Warlock magazine mini-adventures

[a moderator]

There doesn't yet appear to be a thread for these here. Given the lack of activity in the Fantazine threads, I don't think it's worth creating a separate thread for each individual Warlock adventure, but I think it's worth having somewhere to rehost my playthroughs from the old forum that we can discuss them.

[a moderator]

Since the document in which I'd archived my playthroughs up to Deathmoor includes the Warlock minis, I may as well repost them here. Might even spark some discussion, so I'll spread them out rather than doing them all at once.

The Dervish Stone by Paul Struth.

It uses the standard FF set-up, though you start with only 5 Provisions as the adventure's half the usual length. The Background is too short to get its own header - it just mentions the legendary Stone of Shanhara (Terry Brooks' lawyers can join the queue behind the bunch from Lucasfilms, who have a stronger case), which is in a long-lost cave full of traps, and gives spoilers for paragraph 1.

After rolling a Skill 7 character, I'm probably doomed, as I remember that the Golem of Inconsistent SKILL has it in double-figures whichever variant you have to fight. Still, let's see how far I can get. I am, for no adequately explained reason, descending a hill near the town of Alasiyan, on the borders of the Twin Sun Desert. Either one of the suns is unique to the desert, which would be odd (maybe Fenestra let her captive Serpent go after the Archmage died, and it wound up making its new home around here), or they have some pretty rubbish conventions for naming places round here. If I see a signpost to the One Sky Lake, I'll know for sure. Anyway, I sit on something sharp and find that it's the tip of a dagger, strangely buried point upwards. Close by are human bones, armour, and a chest inscribed with the name Jakor One-Eye. I'm guessing that wasn't what his parents called him (unless he was a Cyclops, and they were inspired by the local maps). The chest contains 20GP and a note that, in effect, says, "I've found out roughly where the Stone of Shanhara is, but for reasons I can't be bothered to explain, I'm going to die and leave my discovery and adventuring nick-nacks to whoever finds them. Love, Jakor. P.S. Beware the Guardian."

To be honest, what he's learned about the stone's location isn't much: 'the Lost Cave of the Dervishes' (bit of a giveaway, that bit), which is 'somewhere in Twin Sun Desert'. Okay, so it's an improvement on 'somewhere on Titan', but 'X marks the spot' it ain't. Nevertheless, I am apparently fool enough to abandon whatever plans I had before discovering Jakor's remains and embark on a search of the desert. Jakor's note mentions a potion he hid in a rocky cleft, so I go looking for that. After finding it, apparently I rummage around in the cleft some more, as I've already read the label on the bottle when I hear a hiss and get bitten on the hand. This isn't Fire Island, though, so the damage done is minor. Assuming that the Guardian is long dead, or got fed up and wandered off (because obviously Jakor must have been referring to something that would watch over his remains, rather than some End Boss sitting by the Dervish Stone, ready to mutilate any hero who gets past all the traps), I head into Alasiyan to stock up on adventuresome goodies.

Town Guards demand to search my pack, but that potion was Essence of Jedi Mind Trick, and the Guards are too slow-witted to stop me from downing it, so I just tell them that I don't have the droids they're looking for, and they let me past. I get a Luck bonus for this, even though it is physically impossible for me to have used any Luck yet, and the rules have the standard 'no exceeding the Initial score without a note from your mother' clause.

Spotting a Nomad telling tales, I join the crowd in the hope of getting some handy exposition, and he transforms into a tradesman. Aware that I'm planning on heading into the desert, he offers to sell me appropriate items like Gas Capsules, a Glass Eye and a Sword. This is tricky, actually. Is the sword there because the Guards confiscate the swords of anyone who didn't get the potion, or does it have an Attack Strength bonus that will reduce the likelihood of my being turned into a red smear when I run into that Golem? It costs half of what I have, and the Glass Eye is so random and pointless that it has to be important, but I may need funds later on. I think I have to risk it.

First I get the Glass Eye, which turns out to be magical, working 'just like a pair of binoculars'. Wouldn't a comparison to a telescope be more appropriate and less anachronistic? The Sword... is magical. Yes! With an Attack Strength bonus, rather than one of those rubbishy Skill ones. The improvement in my prospects is marginal, but I'll take what I can get. After that I can only afford one Gas Capsule (poison gas, for throwing at enemies), but I have enough money left for the inevitable drink in the inevitable bar.

Proceeding to the town square, I am informed that I can stop to eat Provisions. As the adventure has the post-TWoFM standard rules, I can actually stop to eat Provisions anywhere I like (except during battle, as I'm not Jon Pertwee), but thanks for telling me that I'm allowed to do what I know I'm allowed to do. Next paragraph I may even get permission to breathe, too. Or not, as I have espied a large house with Hobgoblin Guards, which means I probably get the option of looting and plundering some local dignitary's home, what with the vaguely Marxist attitude gamebooks tend to take towards the wealthy (except, of course, when it's you who has the money, in which case anyone trying to take it is evil peasant riff-raff in need of a good eviscerating).

I stroll over, and am informed that this is the Governor's residence, and I need an appointment to enter. The adventure asks if I have an appointment. Is it possible to get one when having your pack searched by the other Guards ("If you would like to register a formal complaint about having your stuff confiscated, His High-and-Mightiness has a window in his schedule several minutes from now.") or is this just a really carelessly written opportunity to bluff your way in? Giving Mr Aussie Expletive the benefit of the doubt, I deny having an appointment, and rather than informing me of how I can arrange one, the Hobgoblin tells me to get lost. So I deck him. The other one joins the fight, exposing the adventure's lack of policy on combat against multiple opponents. Do I take them on one at a time? Roll one Attack Strength for myself and apply it to both opponents' Attack Strengths (as in, for example, The Seven Serpents) or roll separate Attack Strengths against each of them (as in the likes of Talisman of Death)? I take the latter option, for all the difference it makes.

One of the Hobgoblins has a key. The door to the house is locked. Thankfully, the text suggests that the key might fit the lock, because I'm not sure such an unlikely situation would ever have occurred to me without the hint. Everyone knows that keys in gamebooks are found some distance away from the locks they fit, in the possession of characters who have no good reason to possess them. In a shocking twist, the key works. Entering the house, I am faced with a choice between stairs and a door, from behind which comes the sound of singing and laughter. Evidently the Governor runs a fairly informal office.

Not wishing to attract the inhabitants' attention, I head upstairs and encounter a wealthy-looking man with a Hobgoblin Guard. Declining the option to run away very quickly, I get hit with a ZAP spell and discover that the Hobgoblin is actually a Troll/Hobgoblin/Ghoul hybrid. I don't even want to think about how they crossbred that. It has the standard 'free paralysis with every fourth wound' ability, but that lightning bolt has left me with just 7 Stamina, so the fourth wound will kill me before the paralysis can take effect, and won't that just make the Thoul (seriously, that's what they call it) look silly?

Actually I use Luck whenever I hit the thing, and kill it, which makes it look even more of a fool. The man introduces himself, and then casts HOT. It's like the Monty Python sketch with the butcher who alternately insults and speaks politely to his customer. His aim with fireballs is lousy, but that's scant consolation, as he then casts YAZ and attacks me with an invisibility bonus on Attack Strength. As if his Skill of 10 wasn't enough of an advantage anyway, and me down to my last Stamina point. He's probably wasted the Stamina he spent casting that spell, and if he wins, I bet it'll keep him up at nights, brooding, for the rest of his life.

An epic battle ensues, in which I very nearly survive to the end of the first Attack Round.

[paltogue]

I see the Twin Sun Desert is located in Khul in the new Beyond the Pit by Andy Wright (who was always a fan of locating it there).

[a moderator]

So Alasiyan isn't in Allansia? That amuses me.

[paltogue]

Jul 21, 2014 13:27:41 GMT a moderator said:

So Alasiyan isn't in Allansia? That amuses me.

No, the desert's beside the Wastes of Chaos, as per long time fan theories (to account for the twin suns I presume).

[a moderator]

It makes sense. But given the similarities between the two names, the fact that the places are completely unrelated to each other just appeals to my sense of humour.

Anyway...

Dungeon of Justice by Nathan Ford.

I have vague memories of turning my attention to this after losing interest in the stalls at a coffee morning or jumble sale to which I'd been dragged along.

It may be another adventure that justifies fudging, because it beat Black Vein Prophecy to the 'you must fail a certain roll to have any chance of winning' gimmick, but the roll occurs some way into the adventure, so it might be possible to take a hit in the relevant attribute before then. And fudging was not required, as the dice gave me 7 Skill anyway (and 12 Luck).

The Background section has more substance to it than the one for The Dervish Stone, but that just makes it more nitpickable. Mr Ford cannot be blamed for the fact that Sapphire City, to the south of the Desert of Skulls, is conspicuously absent from all official FF works, but this is the least of its problems. My character is hoping to find work there, and is about to cross the Desert (because obviously there's no way of detouring round it for a longer but much less hazardous journey, now is there?) when he witnesses the murder of 'an obviously important Elf' by a dagger-wielding Goblin, who runs off. For no readily apparent reason it is pointed out that the dead Elf is clutching a blue diamond - even if such things do exist, wouldn't someone who only sees the gem clutched in the corpse's hand be more likely to assume that it's a sapphire, especially with them on his mind thanks to the city name? Suddenly a horde of Elves descends upon me and, seeing their dead Chief with a dagger wound in his chest, and me with my blood-free sword in hand, naturally they won't believe my claims of innocence. Where's CSI:Allansia when you need them? Anyway, they take me to their Dungeon of Justice and announce that to prove my innocence I must find the Golden Idol concealed within it. The fact that it's possible to fail this adventure proves that there can be no divine guidance for the innocent inside there, so frankly, this place has about as much to do with justice as the Gladiators studio.

Still, with two dozen arrows pointed at my torso, I'm not sure that a cry of 'Objection!' would be in my best interests, so in I go.

Okay, to be fair, Fordy does acknowledge that the title's a misnomer in paragraph 1, as I 'sigh at the injustice of it all'. Only one direction I can go, but heading that way still gets a new section. Almost immediately I run into a black-clad man whom I identify as a Thief (so it's not just the Elves who make snap judgements about people's guilt), and we fight. Okay, so with that Skill he's more likely to be a Thief than an Assassin, but still... His possessions include a mouldy triangular fruit, which I think could be the legendary life-prolonging Xentos, but discard because of its manky condition. Oh, real smart.

Continuing down the road (well, that's what the text calls it), I reach a junction. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't matter which way I go, so I ignore the turning. Another side turning, also ignored. Such behaviour is usually suicidal in gamebooks, but as I recall, the roll that makes all the difference is reached from a section you cannot avoid (except by dying beforehand), and so the more encounters I avoid, the less chance I have of being killed before I get there. Pass a door inscribed with a cross. Another side turning, which the adventure makes me ignore because the floor's in a bad state. Yeah, I bet even the guy who re-killed Razaak is afraid of potholes.

Yet another side passage, while up ahead is either a dead end or a corner. Just keep going. At this rate I may 'prove' my guilt by dying of boredom. Oh, it is a dead end. So I can search it (because that always works so well in the Maze of Zagor, doesn't it?) or go back and east. Keep moving. New junction, at which I suffer the traditional FF adventurer's aversion to heading south. Okay, so as a metagamer I know that the Idol isn't around here, but if I were playing this for the first time, I might get a little peeved at being denied the opportunity to make a really detailed search of the place. Knowing that one's life depends on finding the McGuffin is a strong incentive for thoroughness.

Pass a locked gate for which I don't have the key. Even my character is getting fed up of this dull plod, but though 'beginning to despair', I ignore the next door, too. Maybe if I had 9 or 10 Skill I'd be a bit more adventurous (and have significantly less chance of finding the Idol), so I could poke fun at more interesting aspects of the adventure, but I'm playing to win, so that means extreme caution. There's a truly bastardly trap (not cunning, not clever, just a kick in the teeth for the player when encountering it for the first time) in here somewhere, but as I don't know exactly where, and opening the wrong door may lead to combat against something with a high Skill, I'm not going to risk looking for it just so when I find it I can say, 'However, I know that that's not actually the real Idol, and the tripwires are just there as a distraction from the descending ceiling that'd splat me as soon as I stepped through the door.'

New junction, another bout of what I will call votiosophobia (with apologies to any Greek speakers, as I'm sure that's a horrendously wrong way of rendering 'fear of going south'), and I find myself on a ledge half way up a massive cliff. The phobia is now so strong that I don't even contemplate turning back, and as I don't have any means of levitating, I have to climb down a convenient rope. At least I'm certain to be Lucky at this stage. Oh, and another Test of Luck follows straight away. I think the 35 in 36 chance of succeeding at that one justifies not glugging down my Potion of Fortune while hanging onto the rope. It's good.

Safely reaching the bank of a fast-flowing river, I spot a rickety-looking bridge, and as I approach it, I observe that it is being devoured by giant two-headed termites. The illustration is impressive in its wrongness: the termites only have one head each, and are so big that there's no way I could spot the condition of the bridge yet fail to notice them - it'd be like reading the registration number of a car, and having to get closer before I can see that there's a cow on the roof.

Anyway, here comes the make-or-break moment. As the spirit girl from Deathtrap Dungeon might say if she were to relocate here:

At the river, cold as fridge,
Do not cross the termites' bridge,
But take a breath and jump right in,
Hoping your next roll you won't win.

And I take the plunge. Carelessly, I get told where to turn if I roll under my Skill, and there's a section number for if I roll over it, but the idea of my rolling equal to it is apparently just crazy talk. And... I succeed. Bother. So I make it across the river, and wind up on a beach identical to the one on which I'd have wound up if I'd been swept downstream, only without the Idol. Seriously. The 'Idol-finding' section leads to the exact same paragraph as the 'making it across the river' section, even though these have to be set in completely different places, unless a freak wormhole unnoticeably teleports you upstream and then winks out of existence before you reach it again. Ford could have combined section 1 with the one into which it fed, and used the paragraph thereby freed up for a transition that realistically takes the lucky player to Convergence Beach, but no, he chose to create a geographically impossible location.

So I've crossed the river which is spanned by an unreliable bridge, and on the north side is a beach that leads up to a cliff with three doors set into it. When Zagor resurrects, he's going to sue your pointy ears off, Elves of Injustice.

Except that what lies behind the doors is rather different. Wish I could remember which one leads to the Skill 12 opponent. I suppose I should be thankful that there is a route or two which avoids that particular foe, given the need to fail a Skill roll just beforehand, but there's still a 1 in 3 chance for anyone who doesn't remember where each door leads to wind up having to fight the wretched thing.

