Fighting Fantasy - Books 41-45

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41. Master of Chaos - Score = 7.3    Tier = Good

Attempts to Beat: 13

I am ready to continue my reviews/playthroughs of the Fighting Fantasy series, and as always, there are going to be spoilers here, as I don't feel like I could review the adventures in as much detail as I would like otherwise, so fair warning if you haven't played these yet and plan to do so anytime soon. I've also decided to go from reviewing 10 Fighting Fantasy books at a time down to 5. I wish I had done this at the start, as it would have allowed me to mix them in more often, and helped to get some of the review pages from being so ridiculously long, but oh well, hindsight and all that. 

Kicking off the 1990's, I come to this adventure from series stalwart Keith Martin, aka Carl Sargent, of whose previous books I have very much enjoyed. That said, this particular entry does not get off to a good start to say the least. The introduction here? Oof! It opens with your player character, a famous warrior, being hired by a group of wizards to recover a magical staff of theirs, the Staff of Rulership, which has recently been stolen by an apparently resurrected evil mage who died long ago. Sigh. So, go and kill an evil wizard then? Really? As rote as that concept is, I could have begrudgingly gone along with it (and a well designed adventure could still rescue it), but the introduction then just gets silly. The evil wizard, known as Shanzikuul, and about who precious little information is given, is currently holed up in the ruins of Kabesh, which are located outside the city of Ashkyos on the lawless continent of Khul. So what is the good wizards' plan to get us there? Glad you asked! They suggest allowing ourselves to be captured by a group of local slavers in the area, who would then transport us to Khul aboard their ship. This would of course mean we would have to give up all our weapons and items, only leaving with the clothes on our back and the 2 measly gold pieces that the wizards so generously have hidden in the heels of our boots. (Wouldn't the slavers have taken our boots too?) This also means we would have to allow ourselves to be knocked out, dragged aboard the ship, and subjected to who knows what terrible abuses on the journey. Great plan guys! What kind of crappy wizards are these? Do they not have some kind of magic that can get us to Khul instead? No large bird or anything that can fly us there? They don't even have access to ONE lousy ship? Jeesh! So after accepting the quest like a total idiot, we visit the docks and allow ourselves to be knocked out and press-ganged into becoming a galley-slave. As far as introductions to the adventures go, this has to be up there with some of the worst. At this point I started to develop a pit in my stomach, wondering if perhaps the Fighting Fantasy books were not quite as good as I remembered them being (it has been awhile since I have played one after all).  

The adventure uses the typical Fighting Fantasy system, but also throws in some Skill selection, as you are given a list of 6 different Skills to choose from, of which you can select 3 to begin. These Skills, which include: Acute Hearing, Animal Wisdom, Blindsight, Climbing, Move Silently, and Tracking, were a more than welcome addition, and I had a good time experimenting with each and learning where they all might come in handy, as they all appear to have a chance to be useful. Ultimately after several playthroughs, I settled upon Blindsight, Move Silently, and Tracking as my Skills of choice, but I would be interested to know if other players found a more useful combination.  

Breaking down the areas of the book as you travel along:

The voyage to Ashkyos

Ugh. If I was feeling rather worried by the introduction to the adventure, nothing contained in this sequence helped to allay those fears. This is the opening sequence whereby you have been abducted (willingly) to serve as a slave aboard the ship, which is commanded by the evil Captain Shagrot. You do indeed serve as a galley-slave, chained to the oars beneath the boat where you suffer daily beatings by the Second Mate. (They fell right into our trap boys!) The journey is one big stamina drain, as you continually lose Stamina points due to malnourishment, beatings, and overwork. It's boring as hell and it isn't even all that well designed, as I found myself getting rather angry at one point when I was asked if I wanted to stick up for a fellow slave who was being beaten, and who the adventure makes clear has become my friend, only to find doing so leads to yet even more Stamina point loss. As such, every time I played the book after this, I was left feeling like a coward, with not much of a choice to be made but to stand by in silence and watch my "friend" take a vicious beating. There is one combat that can be had here, against a Tentacle (not even a whole sea monster, just a tentacle), but you don't even need to do that if you don't feel like it (although in that case you might want to make sure you have a decent starting Stamina score along with the Move Silently skill). As a saving grace, at least this trip is relatively brief before you reach Ashkyos, and the author manages to work in the expression "treacly grog" into the mix. Don't know if I have heard grog described that way before, and I often found myself saying it out loud every time I came to it. 

Exploring Ashkyos

Phew! Thank goodness the adventure starts to trend in the right direction starting here, and my spirits for the rest of the book began to rise. Once you enter the city of Ashkyos, the adventure takes a page out of more open-world style gamebooks by allowing you to visit the various districts of the city in any order you like. You have the shops, the warehouses, the markets, the docks, the old quarter, and the entertainment district all open to you from the start. The goal here is to steal or earn as much gold as you can, so that you can buy the necessary equipment and provisions you will need to complete your quest. Most importantly you will need to buy a sword, some armour, and some food in the shops district, but you can also buy other helpful items such as a lantern or some potions if you have the gold and wish to purchase them. I gotta ask though, if I have no problem in stealing gold, why would I not cut out the middle man and try to steal the equipment I need directly? 

In any case, this was the best area of the adventure, and I had a lot of fun exploring the districts and figuring out how I could maximize my gold intake. Each of the districts, save for the shops, had some kind of mini-adventure or colorful characters to encounter, including a shady-yet-somehow-good-hearted thief named Vesper, and a talking mongoose named Jesper. (Vesper and Jesper? Did the author do that on purpose?) There is also some business with a fascinating Dark Elf that can be encountered in here as well, although he can be easily missed (and more on this later), and you can even run into your old pal Captain Shagrot from the opening sequence again. 

There was very little dice rolling that is required to be done here, with most of the area coming down to experimenting with which Skills to choose at the beginning and which options to take in how to deal with everyone you meet. This made it feel like one of those books that is a big puzzle to be solved rather than an exercise in dice rolling (both types of which I enjoy mind you). That said, there was still some room for improvement. For example, the book introduces a Notoriety stat, whereby you start at 0, and every time your character does something to call attention to themselves, you must add a point or two to this number. Should this Notoriety stat ever reach 8 points, you are then forced to leave Ashkyos immediately, whether you are ready or not. I think this aspect really fell flat though, and not even once did I ever find myself reaching the 8 points which would have forced me to leave early. 

