Post by a moderator on Jun 2, 2023 13:31:25 GMT
I was fairly critical of this book when I attempted it for my blog, but for a really thorough deforestation, we have Per Jorner's review from a now-dead mailing list:
VR1: Green Blood
Muse, first of Arden tell, whose footsteps yet are found
In her rough woodlands, more than any other ground
That mighty Arden held, even in her height of pride
Her one hand touching Trent, the other Severn's side.
Having found Heart of Ice to be such a rewarding experience, one might think the natural thing to do would be to follow it up with a title by the same author. Such predictability can be averted by instead selecting the book one would ordinarily begin a series with, No. 1. Dave Morris' VR titles are often hailed as masterpieces, and Mark Smith's VR titles are equally often hailed as... rancid sea water. Oops! Surely it's not that bad.
OR IS IT.
Character creation is completely open as usual, unless you obey the instruction to choose between seven predefined characters of flavourful, wildly varying backgrounds. The introduction then goes on to ram a completely different background down your throat. Were you the restless traveller? Sorry, up until just recently you were a devout city dweller. Were you the street urchin? Oh, we just took your defining shtick and handed it out to everyone else. Did or didn't you select the Cunning skill? Either way, you have "the cunning of a sewer rat". Or maybe the introduction was making a statement on sewer rats there. Or maybe you were just insulted. I'm not sure.
Not entirely content with this amount of cramming, the introduction also fobs you off with a nice perspective on your fellow men, these "sickening" and "revolting" folks, not at all like you and your "nobleness of the spirit". The people of your home are apparently great on "cesspools and plague pits" mostly. So you leave to seek the elves, with the purpose of making them cry - the only possible outcome of such a meeting, seeing that they "keenly sense the tragedy of man's mortality". Oh, so mortality is the problem, now? You trying to tell me an immortal's never found a use for a good cesspool?
In rebellion against this little piece, I decided to create an urban mage - Charms, Spells, Streetwise and Swordplay. This guy doesn't like the forest at all! He likes the city! He's also doomed. DOOMED!
On to the beginning of the adventure... it is annoying. Why? Because it's immediately obvious that Mark Smith is no Dave Morris. There are contradictory or nonsensical descriptions. NPOV is violated here and there, weasel words frolic in the underbrush. It becomes clear that the writer has little or no experience with actual forests, or else is just trying to paint a general, fluffed-up fantasy forest and not doing a terribly good job at it. At one point it is termed a "rainforest" , although, with the exception of a bunch of mangroves, what this _means_ is entirely up for debate (there are no hints on the climate unless you count the presence of several trees that belong in temperate regions). Most of the time the environment is mentioned in very general terms, then once in a while you come across some passage like "you can only guess that it is still daytime" that forces you to completely revise your mental picture of the surroundings. One moment the book suddenly thinks you've left the path - there was no mention of this - and happily tries to sink you in quicksand or something. The next moment after crashing off at random there's talk of the path again - no mention of finding one - and who maintains these bloody paths in the middle of a rainforest anyway? You go from moonlight in one paragraph to glaring sunlight in the next, with no other indication of the passage of time. Your first wanderings, partly over rough and unfamiliar terrain, will initially seem to cover the farcical distance of some thirty to fifty miles in a single day; only if you visit one particular section will you learn that this actually took three days. There are numerous cut-and-paste jobs with minimal variations (which can appear at different stages of the proceedings, or clash with paragraph-specific elements). Heart of Ice has _no_ instances of cut-and-paste! NONE!
Nothing is really true or believable. A cynical guide who agreed to accompany you only when gold was put on the table spends his last Mungoesque moments shouting advice. The protagonist seemingly brings no food at all when entering the endless forest, and when hungry tries to eat dry leaves and earwigs (I'm not making this up). At one point you are rewarded for ignoring a grave warning/threat offered by an ally, who proceeds to not care at all. Enemy soldiers distrust their druid ally to the point of being willing to attack him - at the urging of a total stranger who appeared in their strictly guarded HQ as if by magic (because _that_ is how you inspire trust). The river Sirion is supposed to be either three or six miles across; the book cannot really decide, but it does state emphatically that you, who grew up by the sea, are awed by it. Unless the map is completely and utterly out of scale, either all the important locations in the Forest of Arden are crowded in a small area along its border, or else this primordial rainforest without which "all living things would choke" is pathetically small, crossable in a few days' walk from the cesspools of Godorno - why _shouldn't_ the Westermen get to cut it down?