I pick a door, and it's locked. The sounds from behind it suggest that this is the room with the Skill 12 Birdman, but I don't have a golden key, so I can't unlock it, which means I get to... try and charge it down, in spite of its being covered in sharp studs. *headdesk* Or rather, headdoor, as the way the paragraph is written, it implies that I pad my shoulder and then charge at the door head-first. Well, given that my character didn't even consider going back and trying another door, I'm guessing that there's precious little to damage inside that cranium.

On my fourth attempt, the door opens, and oh joy, it is Galon the Birdman (apparently instantly recognisable for being green, though what such an infamous character is doing in a dump like this, I dread to think). He has an all-consuming lust for metal, so naturally I draw my sword, rather than attacking bare-handed or trying to show him the shiny (all right, in places bloody) iron studs on the door.

And I win the first Attack Round, and am Lucky! Didn't remotely expect that.
Jaw drops. I win the next round, too. His starting Stamina is 8, so a further successful Test of Luck brings him down. I have just defeated a foe whose Skill was 5 above mine, without taking a scratch in the process. That has to be one of my most awesome feats in over 25 years of playing gamebooks.

And now I have to carry on and get shot by a tribe of bastard Elves for not finding their stupid Idol.

That is, assuming I get that far. Because while I'm searching for another way out, a horde of maggots consumes the body and, their appetite not yet satiated, they advance on me. It's like time lapse photography's evil twin is manifesting in the room. Luckily, I find a secret door, and make it to a crossroads. Guess how much choice I have regarding which path to take? Well, I can carry on north, or I can choose to turn neither east nor west, or I can continue in the same direction I was already going.

Heading the opposite of south, I reach a door with a parchment on it. Not a Death Spell, but it might as well be. It states (in several languages, at least I'm assuming that the text in unfamiliar languages says the same thing) that anyone who gets this far must have great courage. Now, I had been planning to heap scorn on it, on account of my having done everything I could to avoid encountering anything hostile on my way to the river, but hey, this is the hero who butchered a vastly superior opponent unscathed. That might not exactly show courage, but it's still pretty impressive. Regardless, now I 'must live with courage or die with courage'. Well, I know which of those it's going to be.

Behind the door I meet an elderly human (why not an Elf? What's this git doing aiding and abetting the Elves of Negligible Justice?). He asks for the Idol, and as there are no numerical inscriptions on it, I could just lie and say I do have it, but I'm not letting Ford's atrocious gamebook design turn me into a cheat. "No, I do not have the Idol, you repellent little collaborator. I hope the Goblins get you and your wouldn't-know-justice-if-it-smacked-them-around-the-head-with-its-scales-while-running-them-through-with-its-sword friends."

He takes me to the Elves, the leader of whom is glad of the excuse to have his troops repeatedly perforate me.

[a moderator]

The Dark Chronicles of Anakendis
by Andrew Whitworth


This was in the first issue of Warlock to be published by Games Workshop, and among the changes brought in by the new publishers was a new look for the mini-adventures. The font's not the same, and the illustrations are quite a departure from the norm. Artist Mark K. Dunn (who would go on to provide rival magazine Proteus with a variety of scantily-clad females and gruesome monsters) has a crude intensity and a flair for the grotesque unlike anything previously featured in the mag. Tim Sell's illustrations for the House of Hell mini come closest, but they're as distinct as Dali and Picasso.



Anyway, enough waffle. Let's get adventuring. On the way to Fang (visiting a friend rather than seeking to get myself killed in Deathtrap Dungeon) I stop in the village of Kokbridge and learn that the locals are having problems with the villainous Anakendis, a wizard who lives in some nearby caves with assorted minions. Like Zagor, he has a spell book (the eponymous Dark Chronicles). Like Balthus Dire in one 'fail' variant of TCoC, he has subverted an adventurer who went to kill him. Like Zanbar Bone, he's using vicious dogs to intimidate the people, and demands tribute of the female kind (though he wants two fresh maidens a week, rather than just the headman's daughter, which really isn't going to be viable in the long term). Naturally, the Kokbridgers appeal to me to destroy the wizard and his book, and, being a generic adventurer, I agree.



Being a not very good generic adventurer, I'm unlikely to succeed. But here we go anyway. So, I set off, reach the cave mouth, enter, and soon reach a left/right turning. Any similarities to the opening of TWoFM are completely dispelled by the fact that it took me just a day and a night to get there, rather than two days. Oh yes.



Turning right, I reach a room with two exits and an alcove. Checking out the alcove, I find only a bellrope hanging down, and decide to pull it. This reveals Mr Whitworth to be something of a Doctor Who geek, as the monster that smashes through the walls is straight out of an obscure story broadcast in 1967. It also shows him to be a little harsh, as there's nothing to be gained (other than extra-hurtful wounds - 3 Stamina damage per blow) by fighting the Macra. There's no Escape option, either, so I wind up dead even faster than expected.

[a moderator]

Temple of Testing by A.E. Arkle

This has a significantly longer 'Background to the Adventure' than any of the previous Warlock mini-adventures, and its Scorpion Swamp-esque lack of linearity means that it's likely to take longer than most (unless I die early).

I am a student at a School of Magic (apparently on Earth, given the reference to Chinese Taoism), though so far I've only studied theory. Only those who survive the testing get taught how to actually cast spells. Unusually, character generation forms part of the background - I watch the Grey Oracle tossing bones (using dice to simulate the bone-tossing), and where they fall determines my Skill, Stamina and Luck. It could be argued that the ritual is a way of mystically divining the capabilities of the one being tested, rather than establishing what they are, but it's a bit odd all the same.

What I roll is far from promising. Still, equipped with TWoFM-style starting gear, plus some vaguely mystical hints (one of which is flawed, as water is omitted from the generational sequence of Elements, but not the conquering one), I commence the test, finding myself at the easternmost extremity of a circular passage with no exits (the entrance vanished just after I used it). I'm not sure it matters which way I go at this stage, so I'll try widdershins. Five minutes later I'm back where I started, but I keep going, picking up the pace so it doesn't take me as long to complete my second circuit. Refusing to turn around, I plod onwards, and upon completion of the third circuit, a door appears for just long enough to let me through to a semicircular room with three exits in the facing wall.

Choosing the southernmost door, I find a square room containing a cluttered desk and basin, which provide me with such dubious treasures as paper clips, rubber bands, a shaving mirror and some 'disreputable' toothbrushes. According to the rules, anything I take from this room will not be replaced until I have been through at least five others (though opponents automatically respawn the moment I depart). Not that there's anything to stop me from cheating and repeatedly going to and from the semicircular room until I've amassed several hundred dirty flannels. Except maybe sanity.

Exits to all points of the compass, so I go south. The next room contains a strange 'car-like' machine and five boxes. A quick look at the machine gives no hints as to its function, or even how to switch it on, so I open a box, picking the second one more or less at random. Inside is something green with fangs and claws, so I slam down the lid and sit on it, at which point similar beasties emerge from the other four boxes. Drawing my sword, I leap to my feet to defend myself, and the Gremlin I had been trapping bursts out of its box. This is going to be a fun fight...

Well, that could have been worse, especially as they attacked three at a time. One of the boxes also contains a Bluesteel Chalice, which I grab. No east door (which makes sense), so I go south again. Another semicircular room, containing a swimming pool, towels, and five exits set into the straight wall to the north. Douglas Adams fan that I am, I cannot resist the temptation to grab a towel, after which I test the water. It is just water, so I decide to have a swim, which heals a little Stamina, and would also restore some Skill if I'd lost any of that. Worth remembering in five rooms' time.

Favouring a methodical approach, I try the door next to the one by which I entered. Beyond it is a room in which two Orcs are wrestling, with a third acting as referee. Unfortunately for me, all three decide that 'stab the human' is a more fun game than wrestling, so I have to fight again, and it's simultaneous combat, too. One Orc dies, and I wound another twice, but in the end the Referee puts me out for the count.

[a moderator]

The Floating City
by Ruth Pracy


A mysterious adventurer on a world where seasons are a matter of geography, not time, I am close to the border between Winter and Spring when I overhear a nearby massacre, arriving too late to save anyone, but seeing an Eagle leaving the scene of the crime. The one doomed survivor says enough to convince me that I have a chance of achieving fame and fortune in the fabled Floating City. All I have to do is rescue Lord Karon's favourite Dwarf from the Eagle which has, apparently, abducted him for the second time.



For a while I head into the lands of Winter, eventually reaching a point where the path splits near an abandoned-looking hut. Naturally, I check out the hut first, and spot a harpoon hanging on the wall. Walking over to grab it, I almost fall into a concealed pit, but not even a double 6 can stop me from being Lucky. Peering into the pit, I discover that it is occupied by a slavering predator known as a Bear-Trap (you'd think that I might have noticed that while I was dangling from the edge, trying to pull myself up, but apparently not), and decide to kill it in the hope of looting the remains of its past victims. I don't even have to jump into the pit to do so, as the Bear-Trap clambers out (making it all the stranger that I didn't get attacked while hanging precariously). The treasure's not that special - 2GP, a pair of earmuffs, and a scale (possibly from a snake) - but the fight was pretty tame, considering the way the Bear-Trap was described before its stats were revealed. I also grab that harpoon, which turns out to be made of a precious metal that I can make heat up with the power of my mind. Could be nifty.



Emerging from the hut, I decide to investigate the nearby glacier, there discovering that I'm the kind of wimp who loses Stamina by walking on uneven surfaces. A crevasse tries to ambush me, but times its opening badly, so I don't fall in. Catching sight of what looks like someone who did fall in, I decide against fishing for corpses with my harpoon, and climb down to see what can be plundered. More gold, a jewelled dagger, and a bone.



And then the crevasse closes up again, leaving me as doomed as the corpse I just robbed. D'oh!

[a moderator]

Fortress Throngard by Tom Williams

The letters page in the issue of Warlock in which this adventure appeared included one letter about colouring in the illustrations in gamebooks with watercolours. Regrettably, I had access to some watercolours at the time I got the magazine, and was 'inspired' to try doing just that with some of the pictures accompanying the mini-adventure. The results do not look good.

Anyway, on with the adventure. I am squire to Sir Falfax the Fair, who is the latest of many fools to be captured by the evil wizard Throngard's minions and imprisoned in the dungeons beneath the eponymous castle. In the hope of rescuing him, I decide to conceal a knife and a picklock on my person (but not, alas, a compass) and contrive to get myself taken prisoner, in the hope that breaking out will be easier than breaking in and then out.

My stats are promising (though, unless there's some serious anti-meritocratic stuff going on around here, I can't help but wonder just how hard Sir Falfax must be to have a Skill 12 squire). Writing this up may also help negate one of the most problematic aspects of the adventure as I remember it from playing it back in the '80s: with no compass, all directions are left/right or forward/back, which made it easy to get lost, as what's to the left when you're on one side of the corridor is to the right when you're on the other. Keeping note of the directions I turn might help me get a better grasp of what is where. Time will tell.

So, ostensibly armed with just a wooden stick, I go wandering in the wood of Ergon, and am ambushed (by three men rather than a silly-looking featherless chicken-dinosaur-biped thing). Even my paintbrush-wielding twit self could tell that putting up token resistance and allowing the thugs to believe that they'd overpowered me was smarter than instantly surrendering or properly beating up the goons I want to abduct me, so I throw the fight, and am coshed into unconsciousness.

Coming round, I find myself chained up in a cell, but my captors didn't search me thoroughly enough to find the knife and lockpicks, so before long I have my chains undone. Pick the lock on the door, or wait and see what happens? There might be something to gain by ambushing the jailer, so I'll twiddle my thumbs for a bit. Before too long, I hear a key in the lock, and hide behind the door. A guard enters bearing water and mouldy bread, and - whoa! - I slit his throat. None of this hippy 'knocking out' stuff for me. Grabbing the dead man's cudgel (but not his keys, because that would make things too easy), I exit the cell and step into a corridor. Another door across the way, or I can go left or right.

Door first. It turns out that my cell is opposite the provisions store. A guard is shelf-stacking, but I convince him to take an extended break, and relieve him of his sword. Back to the corridor, and... right. Which would've been left if I'd turned aside as soon as I left the cell (and the section numbers agree with that). This takes me past a door with a strange runic inscription, which I decide to leave well alone, and I stop when I reach another pair of doors facing each other. The one on the left (which should be the same side as my cell) has a peephole, so I look through it, and see an old man muttering about revenge. He also says, "Throngard was right," so unless I've missed hearing the words "out of order to have me locked up, and the next time I see him, I'll smash his face in," straight afterwards, it's probably not in my best interests to free him.

Section numbers indicate that directions to go are accurate for someone facing the door rather than emerging from the cell, which makes sense. Still, there's the other door to investigate before I go any further along the corridor. That leads to a storeroom containing a rope, a canvas bag, and a selection of wooden stakes. Metaknowledge tells me that there's a Vampire around somewhere, but the rules say I can only take a stake if I have no other weapon, and must discard it as soon as I obtain something better. How very tiresome. Directions still correct upon emergence from the storeroom, and I turn right to continue the way I was heading.

Further along is a door with a grille in it, and the sounds emanating from within suggest that behind it is an extremely distressed prisoner or a pack of dogs. I have the option of advancing, turning back, or trying to think of something else. 'Something else' probably only works if I have something with which to distract the dogs, which I don't. I can't even misspell 'stake' to gain some raw meat. Not wishing to risk having the alarm raised, I turn back.

Past the two doors, past the door with the runes (which I don't even have the choice of investigating this time) and back to where I entered the corridor. I reenter the provisions store and kill the replacement stacker because now I have a bag, I can put some spare food in it, and there's nothing in the text to say I can't (whereas it's explicitly stated that repeat visits to the storeroom will not yield multiple bags, ropes and tantalising stakes).

Back out, and now I go left of that door. It's becoming increasingly apparent that my confusion back in '86 was purely the result of lack of concentration on my part. A compass and NESW directions would have made this easier, but so far the subjective bearings have been right every time, and I take back whatever nasty things I may have said about the author as regards directions all those years ago.

Another two facing doors. If the pattern holds up, the one on the right should be a cell, the other something else. Right first, then. It's locked, but I have my lockpicks and oh! It's an armoury. I get to choose one item of armour (more would be too cumbersome, apparently), and go for a shield. It works like the one in TWoFM, only twice as effective. Better than nothing, I suppose.

The other door is also locked. But not for long. Behind it is an unusually lavishly decorated cell, with an occupant who beckons to me. If he's a prisoner, he's someone important. If not, I doubt I'd have the option to slam and lock the door (nice work with just picks). I'll risk seeing what he has to say for himself. Turns out he was Throngard's tutor, imprisoned when the wizard turned evil, but given a five-star cell out of gratitude for services rendered. He teaches me an invocation to temporarily immobilise Throngard so long as I don't attempt to harm him, and tells me to look in the library upstairs for more secrets. He won't try to escape, as he was responsible for Throngy's rise to power. It could have been fun to see the two of them fight a magical duel, but then again, I wouldn't want to be collateral damage from that, so I just continue on my way.