There was also something else that came up that had me scratching my head on how to handle it. This occurs when you meet the Vesper character, and you are soon told that he leads you back to his home in the Old Quarter. Should you try to visit the Old Quarter later though, you will be asked if you have been here before, and if so, you are locked out of returning there. Did this trip with Vesper count then, or did the author mean that you only officially visited the Old Quarter when choosing it from the hub section? By the letter of the law, I guess you WERE there before, I was just left wondering if that was the author's intention. I would eventually discover that I could safely ignore a couple of the districts completely with no undue effects, but it took me quite a few playthroughs to discover this, at which point I had explored them all rather thoroughly, and greatly enjoyed doing so. Well done! 

Travelling to Rahasta

Rahasta is the name of the village that lies closest to the ruins of Kabesh, which is your ultimate destination, so once you have bought all the supplies you think you will need in Ashkyos, it's off to Rahasta you go. There are a couple of different routes you can take to get there, and thankfully unlike an Ian Livingstone book, choosing one over the other doesn't automatically lock you out of winning the adventure. You can choose to go overland by either foot or on camel, or you can book passage on a riverboat. The river option is over far too quickly to be honest. I mean, I would expect it to be the faster travel option obviously, but it's over ridiculously fast. Was I merely travelling across a river as opposed to along it? The overland route fares better, although not by much. It is a lot longer yes so you will get more play value out of it, but that is not necessarily a good thing, as the encounters are rather dry (snake, orc, troll, etc.). The real problem with the overland route though is that you will find yourself told an ungodly amount of times that you need to eat 2 provisions or suffer a Stamina penalty. You are told this so many times in fact that I started to wonder if the author was taking the piss. There is a Manticore to be found along this route that provides a useful item for the endgame of the adventure, but I ultimately decided the item in question wasn't worth it, and found myself eventually settling on the river option in my later playthroughs. While overall this travel sequence was not as bad as the one that opened the book, it was still a large letdown after the previous exploration of Ashkyos had set the adventure back on track. The village of Rahasta itself is suitably horrifying, with its inhabitants having been mutated due to their proximity to the ruins you are heading towards. There isn't all that much to do in the village itself unfortunately, and even less so should you have a particular travelling companion with you (and you probably will in most playthroughs). 

Exploring the ruins of Kabesh

Ahhhhhh that's better. Back to the good stuff. Not as good as the Ashkyos sections mind you, but quite enjoyable nonetheless. This area mimics what was done in that prior Ashkyos sequence by providing you a hub section listing all the various areas of the ruins that you can explore in any order you like. There is the Senate House, the Ruined Houses of the living quarter, the Old Temple, the Mausoleum, the Warehouses, and the Coliseum. Your goal here of course is to locate the Staff of Rulership which is presumably held by the resurrected mage Shanzikuul, who is holed up somewhere in the ruins. Exploring all the areas is fun and pays dividends, as there are several items scattered about that are very helpful as you get closer to the endgame. Unlike Ashkyos, combat ramps up here, and you will likely find yourself having to battle a handful of baddies in order to get those aforementioned items. Once you have collected everything you think you might need, you are ready to head down into the "Chaos Pits"  (which are hinted at as being well hidden within the ruins, but I didn't think the entrance to them was hard to find at all!) for the final confrontation with Shanzikuul. 

Up until this point in the adventure, I thought one of the bigger weaknesses of the whole book was with its villain. We didn't really learn much about him in the introduction, and he is barely mentioned throughout the whole quest, so that I began to wonder if perhaps Shanzikuul was just a red herring. Thankfully he is at last given some characterization here when you finally locate him, and overall I thought the fight against him played out better than I was expecting. It may have been a case of too little too late, but it was nice to finally have an actual idea of who or what I was up against. Defeating him though really seems to come down to picking a particular option right before the fight begins, which will probably make this fight a cakewalk for an already high Skilled player. The adventure isn't quite over though even after Shanzikuul is defeated, as you are first given a choice on what you want to do in the immediate aftermath of his defeat, with one of those options being to "run like the wind", which gave me a good chuckle. Who is going to pick that? After this choice, you then have one last confrontation with a Dark Elf who has also been seeking to obtain the Staff of Rulership. Now this is where things could get head-scratching once again, as it is entirely possible you would never have met this Dark Elf before in the adventure, but the book carries on like you have regardless. Now if you play the book enough times there is a good chance you would have come across him at some point, but if for some reason you hadn't, this final encounter would make absolutely no sense. Anyway, once he is taken care of, and in another example of the return journey in an adventure being totally glossed over, you are magically transported back to the group of wizards who gave you the quest in the first place, where they shower you with glory and valuable treasures.    

I found the challenge level of the adventure to be just about right, with it perhaps leaning a bit to the easy side considering it's a Fighting Fantasy book after all. The writing I thought was solid, but nothing special, which is surprising after the great atmosphere from Martin's previous book, Vault of the Vampire. Although let's face it, a haunted house setting is always going to have a leg up in that area. One of the weaker parts of the adventure I thought were the enemy encounters, as thinking back on it, nothing really stands out. Martin tries with some of the creatures found in the ruins, such as the Zoalinth, but to me it just ended up feeling like he pressed a button on the "Enemy Monster Randomizer" machine. Martin also throws quite a few design mechanics at the wall here, with some such as the open ended exploration, and a mechanic that appears later in the book whereby the player is given a time limit in which they have to choose from a list of actions to perform, with each action taking up a different amount of time, and these design ideas stuck to the wall rather well. Others however, such as the Notoriety score and the annoying Provisions system, fell to the floor with a splat. I also noticed that Martin sure seems to like the word "baleful" when describing a look someone gives you. The book also has one of the more odder final lines in section 400 that I can recall........"It's going to be a long night, and you've deserved it a hundred times over!" Is it just me, or does that sound like a bad thing!

