#12 - "Space Assassin", by Andrew Chapman (1985)

Back in spaaaaaace! "Space Assassin" tells you everything you need to know right there in the title, which is a quality I very much admire about this book and the Fighting Fantasy series taken as a whole. It's even better when the cover literally depicts what the title describes as well. Scorpion Swamp, for instance, was a disappointment in that the cover failed to show one or more scorpions in a swamp, regardless of the fact the book was simply teeming with scorpions. These aren't books for adults - not real, grown-up ones - and ambiguity is intolerable. You cannot name a Fighting Fantasy book something like "Glimpses of the Nearest Tide: A Novel" and have the cover be e.g. a fountain pen lying next to a rose, or a silhouette of a guy experiencing loneliness, or a double-exposure of some tree branches and a fox's face, or whatever the fuck else they put on the front of dumbass proper literature that people respect, no! That will not play. This is not literature - the cover and the title need to tell you a lot, almost everything, so much that you can just about  throw the book away at once. And it needs to pop.


(I challenge serious literature to try this approach, by the way - e.g. I want to see an edition of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian retitled as "Bad Cowboys", with depicted on the cover, some bad cowboys throwing donkeys off the side of a mountain. And sorry if that was a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it.)

Now this is a pretty cool cover and no-one will disagree that it definitely pops but I think it is only showing a couple of Space Mallcops instead of a Space Assassin so I guess that's a 1 out of 2, which is just 50%. My favourite thing about this picture though is that the mallcops have a game of some kind of space football up on the big screens, having worked in similar environments in the past I can tell you this is exactly what really happens. They are supposed to be watching out for intruders at the T-junction but they have the footie on instead. If you examine the image closely you can see that the football is all spikey which probably means this future is pretty dystopian, maaaaan.

This book was written by an Australian, Andrew Chapman, interestingly he wrote the first draft after reading Warlock and after a few years in publication limbo it was picked up for the Fighting Fantasy series, though that was not his original intention. The book was born from the fertile desperation that only working a soul-crushing public service job can bring - he relates it all over at his blog.

Background

So yeah, Andrew wrote the earlier drafts of this book after reading his little brother's copy of Warlock, before any other books in the series had been published. Interestingly, he hit upon a similar premise and structure as the second book in the series, Citadel of Chaos, still yet to published. Presumably this is a natural place for your mind to go as you sit on a treasure chest, wiping snotty tears from your chin - why couldn't this just be about killing the Warlock? So this is basically another case of get in the castle, murder the wizard, only it's in spaaaaaaaaace, and therefore rather than a buff sorcerer your target for space assassination is "Cyrus, the tyrannical ruling scientist of Od (your local sector)".

I just whipped him up a business card right quick at like bidnizcardz.com or wherever.

He has been causing bad trouble all up in your planet by various methods that lean pretty heavily on robots and "evil creatures almost certainly of mutant origin", henceforth referred to only as "mutants".  Kidnapping citizens for experimental surgery is, we are told, his "most usual crime".

This is just a thing that most everyone has resigned themselves to, but then word reaches the unspecified bigwigs of your nameless planet that his next crime will be at the less usual end of the spectrum: "he intends to use your entire world for one gruesome biological experiment in which he will cover the surface of the planet in radioactive isotopes while showering deadly viruses on all living creatures".

Let me say that as an experimental method this is unforgivably imprecise - I don't know what conclusions Dr. Cyrus believes he will be able to draw from this. Anyway the folks in charge decide that the best way to head this off is to have Cyrus assassinated, which is where YOU come in, in your capacity as a Space Assassin. 

So! While we don't know much about your home planet we can conclude it's the sort of backwater where this type of experiment can go ahead without anyone beyond the resident yokels being overmuch concerned - this is reinforced by the fact that the "planetary Assassin's Guild" is a rinky-dink outfit that provides the sole hope for the planet's survival with 1d6 credits and tells him to make sure he stays in budget and, for fuck's sake, hang on to the goddamn receipts.

Rolling Up My Dude

SKILL - 10
STAMINA - 20
LUCK - 7

Okay rolls. Because we're in a high-tech yet dystopian future there are some more attributes to determine (and you get "pep pills" to restore your STAMINA instead of my beloved PROVISIONS).

ARMOUR comes into play during firefights, if you get hit you roll two dice vs. ARMOUR and if you roll lower than your armour, the damage is prevented. ARMOUR is like LUCK in that it decreases by one point any time you Test it.