Up ahead is a corner, but there's another pair of doors first. On the left is a guard room. Oops! Try to sneak away before they spot me, and Luck is on my side, so I vanish round that corner. Stairs lead up, so I ascend and go through a door. More corridor action, with another door straight ahead. Open it, of course. Beyond it is a passageway to another door, this one locked. Out with the picks, and I attract the attention of the two guards and Puma on the other side. Double oops! Still, I survive the fight, and my younger self has pencilled in the missing 'If you win, turn to...' reference in accordance with the correction in issue 10, so the adventure can continue.

I step through into the entrance hall, and attract the attention of Throngard's pet Dragon. Triple oops with hot oops sauce and grated oops on top, it has 15 Skill and there's no Escape option. Shoulda left that door alone and gone looking for a bow and arrow. My shield protects me from its breath attack, but I'm still probably doomed. Well, here goes nothing...

Yep, I'm dead. Hit it twice, but even with Luck it'd have taken four blows to kill the thing. I was starting to get into the adventure, too.

[a moderator]

Rogue Mage by Graeme Davis

Warlock 10 introduced the pointless and irritating gimmick of making the mini-adventure dual-system, giving stats for playing it by D&D rules as well as FF. The editorial indicates that this was an attempt at pleasing 'serious' gamers, which insults FF fans, and misses the point that any hardcore D&Ders who looked down on the FF books were more likely to be doing so because solo play lacks the flexibility of a GMed adventure, rather than on account of the rules.

The adventure itself was reprinted (minus D&D waffle) in The Fighting Fantasy 10th Anniversary Yearbook. A few sections had been moved around, for no obvious reason (41 still leads to 42, so if they were trying to separate out the sections better, they didn't do a very good job), and I think the most egregious typos were cleared up, but no changes seem to have been made to the adventure itself, more's the pity. I assume RM was chosen for the Yearbook because Graeme Davis, the author, had had a full-length FF book published (unlike all the other mini-adventure authors), and was easier to contact/already had a contract/had signed away his soul to Puffin. It seems highly unlikely that the adventure was selected for reprinting on grounds of merit.

Anyway, that's more than enough blather. What of the adventure itself? A down-on-his-luck adventurer, on trial for attempting to rob a fat merchant, I face either the death sentence or a fine of one right hand (and no, somebody else's will not suffice). Before sentence can be passed, a representative of the Guild of Magicians turns up and asks if they can have me, and I am promptly handed over. It transpires that the Guild wants me to deal with Galthazzeth, a former member expelled for general naughtiness a century or so ago, who has taken up residence in an abandoned mine and plans to conquer the world. Or the Guild could just confiscate my innards, if I'd prefer. Guess what I choose.

So I trek to the abandoned mine and attack a Goblin guard while it's snacking on a human arm. Sloppy writing (fixed in the Yearbook) implies that I enter the mine, come back out to loot the Guard, and then go in again. Maybe I'll wind up doing the Hokey-Cokey before this adventure is over.

Soon I reach a crossroads, and go west because it doesn't matter. Reach a door, listen at it, overhear chatter in Goblinese, and burst in to do some killing. Loot, find a strange pendant, search the room, find an indentation shaped like the pendant, do the obvious, and a secret door opens to reveal yet another Goblin, this one with some magical ability, but a bad aim. Dodging his fireball, I slice him up and grab a potion and a magical scroll.

Next door is a Goblin temple, with a ruby-eyed statue (wonder if I'll find the Eye of Argon around here somewhere) and assorted torture implements. Normally I'd be a little cautious around statues with jewelled eyes, but as I recall, there's only one Instant Death in the whole adventure, and that's set between the death of Galthazzeth and total victory, so I plunder away. A magical trap costs me a whole 2 Stamina, but after that I have the gems, and return to the crossroads.

East next. Passing through an uninteresting room, I go north, then east at another junction, and find a storeroom. A quick search turns up an amulet, which I find every bit as non-ominous as the statue's eyes, and less harmful, to boot. Wander around some more, find another door, and it turns out to be an Imitator. Isn't that a trick Davis uses in Midnight Rogue? It's not the only element of the adventure that he'll rehash, either. Indeed, straight after the Imitator, I encounter a Scitalis (though the amulet enables me to see through the illusion and avoid getting caught). I kill it in case it has any useful loot, and find a magic sword. Attack Strength bonus, hurrah!

Continuing on my way, I run into a Bandit. Not the chocolate bar, if anyone remembers them. Not much of an opponent: I club him down, then knock him to the floor again (which would make me a double-decker), smack him be-twix-t the eyes, and one more blow causes him to flake out. After nicking his stuff, I am given the option to push the body through a nearby door, which is such an odd choice that I just have to take it. The corpse is promptly siezed (sic) by a huge Giant Beetle (as opposed to one of those tiny Giant Beetles that go around confusing people by looking like ordinary beetles), and I leap to the attack. An epic struggle ensues, and while I do survive, I'm now low on Stamina, and only allowed to eat Provisions when the text says. What's worse, the Beetle's treasure is just a mound of Gold Pieces - very useful in the civilised world where an impoverished hero can get his hand lopped off for trying to pilfer a crust of bread, but a fat lot of use in non-Livingstonian dungeons.

Having exhausted the options in this section of the mines, I retrace my footsteps to an earlier junction, wander around some more, and eventually find some more Goblins. They provide bonus loot (if I'd known there were Potions of Fortune just lying around here, I'd have brought a Potion of Strength with me) and, more importantly, a chance to sit down and have a bite to eat.

Further wandering leads to an encounter with an Antman. I'm going to be generous and assume that, as Galthazzeth is known for magical hybridisation, this is one of his creations, rather than evidence that Davis has forgotten about Xoroa. Indeed, given its acid-spraying ability and sub-Xoroan Skill, this has to be a different species. Once I've stomped it, I listen at the door it was guarding, and hear sounds implying the existence of more Antmen beyond. I risk opening it (could be another snack break in there), and realise that they heard the fight and have their acid jets ready. Fortunately, their aim is as bad as the Goblin Shaman's, and they're worse fighters that their counterpart outside the door was.

The Antmen have some precious stones and shields. A shield gives a Skill bonus (not Attack Strength - boo!), but I can't carry one and a spear at the same time, and I looted a spear from the Goblin guard. Shields have uses other than providing redundant bonuses, but the spear might come in handy too, so I'll stick with that.

There's a door other than the entrance, so I try that. One thing I will say in this adventure's favour: it has much greater freedom of movement than most FF dungeons. I could probably return to the initial crossroads from here (though I can't actually leave the mines before completing my mission, owing to an aversion to being magically sought out and forced to watch as the Magicians extract my still-beating heart and mix it into some potion), but I don't think there's anything to gain by so doing. There is, technically, nothing to stop me repeating any of my previous encounters, which is something of a flaw, but there are no rewards so impressive as to make it worth doing so again.

Behind the door is a flight of stairs, which I opt to ascend. At the top I find a door and a passageway, and behind the door is Galthazzeth's workshop, operated by Worker Antmen and the Zombies of adventurers who failed at this quest, supervised by the big G himself. Just the sort of place where that Firestorm scroll could do some satisfactory mayhem. Alas, I'm no Wizard, and botch it. What's worse, my bungled attempt attracts Gally's attention, and he sets his Zombies on me. They don't get far, though, as a medallion I took from the Goblin guard, inscribed with a 'G' rune, causes them to back off. Could be a magical ward, could just be that they really don't like the font it's written in. These things bother some people, and geekery that intense is liable to persist even after death.

Recklessly, I attack the Antmen, and despite not being armed with a kettle, I prevail. Galthazzeth prepares to cast a spell, but this is where my having retained the spear pays off, as I get a chance to distract him by throwing the spear. Okay, so I could have done just the same with one of the daggers I grabbed from some other denizen, but I gave up an insect-themed shield for this spear, so I'm going to use it! I have to roll to see if I hit, and score equal to my Skill, but Mr Davis is no Andrew Chapman, so that's good enough. A typo here implies that Rincewind has turned up out of the blue, but he's gone before he can complicate matters.

Before Galthazzeth can try casting another spell, I close with him, and find that his Skill is equal to mine plus my Attack Strength bonus. Could be nasty, but I downed one of those Potions of Fortune during a quiet moment, and use Luck to hammer his Stamina into the ground. He teleports away from what should have been a killing blow, but only manages a short hop, so I give chase, cornering him in a laboratory, where he sets his Clone Slime on me. It's not much of a fighter, but keeps spawning humanoid figures (which are even worse in battle) to attack me until it finally runs out of Stamina.

Being a traditionalist, I set the laboratory ablaze before resuming my pursuit of Galthazzeth. He's not doing too well himself, and I catch sight of him across a gorge spanned by a rope bridge. Three guesses as to what he's trying to do. Trying and. alas, succeeding (shoulda had another of those Potions of Fortune after my little act of arson - I do so even as the bridge falls). Still, it's only a shallow gorge, and I hope that the river running through it is similarly shallow. Well, it's deep enough to house a Man-Octopus, but my renewed Luck enables me to make short work of the thing.

Meanwhile, the G-man is out of luck, and out of clever tricks by the time I catch up with him. Mission accomplished, but I still have to get out alive. Luckily for me, he has a Potion of WHAT? Skill? I'm sure it was Strength in the Yearbook. Quick check, and yup, I'm right. But I'm playing the original version, so I must remain hanging onto life by a thread for now. Kick the corpse for carrying something so unhelpful. Then again, if it had been a Potion of Strength, the sensible thing would have been for him to neck it and restore his Stamina before I caught up to him, so maybe it's for the best.

He also has a scroll, but he's not the Snow Witch, so I need not worry about reading it. It is, in fact, a map, depicting a nearby maze with a star marked at the centre. Curiosity gets the better of me, compelling me to see what the star signifies. Oh, just the source of Galthazzeth's power. Might as well smash it while I'm here. Except that there's a guard, and this ain't no Goblin. As much Skill as the man himself, and two attacks per round. Even with Luck, two hits will take me down.

They do. So near and yet so far (and why couldn't I eat Provisions before entering the maze, eh?).

[a moderator]

The Land of Changes by Ruth Pracy

This is a sequel to The Floating City, and the last Warlock mini to have D&D stats alongside the FF ones. Several years ago I wrote a review of it (now archived at Demian's gamebook site), and from my repeated attempts at the adventure back then, I remember an extremely annoying unavoidable bit in which 3 out of 4 choices lead to Instant Death. Regrettably, I do not remember which is the non-lethal choice.

An unspecified length of time after The Floating City (a variant in which I didn't get swallowed up by a glacier, that is), I get homesick and decide to return to the lands of Summer. From where I am, the best way to get there is through the Autumn region, which is reputed to get pretty freaky at times. Still, there's no alternative here, so off I go...

There's little likelihood that the character I roll up could have survived the climactic battle in TFC, but stranger things have happened coughGalontheBirdmancough. Entering the forest that is Autumn, I soon get the sense that I am not alone, and decide to tread carefully. This enables me to spot and avoid a concealed net, and makes me far more confident than is likely to be good for me.

Before long I reach a glade containing a stone with a hole bored in it. As I recall, that's none too far from the end of the adventure, which suggests that I've missed great chunks of story. Not good. I check out the stone, which proves to be self-bored, and thus inherently magical. Well, actually, thanks to a typo, this is identified as 'Self-Bored Stoned', which sounds like a group of out-of-their-heads hippies all going, "I'm not interested in being me!" Nevertheless, it is a stone, and folklore claims that magical things may be seen through it, so I peer through the hole. Who lives in a glade like this? Uh-oh, it's the Gwyllion, a bunch of supernatural nasties. I can only see them while looking through the hole, but I can't exactly fight them with my face pressed up against a stone, so I bravely run away. My high Luck ensures a safe getaway, but I expect that this is a brief reprieve.

Indeed, I soon discover that I am lost, and the epileptic trees start their rustling as I reach a junction. One direction seems as good as another, so I head left. All of a sudden Spring is here, but I anticipate little chance to go poisoning pigeons in the park. The time lapsey goings-on around me induce nausea, and I stagger along the path until I spot a Mazzamarieddu, a wind spirit that's probably not as useful in Scrabble as one might think. It 'can only travel when it sees the blood of a murdered man', which could form the basis for a very weird detective series, but that's beside the point. Somehow I can tell that this 'spinning cloud of air and vapour' is facing away from me, so I sneak past it.

Further on I see what appears to be a large, spherical bird's nest. Punctuation and lack of capitalisation suggest that that is a bird's nest which is large and spherical, rather than a nest belonging to an oversized representative of the possibly dreaded Spherical Bird species, so I take a closer look. Opening the door (I wasn't aware that they were a standard feature of birds' nests), I enter and see the Moss Maiden, who is doing six different household chores simultaneously. While women are reputedly much better at multi-tasking than men, that's just showing off.

If she were as good with weapons as she is with spinning wheel, needle, broom, saucepan and duster, she'd be a formidable opponent. Maybe a 1 got left off the front of her Skill, because as I remember, she's pretty useless. Not that that matters, as I'm not going to attack her this time. I give a friendly greeting, and get an unnecessary Stamina boost. She gives me a choice between helping with the housework and going to sleep, and I go for the slightly more heroic of the two. Boldly I attack the encroaching dust. Fearlessly I wield cold steel and give it a good shine. With remarkable tenacity I tackle grime. The pointed implement in my hand does not rest until every hole has been patched. And so on.

At last my work is done, and the Moss Maiden points out that my skills could probably have been put to better use. It's so nice to feel appreciated. She says she can turn back time and give me a chance to be braver and bolder and wash up the wine glasses *before* the greasy saucepans, or send me home, or give me what help she can in facing the perils that lie ahead. While going home was my intention at the start of the adventure, actually doing what I set out to do counts as failure in this adventure (Ruth Pracy has some seriously wacky ideas about what constitutes heroism), and I'm not sure that going onwards in my apparently ill-prepared state is wise, so I take the Cher option.

Despite being sent back in time, I am able to retain everything I acquired while getting this far. Which would be a good deal more impressive if I'd got anything other than a sensation of nausea. However, there is a twist to this 'back in time' lark, as I wind up not where and when I once was, but w&w I would have been if I hadn't been so foolish as to exercise caution right back at the start. Yes, I'm in a net. The captive of a mob of Brownies, and not the pre-Girl Guide type (though I'm sure they can be just as dangerous as the Little People in their own way). A cut rope brings me down to earth, and the Brownies indicate that they want me to go with them. Okay, I'll chance it, but if this ends in a camp-fire singalong of Kumbayah, there's going to be trouble.