Then there's the hero quiz, where among other things you are rewarded for taking the position that information should be hoarded by a self-appointed elite. Without going into too much detail, it is poorly designed, as not only do the "good" responses not really make any sense, but the "bad" responses will be apparent for more than one reason. What's more, none of the forest denizens themselves hold to the weirdly rigorous standards they expect _you_ to live and (mostly) die by. There's no reason why they should - because it's silly - but can we have a little less sanctimony, please? The elves are very big on honour and melancholy when it suits them (i.e. when the book needs to justify certain outcomes), at other times they're perfectly happy to act indifferent, play mind games and nuke you from orbit.
Skill use differs significantly from Heart of Ice. Firstly, using a skill doesn't mean you know what you're doing, but often involves an additional choice on how to proceed. Pick one option and you die, pick another and you live. A lot of the time these choices make little more sense than having the experienced woodsman choose blindly between the red and the blue mushrooms. Secondly, skills are noticeably unbalanced. Two of them are of any real help once or twice in the entire book, a third maybe a handful of times, though none significant. Five are useful in that they allow you to get past the book's major trial, but only one of these is of any _other_ use. The remaining three (there is no Navigation/Piloting ) offer considerably more opportunities for use and have extensive sequences exclusively devoted to them. It's not that you're necessarily more likely to win if you have them, but they do unlock more game content, as it were. Not better. More.
I should point out that despite what I said before about my urban mage, he's only doomed for reasons of role-playing, not because of his skill selection. Since there are eight skills that can take you past the only point where skills are a must, and there are eleven skills in all, there's no four-skill selection that leaves you with no chance of winning.
Next up we have a system for returning to previous locations that works pretty much as poorly as any I have seen. First of all, the system is thoroughly broken; it allows for several infinite loops where you can go through encounters partially or completely and return to do them again, including a central exposition sequence that you can repeat simply by dropping the item the game uses to keep track of it. This also makes a joke of the supposed time constraints; it's possible to have "the days come and go" repeatedly, or even sit around until "the autumn rains have come", but the bad guys are no closer to their goal, and it is still Midsummer's Eve for at least one more day (miss your cue however and it's suddenly the day after and you DIE!). For another thing, it's nowhere near consistently applied. For instance, if you tell Yaztromo "Screw you and everyone who looks like you", he might kick you out and you continue to your next stop, whereas if you tell him "Thanks for the tea, but hold the quest for now", you might part on peaceful terms but then you suddenly remember that you left the gas on in Godorno and die at the thought of the bill you're running up. If you end up in a particular place with only one of the two major codewords, you may be forced to go out and seek the one you already have. Finally this backup system suffers from that usual fundamental flaw of its kind, namely that once you are in a position to make use of it - having avoided all the instant deaths, including the ones that could have let you go back but arbitrarily didn't - you no longer need it. Unless you are being deliberately contrary. I guess the saving graces here are that the system doesn't take up much space - the encounters themselves provide the redundancy - and that you can in fact tell Yaztromo to get stuffed and still complete the book, although it doesn't make the proceedings any more comprehensible, and it certainly doesn't excuse the preposterous continuity breaks.
Some observations and annoyances:
* The illustrations for paragraphs 260 and 402 do not face the sections in question. The curious illustration across from 305 actually depicts Renard being attacked by the Embracer - it's upside-down! - but that happens in 200. The Paul Bunyan Machine is shown on the cover and in one illustration bearing an axe, but it's described as carrying a sword, which is also reflected in a smaller illustration. The picture of the elves jumping and cheering has no basis in the text. If the fire in the illustration for 150 will "undoubtedly burn you horribly", then that is one giant chipmunk, and I don't see what you could possibly be expected to do for it.
