense of being a true epic.

A year later, we arrive in a city. Our group are exploring the marketplace, when suddenly a large fight breaks out and a guard starts to attack me. Having no chance to surrender or run away, I fight him to the death. As I drop him, twenty of his best friends jump on me and drag me off to jail. A few days later they chop my head off because, apparently, I’m a public nuisance.

Now I’ll give the book this, it does give us an option where if my stamina point lands at exactly 1 during that fight, I may perhaps survive, I’m not sure, I killed the guard outright so didn’t have the chance to take that path. But this is rather anticlimactic, and as it’s an instant death segment that you’re given because you WON a combat, that always rather leaves me feeling a bit unhappy with how the adventure turns out…

Having said that, this is a pretty good book. The atmosphere is lovely, it’s nicely laid out, the encounters are solid, it has a good pace and feels like a sweeping epic. Overall I rather like this one. I’d like to give it another shot sometime.

Cause of death: Execution.

Tower of Destruction

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Journey with me now as we climb the Tower of Destruction!

So, Tower of Destruction. Must be honest, I’ve been looking forward to this one. I remember seeing it on a visit to a library once, when I was a kid, but never did get around to borrowing it. I’d rather grown tired of the selection in my local library, so I’d insisted that we use the library in a neighbouring part of town for a while, which tended to have a better selection.

In part, I think it was catching sight of Tower of Destruction there, during a school visit, that had convinced me to insist on making this journey each time I needed to rent out a library book. This is almost entirely down to the cover. Look at it. Seriously, that is epic. Not having actually read the book yet, I’m still convinced that the giant… thing… on the cover IS the titular Tower of Destruction, a flying tower that rains down destruction on innocent villagers. A flying tower. Freaking awesome, guys!

The game has a few extra stats, namely the often-annoying Time stat to keep track of (has this ever been anything but fiddly and unnecessary?) and an Honour stat, which brings to mind Sword of the Samurai. This, in turn, makes me think of oriental mythology, which in turn makes me remember the giant flying tower in Final Fantasy 9. See how my mind works? Terrifying, isn’t it?

The story begins as I trudge through the snowy northern lands, to find that my home village has been destroyed. Which is all rather like Conan the Barbarian, with the slight difference of that James Earl Jones wasn’t a giant flying tower. Leaving the village, and my family as smouldering ruins, I spend the evening helping the survivors patch their wounds and tending to their injuries. The next day, I’m sent off to follow the tower, because one man with a sharp sword is a perfect match for a flying death machine.

At about this point I realise that this adventure has nothing in common with Sword of the Samurai. I trudge off through the snowy northlands, until I stumble upon a small copse of trees. Among the trees, I find an owl. He tells me, in plain and simple language, that I should probably go and talk to the wise man who lives to the east. I don’t question my newfound ability to talk to the animals, because in Fighting Fantasy games it’s just more unusual to find animals who don’t talk. It’s kinda like Oz in that way. I toddle off to find the wise man’s wooden hut some day’s travel away, only to find that it’s occupied by a Smoke Demon.

The Smoke Demon is a pretty tough fight for this early in the game, with a skill of 9. But because I was sneaking around the house and being all Stealthy McStealtherson, I managed to score a free first strike on him, which helped. To add to its general worrying nature, its accompanying illustration also shows the Smoke Demon is actually an entirely naked rotting zombie, with only a whisp of smoke covering its decomposing floppage. Either way, I find the old wise man, Tasrin, who babbles incoherantly and then dies. My working theory is that he summoned the Smoke Demon whilst drunk.

I steal the dead old man’s ring and run off to get back into the trail of the tower, which the book is referring to as a sphere. Which is a little confusing, but maybe I’m just not doing it right. Along the way, I find a dead snow fox, and I’m given the chance to take it. Unable to resist carrying around a dead body, I pack the fox’s corpse into my backpack, because fuck it why not? Before long I find a batch of footprints, which I decide to investigate, hoping to meet some new friends and show them my newfound lump of carrion.

