Gamebook – Page 8 – Cybe's Website

The Keep of the Lich Lord

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Now it’s time to venture into… The Keep of the Lich Lord!

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’m in two minds about this book. It’s not one that I played when I was a kid, in fact it’s not one that would even stand out to me from the first look of it. The blurb sounds very standard and formulaic sadly, describing Lord Mortis (honestly, who names their son Mortis? You’re kinda limiting his entire career prospects to ‘evil necromancer’ with a name like that) having come back from the dead and raising an undead army.

Well, of course he is. Also, you’ll notice that on the cover, the titular Lich Lord towers several dozen feet higher than any of his undead minions – perhaps he has the same unfortunate Napoleon-ish condition that affects World of Warcraft bosses, that forces them to be the biggest person in the entire room.

The second thing that worries me is that this book has two additional stats, resolve (which measures your fear at facing undead beings) and alarm (which measures how aware the inhabitants of the keep are of your presence). That isn’t the problem though, they’re actually petty neat. The problem is, neither of these stats are listed on the adventurer’s sheet, which means that you have no place to record them. This does not bode well, but I’ve been wrong about books before, so I’m more than willing to try this out and see how it goes!

Decent stats this time around, my skill is 9, luck of 11, stamina of 18. My resolve is 6, which probably means I’m scared of even a drawing of a zombie. I want to come up with a bit of history for my character, who has been asked by the rulers of a certain far-distant land to go and clean up the mess all by myself.

There’s no army to support me, purely because that would make things too easy. Because I’m evidently the type of person that you send into certain death with a certainty that he can accomplish what an entire army cannot, I’m going to call my character Jack Bauer.

So Jack Bauer is sent off to the Lich-Lord’s island with only a mobile phone.. erm, ‘ring of communication’ for company. On my way, I stop in at a small decrepit old inn called the Sword of the Samurai… agh god that books haunts me! It seems that the locals are all fairly terrified of the night, so to help put their minds at rest, I proclaim loudly that I am planning to invade Bloodrise Keep and slay the Lich Lord. I even say it nice and loud to make sure that the Lich Lord’s pirate lackies can hear me, surely that will work very well and have no negative downsides whatsoever!

I leave the inn on the very next day, heading north until I find a small village. Once there, I speak with the elders who tell me that as well as being beset by Mortis’ forces, their people are being preyed upon by a monster… oh honestly people! Can you not take care of yourselves at all? I mean, do you rely on wandering adventurers to kill every monster that preys on you? Just pick up a heavy stick and go fix things yourselves. Right, fine, I’ll go kill your monster for you. Ingrates.

I really start to take a dislike to these villagers when one of them offers to sharpen my sword in exchange for two of my provisions. No! Hands off my provisions, I need them to live! I mean c’mon, the damn monster is killing your friends and family – are you really so conniving that you’ll actually charge me the food I need to survive, just so that you can rub a stone against my sword for a while? Get lost!

I go off and kill the monster for these fools, which in the end of it all turned out to be some kind of monkey with a large heavy ball on the end of its tail. I return to the village, and they give me fifty gold. When I then ask if they will show me the way to the Lich-Lord’s tomb, they refuse to help until I brow-beat them into it. As I said, ingrates.

The one person I’ve press-ganged into helping me out with my adventure (some poor schlub by the name of Khiro) eventually shows me to Mortis’ tomb. I’m not quite sure why the book is so convinced that I need to go here in order to verify that the guy is indeed up and about – the fact that he’s raising an undead army that are invading the local area seems a good indication of this. I glance around, and Khero has done a runner, leaving me to trudge through the tomb all on my own.

I’m asked to make a resolve roll, because I sure enough do see a drawing of a skeleton that looks a bit scary. Okay, actually it’s an engraving on a wall – but it does kinda prove my point that my character is terrified of anything and everything around him. Being Jack Bauer, this is very unusual. I’m going to put it down to post-traumatic stress.

I do indeed find and examine Mortis’ opened tomb, and recover a runic spear from the body of the poor dead idiot that opened the tomb in the first place. As I pull the spear free, the dead idiot lurches up and tries to kill me, forcing me to stab him repeatedly with the spear. It seems that Mortis’s very presence was enough to convert this poor fool into a zombie, or something. However, I’m quite happy to find that the spear deals double damage to the undead.

I use my ring to discover that the spear was used to keep Mortis’ body in place for so long – until now, that is. This should be very useful in putting the Lich Lord down again, hopefully for good this time. I really do like these anti-undead spears, they have a Lone Wolf feel to them…

As I head back to the port, I am attacked by some of those pirates that I’d expected to turn up earlier. Almost forgot about them. Sure enough, they ambush me with arrows while I’m on the way back to the port, and I opt to flee, seeking shelter in a nearby cave. As I stumble into the depths of the cave, I notice that the walls are made more out of structured brick than stone, and some of the bricks have engravings on them.

