Fatemaster

                                                        RANKINGS  

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1. Treachery in Drakenwood - Score = 7.2    Tier = Good

Attempts to beat: 13

Another day, another new gamebook series that I had previously never heard of (although I guess that's true of all series until you hear about them). The "Fatemaster" books are larger size, 500 section gamebooks similar to the "Sorcery!" or "Cretan Chronicles" series in format. The first book, "Treachery in Drakenwood", finds us playing as a wandering adventurer who whilst (and this book loves to use the word "whilst") camping in the dark and dangerous Drakenwood forest one night, happens to witness the abduction of a fair lady by a group of men on horseback. Travelling to the nearby city of Beckford the next day, we learn that the lady in question was in fact the Lady Arwen Arowen, daughter of the Count of Esgaron, ruler of the region. There are a few suspects who would gain from Arowen's abduction and the war that could result, as the Count of Esgaron has blamed the nearby region of Drakensfeld for the kidnapping and threatens to invade if she is not returned. All we know is that Arowen was taken to a mountain hideout within the Drakenwood forest, having overheard this when we witnessed the abduction itself. A large reward is offered for her return by a couple of different individuals, as both the Count of Esgaron and the Duke of Romark (Arowen's fiancee) wish to see her returned safely. As a seeker of both fame and fortune, and with nothing else to do on a Saturday night, we decide to take up the quest of rescuing her. Oh, and just to add even more of a challenge, we learn that one of the prime suspects of the kidnapping, a local noble called Sir Roderick, in addition to having a horde of goblins and a legion of men-at-arms at his disposal, also has an ally in the form of Zandabar the Necromancer, an extremely powerful sorcerer. (Hmm, I wonder if this Sir Roderick is the guilty party?) So after using the last measly 10 gold pieces we have to our name to buy some equipment from a list of items that includes swords, daggers, and armour (wait, we are a wandering adventurer and didn't even own a sword?), we set off on foot into Mirkwood Drakenwood forest, heading toward the mountain hideout at its centre. 

As far as game mechanics go, there are a few different things going on here for discussion: 

The free movement system -  The outdoor area of the forest uses a hex-based mapping system whereby you enter a hex, are provided a picture of the hex and what it contains (usually just trees and perhaps a trail), and then have the option of moving in any one of 6 possible directions. You repeat this process as you head toward the mountain, perhaps meeting random creatures as you go, and can move back to any hex previously visited as many times as you like. Once you make it inside the mountain, you are provided with a picture of the hallway or room you happen to be in, along with any entrances or doorways, and can choose which direction you want to head, with the free movement system still in place allowing you to backtrack and check out rooms previously visited as many times as you like. This whole endeavor is something of a cross between the "Middle-earth Quest" and "Legends of Skyfall" systems, and with it comes the usual positives and negatives. It can be nice to know you can go back anywhere at any time to search for any item or individual you may have missed, but on the flip side you can find yourself going round and round in circles, and it can start to feel silly reading the same sections over and over. At least the book realizes some of the problems inherent with this, as you are instructed to treat any room to be in the same state as the last time you left it, so that any monsters or individuals killed on your first trip through a room stay dead. Of course, without this rule, the adventure would become ludicrous.  