The footprints belong to an injured barbarian called Torsten, who I nurse back to health. He tells me that he has been injured by Ice Ghosts, which are essentially White Walkers from Game of Thrones. He doesn’t seem impressed by the dead fox that I’ve got crammed in my backpack, but he does offer me to come back to his place for some booze and entirely non-homoerotic night-time activities.

Torsten introduces me to his village’s shaman, who tells me that the spirits have been chattering away about an evil wizard who has summoned the flying death sphere. The wizard is, apparantly, inside the sphere and yet at the same time not there, so perhaps he’s a time lord, I dunno. Or the shaman is just faking, and trying to hedge his bets. Anyway, that evening a merchant shows up at the barbarian camp, and I have the option to sell him a ‘Silver’ Fox. I don’t know if this is the same item as I found earlier, which was a Snow Fox. But the two are similar enough, I’m happy to call it the same thing. I sell him the dead animal and buy a crowbar, some food, and a bag of salt.

I’m getting worried about the time score on this. The game requires me to keep track of how many days pass, and by the time I leave the barbarian village, it’s so late that I’ve lost two days worth of travel, bringing my total to four. I sleep for the fourth time in a cave, and upon emerging to continue my adventure, I manage to accidently attract the attention of a dragon which has been flying overhead. Rather than roasting me where I stand, the dragon instead lands and asks if I can convince him not to eat me. I’m somehow not only able to convince him not to eat me, but to let me ride him on to the next part of the journey!

Rather bewildered by this, I’m now close enough to the sphere to see that it is, indeed, a flying sphere about twelve meters across, and not a giant tower as I’d seen on the front cover. Not sure how to feel about that, to be honest. Everything I’d thought I’ve known was wrong! But yeah, there’s an entrance into the sphere, and I step on inside, only to find a large tunnel. It’s clearly bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. I rush to check the year that this book was published. Hmm, seems that Doctor Who was off the air during that year. Most curious, most curious indeed…

I travel down a long, long corridor until I wind up in the engine room. A large golem appears to be throwing round balls of super-heated… stuff… into holes in the wall, which I assume is somehow powering the sphere. I knock the golem down and stamp on it, it’s somewhat less of a challenge than the naked zombie we met earlier. The book then offers me the chance to jump into the engine’s furnace, which… yeah, doesn’t quite appeal to me. I head out of the room, heading into the opposite direction, and meet yet another naked zombie. I’m now convinced that I’ve stumbled upon a British Nudist gathering.

Making short work of the zombie and its flapping bodily appendages, I find a secret panel in the room. The book then asks how many days I’ve been awake for, and I’m barely able to scrape through with four days. The cut-off period here is five, and I barely manage to pass. As a result, the secret room into which I step that is full of dead bodies is relatively safe. I assume that if I were too late, those dead bodies would be fully alive and strolling around.
I’m then promptly thrown into an especially deadly boss fight. The very next chamber contains a man-orc champion with a hefty sword, who has a fondness for thwapping me with it. It also contains a mage who likes to zap me with lightning bolts. I’m pretty sure that the mage is in charge of this freaky operation, so I beat up the man-orc for a while until I can get a good look at the mage. The mage then blasts me with lightning.

I can’t get a good hit in at the mage, because of his tendency to blast me with lightning. Instead, I turn my attention towards the only other thing in the room, a giant statue of a demon. The statue of a demon then blasts me as well, just for good measure. But I’m able to determine that the eye of the statue is its weak spot, so I break the gem that’s set into its eye socket. This seems to cause the mage to teleport out.

By this point, I’ve taken quite a bit of damage, and the man-orc still needs to be killed. I finish him off, and the book reliably informs me that this chamber is the control system of the sphere. It also tells me that there is a door opposite, behind which I can hear ‘something’. I decide to try to play around with the controls, only being electrocuted for my effort. Grumbling and hemoraging stamina points like there’s no tomorrow, I throw open the door and find a prisoner. Yay, I can be a hero and rescue this prisoner, although the sphere seems to be about to explode.