Turns out that the cave leads down into an ancient and long-forgotten tomb of the goddess of good fortune. Wow, isn’t that lucky? Not so damn lucky, because I almost fall down a pit trap. I manage to avoid falling to a horrible death, though. Staggering to the alter, I desperately try to grab some of the temple’s treasure, only to be confronted by the temple’s guardian. It tells me that I must slay it in order to obtain the treasure.

This fight includes a mechanic in which every round of combat I win, I am required to roll a dice to see if I am lucky (in which case I inflict extra damage) or unlucky (in which case I inflict less damage).Guess which one I am. Go on. Guess. I’ll give you a clue – I’m in the temple of luck. So naturally, I am utterly unlucky, and the temple guardian beats me up with a large sack full of irony.

I chow down on a meal to recoup as much of the damage as I can, and help myself to the temple’s treasures, which includes some gold, a golden whistle, and an elixir. Leaving the temple, I’m able to rest up for the night before I push onwards. Soon I come to another inn, this one on the side of a local cemetery.

The atmosphere in the inn is tense, as I’m sure that most inns that are built beside cemeteries are. The innkeeper has taken to hanging garlic around the place, and the locals eye me suspiciously and do not talk much. I do, however, see one hooded figure keeping to himself in the corner, no doubt waiting for Frodo and chums to drop in.

I try to squeeze as much information from the locals, but they are tight-lipped about whatever terror lurks in the cemetery. As I head up to my room, the hooded figure tries to talk to me, but is shoo’d away by a soldier. The soldier tells me that he is a survivor from Mortis’ attack on one of the local fortresses, and presses to know who I am. I don’t much trust him, as I don’t really think Mortis is the kind to leave survivors. I make my excuses and head up to the room.

During the night, the hooded figure sneaks into my room. I’m waiting and about to strike, but I find that the figure is an elven woman who is also on a mission to take down Mortis. She tells me that the cemetery is haunted by Mortis’ wife, who is now a vampire. I think it’s actually quite sweet that Mortis had a wife, it just shows that evil necromancers know love as well. Maybe if we could just remind him of love, he will abandon his evil ways and we can live in peace and…

Oh, no, the elf wants to stick a stake through Mortis’ wife’s heart, chop her head off and burn the bodies. Oh well, I guess that works too. Sensibly, we head off under cover of daylight, when the vampires are in their lairs, and it is a simple matter to dispose of them without even breaking a sweat. It makes me wonder why so many adventurers never think to do things like this – just kill the damn vampires when they’re asleep during the day. I literally don’t even need to roll a dice for it. I find them, stake them, end of problem. The elf gives me a magic ring that can summon the aid of elven magic, and heads off to leave me to my work.

I’m unsure which way to travel next, so I use my ring of communication to get some hint as to where I should be heading towards. The magic voice on the other side of the ring (I wonder if this is like a green lantern power ring, and has a little computer inside it) tells me that some pirate ships under Mortis’ employ are heading towards one of the nearby villages, and may be carrying some useful clues. I set that as my next destination, which is doubly useful as the forest where my elven friend originates is en route as well. Maybe I can drop in and say hi to her.

In the forest, I don’t find the elf, but I do meet a few of her kin who have set up a small camp and are keeping company with the refugees from the neighbouring villages that have fallen to Mortis’ army. I encounter a bard who tells us all a song of Mortis’ previous defeat, mentioning a few items that were used to accomplish this task. Isn’t it useful when you meet a character whose main function is exposition?

Mr Singing Exposition tells me about a runic spear that was used (oh hey, that sounds familiar!) as well as an elven charm which I don’t think I’ve encountered yet, and an artefact that is hidden in a tor not far to the west of the camp. I head off to the tor, as the item that it apparently hidden there is connected with the items I grabbed from the temple earlier. Specifically the golden whistle, which I assume I need to blow on at this particular location. Given that it’s called Whistlestone Tor, I think I’m guessing correctly here!

As I travel there, I am attacked by a pack of ‘whipperwolves’, which are regular wolves who have whips instead of tails, possibly because natural selection in this part of the world is a cruel joke. I barely survive, again. I manage to drag my beaten, battered body to the tor, being given the chance to snarf down one meal and use my elixir from earlier to recover as much of my health as possible (turned out that it’s a healing potion), I was still very wounded. It’s really my own fault for not running away from the Whipperwolves, the silly abominations of nature that they are.

Of course, when I actually get to the tor, it’s guarded. Not by men in armour or anything sensible like that, nope, the ancient people who’ve built it decided that a rock golem would make a better choice. It, like most rock monsters, has a stupidly high stamina score, while mine was in single digits. Only by blasting my luck score down to a tiny sliver do I manage to survive this fight, and even then I survive with only two stamina points remaining. Are you on the edge of your seat yet? I turn to the next page, fully expecting the rock golem to fall on me and kill me anyway.

