Prince of Shadows

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1. Mean Streets - Score = 5.8   Tier = OK

Sections: 232
Attempts to beat: 7

Time to "take it to the streets!". The Mean Streets that is, with book 1 of this short two book series from authors Gary Chalk and David Kerrigan. Right off the top, this gamebook might have the shortest introduction I can recall seeing. We get one short paragraph to set the stage for the story of the adventure, and then that's it, and it's right into the rules after that. That one paragraph does get to the point though, and we learn that we are playing as Prince Edrix, who has been in hiding for over a year after his family was overthrown by the usurper Luko, who now rules over the city of Salos with an iron fist, using barbarian guards and his own secret police to strike fear into the populace. (Is it just this city he rules over? Does his grip reach farther than this? Is there a whole country here? Who knows!). Anyway, being in hiding, we have taken on the name Dermik, and have found employment as an actor among a troupe run by someone called Master Melfi. No real goal is stated in this introduction, and I can only surmise that we will need to overthrow Luko, and so from here we move on to the rules.   

As far as the game mechanics go, you generate a starting Strength score by rolling a 10-sided dice 4 times (with a zero counting as a 10) and adding up the results. The minimum starting Strength score you can have is 20, as the rules tell you to bump it up to that score should your 4 dice rolls have totaled lower. There is also a Random Number Table Table of Fortune provided near the front of the book, where you can close your eyes and point at a random number on the table to see what you get, which is very "Lone Wolf"-like, which probably isn't surprising seeing as how one of the authors here, Gary Chalk, was an illustrator for many of the "Lone Wolf" books. However, the "Lone Wolf" comparisons don't end there, as you also get to select 4 different Skills from a list. The Skills are broken into two categories, "Princely Skills" include: Persuasion, Marksmanship, Fencing, and High Tongue, and "Street Skills" include: Thieving, Tumbling, Disguise, Streetfighting, Gutter Speak, and Orientation. A dice roll determines how many of your 4 Skills can be chosen from the Princely Skills list, and you then fill in your remaining Skill slots from the Street Skills list. Good stuff here on the surface at least, and I often enjoy experimenting with options such as these. 

And then we get to the Combat system, which in my humble opinion, kind of stinks. First, you need to calculate the odds of you hitting your enemy, which you do by adding together your Strength score and the value of the weapon you are using, with the various weapons you could have listed in a chart in the rules section (a dagger gives +7, a sword gives +9, etc). You then get to add any bonus you might have (the Fencing Skill gives a +25 bonus if you are fighting with a sword for example), and then finally subtract the value for any armour your opponent may be wearing, and the different kinds of armour and their values are also listed in the rules section (leather armour, chainmail, etc). Once you do all this, you will have the number required to hit your opponent, except it is given in a percentage form. So if your number to hit your opponent came to 34, you would have a 34% chance of hitting them. How do you find out if you are successful? Well, you roll your 10 sided dice twice, with the first number representing the first digit of your percentage, and the second number then gives you your second digit, and you need to roll equal to or lower than the to-hit value you calculated earlier. So in the above example if you roll a 6 and an 8, you have a 68 and would have missed. It probably goes without saying that in the vast majority of cases, the second dice roll is rendered meaningless, and you will know whether you will hit or not after the very first roll. You similarly repeat all the above for your opponent, calculating the value they need to hit you. This is a pain in the ass, mainly because you need to flip to the front of the book to find the value chart for weapons and armour every time (until you start to memorize it, or just eventually write the damn thing out on your character sheet). Is there a reason the values of your opponents equipment couldn't have been listed in the section containing the combat? 

It gets worse though. Should you hit your opponent successfully, you then subtract your weapon value from their Strength, and they then continue on with this lowered Strength factored into their to-hit calculation. This means that the to-hit value is constantly changing, and it also means that whoever gets the first one or two successful hits in has a large advantage, all other things being equal. You may also find yourself in a ridiculous situation where both you and your opponent lower each other's Strength value sufficiently enough so that both of you now have very low to-hit values, and you then both flail about wildly, continually missing each other. You also will usually have the option to run from a Combat, with the proviso that your foe will get to take one final swipe at you as you flee. I found it was always better to just run from a Combat as soon as you could, as none of your opponents had anything key to beating the adventure, and I didn't want to risk a few bad dice rolls causing me to lose all my Strength, which equals death and game over. Thankfully though, the adventure is much more of a stealth-based quest than most I have seen, and with your character being both a prince and an actor, it would make sense that they would avoid combat whenever possible. Oh, and you also are given an amount of money to spend during the quest, (and the section of the rules that talks about money gives a bit more background information as to what life in this world is like), with your starting amount of money being "2 Ships and 40 Smecks". Who comes up with these names? 

