I've now tackled this adventure on
my blog, with an 'author's commentary' on some of the thinking that went into writing it.
As Kieran offered to let me add such a commentary to his playthrough of
Return, and he took a different route through the adventure, I'm adding a second commentary in this thread. Here there be spoilers...
Return to the Icefinger Mountains by Ed Jolley
Not only have I actually played this one before, I actually wrote up my playthrough on the old FF forum that is sadly now lost to the abyss. As far as I recall, I rolled terrible stats, I took a rule too literally which meant I missed out on a possibly vital clue, and I got killed by a somersaulting giant. So really this attempt couldn’t go much worse. Well, certainly my stats are better this time out: Sk 9 St 21 Lu 10.
So as you may have guessed, this is a sequel to
Caverns of the Snow Witch. I am not the hero of that adventure though (after all I never would have beaten that book with those stats), but a former child slave of the snow witch, liberated by said hero. But now thirty years after her death, my nightmares about her are returning. I confide in Reniso, another former slave who took me in after the witch was killed, and worryingly he has dreamt of her too. He is convinced she is back and when I volunteer to explore the Crystal Caves to find the source of her power, Reniso shakes his head at the impatience of ‘young people’ (Hang on, how young am I exactly? Wouldn’t I be around 40? I guess it’s all relative for Reniso). Anyway, a scholar from Salamonis should be arriving shortly to explain more about her powers and then the three of us shall set forth to stop her if we can.
After going to bed and doing my last day of work for my foster family, I return to Reniso’s home to find his corpse pinned to the wooden pillar of the hut and a message written in his drying blood saying ‘She will return.’ Lovely. There is something stuck in his mouth so I pull it out to find. It’s a balled up piece of paper, and rather grisly to remove. I can’t read it immediately however as I am startled by a knocking, but can look at it when I am next given the opportunity to eat (note, this is where I went wrong in my last attempt as I was never given any opportunities to eat and so never got to read the paper - Ed clarified that I could read it at any quiet moment so maybe this attempt I’ll finally find out what it says). Opening the door so the knocker can’t see Reniso’s corpse, I find an old man before me. It turns out he is Denati, the scholar we were expecting. Denati is taken aback by Reniso’s untimely demise but he takes some comfort from the fact the message in the blood implies the Snow Witch isn’t back quite yet. He decides to come with me and we equip ourselves for some mountain travel at the market. I decide not to bother reporting Reniso’s death to the wardens - they may accuse us of the crime and maybe some are in league with the Snow Witch.
That’s the kind of paranoia I was hoping to induce.
Deities in fantasy stories who take an interest in games or contests tend to have a ‘win or die’ attitude. At some point I got to wondering what would happen if there was one who inclined more towards “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.”
That concept was originally unrelated to
Return, but when I started thinking about some of the peculiarities of
Caverns, I realised that this idea could make some kind of sense of the Snow Witch’s challenging her killer to a version of scissors-paper-stone: knowing how to call upon Kurentz, she turned the confrontation into a game so that winning would give her still more power, but losing would provide an opportunity to return from beyond beyond the grave (being undead is already beyond the grave, so a post-vampiric existence must be even further on, right?).
To come up with the name of the lost city, I took the name of a famous lost city (Atlantis), added a prefix redolent of the frozen setting (cryo-), and messed around with the letters a bit to make it less blatant.
The gambling token is a metal disc, similar to the ones used in that game against the Snow Witch. In
Caverns no explanation is given for why the discs are lying around: making them relics of ancient Cyrantis and giving them a significant purpose in that culture provides a reason for their existence.
This made me laugh because if you handle the encounter with the Frost Giants differently, you can end up acquiring a key. However, in a rare instance of realism, the key serves no useful purpose within the adventure (it actually opens the stores where the Frost Giants keep their alcohol), and attempting to use it in Cyrantis results in a (perhaps slightly mean-spirited) Luck penalty for being naïve enough to think that a random Frost Giant would just happen to be carrying the very key you need.
The random roll was to ensure that something happened during the final stretch of the trek to the Crystal Caves. I’ve complained often enough about the scarcity of incidents in stretches of
Tower of Destruction – here I endeavoured to avoid having the same problem myself.
I concede that the Barbarian’s demise was a bit awkwardly written. I think the main reason for having him charge over the cliff was so I wouldn’t have to come up with any lootable items on the corpse: there was enough inventory management going on already.
Making it optional slightly cut down the number of mandatory
Test your Luck rolls in the adventure. Not taking the rope can cause complications later on, but (at least after the first time a reader gets this far) it is still a viable option for anyone who wants to save a point of Luck.
Not just any zombie orc: this is the zombie of the orc from the front cover of the Puffin edition of
Caverns. All he got to do in the original adventure was come running in and get killed in a display of the Snow Witch’s power – here he at least gets to fight the hero.
If you don’t investigate the corpse, he attacks you during the night. In the section covering that fight I tried to play up the horrific aspect of doing battle with a frozen animated corpse, though the melodramatic prose may be undermined by the zombie orc’s not-so-spectacular stats.
The bracelet actually has three Cyrantian gambling tokens on it, each with a different shape embossed on it: circle, star and square. The idea was that these helped inspire the Snow Witch while she was trying to think up a game – and it also, in perhaps the most outrageous retcon of the whole adventure, suggests that Ian Livingstone’s nonsensical ‘square metal disc’ could have been a circular disc (you know, like discs
are actually shaped) with the shape of a square on it.