I hurry out of the sphere, prisoner in tow. The sphere promtly explodes, and I’m quite confident that I’ve managed to win this part of the adventure. But I’m then promptly struck on the head by a piece of exploding debris, which deals an enormous four hit points of damage. Combined with the five I’d suffered for daring to touch the controls of the sphere, and all of the ones I’d taken from the mage’s blasts a few seconds before, all without any real chance to heal up. The bit of debris knocks my stamina down to zero, so although I’ve rescued the prisoner and saved the world from the evil flying death sphere, I nontheless die.

But I die a hero, right?

I actually rather like this one. The text isn’t as descriptive as I’d like it to be, though, but the structure of it is very nice and delivered well. You’re left feeling that the adventure is arduous and difficult, and I don’t at any time feel that the death I suffered was unfair.

I’m going to count this as one of the ‘Books I didn’t play as a kid but I’m very glad I have now’ from the series. Very nice, overall. Check it out if you get the chance.

More adventure (hopefully) this time next week! Hopefully with less naked zombies next time.

Cause of death: Rock to the head.

Spectral Stalkers

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. But now we have to flee from the terror of the Spectral Stalkers!

This is a weird one. You see, I know that I can complete Spectral Stalkers. It’s one of the easiest Fighting Fantasy books to complete, because it has a built-in segment that will jump you from near the beginning to near the end. The temptation to use this choice is pretty huge, especially as I’m sure that if I did, this would be one of the first books I’d have won in this blog.

But I’m not going to do that, because I can strongly remember from playing this game as a kid just how much fun playing Spectral Stalkers was. It’s fairly unique among the FF books, because it works very much like the old D&D Planescape setting, meaning that the player jumps between some very different worlds. Some very unique and interesting locations. I remember this being a lot of fun, but it’s been so long since those days that I can’t remember what those worlds were, or why it was so fun.

So let’s see if we can remember, eh?

I start off with a skill of 8, luck of 7 and stamina of 21, so not too bad. I also begin with a trail score of 0, which I’m sure will increase as the adventure goes on. The higher this score goes, the greater the chance that the titular Spectral Stalker will come ripping through the walls of reality and feast on your gooey, gooey brain-matter. Speaking of feasting, I only have two meals to start off with. But none of them are brain-matter, they’re probably chicken.

I start my adventure in a travelling gypsie’s tent having my tarot cards read. Y’know, when I was younger, I used to play the Ultima games on my old PC, which was as old as dirt. These games would use that tarot card sequence as a way to generate your character class, by asking you moral questions to go along with the cards. For instance, you’re a knight and your lord has insulted someone, do you uphold your oath and stay silent or do you truthfully speak out against your lord, that sort of thing, all very impressive.

Sadly this has nothing to do with this adventure, because all that happens is that the gypsie tells me that I will go on a long journey that will take me beyond this world. Well, it’s better than pointing at the cards and screaming “I see death! DEATH!!!” like they usually do. Still, I leave the tent and notice a storm is brewing. As I rush for shelter beneath some trees, there is a flash and a loud bang from the sky, and a winged creature falls onto the path before me.

My first instinct is to help the creature… okay okay, my first instinct is to stick its charred and broken body in a cage and charge punters £10 a turn to gawk at a real-life angel. But being a hero, I decide to help first. He gives me a package and begs me to take it, mentioning the name Archmage Globus and telling me to “beware the Spectral Stalkers!” I unwrap the package, and discover that it contains a very strange sphere.

The sphere swims with weird objects and landscapes, as if it contains an entire universe. Or universes. It seems that the orb is a means of teleporting between these worlds, as the moment I pull my gaze from it, I’m no longer in the same place I was standing a few moments ago, but am instead in a large building. The walls are lined full of shelves of books, so it’s pretty clear that I’ve fallen into L-Space.