* It is not unreasonable that you must depend on the military and magical abilities of others if you are to prevail against an army of loggers, but this book doesn't even think your _spirit_ could possible be up for the task. If you decline to use a magic item that artificially boosts your "resolve", not only are you repeatedly chided for it, but you are told that the reason for this refusal is that you are "weak-willed" and the book may force you to recant - even if you've already accomplished nearly all of your tasks without the item's help. I wonder what Ruth Pracy would have said about such ersatz bravery, though somewhere deep down she might have appreciated the kind of innovative proactivity that doesn't take no for an answer: "Take this! You now ARE heroic! END OF SODDING STORY!"
* Near the end of the book, you are given the opportunity to pay a visit to a potential ally if you didn't secure his help yet. If you do, you are quizzed for information which could only be gained if you _had_ secured his help. Moreover, you couldn't have got to this point without recruiting the ally in the first place, so these paragraphs are wasted, and there's no contextual explanation for the quiz anyway. I suppose we could be looking at one of those rare anti-anti-cheating devices...
* Going from 23 to 397 is a good example of a puzzling discontinuity caused by poor interlinking. Same thing with going from 476 to 468. And from 358 to 146. And from 462 to 95.
* The magic duel with the King of the Elves contains several inconsistencies and minor errors. His version of the Visions spell clearly doesn't have the limitations yours does. You may render him helpless but still not win because he's "too baffled to realize the time has come for him to submit" and "under the rules of a duel you may only use magic to subdue him" - but if _you_ fail to submit at the proper time, he "feels he may use death magic" and you are "slain for breaking the rules". 285 should read "his left", not "his right". Seeing that 174 says you cast your spell, why is 52 so different from 326?
* The map shows "Valerian's Tower", but the only tower that figures in the adventure doesn't belong to him. Many of the locations seem to have been placed randomly on the map and a few are obviously not in their proper places.
* 116, 213, 416 and 450 point to more than one section on the same page spread, while 475, 483 and 493 point to sections on the current spread (475 points to 476!). 458 points to 455 across the page _and_ to 475 and 478 on the same spread.
* In 153 you regain Life Points for sleeping, even though you couldn't have lost any yet (in light of which I won't complain about the lack of such recuperation in the rest of the book, including the part with the autumn rains).
* Paragraphs 253 and 304 make reference to a sword even though you may not have one. There are several references to a dagger that you evidently start out with and which apparently doesn't count towards your carrying capacity.
* When you find the innkeeper, the book assumes you passed by 333 even though you may not have. Also, if you mess up and he dies, you can just loop back very briefly and he will be alive again. This sort of showcases the problem with loops. 264-315-378- 428-350-239- 151-229-264 is another funny recursion, but at least that doesn't involve resurrection, just temporal extension and mass amnesia. Finally, when instructing the innkeeper how to find his way home, you come up with a scheme that could apparently land him battered and penniless in a port "hundreds of miles" from home, and doesn't address the issue of staying alive in the wilderness. Cripes, man! Just teach the guy how to determine directions and let him take the closest route home, it's not that far.
* 377 should point to 344, not 422.
* 456 and 466 are written as if you have Unarmed Combat (armed guards are helpless before your martial prowess etc.), even though the book is clearly aware that you can get there without it. 203 and 376 are similarly weird in that veteran warriors are "certainly no match" for your pacifist Charms-Folklore- Streetwise- Wilderness Lore character.
* Even though in other places the book forgoes the use of cloned sections to avoid spoilers, a fight with mostly separate paths for Swordplay and Unarmed Combat cheerfully and pointlessly duplicates paragraphs - compare 477 with 484, and 487 with 494. Also these fights (and the meta-thinking you must do to survive them) don't make much sense, including where it seems the writer really wanted them to. The word "right" should be deleted from 480.
* Some of the outcomes of approaching the Westerman camp lead you to abandon the mission for no stated reason, even if you were there with a very clear purpose.
* The line between the Charms and Spells skills is fairly blurred with regard to what types of effects they are capable of. In 366 and 471 Charms is used to inspire feelings of friendship, but in 428 this is handled by Spells. The part of the Charms description that says it includes luck makes little sense because using _any_ skill successfully here is often a sign of good luck - there are just too many arbitrary differences in outcome that do not follow logically from your actions.
