#58 - Revenge of the Vampire

After reading Revenge of the Vampire, something was bugging me. It didn't seem this vampire had anything to avenge, until I realised it's a sequel to Vault of the Vampire - replayed here - which has an almost identical cover. Hey, it's been a few years since I played that one.

Book 58, second to last, of the original FF series, and you could tell the publishers weren't giving too much of a fuck. The adventure sheet has three skill boxes instead of skill, stamina and luck, and the instructions talk about 'magic points', which as far as I can tell, there are none of in the book itself.

And there's the almost identical cover, but anyway...

I roll 11/20/7, with 4 'faith' - it's as if the dice know I'm an unlucky heathen.

The book also makes you keep a 'blood' score, which I initially thought was going to be a measure of literally how much blood I have, like in litres, but was more a measure of time, luck, and whatever else author Keith Martin felt like throwing in there at the time. Or luck, or whatever else....

Long story short, there's a vampire you have to kill... again. Setting off with a backpack bursting with 12 meals - none of them cheese, I hope, for reasons I'll explain soon - I'm thrown in the deep end, stealing a dead guy's gold and being run out of town.

I'm soon at the house of Sewarth, a monk who knows a thing or two about this Count Heydrich, but he's out - and no one seems to know why.

I don't trust his housesitters, and tell them so, but the book makes me stay the night anyway.

Not surprisingly I can't sleep, so decide to go chat to the creepiest housesitter, Endrell. He's not in his room, so naturally, it's time for snooping! Bad idea. Endrell catches me, sends me to bed without any supper, and gives me a "herbal nightcap".

Now, in real life, I'm suffering a pretty bad dose of insomnia, and know for sure that herbal crap doesn't work. In the book it does, so I'm guessing it's some kind of Allansian magic the doctor's here cant' prescribe. Like marijuana.

Turns out it's poison, and I'm dead.

Now, if you've read this blog before, you'll know this falls under my 'too short, not enough for a blog' rule, so backtracking to before I searched his room...

Endrell walks in, and sends me to bed with 'thin soup'. Hungry, I get up, and look for something to eat. I soon come across the dining room, but aren't given the option to go in (probably 'cause I'm carrying a backpack bursting with provisions, but still no cheese), so I pick a random door.

It's a prayer room, so what the hell, I decide to pray. The book tells me this time wasting costs me a blood point, which begs the question, what the hell god am I praying to?

It then tells me I should turn to page 381, if my 'hands are clean'. After that prayer session I'm not so sure! Anyway, following a trail of blood I find a ghoul monk, kill it, but am injured in the process - and by injured, I mean infected with 'bloodbane', which proceeds to drain my stamina - and initial stamina - luckily, this part of Allansia is overflowing with excess food (cheese still to come).

Next I find the kitchen, which for some ungodly reason has a trapdoor, where I find some of Sewarth's notes, telling me to find a 'Soul Gem'. It also has a smudged, unreadable map, which I assume was left there by some previous FF gamer.

I also gain two blood points - guessing Sewarth left a vial of it here?

Moving on, I'm heading out of town chasing this suspicious character riding in a horse-pulled carriage, and the only horse I can find costs me 'all' my gold. What kind of economy is this? Sounds commy.

In the morning, I catch up - he's heading into a bar. Fuckin' eh. I decline to go in, just hanging out in a local ditch for the night, sleeping in the day, as you do. Come evening, this guy I've no idea who he is, is leaving, and I need my horse, but the guys at the stable won't give him back. They want this thing called 'payment' - again with the socialism - which I can't provide, having spent all my money on the damn horse. So I kill them, take the hit in faith points, take their food (still no damn cheese) and head off.

A couple of lines of illegible note-taking later, I'm hanging with a dude called Sandar, who's wearing a sweet amulet. He's insane, but not after I snatch off his amulet.

Anyway, I need to find Crab Peak, which is where ye olde Count Heydrich is, and it takes me 10 blood points of time to find someone who knows. Um, okay...

Turns out, it sits in the middle of the 'Plains of Analand', near 'The Great Wall'. Both of these things are on the map at the front of the book, but a giant fucking mountain the middle of the plains isn't? Who drew this map? A FF gamer?

I get to Crab Peak, and there's a few old witches arguing. How do I know they're witches? Well, they're old, cranky and female - that's about all the evidence the book's giving me anyway.

I sneak into the mountain, and soon come across a room with 20 decaying dwarfs and an 'evil' monolith. I don't have 'Oil of Enchantment', a 'heart-shaped gem' or a 'magic sword', so can't do much.

Except kill the local witch and raid her treasures of gold and PRESERVED CHEESE! Finally, some goddamn cheese! Time to go through the ominous magical barrier? Nah, onto fight the other witch.

Easy fight, more gold (I could buy so many horses, if this were a capitalist society) and the book forces me on to this mansion, which I'm guessing belongs to the Count (one, one mansion, muahaha).

Another long story short, I end up in a room full of "weird" jars, with a "palpable sense of evil" in the air. So of course I'm going to smash a jar! Starting with an empty one, of course.

Nothing happens.

A dusty one? I lose one meal's worth of stamina due to a "freeze". Not given the option to open with stars and shit, 'cause it's "not wise".

A few doors later, I come across a mad scientist. He has a cure for everything - literally. The page says I drink his concoction, and I'm cured of whatever I have. I'm almost tempted to go find this guy in real life.

So I kill him, 'cause you know, he wants me to leave after performing his miracle cure, and find more cheese. Sweeet.

He also has these potions lying around, so I drink something called 'essence'. Turns out its effects are somewhat of a dice roll - lol - so I spend some luck to help it out. I lose one stamina. I guess I was drinking light beer?

Several battles with ghouls and zombies later - one fight is literally against 'more ghouls' - I come to Count Heydrich's quarters... where I die 'cause I dont' have a magic sword.

As if there's no other way to kill a vampire!

Right. So, it sounds like I've been pretty hard on this book, but it wasn't that bad. It just never seemed like I was in control of anything. I could tell early on it was one of those adventures where certain items would be vital - eg the book I saw in my ill-fated first attempt, which I had to pretend (several times) I hadn't seen in the second - and if I didn't have said items, it was a futile effort.

That's the flaw in these complicated adventure gamebooks - because it relies on asking if I have certain items, so often, I get an idea I'm going to fail pretty early on.

Still, I could see the depth was there - the game was long, even though I didn't have anywhere near the necessary number of items or amount of information to complete it, and I got to (I guess?!) the final boss without too much trouble - apart from the early death - but there were a lot of fights. A LOT of fights. Anything less than skill 11 and I would have been screwed.

A last question - why the hell weren't there any silver-plated stakes lying around? And why so much cheese, when what I needed was garlic?

#57 - Magehunter

Miss me? No? Alright then.

An old friend got in touch over Facebook, and has kindly agreed to loan me the FF books he's got that I don't, which is awesome. He's a collector, but has a couple of gaps he'd like to fill - so if you've got copies of FF55 or 56 you don't want, leave a comment on this entry and I'll put you in touch.

Okay! Now that's out of the way, let's take a look at Magehunter.

The basic premise is you're a hunter of mages (no wai!), but really wacky mages in particular. I say this, 'cause the book opens with a document called 'The Most Revered Treatise of MAGE HUNTING', which lists a bunch of magician rules that makes shit like "In Philadelphia, you can't put pretzels in bags" sound completely reasonable.