Now THAT'S what I call a Baleful look! 

Ranking: This was a rather noticeable comedown from the last Fighting Fantasy book I played, that being the phenomenal Dead of Night, and also from the last Keith Martin book I played, the fantastic Vault of the Vampire. Those comparisons might be unfair though, as Master of Chaos is a solid book in its own right, even if it doesn't reach the lofty heights of those Hall of Famers. I really enjoyed the puzzle design aspect of this adventure quite a bit, with lots of areas to explore and Skills to experiment with. The introduction was.....pretty bad, and the overall plot isn't anything to write home about at this stage of the series (a less generic villain would have been appreciated here), but the mini-adventures and characters inside Ashkyos, (and to a lesser degree, inside the ruins of Kabesh), fared much better and were the highlight of the book. I put this near the bottom of my "Good" tier alongside such entries as Beneath Nightmare Castle and Stealer of Souls, and this was a solid if unspectacular return for me to my favorite gamebook series.

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42. Black Vein Prophecy - Score = ?    Tier = ?

Attempts to Beat: ?

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42. Black Vein Prophecy - Score = 7.0    Tier = Good

Attempts to Beat: 57

Well, that certainly was a marathon. Every so often a gamebook comes along that throws a wrench in my schedule, not because it is bad necessarily (sometimes quite the opposite), but because it takes so damn long to beat! "Fighting Fantasy" had seemingly moved on from that though, with the last handful of books feeling downright charitable considering what came before them, and I had to go all the way back to Sky Lord to find one that took me as long to play through as did Black Vein Prophecy. Thank goodness for me though, this adventure is MUCH better than Sky Lord (hallelujah!), although not without some major faults of its own. My hopes were high for this one too, as it was written by Paul Mason and Steve Williams, the same authors responsible for the fantastic Slaves of the Abyss. I try my best to avoid knowing too much about the gamebooks before I go into them, however there are still those that, I suppose due to a certainly level of infamy, I cannot help but be made aware of certain aspects of them before I even open them up (Crypt of the Sorcerer and Blood of the Zombies spring to mind). That was also the case with Black Vein Prophecy, as I had long ago learned of an early Luck test that HAD to be failed in order to beat the book. Ugh. So with that disheartening piece of information already known to me, I dove into the adventure.

And boy you really do dive right into this one. In fact you don't even start off with any rules, as they are contained at the back of the book should you need them and are only for those unfamiliar with the "Fighting Fantasy" ruleset. This is a bit dangerous isn't it? I mean, the rules often have subtle differences from book to book, which is why I always go over them in each, so how would I know exactly what rules I should be using? There is no introduction here either, and you immediately go to section 1 where you find your character awakening inside what is apparently his own tomb, with no memory of who or what he is. Now right away, it's tough not to draw Creature of Havoc parallels to this setup, as not only do we have the amnesia angle right at the start, but your character also appears not to be a hero, but one of the bad guys to boot, with your underground burial complex having been sealed by apparently magical means (and that dead tomb-robber you discover got in there pretty easily then didn't he?). However, I quickly found the Creature of Havoc comparison to be a bit unfair, as other than that initial opening, it quickly diverged into its own thing after that. One of the big differences is that you discover as you make your way out of the burial complex is that you are (or were), a magic user, and can later learn (or re-learn) spells as you progress through the adventure. This opening sequence of making your way up to the outside world, while not too difficult, is quite atmospheric and leaves you with many unanswered questions that will only be solved later as you uncover more about yourself. The rolling up of your initial stats also occurs within the adventure itself as you make your way outside, although there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. A big problem though is that you will likely have to go through this sequence so many times that you will be sick of it all by the end! I think I could recite these opening sections by heart at this point. It is also during this opening sequence where that infamous Luck test occurs, but I will save that discussion for later.

Once you manage to escape the underground burial complex, then you begin a strange and mystifying adventure as you travel around the land attempting to.....well, for the longest time I had absolutely no idea what I was attempting to do. Thanks to the amnesia angle, there is no initial goal given here, and you end up wandering from place to place, meeting various colorful characters along the way as you slowly piece together what the overall situation is in the area you are exploring. Heck for the longest time I didn't even know what area of Titan this book was supposed to be taking place in. You initially find yourself emerging into a ruined city, which apparently fell to some sort of massive magical attack, which might possibly explain how you ended up buried in a tomb, and you now must find a way to exit this city. That isn't as easy as it might sound though, because the gates to this coastal city are sealed by some sort of magical barrier, which is yet another hint that someone in the outside world saw you as a threat, and maybe even expected your resurrection. In an absolutely incredible moment, you escape the city by loading yourself into one of the seaward-facing catapults located on the ramparts, and then you fire yourself over the walls and into the sea! I'm not sure if this moment is totally badass, or totally ridiculous (probably a bit of both), but talk about making an exit! And by the way, wouldn't you have suffered some massive injuries when you slammed into the water? Anyway, thankfully you are rescued by a fellow adventurer out on the water, Velkos, and the two of you form an uneasy bond and set off exploring together. 

While the adventure had been fairly linear up to this point, you now begin to have several different courses of action open to you. You can stick with Velkos if you like, or choose to set off on your own for example. You still have no idea what you are supposed to be doing, and I have to admit that I found this aimless wandering to be somewhat boring and frustrating at first, but as I slowly started to unravel the mystery of who I was, everything started to become much more interesting. Some of the characters you meet react to you with fear, which would suggest you are not only someone of renown but possibly an evil person at that. You can also find yourself having certain encounters that trigger some sort of memory within you, which allows you to remember a magical spell that you once knew, which you then have the option of using at various points in the adventure, and discovering these spells is key to beating the gamebook. One thing I wondered about though, is that whenever you learn a spell, you are given a codeword associated with it. For example when you learn the Mutation spell you are told to note down the word "Biantai", then later you might be asked if you know this word and wish to use it. Why bother with the codewords though? Why not just ask if you know the Mutation spell and wish to use it? Perhaps this was just for immersion purposes, or perhaps I am missing something altogether. 