You then begin the quest by setting out from your boarding room to just enjoy a day off in the city of Salos, but quickly learn that the city's Secret Police may be aware of your existence, and are currently stopping people in the street, checking them for the moon shaped birthmark that the prince is known to have on his shoulder (and which you do). At this point, you decide to join up with the Resistance movement within the city, and so attempt to make contact with them, hoping to join with them in their attempt to overthrow Luko. This then leads to a stretch involving exploring seedy taverns, never knowing who you can trust, before eventually finding the Resistance and revealing to them who you really are. They are suspicious of any member of the nobility, but agree to let you prove your worth to them by aiding them in a mission they have planned. They intend to create a diversion near the Citadel, which will thus draw out the guards, allowing you to sneak in to the nearby Repository and locate a special Horn, which is known to be somewhere inside. You are then to make your way to the roof and blow the Horn over the city at daybreak, which will hopefully inspire many of the citizens to join in overthrowing Luko. Now, is it just me, or does this sound like a pretty shitty plan? The Resistance overall actually seemed rather inept, as you, an outsider, not only find them rather easily, but their hideout is infiltrated and their leader is murdered almost immediately after you make it through their door, not to mention the spies they apparently have in their midst. I'd think twice about joining these clowns!   

The adventure attempts to do something a little different around the halfway point of the quest, when you find yourself leading a group of Resistance fighters through a maze of back-alleys while being pursued by city guards. The book does this by providing a large map of the alleys you are running through, and tells you where on the map to begin. From there, you need to trace a route through the maze, and turn to any indicated section number should you come across one. These sections normally involve you having to either fight or sneak past some guards, and if successful, you are told to return to the map and continue on from where you left off. Not a bad idea in theory to try and add some immersion, but the map itself does not have much of interest going on in it, and I started to wonder why they even bothered, and maybe it would have been better to have it as a typical gamebook maze that allowed the player to map it out for themselves (something I always love doing). I will give them points for trying something here, even if the execution really didn't turn out all that great.

  

I had the Benny Hill "chase" music in my head as I was leading the Resistance through that maze.

Getting into the back-half of the adventure, and up until this point I was finding the book rather easy. Combats were few and far between, and not having a particular Skill when asked usually just led to a detour of some sort rather than outright failure. That sure changed near the end of the adventure once you make it inside the Repository though, where just about any wrong move leads to instant death and game over. Instant death sections don't normally bother me, as I usually see them as part of "the deal" when it comes to gamebooks, here though I got a bit frustrated a couple of times with just how random some (but not all) of them felt. Once I had used trial-and-error to determine the proper Skills to take, and what the correct choices were on the do-or-die 50/50 questions, I was successfully able to grab the Horn and sound it over the city. The adventure doesn't end there though, as you still need to escape the Repository and meet up with the remaining Resistance members to continue your goal of overthrowing Luko, which presumably will pick up from here in the next book.  

For awhile I was starting to think this gamebook might be another "Starship Traveller", in that I thought it might be possible to beat it without ever touching the dice. This isn't quite the case (at least I never found a way to avoid combat completely), however it still comes VERY close. On my winning playthrough I found myself in a whopping two combats, and even those I found it better just to flee as soon as possible, so that I only ended up fighting for a couple of rounds overall total. Now, not having combat in a gamebook is perfectly fine, and it even makes sense in an adventure such as this where you are playing a more stealth-oriented character, however I think it then needs to implement Skill checks in the form of dice rolls against your stats to overcome obstacles. The way this system is set up though, you are routinely asked if you have a particular Skill, and if you have it you pass, and if you don't you fail. Even this might have led to some great experimentation with the Skills, however with several of them seeming rather weak or rarely asked about, it shouldn't take too long to zero in on the more key Skills to select.

The adventure itself is also more "grounded" than many fantasy quests, and for a time I thought this could easily have been set in a real world medieval city. But then of course the authors couldn't help themselves, and had to throw in some dwarves, fantastical bee-creatures, and a talking chalice(!) into the adventure as you get closer to the end. The city does have a nice gritty feel to it, although the sections of the gamebook are often on the shorter side, so its tough to get a completely in-depth immersive feel going on here. There is a large map of the city of Salos at the front of the book which could have helped in this area, however I found the very high-up "birds-eye" view of the city shown on the map worked against it, as it does not provide nearly the amount of detail I would have liked to have seen. The writing itself doesn't help much either, because as mentioned, the sections are often very short and provided very little in the way of characterization. 

Ranking: I liked the emphasis on stealth and the more realistic (for the most part) urban setting, but the gameplay is quite lacking here. The Combat system is not good, and winning mostly comes down to using trial and error as for what Skills you should take so that you can pass all the more important Skill checks of the adventure. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I was shocked at just how far you can make it through the adventure before you ever need to touch the dice, and even then you only need to pick them up a couple of times. Some of the random deaths were also rather frustrating, although this was mitigated by just how fast you could get back to the point in question and try something else. And while I did enjoy the setting, the story itself is already fading from memory just a day or so after finishing it, and I didn't feel as though I learned all that much about my character, or any characters for that matter. Overall this is a so-so adventure, enjoyable enough to get a passing grade, but not by all that much. I wonder if the second book will up its game (literally).