Ok, I feel like writing up a review now that I've played both this and Shadow of the Giants! Apologies for the length but I have a lot of thoughts on this one!
Note that while I've tried to avoid revealing too much there are probably mild unmarked spoilers ahead, so beware:
Book and Cover
The cover art is good, showing some of the more memorable monsters in the adventure, but is not entirely reflective of the 'feel' of the book - it gives the impression of a very sinister adventure, when this book is mostly not that at all.
The spine comes with gold foil which seems to be very low quality - it flakes off very easily and leaves the spine looking very ugly.
As with all the Scholastic Fighting Fantasy books, the quality of the paper is poor.
Internal Art
The bold, black-and-white pen and ink illustrations from Tazio Bettin are a massive improvement over the muddy, cartoonish greyscale art of the previous Scholastic releases and really recalls the high quality art of some of the Puffin and Wizard releases, resembling the likes of Martin McKenna and Ian McCaig. They are bold, detailed and full of character. The small interstatial images are similarly high quality. It's great to see Scholastic correct course on the art for the 40th anniversary releases and I commend Tazio Bettin for properly capturing this style so well.
Story
Secrets of Salamonis places you in the role of a young, wide-eyed newcomer to Salamonis wanting to be an adventurer. I feel this is actually a great way to write a 40th anniversary book - paralleling the protagonists' desire for adventure with the player themselves, either reflecting the newcomers who are just getting into the genre or contrasting amusingly with the 'old guard' who have been playing for 40 years.
The protagonist comes across first as naive and inexperienced, with the core of the story being them turning into a real adventurer and solving a major quest in the way a "real" adventurer would.
Broadly speaking, this happens in three parts:
The initial stages of the adventure are about the protagonist finding their feet: learning about Salamonis, trying to make some money, finding teachers, learning useful skills, and recovering their equipment. In this part of the story the protagonist struggles and potentially has to be willing to put their pride and idealism aside in order to succeed. By the end of this section they should be ready to go adventuring.
The second stage of the adventure consists of a bunch of 'mini-adventures' as the protagonist takes various jobs (big or small) to earn enough gold, buy and find equipment, and build a reputation for themselves. Their training, equipment and contacts may pay off here. At the tail end of this stage, the protagonist may gain enough reputation ('Amonour') to take on some more intense or difficult quests. During this stage, there is a 'time limit', with each attempted quest moving us closer toward the final stage of the adventure.
The last stage of the adventure presents the player with a major quest to lift a curse and end a threat to the kingdom itself. This is where the protagonist is tested to their fullest. To succeed they need to have completed the most challenging quests and obtained a number of items in the previous stage of the adventure - and if they do succeed, they are recognized and celebrated for their heroism by King Salamon himself.
There are also a couple of playable 'dream sequences', including one that recreates the beginnings of "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain". This sequence is a nice nod to the old adventure, but it does go on a bit long and seems a little uninspired considering that much of it is literally copy-pasted from said book. The dream sequences also have very little tie-in to the core story itself.
The characters and adventures are interesting and memorable, but the various mini-quests in the second stage of the story tend to be quite short.
Perhaps the biggest failing of the story is that there is little narrative connection between the protagonist and the final quest they undertake (or indeed, any of the quests). The have no real personal stake in the goings-on aside from their desire to be an adventurer and because of this, the fact that they have the required items to help solve the final quest feels like coincidence rather than the outcome of an actual quest (unlike, say, City of Thieves, Night Dragon, or Moonrunner). Parts of the story are unexplained and there are some plot threads that are left hanging.
I also found some small parts of the adventure a little bit too light-hearted (but I say this as someone who has a preference for the 'darker' Fighting Fantasy books). There are characters with names like "Odious Pinchpenny", "Healing Hans" the "Bruise Brothers" and "Cardinal Zyn", which are a little too on-the-nose punny for my tastes.
On the more positive side, the story does a very good job of making references to other Fighting Fantasy books and titles without feeling too forced. The world-building references The Trolltooth Wars/Creature of Havoc/Citadel of Chaos but does so in a way that feels natural and places the player in a world where larger events are taking place. This is done really well and in a much better way than many of Ian Livingstone's later efforts (where it feels like he's just name-dropping places and events just for the sake of it, and in some cases without any regard for continuity).
The overall tone is one of discovery, success and heroism. The writing is detailed and evocative while still remaining simple enough, in the style of some of the best-written Fighting Fantasy books. This is wonderful to see, as I've found many of Steve Jackson's earlier efforts to be experimental and interesting in terms of structure, but lacking in the writing department. I also appreciate that the ultimate goal is to lift a curse, rather than kill the evil crazy wizard... but it still includes a kill the evil crazy wizard quest in one of its mini-adventures as a nod to how iconic they are to the franchise. Overall, this is great work.
Gameplay/Structure/Errors
This is a bit of a mixed bag.
Right off the bat, the book makes the mistake of telling regular players to skip most of the rules at the back: you definitely should NOT do this, as this adventure starts our hero off with pre-generated stats, and you'd miss this if you didn't read the rules carefully!