So you explore the region, slowly piecing things together, and learn that a war is taking place between the current ruler of the area (a snot-nosed spoiled brat of a king), and an invading force led by a powerful sorcerer who you oftentimes find yourself being mistaken for (hmmm, interesting that). I thought it was a stroke of genius making the king almost out to be a bad guy, as for awhile I wasn't totally sure whose side I was supposed to be on. In addition to the spells you need to locate, you will also need to gather some allies to aid you in the final battle if you hope to stand a chance, the two prominent ones being a local rebel named Merzei, and an eccentric old wizard named Credas who lives underground (don't they always?). Merzei wants to overthrow the king, but realizes that the sorcerer is the bigger threat, and wants you to help him raise a peasant army which he would use to depose the king once the sorcerer is taken care of first. Credas is the more interesting and shadowy character, and he initially tasks you with locating an idol deep inside a southern jungle that he claims he will need in order to assist you in the battle to come. This begins a nice mini-quest into the jungle where you find yourself hunted by some sort of frog-like creatures in your search for the idol, only to find that when you eventually return to Credas with it, all is not as it appears to be. Additionally, there is a powerful creature trapped inside a magical brooch which you can discover, and while not essential to beating the quest, he can come in quite handy indeed. I will say that all of the above seemingly has to be done in an exact order, with just about any wrong move meaning you now can't win the game, but for me this just contributes to the puzzle-like experience of a gamebook I enjoy so much. Combat is also very much de-emphasized in this adventure, with very few actually required to win the game, and even the ones that are required you should not have much trouble with. A good thing too, because the instructions for this particular book instruct you to add only 4 points to your initial Skill roll as opposed to the usual 6. Thankfully, this lowered score seems to have been taken into consideration when providing the Skill scores of the enemies you need to beat as well. 

Once you have gathered all the spells, items, and allies that you need, you move on to the final battle against the evil sorcerer's forces. Providing you obtained everything, this battle against his army is actually very easy, with the difficulty having come in just getting everything in the first place, which can be rather convoluted. Now just before this final battle, Credas would have given you an info-dump as to who you really are and who the sorcerer is you are facing, although you may have put some of this together for yourself already. Once the sorcerer's forces are defeated, you of course must face off against him in a one-on-one magic battle, with the two of you hurling spells at one another. A cool idea for sure, and a great visual, but I have to say I did not like the way this fight plays out. At the start, you are given the option among your spells as to which one you want to cast. Only one of the spells is the "correct" one to choose though. Pick the wrong one and it's game over, which seems incredibly unfair. Not only that, you have to do this several times in a row! The whole thing just felt like random guessing to me. I mean sure, you could argue that there is a reason why the correct order of spells worked the way they did, but I feel I could come up with a different order of the spells that would be just as valid, and so I just had to hope I was thinking the same way the authors did. I think taking Stamina damage for choosing "wrong" would have been the far better way to go here, but these authors do love their instant deaths. 

What did thankfully help to wipe the bad taste of that magic battle out of my mouth was what happens after it, as time travel is all of a sudden added to the mix! Even though you won the previous battle, one of the surviving creatures of the enemy side is about to kill you when you find yourself transported back to your childhood self inside the castle you grew up in. This sequence reveals more about your past and the abusive home you lived through, and in order for your future self to survive, you need to find a way to send a warning to yourself through a magical portal, all while trying to prevent becoming the victim of a ritual led by your father and his high priest. While not a long sequence, this is really great stuff, although whenever time travel is introduced in a gamebook, even if only moderately so, I am instantly hooked. This helps the adventure to go out on a high note in my opinion, and future you of course survives the creature's attack and becomes the new ruler of the region, with the previous king having died in the battle.

Now though, I come to the two main problems I had with the adventure, and unfortunately, they were both rather large ones. First, the amount of instant-deaths in the book is insane! There are many places where any wrong move, even if it seems a perfectly reasonable course of action to take, is met with an abrupt "automatic game over" section. This has to be up there in terms of books with the most insta-deaths right? The second main problem I had is, you guessed it, that $@#^$ blasted opening Luck test! I remember back when I played Dungeon of Justice from my "Warlock Magazine" playthroughs, and how completely incensed I was upon discovering that there was a Skill check in that adventure that had to be failed in order to win. I was "saved" from that feeling somewhat while playing Black Vein Prophecy because I had already known about the mandatory failed Luck test for some time, where you need to fail it in order to get an item that you cannot win without, otherwise I probably would have been just as enraged. The "good" news in this case (if you can call it that), is that this Luck test occurs so early in the adventure that I suppose if you pass it (or should I say in actuality"fail" it? Shit I don't know), you could just close up the book or start again right away without much effort having gone into it. The bad news is that because it occurs so early, you will have your maximum Luck score and thus are far less likely to "succeed". You know, this COULD have been a brilliant bit of design (depending on how it was implemented) had it occurred much later in the book, whereupon when the player realizes they need to fail this test, they could then purposefully use up their Luck points in one of the preceding combats to ensure passing this test, which would have made for a great "A-ha!" moment. As it was, I decided to track on which of my playthroughs I did indeed manage to "fail" this opening Luck test, and was quite discouraged when it took me until my 14th attempt at the book before that happened even once! My "failure rate" got a bit better than that as I continued my playthroughs, but it was still usually between 8-10 attempts before I would get another "failure". This is compounded when you bring in my first problem with the adventure, the plethora of instant deaths, because any wrong move near the end of the adventure ends in auto-failure, which means I needed to go back and wait another 8-10 attempts before getting another crack at it. Arggghh! There were many times playing the book where I was having Masks of Mayhem flashbacks, as that was another book with loads of instant deaths and one infuriating dice roll that needed to be dealt with in order to win. This has to be up there as one of the single worst ideas in Fighting Fantasy. If I was one of the authors, I would go to my grave insisting it was an editing error, and the sections for pass and fail were switched around. No way would I admit to this! Was this Luck test meant to be an anti-cheating mechanism? It seems to me that whenever this is attempted by gamebook authors, it ends up hurting the fair minded players the most. Players who want to cheat are going to find some way to do it regardless, and besides, they have bought the book, they are playing solo so are not cheating anyone (other than perhaps themselves), so why did the authors even care if they cheated? Stop gatekeeping guys! #endrant.