ARMOUR - 8

A lowish roll, but hey, you only need armour if you gonna get hit right? I resolved not to get hit. Next up I needed to determine my equipment. You get 1d6 space credits to invest in weapons and other equipment. You can buy extra points of armour and neato gravity bombs and assault blasters and whatnot.

BUDGET - 1

...however if you roll a snake's wink like Yours Truly all you can afford is the electric lash, described as - "a small hand-gun which projects an electric pulse"

Pew! Pew!

:-(

There's a few explanations I can imagine that would justify this randomly crappy budget in story terms:
1) The electric lash is the best technology available in your shitty backwater planet.
2) No-one in charge really believes the rumours about Cyrus' evil science experiment but they hired a local night-club bouncer just to appease the paranoid fringe within the electorate. "Quick mate put on this here Space Assassin armour" they hiss as you are hastily stripped of your yellowing wife-beater. The cardboard box labelled "REAL Space Assassin Armour!" is hastily kicked under a desk.
3) Planet Dumb-Dumb is more or less okay with the radioactive virus shower thing.

"Caint harm us none mo then sixty gennerations of inbreedin', right bro?"

"Thess right, bro."

Actually on reflection, none of these theories exclude each other, so I have chosen to believe all of them.

The Adventure

Okay so what you got here is not a morbidly obese ghetto blaster but in fact the mighty starship Vandervecken:

Aye, she looks a fat turd of a shippe, but she cuts through spaaaaaace like a razor!

YOU, the Space Assassin, start your quest by canvassing "the local star systems" in search of your quarry, eventually catching up with this shambling bubo of a craft in "a relatively isolated system" (does nobody ever name anywhere in this damn galaxy?) That all happens in a sentence shorter than the preceding one. You notice that the Vandervecken is taking on supplies so you stow away on the supply shuttle, and, nearing the mother ship, sneak out the back and EVA your way over to a non-descript iris airlock in the Vandervecken's hull.

You find yourself on the wrong side of an impassable security door with maintenance hatches to the right and left (T-junction alert!). Both are labelled "CAUTION". Better funded space assassins can try blowing up the door with a gravity bomb, but not I. You also have the option to sift through "a small pile of what seems to be organic refuse".

Inviting, I thought to myself, but I don't wanna go back to punching drunk space-bikies at the roadhouse - this is my big chance to make good as a Spaaaaaace Assassin. I gotta be 100% focused on the mission. Reluctantly, I turned aside from the pile of shit on the floor,  and popped open the right-hand maintenance hatch.

Clambering down the maintenance shaft you stop and listen at the hatches you pass, which is an under-utilised idea in the series - adding a bit of flavour to the direction-choosing is always a good idea. I bypassed the first side-hatch which had a creepy gurgling noise audible from the other side, but took the second one which was quiet but "rather warm". Hope this doesn't lead to some elaborate and needlessly dangerous apparatus for venting waste gases, I thought. They're kind of a big deal in dystopian futures. But I needn't have feared, the hatch just lead to moderately warm room, from where I could spy upon some space aliens - two Fossniks, disarmingly described as follows:

Seated, reading from electronic resource sheets, are two rodent-like Fossniks, their white lab coats and tiny pince-nez betray them as being technical types.

Here's what they look like after you kill them.

The book also calls them "hench-beings" which is an adorable noun. You don't have to murder them though, you have the option also of buggering off or "threatening" them which is what I decided to do. I jumped out and waved my teensy electric lash around, they were like "what is that, keep your hand still" and then they were like "woah hang on it's a electric lash!" and then they dropped to their knees and begged for mercy.

"Where's Cyrus!" I barked.
"I dunno, man, sorry man!" pleaded one Fossnik, "we only work in this one lab, he could be anywhere on the ship though."
"Yeah have you seen the size of this fukken place," said the second, "there's one room wit' a whole dang old forest in it and there's a lost tribe in it and giant scorpions flyin' around in it."
"Oh yeah and they got that canyon with the lake with all the Loch Ness monsters and whatnot," Fossnik #1 chimed in enthusiastically.
"What?! What?!" I bellowed, forgetting the need for stealth in my confusion.
"It's a science experiment!", they said, nodding gleefully. "Dr. Cyrus has a very inquisitive mind".
"He basically never comes to see us though," said the first, remorsefully, "I've been waiting three months to report that we completed our assigned tasks and scientifically determined that when you stab a dog in the liver, it dies."
"Well, usually," said the second. "It's statistically significant anyway."
"Shut up!" I howled, hoping very much that I sounded like someone who needs to be taken seriously.