For example: "Wizards do not eat fish." Obviously wizards in this book don't listen to Nirvana, 'cause everyone knows it's okay to eat fish ('cause they don't have any feelings).

Or how about: "Every 101st footprint left by a mage is that of a cat." What, a cat paw print? Or a human footprint, but cat-shaped? Be more specific, Treatise! I want to know what to expect when I next see a cat-shaped imprint on the lawn.

And: "A hound which is fed for a week on nothing but goats meat may sniff out the scent of a wizard." I like how you can go to the effort of feeding your hound nothing but goat for a week, and there's still a chance he might not sniff out a wizard. Back to eating Chump, Rover.

Anyway. There's this particularly naughty mage called Mencius whom you capture just as the book begins, but that won't fill 400 pages, so of course he gets away.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, there's the small matter the Adventure Sheet contains three skill boxes. Now, I know people like to say rolling 12 for their skill is a skill in itself - and some seem to be suspiciously good at it - but doing it three times? Turns out it's a printing error. So is the fact my potential companion has a box for his/her provisions, but I don't. Not like I need to eat, is it? Not even fish!

Funnily enough, I do actually roll a skill and luck of 12, thanks to lucky red die. I used the white die for my starting gold stash, and got a 2. Fuck you, white die. And fuck you companion, whoever you were meant to be, 'cause you never showed up. Anyway, getting ahead of myself.

So! Mencius escapes, kidnapping the heir to the something or rather, and I have to get him back. He's vanished down some magic portal inside a crack in the earth, conveniently disguised by a simultaneously-occurring earthquake. Us here in New Zealand have learned a thing or two about earthquakes in the past year (yes, even those of us up in Auckland), and not even Ken Ring says jumping into a seismic crack is a good idea.

Mencius conveniently leaves his spell book behind, so I'm able to learn how he did it, and create my own wormhole. Where will I end up? Lucky red die rolls me a 2, and on the other side I've suddenly aged 10 years, and find myself standing on a cliff edge over Mencius' dead body.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Nice one, lucky red die!

Not so fast... I still need to find that idiot who got himself kidnapped in the first place, I guess. I have the option of climbing a mountain or following a river, so I choose to follow the river 'cause that song by Lykke Li about following rivers keeps getting stuck in my head. In real life, not the book, 'cause that would be weird.

I come across a town, with "towers... with tops like onions", populated by "strange dark people" dressed in "silk", who speak in an "incomprehensible guttural gabble" which gives me a headache.

Woah, holy pre-911 book, Batman.

Anyway, despite finding myself in what is essentially pre-Renaissance Constantinople, I manage to find a sweet bar and befriend a drunk bearded man, Al-Bakbuk. He teaches me a bit of the local lingo - probably mostly insults and pick-up lines - so as a gift, I decide to give him this ring I found earlier. I should have guessed giving it a quick clean would summon a genie.

The genie teaches me the rest of the "guttural" language, which is pretty awesome, and Al-Bakbuk gives me a turban, which is, um, "Cool... it's a turban. Thanks..."

Anyway, I head out shopping to find better shit than a stupid turban, but it's all a ripoff, so I head to the city of Kallamehr to find Al-Bakbuk's brother, Al-Fakik. Al-Fakik tells me to see a guy whose name doesn't begin with Al. Saleem. I'll apparently know him when I see him, 'cause he has a monkey on his shoulder. What, all the time? When does the monkey poo?

(Speaking of odd rules, here's another gem from the Treatise: "If submerged in water, a sorcerer's body will swell to twice its size." Does that also apply to witches? 'Cause that would have helped the peasants from that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail no end... Ni!)

I don't bother, instead checking out this awesome tower I caught in the corner of my eye. On arrival, that heir to the thing I mentioned earlier's there, except it's not him - it's Mencius, what a twist! - so I unleash my language-teaching genie and run away. I know I'm carrying a gun with bullets capable of killing wizards (takes a silver bullet in this book, because... it's not explained, but I'm going assume they're all part werewolf), but I'm not given the option to shoot.

I go to the authorities, 'cause maybe they'll have the option to shoot to kill, but they're not convinced anything's the matter.

Now, one thing this book does a lot - and fairly well, from what I could tell in my particular journey - is getting the player to take notes, write down words, make marks on their Adventure Sheet - which affects the gameplay and plot. It's pretty cool, except I could see in the text that adding too many "x" marks would lead to a "fame" note, and that can NOT be good to get.

So I decided to go after Mencius, which was a bad idea. He unleashed a whole lot of skeletons on me, and the genie didn't show up, 'cause I bailed on him earlier. DEAD is me.

Which sucks, 'cause I was quite enjoying Magehunter. It's well-written, unpredictable, and as far as I could tell, on the winning side of the fine line dividing" WTF" with "WTF, this sucks". After reading it I did a bit of a Google, and it seems I might be alone in thinking this.

And I just realised I think I only made a single die roll in the entire adventure, which is kind of cool, but kind of annoying, since I spent 10 minutes earlier this evening trying to find my damn dice, whilst trying not to attract the attention of a toddler that was refusing to go to sleep.

I must have got 'lucky'.

So! That was Magehunter. Big ups to Jarrod for the loan, and hopefully I'll be back in the near future with FF58. Till then... remember this: "Dressing a sorcerer in undyed cloth will tie him to the earth."

#48 - Moonrunner

So I'm out of FF gamebooks, or at least I thought I was till one of YOU sent me Moonrunner! Thanks Mark! I'll post you one of my albums, though I'm not sure whether that's really a fair exchange...

Moonrunner's a good one. You're a bounty hunter, but not named, so you can pick one, I guess. Is anyone here not going to pick Boba Fett? No? Okay. Let's move on.

Mr Fett has to track down the last big war criminal still bugging the Old World town of Blackhaven, which is in no way a sideways-universe Blacksand, not at all. Except it totally is, but with a more Sherlock Holmes-era London kind of feel.

The book's true distinction is letting you pick a bunch of skills from a list, but implementing those skills naturally, and in a way that makes the narrative feel open and enveloping. More on that later.

This guy Bennet is giving me the info-dump, and in the very first paragraph he's killed, John Locke-on-Naomi-style - a thrown knife in the back. A quick look reveals who forged it - Alcham Lugosh - which is really useful... not, and I jump out the window in pursuit of the assassin. I spot him talking to a man running a horse and carriage, and disappear. I leap onto the now-moving carriage, and wait. And wait. And soon enough, the jockey drives the whole thing into the "filthy" river.

Growing up where I did, I know all about filthy rivers.

Anyway, I lost that brand name knife trying to swim out, but being stinky and wet didn't stop some beggar woman trying to chat me up. Beggars can'[t be choosers, I guess.

As it's the time of night when even pubs in a hole like Blackhaven are closed, I decide to pay a visit to Mr Lugosh. It's an option, so I guess he's an all-hours knifeman.

I should have known better though - it was a trap. Literally - I fell into a pit with 12 dead guys, all missing three fingers. This must be where woodwork teachers and guitarists from Black Sabbath go to die. That, or the New Testament story of the 12 disciples was a rose-tinted version of events.