I find a sign that reads ‘Enquiries’, beside which sits a bell. I ring the bell, and from behind a desk emerges a dragon! A great, fearsome, fire-breathing dragon, belching fumes and wearing delicate glasses and… oh wait, the dragon’s the librarian. And I’m sure she has a better attitude than the woman in my own local library. I ask her if she knows Archmage Globus, and she directs me towards a large book that contains details on every mage in the known universe. See, even back before they had computers, ‘they’ were keeping tabs on you!

The book tells me that Globus is a powerful mage who specialises in travel between different worlds, and studies the ‘aleph’, an artefact that contains all things that exist. I realise that I’m carrying this item around in my backpack, so I decide to walk a bit more carefully so as not to shake the universe while I walk. I eventually come to a doorway that’s sitting snug between two bookshelves, which leads to an office of powerful artefact study. I knock, and the door itself asks me to hand over four gold coins!

I take a deep sigh and fork over the gold, step through the door, and a bucket of water falls from the top of the door right onto my head. The man inside, Wayland by name, seems to have a sense of humour that borders on the about-to-be-kicked. The book even gives me the option of attacking the man, and it takes all of my patience to restrain myself and talk to him normally. My patience is rewarded as he hands me a bottle of a potion that removes all water from me. Very odd.

This cosmic joker tells me a few useful things, such as that the library is a non-space between the walls of reality and other timey-wimey stuff, not to stay on the same world for too long otherwise Spectral Stalkers will come for me, and to keep an eye out for round objects (because they’ll be useful, or something), and then he hurries me away through the exit so that he can jump into his tardis and go away before he regenerates into Tom Baker or something. I leave the library (being told my a dwarf as I leave that if I lost my hat, it’s probably been eaten by a grue and I’ll never see it again), waving it a fond farewell, and try to decide where to go next. Globus lives in the Ziggaurat world, but I don’t want to go there yet. I trust in the aleph to take me where I need to go.

It seems that the aleph hates me, because it immediately sends me down a dark tunnel that leads straight into the Temple of Doom. I’m not even exaggerating here, the chamber is full of chanting cultists and the high priest is a giant skelaton warlord by the name of Syzuk the Devestator, who declares that I will be their prisoner. Gosh, thanks for this, aleph. I decide not to resist as they advance, hoping that Indiana Jones will swing in and save the day.

Evidently he does not, as I wake up in the middle of a great battle. Bundled on Syzuk’s war chariot, he directs a massive army as they crush the last alliance of men and elves. The Devestator’s side is definitely winning, but just as victory is assured, Isildur (or some other lucky bugger) shoots an arrow into Syzuk’s shoulder, forcing the titan to collapse.

I immediately leap up and plan to strike the tyrant’s head from his shoulders and claim all the glory. Sadly at the last moment, his horses go wild and flee, breaking a wheel from the chariot as it does so. The wheel seems to have runes marked on it, and it creates great fear in the men and elves who look at it, making me certain that this is the One Wheel to rule them all. I take it, easily slipping an entire chariot wheel into my backpack with no effort at all.

The aleph takes me to a world with a great purple sky, I am standing at a stone table in an overgrown garden. A large number of little green monks shuffle up the garden path, muttering prayers. Their leader finally looks up, gapes as he sees me, and proclaims that I am his messiah. He tells me that I have returned and that I will take the jewel of sleep to overthrow his evil overlord. Now I think we all know that I’m not the messiah, I’m just a very naughty boy, but I still opt to play along with these chaps.

The monks create a jewel of sleep (a hollow gem filled with a strange liquid) from a collection of leaves they’ve gathered from the garden. The book gives me the option of taking the gem and doing a runner to another world, but because the gem isn’t round, I assume it’s not the item I need to collect from this world. After nightfall, I journey to the tyrant’s castle.

I find that the castle itself is empty, the rooms full of dust an disrepair, and without any skelatons or vampires lurking in them. I head to the top of the castle, and find the tyrant – a geriatric old man who has no power and is about as anticlimactic as the end of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. He asks me to grant his dying wish by showing him the aleph. I do, and he tries to grab the thing from me. The book then tells me that I flee from the old man, which is totally ridiculous – given the choice, I’d kick the old man in his elderly old hip for trying to nick the entire universe from me! Still, at least I got the Jewel of Sleep from this silly world. Let’s go somewhere else.