Then I forced them to strip and tied them up. HOLD ON A MINUTE WHAT DID I JUST DO. No, there it is in the book - "You force them to strip and tie them up." - the option said I could threaten the funny rat-men, now I got them stripping at (admittedly tiny) gunpoint? I am uncomfortable with treating the rat-men in this degrading way, it is not what I had in mind at all! Yet here my Space Assassin is, wishing there were more Fossnicks to "threaten" so he could stack them in a Abu Ghraib style pyramid of hench-beings.

This moment serves to illustrate a basic issue of agency in Fighting Fantasy, YOU are not in fact the hero, YOU are just one tiny Eddie Murphy inside the hero's giant Eddie Murphy head, tipping his impulses one way or t'other at certain opportune moments, but otherwise just along for the ride, one tiny Eddie Murphy among so many others. It is a matter than I have given some philosophical consideration.

 

This giant Eddie Murphy head car is being driven by Eddie Murphy, whose own head is in turn full of tiny Eddie Murphies each representing one of his foibles, quirks and desires.

And that's how you end up with two nude, terrified rat-men quivering on the floor before you.

Anyway. "While they are stripping", you notice that they each have an electronic key-card around their neck so you pilfer one of those and swipe yourself through to the next corridor, leaving the disgraced and violated Fossnicks to recover from their trauma as best they may. I elected to duck into a cafeteria along the way - "once again everything is decorated in an alien style designed to make human behaviour difficult" - how lamentably chauvinist! I'm sure the decor is in fact designed to make alien behaviour extremely comfortable and easy - update your perspective, buddy, you are like a cat complaining that the car windscreen doesn't have a cat-flap. Anyway the protagonist follows up this unreconstructed blunder by mouthing off to himself about the stinky foreign muck that those aliens eat before happily stumbling upon some muesli bars. And of course they have those miraculous healing powers beloved of ill-fated heroes everywhere, result! Next time someone burns a hole through my torso with a high-powered laser I shall remember to gnaw on them bad boys.

Exiting the break room, I continued down the corridor.


Failure, and Death

So, the method by which I died.... is pretty crazy. Let me tell you about it.

At the end of the corridor is a T-junction and standing there is a GUARD ROBOT "with a pair of electric lashes protruding from its chest" like murderous little zappy nipples. You have an option to "bluff the robot".

"What's up," said the ROBOT.
"Say, ah, I'm, ah, inspecting IDs," said I. "You a robot though, you don't need no ID. I'm a let you just cool out for now. Okay seeya."
"Hold up my mans," that crafty ROBOT interrupted, "let me get at the base, they might coulda forgot and tell me about clearance for inbred-looking-ass hayseed mah'fukking denim-overalls-havin' ID inspectors creepin' up on my T-junction with they dick-fronts poking out they flyyyyyyyyyyyy... oversight like stands to be noted, you would agree."
"Well sure if you wanna waste they time you go right on aheed," I said sounding super pissy and not really nervous, (cos' I was pretty much nailing this bluff).
A long pause, punctuated only by the screech of a 14.4k modem negotiating a connection.
"This ID thing is a problem though," I volunteered, "lotta the aliens gettin' sloppy with they IDs, got 'em all dog-eared and what-not. Even some of the proper folks, too. Dirty thumbprints on the face part of the ID and that. Photo peeling up at the corner and what have you. HQ is havin' a fit, man, they pissed. Sent me down to bust some heads, tell y'all to get right with your IDs, straighten out them shits, yew know."
Another pause.

"Acknowledged".
The ROBOT opened fire and zapped one point of my armour off.

There's no illustration of the crappy shooty-nippled robot that I fought, so here's a sick drawing of a way cooler robot from some much cooler part of the starship. 

It is a kind of a main theme of this book actually, that ROBOTS are not easily bluffed. It's something Andrew Chapman wants his readers to "take home" from the experience, as they say. Reader beware! You cannot take these ROBOTS for the okey-doke. So this shrewd little guy got the drop on me and for what felt like hours we traded needle-thin rays of lukewarm electrical energy until, suffering an ultimate reverse in its moment of triumph, the GUARD ROBOT collapsed in a pachinko-like clatter.