The combat system - I wouldn't call this system complicated, but for me it is difficult to explain. Your character begins the quest with random scores generated for both Strength and Agility which can range from anywhere between 7-12. You also have Attack and Defense modifiers which both start at 0, but can be increased depending upon what weapons and armour you have equipped (a magical sword might add +1 to your Attack, and a suit of chainmail armour might add +2 to Defense for example). Both you and your opponent take turns rolling two dice, and require a 7 or higher to hit after all modifiers for weapons and armour or any other bonuses have been applied. An interesting addition to these rules is that if you (but not your opponent) scores a 9 or higher on your attack, then you get to attack again and can keep attacking as long as you keep scoring 9 or more. This can allow you to chain some nice hits together and was a welcome inclusion. The amount of damage you do on a successful hit depends upon your weapon (a sword might do 4 points of damage while a dagger might do only 2 points) and this amount is then deducted from EITHER the opponent's Strength or Agility (but not split between them). For your enemies, you always deduct it from whichever attribute is currently higher, while if you are hit, you get to decide which of the attributes you wish to deduct from. Once a combatant's Strength OR Agility fall to 0, they are rendered unconscious and are out of the fight. This whole setup is ok on the surface, but I found that Defense boosting items were fairly common throughout the adventure, and many of the enemies you encounter similarly have high Defense bonuses. This can result in some of the same problems that arose in the "Car Wars" series (although it's not near as problematic as that one), where fights can drag on for too long because no one can seem to score a hit due to needing to roll a high number.     

The magic system - As I felt the combat system didn't necessarily work all that well, the adventure redeems itself here, as I found the magic system to be quite good. In addition to Strength and Agility, you also begin with a randomly generated Power attribute (between 5-10), which you can then spend to cast spells from a list provided at the front of the book. The spells cost different amounts of points depending on how powerful they are, and much like the "Sorcery!" series, can be used to help you overcome different obstacles, or even to cause increased damage in combat. A couple of the spells are more useful than the others, (the Invisibility spell is particularly handy), but this is to be expected. Where the adventure excels is by having you think long and hard about where to use your Power points, as there is a battle near the end of the book where you are going to need to have saved up a certain amount should you want to give yourself a fighting chance to win. These points can actually be replenished by sleeping, but moments where you are allowed to sleep are few and far between. Therefore (and without using a loophole I will discuss later), I found I had to really limit the usage of my spells to key moments, and while devising my ultimate plan to beat the book, I carefully plotted out the best areas to spend these precious Power points.   

There are however a few loopholes present in the adventure that you can use to your advantage. One involves the acquisition of an item called the "Chief's ring". This ring gives you a +2 to your Defense bonus when the ring is worn. Obviously this ring is of incredible benefit, and I'm not sure I would have beaten the book without it. There is a moment near the end of the adventure though where you are told that if you are wearing the ring at that moment, you suffer a massive damage penalty. The use of the word "wearing" is an important distinction, as once you know this moment is coming, you can just take the ring off immediately before it, and put it right back on again immediately after. There is no way your character would have known to do this of course without the advantage of having gone through it before, but I suppose this is really no different from using past experience as a player to help you meta-game on subsequent playthroughs in most gamebooks. And it may be just the nature of a free-movement style system in general, but any area of the adventure that allows you to sleep and recover your Power points could be exploited by just trekking back to them anytime your Power happens to become low and thus bring it back up to maximum again. As the rules state that enemies in rooms do not regenerate, there wouldn't even be any risk in doing so, as you would be moving back through empty rooms. So apart from having to endure all the page flipping, this could be used as a cheap and easy way to re-Power yourself up after a difficult encounter.   

  

While I wouldn't classify the above as bad things necessarily, there are unfortunately a few missteps in the adventure: 

Random encounters - Whenever you travel to a new hex in the forest area, you are often asked to roll two dice, and if the number is odd then you must face a random creature (wolves, a pack of goblins, a giant spider etc.) and if the number is even then you can go on your way unmolested. Facing the same creatures over and over again should you be unlucky gets very tedious, very quickly. Also, the whole outdoor forest area is really quite barren of much of interest, and I eventually found it to be optimal just to make a beeline straight for the mountain. This is a pity as it renders the forest section something of a waste. 

Secret doors - When travelling through the mountain hideout areas, you can choose to search for secret doors in most of the sections. I found that any spot that actually did contain a secret door was telegraphed in advance with you being told something along the lines of "You notice an unusually large tapestry hanging in a suspiciously odd place. Do you wish to search for secret doors?" To make matters worse, if you decide to search for a secret door but do not find one, you somehow end up making enough noise in doing so (are we playing as a total klutz?) that it attracts the guards and you will likely find yourself thrown in the jail cells. Which leads me to... 