It doesn’t, and I am surrounded by a blue light which crackles and charges into my, filling me with power. I have been inbued by the favour of the goddess of luck, which boosts my initial luck score by quite a bit, as well as my other stats. It’s not too bad, but I thought I was to get a special item or something? I guess not, because no sooner am I done here than I’m hurried along to the village. Yeah, I’m a little confused about this, the game seems to think I’ve done all I need to at the tor.

Anyway, I get to the village to find that Mortis’ pirates have landed and are taking the inhabitants prisoner. I use the elven ring, which renders me invisible (don’t they all?) and sneak aboard the ship. I sneak down to the hold, planning to rescue as many of the prisoners as I can and use them as an impromptu fighting force in order to take over the ship, but one of the pirates escapes and raises the alarm. The book then tells me that I flee from the ship, leaping overboard and getting shot by arrows. So much for my idea.

Having managed to utterly fail at my pirate adventure, I press on and soon see a horseman being pursued by a pack of wolves. And by ‘horseman’, I mean a centaur. Stupidly, I decide to help him by throwing some of my spare food to the wolves. The centaur is grateful for my help, and offers to give me a ride along the way. I’m not keen on this idea, and the centaur quickly gets tired and makes an excuse to go and do something else. I don’t blame him, I’m sure he doesn’t want to go home and have to tell his friends about the strange man he met that rode him around a field.

Along the road, I see a man hanging from a gibbet. A common sight in medievil times, sure, but this man is wearing the tattered armour of the keep. Perhaps he’s a legitimate survivor, put here by Mortis’ forces for some cruel joke. I’m ready to unlock him, but I first need to fend off the crows that have decided that this man is their dinner. I fend the crows off, and as I unlock the man’s cage I realise that he’s a zombie. Still, it’s not a complete waste of my time, as I’m able to rip a heavy mace out of the undead’s grip as I push on towards the village of Benrai.

Benrai’s a bit of a mess. Mortis recently invaded the place, and although the villagers seemed to be able to repel his forces, it came as the cost of pretty much every single life in the village. It’s a ghost town, full of dead bodies. The only survivor mentions that Mortis’ army is lead by a strange spider-skull thing which seemed impervious to arrows, but he died before he could tell me where the village keeps its hidden secret treasures (how rude!)

I find a trapdoor in one of the abandoned buildings, and start to sneak down into the basement below. I find that it is inhabited – the town’s alchemist has been cowering there. He has been spending his time making a potion of bravery, and when I tell him that it’s a bit too late for him to use it, he tries to sell it to me. Sigh. Again I have to remind you – I am saving the world here, stop trying to sell me things. Just GIVE me the damn potion! Actually, you know what? My resolve score is high enough, so just keep your damn potion, I’m off to Port Borgos.

My last stop before I get to the Keep itself, Port Borgos is a total ghost town, lacking even the dead bodies that littered Benrai’s streets. I’ll give the book one thing, it really does build the sense of desolation and ruin as you get further and further along. If I wanted to be a bit more pretentious, I’d compare it to Heart Of Darkness. Except that I’m pretty sure neither the book or the movie Apocalypse Now had a giant skeleton-spider monster that needs to be hit with a mace. Although I could be wrong about that, it’s been a while since I seen the movie.

The book asks if I have an ‘iron’ mace. I got a ‘heavy’ mace from the zombie in the gibbet, and I’m going to assume it’s the same thing. I give the monster a few sturdy whacks with it. This seems to only result in it getting angry and biting me. I do eventually manage to squish it, but I’m once again down to only two stamina points as a result.

I find that the Skull Beast has left a dark cloak in its wake, which I can use to help avoid detection inside the keep – which is my next and final location. On the dawn of the next day, I approach the Keep of the Lich-Lord!!

Crossing the moat into the keep is easy, as the undead seem to have made a damn out of human skulls in order to keep the water out. I use my ring of communication one final time, and it tells me that it may be a useful idea to find some prisoners inside the keep and convince them to help break the dam. I head into the main courtyard, and sneak into the barracks. Inside the barracks I find a being which is ‘neither alive nor undead’, a foul and bizarre mish-mash of alchemy and necromancy called a Werewight. It’s smell deals me two stamina points of damage. Which kills me.

I repeat – I get all this way to the keep, and a monster’s stench is enough to kill me. Death by body odour.

I initially had some reservations about this book, but I’m glad to say that in the end I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s a very interesting book, structured in such a way that you get to travel to a lot of interesting areas, and the sense of danger ramps up as you progress by means of the atmosphere becoming darker and more threatening. Some of the monsters are very goofy even by Fighting Fantasy standards, and although I’m sure I missed a lot of the more useful items, I think I got quite far and did quite well with this.