So whut wuz thet somnbitch guardin' anyhoo, my character thought. Set into the floor beneath its smouldering wreck was a safe with a three button combination lock - red button, blue button, green button. Now, I know a little bit about security because I used to live in a building where any attentive intruder could figure out the door code because microbes from a hundred greasy fingertips had grown into ring-shaped colonies around the only numbers on the keypad that ever got pressed. So I know that a safe with a three button lock is pretty fukken easy to crack. I felt pretty suspicious about this safe, and I kind of wanted to leave it alone - the protagonist however, is enraptured the moment he notices the shiny buttons, and he simple must press them, even as I, tiny Eddie Murphy (i.e. the reader), pound my fists ineffectually against the inside curve of his cranium. If you know about the safe there is no option but to meddle with it.

Red button.
Beep!
Oh, that was okay! Alright how about the blue butto--

337
As you depress the button, your world falls apart in a soundless explosion - you never see what the safe had hidden. You have failed. 

If an idiot dies in an explosion, and his ears are the first things that blow up, did it really make a sound?
Apparently not.

Notable Encounters

Actually no, pardon me but I'm going to talk a bit more about how I died though.

Alright, so:

• There is a safe set in the floor operated by three buttons.
• Pressing them in the wrong order blows up the safe.
• The safe actually only contains the bomb that blows it up (confirmed by cheating - if you guess the combo you can waltz off with the bomb and use it to blow up a door or a baddy or something)
• The safe is set into the floor in the middle of a goddamn corridor where any little rat-scientist or whatever can step on the buttons while rushing towards the superbly ergonomic dining area.
• This is in a spaceship that's in space, by the way. 

So I think the GUARD ROBOT was mainly there to prevent people from stepping on the trap buttons on the floor and blowing themselves up and potentially breaching the ship's hull? WHAT KIND OF FUKKEN SPACESHIP ARE YOU RUNNING, CYRUS-THE-SCIENTUSS.

Okay, then:

Notable Encounters

I didn't get very far but there is a great jumble of fun stuff in this book. The massive on-ship wilderness zone I referred to in the dialogue with the Fossnicks is really in the book and all of the stuff mentioned in said dialogue is also really in the book:

From left to right - towering cliffs (note also the lake full of Nessies), tribe of lozenge-shaped Stone Age aliens, flying scorpion soaring over plains that stretch to the horizon - all aboard ship. NOT. EVEN. JOKING. 

Maybe it's a holodeck or something, I dunno, I didn't get that far. This barely scratches the surface of weirdo encounters on the Vandervecken though. The author seems to have had a fun time dreaming them up, and there's a distinct tongue-in-cheek absurdity to many encounters that is so patently deliberate and knowing that it rather cocks up the usual blend of genuine fondness and mean-spirited literalism in which I normally discuss these things - because Andrew Chapman is very much in on the joke. 

Another of Dr. Cyrus' experiments (possibly the control condition for the planetary radiation/virus bombardment)

My favourite moment of deliberate humour in Space Assassin - that I've noticed while skimming at least - comes during another attempt to bluff another GUARD ROBOT. You have the option of talking, attacking, or trying to sneak past - talking nets the following:

192
'I say...' you say, to attract its attention. Before you can finish however, the robot spins, aims and fires - the blast smashes into the tunnel behind you and showers the area with molten metal. You will have to fight it. Turn to 228

Having our Space Assassin launch his bad idea for a conversation with the stereotypically upper crust "I say!" is a stroke of comedic genius, it cracked me up.

The SKELETON Count

And reprising his award-winning role from Starship Traveller, here we have the "No Skeletons, Dummy, It's Sci-Fi" SKELETON:

I don't think there will ever be any SKELETONS in any of the science-fiction books. Maybe for the sci-fi books I should try counting laser swords instead or something instead, I dunno. Jury's out on that one.

Final Thoughts

I think I like this book, from as much as I've read of it at least. Andrew Chapman brings a comedic and slightly lunatic tone to the book that is amusing without throwing things outside the narrative world, if that makes sense.