* 450 should presumably point to 478, not 468 (even though the outcome is the same, and the discontinuity is no worse than many others).
* You can loop endlessly through 475, 476 and 458, engaging in an infinite exchange of spells while everyone else just stands around. The end battle allows several loops where you can fling spells to your heart's content while the two opposing armies yawn and look at their watches.
* Why isn't Roguery needed to go to 462 given the nature of the task? This section also nicely demonstrates the dangers of reckless cut-and-paste, since you detect a "magical disturbance" presumably written for 452 where you have Spells.
* Surely "turned off by a master switch" is an anachronism.
* Why is 278 unsure whether you have Spells, given that it begins with you casting a spell?
* In 376 the Infernal Statue is still approaching the Tree of Life, but you can only get there by passing through 349 where the Statue reaches the Tree. 376 is also funny in that it's the only section after 390 which makes reference to the battle still going on; it's easy to assume that everyone just stops and waits to see what goes on with the Infernal Statue.
The bottom line is, Green Blood isn't very interesting, or challenging, or rewarding. It fails as a forest adventure, not just because of the lack of environmental flavour, but also because in the end only two or three of the encounters are truly forest-specific. And encounters are quite few in number overall, 500 sections feeling more like 300. After you win you're not likely to be itching to do it again with new skills, because that just means navigating a slightly different gauntlet of instant deaths. Even people for whom being a champion of nature would be a major draw will probably be disappointed as this is only determined sort of retroactively; no one's going to cut you any slack just for being there to help them, instead they will look for arbitrary reasons to reject you.
This book demonstrates how the injection of tone into a story can actually turn you off, proving inferior to the matter-of-fact style of most FFs. While Heart of Ice is written with great care and pride of work, Green Blood is written with a great lack of it, as if the writer approached the job thinking that it doesn't _have_ to make sense, you don't _have_ to put an effort into it, because, hey, it's only for kids anyway. It's puzzling that this was made the first book in the series rather than Morris' Down Among the Dead Men, as if someone thought it would have an equal chance of roping in a readership.
Muse, first of Arden tell, whose footsteps yet are found
In her rough woodlands, more than any other ground
That mighty Arden held, even in her height of pride
Her one hand touching Trent, the other Severn's side.
Having found Heart of Ice to be such a rewarding experience, one might think the natural thing to do would be to follow it up with a title by the same author. Such predictability can be averted by instead selecting the book one would ordinarily begin a series with, No. 1. Dave Morris' VR titles are often hailed as masterpieces, and Mark Smith's VR titles are equally often hailed as... rancid sea water. Oops! Surely it's not that bad.
OR IS IT.
Character creation is completely open as usual, unless you obey the instruction to choose between seven predefined characters of flavourful, wildly varying backgrounds. The introduction then goes on to ram a completely different background down your throat. Were you the restless traveller? Sorry, up until just recently you were a devout city dweller. Were you the street urchin? Oh, we just took your defining shtick and handed it out to everyone else. Did or didn't you select the Cunning skill? Either way, you have "the cunning of a sewer rat". Or maybe the introduction was making a statement on sewer rats there. Or maybe you were just insulted. I'm not sure.
Not entirely content with this amount of cramming, the introduction also fobs you off with a nice perspective on your fellow men, these "sickening" and "revolting" folks, not at all like you and your "nobleness of the spirit". The people of your home are apparently great on "cesspools and plague pits" mostly. So you leave to seek the elves, with the purpose of making them cry - the only possible outcome of such a meeting, seeing that they "keenly sense the tragedy of man's mortality". Oh, so mortality is the problem, now? You trying to tell me an immortal's never found a use for a good cesspool?
In rebellion against this little piece, I decided to create an urban mage - Charms, Spells, Streetwise and Swordplay. This guy doesn't like the forest at all! He likes the city! He's also doomed. DOOMED!