The room starts filling with water, and I reach for a beam above to try and pull myself out. Oh yeah, that's right - Mr Lugosh is some kind of Ginsu fiend, and I quickly find out why so many dudes are missing three fingers. His knife skills are so precise, he makes sure his traps always cut off precisely three fingers - no more, no less, and all on one hand - just enough to make you lose 1 SKILL and a massive 2 STAMINA points. Really? Later in the book I get 'roughed up' by some ruffians, and I lose 2 STAMINA points. What did they do, chop off three of my toes?

I escape the pit by floating to the top as the water rises (slap to the forehead), and morning has dawned, so it's time to hit the pub. Not the doctor, the pub.

Some trickster is trying to con people into giving him money, so I try to use my own con skill on him. The book only gives me the option of using sleight of hand, which I don't have. This will be a recurring feature. Still, I win, and am loaded and set for the rest of the game.

I ask the bar wench about the Cabal of the Werewolf, the dodgy group behind the bad guy's plans. The entire bar kicks out their stools, I assume in a manner I think only David Cross could describe, and eye me up. I repeat my question, and lose that 2 STAMINA I was talking about earlier.

It works out though when some old lady professer gives me soup and money, and tells me I need to find these six MacGuffins in order to beat Mr Bad Guy. And only nine hours in which to do it! For some reason. What if I had waited till a reasonably drinking hour to visit this bar? "It is 4pm and... you're out of time! So ah... let's just get wasted."

To be fair, the quests to get these six items were quick but interesting. I got to con some orcs (no, I don't need a medal), buy a magic shroud for almost nothing, kill a demon. I also went to the Three Broken Fingers Tavern, which seemed appropriate at the time.

I got three of the widgets out of six, and as if by magic - or plot requirements - came across the secret meeting of the Priory of Sion, no wait, the Eternal Fraternity of the Rosy Chalice. Either or. I got gassed, and woke up in a coffin. Uh-oh.

I wouldn't tell Mr Bad Guy what I knew, so had my face eaten off by rats. Once again, sleight of hand would have been handy, somehow. I guess it extends to sleight of face?

Was a good read though. Yes, rats eating my face killed me.

But despite my jabs above, it was a well-written book, with much illusion of freedom and openness, despite the few obvious plot-pushing points. The skills do work well, even if in my ignorance of the game, I chose poorly. For the record I chose combat, so I could be like Sayid, con so I could be like Sawyer, disguise so I could be like Man in Black, and tracking so I could be like, er, Kate. Or Locke. If you've no idea what I'm talking about, sorry - I'm not going to try and explain five seasons and 16 episodes of Lost to you :) (One more episode... I'm about to explode!)

I liked the author Stephen Hand's other FF book, Legend of the Shadow Warriors, too.

Anyway... the latest issue of Fighting Fantazine is out, issue #3, PDF download with loads of Fighting Fantasy goodies. Check that out, and if you need some sounds to listen to while you're reading it, I've got a new album out under my Radio Over Moscow banner - it's called 'Hide the Decline', and you can download it free or chuck me $5 and have a dynamic, less compressed mix of the album and bonus goodies.

All good. Till next time...

Combat Heroes 1 - White Warlord

So, aside from the few I haven't got copies of yet, I'm out of FF books (and it's been 20 years since I tried a round Advanced FF with a bunch of highly uninterested intermediate school friends, so you can forget that!).

But a workmate dumped me with a few gamebooks from his personal collection he wanted done, so hey - why not?

I think though just grabbing one off the pile at random was a bad idea.

Firstly, White Warlord does not require dice. That was my first clue I was throwing myself in the deep end. The second? The paragraphs don't have any text.

Err, what?

This book is like a first-person-shooter, except without the shooting, and in book form. I know that sounds... retarded, but I'll try to explain.

So, pretend it's the mid-'80s, and two-player first-person-shooters don't exist yet, or they do, but suck. But things sucking or not existing never stopped nerds in the '80s, thus the Combat Heroes series was born.

Thing is, to have two players going against each other, two books would be needed, much like two controllers are needed these days. And much like console makers nowadays only ever ship one controller with the console, forcing you to buy a second one if you want to play two-player, Joe Dever realised not everyone would have both books (or a friend to play with) - so included a solo game in each.

Thing is, the solo game has no combat, at all, let alone any heroism. In White Warlord, the solo game, your arch enemy captures you and throws you in a dungeon. To win the game, you have to escape the dungeon, which you can only do so by collecting a bunch of trinkets in a particular order, and not be killed by traps.

And that's it. Hmmm. It's like Deathtrap Dungeon, without the plot.

So after two pages of instructions, skipping the 20 or so pages of instructions for the two-player game (thank god - it looked more like a technical manual than anything), I'm thrown right into it, on page 7.

The game itself is largely illustrations of what you can see directly in front of you, with a four-pointed compass showing possible directions to go in. If an action is available, there's a secondary set of paragraphs of text telling you what happens.

At first, I found it disorienting, despite trying to keep a map. I'm so used to N-S-E-W, that when I'm suddenly confronted with directions based on which way I'm facing - a no-brainer when playing on the PC or PlayStation - I've no idea which way I'm going. Even after getting the hang of it, almost every illustration that doesn't have a picture of an axe swinging at you looks pretty much the same. It might as well have been the infamous Warlock of Firetop Mountain maze - all text, no obvious way out.

After wandering around and diminishing my stamina, I mean endurance, to a single point, I had some luck - I found my way back to where I started, and went the other way. Almost immediately I'd found the first trinket of 10, then a second. Then I was killed by a swinging axe.

The traps were so brutal, and my luck in picking the right random pages so bad, I kind of wish I had dice to decide my fate for me.

I imagine this book would have been O for awesome if I'd sat down with a friend in 1988 and played it. Nowadays, it just came over as the most clunky way you could ever hope to present a one-on-one fight to the death in a maze, ever. The two-player instructions took 10 times as many pages as the single-player instructions, and that about sums it up.

Though, at least it would have lived up to the title Combat Heroes!

If you played this book a lot though, you'd get real good at flipping pages. Ninety percent of what you're doing is flipping pages. If you were playing the exact same story on a PC or console, it'd be 15 minutes of gameplay, including mapping, failed attempts and learning, to clock it.

So um, yeah. Might have been great in its time, but there's a reason people still get into FF, and I'd never heard of Combat Heroes till now. I trust Dever's Lone Wolf books are better!

Sorcery #4 - The Crown of Kings

Eight hundred pages - twice that of a normal FF book. Epic. But only if you finish it, of course.

And I highly doubt The Crown of Kings is able to be completed without completing the three before it. I guess.

Regardless, the book begins as the others did - with the assumption your character, if not you, has completed the previous three. It's a little disconcerting, considering there's no explanation in the intro, bar the usual blurb familiar from The Shamutanti Hills.

It's like dropping in on Arrested Development two seasons in, or Lost at any point that isn't the pilot.

So, night's approaching, and I have to choose from three caves - small, medium or large. Who am I, Goldilocks? Still, I chose the smallest cave, because you know, it felt just right. Or something.

There's a monster of sorts in there - I can't see it, but it sounds horrific. Time for a spell! No matter I can't remember what does what - come on, I've died how many times now? Can't expect my memory to be that great. HOW! Don't have an orb crystal. KIN! No gold-backed mirror. Fuck it, I'll just use my sword.

It's a jib-jib - the tribbles of the FF world. Great. Still, for some reason it's guarding a parchment I can't read.