I’m actually going to rate this book quite highly as a result. If I had to come up with some kind of arbitrary scale of measuring how enjoyable it is, I would signify this with a numerical value of eight skeleton’s fingers out of a possible number of ten. But I’m sure that scale of rating enjoyment will never catch on.

Cause of death: Werewight Stech!

Black Vein Prophecy

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. Let’s open the tome and hear the words of the Black Vein Prophecy!

I never played this book when I was a kid.

Look at the cover and tell me you don’t understand why. If not, I’ll explain. When I was a kid, I was visiting my local library to borrow a copy of Frankenstein. Yeah, I was a weird kid. Anyway, I found two books. One had a simple off-yellow cover with the book’s title in gothic font. The other was a more gaudy paperback version with a lurid painting of Frankenstein’s monster, its body a mass of scars, its face twisted in rage, its ragged stitches open to reveal red gore beneath.

Obviously I took the book with the monster on the cover. People do judge books by their covers, and sadly the cover for this book is terribly underwhelming. And also rather misleading to the adventure within, which immediately sounds interesting from the very minute you read over the blurb on the back.

Y’see, as you start this adventure you know nothing. Nothing at all. You don’t even roll up stats, like you do in Creature of Havoc (which we’ll be re-playing soon, too). You’re thrown right into things, and have to learn on your own. It’s the first FF adventure where you start out with a blank sheet. Mysterious, indeed!

You awake locked inside your own tomb. Just like I do most Sunday mornings. You break through the tomb sarcophagus with significantly less trouble than Uma Thurman would have, and stagger around inside what appears to be a huge sepulchur for a while, surrounded by other sarcophagus… sarcophagi… sarcophaguses… whatever.

It’s at this point that I start to experience crippling headaches, which means that this is very much like a usual Sunday morning. I try to inspect as much of the chamber as possible, but with my head spinning, it’s difficult to gather anything cohesive other than fleeting visions of a figure. I leave the chamber, only to find that that the building is far larger than I’d expected, with a new chamber filled with statues.

When one of the statues seems to move, and I experience memories associated with the statue’s figure, I begin to surmise that I’ve been brought back from the dead somehow. Seems that my earlier comments about Frankenstein may not have been entirely unconnected to this book. Creepy. Anyway, the main theme of this part of the book is spinning headaches and haunting images flashing before my eyes, much like you experience when watching an Uwe Boll film.

The chambers seem to gradually collapse as I move through them. I wonder if it is my awakening that has caused them to collapse (much like when you kill a boss in a video game, which causes a temple to collapse due to it being a load-baring boss), or if it is simply my presence passing by that is spreading some kind of corruption to the building. I glance back at the statues, to see that they have collapsed – and seem to be constructed with human bones. Maybe they’re not statues after all. Ewww.

The doors in the catacomb all possess seals. As I pass through them, the pressure in my head seems to ease. As I move along, I gradually roll up my stats, starting with luck (required as I run through a chamber that drips a curious liquid), stamina (as I flee up some stairs to escape their collapse) and skill (which I note is set lower than most FF books, as you only add 4 to your roll rather than the usual 6). I procure a sword a backpack with five provisions, and a haunting voice tells me to remember all that I have forgotten. And then I pass through the final sealed door, and emerge into the sunlight.

It quickly becomes apparent that the catacombs I was entombed within lie beneath a large city, one which seems to have been under siege at some point. The streets are empty and the inhabitants seem long dead. As I stumble through the wreckage, I find a curious object lying against a building – I look closer, only to be encountered by a mirror image of myself, which attacks.

It’s a long fight due to the high stamina, but I manage to kill the mirror image and am blinded by a flash of light as it perishes. In the wake of the light, I find a small wicker box. When I open the box, a cloud of fiery wings and madness flies out, knocking me to the ground and flying off. I… have no idea what’s going on. At all. This is just weird.

The entire adventure gets weirder. Before long, I have encountered a strange mutant horse creature, who speaks about rats being stuck in mazes. When I approach this being, I start to remember the ability to control mutations, and am told that this will be useful for me later. Staggering my way away from this strange creature, I eventually work my way into one of the city’s siege catapults and fire myself into the sea. I don’t know why I do this, I just do.

I’m dragged from the sea by the crew of a ship, who ask me about a dead man I encountered in the catacombs way back when, and then tell me to man the sails. This isn’t what I’d have said to the character if I were the captain of this ship. More likely I’d say “Oh my god, man! Did you just fire yourself into the sea from a catapult? What the hell is wrong with you? And why do you look as if you’ve been stuck in a sarcophagus for so long? What is going on?”

We sail along the sea for a while, until a large sphere emerges from the mist and attacks the ship. I shrug my shouders and say ‘Oh, sure’ and fight the giant ball. My sword manages to pierce it, and an insane maddened criminal emerges from inside the sphere and I need to chop his head off. The ship’s captain then comes along and tells me that, as punishment for their crimes, criminals in this part of the world are sent into the sea encased in large bubbles, which is… about the standard level of sanity I’ve come to expect in this book so far.