Starting with Skill 6, Stamina 12 and Luck 6, the hero is basically a 'proto-Fighting Fantasy hero' - someone who hasn't actually rolled for their stats yet, which is a clever way of starting the story out. Mechanically, I think this is great, as it allows the book to be balanced toward a specific set of stats/circumstances: your chances of winning aren't set before you even started by whatever you happened to roll up for your Skill (and Luck) score. That balance is indeed there, but with some caveats (which I'll talk more about later in this section)
The book introduces 'Amonour', which I see as perhaps best representing a "reputation" or "Heroism" score. It goes up by doing things that show off your skills as an adventurer. It serves a dual purpose: firstly, it is used at the end of the first stage of the story to 'level up' your stats, increasing your Skill, Stamina and/or Luck, and it is thus important to get a bunch of it early on. Secondly, it is used to ensure you cannot take any 'high risk' quests in the second part of the adventure until you've proven yourself.
There is also a time tracker in the form of a 'day of the week wheel'. The book makes it seem a lot more complicated than it really is. It only really matters in the second section, should only be used when you're explicitly instructed to (despite there being some instances in the book where you spend days doing stuff in other sections of the book) and overall, it boils down to "if you attempt a quest, you move the time tracker along by 1 box" (though this gets obfuscated by asking you to move the wheel by "8 days"... this will effectively always land it on the next day of the week though). As long as you follow the instructions exactly, it seems to work well as a way of ensuring that the adventure actually advances toward the final part of the story.
You also have special skills, which you can learn during the first part of the adventure. You're limited to learning, at most, 2 of these however - they often come with some additional bonuses when learned too (eg, additional money, or a limited-use special skill or the like). The text will sometimes ask if you have a special skill and it will make parts of the adventure easier if you have the right skill.
However, although the structure of the book appears very free-form, this is not entirely the case.
In part one, you really need to get almost the maximum amount of Amonour possible as otherwise you will not have high enough stats to survive some required combats later in the book. There is a little leeway here, but not much.
In part two, you have to succeed at most quests in specific ways in order to get enough Amonour to take on the tougher quests early enough and to get the required items. Very irritatingly, you also need to perform a specific action very strategically (rather than logically) to avoid missing out on some pretty crucial items and equipment - more on this later.
Part three is impossible to complete without a significant raft of items - some can be obtained in more than one way, but several can only be obtained if you complete specific quests/perform specific actions, and often in specific ways. And what is more, there is no way to know in advance that you need these items. While this is classic Fighting Fantasy (think City of Thieves or Crypt of the Sorcerer), it doesn't feel great.
The special skills you can gain are a bit of a let-down because of how unbalanced they are. Some of the skills are massively useful (especially one that renders your Luck score almost completely irrelevant outside of the rare occasion where you might want to use it in combat) while others are barely used at all. Two of the skills are not only often useful in and of themselves, but can basically be used in place of others skills a lot of the time, one of them with no cost to you at all, and the other just requiring you to solve a simple riddle each time, which makes one question why you'd ever go for the other skills except as a challenge. The way you gain special skills is somewhat poorly-explained as well - a lot of readers seem to be confused and think they can train whenever they're in Salamonis, but this actually isn't the case (and would result in loops if they do) - you can only visit the references you are told to write down if you 'naturally' reach paragraph 127 or 110.
The mechanics of Fighting Fantasy are inherently unbalanced: Skill tends to be the most important score, followed by Luck, with Stamina only really mattering if those two are bad. As a result, the 'level up' system built into Secrets of Salamonis at the end of the first part of the story is also seriously flawed: it costs you the same amount of 'upgrade points' to upgrade your Skill, Stamina, or Luck by 1 point... and if you chose the 'right' Special Skill, you render Luck basically irrelevant. Why would anyone spend any upgrade points to raise their Stamina by a measly 1 point if they could increase their Skill by 1? Though it does mean that anyone playing it the 'right' way will have a very predictable set of stats, which means that the combats can be (and indeed, have been) tweaked to be 'just right' for our hero... but only if they've done things the right way! The way this section is written also makes it seem a different system was initially intended but not implemented (it talks about a 'pool of points' equal to your Amonour score that you need to share out amongst your different attributes... but then immediately says that for every 2 points of Amonour you have, you can increase your Initial Skill, Stamina or Luck... without any further reference to the 'pool of points equal to your Amonour score' that it just talked about). It feels like this whole system required a bit more thought.
The book's non-linear structure tracks your actions through a variety of means. These include codewords (yes, there are some, even if disguised), key items, and the time tracker. Overall it works pretty well, but there are parts where the non-linear structure breaks down. It seems there is a vicious and almost certainly unintended loop where you are forced to pay a fine over and over again as a codeword is not removed/key item is not given after you pay the fine. Also, in the first part especially, it is possible to re-visit the same area (near the Adventurer's guild) and have the same encounters multiple times in a loop - this is pretty bad considering there are already systems in place in the book that could have avoided this. It's nowhere near on the level of Crystal of Storms or Gates of Death but it's a shame it's there at all, as I consider this one of the biggest mechanical failures possible in a gamebook that attempts to give you freedom of movement around a place.