I emerge in a desert world. Stumbling through the dunes, I come to a small village. An old lady asks me to buy a candle for a single gold coin, and tells me that selling these candles is the village’s only source of income since so many of its people have gone missing. She begs me to help the village find their missing inhabitants, and like a fool, I agree to the idea. Maybe they’ll give me some of their secret supply of Spice.

It seems that the root of the problem is the local potter, who has made a golem out of clay. The golem is now running a bit of a riot, having taken over the potter’s home, and generally being a bit of a pain. Thankfully I remember what happens when you remove water from clay, and by chucking my anti-water potion over the golem (which I very nearly fail to do, due to my rather low skill rating), I reduce the golem to pieces of dry sand.

There’s no sign of the other villagers that went missing following this, so I have to assume that the golem ate them. Either way, the potter offers me a choice of rewards – a box of gold, or a round clay ball. Oh hey, it’s round! I’ll take that, thank you. The potter tells me that this is a wise choice, because the ball contains pure distilled life-force. I shake the ball, and it rattles. For some reason, I didn’t think life-force would rattle. Anyway, I leave this world and head to the next one…

I appear on stage in front of an amazed crowd. Ah, the giddy thrill of the theatre! My first urge is to launch into one of my Shakespeare monologues, but then I notice that I’m not alone on the stage. Beside me is a stage magician, who blags to the audience about having conjured me from thin air. Apparently his previous guest from the audience, the daughter of the baron of this land, has vanished into the backstage areas.

The magician’s assistant leads me into the back stage, where I’m all ready to retire and enjoy a leisurely day of relaxation and hot baths. But strangely enough, it seems that the stage magician is less than honest, and plans to kidnap the baron’s daughter. I find her locked in a cage in the backstage dressing rooms, she tells me that the magician has the key to her cage. No sooner has she declared this, then the magician enters the room.

I draw my sword and am prepared to slay the conjurer, when he opens his mouth and reveals his vampiric fangs. Yeesh, why are things never easy? You know, back in the old days, if a vampire wanted to seduce a baron’s daughter he’d just use his preternatural charm. Nowadays it’s all dressing up as a stage magician, putting on a show, sparkling in daylight…. modern vampires just don’t have the style they used to back in the old days.

Modern vampires are also immune to normal weapons, it seems. His wounds knit together as I inflict them, and he quickly feasts on my blood, ending my trip between worlds.

Spectral Stalkers is still a lot of fun to play, if you’re happy to put your fate in the dice that determine which world you’ll wind up going to next. I wasn’t able to piece together what the significance of the round objects was yet. Either way, I quickly noticed that I didn’t wind up gaining any trail points, so I guess I didn’t over-stay my visit in either world.

As I mentioned at the start, you do get a chance to go right to the Ziggaurat world, which takes you right to the ending.Which I suppose can make this the easiest of the Fighting Fantasy games. So I’d recommend avoiding that option, and enjoying the ride between different realms. I hadn’t expected to enjoy this one as much as I did, it’s good to see it holds up to memory.

Cause of death: Manticore-induced exhaustion…

The Legend of the Shadow Warriors

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now sit and hear me tell you The Legend of the Shadow Warriors!

This was another one of the very first Fighting Fantasy books I played. Legend of the Shadow Warriors was one of the darkest ones I remember, although that may be simply because I was young at the time. I remember the story being rather nightmarish and ghastly, so I’m keen to see if it lives up to my memory.

I also recall this as being the first gamebook I couldn’t win even by cheating. The titular Shadow Warriors were nigh-indestructible, and would always wind up overwhelming me in the end. Maybe that’s why I remember it being so terrifying. The cover itself always creeped me out, a few levels more than the House of Hell cover… so yeah, this is my Halloween post! Enjoy!