That night, one of the crewmen called Velkos awakes me to tell me that there is a strange brooch on my clothes, which I had not noticed before. I open the brooch, and an evil baby falls out. I can tell it’s evil, because its face is twisted with wickedness. And I can tell that it’s a baby because oh fuck it whatever. This makes about as much sense as the film ‘The Happiness of the Katakuris’.

It occurs to me at this stage of the playthrough that nobody who is reading this who has not also read the book itself will have any idea what I’m rambling about. I’m sorry. This playthrough must sound like the product of a demented mind, full of mutant horses and strange lights and men in bubbles and evil babies. I’m sorry. I’m trying my best to make this all into something that can be understood, but I’m not really sure this is possible. It kinda defies the minds of mortal man.

Remember the Sorcery! book “Khare: Cityport of Traps”? It was crazy in that it was a wild adventure filled with utterly bewildering events. This is different. This is crazy in a David Lynch kind of a way, where things kinda make sense in their own respective ways, but it’s all so utterly ‘stream of consciousness’ that it’s difficult for you to effectively describe it to another person. And that is NOT to say that I am not enjoying this book. On the contrary, I’m enjoying it immensely.

The ship comes to ground, leaving me and Velkos opting to venture inland for a while. Soon we see a large monkey-type creature being chased by a group of angry people. I follow the monkey as it hides in a cave, but I lose track of it when I discover a buried trove of gemstones worth around 3000 gold pieces. As I gather them up, a strange and obviously sinister mist starts to descend around me. Not wanting to be trapped in a cave with the fog monster, I use the power of evil baby, summoning it like a demented pokemon trainer.

The evil baby leads me out of the cave and away from the fog monster, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say in my entire life. I don’t other to tell Velkos of my discovery, but no sooner have I emerged from the cave do I see a group of people who are under attack. I slip closer, despite Velkos’ warnings of the contrary, and I notice that they’re being attacked by a mass of light and twisting bubbling insanity that would twist the mind of Lovecraft himself. Basically, I’m up against the 5th Angel, and I don’t have Eva Unit 01 around to help me out.

What else can I do? Evil baby, I choose you! I hurtle the evil baby at the Lovecraftian horror (do you ever feel that you need a less insane hobby to spend your Saturdays doing?) and they are both destroyed in a giant explosion that destroys time itself, ushering in a Singularity. As my body melts into a liquid mass and my mind becomes part of every other mind in the cosmos, the entirety of Titan is reborn into a single being… actually no, that doesn’t happen. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Instead, the monster is destroyed, but so is my evil baby thing.

Oh well, I still have that mutation power that I got from the horse-thing earlier, in case I need some bizarre power to perplex the minds of humanity with. I decide that I actually want to find where Valkos has run off to, and eventually stumble across her fending off some bandits. We fend the bandits off and head into a nearby forest. In the depths of the trees, we can hear some people approaching and promptly we climb up some trees in order to hide. The men find me, but do not catch Valkos. I don’t bother to tell them about her, because I don’t really like her all that much.

I tell the men that I’m a powerful sorcerer and will cast a spell on them if they don’t let me go, and they believe me without question. I decide to leave Valkos stuck up the tree and head off on my own. Before long I find a pair of villagers who seem to be trapped in some mud. I try to offer to help them, but as I do, a giant cloaked monster sneaks up behind me and hits me. It flies off with me to its lair, and we fight there for a while. I kill it, and don’t find anything of any use.

On the way back to the road, I find some discarded clothes. Eager to find this nudist, I instead encounter a helmeted man who has been tied up and had a scroll of paper shoved in his mouth. I take the scroll, hoping it will contain a clue of some sort. Instead it contains nothing, and the helmeted man walks off into the sunset. I don’t know what the point of this was, except to confuse me more. It’s working, in that case.

I find a small village, where I spend the night with a few other travelers. I wake the next morning to find a large horse-drawn carriage parked in the middle of the village. I have a closer look, when a man emerges and confuses me for a captain in his army. As you do. I play along, and before long he is asking me for strategic advice on the battlefield. When it becomes clear that I don’t know what I’m talking about, he attacks me and I need to beat him down.

I continue my adventure alone, and it occurs to me at this point that I don’t really have any set goal or destination in mind, and that I’ve been simply walking in random directions for a while. I stop my a cliff-side and watch the birds for a while, somehow learning a mystical art of harmony by doing so. I’m not quite sure what this will do, but at that point I’m drawn by a disembodied voice into a tunnel. In a large chamber, I meet a man called Credas. He tells me that my name is Maoir. Ah-ah!

