Fighting Fantasy - Books 51-55

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51. Island of the Undead  - Score = 7.8   Tier = Good

Sections: 400
Attempts to Beat: 44

I return to the Fighting Fantasy series with this very good effort from series veteran Keith Martin (Carl Sargent), but my word what a marathon it was to beat this one! We play here as a member of a coastal fishing village which maintains a mutually beneficial alliance with a group of wizards that live on nearby Solani Island, which lies just off the coast. The wizards have agreed to use their magic to keep the seas around our village calm and free from the violent storms that would otherwise plague it, allowing us to prosper thanks to the voluminous amount of fish this allows us to catch, not only to consume for ourselves but to also sell and trade with nearby towns as well. In return, we provide the wizards with any supplies they might need for their personal use on the island, and additionally agree to leave them in peace to conduct their magical research and experiments. This relationship proves successful for both parties for many years, until suddenly the protection provided by the wizards abruptly ceases, and our village is once again beset by the violent storms that prevent us from plying our trade. Wondering what has happened on the island that has caused the wizards to abandon their part of the bargain, we send a party out in a boat to head over to the island, with our character being a member of this crew. Unfortunately, one of those pesky storms just happens to wreck our boat on the voyage, and we find ourselves washed up on the shore of the island of the wizards as the only survivor of the disaster. Armed with only a knife, we have little choice but to explore the island on our own to figure out what happened to the wizards, and so the adventure begins with a mystery to solve, which is always a good thing. 

What isn't a good thing though is the Adventure Sheet for this book. Is this the worst such Sheet in the series so far or what? This thing is just a massive exercise in head-scratching! First off, there is a box to record your "Honour" score, even though the rules preceding the Adventure Sheet made no mention of such a stat. Well, perhaps it's just something you learn about as you play? Nope! There is nothing to do with this Honour score at any point during the adventure. The exact same thing could be said about the next box on the Sheet, the one entitled "Time Elapsed". Again, no mention of this in the rules, nor was there any indication while playing the book that any kind of time mechanic is involved. But let's not stop there, because the very next box also makes no sense, as it's entitled "Enemy Encounter". Were we meant to record every enemy we meet (and there are many in this book) in this tiny little box? Why? The page facing the Adventure Sheet has the usual Encounter Boxes, so maybe something happens should we "encounter" a certain number of "enemies"? Nah. So yeah, this whole row of boxes makes no sense, and right off the bat this did not inspire a lot of confidence for the adventure to come. How does something like this get by everybody? Anyway, one stat that the rules DO mention is your Presence score, which is determined before you begin and can start at any value between 5-7. This score is then meant to indicate how much the inhabitants of the island are aware of your presence there, with actions that call attention to yourself usually requiring you to increase this score as you play, and then this stat can be tested at various times to see how certain creatures or individuals might react to you. We also get to start with a whopping 12 Provisions, which felt like a lot to me but hey, who am I to look a gift horse-radish in the mouth.  

There is no other way to say this, but this is a loooooooong adventure! It initially gives you the illusion of being open-ended, immediately giving you a list of locations on the island you can explore in any order you wish, but you eventually learn that if you want to beat the book, you have to do things in a particular order, which thus makes it far more linear than it first appears. Not wanting to miss anything, I will go over the various parts of the adventure below.

-Section 1. Ok, I gotta start here. And by this, I literally mean the first numbered section of the book. In this section we begin walking along the shore toward the interior of the island, and come across a body lying in the surf. Thanks to the title of the book, it should come as no surprise that this dead body promptly rises to attack us, and we find ourselves in the first combat of the adventure against a Sea Zombie, who has stats of Skill=6 and Stamina=7. Now, we are told when we began the quest that because we are only equipped with a knife, that should we score a hit we need to roll again, and if we get a 1-4 we only do 1 point of Stamina damage, and if we roll 5-6 we do the usual 2 points of damage, and this will continue until we can locate a sword. Similarly, until we can locate a shield, we must fight combats with a -1 to our Attack Strength. The first one of these is the problem here, as obviously we have not yet had enough time to find a sword, so that every time we fight this Zombie (which you obviously do right away every single time you start the book), it can take twice as many hits to kill him as it normally would. Combine that with the low Skill score of the Zombie, not to mention having to roll a second time whenever you score a hit to see how much damage you inflict, and this just resulted in a hell of a lot of seemingly pointless dice-rolling over the many attempts this book took me to complete. At this point, combined with that Adventure Sheet fiasco, my expectations for the adventure had officially hit rock bottom. 

Wait, what were the stats of that Sea Zombie again....

SIX SEVVVVVEN! (I had to use this meme at some point.) 

- The Island Hub. Thank goodness that the book starts to get much better here, as after making it off the beach you are given a choice from among several options as to which part of the island you want to explore, and you get the chance to do them in pretty much any order you want. I don't think you can win unless you do them in a specific order of course, but you don't know that at first, and truth be told I don't have a problem with it anyway, as working out the correct order to do things is a main part of the fun, and using the hub-style approach means you can "work out" what to do in each area first before assembling the greater puzzle at play in the gamebook. In this first half of the adventure, you will find yourself investigating in various order: a lighthouse, a shipwreck, a monastery, a cliffside, a forest, and even some kind of other-worldly ethereal realm. Some of these deserve special mention following:. 