The next day, I leave, taking some dust and three - and only three - pebbles with me. Heading on across a rope bridge, I'm soon confronted by a bird man. It won't translate the scroll for me - so I blast it with a magic fireball and stab it to death. That's how I've decided to roll - at least till I run out of stamina to waste on awesome magic tricks.

I stop to rest in another cave, this one has a message from a guy called Colletus (the slack-jawed yokel?), who's hanging out by the 'Groaning Bridge', apparently.

After a non-moaning bridge, I'm confronted with a ridiculously dangerous landslide. I know it's ridiculously dangerous, because it took me four lives to get past. Yeah, I died. Four times. But I didn't think any Fighting Dantasy entry should be fewer words than pages in the book being reviewed! I tried HUF - pretending my reanimated corpse still carried the Galehorn from The Seven Serpents - and died. Tried ZIP, and died. Tired NIF, mostly because it was on offer, and died (it creates a pungent smell. I'm not sure how it would have worked - perhaps the smell would attract a pterodactyl, Riddling Reaver or deus ex machina who'd whisk me away to safety?) . ROK? Um, rocks are already rocks. Dead.

WAL is the one.

Moving on, we're pretty much outside the fortress. Stabbed a couple of guards as they drunkenly slept, ate their food, usual Saturday night stuff in the suburb I live. Although they obviously had grog and food, they must've had nowhere to sleep, 'cause I had to sleep in another cave. Not sure where I found a cave at the gates to the fortress of Mampang.

Anyway, Libra came to me in a dream (no, she couldn't translate my scroll either). "At each stage of the journey, you have been successful." LOL. Anyway, she says she can't help me once I'm inside the fortresses - so I take the luck and stamina bonuses now.

Just as well too - at the actual gates there are four guards, none of them sleeping. I DUM one of them into a stupor, and narrowly slay the other three. Five stamina points left.

Once in the gates, it's as if I'm back in the land of the three bears - three doors to choose from, etc. Except this time, I choose... poorly. I found three Black Elves (who couldn't translate my scroll either). So far so good. Being on only five stamina points, I thought I'd try and befriend them. So far again, so good. But then...

I wasn't asked to test my skill or luck or anything. It was just assumed this would be my attempt at befriending a group of Black Elves.

"So, how do you black-skinned creatures keep from bumping into each other at night?"

Oh dear. They were apparently "deeply insulted" by my "harmless remark". I'm not at all surprised they kill me. I guess it was 1985, and it was still cool...

Weird way to end the series, huh?

Anyway... the link I mentioned last night is now tidied up. As in, if you click it, you get my current musical endeavour's website, etc. The album's free to download in some formats, so go nuts. Can't say it has a huge FF influence, though the next one - almost done already - might.

Oh wow.

I just realised a couple of links on my site are woefully out of date, haha! I've upgraded some, but the banner at the bottom of the site will have to wait till the morning.

Yes, you can still access my 'personal' blog on Livejournal, but nowadays it's just a feed from the blog on my website, radioovermoscow.com - another link I had to get into the 211th decade (210th?). I dropped the old musical moniker last year, to start anew.

It's late here, so that one at the bottom - if anyone ever dared scroll down 20 entries and click on a banner ad - will have to wait till tomorrow.

If you've read this far, you must really love this blog, so where do you think I should go from here? We're running out of FF books, and it's been 19 years since I tried to host an Advanced FF game. An awesome workmate has lent me some Lone Wolf books, and a couple of others, is this the new (old) thing, you reckon?

Anwyay. If you're itching for a FF fix in the meantime, you should check out Fighting Fantazine. Alex, a fellow Kiwi, has done an awesome job getting this webzine together, it's a few issues old, and includes edited-for-typos, swearing and nonsense-versions of entries from this blog.

Watching season six Lost, I'm almost convinced a re-do of this entire blog is needed - done as if the continent of Titan was under the water. WOAH

Sorcery #3 - The Seven Serpents

Much like John Locke, death can't stop the hero of the Sorcery! series, and so here we go again, with part three - The Seven Serpents.

It's been a while since I did part two, enough time to go back to Hogwarts and get a bit more magic training done. Well, a skim through the back few pages before beginning.

So, onto the book. The bad guy's got some magic winged serpents who've found out your on the way to wreck his evil shenanigans, so they're on their way to tell him. All seven. And they're magic. Not so magic they can just magic themselves back to bad guy HQ (which despite the fantasy setting, I like to think resembles Globex Corporation). Or fly.

The seven serpents are kind of based on the elements. And the sun and moon. And time. If they aligned themselves with Captain Planet, we could've knocked this climate change business on the head a long time ago. That 'heart' kid really screwed things up.

So, into the Baklands. Right on the first page there are storm clouds, the region is unmapped, and there's a big fuck-off scary bird illustration. Great. Turns out they're Nighthawks (fighter of the Dayhawks?) and they're here to fuck my shit up. I think hey, I know my magic spells, having just read my spell book prior to my resurrection, and cast WAL (it makes a wall). They fly around it.

Luckily, an even scarier bird turns up and frightens them off, and it has a message for me - the serpents are on their way, blah blah blah. It then leaves, under a cloak of invisibility. Doesn't offer to give me a ride to my destination or anything.

Moving on, I stop to eat and a talking tree tells me to go east, where a hermit will give me some advice. Ents don't lie, right?

This one didn't. I came across Shadrack, a hermit in the middle of nowhere that knew all about my journey. Come on! If a hermit in the middle of the Baklands, which no Analander has ever successfully crossed, knows about my mission... I'm again wondering how important it is to kill these serpents. Word about my mission is probably all over the Old World Twitter by now.

The next bunch I come across don't know me though. A group of Centaurs tell me there's a snake charmer nearby, so I head off in search of him. Maybe he's managed to lure some of these supposedly magic serpents.

He hasn't, it turns out - he's just got a bunch of ordinary snakes, which he controls with his magic flute. No, neither of those was a euphemism. I cast SUS, quickly work out he wants to know what's in my pack. Nothing he wants, it turns out, so in true FF tradition, a fight breaks out. He's a good snake charmer though - his six pets attack me one at a time. I don't know, I've never had to train a snake before, but they don't strike me as the kind of animal you can get to fight in sequence.

Maybe I found a really, really narrow hallway?

Anyway, I barely win, and have snake bite poison running through my system. Still, I pick up his magic flute and some holy water for my troubles. Isn't it convenient that everyone in Titan carries magical items on their person?

The poison will kill me by sundown if I don't find a cure, so I trek on quickly. Despite my efforts to avoid another rumble, considering I'm bleeding stamina points at double the normal rate, I'm soon attacked by an Internet Explorer. Wait, I mean a Firefox. If it was an Internet Explorer, I'd probably have been hit with a virus on top of my poison. BA-DOOM-TISH!

It eventually kills itself - no joke. Every time I hit it, it explodes into fire, risking my wellbeing, but losing 1 skill and 1 stamina itself. Not being the brightest creature, it exploded into fire on a single stamina point. If it was Internet Explorer, the book itself probably would have crashed.

Night soon came. I decided to trek on, in the hope of finding some snake poison antidote before the morning, and in doing so, lost 4 stamina points instead of 2, which killed me. I like to think I walked myself to death, rather than died from poison. It's somehow more noble.