This is pretty big. I’ve met someone who knows me. He tells me that he knows a lot more, including how to use my powers to their fullest extent. He may even be able to make this entire adventure make some kind of logical sense. After all, he can give me the context to what is going on, and context is important. I help the man clear some bandits from his caves by combining our magical ability to control their minds, and then he tells me the catch – he wants me to do something for him first before he’ll tell me anything.

He asks me to find an item from the jungle to the south. I head down there, ready to hunt through the entire place for one arbitrary random item for an old man who is clearly capable enough of finding it on his own, and with very little description as to what item it is that I should look for. Nevertheless, it’s not too long before I am able to find a river. And as I’m sure you’ve noticed, my new hobby in these Fighting Fantasy books is to fall into any river that I come across, usually resulting in my death (see Island of the Lizard King, Sword of the Samurai, and so on).

So I get eaten by killer eels.

And despite that, I’m not too annoyed, because I actually really enjoyed this book. I still have no idea what was going on, but I feel that’s more to do with it all being intentionally mysterious. The book does become more easy to grasp as it goes along, which pretty much mirrors your character’s disorientation and confusion.

The world itself feels very infused with magic in this particular book, with far more emphasis on the mystical and mind-altering than in a typical Fighting Fantasy book. More than anything else, it left you wanting to replay it, in order to find all the missing pieces of the puzzle and figure out the details that you were unable to grasp on the first playthrough.

It’s definitely a good book. If you’re in the right frame of mind to enjoy it, it’s one I’d recommend strongly. But only if you’re in the right frame of mind for it. Otherwise you’re likely to reply to it with “What did I just read?”

Cause of death: Became eel-chow…

Master of Chaos

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. It’s time to liberate ourselves from the Master of Chaos!

The storyline is as standard as they come for Fighting Fantasy adventures. An evil wizard is causing some chaos (maybe he’s the master of the chaos, you could say?) and I have to go and kick him a bit with my Mighty Boot. There’s a handful of variations on the sheet, namely that I have the option to select a few specialist skills for my character. I choose Acute Hearing, Climbing, and Move Silently, assuming that these will be the ones that are most likely to be the ones that will prevent instant unavoidable death sections.

The game also has a notoriety score, which measures how alert the city guards are to the devastation that your character will surely leave in his wake. Evidently the author is quite familiar with my roleplay group, then.

The adventure begins with a mage telling you that you’re being sent off to stop the evil wizard, because he has nicked their ancient staff of power. The mage is so keen that you maintain a discrete profile that the only help me can offer is two gold coins, and passage on a rather unpleasant boat. And by ‘passage’, I mean that he arranges for you to be captured by the captain of a slaving ship and chained to the rowing party. I’m not even kidding here. Honestly, the first section reads less like you’re on a covert mission to save the world, and more like you just lost a really unfortunate bet.

In all seriousness though, I like the idea of starting the adventure as an oarsman on a slave galley, it’s very Conan. Might have worked better for you to learn of the adventure as you progress, rather than this convoluted idea of the mage’s. But nevertheless, it isn’t long before the crew of the ship get tired of my attempts to stir up a revolution and take over the ship, so I’m promptly fed to the sharks.

Restart the game? Restart the game.

This time I decide to keep my head down and avoid trouble – but when the ship is attacked by a kraken, I save the captain’s life by beating the tentacled monstrocity away with my ball-and-chain. In gratitude, the captain orders that I no longer be fed food that gradually reduces my stamina points each time I eat any. You have no idea how grateful I am that the crew are no longer poisoning my meals – so grateful that I’m almost tempted to resist the urge to steal one of the lifeboats and row away to freedom. Almost. But I steal it anyway.

I row my way to the nearby city, and in traditional fantasy adventure fashion, head right for the grimiest pub I can find, only to find that it has actually been turned into a trendy wine bar. I sit around sipping wine, feeling vaguely less than adventure-ish, until I catch sight of a couple of vagabonds who are sneaking out through the kitchen. I follow them, only to be attacked for no apparent reason. I quickly dispatch one of them, but the second takes a hostage. I manage to rescue the hostage, but the book informs me that I’m feeling too tired to interrogate the hostage, so I instead go to bed. All in all, it’s been a confusing day.

The next day turns even stranger. I buy a mongoose from a rather unusual gentleman at the market, only to discover that it’s a talking mongoose called Jesper. Fearing that I’ve tragically acquired a comedy sidekick, I’m desperate to get rid of the demonic spawn of darkness that is the talking mongoose. However he is determined to stick by my side, and eventually leads me into what is euphemistically called ‘the entertainment district’ of the city. The mongoose insists on doing some backflips for a crowd of onlookers, and then informs me that there is a lady moongoose he wishes to visit before we leave the city.

With my comedy sidekick away getting freaky mongoose sex on, I manage to overhear the two people that I killed the night before as they are conspiring their plans. This is, of course, impossible. I can either put it down to a problem in editing for the book, or time travel. I ignore this, and instead go on to have various adventures across the city.