One thing I do notice is that this adventure seems to incorporate an armour system. This is a nice touch, as it will hopefully diminish some of the damage taken. The armour itself has a level of hits it can take, so that replicates the idea of the armour degrading over time. So let’s begin.

The adventure starts by giving us a bit of an exposition dump, telling us a bit of history that reminds me a little of Creature of Havoc, but more brief and to the point. It doesn’t mention the Shadow Warriors though – the only reference we get to those is when a poor villager comes to ask me (the mighty adventurer) if I will help protect them. We’re then informed that these titular Shadow Warriors are sinister boogymen that are nothing but myths.

Nevertheless I agree to help the villagers, and am about to leave the comfort of the local tavern when I meet the city’s most infamous gambler. He challenges me to a game of dice, which I quickly accept. I win, only to notice that he has cheated by using loaded dice. I take his dice, and throw him out of the tavern, loudly proclaiming him a cheat.

I head to the market in order to stock up for my adventure, buying some provisions, some firecrackers and a mirror. Midway through my shopping, I am stopped by a short well-dressed man, accompanied by several city guards. He loudly proclaims that he is the tax inspector, and demands that I pay upwards of 500 gold in back taxes. I don’t even have a home, and have only pennies to my name, and he still wants me to pay excessive taxes. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when you vote for the tories!

So I do what any self-respecting, law-abiding citizen would do in this situation – I kick the tax man in the knees and run for it. As I sprint down one of the alleyways, I start to wonder if this is the kind of adventure that my character had in mind when he first picked up his sword. Surely this is more of a ‘mis’adventure. I do run face-first into my gambler friend and two thugs, who are wanting revenge for having humiliated them earlier. I’m in no mood for playing games, so I stab them repeatedly (hey, if I’m being chased by the guards for tax evasion, resisting arrest and assault, may as well add manslaughter to the list) and run into the alleyways.

Growing desperate, I dive into the sewer system. As we learned back during my adventures in Khare, the sewers are a happy place, filled with joy and fun. Or giant monsters made of poo. In this instance, you can guess what I find in the sewers. If your guess is that I find a giant monster made of poo, congratulations, you’re king of the obvious. I chuck a firecracker at it and run like buggery.

The whole silly debacle ends with me escaping from the city on the back of a rubbish cart, eventually to meet up with the villagers on a highway pass. As I do, we are beset by none other than the five Shadow Warriors themselves – ghastly monsters much like the nazgul, but wearing silver masks and robes. Strange, I remember them looking like the monsters in the cover. Maybe my youthful mind got mixed up. Any way, they decimate the entire group of villagers, stab me in the knee, and leave me for dead.

But I do not die. My hate sustains me. Well, hate and provisions.

I head to the home of a wise hermit, who is sagely in the ways of such things. Two things I know about the wise hermit – the first is that he is a hermit. The second is that he is wise. The third is that he lives not far from a well, where I am assailed by a dandy highwayman. He tries to take my cash while looking flash, I kick him in the shin and finish my drink of fresh well water.

Eventually I manage to arrive at the hermit’s cabin, where he tells me the tale of the Shadow Warriors, servants of the dread god-monster Voivod. As he tells me the story, there is a knock on the door. “Let me in” says the visitor, “I am your son”. But it cannot be – for the hermit’s son died some years before! I knock the hermit on the head until he quits this whole Monkey’s Paw debacle, and the monster at the door gives up and goes home.

The hermit then tells me something very useful – that if I rip their masks off, the Shadow Warriors can be defeated. I suspect that this is valuable information. I thank him and head out on my travels, opting to cut through the fields rather than stay on the roads. Along the way the atmosphere of the game really starts to ramp up, with dramatic thunderstorms rolling in, lightning striking the earth, and some very creepy trees trying to kill me.

I know that normally, trees aren’t as horrifying when they’re attempting to kill you. But I’m wielding an axe that I picked up in the city – of course! An axe is the natural enemy of a tree! So I make short work of it without too much trouble at all.