- The Cliffside. Ok, I'm going to backtrack just a little bit on what I said about the book getting much better and get this one out of the way, because if you go here first, you will likely find yourself fighting an Octopus in order to get that much coveted sword that you need in order to bring your damage in combat back to normal. The problem is, as with the Sea Zombie, you don't have the sword yet when you fight the Octopus, so are once again stuck usually doing only one measly point of damage per hit, which turns this combat into an exercise in continuous dice-rolling also. Sigh. But hey, at least you finally have that freaking sword! The shield that you still need to find turns out to be problematic as well, but I will get to that later.   

- The Lighthouse. Alright, now on to the good stuff! The island lighthouse, which had been powered by magic in order to keep approaching ships safe from the surrounding rocks, is no longer functioning, and you need to find a way to get it working again. This isn't a large area by any means, but it did do something I thought was brilliant in that when you make it to the top of the lighthouse, you are instructed to write down the section number you are on, and should you find the means to power the lighthouse up again, you can then return to this section without having to backtrack all the way here. This also helps to eliminate the usual continuity problems that might arise in having you go through all the same sections just to get back here again, and I'm now wondering why something like this isn't implemented more often.  

- The Monastery. Former home to the monks on the island, which has since been left in a state of shambles, apparently from some form of attack from the undead. Bigger than the lighthouse, but still not what I would call a large area, the monastery contains a boatload of goodies to uncover, along with some nice encounters that include a mysterious elemental creature along with the now-transformed-into-a-member-of-the-undead former head of the monastery himself. I enjoyed this area a lot, BUT, there are couple of things that must be mentioned here that could cause frustration. First, there is a Luck test that must be passed here otherwise you can't win the adventure, and whenever success or failure hinges on one single roll, I tend to get annoyed. Although at least this roll should be in your favour most times. The second thing is that there is a note that you discover here shown in an illustration that has been torn into 4 pieces, and you need to re-assemble the pieces so that you can read the note and get information vital to winning the game. My problem here is actually two-fold, as short of cutting up your book, you will probably need to write out the note by hand yourself, which felt a bit laborious. The other part might just be my own issue, but I had a hell of a time making out the spelling of a name contained in the note thanks to the handwriting it is written in combined with where the note is torn. This is important later as you need to turn this name into a numbered code to access a hidden section, and I just ended up using trial-and-error as to what I thought this name MIGHT be. Again, rather laborious. 

- The Shipwreck. Hands down one of the better areas of the book to explore, and I say that despite the fact that, like The Monastery, there are some issues that crop up with it. The good news though is that this area does a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere of being inside a broken ship smashed over some rocks just off the shore (not that I have ever been in that actual situation). You can choose to explore the hold, go below decks, investigate the captain's quarters, or try to break into the room of a mysterious passenger, and everything just FEELS like you are inside a shipwreck. Again, there are all kinds of goodies to collect here, and everything you manage to locate feels like it will have an essential purpose later on (which I'm learning in the case of Keith Martin's books is probably true!). The couple of minor problems I had were that: (1) there is an insta-death triggered just from exploring one of the opening options, which felt rather cheap to me. I mean, the option in question was just as likely to contain an item essential to beating the whole book as it was an automatic game over, so who isn't going to check that out? (2) There is a fight against a Ghoul here where I died more times than at any other place in the book. The Ghoul's stats aren't super high at Skill=9, Stamina=11, except that you won't have a shield yet so are stuck fighting it at -1 Attack Strength. The bigger problem though is that should the Ghoul hit you 3 times, you are now paralyzed and suffer an insta-death. Harsh! I'm not saying this is necessarily a huge problem with the book, just that it makes it extremely tough for anything other than a Skill 11 or 12 adventurer, and I died a few times even when I did have Skill 11! Although needing those kind of starting stats to beat a Fighting Fantasy book has kind of become par for the course by now. But now I move on to my real issue....            