By the time I am done with my escapades, I am left with very little knowledge about the evil wizard. But I do have a considerable amount of gold, the cutlass of the captain of the ship that I had fled, and a camel. Content with my camel, I ride it off into the golden sands of the desert, my trusty talking mongoose by my side. This is all very weird.

It’s roughly about this point in the adventure that the game begins to hate me. As we ride through the desert, I am attacked during the night by a hideously mutated orc, who I beat down. I show mercy on the creature, and he tells me the story of how he was kidnapped from his happy little orc village and turned into a mutant by the evil wizard. I’m so touched by this story that I leave him in the middle of the desert and go on my way.

Over the course of the next few sections, my stamina points go into abject freefall, with my provisions quickly turning rancid in the hot air. Without a magic ring of endurance, I am soon losing more stamina points than my remaining provisions can heal, and it’s not before long that I am attacked by something called a chaos manticore. The creature flies up and shoots barbs at me, killing my camel in the process! No! That camel was just like a camel to me!

So there I am, struggling to survive, impaled by manticore barbs, stuck in a life-or-death struggle with the manticore. I manage to kill it, with only two remaining stamina points left. I then promptly die from exhaustion, because I don’t have that bloody magic ring.

Masters of Chaos isn’t an especially difficult adventure, and it’s laid out very nicely. In fact, it reminds me quite a lot of Bloodbones in how the city section of the adventure is laid out. I really can’t fault that part. It plays smoothly enough, although at the end of the day it feels very generic and you wind up wishing that the clues that I feel you’re meant to acquire in the city are more readily telegraphed. The difficulty spike I came across is no doubt mitigated a lot with more careful item selection whilst shopping, but without any significant indication that the ring of endurance was in any way important, it’s all a bit of a gamble.

Cause of death: Manticore-induced exhaustion…

Dead of Night

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were blockbusters of the era. It’s time to head out and explore in the Dead of Night!

Written by Jim Bambra and Stephen Hand, artwork by Martin McKenna
I haven’t read this one before, I think. No excuses. It has Martin McKenna’s artwork though, which is always a huge plus for me. His moody, dark work always seemed a great fit for a lot of the later Fighting Fantasy books.

In this book, you play a noble paladin, who battles the forces of evil and demons etc. In fact, you even have a score called ‘evil’ which indicates how seduced by the dark side you’re becoming. I guess I’ll have to get all the ‘evil’ out of my system now, so please excuse me while I laugh maniacally and kick a nearby box of kittens. Mwa-hahahah!!

The book gives a very simple background for your character, who is on a quest to find the evil demon lord Myurr and say to him “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my brother and kidnapped my parents. Prepare to die.” It’s not exactly Shakespeare, but it’s significantly more than is typical in a Fighting Fantasy book, whose character backgrounds usually involve the words ‘sword for hire’.

I take three skills with me – heal, sense demon and meditation. There’s a decent list of skills, one of which is rather interesting as it’s called dark veil, which will make you invisible to enemies, but at the risk of increasing your evil score, evidently because the word ‘veil’ is an anagram of ‘evil’. No, really, that’s what the book says.

Enough of this, let’s get on with the adventure. Having just received a message from the demon lord Myurr telling me that he’s captured my parents, I rush back to my childhood home. It starts off fairly badly, because I come across a skeleton hanging from a gibbet by the roadside. It tells me that I am too late and that all is hopeless, so I opt to thump it with my sword, which causes the gibbet to fall on top of me. Oh yeah, this bodes so well.

Sure enough, my parent’s home is empty. I rush to a nearby tavern, hoping to find someone who knows a little more about it all, but I’m met by an old friend. He asks me to meet him later, but it turns out that most of the villagers are terrified of me. I try to meet my old friend, but a group of angry villagers tell me to just get out of town and spare them all the trouble. So naturally, I beat the living snot out of them. Which… earns me two points of my evil score… Okay, I think I know to be a bit more careful from now on.

Leaving town, I opt to head to go and see a Seer. I wish I knew what it was about these books that caused my characters to so frequently pay visits to Mystic Meg. Anyway, I pause at a nearby wagon to heal an old woman who’s been bitten by an undead demon monster thing. Following this, I help a group of torch-wielding villagers put a stake through a vampire’s heart, both very quick little missions, but in the process I’ve lost track of how to get to the seer. Oh well.

There’s a little road-side temple I stop in to meditate at, during which I manage to find a holy amulet, which I was apparently destined to find. It’s just hidden in a little alcove, I don’t know who put it there, maybe the gods themselves. Anyway, I nick it from the temple, but because I was ‘destined’ to find it, I don’t earn any evil points for this blatant theft. Soon arriving at a nearby village, my horse decides to make a run into the woods, leaving me stranded for the evening.