Goblin jail -  Basically any wrong move while travelling the underground area will find you captured by the goblins and thrown in the jail cell. Escape from the cell is actually very easy, but this event can (and likely will on your first several attempts at the book) happen over and over again, and as you can imagine becomes incredibly tiresome. The book seems to acknowledge this by adding the proviso that should you be captured 3 different times, then it's game over, as I guess the goblins finally decided to beef up their security after your first 2 escapes. 

Time limit - As you start your quest, you are told you only have 7 days in which to rescue the Lady Arowen. Your character sheet lists the days, and you are instructed when you should cross one off. This whole mechanic seemed to me to be pointless however, as I was only ever told to mark off that a day had passed if I had slept. And as mentioned earlier, there are not all that many places to do this. You can therefore circle the map as many times as you like, and as long as you don't sleep, you aren't required to mark off any days. I believe this time limit may only exist to prevent you from overusing the sleep loophole discussed earlier, but even so you still would be able to go back and recover your Power points using this method more than a few times and still have enough days to rescue Lady Arowen.   

That all said, the writing here by author Paul Vernon I found to be quite good, with the underground area having a nice claustrophobic atmosphere. And with many different rooms and caverns to explore, along with several interesting encounters, there is much to see and do (as long as you can stay out of jail). The book also contains one of the better epilogues I have seen yet. At a banquet celebrating the wedding between the Lady Arowen and the Duke of Romark (where you are the guest of honor), it is made clear that despite all you have done for them, the Count of Esgaron and the Baron of Drakensfeld still expect you to help them with another problem they have in the form of a mysterious evil sorcerer known as the "Firelord", who is giving them grief.  This sets up the next adventure in the series very nicely, and I expect to flow smoothly into that next book. 

Finally, I need to mention some of the illustrations of this book, which I found to be a mixed bag. The illustrations for the human characters I felt had a nice 80's fantasy style quality to them, particularly those of Zandabar the Necromancer and the Lady Arowen. That said, a couple of the creature illustrations had me chuckling to myself. The one showcasing the Giant Spider (shown below) makes him look like he is just missing a top hat and cane before stepping on stage in a vaudeville show: 

"Helloooo my baby, hellooo my honey, hellooo my rag time gaaaal"

And the drawing of the four Goblins on the back of a Giant Weasel (shown below) looks like something out of a Monty Python skit:

"MEMO: Due to budgetary cutbacks, all Goblin patrols will now be required to triple or quadruple up on transportation."

Incidentally, the text for this Goblin encounter mentions that you are attacked by (and the ensuing combat has you fighting) THREE Goblins. How many do you see? I know I'm not THAT drunk.

"There....are....FOUR GOBLINS!"

  

Ranking: My opinion of this adventure was all over the place over the course of my playthroughs. After my first half dozen or so tries at the book, I was thinking it was going to end up in the Bad tier. The "rescue the princess" quest is not exactly the pinnacle of originality, the combat system doesn't really work as well as it should, and the movement through the forest with the silly random encounters was tedious as all get out. Not to mention that just about any wrong move within the underground area would see you thrown in jail. However, once I came to realize all the steps that needed to be taken to beat the adventure, and that despite the free movement allowed within the mountain, there was an almost exact order you needed to do things in if you wanted to win, I came to appreciate the book from a puzzle-solving perspective. Planning out my exact path ahead of time, including what spells I would use and where I intended to use every single one of my Power points, eventually became good fun despite all the other faults of the book, as I take great satisfaction in formulating a plan and then executing it through to victory. So I have this adventure just making it into the Good tier, even if I can acknowledge that it has its share of issues and has a lot of room for improvement.