- The Magical Door Puzzle. Alright, so this was one of the bigger bugbears I had with the adventure. While investigating the shipwreck, you come across a door below deck that is locked by magic. There is a symbol on the door (shown in a full page illustration), and you are told that it contains a hidden number of the section you need to turn to next should you wish to open it. And that's all you get. The symbol shows a circle broken up into 6 segments, with each segment showing various alphabetic letters around its edges. And oh brother did I stare at this for a long time. I've noticed that for myself with puzzles, if I generally don't come up with the solution right away, I'm in a lot of trouble. I incorrectly assumed I was looking for a number (isn't that what the instructions said?), so tried all the usual solutions (such as A=1, B=2, etc.) to no avail. Not coming up with anything that appeared correct, I thought "Well, there are likely some goodies behind this door for sure, but probably not anything essential to beating the book right?" Wrong! After several playthroughs of ignoring the door and trying to make due without, (and then remembering what author I was dealing with here), I reluctantly came to the conclusion that this puzzle was going to have to be cracked in order to beat the book, much like an earlier Martin effort, Tower of Destruction. Thank goodness I had played an even earlier book by Keith Martin, Vault of the Vampire, which contained a similar puzzle, or I might still be staring at this one right now. Even then it still took me awhile to remember that earlier puzzle existed, and when I finally did, I felt a bit foolish that it took me so long. So, using that prior knowledge, I was able to decode the message on the door, which told me to turn to.........wait, the message actually doesn't give you a section number, but some kind of riddle instead, which you also then have to solve to get the correct section number! Okay, so it's not the most difficult riddle in the world, but it's a bit on the vague side, and requires you making an assumption or two. (Not to mention it containing a spelling error). And yes, as it turns out getting past this door is essential to beating the adventure, as there is a Magic Sword contained here that you cannot win without. I'm all for puzzles in gamebooks, even hard ones, but they should probably lead to a helpful item rather than an essential one, otherwise they run the risk of totally locking a player out from completing the adventure. 

To paraphrase the late, great comedian, Norm Macdonald...

"I thought I was dumb when I didn't know the answer. Now I think I'm even dumber, because after having seen the solution, I still don't know the answer." 

- The Barrow. This is the otherworldly area I mentioned earlier, where you find yourself exploring a spooky burial mound. You have your choice of investigating 3 different tunnels with a couple of them being red herrings, and Martin even makes the obvious choice the correct one (sneaky bugger!). What makes this area so cool is that you can acquire a Spirit ally here who will accompany you for a short time. This Spirit was once a slave to the wizards, and now only wishes to finally rest in peace, but can only do so if you can locate his bones somewhere on the nearby Plain of Swords where a battle took place long ago, and give him a proper burial. The Spirit is not just excess baggage either, as he comes with three boons that can be used to do things such as replenish your Stamina, or more importantly, cure diseases. While not adding a ton of gameplay necessarily, I thought this was a great little mini-quest added to the middle of the proceedings, and successfully retrieving and giving him a proper burial actually did make me feel like a good person when I was able to do so. More mini-quests like this one please!  

Alright, so once you feel you have fully explored the various opening areas of the island, you are ready to head for the Black Tower where the wizards reside. In order to do this, you first need to make your way through a swamp, and then across that pesky Plain of Swords. Both of these areas provide several different ways that you can travel through them, although in the case of the Plain of Swords, I believe if you don't go a particular way then you can't win, but that's really nothing new here. This route through the Plain involves what can be a tricky fight against a Hydra Snake, that because of its 2 heads (doesn't a Hydra have at least 3 heads?), gets 2 attacks per round to your one. However, you can optionally choose to attack just one of the Hydra's heads instead, with different rules explained in the text should you wish to take that approach. This is as good an example as any to call attention to something that Martin does very well throughout the adventure, in that almost every combat you get involved in has some sort of special rules attached to it (like that earlier Ghoul fight also for example). This helps to keep each combat fresh and unique, and although the Hydra Snake fight rules can seem a bit convoluted at first, they are normally fairly simple extra rules, and I enjoyed them a lot. 

After this extra bit of travel, you finally arrive at your ultimate destination, the Black Tower itself. Interestingly, the wizards do not dwell at the top of the Tower as you might expect, but in the underground dungeon area. And this I'm sorry to say is where the adventure starts to sag a bit. After all those interesting and atmospheric areas we got to explore spread out across the island, the book now devolves into a more typical dungeon crawl, with you being asked if you want to go down the left or right corridor, or open the door on the left or the right. I found these dungeons to be mostly devoid of anything interesting with the exception of the wizards themselves, who we learn is each a Master of one of the 4 elements of Earth, Fire, Air, or Water. Thank goodness these Masters (or their spirits anyway), are given some personality, or this underground sequence would have been rather dry. In a nice touch, you will need to learn the true names of the various Masters as you make your way through the gamebook, and then when the moment of truth for each of them comes, you need to convert those names into the section number to go to next (by using the A=1, B=2, method that I unsuccessfully had tried on the magical door earlier). You also learn the secret to the mystery of what happened on the island, as perhaps unsurprisingly one of the Masters meddled with forces he shouldn't have and attempted to take over. After dealing with the first 3 Masters, you make your way to the final confrontation with this last Master and the ultimate mastermind behind everything.