The next book, The Crown Of Kings, is something like a million pages long. It's gonna take some mental preperation to dive into that. I've had Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged sitting on my bedside table for about two or three weeks now - that's where I put it when I got home from the library, and that's likely where it will be when I have to return it. It's just so... epic-looking. Well, that, and apparently it's a sickening book no self-respecting liberal kind of guy should ever take seriously.

We'll see which I get to first.

#53 - Spellbreaker

Reading some of the previous reviews of Spellbreaker, I think a better title for the book might be 'Gamebreaker'. Luckily, I didn't knowingly come across any of the multiple bugs it has, nor did I notice when I owned it the first time around. Probably 'cause I always cheated.

Anyway, so you're some guy who unwittingly lets the Titan equivalent of a Sith steal some magic book from a woefully undefended monastery, which in four nights will allow the demon pictured on the right (I assume) escape the snug, overheating coffin he's been trapped in. With the help of Skeletor, it would appear.

And despite the fact you've rolled a SKILL score of 7, it's somehow up to you to retrieve the book. Okay, maybe you didn't, but I did. Luckily (pun intended) I rolled a LUCK score of 12, which staved off the inevitable just long enough for me to have enough material to write this blog entry.

So, book thief guy left a parting gift in the form of a demon, one I had to fight in the very first paragraph. With a SKILL of 7, I was facing the very real probability I'd set some kind of FF record for lameness. I got through it, and Brother Hugo, whom I picture to be a cross between Desmond Hume (in his monk phase) and Hugo Reyes, healed my wounds. But only some of them.

The next morning, it was time to pursue the thief, who was probably using dark magic and his day in advance to hightail it back to Evil HQ. Still, I took a few minutes to check out the herb garden, on the monks' advice. They only had three herbs, which is kinda lame for an old-timey religious order. I thought they were smashed the whole time. I chose this lame herb harden over the library, thinking I only had time for one. An hour later, after waiting for some old fat bitch I'd agreed to escort in exchange for cash (escort in the traditional sense, not the naughty sense - I'd need a lot more than 10 gold pieces for that), gamebook mechanics meant I had to spend it sitting about grumbling about how shitty the herb garden was, instead of reading essential information about the plot-to-be in the no doubt awesome library.

The woman has an entire entourage of bodyguards, but she's paying me, with my epic SKILL level of 7, to defend them all? She's stupider than she is fat. The gaudy pimp rings should have tipped me off. Her name is Attana. I call her Fattana.

Anyway, not long after heading off I fail to spot an ambush by brigands, who almost kill me and make off with Fattana's jewellery box. I don't really care, but she tells me if I find it I can have what's inside, and gives me a key marked '252' - the year of her wedding. She's older than I thought.

Ditching that hapless crew, I venture into a small town, and hit up the local bar. If you've read my previous entries, you'd know this is a regular feature of this blog/FF gamebooks. Found some guys who were having a storytelling competition, so thought yeah, I've got some great stories, I'll enter.

Unfortunately, the book didn't give me the option of telling the story about that time I biked 100km through a gorge or woke up one New Year's Day in a tent wearing someone else's shirt, so I lost. I had to roll two die beneath my SKILL level instead. How does my swordfighting prowess affect my ability to tell a good story? Fuck knows.

Anyway, the next day I went to the markets to waste some more time, and a guy asked me if I wanted to buy a hawk. That's not a question that needs asking. Of course I want to buy a fucking hawk. Unfortunately, I'd already bought some cheap Shroud of Turin knockoff, and couldn't afford it. I could afford a whole backpackfull of cheap 'herbs' though, and made my way west towards the city gates.

Came across some religious morons, which the book's description led me to believe they were a cross between the Hare Krishna guys who dance through the CBD here in Auckland every Friday around 6pm, and Opus Dei, as they appeared in The Da Vinci Code.

Turns out I was kind of right - they were the 'Acolytes of Pain'. If I ever form a black metal/goth rock band, it will be called the Acolytes of Pain. They think I'm some kind of heathen (really? No wai!) and try to kill me. I'm already low on stamina, so wolf down three meals and jump the city walls. If I could do that in real life, I would have moved out of Hamilton long before I did.

On the outside though, I don't last long. I survived a werewolf attack through liberal use of LUCK and some of those crazy herbs, but am soon torn apart by werewolves.

If it wasn't werewolves, it would have been the plague tormenting the next town on the road anyway.

Soooo... thanks to my workmate Dan #2, who has loaned me this book and a bunch of others - non FF, but a few Lone Wolf ones and some others that look like Mad Max. I've still got to get through the last two Sorcery! entries at some point too... I should get reading.

Sorcery #2 - Khare, Cityport of Traps, part two

Halfway through Khare, coming off the bridge I turned right. Soon came across a square containing a large monument of sorts, around which weirdos were hanging. 

Nah, I wasn't going to get a line of the incantation from them, so decided to skirt around the edges, but to no avail. The 'Red-Eyes' said they didn't like intruders, of which I wasn't, but no dice rolls or choices were given, and I was soon thrown into a cell with an Elvin. Crap.

Must have been a good jail too, cause I had to call on Libra to get me out. She unlocked the door, which was far less dramatic than how the Riddling Reaver would have done it. 

So, wandering out of the jail, cause you know, there's only one guard and in true FF style he's asleep. They must have a kick-ass union or something.

Anyway, I came across a market, which was great cause I was loaded with gold coins. Bought an awesome sword, tinderbox, snake antidote, bow and arrow and some food. It struck me as one of those markets whose merchandise seems strangely apt for the mission I'm about to head on. 

Passing on a graveyard, deciding getting to the gates in one piece was imperative (low on stamina, and I could always double back for more incantation lines, no?), I came across a wishing well scam. I know it was a scam cause after hiffing in three or four gold pieces, with ever-escalating promises of awesomeness, they got lamer, which is when I realised the page numbers were on a loop. Grrr.

Luckily I still had a piece left to gift a beggar, and another to cast WOK and make a magic shield to keep his nemesis harpies away. Turns out he used to be a noble, and had another line! Well, all except a name, which he said I could get from the Shrine of Courga (there was no option to ask if Courga was the name... seemed obvious). 

So onto the shrine, there was this giant statue, and it would only speak if I kissed its face in a cross. So I did, finishing on the lips as the picture said, and for my troubles recieved a poisoned dart in the back of the throat. Gees, I was only kissing it, not slipping it the tongue!

Not sure I need to say this, but yeah, I was dead.

Sorcery #2 - Khare, Cityport of Traps, part one

So after being killed by snakes in part one, I punched in a cheat code, rerolled some new stats and started anew with book two in the series. Figuring they'd be able to stand alone, I soon realised it wouldn't be as easy, as I didn't have a key from the first book to get into the titular city.

DOP is one of the few spells whose purpose I remember though, so snuck on through with magic and was promptly arrested and thrown in the cells for a night. What is it with the paranoia in Titan cities, particularly when so many of the legal inhabitants are undesirables themselves?

Anyway, it's a plot device as my cellmate just happens to know how to get out the other side - yeah, the purpose of this entire adventure is quite literally to get out Khare the other side; the river Jabaji is impossible to cross, we're told - and now I learn the only way to open the north gate is to chant an incantation of four lines, each line being known only by a single person, like some kind of secret Coca Cola recipe. GREAT.