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2. Fortress of the Firelord - Score = 5.4    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 30

Picking up right from where the prior book left off, this adventure has us taking up the assigned quest of infiltrating the fortress of the mysterious Firelord, who has been raiding passing caravans, and neutralizing him as a threat. I mentioned with the previous book that the "rescue the princess" plot was not very original, but then this adventure provides us probably the only type of quest even less original than that, by giving us an "infiltrate a fortress and kill the evil sorcerer" plot. Still, the adventure actually starts on pretty good footing, by giving us an opening choice of four different disguises (merchant, scribe, driver, or guard) to don as we travel with the caravan in the hopes of getting ourselves captured and brought within the fortress. It's a pretty big leap of faith to assume that the Firelord will take us as a prisoner instead of just killing us outright, but what do you know, that's exactly what he does. The really great bit of design here is that where you begin within the fortress is determined by which disguise you chose, with each of the four options having you wake up in completely different locations and with different obstacles to overcome in order to escape your opening situation before you can begin going about the process of exploring the fortress and learning how to vanquish the Firelord (whose actual name we find out in the first section is Farak). 

This adventure ditches the outdoor hex travelling system seen in the opening of the prior book and dives right into the indoor exploration, once again providing you a map picture of every corridor and room you travel through. The fortress itself isn't as big as you might expect from a 500 section gamebook that contains nothing but the fortress, but it is laid out well enough and also includes an underground area. While you do your exploring of the fortress at night, this helps to explain how empty it feels, with almost all the corridors you travel along, and half the rooms you look inside, being empty. I get that everyone is supposed to be asleep, but this doesn't help to provide a lot of interesting encounters.  

The fortress not being all that large turns out to be a blessing in disguise, because the travel here is very tedious. The free movement system returns and you can travel freely through places you have already been, but the constant descriptions of each empty hallway whenever you move a few feet was giving me flashbacks to "The Black Pyramid" from "The Legends of Skyfall" series. It's not at the level of that book, but it sure isn't a lot of fun either. So you need to wander the fortress looking for information on how to defeat Farak and also discover where his quarters are located so that you know where to go when you are ready to put your plan into action. Unfortunately, the amount of instant-deaths in the adventure has been dialed up far too much. The previous book has something of the same problem, seeing you thrown in jail with just about any wrong move, but here most any wrong decision will either see you killed outright, or sent to the arena. The arena is very tough to survive too, as you will eventually need to defeat the Orc Champion in order to be crowned the new arena champion yourself, which gives you another opportunity to take down Farak. The first couple of fights against the wolves and the lion aren't too difficult, but the following gladiator is a 50/50 proposition, and the odds are stacked against you if you make it to the Orc Champion. What makes all this even tougher is that you can't use your magic at any point during the fights, because if Farak (who is watching the battles from his private box) sees this, he immediately puts you to death as he wisely won't chance having any other magic users in his fortress. And unlike the jail cell from the first book, which gave you a couple of opportunities before killing you, here you just get the one arena chance. 

Farak himself is just about the lamest antagonist I can recall being up against in a gamebook. First of all, why is he in disguise and driving the caravan that gets captured in the first section of the book? These caravans are not hard for his orcs to find and are passing near his territory anyway, so I can't think of a good reason for him to be doing this. Later on, the ease by which you defeat him once you make it to his chambers is almost comical. He has fierce looking Death Guards posted at the entrance to his sleeping quarters, and these guys are indeed a tough fight if you find yourself in combat with them, but I eventually discovered that you can just RUN RIGHT PAST THEM! Seriously, one of them takes a half-hearted swipe at you causing a few damage points, but they don't even follow you as you head toward their master dozing helplessly in his bed, they just stand there rooted to the spot. These must surely be the worst personal guard in the history of protecting despotic evil wizards. Once inside Farak's room, there is no fight here, heck there isn't even a skill check if you just play your cards right, and all you do is enter his chambers by using your Sesame (open door) spell, then snatch his amulet that is the source of his power off the table while he sleeps! There then follows a ridiculous moment where Farak leaps out of bed (I guess the loud sound of your "snatching" wakes him up), and then realizes in horror that you have stolen his amulet. He then races over to a wall, topples over a freakin bookcase, and escapes through a hidden door while you just stand there letting him get away (presumably with your mouth agape). It can be learned earlier that the source of his power can be destroyed within the caverns beneath the fortress, so now you need to head back down there to finish him off once and for all. 