I have to admit to being disappointed with the final reveal as to what happened on the island, as it didn't feel to me all that original or even altogether unexpected. That said, I was rather pleased with the final battles here, with one exception that I will get to in a minute. The final combats are some of those multi-stage affairs that work much better as a final boss fight rather than just giving you standard stats and telling you to start rolling. The adventure even does something really cool here, by telling you at one point that you have time to take 5 actions before turning to the next section, such as eating a provision, using a potion, or spreading some venom on your sword blade. The one exception I mentioned though occurs here, because when you decide on your 5 actions and turn to the next section, you are immediately asked if you took one particular action, and if you didn't, it's automatic game over. Ugh! As someone who fell victim to this my first time here, I will say that again....Ugh! I mean, you might as well just have asked me if I had the the item in question before having me go to the trouble of taking the 5 actions and wasting my time. These final battles do involve some enemies with high Skills, but this is offset by the fact that you likely won't make it anywhere close to the end without a high Skill score yourself, and also that the adventure offers up some places where you can acquire an item that can add +1 to your Attack Strength (and I assume these can be stacked), allowing you to properly "power up" for the end game. Once you defeat the last big bad, your character decides to help themselves to some of the treasure laying about before making their way back to their village, but the thought occurred to me that your village is still in the same trouble it was before, as the wizards are still all dead, and therefore those nasty storms will still be destroying the fishing livelihood of your village. Oh well, easy come, easy go I guess. I got my gold, the rest of you are on your own!        

And there we have it! This might be a positive or a negative depending on your point of view, but it bears repeating that my goodness the successful path through this gamebook is an incredibly long one. How in the hell does this book have the same number of sections as say, The Citadel of Chaos for example? In a strange way, it seems like a feat that should be applauded, but on my winning playthrough I felt as though I must have read close to 350 of the 400 sections! If you like to take a "tour of the gamebook" when you play one (being able to see just about everything there is to see in one go) then this entry might be the poster child for such a design. I can see the attraction to be honest, as I definitely feel like you get your money's worth, but I could also see where for some this might feel like you have taken on a second job in just trying to beat it. There is a colossal amount of items and information that you need to locate here, and I found that I had to be in the right state of mind before attempting to play it. Thankfully Keith Martin's writing is typically good for him, with a nice air of desolation and mystery hanging over the whole island. 

Something else that I need to talk about is the matter of Provisions in this adventure. To say they are bountiful would be an understatement, as you begin with a whopping 12 and there are numerous places to gather more (not to mention a couple of places to pick up Stamina restoring potions as well). That, combined with the sheer number of items you need to gather, got me to wondering about the whole encumbrance system at work here, and although this could be said about most Fighting Fantasy books I suppose, it was this book that got me wondering something about all this the most, and that is, why is there a limit to how many Provisions you can carry? When we start the game, we are told that we cannot exceed 12, but why if there is apparently no limit to how many other items you can find yourself lugging around? So I can pick up that wooden pole and shove it in my backpack for instance, but grabbing one more sandwich is the bridge too far? Weird. I will say though that this particular adventure does something pretty cool in the form of allowing you to find and collect empty bottles as you travel along, and then you can later use these empties to store potions and such. A rather neat idea, if even if adds even more things for you to collect.   

Ranking: Just based on the design alone, this entry is very impressive, although I think there are a few things that hold it back from greatness. Could it possibly be even "over-designed'? I won't go as far as to say that, as I mostly enjoyed the complexity, if not the length of the adventure, but I could definitely see if some players thought that this was just too much of a good thing. (Does this book set a Fighting Fantasy record for most essential things to collect and information to uncover?) The door puzzle was something of a roadblock, and I am sick to (un)death of rolling against that opening Sea Zombie, but overall this is a very good gamebook thanks to the sheer amount of things to find and secrets to uncover, which plays out very well against the creepy atmospheric backdrop of this seemingly abandoned island. Those opening island exploration sequences were great, and although I thought the adventure started to sag a bit once you finally get inside the Tower and it reverts to a more typical dungeon crawl (with Martin even flat out calling it a dungeon), it begins to rebound again as you get closer to the end and start confronting all the various wizards and the power controlling them, even though I personally found the final payoff to the mystery of the book a little weak. It's probably a bit longer than what I want from a Fighting Fantasy gamebook too, but I'm not going to hold an adventure that provides me this much gameplay against it either.

On a review note, this is the third Fighting Fantasy book in a row now (following Siege of Sardath and Return to Firetop Mountain), that has taken me a really long time to finish. I'm used to longer and harder FF books of course, but they are usually sprinkled in here and there, not thrown at me in rapid succession like this. If this is how the rest of the "50's" run of the series is going to go, I might have to take more breaks between these books in order to work in some other series, otherwise I might spend 5 months just playing the 5 FF gamebooks from 51-55!

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52. Night Dragon  - Score = 9.3   Tier = Great!

Sections: 400
Attempts to Beat: 6

Keith Martin getting the job done! With his second book in a row for the series, Martin fixes most of the issues I had with Island of the Undead, if even then introducing some new ones, so while not perfect (what is?), this was easily one for my Great tier with not much thought on that required. In this book we play as a veteran adventurer, who while stopping in the notorious city of Port Blacksand, is approached by a Dark Elf who seeks to enlist our aid for a mission. The fact that the ones seeking our help, the Dark Elves, who are normally the enemies of mankind, goes to illustrate just how important this mission is, as it involves a threat to all of Titan such that we need to put aside our differences lest we all perish. The Dark Elf goes on to tell us of the imminent coming awakening of an Ancient One, the titular Night Dragon, from his long underground slumber. This powerful god-like being will subjugate all of Titan to it's will, and therefore a powerful hero will be needed to stop it. Why us? Because long ago it was a human hero who was able to stop the Night Dragon with the aid of magical armour and equipment, and with tales of our exploits having reached the Dark Elves, we are tasked with finding these magical artefacts, then proceeding to the lair of the Night Dragon in order to vanquish it. Before we depart Port Blacksand, the Dark Elf provides us with some gold pieces and tells us that we should head north to the town of Rentarn, where another contact will be waiting for us with further instructions on how we should proceed.   