As I stumble through the fields, I encounter a strange voice in the winds, a rustle of the leaves. The avatar of the wilderness, a demigod by the name of Jack-in-the-Green (who, being the incarnation of the forces of nature, will hereafter be referred to as the Swamp Thing), speaks to me and asks that I be his champion in defending the world from the evils of the Shadow Warriors. This is a really nice touch. It’s a bit abrupt, but the inclusion of this type of anthropomorphic earth-god deity adds a lot of the mythical atmosphere to this game. I’m not even sure if I got this sequence in my playthroughs of this adventure when I was a kid. The character really came as quite an interesting surprise, and incorporates quite a few of the elements of the ‘Green Man’ style.

I’ve mentioned the atmosphere a few times so far, and really it’s around this point in the book when you really start to pause and appreciate it. I don’t remember if the prose actually specified, but you end up picturing the entire next few locations as occurring entirely at the depths of night, possibly in the rain as well. It’s such a little thing, but atmosphere really is so very important. Like in horror movies (although that’s a very blanket statement, given how terribly bland some horror films can be). Just, whatever you do… don’t go and watch Paranormal Activity, okay? These films are a banal, tedious, insipid, not remotely scary, and are an insult to an artform that I love. If you really, really want to watch it, you can enjoy entirely the same experience by staring at a pair of rich douchebag white people sleeping for hours on end, climaxing in screaming at a closing door. Do not pay to see these films, the people who are making them do not deserve your money. If you want to watch a film this halloween, get a copy of Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’. Huh… sorry, I’ve gone off on a rant now, haven’t I?

Eventually I stumble into a town, to find that it is here that the monsters on the book’s cover make their appearance. The pumpkin-headed entities are the constructs of a witch who is laying assault to the town, for no real reason other than to cause strife and chaos. I kill one of these creatures (who remind me of the disturbing pumpkin-headed thing in the movie ‘Return to Oz’, which is surely a precursor to both Jack Skellington and the Slender Man) without too much trouble.

Soon enough I am over-run by them as I try to sneak into the witch’s makeshift tower, and am dragged into her study. She explains that she is no simple witch, but is in fact a type of undead called a wampyre (like a vampire, but a bit more effete). She boasts about her fantastic power, and I tell her that if she is so powerful, she should try freeing her pumpkin servitors. She does, and they promptly chuck her into the fireplace.

In gratitude, Swamp Thing teleports me to stonehenge for a while, where a large number of mythological figures sit around in merry avalon-style frolics. The great horned god gives me a powerful spear of instant-death, and tells me that I can use this to defeat Voivod. This entire sequence is very nice, with some lovely and imaginative characters, and definitely ranks highly in the level of creativity it shows.

I am returned back to the mortal realm, and push into the next part of my journey (I have no clear destination in mind, so I’m just wandering from place to place). I manage to wander right head-long into a troupe of orcs, who kidnap me and force me to work in their kitchen. For a bit of a laugh, I tell them that I’m actually a spy from their enemies. They don’t have much of a sense of humour, because they promptly kill me. Which means I don’t need to work in their kitchens any more, so it’s not all bad.

So yeah, we come to a rather undignified end to this adventure. But curiously, I feel that I’ve been making a lot of right turns along the way too. Finding the method on how to dispatch the Shadow Warriors was a real strong hint, and acquiring the spear weapon was very portentous, hinting that I was on the right trail with those ones. Maybe if I’d have just been able to keep my mouth shut around the orcs, I’d have even managed to win this adventure!

I’m really impressed with this book. The atmosphere is very immersive, the sense of mythology and characters is excellent. You spend so much time meeting new and interesting characters that you quickly get involved in the story, which is not as insanely difficult as I remember it being. I’ve taken quite a fondness for this book. It’s not your traditional Halloween gamebook, maybe you might prefer House of Hell, Vault of the Vampire, Blood of the Zombies, Howl of the Werewolf etc, but this one really fits for me, so don’t count it out either. Give it a shot, eh? It really is very cool.

Cause of death: Poorly-timed confession of spy status.