I also feel that it might be possible to get stuck in the second part of the adventure if you do sufficiently poorly at the quests, as you can only take each quest once (and one of the quests actually ends up being the same as another) and you need a certain minimum Amonour score to attempt two of them - I feel like you could potentially run out of quests you can legitimately do if you don't raise your Amonour score enough, which would prevent you progressing. I could be wrong with this though, I haven't tested it yet. (Edit: I have tested it now, and yes, I was right: it's quite possible to end up at the quest board with no valid options to take, leaving the player unable to proceed).
There are also some errors in the book itself, such as a puzzle solution that links to the wrong paragraph, and another puzzle solution where there are, in my opinion, several 'right' answers but it only accepts two (which admittedly is better than just one)... and one of the wrong ones sends you to a paragraph that, at first glance, might actually look right. Yikes.
Funnily enough, my first successful run-through of the book was one I almost lost due to one particularly irritating mechanic, and I won by exploiting a bug in the mechanics. Spoilers ahead as I recount my experience:
In the second part of the story, you have the option to go shopping every day before you visit the job notice board.
Even though this is an option you get presented very early on (and repeatedly afterward), and it seems like a logical thing to do to see what is on sale, it's actually a massive trap. The problem is that when you go shopping from this point (and only if you do it from here - other times when you go shopping for some reason arbitrarily won't send you to the same paragraph), you will meet the Bruise Brothers for the first and ONLY time in your adventure. These guys sell all sorts of really useful equipment much of which will help you with your quests, and one item being essential to finishing the game.
The problem is that if you meet them early on, which you almost certainly will, you won't be able to afford most of their stuff, and despite what they say to you ("Don't forget the name. We won't forget you...") which suggests you can see them again, you actually will not: during this meeting you will encounter Odious Pinchpenny the tax collector, and regardless of how you deal with him, you'll end up with either a 'codeword' or a key item that will prevent you from ever meeting the Bruise Brothers again even if you pick this same option.
So you need to artificially delay picking this option from this specific repeat paragraph until later in your adventures when you've gathered enough money to buy up all of the stuff you want from the Bruise Bothers, only visiting the shops from OTHER paragraphs when offered. This felt very artificial indeed and took me out of the story.
In my playthrough, I visited the Bruise Brothers early on, and got a "Token" from Pinchpenny, which is the key item that, it turned out, would prevent me from ever meeting them again.
I was very annoyed when on trying to do a subsequent visit, I couldn't locate the Bruise Brothers anymore.
But I fixed it with another bug/oversight: near the end of the game, you have the dream that is a copy/paste of Warlock of Firetop mountain. Being a copy/paste, there is a part where you can exchange an item from your backpack for a shield.
While you don't get to keep any of the items from your dream, the instructions do NOT say that you regain any items you left behind/used up either... and so I took that opportunity to drop the Token in exchange for the shield.
What do you know? With the pesky Token gone, I ended up in a loop that led to me re-meeting the Bruise Brothers (and Odious Pinchpenny) and cleared out their stock this time, getting a vital item I needed in the process.
Pretty clearly not the intended solution, but I felt that if the book was going to screw me over with arbitrary rules, I could do the same.
Incidentally, I had 1 less Skill point than the ideal and had some bad rolls during the last combat, which resulted in my victory being super-close: I actually had to avoid a killing blow via an optional Test Your Luck against my un-improved Luck of 6 - and I succeeded, then finished the enemy with my next attack, with just 1 Stamina left. That was very nail-biting and satisfying, if not necessarily intended that way.
Overall
I came away with a generally positive feeling with this book. Despite the overall bad quality of Scholastic, the improved illustrations alone already made a huge difference to how good the book looked and felt. The prose is of a much higher standard than many of Scholastic's 'new' titles (eg, Port of Peril, Gates of Death) and the story does really capture the sense of the joy and wonder of being a fantasy hero - which is meant to parallel both the protagonist and the reader.
I do feel however that the mechanical issues I mention above tarnish the book somewhat - while I welcome and praise attempts at innovation, in a gamebook I do tend to prefer a simple structure done seamlessly to a complex and ambitious one that is marred by avoidable mistakes. On the other hand, it isn't outright broken either, and considering the complexity that's saying something.
Its a massive step up from every new title that came out in Scholastic's range, and I enjoyed reading and playing it. While it's not at the very top of my rankings of favourite Fighting Fantasy books, I'd definitely recommend it to Fighting Fantasy veterans: this one really does feel like it's for us.
Final Note
"Nanoc" is "Conan" backwards.
It took a while for this to click with me and nobody seems to have mentioned it, but I don't know if that's because it's so blatantly obvious that nobody felt the need to and I'm just slow, or if it's something most people, just like me, may not have noticed right away.
There's definitely some inspiration from Conan in this story, with the hero switching from job to job and making their fortune and way in the world....
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