Before going any further I should touch on the rules for this book, and to say this adventure adds some new stats to track would be putting it mildly, as in addition to the usual Skill, Stamina and Luck (not to mention Gold and Provisions), here we are also given the extra stats of: Honour Points, Nemesis Points, and a Time Track, with all of them starting at a value of 0. The Honor Points work as they usually do whenever they are included, as if you perform some sort of exceptionally notable heroic and altruistic action, you might find yourself rewarded with such a point. A Nemesis Point might be awarded to you should you find yourself involved in an altercation with members of a cult who are attempting to aid the Night Dragon in its awakening, and it's supposed to indicate how far you have fallen afoul of them. This stat can then be tested later and events might play out different depending on how much of their bad side you have gotten yourself. Finally, as you make your way along through the adventure, you will routinely be told to add numbers to your Time Track (with 1 point representing half a day), with the idea being that the Night Dragon grows more powerful each day as he begins to awaken, so the longer you take to get to him, the more powerful he will be. All of these new stats sound great in theory, but I will get to that later. 

One more thing about your starting stats I have to mention, and something that I thought was a stroke of brilliance, is that because your character is a veteran adventurer, you get to add 2 points to your starting values for Skill, Stamina, or Luck! You can't put both into Skill or Luck (so I assume just about everyone adds 1 to Skill, and 1 to Luck), but various number crunching done by others when it comes to Fighting Fantasy has shown just how much of a difference even one extra Skill point can make, and this can help to make a lower initial Skill roll not feel like the character is instantly doomed as is so often the case. (Although it doesn't fix the problem completely.)  Man, I REALLY hope this aspect of starting point allocation is something that is maintained, and possibly even expanded upon, as the series moves on! Pretty please!  

Alright, with that taken care of, time to break down the adventure itself!

Rentarn - After being given the option of using our Gold to buy some equipment in Port Blacksand, we are then ready to head for Rentarn, and are given two different routes to get there, as we can choose to travel by land or to take the more expensive option and pay for passage aboard a boat. I have to confess that after the prologue which detailed how one lone adventurer was being sent on a seemingly impossible quest to save the world from an immensely powerful ancient being, and then being given a couple of different routes to take for outdoor travel, I was starting to get some serious "Lone Wolf" vibes. You can buy even more useful items for use later in Rentarn, and even acquire a bit more Gold in order to do so. The book even throws in a unique mechanic once you make it to Rentarn, by allowing you to spend a day working in the town in exchange for extra Provisions. There doesn't appear to be any limit on how many times you can do this (although you can only carry up to 12 Provisions), and you need to add to your Time Track every time you spend a day working which is supposed to be the big trade off, however seeing as how important it is to have Provisions as you travel (you are told you HAVE to eat a meal or suffer a Stamina penalty many, many times in this adventure), I found it better to gather as many Provisions as you can at all times. 

Ismater - Shortly after leaving Rentarn, you may come across another village, Ismater. This town plays out much like Rentarn, and you once again have the option to spend a day working, with the reward this time being extra Gold as opposed to Provisions, in exchange for taking a penalty to your Time Track. Earning this Gold is important too, as there are even more useful items in the shops that you will likely want to buy for the adventure ahead (just make sure to remember the names of those who sold you these items, as you never know when you might be required to turn said name into a hidden numbered section! Keith Martin sure loved his A=1, B=2, codes didn't he?) At this point in the quest, I had found both the journeys to Rentarn and Ismater, along with the towns themselves, enjoyable enough if nothing special. Thankfully, things were about to get much, much better.

Dragon Conclave - Ok, so there isn't much, if any, gameplay in this sequence. Yet, I still found it incredibly cool. Shortly after leaving Rentarn or Ismater (depending on which direction you head), you will eventually find yourself directed towards a mountain where a very rare meeting of various Dragon species is taking place. The many different colours of Dragons have gathered to discuss just what exactly they can do to stop the Ancient One. Keith Martin gets around the question of why the Dragons don't just proceed to the Night Dragon's lair themselves in an attempt to destroy him by including an oath that all Dragons have taken, not to directly interfere with the Ancient One. The word "directly" is important, as the Dragons are still able to aid you by giving you the location of 3 magical items that could make you powerful enough to defeat the Night Dragon in combat. These items, a Shield, a Sword, and Armour, are scattered around the region, and will need to be claimed from the various individuals or groups currently holding them. The real stroke of genius from a gameplay standpoint though is that you can attempt to acquire these 3 items in any order you wish! This I felt added no small amount of strategy to the gamebook and helped to keep my earlier playthroughs more fresh. In addition, the Dragons instruct you to seek out a wise ancient being known as the Loremaster once you have acquired all the magical items, as he will be able to provide more guidance as on what to do next and where the Night Dragon itself can be found. There is some really great exposition here. 