They lead me to their village, which brings a Luck bonus redundant to anyone who hasn't done the Time Warp, and introduce me to an unpleasant-looking old woman beside a fire. No songs, but I don't like the way she's wielding that poker. Still, boldness appears to be what is required of me, so I take my place next to her. And she gets me between the eyes with a branding iron. But this is no Instant Death, just a test of fortitude (well, Luck), which I pass, receiving a Mark of True Sight (which reveals the woman's beauty, possibly inner) and a small horn I can blow to summon help. Now I'm starting to get somewhere.

The Brownies are impressed with my new look, and give me a hearty meal to restore the Stamina I lost falling from the net. The next morning they give me a tour of the village, providing me with an opportunity to steal a few diamonds from the cabbage patch if I'm that way inclined (some aspects of this adventure are so surreal as to be beyond parody), and then I set off again. Before I leave, I am presented with some extra Provisions (including a string of onions and garlic) and a Brownie knife. Back when I saw the Gwyllion, I was asked if I had a knife, so I suspect that this may come in handy if I find myself in the glade again.

On my way out, I see what could be an Ent, and go closer in the hope that the tree won't harm me. Some kind of metamorphosis commences, but I'm not feeling queasy yet, so I keep watching. Next moment, the tree's a green-skinned woman, who kisses extra Luck into me. At some point between now and the end of this write-up, I shall throw in a completely false bit of nonsense, and see if anyone can distinguish what I've made up from the more bizarre aspects of the adventure itself.

Soon I reach that glade again, and approach the stone to find out if the Gwyllion are still there. This time I see a vision things that wouldn't be out of place in the Book of Revelation: strange figures riding antlered steeds across stormy skies, frogs raising rabbits from the dead, evil things fleeing, the blowing of a horn like the one I was given... Oh, and the Gwyllion are still there, but now I have a much wider range of things to choose from, only half of which are in my inventory. In view of Ms Pracy's tendency to provide some options with the sole purpose of then saying, "You are SO stupid you deserve to die," to anyone who takes them, I'm guessing that brandishing the garlic will lead to a short and lethal lecture on the difference between Vampires and Gwyllion. From past attempts I remember that blowing the horn prompts the revelation that Gwyllion are like an arcane mute button, rendering that item useless. That only leaves the knife. Well, if I have my way, some of the Gwyllion are going to die.

Blimey! It defeats them without any of that messy combat nonsense. The stone sings a song and vanishes, leavng behind a crown, which I take. Continuing on my way, I reach a ruined tower, which I seem to recall contains a nasty but probably non-lethal fight. Evading it may not be in my best interests, so I risk entering. Inside is the dreaded rogue (and somewhat rouge) Brownie Redcap, who takes his name from his propensity for dyeing his headgear in the blood of his victims, and must be a welcome sight for bored Mazzamarieddus. Even taking the time travel into account, it's taken a remarkably long time to get into a fight.

Pracy evidently expects poor fighers in this adventure, as Redcap has 10 Stamina, but the only direction at the end of the section is for anyone who manages to survive 6 rounds of combat, with no acknowledgement of the possibility of actually killing him before then. Not that there's much chance of that here, but I get in a couple of decent blows before the time limit, after which I scare Redcap off by quoting Scripture at him, and take one of his teeth as a souvenir.

Continuing on my way, I reach the Moss Maiden's nest again, and my True Sight convinces me to pay her another visit. This time round the interior looks palatial, and its occupant beautiful. Her hugs still restore Stamina, though, and after that run-in with Redcap, I could do with the healing. Randomly getting the idea of giving her a present, I decide to find out if she moonlights as the Tooth Fairy, which proves an inspired choice. It turns out that Redcap teeth confer invulnerability on their bearers (though there was little indication of their doing so while in his mouth). I might have been better off keeping it for myself (though doubtless Pracy would have found a loophole and killed me sooner or later if I had done), but for handing it over I can have a reward. The choice is between my greatest wish and my heart's desire, and (while there's no indication in the text at this point) picking the wrong one means Failure.

I get it right, and my reward is the chance to go on a new quest. For some people, that might be on a par with socks for Christmas, but ruthless Ruth clearly thinks that it's the best present ever. I can learn how to get past the star-high mountains at the edge of the world and find the secret of the Universe itself (incidentally, section 42 is a 'use the wrong item and get redirected to Instant Death' paragraph), if only I swear to undertake the quest or die in the attempt.

Do I swear? ****, yeah! In response, the Moss Maiden gives me a crystal orb and a ball of yarn, tells me that her name is Lina, and the letter of it may help me, and reveals her secret, which is...
that I should seek the holder of the secret. Well, that was certainly worth pledging my life for.

Resuming my journey, I reach a rock pillar engraved with four letters: A, J, L and Z. Pressing the right one will open the way forward, any other will kill me. Now, Lina did tell me that the letter of her name might help me, so you'd think that 'L' would be the right one. Ms Pracy presumably thought that that was too obvious, as I remember making that mistake and getting atomised (or was it drowned or crushed?) back when I was reviewing this.

That leaves three possibilities. I pick the one that didn't appear in the title of a televised Doctor Who story until 2007. It's another of the wrong ones. The ground turns to quicksand. That would be 'die in the attempt', then, so at least Lina's happy.

[a moderator]

Deadline to Destruction by Gavin Shute

This is a sequel to Appointment With F.E.A.R., and as I won that one here, I shall dust off the character I used in that attempt. I must have bought the magazine on the way to school, as I remember the Silver Crusader rescuing a (non-supervillain-in-disguise) cat during the journey.

A little while after the defeat of Vladimir Utoshki and his cronies, an inexplicable power cut afflicts Titan City. Somewhat implausibly, at first everybody only notices that the radios and TVs aren't working, and only later does the shutting down of everything else attract any attention - even at midday, there are going to be a lot of lights on indoors, and I imagine that in the hospitals, the power loss would have been noticeable for reasons other than the abrupt interruption in the broadcast of Going for Gold being watched by assorted geriatrics in the common room.

The next day, there's another power cut, only this time the TVs and radios are unaffected, so the costumed criminal responsible can hijack the airwaves and gloat. The masked miscreant in question calls himself the Dynamo, and demands to be made ruler of the Earth, or he'll start doing really nasty stuff. Just to prove that his threats aren't hollow, he's going to destroy Titan City in a week. How very obliging of him to wait long enough that a superhero might manage to track him down before he can put his plan into action.

David Stevens' accompanying illustrations suggest that he has no interest in the 'could be male or female' aspect of the Crusader, unless the Ms Lafayette variant is extremely flat-chested and in the habit of wearing a tie to work.

My starting clues are that the villainous Mr Obesity is in town, and liable to be heading for a branch of McWimpy's, and that Cyanide Cecil will probably hit Titan City Chemical Plant before long. No villains from AWF appear in this adventure (not even the mentioned-but-unseen Ocean Behemoth), so any time author Gavin Shute wants a bad guy with a similar gimmick to one of Steve Jackson's creations, we get an inferior knock-off like CC here.

The adventure begins. None of the newspapers are taking the Dynamo's threats seriously. Well, it's not as if Titan City's ever been in any real danger from a self-proclaimed supervi- Okay, there was the Titanium Cyborg, but that was different, I mean this Dynamo hasn't even demonstrated any kind of ability to cause troub- All right, I live in a city full of morons! On my way to work I see a police car race round the corner, and gunshots ring out. Looks like I'm going to be late in again.

It turns out that the crime in progress is a simple hostage situation, without even a fancy-named villain. I'm too bored to do anything clever, and just kick my way into the building. The gunman panics and fires at me, missing, and I pull out the silly sound effects again.

BINK! QUAT! FREP! SAS!

Having done my duty, I catch sight of film star Richard Gears, but don't have the clue about him, so there's no point in joining the queue for autographs. Instead, I decide to go shopping (I'm not even trying to keep the day job any more, am I?), and wander into the local branch of Cottonworth's (groan!). Shute then proceeds to brutally murder Steve Jackson's self-referential gag from FF book 17 (18 if you're a Wizard type) by having Gerry the Grass recommend Appointment With F.E.A.R. to me.

The hole in the fourth wall leads to two other sections of the store, and I head for the electrical department on the grounds that it's more likely to attract criminal types than the clothes department. There I see a man slipping a computer into his jacket (in 1986? It must make him look like he's pregnant with Cheltenham!), and duck behind a scissor-action sandwich toaster to change into my costume. That done, I try to apprehend him, and he shows off a mouthful of metal teeth. This goon even has the same name as the Bond film second-string villain with a similar dental set-up, but his Skill and Stamina prove him to be no Richard Kiel.

TING! PYOK! WERB! DUMF! VALC! RINSE AND SPIT!

Not only does he have no clues, I don't even get any Hero Points for removing the jugular-chomping psychopath from the streets. Rip-off! Still, fighting him has made me hungry, so I get to choose between visiting a swanky restaurant or a burger bar. Naturally I choose McWimpy's, and what was Shute thinking when he came up with the 'humorous' burger name that is the Big Kak? Is he expressing his opinion of the quality of fast food? Predictably, in waddles Mr Obesity, so I fight the flab.

BIM! WAK! FEP! CHO! DUN! ZYT! JEG! QRL! SVX! @%$! DIET!

Once I've hit the fat man often enough to make him blubber, I threaten him with reduced rations in jail, and in less time than it takes to say 'lawyer alleges human rights violation' he's spilling his guts (not literally) about the Dynamo's hideout. Naturally he only knows the street, not the house number, but it's a start all the same.

Back home I watch some TV, and a weak pun of a newsreader reveals that practically everyone still thinks the Dynamo is a joke. If he had any real panache, he'd interrupt the broadcast to say, "Let's see you laugh this off," and shut the station down for the rest of the evening, but I guess he's too busy muttering, "My time will come, oh yes," to himself to actually do anything.

Next morning my Crimewatch summons me to the Chemical Plant. On my way there I see a small child crying, and stop to find out what's wrong. After all, what hero would pass up the chance to sort out a trivial problem just because lives might be at stake? Her cat is stuck up a tree, so I climb up (why not fly?) and rescue it, getting clawed in the process, and then the Chemical Plant goes up in a huge toxic fireball that engulfs me, the girl, the cat and the whole of Titan City. Only kidding - in fact, my delay in responding to the urgent call makes no difference whatsoever because the disaster's on one of those Hollywood countdowns that only actually change while the camera is on them, and kittens are more photogenic than doom-laden LEDs. Or something.

Actually, upon arrival at the Plant I am informed that a burst pipe has caused a leak of a non-harmful but very expensive chemical. I sacrificed my lie-in for this? Grumpily, I squish both ends of the pipe together and hold them in place while the Welder does his stuff, losing some Stamina as a consequence of being exposed to the harmless chemical that's leaking out. I'm willing to believe that the foreman has been spouting spin here, rather than assuming that Shute and the editors never spotted the contradiction. "Thank you, Crusader! You've saved out money!"

This is, no doubt, a diversion caused by Cyanide Cecil while he raids the 'Really Harmless Chemicals, Honest' cupboard, so once I've finished coughing my lungs up and bandaging the burns on my hands, I go looking for him. He's there, of course, and threatens me with a vial that purportedly contains enough deadly virus to wipe out the entire city. He wouldn't be so quick to try and intimidate me with germs if he knew where I'd been eating yesterday. I advance on him, he throws the vial at me, and while I'm performing a quick analysis to confirm that it only contains water, he orders a taxi and gets away.

Either it's the weekend, or I've given up on the job again, as I must now choose between going home or heading to the swimming pool for 'a relaxing twenty lengths'. Yeah, right. And what exciting new threat do you think Shute has come up with to confront me at the baths? Captain Kipper? The Chlorinator? Heavy Petting? Nope, it's the exact same situation as cropped up at the pool in AWF, only this time the frozen waters are the handiwork of embittered ex-ice cream vendor Mr Frosty. Reluctant to fight in just my trunks (unless Titan City Municipal Baths are remarkably liberal, I'm definitely a man) in case the paparazzi are about, I hurry back to the changing room and slip into my costume while Mr Frosty is searching for his locker key. I kid you not, the line below his stats begins, 'If you flay the frigid fiend...' Someone didn't bother looking up the meaning of a word there, now did he?

BRR! GNN! VVH! JJL! TTK! DEFROST!

After the fight, Mr F just keeps unhelpfully saying, 'Electricity.' Maybe he's a big OMD fan, and is singing the chorus of their first single to cheer himself up. In any case, it's preferable to lots of tiresome screaming aboout having had his skin removed, so I think I was wise to avoid taking the text too literally.

My presence is requested at Laural's Rollerama, and I arrive just as a man is departing with his arms full of handbags and wallets. Yells of, 'Stop! Thief!' ring out. Nevertheless, it is not until a security guard emerges and indicates the departing man that I deduce the identity of the criminal perpetrating this machiavellian scheme. Considering how much my intellect is shining right now, it's not entirely out of character for me to respond by grabbing a nearby bin and throwing it at the man. Either I've missed an opportunity to lose Skill, or Shute has forgotten one of the fundamentals of Super Strength, as I must roll equal to or under my Skill on 2d6 to hit him, and if I get 14 or more, there's something wrong with my dice. Inevitably, the bin is on target. The guard gathers up the scattered wallets and handbags (and the way the passage is written, it appears that he also picks a couple of policemen off the ground), and I head off to the Police Station to see if anyone's handed in the IQ points I seem to have left lying around somewhere. On the way, I stop off for a free sample from the drugged orange juice stall that's just started doing business in the neighbourhood, and am startled to find myself blacking out...

Regaining consciousness (and probably saying something daft as I come round), I find myself strapped to a chair in a warehouse. The Dynamo is here too, both glowing and gloating, and apparently intent on getting me to take him as seriously as everyone else does. I mean, honestly! He has me at his mercy. A passing rat provides him with an opportunity to show off his Death-Touch. And what does he do? Tell me his plan, laugh maniacally, set an escapable-from trap and hurry off, no doubt to post his resubscription form for the Guild of Clichéd Villains. I break the straps, and even with my tartrazine-fuddled mind, I have no trouble working out that to deactivate the bomb I must cut either the red wire or the blue one. It is as obvious as it looks, and this is another 'no witnesses, so no Hero Points' job, so I gain only the chance to go home and sleep the hangover off.

My Crimewatch gets me up again, and today there are two emergencies immediately demanding my attention, one at the Dough-Play rubber factory, the other at Captain Fisheye's fish factory. Given Shute's sense of humour, the fish factory is liable to be a red herring, so I check out the other place.