On to the beginning of the adventure... it is annoying. Why? Because it's immediately obvious that Mark Smith is no Dave Morris. There are contradictory or nonsensical descriptions. NPOV is violated here and there, weasel words frolic in the underbrush. It becomes clear that the writer has little or no experience with actual forests, or else is just trying to paint a general, fluffed-up fantasy forest and not doing a terribly good job at it. At one point it is termed a "rainforest" , although, with the exception of a bunch of mangroves, what this _means_ is entirely up for debate (there are no hints on the climate unless you count the presence of several trees that belong in temperate regions). Most of the time the environment is mentioned in very general terms, then once in a while you come across some passage like "you can only guess that it is still daytime" that forces you to completely revise your mental picture of the surroundings. One moment the book suddenly thinks you've left the path - there was no mention of this - and happily tries to sink you in quicksand or something. The next moment after crashing off at random there's talk of the path again - no mention of finding one - and who maintains these bloody paths in the middle of a rainforest anyway? You go from moonlight in one paragraph to glaring sunlight in the next, with no other indication of the passage of time. Your first wanderings, partly over rough and unfamiliar terrain, will initially seem to cover the farcical distance of some thirty to fifty miles in a single day; only if you visit one particular section will you learn that this actually took three days. There are numerous cut-and-paste jobs with minimal variations (which can appear at different stages of the proceedings, or clash with paragraph-specific elements). Heart of Ice has _no_ instances of cut-and-paste! NONE!
Nothing is really true or believable. A cynical guide who agreed to accompany you only when gold was put on the table spends his last Mungoesque moments shouting advice. The protagonist seemingly brings no food at all when entering the endless forest, and when hungry tries to eat dry leaves and earwigs (I'm not making this up). At one point you are rewarded for ignoring a grave warning/threat offered by an ally, who proceeds to not care at all. Enemy soldiers distrust their druid ally to the point of being willing to attack him - at the urging of a total stranger who appeared in their strictly guarded HQ as if by magic (because _that_ is how you inspire trust). The river Sirion is supposed to be either three or six miles across; the book cannot really decide, but it does state emphatically that you, who grew up by the sea, are awed by it. Unless the map is completely and utterly out of scale, either all the important locations in the Forest of Arden are crowded in a small area along its border, or else this primordial rainforest without which "all living things would choke" is pathetically small, crossable in a few days' walk from the cesspools of Godorno - why _shouldn't_ the Westermen get to cut it down?
Then there's the hero quiz, where among other things you are rewarded for taking the position that information should be hoarded by a self-appointed elite. Without going into too much detail, it is poorly designed, as not only do the "good" responses not really make any sense, but the "bad" responses will be apparent for more than one reason. What's more, none of the forest denizens themselves hold to the weirdly rigorous standards they expect _you_ to live and (mostly) die by. There's no reason why they should - because it's silly - but can we have a little less sanctimony, please? The elves are very big on honour and melancholy when it suits them (i.e. when the book needs to justify certain outcomes), at other times they're perfectly happy to act indifferent, play mind games and nuke you from orbit.
Skill use differs significantly from Heart of Ice. Firstly, using a skill doesn't mean you know what you're doing, but often involves an additional choice on how to proceed. Pick one option and you die, pick another and you live. A lot of the time these choices make little more sense than having the experienced woodsman choose blindly between the red and the blue mushrooms. Secondly, skills are noticeably unbalanced. Two of them are of any real help once or twice in the entire book, a third maybe a handful of times, though none significant. Five are useful in that they allow you to get past the book's major trial, but only one of these is of any _other_ use. The remaining three (there is no Navigation/Piloting ) offer considerably more opportunities for use and have extensive sequences exclusively devoted to them. It's not that you're necessarily more likely to win if you have them, but they do unlock more game content, as it were. Not better. More.
I should point out that despite what I said before about my urban mage, he's only doomed for reasons of role-playing, not because of his skill selection. Since there are eight skills that can take you past the only point where skills are a must, and there are eleven skills in all, there's no four-skill selection that leaves you with no chance of winning.