My demon-sense (kinda like spidey-sense, but not as fun) warns me that there’s a demonic presence in a nearby wooden house, so instead the book tells me that I avoid it and stay in a stone house instead – eh? I want to go in and fight the bugger! I guess I’m not much of a demon hunting paladin. Maybe the only reason I’ve survived this long is because I know where to hide from the demons. Anyway, the book immediately gives me a chance to redeem myself, because it throws a bunch of demons at me nonetheless. Not all paladins are great. Hell, in Ultima 9, your character doesn’t even know what a paladin IS, despite the fact that he’s the physical incarnation of all Paladins, grrr…I don’t even know what made me think about this, despite the fact that I’ve been re-playing Ultima 7 this last week.

A bunch of villagers rush up to me, armed with torches and pitchforks… y’know, I really wonder where these rampaging mobs get these torches and pitchforks. It reminds me of a scene in the 90s X-Men cartoon, when a village were rather scared of the mutant Nightcrawler, and decided to form an angry mob armed with pitchforks and torches… in the very middle of the 1990s… it just looked very weird. Anyway, the villagers enlist me to make their little hovel safe for the night. Over the course of that night, I fight three demons for the ungrateful buggers, who don’t even open their purse-strings in gratitu – oh wait, I’m meant to be a goodly paladin hero in this one, aren’t I? So I guess that no reward is necessary….. crap….

The next morning I press on, snarfing down breakfast as I go in order to recover some stamina from the battles of the night before. I assume that we’ve managed to recover my horse along the way, as well. No sooner am I a few feet down the path, then I start to hear the beating of giant wings. I am swept up by a giant elemental beast, which flies away with me into the air.

I’m all ready to chop the thing apart, but the fall is not too appealing. Plus, the book makes sure to mention that I experience the sensation of a magical aura around the beast, and sense the wizard’s name “Aha,” I think, “Maybe a kindly wizard has sent this beast here to escort me to safety.” When the beast sets me down in the middle of a puddle of quicksand, I start to think I may be wrong.

I pull myself free of the quicksand and head into a nearby mill, chopping apart a few wandering zombies as I do. I sense great magic inside the mill, so I assume that the kindly wizard who has summoned me is barricaded inside, hiding from the zombies. I climb in through a hole in the wall, and meet the wizard, who is a necromancer lord of the undead, and probably isn’t as kindly as I had hoped. A few villagers give me five gold coins for the act of slaying the foul necromancer who is the enemy of all who live – hey, big spenders!

I rest up at another road-side temple, and as I meditate I receive a vision from the gods warning me of a horrible course of events going down nearby. Being especially heroic, I rush along the road until I start to hear some ominous chanting in the woods. I charge on in, sword drawn, and encounter what I can only describe as a satanic ritual.

In the clearing of the woods, a moon demon has put the body of the mage I’d killed the night before on an evil-looking pedestal, and is in the process of resurrecting him as an undead demon monster hybrid thing type of a thing. I find it a bit hard to believe that I wouldn’t have chopped the wizard’s head off in the first place, but eh, whatever. I rush on in and kill the demon, but it’s too late as the ritual has already taken place.

The wizard’s head then splits apart and a load of tentacles shoot out. I am already pretty damn low on stamina by this point, but this creature (called an Abomination, and rightfully so because the wizard is now pretty much composed of tentacles and one giant mouth) is tough to kill, but not impossible. Except for a slight problem in which you get an instant-death if the monster’s attack roll is five points higher than yours. Guess what I rolled. No, go on, have a guess. If you guess that I’ve rolled the instant-death option, no shit!

So yeah, the git which looks like Cthulhu’s dangly bits then wraps me up in his tentacles in a way that’s not been seen since Japanese porn, and yanks me into its giant mouth, which falls like a guillotine. The book tells me “Your adventure is most horribly over.” That’s no exaggeration. Has anyone been keeping track of how many deaths by tentacles I’ve suffered in these books? I’m sure it’s a lot…

I’ve talked previously about the books 30-39 in the Fighting Fantasy series being rather samey and dull, and I really do think that the ones 40-49 did pick up a lot on it. They’re far more atmospheric, often more experimental in how they deliver the story. They cross over a lot more into the gothic fantasy subgenre, which I really do care for. This is all personal sentiment though.

I rather like this book. It’s got a dense, moody atmosphere with a lot of darkness and creepiness. The things you encounter along the way do seem a little episodic and self-contained though, but it’s all held together by the overarching quest to recover your parents from the demon’s grip. It’s not quite to the same heights as Vault of the Vampire, but it’s definitely on the level with Legend of the Shadow Warriors. In short, I’d recommend giving Dead of Night a shot if you haven’t had the chance to do so before. It’s enjoyable, and worth it. And I’d really like to do a play-through aiming to be as evil as possible.

Cause of death: Death by tentacles. So much fun, I’m sure…