An utterly redundant paragraph redirects me from where my last decision sent me to where the next encounter actually starts without telling me anything.

The manager greets me with, 'Hello, Silver Crusader. There's a strange plastic-like man running riot in my factory.' Positively Pinteresque dialogue, except for the words, which would make even George Lucas wince. Still, I figure out that master-contortionist Elastic Eddie is up to some kind of no-goodnitude here, and enter the factory, where I have to choose an aisle to explore - left, central, or right. I choose the correct one, and Eddie transforms himself into a giant fist and hurls himself at me. I choose to fight fist with fist, and his elasticity is facing a long stretch behind bars. He has on him a puzzle, the solution to which is the Dynamo's room number. Which makes perfect sense.

While I'm dropping Eddie off at the Police Station, I decide to see if anything interesting is going on there. No members of staff claiming to be from the early 21st century, but my old friend who's never been mentioned before knows absolutely nothing of use. Also present is Gerry the Grass, who is equally clueless. Well, that was a productive afternoon.

The next day, I must track down the Dynamo or he will put his evil plan into action. Now, unless that orange juice put me out for days, it's been nowhere near a week since he said, 'A week from now I will destroy Titan City just to show the rest of the world that I mean business. Muahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha.' I guess he got fed up with the 'Laugh at the Dynamo' slot on News at Ten. Still, I know the street, I know the room number, and while some people might think that I'd be better off knowing which building on the street contains that room before I start kicking in doors, Gavin Shute and the Titan City Carpenters and Locksmiths' Union do not share such an opinion.

Led to the right house by my Crusadey sense, I find a massive computer and - dun dun daah! - the Dynamo, who promptly surrenders. Call me paranoid if you will, but that seems ever slightly too easy. I pay considerable attention to the man behind the curtain, who turns out to be somewhat less illusory than his 'It's a fair cop, guv!' counterpart over by the lethal booby trap. The real Dynamo is positively abuzz with electricity, and would probably be significantly affected by the Circuit Jammer I used on the Titanium Cyborg, but I don't seem to have that any more. Maybe I flushed it down the toilet to prevent the alligators in the sewers from developing their own technology with which to subjugate humanity, or something. Still, I can fight him without any risk of Instant Death even if I don't have an off switch for him: it'll just be more difficult.

BZZT! FIZZ! ZZAP! KRAKL! PENG! VOLT! OHM! WATT!

And my electrocuted corpse slides to the floor.

[a moderator]

The Temple of the Pharaoh by Tom Williams

This adventure may have suffered a little from poor timing: rival magazine Proteus had brought out a rather good Egyptian-themed adventure a couple of months before (it remains my favourite mummy-orientated adventure to this day - well, this hour of this day, as it's possible that the impending playthrough of Temple will result in a radical reappraisal), and the comparison did TTotP no favours.

Anyway, I'm an archaeologist, who has for some time been searching in vain for the lost Temple of Terratakamen, affectionately known as 'King Terror' because of the brutality of his regime. Fortuitously, I discover the hidden valley containing the temple during a solo flight in the desert. Less fortuitously, I then crash the plane, and while I survive, I'm a bit stranded in the middle of nowhere. I thus resolve to pass the time until someone notices my absence and sends out a rescue party by exploring the temple. Not entirely dissimilar to the set-up for House of Hell, except that I start off with a weapon and am sufficiently tough not to drop dead from fright.

The temple is surprisingly well-preserved - there's even still oil on the door hinges. I try a door, which opens (though not from the other side, as I discover after stepping through). So, wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, or blunder around like a cretin? I take the sensible option, and before long I can make out more doors. Keep waiting, attack the door I came through with an axe, or try a new door? Unusually for FF, south is an option, so I try that.

The door opens onto a room containing a gold goblet, a bowl of gruel (still hot, so it can't belong to the mummy bear), a rope and a spear. I may only take one of these items because mumblemumble, and as the spear carries an unhelpful Skill bonus, I pick the rope. Stepping back out, (and disregarding the already tried option) I only have the choice of trying the north door or waiting, which rather suggests that using the axe is as dim an idea as it looked. Or it's a one-shot chance at escape and victory, but unless there's a Skill penalty hiding behind the north door, that spear suggests it's more of a ticket to weaponlessness.

Behind the north door is a dimly-lit room, with wall paintings showing the torture and killing of many people. Some of the victims appear to be wearing modern styles, but I assume that the poor lighting is causing me to make mistakes, which just goes to show that it's not only the lighting that's dim. I've just come from a room containing hot food, so it's obvious that this place is still inhabited, and those paintings could be less than a week old. Ah, says head-Scully, but nobody's discovered this place in centuries, so your interpretation of the art is still anachronistic. Minor correction, points out my inner Mulder: nobody has discovered it *and returned to civilisation to tell the world*, and these pictures give a big clue as to why they never made it back.

A ladder leads to a higher level, so I investigate. The upper room is empty, but has a window overlooking a courtyard. The wall's a bit steep, but climbing down is the obvious way onwards, and isn't it lucky that I decided against a useless bonus, valuables of questionable utility, and the logistical fun of dragging around a bowl of hot gruel?

The courtyard is surrounded by an arcade on three sides. The far wall is exposed to the sun, has a door set into it, and is decorated with huge statues of warriors, plus the odd chained-up corpse. South has served me well so far, so I head that way around the arcade. Alas, it turns out that I'm not the only one to appreciate the shade. An assortment of venomous snakes can be found resting in the shadows, and they resent having to share. A fight ensues, and their poison does a staggering zero extra Stamina damage every time they win a round. Not that they ever do, since an archaeologist with an axe is always going to be a match for a bunch of asps that has him surrounded, right?

After that I'm forced to head straight across the courtyard to the door. There's an inscription on the statues' bases, which I translate as meaning that the statues are there to do bad things to intruders. None too surprisingly, they animate, and I must choose fight or flight, given that I have no items to use against them. The 'check your pack' option suggests that there may be interesting things to be found in the northern arcade. Either that, or the statues have an unfortunate vulnerability to gruel (is that really so much more unlikely than a Night Horror's being killed by a spot of bell-ringing?) Running away to a locked gate wouldn't be very clever, and I doubt that there's time to climb the rope, so I'll have to fight.

While their Skill is no higher than mine, they get lots of good rolls, and my Luck isn't high enough to be much help in battle. Guess there's going to be another dead body hanging on the wall.

[vastariner]

Quick critique of The Dervish Stone.

It's difficult to criticize it fairly because it was a winning competition entry. So the author was probably 11-14 at the time. Plus we were still on 9-10 FF works and the genre was developing. Therefore it/s got some of the non-playtested mistakes; you can restore points before you lose them, for instance, and you could get a major potentially game-breaking item at the start yet are forced into using it at a point where it is not really needed.

Plus the right, or best, route looks to be Byzantine and incongruous.

Interestingly Warlock 1 suggested a desert adventure for an entry, so we get Star Wars meets Indiana Jones. The ending is particularly derivative.

But there are three fun bits that I found intriguing.

One: you get the chance to walk through a pool of light.  That was a fun twist on the Deathtrap Dungeon one, it's surely an obvious shoutout.

Two: there is one ending where you Test Your Luck for it.  If unlucky, game over.  If lucky, then game still over, but it's not that bad an ending, and it's a strong hint that you go back and give it another go, this time with a 5GP bonus.

Three: the aerial combat, though intensely confusing (and with perhaps the most incongruous "winning" option going - you're battling a goblin on the back of a griffin, so you get the chance to nick his boots) is something that could be developed into a terrific game mechanic/sub-quest.

[vastariner]

Temple of Testing.

Has about the best introduction of any book; great way to bring in the whole potion thing. And I liked the winning para as well, although Crown of Kings being on Titan jars with the Chinese and Tibetan and whatever stuff in the adventure.

The problems with the adventure are...

-it's open door, face problem, bash it, move on;

-it's compulsory to map it because of the unfair "which way did you come from?" questions - heck, I wouldn't be writing it down if I were in there, why should I be forced to now?

-the regen is really there because 200 references is too short for it, and it makes the adventure ludicrously unfair. Bad enough to face (in the ninja) essentially Sk12 St8 and THEN Sk11 St8 with 3 St damage once - but to have to do so again instantly?;

-probably needs a "teleport out" option otherwise they'd kill all their students - maybe with a re-roll option;

-there are too many very dull fights. E.g. 5 Gremlins with max skill 5. Even Sk7 will beat those without much of a problem, but it requires at least (I think) FIFTY-TWO 2d6 rolls to finish them all off;

-the win-or-lose question at the end is STUPID;

-there's no real engagement with the adventure, it really is just going into rooms and bashing.

It's a great idea for an adventure, and there are some fun ideas for opponents/traps. The execution was lacking though, especially the fights.

[vastariner]

Temple of the Pharaoh: OK, it's Indiana Jones, some of the plotting is neat, but it suffers hugely from lack of detail. E.g. you get an option to investigate corpses. One of which has a camera. It asks you if you want to look at corpse 1, 2, or 3. Erm, which is which?

And it seems a bit counter-archaeological that there is a fully functioning Egyptian temple and the purpose of the adventure is to destroy it...

[Peter]

Jul 14, 2022 11:38:28 GMT vastariner said:

And it seems a bit counter-archaeological that there is a fully functioning Egyptian temple and the purpose of the adventure is to destroy it...

Haha. Good point.

[vastariner]

Deadline to Destruction notes:

-high Skill makes most of it a piece of cake. If you start with Super Strength, you don't even need the McGuffin to win with ease, which makes this book somewhat unbalanced;

-playing it with ETS was frustrating because a couple of times you do not have an item to help - YET YOU HAVE A STUN GUN WHICH WOULD HELP IN THOSE INSTANCES THE BOOK SAYS YOU HAVE NOTHING. But I put that down to the constraints of having 200 references;

-the route to the McGuffin is random, pure fluke (and indeed unheroic fluke) to get to it, but then again that's like its inspiration. It's far too copy-FEAR for my liking, better to find another route to it;

-I like the idea that the Dynamo is such a pathetic Johnny-no-mates - comes across as some bedroom nerd that nobody thinks is THAT serious a villain but who manages to find something fun.

It's a pretty fun adventure regardless, the writing makes you want to go on, even if it does suffer the FEAR/CYOA thing of branching off in irrelevant ways (e.g. if you don't take the option to go to the swimming pool, you never hear about a villain that has frozen it).

-the cut the blue wire thing is surely a shoutout to Juggernaut?

[vastariner]

Rogue Mage notes:

-you have to deduct your TYL points in FF rules, but no such restriction in D&D. UNFAIR!

-the provisions rule is INSANE. You get a few to start and the chance to pick up a couple - but there is only ONE chance to eat ONE provision. Someone did not do the check;

-it's more sandboxy than most adventures. For the PC, the five-finger bookmark makes sense in, say Deathtrap Dungeon, because you would have the chance to think, actually, let's go back the other way. This adventure lets you do that in the choices more than most;

-the downside is a lot of choices are useless (in that they are just paragraphs leading to paragraphs), or very signposted (e.g. pushing the dead bandit into a room);

-you pick up a LOT of useless stuff. GPs for instance are a pension fund;

-the entire premise is illogical. In that there is no hint that this is the sort of mission that could not be sorted by sending a battalion in there. Especially given the mages themselves, who would surely be able to deal with the somewhat minuscule magical threat from Galthazzeh, who does not even need a magic sword to defeat him;

-are the pointless fights to build up D&D XP? SIX fights against Sk3 things are a total waste of energy.

[a moderator]

Nov 18, 2022 10:46:14 GMT vastariner said:

Rogue Mage notes:

-the provisions rule is INSANE. You get a few to start and the chance to pick up a couple - but there is only ONE chance to eat ONE provision. Someone did not do the check;

When this was reprinted in the 10th Anniversary Yearbook, they modified the rules to say that you could eat one Provision in any room after clearing it of enemies.

-are the pointless fights to build up D&D XP? SIX fights against Sk3 things are a total waste of energy.

If the Slime had been able to learn, so each successive wave of warriors had a slightly higher Skill, there could have been a hint of jeopardy to the encounter. As it is, it's just a load of tedious rolling and flipping back and forth.

[a moderator]

May 30, 2022 18:21:22 GMT vastariner said:

The Dervish Stone.

you get the chance to walk through a pool of light.  That was a fun twist on the Deathtrap Dungeon one, it's surely an obvious shoutout.

Given that this occurs during the Raiders of the Lost Ark-inspired sequence, at the point where the film features a spike trap triggered by stepping into a beam of light, I think it more probable that The Dervish Stone's spike trap triggered by stepping into the light is based on the one from the film than being a deliberate subversion of an aspect of Deathtrap Dungeon.

[a moderator]

I've been able to salvage some of Per Jorner's reviews of Warlock magazine mini-adventures (plus occaasional comments on the magazines themselves) from a no longer extant discussion group, so here they are:

Warlock 1-2: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

I've already reviewed TWoFM once and since this version is pretty much the same thing, I won't go on for too long about it. The first Warlock issue holds sections 1-273 (everything up to and including the first few undead encounters beyond the river) while the second contains 274-400 (the maze and the end sequence). As far as I could tell from my one slightly cheating playthrough, all the rooms, junctions, risks and rewards are in the same places, with one significant exception: the keys. As hinted in the introduction, a few of the keys have been moved slightly and the correct combination may not be the one you remember. There are some indirect consequences to this reshuffle as well, though I'm fairly sure the Y-shaped sticks are still useless.

If you haven't revisited the book in a long time, this could be a good opportunity to do so with a new perspective on what might be important and what's just a red herring. But the key hunt still means you have a fairly small chance of winning even if you get to the end; and the uneconomical design, especially in the maze, is more evident than ever. Interestingly, the intro has been rewritten so that you're not just heading into the mountain looking for riches, but to save the surrounding farmland from unspecified bad wizard influence. Of course there is no reference to this in the adventure proper, and the conclusion still mentions the possibility of staying to become the new (bad?) wizard.

Apart from the two title pages by Tim Sell, there are a couple of new and notable illustrations by Russ Nicholson: the close-up of the cave entrance, rather more impressive than in the book, and the Mazemaster, who probably doesn't get a lot of fresh air in that cramped chamber of his.

Random Details I Stumbled Upon And Compulsively Made A Note Of: Why does 249 ask you to pay an Escape penalty for leaving in between battles, when it explicitly says the remaining enemy doesn't even move towards you until the first one is well and slain? 48 (304) contains a string of seven sentences beginning with "he" or "his". 115 points to 114. 308 points to 307 and vice versa. 396 first tells you that you use keys from your backpack and sends you off to another paragraph, then says what happens if you don't have any keys. You can fight the ferryman, then run onto the bridge, then fall into the water and swim back to shore, then ring for the ferryman, then push his nose making it go BEEP, and man does that piss him off.