This final stretch in the caverns is almost as lame as the preceding encounter. You know the creature shown on the cover of the book? Well you can meet him down in the caverns but I have no idea what he is supposed to be or why he is down here. This snake-man is holed up in a room off the beaten path, and apparently doesn't care much for Farak, as he allows you to take something called the Firegem and additionally gives you directions on where to go next. The thing is, near as I can figure, this Firegem is almost totally useless, as all it does is light up a room along the way to keep you from being attacked by a group of birds (!), basically functioning as some sort of portable light bulb. However, even without the Firegem you can still pass safely through this room using your Light spell at the cost of 1 measly Power Point, and from this room onward, you no longer need your Power Points for anything else anyway. After these birds, you then pass through a cavern containing a massive dragon, who just lets you...... walk right on through. You then come to the final room of the adventure, which contains a demon that Farak has imprisoned within a pentagram and which does Farak's bidding. So, you didn't have to fight Farak, or the dragon, so you must have to fight this demon right? Nope. You are given several different options on how to interact with the demon. Pick the right one and the demon returns to the underworld and drags Farak with him (I guess to torture for all eternity). Pick the wrong option though, and you guessed it, instant death!  Even once this is successfully accomplished and Farak is defeated once and for all, you still need to escape the caverns, as lava starts to pour in thanks to the hole the demon made when he left. You are then left with a choice between two options as to how to escape, and I personally felt that the correct choice here was incredibly counter-intuitive. 

Once I finally completed the adventure, I realized how little there actually is going on along the winning route. This is certainly the case when choosing the scribe as your opening disguise, as I beat the book only having one "combat", and even for that I used Power Bolt to fry the Orc Chieftain while he slept so there was no ensuing fight. There are some additional frustrations as well. For instance it can be learned while exploring that in order to control the demon by using the amulet, you will need to discover the Word of Power that allows you to do so, only I'm fairly certain this is not located anywhere in the book. This felt like a dirty trick on the author's part, as I spent a not insignificant amount of time trying to find this Word of Power, only to eventually learn that it isn't remotely required (and probably doesn't even exist). This would have been ok had the traversal system through the fortress not been so incredibly dull and time consuming. You can also come across choices where the action you will take should you select them are not properly described. I think the author needs to learn the difference between "examine" and "drink", as I was once asked if I wished to examine a flask of liquid, only to then find myself DRINKING the liquid when I selected that option! (Which of course turned out to be a knockout drink). And anytime one of the options you are given tells you to "make a note of this section" before proceeding, this option is almost always bad news, as this just means you are about to encounter something evil, and should you survive, you are just told to return to the section you last noted. So these notes give away what options NOT to pick. 

Ranking: I had the mirror experience here from the one I had with the previous book, as after my first few tries at this I thought it might have a chance at being very good, if not great. A whole fortress of rooms to explore and secrets to discover? Count me in!  But egads after those first few attempts it became clear that the movement through the passageways is even worse than the previous adventure. The plot of the book is once again void of any originality too, and in addition the writing seemed a lot more spartan to me than the previous adventure. The puzzle-solving aspect (if just using trial and error over and over to discover what you need to do can be called such) is not nearly as strong as the last book, but can be faintly seen here. Providing the four different starting points is easily the best thing the adventure has going for it, and allows for a certain level of replayability, along with varying degrees of difficulty depending on how you choose to disguise yourself. Overall the book is more tedious than bad, but it still somewhat saddens me that this is the last book in the series, as author Paul Vernon did show promise in some of his design elements with his first book, even if he went backwards in almost all aspects with this second entry.