The next day, on leaving I realise the bastard stole some of my food, so chasing him we end up in a chain store. Not like a modern chain store, but an actual chain store. I'm given the option to beat the guy dead, so think why not - I need the money for food. 

Anyway, the cops in Khare are ever-vigilant about people entering the city, not so much the same people murdering honest shopkeepers, and I wander freely further into town, where there's a festival on. I ain't got time for this, so keep wandering on but a 2GP stall catches my eye, much like a $2 store I suppose. I play the medieval equivalent of one of them claw-picks-up-a-soft-toy games, instead a mite runs around and grabs me something random - darts. Err, wooo? 

I soon pass a chapel, and figure surely one of the nobles with a line will be a religious leader of some sort. What I didn't guess was that it'd be a servant of Slangg, god of malice, or words to that effect. I assume Khare is not a democracy. Anyway, he gives me a puzzle, which turns into a Monty Python joke, then hits me with the real puzzler. It's maths, and it makes little sense, but five minutes on the throne and I've got it (that's the real-life throne, for those of you that don't mind too much information). One line down, three to go.

Night is nearing, so I hit up a local inn, and proceed to get plastered with a guy buying me drinks, cause each of them gives me much-needed stamina. I assume we're drinking sugary RTDs, but we must move onto the hard stuff at some point cause I miss the part where he's planning to scone me on the head and drag me off to a slave galley. Yep, I'm on a boat.

ZAP, a hole appears in the side of the boat (luckily above the water line), and I'm off again, crossing the river and finding myself halfway across town. At least, that's if the river goes through the middle of town like my hometown (again in real-life, this time not so grossly).

Come back for part two next week!

Sorcery #1 - The Shamutanti Hills, part two

So on leaving Dhumpus, I headed into the woods - there not being anywhere else really to go. I came across a hut manned by a sleeping troll (imagine if trolls actually existed - firstly, they'd be highly offended by the stereotypical portrayal, and secondly, they'd never get hired as security anyway, always being asleep on the job). 

Sneaking past, as you do, I soon arrived at a large village. A little pixie-like thing called a minimite (which I always thought was a small amount of marmite) turned up, and as it's been a few days since I last read the spell book, I was afraid to try magicing him away (the rules state once the adventure begins, you can't consult the spell book). So he, Jann, hung out, annoying the crap out of me in ways the text didn't really specify, but I assume it was like having Jar Jar Binks tag along for the ride.

Anyway, heading into Birritanti, it was quickly apparent this was a conservative radio host's wet dream of a town. Kids were running rampant, drinking in the streets, spanking old ladies and fighting one another. When in Birritanti, do as the locals do I figured, and found a bar. Pity the beer was a ripoff - obviously politicians' plans to increase the cost of alcohol to stop underage boozing don't work. I instead went to the inn where it was just as pricey, so slept rough in the outer suburbs - just how I imagine the kids would do it - without a hitch.

I didn't eat the day before, so in the morning I decided to take the downhill option. I'm soon accosted by someone that looks, going by the illustration, like an Arabian black knight. Spells won't work while Jann is around, so a few lucky rolls and luck rolls later, the knight was dead.

The next set piece we chance upon is an old woman with an obvious distaste for minimites. She sets out some tea, then leaves. Suspicious, I pull the old Princess Bride trick and swap the drinks around, only to find she's a step ahead, and I'm poisoned. But... ruffling through my shit, she finds the missing page from one of her spellbooks, and gives me the antidote in thanks. 

Oh, and she gets rid of Jann. Sweet. No amount of Force power from Qui-Gonn could ever do that.

Anyway, I head on to the next town, find an inn to crash at, but am dragged off in the middle of the night and thrown in some hut. In the morning the cheif apologises, leading me to think I'm sweet and on my way, but instead sends me on some mission to find his kidnapped daughter. Great.

They should have found someone else, as within minutes of being lowered into some kind of dungeon, I was poisoned by snakes and killed. 

Pretty sad way to go, given the importance of the mission and whatnot. Told them they should've funded the trip better, or found someone else. 

Sorcery #1 - The Shamutanti Hills, part one

Hello again! I know it's been a while, but I had excuses twofold, remember - firstly, I was out of books in the original series (yeah there's a few I haven't done, but I at least exhausted the ones I actually own), and was due to have a baby.

On that note, little Parker was born five days after my last post, so I picked the right week to take a hiatus, huh? He's doing well, almost 12 weeks old now, and yeah. I began his education into all things FF-esque this morning, with his first viewing of Bowie's Dance Magic Dance, from the Labyrinth of course, so yeah.

Anyway, onto part one of part one of the Sorcery! series, The Shamutanti Hills. These books are longer than the usual, so I'll do an hour or so an entry, and we'll see how we go.

Right! To it.

The basic plot here is the local kings take four-year turns holding onto the appropriately named Crown of Kings (not to be confused with the Crown of Love) which magically makes their societies awesome and free of crime, poverty, disorder, gays etc. Jokes on that last one, but you get the drift. Some bad dudes steal the crown, and though the local region falls into disrepair, and isn't a threat to the other kingdoms, there's a worry the crown's power might also work for evil, so it must be recovered.

In true FF style, the powers that be select a destitute, mediocre wizard with a skill of 6 and a backpack severely lacking in sandwiches to undergo the mission. The 'Sightmaster Sergeant', which sounds important but is basically a flash way of saying 'Doorman' even goes out of his to tell me he's not going to wish me a safe journey, cause it won't be. Well, Mr Sightmaster, it won't be NOW, will it? Gees.

I soon come across a village, and the text tells me as the path goes into the village, I must also go into the village. Since when was this an Ian Livingstone book? Anyway, I wander in and ask for further directions, fully expecting to be told 'the path'. The guy tells me to head for Kristatanti, and to not go via the lower path, cause there are elves. The higher path merely has mines.

Being a wizard, and more comfortable amongst elves than dwarves, I decide to go via the low path anyway. Besides, his other piece of advice was to beware the Black Lotus - like I was going to pick a flower called the Black Lotus. I've done enough FF to know that.

Wandering on, guy in tree gives me a page from a spell book - incomplete, but I bet you've also read enough FF to know the page number was intact. 

The next night I settle on the world's softest rocks, going to sleep quickly. I'm woken by glowing little elf things throwing stones at fish - oh, these kind of elves! I thought he meant Legolas-style elves, not Happy Little Elves-elves. I ignore them, and head off again in the morning.

Just when I started thinking the book was getting a little easy, I fall into a trap set by headhunters - the tribal kind, I assume, not the gang (amusing side note: the very laptop I'm writing on was once stolen, and when recovered by police containted photos of the daughter of the NZ celebrity in that piece hanging out with the crims - no shit).

Anyway, there's a get-out-of-jail-free card in the Sorcery! series, and that's praying to Libra. Thank fuck it's not that Reaving Riddler guy, he's kind of... I don't know, something about me wouldn't entrust a mission of this supposed importance to that guy. I prayed, and was saved at the last minute, ie as I was being lowered into the cauldron, about to become the bacon in some kind of bacon bone soup.

And before you ask, yes, I did try a spell - DUM - but learned at that moment (according to the text) I can't cast spells when my hands are bound. You think they'd have mentioned that at Hogwarts, no?