Three of the five monsters by Ian Livingstone in the Out of the Pit section in Warlock 1 have Skill 12. One has Skill 11.

Warlock 2: Caverns of the Snow Witch

The news section of Warlock 3 interestingly suggests that Caverns of the Snow Witch and House of Hell were not extended for book publication, but rather that they were shortened for magazine publication. The prevailing theory among readers on Caverns has been that the second half was tacked onto the first with limited regard for continuity or game balance. What is true, and how and to what extent each version of each book was affected by the arrangement, I assume only Ian and Steve themselves and possibly one or two Penguin editors know for sure.

Caverns of the Snow Witch is an insanely hard book and the first half on its own is no cakewalk either. You'll want stats in _at least_ the 10/20/10 range. And this will be of little help before you know the exact true path and can avoid pitfalls like losing a die's worth of Skill, having to face down a Skill 12, Stamina 14 enemy, or seeing your Luck drop to 0 because you have to test it repeatedly while never getting any bonuses. If you roll up stats by the book, expect more than one game to come to an early end.

Though there are some decent dungeon encounters - the kind of stuff I used to look for in a gamebook, admittedly - the whole is marred by its severity as well as its simplistic "do you or don't you" dualist approach to puzzles; and Livingstone' s utter reluctance to provide character for his villains is in evidence. About average for a magazine offering, I guess. Unlike Warlock of Firetop Mountain and House of Hell there are no significant differences from the book version, so there's little reason to play this if you have it.

The major bugs of the adventure are well known, so I'll highlight a few minor ones. You cannot "hurriedly cut blocks of ice out of the mountainside" with a sword - you just can't. Nor can you crush a metal ring under your foot. The White Dragon mysteriously loses its ice breath in 53. Why are you presented with silly choices such as whether to eat mouldy bread, if your character doesn't actually mean to go through with such a bold plan?

The art was done by Duncan Smith who also did Scorpion Swamp. I found his work somewhat by-the-numbers there and here as well, meaning I applaud the decision to commission new and more characterful art for the book. There are a few illustrations that do not have counterparts in the book (though it could just be that I've forgotten): the trapped Dwarf, the Mountain Elf, the White Dragon in mid-transformation, the Minstrel (or his legs anyway), and the Mammoth. The Yeti has a certain menacing quality to it, and the Snow Witch has a remarkably different design from the book - the bird ornament implies they were working off the same brief - but even here I much prefer Peter Andrew Jones' portrayal on the cover to Smith's black and white rendition.

In the same issue, "Sam, Cars and the Cuckoo" is a Car Wars-style short story by Australian novelist Garth Nix who didn't have a Wikipedia entry then but does now, set in an extremely aggressive yet not quite post-apocalyptic future. The numerous references to weaponry, technology and hazards are sometimes mildly amusing, but the end left me wondering if there was any other point to it.

Warlock 3: House of Hell

The Warlock edition of HoH is a shortened "remix" of the devilish den, with rooms and items moved around somewhat. I'm a fan of the book and quite enjoyed the opportunity to crack the mystery of the house again. In fact, in spite of Jackson's tendency to insert options whose only function is to mess with the reader's head, I'd say this is the best disposed and most enjoyable magazine-format adventure I've read so far: it does tons more with its 185 sections than most others do with 200.

There are four illustrations aside from the title page which are not in the Wizard reissue: the animal heads on page 39, the study on page 40 (which was redone for the book), the sacrifice on page 44, and Lord Kelnor on page 45 (redone somewhat differently for the book). Details in the picture on page 41 show that this illustration at least was commissioned with the magazine layout of the house in mind.

183 contains an unusual lapse into the future tense, which did not carry over to the book. 137 says you can use an item "at any appropriate time", which should perhaps more properly be something like "when it is hinted you can". If you go from 131 to 123, you end up getting a Fear point twice for making the same discovery. In the book this can happen, but there's also a way to avoid it. The references in 12 seem to have been exchanged, i.e. being Lucky should take you to 95 (changed in the book). The rules clearly and repeatedly state that the Skill bonus you get from a weapon can only negate your initial penalty, not take Skill above its Initial value - like the book. This also works out fine - unlike the book. It's not really convincing that you can escape unseen in 119. The Fear counter is likely to become the bane of your first few adventurers, but there's no minimum maximum value required for success.

I was able to solve the issue's crossword puzzle, even though I wouldn't quite consider some of the clues to be kosher. Market Mayhem is a board game with RPG elements by Ian Livingstone which is supposed to simulate a "multi-player brawl" in Port Blacksand. However, I can't help but think the rules seem incomplete, and despite character backgrounds amounting to "everybody hates you, and you hate everybody" I see little incentive for getting embroiled in early hostilities. Of the fourteen characters you can choose from, only one is female.

Warlock 4: The Dervish Stone

At the start of The Dervish Stone you learn from a hidden scroll of the existence of some sort of diamond... somewhere in a desert... at some point in time... supposedly. It's a rare desert, forest or mountain range in Generic Fantasyland that doesn't contain a tomb and a diamond _somewhere_, but nevertheless you decide to look for this particular one. Why? Probably rank stupidity, since the adventure doesn't even try to hint at some irrational conviction that fate will guide your steps to your goal (it will).

I don't think this is one of the more successful Warlock adventures. Right at the beginning there is almost a Sorcery! vibe, with a rough settlement, a chance to get thrown in jail together with an "elfin-like young man" and everything. Readers may or may not be amused to find that the adventure is a sly vehicle for a certain kind of references. But at some point you'll have to start using meta-logic to decide what is the right way, and you can guess that it is not one in which you don't play out the climactic set piece to the end. To win you must essentially seek danger (of the not-at-all-related- to-quest kind) but figure out by trial and error the least costly way to do so, pass a number of unavoidable dice rolls, and get a couple of life-or-death choices right. It's not too hard, it's just not very entertaining when rather than perform tasks that might logically take you closer to your goal you must instead play along with what makes the adventure happy and wait to be randomly deposited in the right place as a reward. By the time I got to the end I didn't find the references even vaguely amusing, just dry and unimaginative. The adventure's not HORIBLY BAROKEN, mind you, just something I wasn't very sorry to be done with.

The first section says you find 20 gold pieces; I assume these are the same 20 gold pieces you are supposed to start with. The name Twin Sun Desert is odd if you think about it. 158 awards a Luck bonus when you couldn't have lost any; 110 and 139 award Skill bonuses when you couldn't have lost any. I assume that 50 means the item was lost; that by "point" 87 means "Stamina point"; that 183 doesn't mean "Escape" in the technical sense; that 160 means Stamina instead of Skill (which would mean the Potion of Skill is entirely useless, but still); that 23 means "have and want to use"; that if you don't have enough money to pay in 71 you should get neither the Potion nor the Luck point; and that 162 should read "Skill" in both places. The penalty for not eating in 127 comes out of the blue a bit. 27 says you "get out and continue", then sends you to a section where you must make a roll in order to get out. Why do the Nomads give you a hint in 103 and 181 but not in 53, the "best" outcome of that encounter? It's possible to find a weapon that grants automatic victory against a Skill 7 enemy. Traders apparently attend the same school of magic as Beggars. I liked the random mention of Hellrats (why have ordinary ones?). You always have the Boots of Leaping in 29 and 155, and it's extremely unlikely you wouldn't have them in 48, meaning about a dozen paragraphs are wasted (including an illustrated one). I'm not sure the word "dervish" is used properly. You can fight a great number of Cyndi Laupers.

Now for the rest of the issue. It feels as if at this point the magazine is branching out a bit in terms of content, though the page count is the same, and most of the ads are from Games Workshop (one of which features a jigsaw puzzle of the FF3 cover that I wouldn't mind dropping into my lap). Iain McCaig has drawn a 2-page presentation which shows off his EC Comics influences as well as his fondness for dinosaurs, which could have you thinking that the decision to gloriously portray the FF6 Pit Fiend as a tyrannosaurus was not Ian Livingstone' s idea. Speaking of Ian, he does a little piece on traps: "Traps can be simple - for instance, if you walk through a left-hand door, something unpleasant is going to happen to you, but if you walk through the right-hand door, you will benefit somehow." There are two strips of material. The first contains medium to minor funny but keeps it coming at a decent enough pace. The second contains minor funny only, unless you count the... well, I shan't spoil the "wtf" factor. In the letters section a reader complains about the use of book material for the first three magazine adventures, eliciting a "humph" response from the editor. The articles with optional rules for the FF RPG do little to allay my suspicion that the FF system makes for a very poor RPG mechanic, and that tacking things onto it isn't really going to help. At one point you are required to "roll at least 1 or more with an extra die roll". The new magic system involves rolling against Skill, meaning any great wizard would of necessity also be a great warrior, and would be better off wading into battle than casting a spell likely to do more harm to the caster than to the target (seriously, how does this stuff get printed?). Jonathan Green is listed as a winner in the "create your own adventure" competition from Warlock 1. An odd FF ad on the back cover addresses the reader first as "hero", then as "fool".

Since I already reviewed the adventures in Warlocks 5 and 6, I will sum up my impressions of those issues here, starting with 5: Under the interesting heading "FF Boobs" we are told of an error in Shamutanti Hills which "will be changed in subsequent reprints". But the Wizard edition of the book still has the error. The strip "Arkenor and Max" has now gained a title but the funny is pretty much restricted to minor and comes at a slower pace. The letters editor correctly picks "The Brain of the Lost Prince" as the top choice in a list of suggested gamebook titles. Another reply foreshadows Return to Firetop Mountain, title and all! In the Place the Face feature I was able to identify most non-Sorcery! pictures, but the mermaid doesn't ring any bells. I was mostly stumped by the crossword, and looking at the solution I decided a lot of the clues are _really_ not kosher (though once I caught on to the puzzlemaker' s way of thinking I could solve just a little bit more). The map in the Sorcery! ad would have been quite attractive as a poster - maybe such an item exists? This time the back cover calls you first "mortal", then "hero".

And in Warlock 6: More outside advertisements are now showing up under the supervision of ad manager Jon Sutherland: I count eleven full-page ads aside from the inside covers, where before there was none, meaning there should be roughly eleven less pages of content. Jamie Thomson makes an appearance but quickly meets his end by ritual disembowelment, so he's not going to feature in any future issues. Reviewer Paul Cockburn doesn't really say anything about Temple of Terror or Seas of Blood except that they're difficult, then goes on to slate Super Endless Quest for being "complicated" , "very poorly written" and "heavily over-dramatised" . The strip of material slips further, with not a single gag of note this time. The winning entries in the cartoon competition from Warlock 4 don't have me itching to see the rejected submissions. The letters editor claims British gamebooks "have been translated into hundreds of languages" - does Demian's index bear this out? There's a funny letter from a reader who interpreted the rules for fighting multiple enemies introduced in the Boat House in FF1 to mean that the "secondary" monster can _never_ be injured even after you dispatch the "primary" one. Harsh! Adventure submissions to Warlock can use "the rules of any gamebook or role-playing game", indicating that "concept copyright" was not a big issue of the day.

Warlock 11: The Land of Changes

Ruth Pracy's The Floating City was a decent affair with some non-standard encounters and concepts, which could easily have been trimmed down to half its paragraph count. The Land of Changes continues the story with basically more of the same. Again you could probably cut down the adventure from 200 sections to 100 just by removing all padding, and to even less by working on several structural redundancies. On top of that there is a lot of attention given to the consequences of clearly inferior choices. When it comes to the morality inherent in the game, Pracy comes off as something of a Self-Parodied Author. It's actually a bit morbid the way your potential allies will inflict gleeful torture on you if your behaviour reflects apprehension or prudence. One must agree about the nice descriptive passages, and a heavily edited version of TLoC could have been a good, simple diversion, but with all the page-flipping and arbitrariness it's barely playable.

In his review of TLoC Ed listed many flaws great and small, to which I could add several niggles of my own. The introduction implies that your place of origin is unknown or irrelevant, then two sentences further down states that you're about to head "home" to Summer. There's no explanation given initially for why you can't bypass Autumn when going from Winter to Summer; at first I surmised that the regions are located in a wheel-like cosmology, but it is implied at the very end that they form concentric rings with Winter along the rim and Summer in the centre, with Autumn-Spring separating them. The hero apparently doesn't mind being branded by strangers for no stated reason; that would be odd where I live, but here it is a display of "courtesy and bravery". In 56 and 142 a sword inflicts only half damage on the Mazzamarieddu, in 38 it doesn't. 132 apparently thinks 56 says "win" four Attack Rounds when it really says "survive", making it unclear which to use. In 140 you manage to "rush" despite the fact that you are "stiff and weak" and "your limbs don't seem to want to work". In 55 your wounds vanish, but you don't necessarily have any. The transition from 135 to 153 is so uncharacteristically sudden that you must wonder if there wasn't some mistake, or the author was absurdly running out of free sections as suggested by Ed. It is possible to acquire an item which grants automatic victory... over a Skill 3 enemy. 136 would normally be taken to mean you fight the Brownies as one enemy, although their stats are almost the same as in 85 where it says to fight them one at a time. Three of the items listed in 39 can only be had at that point if you have taken the "start over but keep your stuff" option; ironically, this also means you could potentially have a "bad" knife as well as a "good" knife, which is understandably overlooked. 120 assumes you got the yarn in 126, although you could also have got it in 111 or 135. 75 and 112 are identical but for one word ("as" versus "and"). 72 is unused; either 124 or 138 could have been made to point there instead of 118, but it would still have been a fine example of redundancy. Finally, there _is_ a reference to insects, in 99.

PDF note: There's errata at the end, which didn't stop me from finding a far greater number of other typos, presumably OCR artefacts. For instance, in 13 you are told that hideous females "ate" (instead of "are") the Gwyllion. In 43 you're told that "your adventurer ends here", which, though it may technically be true, is non-standard.

[Per]

These should be the remaining ones:

Warlock 5: Dungeon of Justice

OK, first off, the premise is obviously nothing more than a lame excuse to put the player character in a Deathtrap Dungeon-like maze. The backstory as told is one of the lamer I can think of; clearly if these elves (who, by the way, are a butt-ugly lot) believed that you'd just killed their chief, they'd not haul you away and put you in a stupid dungeon (containing among other things a cavern so vast it "produces its own atmosphere"), they'd just shoot you. Well, since few are likely to be acquitted in this particular trial, maybe they're just sadistic bastards who like to sit back and watch some random suckers get killed messily by sundry traps and monsters. The only other possibility would be that they are all utter morons, considering how good their precious maze is at doing what it's ostensibly for.