More often than not in Ian Livingstone gamebooks, right is the better option when a ‘left or right’ choice is offered. Thus, for the more Livingstone-inspired of the two routes through the book, right is the way to go here. The slope is perhaps a bit too easily mistaken for a hint, but I had to have it because…
A bit of a misunderstanding on Kieran’s part here. In my efforts to avoid duplicating text when describing the two possible outcomes of the roll, I ended up compromising on comprehensibility. What actually happens here is that the slope shelves from something like a 15% gradient to 35%. Not an abyss, but too steep not to slide down. The hero stops in time, but Denati inadvertently knocks him onto the steeper part of the slope, and the subsequent roll determines whether he remains upright and, in essence, skis to the bottom despite not wearing skis, or falls over and rolls down the slope, taking some damage in the process.
This was inspired by an incident from my first year as a student. There was a steep hill between the halls in which I lived and the campus, and that winter it became very icy. On one occasion, as I was carefully descending the hill, a friend of a friend thought it would be hilarious to give me a slight shove, which set me in motion, and it was all I could do to remain on my own two feet for the many metres I slid before reaching a less icy patch and regaining some traction underfoot. Much angry shouting ensued.
I’m not
that cruel.
Actually, that could be the biggest retcon. I just thought that the Demon in
Caverns was a bit weak to be the source of the Snow Witch’s power, so I made the statue an avatar of the real, more monstrous being. It contradicts
Out of the Pit, but Keith Martin contradicted OotP by giving the ‘solitary’ Frost Giants a village and social structures in
Night Dragon, so there was a canonical precedent of disregarding OotP for the sake of an interesting encounter.
A random roll determines which of the three core attributes is tested here, with a different kind of challenge for each one. Kieran got the Luck test, which is a bit like a crude version of roulette.
Having established that, with Kurentz, participation in the games brings a reward even for those who don’t win, I had to make sure that there was a ‘consolation prize’ for every challenge (though some of the ones found on other paths through the adventure are pretty unrewarding from a non-Cyrantian perspective). The bonus here might not seem like much, but having failed more than one gamebook by getting a double six when anything lower would have seen me through safely, I know that getting to choose the outcome of a roll can be a big deal if it’s saved for the right moment.
If two stairways lead from the same place to the same destination, but one has been used a lot more than the other, there’s probably a good reason why so many people stayed off the less-used one. The Luck bonus is for avoiding the trial that deterred most of the Cyrantians from going up or down the other flight.
Denati states that the signpost indicates them to be close to their destination, so that assumption isn’t entirely groundless. This chamber is where the different paths the reader can take through Cyrantis converge. Having Denati read that one of the exits leads to the place where the Snow Witch would be able to take advantage of Kurentz’ blessings provides a vaguely reasonable excuse for denying the reader access to any of the other exits. A bit railroady, I admit, but not as bad as the ‘that route leads south/looks a bit dark/fails to appeal to you for some nebulous reason’ pretexts used for limiting options in some gamebooks. And it did mean I could give the reader a clearly signposted (pun not intended) last chance to restore Stamina (if required) before the endgame.
The signpost also facilitates low-key world-building. A functional city would need all sorts of facilities not touched upon in the adventure. The presence of several unexplored (and, in-game, unexplorable) routes away from the chamber hints that all that essential but unexciting infrastructure is present: it’s just been sidelined in favour of allowing the reader to experience trapped Demons and gaming shrines (or gladiatorial arenas and possibly haunted tombs on the other route). I was impressed by the use of a similar trick in
the penultimate issue of Proteus, and decided to emulate it here.
This is why
Return has more illustrations than normal for a
Fantazine mini-adventure. When compiling the art brief for Brett Schofield, I included the bridge as one of the scenes I’d like to have illustrated. A few weeks later, when updating the art brief with actual quotations from the text, I had second thoughts, worried that the bridge might make a rather bland image, and sent off a couple of alternatives to it. I don’t know if Brett had already drawn the bridge by then, but for whatever reason, he did all the pictures from the original brief and also one of the alternatives.
As it turned out, I’d underestimated Brett’s skills. Following the publication of
Fighting Fantazine 9, one reader singled out the picture of the bridge as being particularly scary, reminding me of why I’d thought to design the bridge like that in the first place.
The broken kite is acquired as a consequence of a trick that causes many icicles to fall elsewhere. Asking about the kite made it possible to single out the readers who knew of the trick without giving away its existence to the rest. It’s a technique cribbed from Paul Mason’s FF books – not that he’s the only writer to have used it, but he did use it often and well.
Failing the roll to endure the wave of cold leads to the ending which was the core idea around which the rest of the adventure was built. It’s not exactly as I envisaged it in the first place, but got modified to better fit the way the adventure turned out.
A companion possessed of highly useful information, who turns out to secretly be a villain, tricking the hero into helping him achieve his nefarious goal? What sort of FF writer would come up with
something that devious?
Taking the other route through Cyrantis (and following a bit of in-text advice) would better equip the reader to judge the accuracy of Denati’s translation.
Those who take the Livingstone path are doomed to failure if they don’t acquire the correct items. And have massive Skill scores.