Next up we have a system for returning to previous locations that works pretty much as poorly as any I have seen. First of all, the system is thoroughly broken; it allows for several infinite loops where you can go through encounters partially or completely and return to do them again, including a central exposition sequence that you can repeat simply by dropping the item the game uses to keep track of it. This also makes a joke of the supposed time constraints; it's possible to have "the days come and go" repeatedly, or even sit around until "the autumn rains have come", but the bad guys are no closer to their goal, and it is still Midsummer's Eve for at least one more day (miss your cue however and it's suddenly the day after and you DIE!). For another thing, it's nowhere near consistently applied. For instance, if you tell Yaztromo "Screw you and everyone who looks like you", he might kick you out and you continue to your next stop, whereas if you tell him "Thanks for the tea, but hold the quest for now", you might part on peaceful terms but then you suddenly remember that you left the gas on in Godorno and die at the thought of the bill you're running up. If you end up in a particular place with only one of the two major codewords, you may be forced to go out and seek the one you already have. Finally this backup system suffers from that usual fundamental flaw of its kind, namely that once you are in a position to make use of it - having avoided all the instant deaths, including the ones that could have let you go back but arbitrarily didn't - you no longer need it. Unless you are being deliberately contrary. I guess the saving graces here are that the system doesn't take up much space - the encounters themselves provide the redundancy - and that you can in fact tell Yaztromo to get stuffed and still complete the book, although it doesn't make the proceedings any more comprehensible, and it certainly doesn't excuse the preposterous continuity breaks.
Some observations and annoyances:
* The illustrations for paragraphs 260 and 402 do not face the sections in question. The curious illustration across from 305 actually depicts Renard being attacked by the Embracer - it's upside-down! - but that happens in 200. The Paul Bunyan Machine is shown on the cover and in one illustration bearing an axe, but it's described as carrying a sword, which is also reflected in a smaller illustration. The picture of the elves jumping and cheering has no basis in the text. If the fire in the illustration for 150 will "undoubtedly burn you horribly", then that is one giant chipmunk, and I don't see what you could possibly be expected to do for it.
* It is not unreasonable that you must depend on the military and magical abilities of others if you are to prevail against an army of loggers, but this book doesn't even think your _spirit_ could possible be up for the task. If you decline to use a magic item that artificially boosts your "resolve", not only are you repeatedly chided for it, but you are told that the reason for this refusal is that you are "weak-willed" and the book may force you to recant - even if you've already accomplished nearly all of your tasks without the item's help. I wonder what Ruth Pracy would have said about such ersatz bravery, though somewhere deep down she might have appreciated the kind of innovative proactivity that doesn't take no for an answer: "Take this! You now ARE heroic! END OF SODDING STORY!"
* Near the end of the book, you are given the opportunity to pay a visit to a potential ally if you didn't secure his help yet. If you do, you are quizzed for information which could only be gained if you _had_ secured his help. Moreover, you couldn't have got to this point without recruiting the ally in the first place, so these paragraphs are wasted, and there's no contextual explanation for the quiz anyway. I suppose we could be looking at one of those rare anti-anti-cheating devices...
* Going from 23 to 397 is a good example of a puzzling discontinuity caused by poor interlinking. Same thing with going from 476 to 468. And from 358 to 146. And from 462 to 95.
* The magic duel with the King of the Elves contains several inconsistencies and minor errors. His version of the Visions spell clearly doesn't have the limitations yours does. You may render him helpless but still not win because he's "too baffled to realize the time has come for him to submit" and "under the rules of a duel you may only use magic to subdue him" - but if _you_ fail to submit at the proper time, he "feels he may use death magic" and you are "slain for breaking the rules". 285 should read "his left", not "his right". Seeing that 174 says you cast your spell, why is 52 so different from 326?
* The map shows "Valerian's Tower", but the only tower that figures in the adventure doesn't belong to him. Many of the locations seem to have been placed randomly on the map and a few are obviously not in their proper places.
* 116, 213, 416 and 450 point to more than one section on the same page spread, while 475, 483 and 493 point to sections on the current spread (475 points to 476!). 458 points to 455 across the page _and_ to 475 and 478 on the same spread.
* In 153 you regain Life Points for sleeping, even though you couldn't have lost any yet (in light of which I won't complain about the lack of such recuperation in the rest of the book, including the part with the autumn rains).