Gameplay is a bit dull. A large amount of time is spent just choosing between different tunnels running on different planes. Indeed, as you map the place you may be amazed at just how many corridors and junctions one can fit within 200 paragraphs. Unfortunately the explanation is that there isn't a whole lot of interest _in_ the maze. I got to the end without difficulty in my first game (but also without finding the Golden Idol). Gaining access to more hard-to-find areas in subsequent games was only momentarily satisfying, as nothing I did seemed to advance my cause. Suffice to say that if and when you do win, it won't be because you figured something out, or because you visited the right combination of rooms, or because you brought down the toughest monsters. It'll just happen and not be satisfying, and then you can go on to wonder about those elves' idea of justice.

Tip: don't take the Potion of Skill as there is no use for it. Style points are awarded for the Porcupines and the purple crab. It's also funny that the illustrator apparently misread "giant two-headed termites" as "two giant termites". Overall the art is decent, excepting that the elves are a bunch of butt-ugly clones in identical suits.

Errata: Paragraph 148 doesn't cover the "equal to" case. Paragraph 143 asks you for the brass key, but you must always have it at that point. Paragraph 159 asks you for the Cape of Levitation, but that's on another path than the brass key which you just used to enter the room. And why is it called the Elixir of Fortune if it _adds_ to your Luck rolls? Shouldn't that be the Elixir of Misfortune?

Warlock 6: Dark Chronicles of Anakendis

The title could lead you to believe this is a more epic than usual adventure, spanning a whole portion of history, or perhaps Anakendis is so ancient and important that entire books have been written about him, and you must now find one of them to determine his weaknesses. Well, no. Anakendis is a regular undefined wizard/warrior type person and the Chronicles is just his undefined booke of shadows type possession. Kill one and destroy the other and let the pieces sort themselves out.

In any case I found this Warlock episode more enjoyable than those in issues 4 and 8; none of the books I've played since my return to gamebooks has quite offered this basic scavenger hunt experience. There are almost no instant deaths and no important object is unfairly hidden, so the game isn't likely to outlive its welcome, either. The endgame's striking similarity to Warlock of Firetop Mountain is perhaps a bit distracting, right down to the chest firing small darts, or sitting down despondently after "getting so far" and being told to look for keys next time (there is no explanation for why you can't just chuck the "small chest" into the chasm). Unlike Dungeon of Justice and The Floating City you only get to eat Provisions when told, which limits their usefulness and steers your potion choice towards the Potion of Strength (and as before you inexplicably get two doses).

One downside is that the adventure is a little shorter than it would have to be; several paragraphs asking things like "Do you really, _really_ want to smash the chest? I may not ask a fourth time!" could have been weeded out with small loss. A second is that there are a few no-consequence choices too many - in a gamebook you jolly well expect everything to either present you with lots of treasure or blow up in your face. A third is that you pretty much need Skill 11-12 to win, but several fights are against Skill 6-8 opponents, who come off as less than intimidating.

As always there is strangeity. In 95, do you lose your Provisions and potions? If so, there's no reason not to simply start over. In 175 you lose "25% of the Stamina you have left" - it surprises me the editors let that little mathematical exercise in. Paragraph 195 has a link to 196 - tut, tut. In paragraph 2 you can retrieve your rope only if you intend to use it right away - why is that, exactly? The part about crossing the chasm is a bit odd, apparently as a result of paragraph conservation. Also, why doesn't it change anything if you know about the net? 25 should point to 138 instead of 151. Odd stuff: "You take a bite of the meat. It is a bit tough because it is raw, but it is good stuff nevertheless." Huh. No prizes for guessing which of the options in the penultimate paragraph leads to victory. And how the heck did the villagers come by and hold on to a chest of "hundreds of gold pieces, and precious jewelry and gems"?

Warlock 7: The Temple of Testing

Issue 7 of Warlock magazine contains a bit of a novelty. The bulk of it consists of a 5x5 grid of rooms where you are allowed to move relatively freely, "in order to pack as much action and decision-making as was humanly possible into a mere two hundred references". And in fact, the result _is_ impressive, even though a good two dozen paragraphs could have been put to more effective use.

The adventure is quite successful in providing a break from the branching dungeons that have filled Warlock so far, with House of Hell and The Dervish Stone as notable and not so notable exceptions. You get to choose how to tackle the inevitable pandoroid mapping of the grid, and there is satisfaction in uncovering some important treasure or finding a use for an object. Of course, some of the items have been inserted in such a way that they are very unlikely to ever be used, and a bunch of rooms offer little more than filler opponents.

Besides the elemental and geometric symbolism, groupings of fours and fives and so on, you can come across rooms of Greek, Tibetan, Japanese and Egyptian design to name a few; some rooms harbour anachronisms like a croquet set or a desk with "out of date bills, paper clips, rubber bands, pencils etc."; and there's even a nod to the Sorcery! series at the end. But even though I in no way found this kitchen sink approach to be a detraction during play, it does serve to undermine the final trial, where you are expected to choose between two different ontological views (and it is not a "choose your own truth" moment). By that time, religious and philosophical elements corresponding to both systems have played an important part in your quest, the format of the game itself could lead to either interpretation, and at least one given tenet of the "correct" philosophy has been blatantly disproved.

* There is an odd passage in the introduction that first explains in some detail that revisiting rooms is "CHEATING", then lays down a couple of rules - harmful contents immediately reset, beneficial contents do not - to ensure that you'd have nothing to gain from doing so. Doesn't this render the talk of CHEATING irrelevant? Then once you are in the adventure you may be forced to back into a room you just left, with explicit reminders of the resetting rules, so again how is this CHEATING? I suppose the author wasn't concerned with the possibility that someone might disregard the extra rules, since nothing is said about DOUBLEPLUSCHEATING.

* The instructions lie when they say the true path holds a "minimum of risk and effort"; you should have at least Skill 10 to have a good chance of winning.

* In a not very politically correct room you can encounter an "Australian Aborigine Shaman (Witch Doctor)" who can be defeated using "the superstitions of primitives".

* Fighting the Salamander can be confusing because the instructions don't entirely add up. Reading 53 you'd probably think that after each other Attack Round you make a separate roll against Skill (a common way of handling special attacks). In 92 however it "alternates" between claws and fire, which could be interpreted to mean you must roll _every_ Attack Round - that every other Attack Round is simply exchanged for the Skill roll - or possibly that every other Attack Round if the Salamander wins it doesn't do any damage because it wasn't trying to claw you anyway, neither of which is a good interpretation of 53.

110 should read "jar", not "door". 27 and 52 are virtually identical. 139 and 158 are also very similar. In 96 the adventure adjusts the listed Stamina of an enemy to account for a hit already scored, but in 80 it doesn't. All the paragraphs that follow on from not having the crucifix in 46 are written as if you do have it. 84 speaks of information that you must find in the maze before you can make use of a "valuable insight"; a scroll in section 6 may have been intended to carry this, but it doesn't actually come out and say so; and in any case the "insight" is not so very helpful. If you leave your sword behind in 54 in favour of the machete, which explicitly does no damage in combat, one must assume that the knife (which does 1 damage) is there as an inferior replacement; yet if you lose your sword in 152 you suffer only a Skill penalty. I also assume that in 54 you can only take one of the "heavy" items, since it makes no sense that you'd have to drop your sword to take a sabre but could also drop the sword to take the sabre _and_ another sword. 101 seems influenced by the myth of superior Japanese swords. Why are the two mirrors you can find effective only against one opponent each, even though neither case hints at any special properties?

Jon Glentoran's art is all right, especially the Vampire (which lacks the Dracula complex that has always seemed rather anachronistic in most fantasy contexts) and the Dwarves.

In this issue, ne'er-do-wells Mason and Williams take over. Aside from lazing in the editors' seats they produce a multiplayer adventure of just the type that I myself used to run, that is, one that aims entirely to set up certain dramatic scenes and effects, leaving little to chance or player initiative. Jamie Thomson also returns from the dead to hate on TSR a bit. In the letters section, a couple of female readers complain that in FF books "the main character is always male"; the editor could have asked them why they think this is the case but doesn't. Two more pages of Arkenor & Max, and about half as many decent puns. Paul Cockburn is not impressed with the first Cretan Chronicles book, and finds Forbidden Gateway atmospheric but frustratingly difficult. This is also the first issue to feature Lew Stringer's Derek the Troll, an unofficial runner-up in the cartoon competition from back in Warlock 2. The strip is not noteworthy in itself, but anyone familiar with Swedish cartoonist Jonas Darnell's slightly more recent Herman Hedning may note a resemblance in design between Stringer's troll and Darnell's cavemen; as noted by Stringer himself this is entirely coincidental. Again eleven full pages are devoted to ads.

Warlock 8 contains another adventure I already reviewed. Ad page count: ten. Jamie Thomson calls Dave Morris and Gary Chalk "strange bubbling heaps of protoplasmic matter" - he's a fine one to talk! In fact, his characterization of his various colleagues (and in one case their readership) sort of makes his column the high point of the issue. Paul Cockburn thinks "complicated" books like Lone Wolf are more "suited to the micro [computer] than the book". Way to miss the point or something, reviewer Paul Cockburn.

Warlock 8: The Floating City

The most annoying thing about TFC is that although it's 200 paragraphs, it really isn't. Numerous paragraphs consist only of two or three sentences saying that something happens and then direct you straight to another paragraph with two or three sentences and so on. By my estimate at least a fourth of all paragraphs amount to nothing but page-flipping; by cutting unreachable sections and inconsequential choices you could probably trim the whole thing down to 100 paragraphs without losing anything of importance. This is definitely a flaw compared to adventures that have enough substance for either 100 or 200 paragraphs and are that long, too.

Content-wise, I much prefer this to the tedious Dungeon of Justice. There are several unique monsters and a smattering of Inuit folklore. There's an element of item hunting and some alternative ways of handling things, but nothing so confusing as to make the adventure truly difficult. For some reason I cannot fathom you are given _two_ potions as well as five portions of Provisions, just as in DoJ. If you stick to the true path you probably won't use up more than a meal or two, let alone a potion, but if you roll good stats there's an alternative path (no less particular about your choices) which involves hacking your way through several situations. Well, why not?

Some of the transformation bits seemed odd. There's no reason why the game should end in paragraph 21 when the potion's effects are temporary, and that particular form is even more unstable than the others. The logic of paragraph 131 is self-defeating: if the item/body in question doesn't work like the others, it shouldn't function as a focus for the potion in the first place. Of course, a fantasy world doesn't have to include matter-spirit dualism as a default, but if it doesn't, then transformation itself is absurd.

I was also slightly annoyed by the book's attitude towards its endings. If you choose to return the treasure to its previous owner, the book mocks you for a "lackey". The "right" ending instead has you wandering off at random, content with the "glory" - but presumably that's the one choice which won't have people knowing what you did anyway.

Possible erratum: if paragraph 51 should point to 132, like 115, four of the unreachable options at the end of the book would open up. That path would still be much more difficult, so I don't see how it could hurt.

Warlock 13: Temple of the Pharaoh

The riddle of the ancients is actually why everyone persists in spelling it "pharoah". There's more than one slip in here as well, but at least they got the title right (although this fact is not reflected on Popp's site nor Demian's).

TotP is definitely the most "professional" Warlock adventure so far, surpassing DCoA in overall quality. There is no padding, the writing is good, and most significantly it does a very good job of making you feel trapped in a hostile place full of traps and ancient beings. There is a tangible puzzle factor as the adventure keeps you supplied with options, some of which are painful and some of which are directly fatal. A less than thrilling example of the latter involves solving a puzzle in order to avoid a string of traps, and instead being faced with a 33% chance of survival - from the player's perspective, there's simply no call for that. Luckily there are other ways in which you can fail that are much more reasonable. You should be able to win with rotten stats if you keep to the true path, although good stats help while you're exploring the place.

There is a maze which is presented in "left-right" mode, i.e. each junction is represented by different paragraphs depending on which direction you come from. A dozen sections or two could probably have been freed up using the "north-south" approach from FF1, but it's no big deal. Although it's not in the rules it seems you're not supposed to eat any of your three meals without being instructed to, and those occasions are few indeed. The practice of spelling out the worth of treasure is just annoying, as it has no function, not even as an end score (since it's not used for all valuables).

Oddage and endage: At one point you encounter an imposing pair of giant statues who turn out to be demi-sissies, except if you flash a certain item which boosts their Skill from 9 to 14 for no apparent reason. Equally inexplicable is why the dialogue is printed in italics. On principle I think books should not shout "Fool!" at its readers. At some points you're told you can take only one item out of several, but it's not completely clear which items you are supposed to choose from. 124 should link to 131, not 11.

[Per]

Warlock 9: Fortress Throngard

The very brief background mentions that Sir Falfax has been captured by the evil wizard Throngard (or Throngar, if you look at the magazine cover), so you, Falfax's squire, conceal a knife and a picklock in some unmentionable way and set out to allow yourself to be captured as well, since this is the only way to gain entry into the wizard's fortress... which he named after himself, or is he a noble too? Thus begins an adventure with a somewhat unorthodox paragraph count of 172.

Almost the entirety of it is spent navigating Throngard's dungeon and residence in a sort of "left, right or straight ahead" first-person view, which might not have been such a problem in itself - though for my own part I don't see the appeal - had it been consistently applied. As it is, the adventure often railroads you in some specific direction or past some door, offers an incomplete set of options, has you arbitrarily turn to face a certain way, or forgets or conceals the existence of a door or hazard depending on where you came from. You can absurdly end up standing at the top of a staircase that you wish to descend, but have no good idea how to make the adventure give you the option instead of just killing you. On occasion you are told what happens if you've previously been in a room - mostly this just leads to shuffling off in whichever direction the adventure prefers - but often there's no indication you're not simply supposed to play out the exact same encounter again. As an illustration of how bizarre this often gets, one must imagine each new guard entering the pantry to find the corpse of the previous one, sighing, cleaning everything up and then getting on with forever restocking the shelves (hopefully with infinite bat meat rather than guard-and-chef stew).