Ranking: To me this book felt like the bastard love child of Slaves of the Abyss and Masks of Mayhem, with the wonderful story and puzzle solving of the former combined with some of the enraging design decisions of the latter. That said, the positives outweighed the negatives for me, and I could not in good conscience keep this out of the Good tier, and I have it just sneaking into that level. I badly wanted to like this more than I did, as there is some real genius at work here at times, but that compulsory failed Luck test and the avalanche of insta-deaths are killers, and brought the score down considerably. Still, Paul Mason and Steve Williams have made it known to me that they are gamebook authors to be reckoned with, and I look forward to their next mind-bending, puzzle heavy approach to a gamebook. Just please guys, no more required failed tests! 

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43. The Keep of the Lich-Lord - Score = 7.5    Tier = Good

Attempts to Beat: 2

Well if the previous book was a marathon, this one was a sprint! Quite a good one though, which should have come to no surprise to me as this entry is written by none other than Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson, which is some serious star-power when it comes to authors whose previous gamebooks I have greatly enjoyed. With expectations thus raised, I have to admit to being a bit disappointed upon reading the introduction to this entry, as once again we have a "hunt down and kill the evil necromancer" quest. Original eh? We play here as a well-known mercenary, who upon the end of his current employment, finds himself offered a new job. It would seem that the evil necromancer in question, known as Lord Mortis, is in the process of taking over Stayng Island off to the east, having already overrun the main bastion of defense on the island, that being Bloodrise Keep. The problem is that every time Mortis takes over an area, or defeats any soldiers sent to confront him, he turns those he defeats into his own Undead Zombie warriors, thus he is constantly adding to his forces, and the situation on the island has become grim. There is one slim chance though, as if Lord Mortis himself can be destroyed, all the Undead under his thrall will be leaderless, and easily defeated. So it's another assassination mission then, where it is thought best to send only one warrior as opposed to a host, as one warrior is less likely to be detected on the island and may be able to slip into Bloodrise Keep to slay Mortis before he can do anything to stop you. (But in this case, at least the authors called attention to the fact, and gave a plausible reason as to why only a single mercenary was being sent on such an important mission). Passage aboard a ship to the island is arranged for you, and the authors also forego having anything happen to you on the way there (it seems like there is normally a pirate or sea-monster attack thrown in here somewhere in most cases), and you open the adventure arriving at Siltport, the main port village of the island.

So yeah, I was a bit disappointed in that opening, but hey we have a few new gameplay mechanics included here, and that is always appreciated:

First off, the guy that hires us for the mission, General Chaideshu, provides us with a "Ring of Communing", which will allow us to communicate directly with him at various points in the adventure when we are given the option to do so. The Ring only comes with 3 "charges" though, so we need to think carefully about when we wish to use it. Or not. The Ring seems to act like a "take a hint" mechanic, which just seems to remove some of the mystery of the adventure. And also, as you can probably tell from the number of attempts this gamebook took me to complete, this all hardly felt necessary anyway. Oh, and the General also acts like a complete jerk at times when you try to contact him using the Ring. I'm trying to help YOU out here buddy!   

Second, we have a new stat to keep track of in the form of our Resolve score. Our starting value for this stat is determined by rolling one die and adding 5 (I wonder why not 6?), then at various times during the quest we will be asked to "Test our Resolve", by rolling two dice and comparing to our current value in the stat, with us needing to roll equal to or under it to pass the Test. This is meant to determine how well we are able to mentally withstand the various horrors we will be confronting on the island, and failing one of these tests can come with some very bad consequences. Something very interesting about how this works though is that, unlike Testing your Luck where you lose a Luck point whether you were successful in the Test or not, here if you are successful you actually GAIN an additional Resolve point, and if you fail the Test then you lose a Resolve point as you would expect. I like the idea here, although I could see you becoming caught up in a "Resolve death spiral" should you fail a couple of these early on. Still, the whole "lose a Luck point whether you are successful or not" always felt a bit unfair, especially if an adventure would throw in several early tests with little reward or consequence, thus draining your Luck score before a key test later in the book. Of the new mechanics introduced in this gamebook, I think this one worked the best. 

And lastly, we have an Alarm Value stat to keep track of, although this is only used once we finally make it to Lord Mortis' headquarters at Bloodrise Keep. Once inside the Keep we need to hunt down Mortis in order to destroy him, and anything we do that might call attention to ourselves from his Undead guards roaming the Keep results in us being told to add a certain amount of points to this score. Then at various times in our exploration of the Keep, we may be asked if our Alarm Value is above a certain amount, and if it is, we can find ourselves involved in a fight that otherwise could have been avoided. And in at least one case, having our Alarm Value over a certain amount when asked, results in an insta-death. This mechanic was fine I suppose, but the consequences in most cases for having a too high Alarm Value did not seem all that onerous, and even in the case of the insta-death, the value was set appropriately high enough that I wasn't even close to reaching it.  

The real highlight of the adventure though occurs before you get to Bloodrise Keep, as you need to traverse the island in order to get there. Here is where my disappointment with that opening faded away right quickly, as the authors do a fantastic job in presenting the ominous atmosphere on the island, with its inhabitants hiding themselves away in their homes or boarding themselves up inside inns while the Undead roam the countryside during the night. While not quite as good as the atmosphere found in Dead of Night, I had a similar feeling as I did during that adventure while travelling across the island, and full props to Morris and Thomson for the great writing all throughout the book. There are several different mini-adventures you can find yourself involved in as you make your way towards the Keep, and I really enjoyed how they told their own little individual stories about what the people were going through in various places across the island. My one and only failure at the book occurred during one of these mini-adventures, when I found myself failing a Resolve roll when confronted by a Vampire in a cemetery right after the sun had gone down, and the failure of this roll led to an instant death. Most of these are side quests which can by bypassed should you choose to just head straight for the Keep, but they offer some of the best stuff in the gamebook, so I would highly advise checking them all out at least once. There are also a few stat boosting items to be found along the way as well, including one that gives you a Skill bonus and another that causes double damage when used against any Undead creatures, which due to the nature of the adventure, is going to come in very handy for sure!. (Probably a little TOO handy if I'm being honest.) 