So, Libra lets me escape, and I'm soon wandering through the forest again, this time being pelted by acorns thrown by elvins. I whip out FOF, a forcefield spell that comes at a cost of 4 stamina, only to wonder if a few acorns would have been any worse. Doesn't matter really, cause there's ample opportunity for eats and sleeps, both of which I partake in at the next village, Kristatanti. At the bar I end up sitting with the village idiot, but I'm not sure who's stupider, him or I, considering the text tells me I sit with him for an hour before realising this.

Onward some more, I arrive at the awesomely named Dhumpus, and decide to crash for the night.

And here I Dhumpus the book till next week!

Wiz #21 - Eye of the Dragon

Ten years after the initial series ended, the first all-new FF gamebook of the Wizard series (so named for the series' new publisher) came in the form of...an uninspired, cliche-ridden Ian Livingstone dungeon crawl. So much for the second coming of FF.

It doesn't start out bad - the instructions are perhaps the most basic used in 60-odd gamebooks, which led me to believe the story would be Eye of the Dragon's calling card. But in ditching the later Puffin entries' use of extra statistics and complex anti-cheat mechanisms, Livingstone made perhaps the most meat-and-potatoes, typical and pedestrian gamebook of the entire brand.

You're an adventurer down on his luck in Fang for the annual Deathtrap Dungeon competition, which I gather is something like Christmas for them, when some guy called Henry Delacor tells you of a solid gold dragon worth "about" 335,00 gold pieces sitting in a dungeon beneath Darkwood Forest. Delacor wants his share though, so he makes you drink a slow-acting poison to ensure you return in 14 days - and you drink it with barely a thought. He gives you one of the statue's emerald eyes, and tells you to find the other before touching the golden dragon. Err, okay.

I arrive at the entrance to the dungeon and proceed to make a series of random 50/50 decisions that veer from blindingly obvious to completely random with few, if any exceptions. Should I search the hut before entering the dungeon? Of course, you dolt. Should I bust the mirror causing me extreme pain? Of course, you idiot. Should I wear the necklace with the snake skull I found in the room with the Medusa? Err, probably not. Should I scoop out coins sitting in an abandoned fountain that doesn't grant wishes? Hell no. 

Other times, it's more like - there's a person. Do you attack them, or run away? Do you talk to them, or run away? It's a door - do you open it? It's a chest - do you open it? There's no context, apart from the fact you're in a fucking dungeon full of meanies. 

Perhaps the most ridiculous scene was when I found a playing card with a smiling Queen of Spades on it - do I pick it up? Well, firstly, do I know anything about magic playing cards? Is there some kind of experience I can draw on here? Did I once hear something in a pub, or from an old Wizard mate? It's a total crapshoot. Lucky, I live, unlucky, I die. Or suffer horribly. 

For the record, I didn't even test my luck a single time, as far as I got. Weird.

Anyway, on killing a goblin and taking his chainmail, I realised that keeping the writing and rules mind-numbingly simple probably isn't the blessing I initially thought it was. The chainmail added one to my skill, but I was still at my initial. This means it would be advantageous to wait until I was hurt enough to lose a skill point before wearing the chainmail. What's wrong with adding to my attack strength, particularly when I have to fight a snake witch with a freakish ability to roll fives and sixes?

Yeah, I was killed by the snake witch, despite having a higher skill and stamina. Being an Ian Livingstone book though, I can only assume it would have happened sooner or later. I'm glad it wasn't the two-headed troll Delacor warned me of though - that thing was easy, and Delacor is a wouss. 

You'd have just as much luck winning this book flipping a coin at every choice you have to make.

Kind of sucks this is where I've run out of books! Well, there's still the Sorcery! series, but the baby is due these next seven days or so... I'll be taking a break, I think. If you want to know when the next entry is made, sign up to the RSS if you haven't already, or join the Fighting Dantasy Networked Blogs feed on Facebook. 

If I acquire any that are left, I'll do those in time too.

So until then, or Sorcery! #1, I'm out of here!

#54 - Legend Of Zagor

If the title didn't already give it away, in FF54 our old friend Zagor is back for another outing, only four books on from his last. I blame the better-than-expected sales for Return to Firetop Mountain, more than anything - because to be honest, there is nothing in the path I took through the book that suggests this is specifically Zagor - it could have been anyone, any evil demon, really.

If I'm sounding a little weary, it's because the premise is wearing a bit thin, and no matter how many extra features an rules the book throws at you, there's no hiding the fact this is a dungeon crawl-item hunt, just one that's so completely open and non-linear it can quickly feel like a pointless bore.

So Zagor's now a demon, bla bla bla, convoluted back story, you have to kill him. In a break from previous adventures you get to choose one of four characters to play as,and  each have different skills and abilities - much like the popular-at-the-time Heroquest (now there's a new blog for when this one ends - playing the HeroQuest expansion packs!). Except here instead of an elf you have a warrior, who's part-Barbarian part-Wizard, the all-rounder whom it's almost impossible not to select.

I noticed the writers had very quickly fixed the new multiple-attacks system to be more realistic, if somewhat less fair to the player. It almost killed me straight up before even getting to the Castle Argent. Yep, this is one of them books where you have to travel to the main arena - and by boat, even. Difference here is you can spend luck to avoid any troubles on the way - now because each character has different modifiers to their stats, I began with a luck of 4. Hmmm. So of course I spent a point, as I'd be failing every future luck roll anyway. 

Arriving at the castle, I decided to check out the ruins, and was almost killed by a bunch of orcs. I found a visions well which told me 'Beware the traitor-wizard Remstar', without telling me who he had betrayed - us, or Zagor? 

I wandered up to the castle and shoved the doors open, only to stumble on a tripwire - the first of what I expected to be many failings of luck. I was attacked then by four orcs with identical skill and stamina sets - already Legend of Zagor was beginning to feel like a lazily-designed round of HeroQuest. I thought perhaps I should have put away my lucky green dice and pulled out the skulls and shields set. 

Opening the first door in the castle and eating my sixth meal of the day, I found an old barracks. Not much going on here, so I opened the one opposite - a drill room. Okay. Let's go further in.

I went through some massive doors, and west. More doors and random passages. Okay. Opened a door to a destroyed library, ate my eighth meal of the day - unlike the author, who must've been a few sandwiches short when he wrote: "Test Your Spot Skill. If you are unsuccessful, turn to 212. If you fail, you find nothing..." Wow, even the book doesn't fancy my chances.

Turning to the page I assumed was the successful path, which was through a secret passageway into a dark tunnel, I soon came across a door. On opening it, three theives cower in fear - I tell them no worries, I've got no gold to steal anyway, just a few coins - and hire one of them as my bitch.

So me and the thief (whose skills add a whole two points to my attack strength) wander randomly about, eventually coming across a merchant who'll offer me a free random key if I spend twice as much gold as I actually have. I KNOW the key is important, this is an Ian Livingstone book after all, but goddamnit. I grab some more food, realising I have the metabolism of a domestic cat, and continue my mission of opening random, ill-described doors. 

Eventually I come to a room defended by zombies, which knock me down to a single stamina point - before the marauding orcs turn up, the book says I can "quaff" down some provisions, should I feel the need. So that's the official FF term for wolfing down a day's worth of food (well, perhaps not a whole day in FF54's case) inbetween scraps. It makes me wonder why Rocky didn't just knock back chickens and potatoes inbetween rounds, or when that dick broke Daniel-san's leg, he didn't just mainline some beef (maybe that was a hit to his skill...).