Alright, so as I mentioned, you can choose to go after the magical items in any order you wish, and experimenting with the different routes in order to find what I thought the best order would be was one of the highlights of the experience for me. Eventually I found the most efficient order to be: Shield first, then Armour, and finally Sword. Although I would like to hear if others found a different order to be preferable. One thing I liked is that you can try making the adventure more challenging for yourself if you wish by taking a different path should you roll up a particularly high attribute character. So, based on the order I took on the acquiring of the various magic items:. 

Magic Shield - This item is being held by a group of Frost Giants who live in a nearby region, and while they are not necessarily hostile toward humans, they aren't just going to hand us such a prized possession with no questions asked either. There are a couple of different approaches you can take, as you can attempt to steal the Shield, or win it from the Frost Giants by challenging their champion in combat. Once obtained, you are told that the Shield now adds +1 to your Attack Strength moving forward, making it a handy item indeed! This was probably the quickest of the magical items to acquire, but having more than one way to accomplish the goal was a nice addition, and Martin's prose in particular made this sequence really come to life.  

Magic Armour - I thought this was far and away the most involved magical item to acquire, and it contained the best backstory as well. For this one, we need to travel to a long deserted Dwarven fortress, with the Dwarves being the last known owners of the Armour. Upon entering the fortress, I was initially surprised at how easy it was to find the Armour, however the catch is that it has been damaged, and is in need of repair that only the Dwarves themselves can provide. We are then taken on a great side-quest where we learn how the Dwarves unleashed a dangerous Basilisk deep within their mines, with the creature then turning them all to stone. The Dwarves are thus still alive, only trapped in a stone-like state, and agree to repair the Armour for us should we travel into the mines and kill the Basilisk, which they assume will turn them back to normal. Once repaired, the Armour also adds +1 to our Attack Strength, but wait, it gets even better, as we learn that against the Night Dragon itself, or its closest minions the Stalkers, it adds a +2 Attack Strength bonus! Wow, even better than the Shield! Overall this is another excellently told sequence by Martin, and it even has a bittersweet conclusion, going on to show us that no matter how much of a hero we imagine ourselves to be, we can't solve everyone's problems.  

Magic Sword - Probably the spookiest item to acquire, as the Sword can be found in the mysterious Mist Crypts. As with acquiring the Shield, this is a somewhat shorter sequence, but I also enjoyed it quite a bit thanks to some wonderful atmosphere. As you might expect in a crypt, there are some undead encounters here, with one against a Wraith in particular proving to be one of the more tense encounters up until this point, because even if you defeat it, should it have hit you with its claws you run the risk of losing a Skill point, which is obviously a hefty price to pay. Once the Wraith is beaten, you get to claim the Sword which adds yet another +1 Attack Strength bonus in normal combat, and a +3(!) Attack bonus against the Night Dragon or its Stalkers. Geez! At this point I began to wonder just how powerful the Night Dragon was going to be, because my own character had become an absolute killing machine.  

Dreamtime World - Alright, so once I had acquired all 3 of the magical items, I was ready for my assault on the Night Dragon! But how do I find him? Oh that's right, the Dragons in the conclave had mentioned earlier that you would need to seek out a being called the Loremaster who could guide you further. In typical Keith Martin fashion, you need to perform some math calculations based upon the magical items (each one comes with an associated number) in order to find the hidden section where a talking cat (?) guides you to the Loremaster's lair. The Loremaster, who we are told is older than any living mortal on Titan, immediately helps you by restoring your Stamina and Luck scores back to maximum, and considering the length of this adventure, I thought this would have been a good place to put in a save point if ever one was going to be introduced.  

Before sending you to the Night Dragon's fortress however, the Loremaster asks you if you want to avail yourself of possible assistance from the Dreamtime World. He goes on to tell you that he can put you in a state of slumber where you then can explore this world of dreams in search of items that may be of use to you. I'm still not totally sure how you are actually able to bring these items physically into the real world, but regardless, I found this sequence very intriguing, as there are many different coloured corridors in the Dream World that you can explore in any order you wish. Some of these do indeed contain valuable items or even further combat bonuses for the coming battle against the Night Dragon, while others prove to be red herrings. I quickly learned to avoid one of the corridors in particular, because boy have I been conditioned to dislike Doppleganger fights by this point in my gamebook adventures! The longer you choose to stay in Dreamtime World the more it costs you on your Time Track, but I found it too much fun to pass up, and entered it on all playthroughs where I made it this far. There is one encounter you might want to find here, against a dream version of the Night Dragon, that should you win, will lower his stats for the final fight. Well worth it! Another bonus is that you can't die here, as if you lose all your Stamina you merely awaken (with I assume your Stamina restored) as opposed to outright character death. I had good fun here using trial and error to determine which corridors were worth my time. Well done!   