Once you make it to your ultimate destination of Bloodrise Keep, you head inside in order to locate Lord Mortis and assassinate him. (If you can assassinate somebody already dead that is). The area of the Keep itself I found to be "ok", but a clear step back from the experiences on the journey to get here. The adventure falls back into the "bad guy castle" trope, as you wander the corridors looking for your quarry. Incidentally, why do all these bad guy lairs feel so empty? They are usually in the process of amassing large forces, yet you often find yourself travelling down empty hallways and going into empty rooms. This was something I felt that Citadel of Chaos got right, making the bad guy HQ feel more "lived-in". but that has proven to be more the exception than the rule. The Keep isn't particularly large either, but I will give credit for one thing, and that is that there are at least two different places where you can confront Lord Mortis. You can find yourself either ascending a tower to his throne room where you can battle him, or you can meet him atop a dam outside the Keep while you are attempting to destroy said dam, which would allow water to flow down into the currently empty moat, thus trapping his Undead legions inside the Keep. (I thought it was "running water" that the Undead couldn't cross though? Is moat-water "running"?) I thought the battle with him on top of the dam was far more atmospheric, and was the one I preferred when I explored some of the different options after I had beaten the book, as on my victory playthrough I had defeated him in his throne room. 

This final battle against Lord Mortis does kind of betray itself though, because in both locations there is an item you can have in your possession that can lead to an insta-win against him, albeit one of them requires a Skill check to use successfully. This might have worked better had these items been difficult to find, but they really were not hard to locate at all, and in fact the item that allows you to beat him atop the dam is flat out handed to you just for walking through the Keep and opening a particular door (and really, who isn't going to open that door when they come to it?). Also, I was surprised at just how quickly you can find yourself arriving at Lord Mortis. Once you enter the Keep and go through the courtyard, if you head left, go up a flight of stairs, cross the battlements, go up another flight of stairs, then boom you are in his throne room! Similarly, while on the battlements, should you decide to climb down a siege tower which was left there, you will find yourself almost immediately on top of the dam where you then confront him right away (albeit without that insta-win item from inside the Keep). In either case, once Lord Mortis is defeated, you have obviously saved the day, and report back to General Chaideshu one last time using your Ring of Communing, with the gamebook giving you one extra charge to do this if you happened to have used all your charges already. I must say I found the final victory section here to be rather disappointing, and the ending in general a bit rushed.    

I would be derelict in my duties as a reviewer if I didn't point out that at only 2 attempts to beat, this has been the "easiest" gamebook for me to complete so far using that metric among the Fighting Fantasy books, narrowly beating out a handful of other entries for that distinction (The Forest of Doom, Scorpion Swamp, Demons of the Deep, Stealer of Souls, and Portal of Evil, all with 3 attempts each). I wish this had been more challenging, perhaps by making the items that can defeat Lord Mortis more difficult to obtain, or in having them decrease his Stamina rather than lead to an insta-win. I know, I know, complaints, complaints. First I complain that Black Vein Prophecy was made unreasonably hard, then that The Keep of the Lich-Lord is much too easy. It probably sounds as though I am never happy, however there is a sweet spot to find when it comes to difficulty and challenge level, and both of these books fall outside separate ends of that sweet spot. Having them come back-to-back in the series really makes them both stand out for that all the more. They are both incredibly well written though, and in the case of Morris and Thomson in this entry, they should be commended for the excellent job when it comes to that side of it.  

Ranking: As hinted at above, this would have scored even higher had it been more challenging. The good news there though is that I'm not sure you will find many Fighting Fantasy books that will benefit more from repeated playthroughs after beating them more than this one. When I hear discussion of gamebook "replayability" from now on, this one will be jumping to the top of mind as a great example of that. The new mechanics here aren't anything special, and the premise is once again rather generic, but the atmosphere on the island is wonderful and there are several mini-quests to check out and mysterious individuals to interact with. I have this tied with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in my scoring, although I give that adventure the tiebreaker due to its clearly more iconic status. I still think that is pretty good praise for The Keep of the Lich-Lord though, and even though this is not up there with some of the better books I have played from either Morris or Thomson, I would still recommend giving this a try to all gamebook fans out there, and perhaps even several tries in order to get the most out of it.

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44. Legend of the Shadow Warriors - Score = 9.6    Tier = Great! 

Attempts to Beat: 17

Stephen Hand come on down! You are the next contestant on "Greatest Start to a Gamebook Career!" Talk about blowing it out of the water right from the get-go, author Hand follows up his initial entry, the fantastic Dead of Night (co-authored with Jim Bambra), with this phenomenal book that somehow winds up being better than his first. As with Dead of Night, this adventure takes place in the kingdom of Gallantaria, and the introduction provides some nice callbacks to The Tasks of Tantalon which I played not too long ago, and which did a very nice job of instantly making me feel a part of this large interconnected world. In this intro we also learn that our character is a soldier of some renown, and while you now do freelance work for money, you are not so much a mercenary on a quest for riches in this adventure, but need to charge your employers something so that you can merely earn a living.  The adventure itself begins simply enough, with your character currently visiting the capital city of Gallantaria, that being Royal Lendle, and enjoying an ale in a tavern one day, when in walks a farmer looking for an adventurer to aid him. According to this farmer, who comes from a village off to the south called Karnstein, his village is currently under siege every night from the legendary five Shadow Warriors, who are only supposed to be the stuff of myth. Skeptical, but also intrigued and wishing to help the clearly desperate farmer, you agree to take up the quest and rid the village of the Shadow Warriors for a promised reward of 200 gold pieces (payment upon completion). You go on to tell the farmer that you will need to gather supplies and provisions within Royal Lendle before heading out, and that you will meet him and his companions south of the city later that afternoon, where you will all set off toward Karnstein together. 