It was all to no avail though, the orcs that came through knew how to fight under the new multiple combat system real well. 

Others rate this book really highly, some calling it the best in the series. I won't go that far, it's hard to say off one reading, but it doesn't look likely. The atmosphere wasn't there for me. I like being able to wander around a bit, but a really well put-together gamebook knows when to push the plot forward; it also knows when things are looking a bit cookie-cutter. 

I've only got one more book left to do before I run out of conventional FF gamebooks - one that didn't appear in the original series, Eye of the Dragon. After that, assuming I haven't acquired any more, I'll be onto the Sorcery! series - though two weeks from now I'm due to become a dad, so it may have to wait. We'll see.

#52 - Night Dragon

Night Dragon was one of my favourites as a kid and reading it 15 years later, it's no surprise. One of the most complex, intriguing, enjoyable yet oddly fair gamebooks of the FF series, Night Dragon manages to not only combine open-ended gameplay with a developing, coherent plot, but has a scaling difficulty that never seems unfair or over the top - even if the titular Night Dragon has a skill of 17 and a stamina of 32. Not that I made it that far.

Reading on the back cover that the Night Dragon is a 'creature of pure evil from before time existed', I figured when it came to rolling my stats I'd need more dice. Instead I settled for the lucky, non-matching green dice I used on Island of the Undead and hoped for the best, rolling 10/17/10. Not bad - then the book let me add two points to anything - err, skill, thankyou very much. Combined with the 12 provisions, I figured finally the FF authors were acknowledging that some FF books were more equal than others in the difficulty department.

Something else the book kept from FF51 is the combat system when you're up against more than one opponent - that everyone rolls, and the highest lands a blow. This is certainly quicker and simpler than the old system of rolling against everyone, but only being able to attack one, the rest are parries; but it's also pretty unrealistic. I mean, if I have a skill of 12, and I'm up against 50 goblins of skill 5, under the new system it'd be a walk in the park, but under the old, it'd be a slog, but I'd eventually succumb. And if more than one has a higher attack strength than I do, shouldn't I be hit more than once? Despite this, I think it was an improvement, if only for the time and brainpower saved.

Anyway, a dark elf tells me about this evil dragon, and coming from a dark elf, I figure it must be pretty serious. Being in Blacksand, I decide to hang out a bit, 'cause despite what the text says I actually like Blacksand. I buy some crap from a local store, you know, the usual - a rope, luck potion, etc. On leaving, I can take the road or a boat - My skill's good, I don't trust boats, so the road it is.

I'm soon in Marzail, and not needing to gain any stamina, given the option I save money and crash outside without incident. I suppose in this way, Marzail has it over Blacksand. Heading on, I soon come across what appears to be a small group of druids or monks walking along the road. I join them, eventually crashing further north.

Unfortunately, these monks are less Desmond Hume and more the Others, but I wake up just in time to stop them murdering me in my sleep (okay, I promise, no more Lost references. Maybe). Being the Rainman I am, I notice their tattoos are of spiderwebs, each with exactly 20 strands.

The next day, I rescue a dude who's been left for dead by theives, adding one to my honour score. Being a latter-day FF book, there's loads of extra scores and things to keep track of - like honour (self-explanatory but seemingly irrelevant, at least as far as I got), nemesis (how well-known you are to the Night Dragon's minions), and time (how long has elapsed since you set off - two points a day, approximately). 

The guy we rescued lived in Sharndale, a town whose economy is based on fur trapping. Once again I have to question the writers off FF's grasp of economics, as I was able to sell some fur there for a pretty decent price. Maybe I was sharked.

Anyway, I went shopping, picked up a few more obviously useful items,  like an ice pick and a mirror, and some less obviously useful items, like walrus oil, and then split for Rentarn, where the dark elf told me a room would be waiting for me at the Rudderless Galley, a tavern.

Turns out someone else knew I'd be there, as it was full of assassins. It wasn't hard to convince the owner of the tavern they were the bad guys, and he apologised as he summoned the local constabulary. Bah, the cell was probably a better sleep anyhow - this is an Allansian pub after all. Less chance of a fight breaking out.

One of the assassins was carrying a plaque with the word 'Endimion' on it, which was my only clue. Four days of investigation, and I finally discovered it was a boat - a boat on which was my next contact, cruelly murdered as we met. Before he died he told me to head northwest and find the Frost Giants, to take them firewater, and 'Ismater'. Err, okay.

I went northwest, slept in a cave, then the next morning found a sign on the trail: 'TO IS   ER'. Ah, Ismater. The next day, the twelfth since I left Blacksand, I arrived in Ismater and hit up the local pub. One of them bastard monks was there, but he didn't know who I was, and I couldn't track him once he bailed. I decided to go shopping, but apart from the same old items on offer, the book told me there was nothing else of interest - like harpoons. Err, I'm going to fight a big-ass dragon, it's kind of like a whale, I could totally use a harpoon. If I need an excuse, will 'scientific research' do?

I pick up some firewater as instructed, then come across a shop named 'EVIL'. Awesome! I could do with some evil - fight fire with fire, and all that. Turns out the shop is named after the guy who works there, Nevill, and the paint is just flaky. I spent the last of my money on firewater, and when I mention the dickhead monks, Nevill kicks me out. Dang it.

Next up I'm forced by the text, in perhaps the only annoying piece of linerity, to go to the Dragon Conclave. It's like the UN, or the Justice League, but for dragons. They tell me there are all these magical items just laying about the place that will help me defeat the Night Dragon, but they can't help me because of some code that prevents dragons taking up arms against other dragons. There's no option to say 'take a vote and overturn that stupid rule', because I assume the Night Dragon is on the council and has veto power.

So I head southeast back to the Frost giants, bribing my way in a vial of firewater. Bad move it turns out, cause head Frost giant wants two vials, and a bunch of other stuff, in exchange for the magic shield. I challenge him to a rumble, and what follows is perhaps the weakest example of virisimilitude in the book: The chief is seven metres tall. He brings out his champion son to fight for him. The son makes the chief look like a 'pygmy'. But his skill is a whopping... 10.

And wouldn't one hit from this 10-20m tall thing kill me? Would he even notice the papercuts I was inflicting on his foot?

Anyway, I take the shield regardless, and head off in search of the sword. On day 24 I find myself in a tomb, and eventually up against an undead chieftan who'd carrying an awesome-looking shiny sword. Turns out it's the wrong one. Well, it might actually be the right one, but apparently it's too big and feels unweildy, and I dump it. Er, okay. The outside-of-book me raises his eyebrows and plays along.

But not for much longer. I'm out of food and struggling, and despite a wicked run of rolls (thankyou mismatched green dice) I'm dispatcehd by a Wizard Wraith living at the top of a frozen waterfall.

It's lengthy, it's involved and it requires maths. But still, Night Dragon just can't be denied a top-five placing at the FF table, I feel. You can detect spots where it's struggling to fit the plot into 400 paragraphs, and not an entry is wasted. From one reading I can't really comment on the mechanics of the extra statistics as others have, but they seemed to work well (though I've no idea how honour works, really).

It's hard to believe there are no plans to republish this one - perhaps a subtle, if unintended suggestion they're aiming the new series at a younger age?