The most frustrating fight in The Legend of Zelda games.......Dark Link! 

Carnex - The Loremaster isn't done though, because once I had exited Dreamtime World I was asked if I had been to the town of Carnex (as it is possible to have visited it earlier). If not, he goes on to tell you how this village has been taken over by the Night Dragon's cult, with its population enslaved, and you are given the option of going there in an attempt to aid the townsfolk and perhaps acquire even more useful items or equipment. I have to say, there are a lot of things to explore in this Carnex sequence, with you first needing to sneak in, then being given a handful of different areas in the town to investigate, with several of them leading to further explorations. However, unlike the Dreamtime World which I entered every chance I could, I found myself thinking long and hard about whether I should go to Carnex or not once I had played through it a couple of times. Aside from a magical bag that can be acquired which increases your Provision limit from 12 to 17, the juice from exploring Carnex didn't seem to be worth the squeeze. Even the Provisions Bag isn't all that needed, as it's really combat bonuses to use against the Night Dragon which were the main thing I was looking for. As such, on my last couple of playthroughs, including my winning one, I avoided Carnex altogether even though it is yet another very well written and atmospheric sequence. Although I also have to admit to feeling no small amount of guilt at that decision, as the enslaved townsfolk there could clearly use my help.       

Final Assault  - Okay, so it's time for the final assault on the lair of the Night Dragon! Being finally ready, the Loremaster is able to transport you to a mountain range in the far north, where you approach one strange mountain in particular (the only one with no snow on its peak, which seems like its hinting at something that never comes), and make your way into its underground caverns. There is a short dungeon crawl here where the adventure briefly falls back into standard fantasy gamebook stuff as you make your way down passages and are asked if you want to open the door on the left or right etc, and you find yourself fighting skeletons and wizards, before the environment starts to get much stranger. As a reader, I felt like I was being led to believe that what we initially thought was a mountain was in fact the body of the Night Dragon itself (which would explain the snow-less peak), because the descriptions of the passages, unless I'm completely off my rocker here, are given as though you are travelling through a living being. As far as I can tell there is no payoff for this, because when you eventually find the Night Dragon, you battle him inside this mountain, so I wonder if Martin was planning something whereby the Night Dragon was even far larger than depicted here (like Godzilla size), and you had to destroy him from the inside, but gave up on the idea at some point in the process. Anyway, it's appropriately gross in places, if even it didn't seem to make much sense, and you can even put those Honor Points you might have been gathering to good use, as they can help you acquire a magical sphere that will prevent the Night Dragon from using magic in the final battle, which is exactly the kind of item I am looking for!  

Night Dragon - Once you have progressed far enough into the mountain and defeated the Night Dragon's final guardian, a Stalker Mage, you at last come to the final battle with the ancient creature itself. This is another of those multi-stage boss battles that Martin does so well, as the Night Dragon, who is still awakening so is not yet at full power, will attempt to attack you with magic first before resorting to a physical assault. And this is also the point where you need to do some calculations to determine what the Night Dragon's stats will be for the combat, taking into effect all the items gathered and actions you have taken over the course of the adventure and applying them to his given stats of Skill=17 and Stamina=32. Wow! Well that explains why there are so many Attack Strength boosting items to locate in the book! You are going to need them too because the Night Dragon does 3 Stamina points of damage per hit as opposed to your 2. This is also where the Time Track comes into play, as you need to do some calculation on your total to determine how much of a Stamina boost the Night Dragon gets for the fight, which is obviously supposed to reflect him having gotten stronger the longer it took you to get there. That said, to say this moment pulled back the curtain to reveal what a disappointment the Time Track mechanic is would be an understatement, but I will get to this more in my issues with the book later. 

Night Dragon Skull - Once you have defeated the Night Dragon, it's not over yet though, as his skull magically re-animates, and you have one last fight against the disembodied Skull that has stats of Skill=11 and Stamina=12. I have to admit, I didn't like the inclusion of this fight at all. First off, thematically it felt extremely anti-climactic after that awesome fight against the Night Dragon. And second, and this might be an incorrect assumption on my part, but I assume you can still use all your Night Dragon combat bonuses here, because the skull would be part of the creature, and also because it clearly has "Night Dragon" in its name. This then makes this fight a total cakewalk. I mean, you just defeated a Skill 17 enemy, so I don't think a Skill 11 one is going to pose much of a problem, and I didn't even take one hit. So while I don't quite think this final fight detracts from the adventure per se, it did feel rather unnecessary, and I wonder why it was thrown in here. Anyway, once the Skull is vanquished, you still aren't out of the woods, as you have to escape the now exploding mountain, testing your Skill along the way to avoid any Stamina damage as you run, before finally escaping and being left content with knowing that you have just saved the world.  