* Paragraphs 253 and 304 make reference to a sword even though you may not have one. There are several references to a dagger that you evidently start out with and which apparently doesn't count towards your carrying capacity.
* When you find the innkeeper, the book assumes you passed by 333 even though you may not have. Also, if you mess up and he dies, you can just loop back very briefly and he will be alive again. This sort of showcases the problem with loops. 264-315-378- 428-350-239- 151-229-264 is another funny recursion, but at least that doesn't involve resurrection, just temporal extension and mass amnesia. Finally, when instructing the innkeeper how to find his way home, you come up with a scheme that could apparently land him battered and penniless in a port "hundreds of miles" from home, and doesn't address the issue of staying alive in the wilderness. Cripes, man! Just teach the guy how to determine directions and let him take the closest route home, it's not that far.
* 377 should point to 344, not 422.
* 456 and 466 are written as if you have Unarmed Combat (armed guards are helpless before your martial prowess etc.), even though the book is clearly aware that you can get there without it. 203 and 376 are similarly weird in that veteran warriors are "certainly no match" for your pacifist Charms-Folklore- Streetwise- Wilderness Lore character.
* Even though in other places the book forgoes the use of cloned sections to avoid spoilers, a fight with mostly separate paths for Swordplay and Unarmed Combat cheerfully and pointlessly duplicates paragraphs - compare 477 with 484, and 487 with 494. Also these fights (and the meta-thinking you must do to survive them) don't make much sense, including where it seems the writer really wanted them to. The word "right" should be deleted from 480.
* Some of the outcomes of approaching the Westerman camp lead you to abandon the mission for no stated reason, even if you were there with a very clear purpose.
* The line between the Charms and Spells skills is fairly blurred with regard to what types of effects they are capable of. In 366 and 471 Charms is used to inspire feelings of friendship, but in 428 this is handled by Spells. The part of the Charms description that says it includes luck makes little sense because using _any_ skill successfully here is often a sign of good luck - there are just too many arbitrary differences in outcome that do not follow logically from your actions.
* 450 should presumably point to 478, not 468 (even though the outcome is the same, and the discontinuity is no worse than many others).
* You can loop endlessly through 475, 476 and 458, engaging in an infinite exchange of spells while everyone else just stands around. The end battle allows several loops where you can fling spells to your heart's content while the two opposing armies yawn and look at their watches.
* Why isn't Roguery needed to go to 462 given the nature of the task? This section also nicely demonstrates the dangers of reckless cut-and-paste, since you detect a "magical disturbance" presumably written for 452 where you have Spells.
* Surely "turned off by a master switch" is an anachronism.
* Why is 278 unsure whether you have Spells, given that it begins with you casting a spell?
* In 376 the Infernal Statue is still approaching the Tree of Life, but you can only get there by passing through 349 where the Statue reaches the Tree. 376 is also funny in that it's the only section after 390 which makes reference to the battle still going on; it's easy to assume that everyone just stops and waits to see what goes on with the Infernal Statue.
The bottom line is, Green Blood isn't very interesting, or challenging, or rewarding. It fails as a forest adventure, not just because of the lack of environmental flavour, but also because in the end only two or three of the encounters are truly forest-specific. And encounters are quite few in number overall, 500 sections feeling more like 300. After you win you're not likely to be itching to do it again with new skills, because that just means navigating a slightly different gauntlet of instant deaths. Even people for whom being a champion of nature would be a major draw will probably be disappointed as this is only determined sort of retroactively; no one's going to cut you any slack just for being there to help them, instead they will look for arbitrary reasons to reject you.
This book demonstrates how the injection of tone into a story can actually turn you off, proving inferior to the matter-of-fact style of most FFs. While Heart of Ice is written with great care and pride of work, Green Blood is written with a great lack of it, as if the writer approached the job thinking that it doesn't _have_ to make sense, you don't _have_ to put an effort into it, because, hey, it's only for kids anyway. It's puzzling that this was made the first book in the series rather than Morris' Down Among the Dead Men, as if someone thought it would have an equal chance of roping in a readership.