The adventure then begins with a surprisingly involved city-set sequence, where you first need to choose what items you wish to buy from the market using the randomly generated amount (2D6 +12) of Gold Pieces you are provided with at the start of the game. We can choose from among such standard items from a price list such as Provisions, rope, or a lantern, but can also purchase some other more unusual things such as chainmail armour that will see us take only 1 Stamina point of damage in combat as opposed to the usual 2, which makes it very useful indeed, although with the caveats that we need to add 1 to any Skill check rolls that need to be made (of which there are quite a few in this game) to account for the weight of the armour, and also that the armour can only take 10 hits before it will buckle and become useless, at which time it must be discarded. There is also a Ring of Agility that can be purchased to aid in those Skill checks, which allows us to deduct 2 from any Skill check roll should we choose to use up 1 of the 3 "charges" it comes with, which makes this Ring almost a necessity should you purchase the armour. These are both great additions to the game system, and in the case of the armour particuarly, I'm surprised I haven't seen something like this implemented more often. On a side note, I also loved how one of the items you can buy happens to be a mirror, but the book points out that these mirrors are often useless in these quests. (And we should probably be paying attention to that hint). This all gives the usual nice bit of trial-and-error we get from such options, and up until my final few attempts at the adventure, I was finding myself buying some different combination of items on just about every playthrough.     

There is much more to this city sequence than just buying stuff though, as upon leaving the market we are immediately accosted by the city tax collector, a pompous prig by the name of Quinsberry Woad (is this unusual name meant to imply something significant?). Apparently we owe some back taxes to the tune of the ridiculous sum of 568 Gold pieces, which we obviously do not have. We then need to make a break for it, which kicks of the goal for this Royal Lendle sequence, that being to escape the city before Woad can have us imprisoned for non-payment of taxes. I would have thought a Fighting Fantasy adventure where you need to avoid the taxman to not exactly be a thrilling premise, but somehow Hand makes the chase through the city quite exciting, and you have a couple different routes you can take to get out of Royal Lendle. You might find yourself needing to avoid a famous gambler that you could have fallen foul of earlier, or try and make your way through the sewers where a large alchemic garbage monster awaits, or even find yourself caught up in a mass brawl inside a square of public speakers. You may even encounter a black clad assassin who tries to maim or kill you, which only adds to the mystery of the adventure, because who would already know of your quest and be trying to stop you? While not necessarily groundbreaking, this was a strong opening to the adventure, and I think I experimented with almost everything there is to do inside the city, which is a great sign. 

Once you escape Royal Lendle (and I guess we can never go back there again), you meet up with the farmer and his friends and set off toward Karnstein. At this point, you have your first meeting with the titular Shadow Warriors, who roam the landscape during the night attempting to free their master, Voivod, who just happens to be the most powerful servant of "Death" itself. With the way these Shadow Warriors are depicted, screeching while riding their steeds through the night, I couldn't help but think of the Black Riders from "The Lord of the Rings", but that didn't bother me when something similar occurred in an earlier Fighting Fantasy entry, The Talisman of Death, so I won't let it here either. Thankfully you only need to defeat one of these Shadow Warriors in this first encounter before the others will flee due to the oncoming sunrise, and which one of the five you fight is determined by random roll. Each of the five has a different special ability, such as causing more damage per hit, or getting to attack twice each round, and this very much helped to keep each playthrough fresh, as I never knew which of the five I would be facing. Unfortunately for your character though, your newfound farmer friends are slaughtered by the Shadow Warriors, leaving only yourself left alive. At this point, with payment for completing the quest now unlikely, your character decides that he owes it to the people of Karnstein to rid their village of this plight, payment or no payment. I enjoy this more than playing as a mercenary just trying to get rich, and it was nice to get back to playing an honest to goodness hero once again who wants to help people because it is the right thing to do, not just because they want to line their pockets. While switching things up every so often can indeed be fun, at the end of the day, I think I enjoy playing the noble hero most of all. 

Bonnie Tyler summed it up best. "I need a hero! I'm holding out for a hero till the end of the night!"

So now you find yourself alone and needing to continue south toward Karnstein, and here is where the lovely map contained on the inside cover of the book starts to come into play. This colour map which shows the area of Gallantaria that you will be traversing is incredibly well implemented. Oftentimes you will not be asked which town or geographic feature on the map you wish to head toward, only if you wish to take the right or left fork in the road, or if you wish to head east or south across the countryside, and it is up to you to use the map and figure out where these options would lead you. I appreciate the lack of hand-holding here, and it helped to put myself into my characters' shoes, as if I was periodically pulling out my own faded and worn map from my backpack in order to get my bearings and plan my next move. 

It is also at this point, after your first encounter with the Shadow Warriors, where you need to make a big decision. Do you wish to head eastward in an attempt to locate a well-known Hermit who may have valuable information about the Shadow Warriors, or head directly south towards Karnstein because time is of the essence. Depending on which way you go will see you involved in different mini-adventures, and boy, are these all really, really good! Should you succeed in locating that Hermit, you are treated to an episode straight out of "The Twilight Zone" (and I think I faintly remember an episode of "Night Gallery" that may also have done something similar). Continuing on you can encounter a village under siege by horrific swamp-monsters with Jack-o-Lantern heads (pictured on the cover of the book) that are under the sway of a resurrected vampire, which means this village needs your help just as much as Karnstein does. There are still other places that could use your help though, and taking a different route can see you arrive in a village where all is apparently not what it seems, with many of the villagers acting a little TOO friendly. And while this sequence borrows heavily from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "They Live", it was done so well that I didn't mind in the least. There is also a claustrophobic underground area in the mountains where evil cultists dwell, having chained up their own "god" down in the mountain depths. And who could forget the incredibly creepy travelling circus that can also be encountered in the countryside, with the clown leading the troupe the stuff of nightmares. This is all fantastic stuff, so that while the opening sequence of the gamebook that took place in Royal Lendle was good, everything from then right up to the final confrontation of the adventure is freaking great, no matter which way you go.   