At first you find yourself in the dungeons, and though there are some early deaths and other bad things you're likely to fall victim to while working out some of the boxes you must check, you should make it up to the ground floor of the fortress before long. Around that point you might feel you've settled confidently into some sort of graphic adventure ready to go all USE METAL POLISH ON SUIT OF ARMOUR, but that's also where the adventure will escalate its attempts to cut your games short: more and truly random instant deaths, enemies showing up with absurdly high Skill and Stamina scores compared to the guards with Skills mostly in the 5-7 range, and the possibility of being re-confined to your dungeon cell, which need not be fatal but will still require you to go through most of the adventure again, and might make things difficult if you had already taken an item that can only be found once, so unless you have a character with great stats there's little reason not to start over. Often it's entirely arbitrary whether the adventure thinks you should be killed or locked up again, or maybe neither for no given reason. A shopping list of items and other conditions keeps on growing until the end as you might expect. A Skill of 12 will help while exploring, potentially allowing you to uncover one more way to die horribly in some games, but you can win with a middling Skill once you've worked out the one true path.

There are a good number of equipment oddities, though most are easily ignored or ultimately inconsequential. The inappropriately copy-pasted instructions shouldn't say once, let alone twice, that you start with a sword, shield and backpack, and no, you don't get a potion either. It might have been a good idea in 104 to spell out that you retain the knife along with the lockpick. It's a little weird that fighting "unarmed" with a "stout stick" gives you a -2 AS penalty, but the "small knife", which would almost certainly have come with a penalty in a book in which it was a replacement weapon, is functionally equivalent to a sword in combat - well, it is against trained guards, but not, for reasons, against chefs. 3 should modify Attack Strength (or "fighting score", as 2 puts it) instead of Skill, as should 31 and 65. 6 assumes you have either a sword or nothing. The guard entering your cell with food has a cudgel if you hide and a sword if you don't. You can carry a sword, a knife, a penknife, a cudgel, a halberd, a bow, a hammer and multiple stakes all at the same time, but in 31 you can't carry a single stake and any other weapon. 39 presumably means that if you had four meals and want to take the bones, you must drop a meal, although this makes little sense given that you may carry many other things in the bag already. 139 absurdly demands you drop an item to make room for a pack of cards - can I drop one of my indeterminate number of stakes, or is that a weapon? (No, I won't try dropping one of my five swords, that would be _cheating_.) I'm not an expert, but I would think halberds are not the most practical weapons for guarding indoor areas. 105 seems to mean to say you may exceed your Initial Skill if it was less than 12. It seems the rule that you can only eat when instructed to should be applied, though it doesn't make a lot of sense; at least half of the times you may eat, it's because you found food, so it's quite rare that you can actually use that which you carry around, and you can abuse repeating encounters to eat for free multiple times anyway. One might think that even if an adventure has been forced by its own design decisions to allow absurdity, it should at least not encourage it.

Several paragraphs, including 1, point to the following one. 5 should point to 23, not 21. 129 should be clearer that you haven't approached the door yet, as what happens if you turn to 29 makes little sense if you had assumed you just couldn't see into the room because it was dark or something. The transition from 130 to 117 forgets to mention you ran down the entire corridor (and how this gets you past the guards is mostly handwaved). In 83 if you're hit hard enough with a thrown candlestick to knock you out, you suffer no damage, but if it "merely grazes" you, you lose 2 Stamina points. 159 doesn't list a Skill for the Armour, but it doesn't matter much, since you end up re-captured in any case. 169 should say Stamina instead of Skill. It's possible to acquire a huge following of fellow prisoners, then tiptoe about in the fortress as normal, or you can have them killed, then return to collect new ones, or you can acquire multiple sets. It's not obvious why the "off duty room" should be understood to be a deathtrap but the "guard watch room" isn't, or why the off duty people should be perfectly ready to instantly massacre you even though they cannot in 130. It's possible to incapacitate the villain to his "horror", then reach an instant death where he claims to have orchestrated everything that happened (including the loss of his pet dragon, maybe it was a fake or something). Though the art is perfectly OK, fairly normal for the magazine, some large illustrations aren't placed where you might expect them to be.

With its cumbersome movement interface and somewhat vicious and capricious attitude, Fortress Throngard didn't end up being one of my favourite Warlock adventures, although that also had me wondering which ones _are_, and not coming up with any clear answer unless you count House of Hell. Though there are two or three titles I haven't had very harsh things to say about, Ruth Pracy's two offerings just may be the most memorable non-book adventures from the magazine, for their idiosyncratic flavour if not for their technical and structural cohesion.

The rest of the issue: Reviewer Paul Cockburn thinks Rebel Planet is "a bit too complex (too many planets) and lacking in really inventive ideas", but rates it above two Middle-earth Quest books (too many rules, not enough descriptions), a 1-on-1 Adventure Gamebook (unclear rules), and the four Magic Voyage books (short, no rules, continuity errors). Someone in the letters column suggests colouring in FF illustrations with watercolours. Haha, who would do that? Another reader complains about the lack of dungeon crawls after the early titles, yet suggests that books 7 and 8 deserve sequels. Graeme Davis writes an article on magic items in FF, starting with weapons and armour which "both have the same effect – that of modifying your Skill score". Shouldn't that be Attack Strength, or is that how it works in the RPG? Davis also writes up the multiplayer adventure where almost all characters can end up being excluded from most of it if you play it as written (and yet this may not actually change much - the tomb should perhaps not be opened if nobody "survived" to the end of the trials), and then again in the final battle there is limited room to participate. At least Trevor Hammond supplies images of several undead or demonic creatures. "Arkenor & Max" continues to not be very good.

The PDF version has more OCR errors than I remember usually being the case (and just possibly some error listed above is due to this, it probably didn't affect the comic strips though), although it adds a missing reference reported in Warlock 10, just like a partially missing paragraph in Warlock 7 was addressed in this issue's letter pages and has been inserted into that PDF. One paragraph says you "carry on clown", which _is_ in line with what the adventure seems to want to make you feel like at times.

I already reviewed the Yearbook version of Rogue Mage, so there's probably no point in revisiting the magazine version in Warlock 10. Reviewer Paul Cockburn thinks Sword of the Samurai is "not a good gamebook", but is a lot happier with Trial of Champions, even though he doesn't end up talking about the dungeon part of the book at all, just the gladiatorial intro. "Arkenor & Max" ends, but will be replaced in issue 12 by something roughly as questionable. Out of the Pit has a monster beginning with "Grem". The art for Rogue Mage is pretty nice, though there are only three large illustrations.

[Per]

Actually I may as well repost the Rogue Mage review here even though it's not the magazine version:

The Fighting Fantasy 10th Anniversary Yearbook

In 1992, along with the 50th Fighting Fantasy book, Puffin released this "part diary, part gamebook". It would perhaps be unfair to characterize it as a shameless money grab, but considering most of the contents are utterly recycled, the words "shameless money grab" don't feel too far off.

Marc Gascoigne is credited with "compilation and editing" on the back cover. Probably he's also written a great deal more of the content than the people credited on the front cover, since I gather a lot of it has been lifted from Titan and Out of the Pit. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he also put together the introduction where Steve and Ian name their favourite books, monsters and characters (all of them their own). There are illustrations from many FF books along with a smattering of Warlock material and, of course, the gamebook element: Graeme Davis' Rogue Mage from Warlock 10, a section of which is found at the bottom of most every page. While it is possible that someone thought this was a particularly deserving adventure which had been out of print for far too long, it seems much more believable that it was just conveniently lying around.

If at the time you were in need of a 1993 calendar, I suppose this might have done, except it's not really something you carry around in your back pocket, and if you bought it because you were collecting FF stuff, there's a chance you wouldn't have wanted to scribble in it. If you want it to serve a lasting purpose you could always use it as a quaint birthday book. Just a few random observations on the articles:

* Dragons are enigmatic because they "believe in higher concepts than life and death" - like treasure and knowledge. Deep, man.
* The guide to adventuring states: "Don't get detoured into sidelines, pursuits and chases which take you away from the goal of your quest." Four out of five adventurers who followed this advice never returned and the fifth is dead.
* The biography of Nicodemus says he moved to Port Blacksand for unknown reasons, possibly to "keep an eye on Azzur", but in FF5 he claimed (and Owen Carralif also surmised) that he moved there so he wouldn't be disturbed by people asking for help. Perhaps that's unknown to most people.

I'm going to assume the adventure hasn't been altered from its original state (although a cursory comparison reveals that one case of adjacent linkage has been fixed, and the D&D rules have been omitted). It's the usual 200 sections but very short all the same. At first you move freely in a small grid of rooms and corridors. The book keeps track of which direction you're going in, which makes for smoother transitions and provides some minor variation. On the other hand, there are a few broken or fudged transitions (for instance, the description and choices in 161 are rather muddled, and if you go south from 62 you come to a paragraph where you're heading north and can "keep going" to where you're coming from), and the book relies entirely on you not to go and do the same things over again. As in The Dervish Stone and some other adventures there is also this odd preoccupation with loot and its value in Gold Pieces even though this isn't going to matter in the least.

Once you make a specific turn there is no going back and you take on your titular mage adversary. How well you explored the corridors will play some part here, and fighting a tricky opponent in a battle where things may not all be as they seem initially made me perk up a little bit (I like the part where you get to explode an entire room, even if it's down to chance), but, well, sorry, I can't say that most of it is particularly interesting or exciting. Mostly this part comes down to rolling against Skill, Testing your Luck, rolling against Skill and so on. I finished on my second attempt, having basically thrown the first. And if I had previously been puzzled by the adventurer's profound dread of human remains, I was not more understanding of his gloomy disposition after winning power, freedom, treasure and the gratitude of a wizards' guild.

41 points to 42. 105 is hidden at the top of the page. Should 126 be interpreted to mean you don't lose Stamina from the lost Attack Round? In 143 the adventure adjusts the listed Stamina of an enemy to account for a hit already scored, but in 192 it doesn't. If you fight the Scitalis in 122 it has the power to trap you repeatedly, but in 141 it doesn't. There's no good reason to fight the Clone Slime over several paragraphs since there's nothing random about how many Clones you're going to fight.

[a moderator]

Jan 2, 2024 18:18:55 GMT Per said:

I'm going to assume the adventure hasn't been altered from its original state (although a cursory comparison reveals that one case of adjacent linkage has been fixed, and the D&D rules have been omitted). 

Another change is that the potion found on Galthazzeth's corpse in section 114 has been changed. In Warlock 10 it was a Potion of Skill, but in the Yearbook it's become a Potion of Stamina. Cynical types might wonder why the grievously wounded Galthazzeth wouldn't take the opportunity to drink the Potion of Stamina and restore some of his lost health when the hero was distracted fighting the Clone Slime, while the more pedantic readers would perhaps focus on the fact that the Stamina-restoring potion mentioned in the rules is called a Potion of Strength, leaving the precise effect of Galthazzeth's potion in some doubt.

[Per]

Warlock 12: Deadline to Destruction

This is the official sequel to Appointment with F.E.A.R., from which it inherits the setting, cheesiness, fourfold hint-combining solution, power rules, and related issues, scaled down where applicable and necessary. I'm guessing this isn't what most readers at the time would have expected - at least not before reading the note on page 45 of Warlock 11 - and that the prevailing opinion now is that in most aspects it's a bit less successful than the book it follows up.

At about 40% the size in terms of paragraphs (if you take some redundancies into account), it's to be expected the puzzles shouldn't be quite as convoluted. Where AWF had you chasing three unique clues for each power and additional stepping stones, DtD reduces the number of critical stops and also isn't so wildly branching that you're likely to lose track of how to reach a certain encounter from another. The difficulty is somewhat maintained using other means as the Silver Crusader has many new ways to prove utterly and sometimes hilariously inept. If for instance you thought that the flying brick would be able to hold aloft a car door without taking damage from its "cumbersome weight", you're in for re-education. Nearly all of the villains you fight have double-digit Stamina scores, whereas in AWF this was reserved for mighty enemies like the Fountain Creature or the Creature of Carnage.

There's a bunch of issues with the powers ranging from minor to major. For Super Strength, the instruction to set your Skill to 13 has been lost, so only the instruction to "always fight with a Skill of 13" remains; this may be a deliberate change to address the issue of a strong hero also necessarily being an expert bomb disarmer, or just careless editing. ETS lacks the line about not using weaponry, and in fact you do use a bunch of things that could be characterized as such. Failures to use your power properly or at all crop up with some regularity; ETS seems especially lazily handled, as all too often you're told you have nothing useful and then you are forced to do something stupid or shamble off, even though it should have been possible to think of some halfway applicable gadget, or maybe in some other situation you turn out to have one anyway. (198 seems like it could have been written to forestall this point: "Oh, so _this_ is how useless you prefer to look?") With Energy Blasts and Psi-Powers it's sometimes hard to say when you're supposed to deduct Stamina: In 11 have you begun to use the ability or not? In 100 should you deduct 2 Stamina, given that it lacks the word "additional", or a total of 4, as spelled out explicitly in similar situations in AWF? It's possible to lose the game at character creation, and in fact one character has a 67% chance of being doomed from a blind selection of starting clues. There's no power that doesn't require multiple successful rolls against Skill and Luck in order to win, but one needs several more than the others.

More bugs and oddities, a few of which may be caused by OCR errors: 13 points to 12. 100 should point to 121 and 196, not 21 and 96. 60 probably shouldn't potentially heal your enemy. 130 should point to 61, not 81, but it could have been anything, as it's unreachable. 76 has you weirdly rolling against Skill to avoid taking extra damage from poison. The clue for the Spider in no way explains why it allows you to safely go look for him, and there are other instances where acting in the "correct" way avoids danger for no obvious reason, or conversely doing the "wrong" thing leaves you at some villain's idea of mercy. If you fight the Cuttlefish with Energy Blasts it loses its combat ability (which is unlikely to trigger against Super Strength, so Psi-Powers gets the shaft here). 178 uses extra sections and flipping for something which could easily already have been handled; disarming the bomb is also done in redundant branches; and there seems to be no reason why 74, 91 and 172 shouldn't all be one paragraph. Why is one of the small illustrations seemingly showing you Energy Blasting some pebbles on the ground? Is there a Greek word for the fear of spell components?

Deadline to Destruction is playable, with the baseline functionality of a condensed retread of FF17. If there's a right time to use phrases like "learn zip all" or "hurts like heck" in a gamebook, I guess it could be here. It's just that, like many adventures before and after, DtD more than just the once or twice forgets that it's a good idea to have a consistent underlying narrative, to have some notion of the protagonist's role in it, and to simply make sense. And so we get nonsensical choices, logical headscratchers and inexplicable plot turns. One encounter repeats a scenario from AWF, in which two people were in deadly peril yet even if you failed they weren't said to perish; here, mirroring the darker turn of comics during the 80s, you walk into the scene of a disturbing mass murder, but if you don't immediately become the next victim, it's right back to the usual bumbling antics.

I already reviewed the adventure in Warlock 13, where Cull the Troll notwithstanding someone who I assume is Marc Gascoigne wins the issue with the words "Darren Chandler reveals nothing".