This is another longer review for me, because as with Island of the Undead, this is a looooooong adventure to play through. Night Dragon fares much better in that respect for me though, because it didn't take me nearly as many attempts to complete. Overall as far as the difficulty goes, I would say it even leans to the much easier end of the spectrum as it pertains to Fighting Fantasy (which is incredibly surprising after Martin's last couple of efforts), but this is far less noticeable when every attempt was taking me such a good chunk of time to play through. The epicness of the quest is undeniable, and a fantastic job was done in making my character feel like I was gradually growing in power as I went along. I also really enjoyed Martin's writing here, and thought it was even a step up from Island of the Undead (although not quite as good as Vault of the Vampire, but the subject matter helps with that one). I additionally thought there was a certain Lovecraftian element to the adventure. Oh not in the creature designs or anything, but more in "The Call of Cthulu" way, whereby a cult attempts to resurrect an Ancient One (or Great Old One in the story) that will likely bring about the world's destruction, with each passing day bringing yet more ominous portents of doom while the vast majority of the world blissfully goes about its business. 

So now I get to my biggest issue with the adventure, and while I wouldn't say it's anything incredibly major, it's not exactly just a niggle either. And this comes in the form of those extra stats you have been keeping track of all along, namely the Honor Points, Nemesis Points, and Time Track. I'm sorry to say that I don't think ANY of them really work very well. The Honor Points probably come the closest to working, as if you find enough of them you might be able to acquire a useful item near the end of the adventure. But the problem is they really seemed to be spread out far and wide, and I only found a few places where you could get one. Even then, that mentioned reward for gathering enough of them hardly seemed necessary when it came to beating the Night Dragon as it turned out, although I suppose if your starting stats were on the low side you might want to give it a go. The Nemesis Points, to me, didn't work at all. Much like Honor, the places where I could find myself picking up these points felt few and far between, and even then they were easily avoidable. Whenever I then found myself being asked later on if I had a certain amount of these Nemesis Points (and presumably if I did, something bad would happen), not once did I ever come even close to having the indicated amount, and so breezed through these checks with ease. Unless the whole idea was to GAIN as many of these points as possible, in which case I guess I missed the whole point completely! The worst one though is easily the Time Track. You are told to add to this number so many times that the constant updating of my Adventure Sheet started to feel a bit ridiculous (and certainly tiresome). That might have been more acceptable if there had at least been a payoff for all this bookkeeping, but when I finally made to the confrontation with the Night Dragon and learned just what effect your final Time Track tally has on this final battle, I had to stop and read the section again to make sure I hadn't missed something, because the effect felt extremely negligible considering all the extra work involved. "So all that record keeping means that the Night Dragon gets a lousy +2 added to its Stamina for the final battle? Are you kidding me?". To be fair, I was involved in a rather close fight with the Night Dragon, so the argument could be made that the extra Stamina might indeed have made a difference, but still, it didn't seem to be anywhere close to appropriate considering all you had been told about the importance of Time up until that point. So again, while not quite major, the above was enough to knock the score down just a tad.    

Ranking: Despite that last paragraph, this is an easy Hall of Famer for me, and Martin's second such gamebook after Vault of the Vampire, over which I give Night Dragon the slightest of edges. While I normally prefer a greater challenge in my gamebooks, I am coming around to the line of thinking that they are actually better off being a bit on the easier side if they are going to be as long as this. This is why I think this entry is much better than Martin's last book, Island of the Undead, as going through an incredibly long adventure in over 40 playthroughs becomes more of an endurance test than anything, even though the story of that adventure was probably just as good as this. With Night Dragon though, I got to play just enough times so that I felt like I got to see most of what the gamebook had to offer and found the path to beating it long before it wore out its welcome. It also provides a way for a player with lower starting stats to have a fighting chance (and this fact alone could knock me over with a feather at this point in the series) thanks to the possibility of finding several combat-stat enhancing items. Getting to add a couple of extra points to your starting stats is also a colossal improvement to the system (words cannot express how much I have come to hate randomized starting stats), and is something that should have been implemented long ago....like since 1982! It's also worth noting that the artwork in this book is fantastic, and my goodness that cover, absolutely gorgeous!

The experimentation for this adventure is off-the-charts, and along with the epicness of the quest and the Night Dragon itself, was the reason why I scored this adventure so highly. And while this book didn't make it into my top 5 Fighting Fantasy books to date (and that is going to be very tough for any book to do at this point), it is still firmly in my top 10. It was an absolute treat to try and uncover what I thought was the best route through the book. In what order should I gather the magic equipment? Which of the various dream zones are worth entering? Is it worth visiting Carnex? Just how much of an Attack Strength bonus will I need for the final battle, and where are all the locations where these bonuses can be found?. Heck, there is even addition by subtraction here, as Martin also wisely leaves out any of those gatekeeping puzzles from some of his earlier books (puzzles weren't really his strong suit were they?). Sure, the extra stats and bookkeeping fell incredibly flat and felt rather useless, but all-in-all this was a really great experience! With only one more Keith Martin book for me to play, I wonder if he will be able to top this one