While you are doing all this travelling toward Karnstein, you will not merely be trying to make it from point A to point B, but will also be looking to obtain any powerful items that you can get your hands on for the final confrontation with Voivod and his Shadow Warriors. One of the items you will most certainly need is the Spear of Doom, which you can obtain by assisting one of the aforementioned villages in need. Doing so will result in the "good" gods providing the Spear as a boon, and the Spear proves to be a mighty weapon indeed. In fact, for awhile I thought it might be TOO mighty. This is because it comes with a certain amount of "charges" which is determined by rolling one die and adding 5. Each charge can then be used to auto-win any combat for the rest of the adventure. I immediately thought this might make the rest of the book a cakewalk, but upon reaching the final meeting with Voivod and learning what was needed in order to beat him, I found a new appreciation for now having to strategically plan out where to spend the charges of my Spear. Another incredibly useful item that can be obtained along the way is the magical Ring of Rabbam, which negates the special attacks given to the 5 Shadow Warriors. A starting character with a high Skill score who also happens to get a high roll when charging up the Spear, and who also gets the Ring, may very well find the quest too easy, and this could be the rare adventure where I would say you might have more fun with a lower Skilled character (but not too low though, thanks to the Skill tests), but even so you will likely need to map out a lot of the book first in order to find that optimal path in any case, and I found the overall challenge level of this book to hit that sweet spot that I often look for. 

Another aspect of the adventure that is well handled is the concept of time, and how much of it you are using as you make your way to Karnstein. When you finally get there, you are asked to solve a puzzle in order to successfully proceed to the final battle, and how many attempts you are given to solve this puzzle will depend upon how long it took you to arrive. Additionally, should you have taken too much time, you risk suffering a large damage penalty right before confronting Voivod, so hopefully you didn't spend too much time dicking around in Gallantaria (even though doing so is really the best part of the book!). In fact, exploring the map is so much fun, that you really owe it to yourself to check out every nook and cranny of it. The book throws in many different settings here with city, countryside, village, swamp, and underground areas to explore, all incredibly well realized. Hell, there is even a maze in here that had me crestfallen the first time I explored it, with it basically being a seemingly never-ending procession of "go North, East, South, or West" options that didn't seem to make much sense when attempting to map it out, and had me questioning just what the heck had gotten into the author all of sudden. It was only after finally escaping the maze did I learn why it was laid out in the manner that it was, and the maze not making sense suddenly made total sense!   

Were there any negatives about the book? Well, any nits I have to pick are minor, but there were a few things to mention, which mainly revolve around the final battle against Voivod and his Shadow Warriors. The Ring of Rabbam is definitely a powerful item to have when you face off against the Shadow Warriors, and I can only imagine how tough it would be to win without it (although I do love that you still can), however having this powerful item then makes the final battles against the Shadow Warriors a string of 3 to 5 identical fights against foes with the exact same Skill-9 Stamina-9 stats, and I feel it would have been better if the stats had at least been changed up a bit for the different Warriors. And as much as I enjoyed the Spear of Doom and deciding strategically when I was going to use it, a lot seems to come down to the number you roll when determining how many charges you get out of the Spear. It's not like the Spear is optional either, as you cannot defeat Voivod without it. But more to this point, the adventure seems to suggest you still can win, having you go through a fight against Voivod even should you not have the Spear (and I LOVE the wrinkle about how if you lose an attack round, Voivod gains the Stamina points you lost), even though the whole thing proves pointless, as you lose the adventure even if you win the combat. This kind of thing is reminiscent of Steve Jackson, and was present in at least two of my most favorite books by him, so I can hardly complain about it too much I suppose. Once you beat Voivod, the victory section actually sees you consoling him after he is turned back into an old man. Why am I consoling the guy who just murdered countless people? Unless this old man was just a body that Voivod inhabited? I will choose to believe the latter otherwise it makes for an odd and somewhat unsatisfying final line of the book. And finally, while I keep my thoughts on the book covers independent from my feelings about the adventures on the whole, and they do not affect my score in any way, I come to the cover of this book, which while a fantastic piece of artwork in my opinion, felt a bit incongruous to the scene it was describing. I thought the creatures depicted here were supposed to be these gelatinous Swamp Thing style monsters made up of oozing mud, not "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow meets The Karate Kid". That said, if I ever get around to ranking the covers of the books based purely on the artwork, this one will surely score very highly. much like the adventure itself does. I must also say that the internal artwork here by Martin McKenna is incredible. Anyway, as you can probably tell from the overall score I have given this gamebook, nothing I mentioned above detracted from my experience in any meaningful way, other than perhaps maybe that final line of the book, I just felt they deserved a mention for the sake of completeness.

Finally, a couple of other aspects that this adventure absolutely nails is the writing and the atmosphere, both of which I thought were excellent if you hadn't already guessed. As was also the case with Dead of Night, there is a strong horror theme going on here, which just might be my favorite kind. A couple of the sequences legitimately had me creeped out, with so much of what is going on conveyed in an incredibly unsettling manner. The more gamebooks I play, the more I realize how important the concept of "atmosphere" is to me, which is probably why the horror themed books do so well. Atmosphere in a book is subjective of course, but in my opinion, this book has it in spades.

 

I couldn't get "The Man Who Laughs" out of my head during a certain sequence.

Ranking: A no-doubt Hall of Famer. My experience with Legend of the Shadow Warriors closely resembled that of Sword of the Samurai, which also blew me away. A wonderful setting and atmosphere, a couple of different viable routes to victory, many different items and situations to experiment with, a unique and challenging endgame, fantastic writing, and incredible artwork to top it all off. There was no single point in the book where failure kept happening over and over, and I never felt like having to start over after character death was a chore. Quite the opposite in fact as I looked forward to exploring new areas and experiencing new horrors. I give a slight edge to Sword of the Samurai in my rankings for having a bit more unique setting (although admittedly I played that one so long ago now that it can be tough to make a direct comparison), but even choosing between the two it is very close. Even so, Legend of the Shadow Warriors moves into my top 3 overall at this point in the series, trailing only Creature of Havoc and Sword of the Samurai, and not by all that much. I can't help but feel saddened to note that Stephen Hand only has one more gamebook for me to experience after this, which is a massive shame based upon his output so far, because after playing only two books of his, he has become one of my favorite gamebook authors. This particular gamebook is fantastic and was an absolute joy to play, so I am obviously highly recommending it...........just remember to pay your taxes!