The prose is pretty good and quite evocative...  except when suddenly it isn't, occasionally lapsing into inexcusable briskness. I'm gonna go ahead and call it for the whole series right now - Space Assassin has to the flattest, most unrewarding, paragraph 400 in all of Fighting Fantasy, perhaps even in all of numbered-paragraph literature:

You drag the unconscious Cyrus from the Waldo. Your mission is a complete success. Congratulations.


Andrew Chapman has gone on the record as apologising "now and forever" for this ending, which I feel is completely appropriate and should probably also be followed up with a small compensatory payment to all readers. It's odd to consider that it was also he who penned my favourite paragraph 400, which is at the end of book 16, Seas of Blood - but we'll get to that in about eight months.

I actually reeled backwards in my chair  when I opened this page as the memories of a cascade of recurring childhood nightmares starring this loathsome hench-being flooded back to me. 

#9 - "Caverns of the Snow Witch", by Ian Livingstone (1984)

Thaggnar's video-conference with Björk
spirals into opprobrium.  

Well, here we are knocking about in the imagination of Ian Livingstone again. Get used to it - the man was prolific. On the cover, both "caverns" and "a snow witch" are clearly depicted, but the star of the show appears to be a bumbling ORC whose boss has hit him up via crystal ball to chew his ass out for leaving the fridge door open. You can tell that he is bumbling because he has a flail stuffed into his belt such that the spiky bit is dangling in front of his crotch - if the homie makes any sudden movements then he is going to get a rude awakening, in the nuts. This might also explain why he's been standing still long enough for icicles to form on his pants.

You are an accident waiting to happen my friend.

It's a dramatic scene. Basically everyone seems to be just howling and freaking out - even the icy skulls that got stuck in the wall somehow - which led me to the alternative interpretation that they've just been told that a wandering swordsman is headed their way.

OH NO I HEARD IT IS THE SAME GUY WHO MADE A MAP OF THE SCORPIONS SWAMPS

So, you could be forgiven for thinking that the book is about a debutante ORC's struggle to make it in the high-pressure world of a modern henchman. You could also be forgiven for thinking that this book is about his boss THE SNOW WITCH, but she actually gets killed off halfway through. The book has an unusual structure, all the stuff about Caverns and a Snow Witch is just the first half, with the boss fight in the middle of the story rather than at the end. The adventure was first published in short form - just the Snow Witch bits - in the second issue of Warlock magazine, which believe it or not was an actual magazine about Fighting Fantasy that you could buy.

The Snow Witch - whom my research tells me has the lovely name of Shareella - made her debut on the cover in the contemporary haute couture of 1984, a snow-white leotard, bead belt and an early "rampant" prototype of her characteristic birdy hat.

What a feeling, bein's believin' / I can't have it all, now I'm dancing for my life

So the shorter adventure from Wizard magazine comprises the first half of the book, and it's fairly self-contained - the second half is kind of a medical drama. 


Background

Our protagonist starts out this adventure travelling with a caravan as a hired caravan guard - as far as fantasy role-playing set-ups go, this is pretty conventional. Then again, it's a damn sight better than some of his predecessors, those guys who you'll remember spent their days wandering the countryside alone, killing indiscriminately and composing erotic fan fiction about their own swords in the quiet intervals while they walk to their next massacre. In terms of characterisation, it's a big step up.

You work for Big Jim Sun, "a man to be reckoned with", who runs caravans up into the Icefinger mountains for the fur trade. At the moment the narrative picks up, our hero is walking ahead of the six carts over a frozen lake, poking the ice with a sword - from which we can see that Fighting Fantasy protagonists can apparently find ways to satisfy their death wish even when they're not in the midst of an official adventure. Suddenly the sound of a hunting horn blasts out across the ice, which is the mediaeval equivalent of yelling "OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT" - Big Jim thinks it might've come from the trading outpost that the caravan was heading for, and he sends you ahead to check. What you find is a "scene of ugly carnage", the bodies of six men massacred by some enormous creature. You report back to Big Jim and he asks you to hunt and kill the beast - by yourself, natch - which you agree to attempt for the sum of 50 GP.

It's actually a succinct and nicely atmospheric intro, which left me with little to make fun of. So, moving on...

Rolling Up My Dude


SKILL - 10
STAMINA - 20
LUCK - 11

Still avoiding single-digit SKILL scores, lucky me. I have my 10 PROVISIONS, hooray! I wish that they would bring back the rules from Warlock where the book would tell you that you could eat, at sensible times. I am running out of jokes about the instantaneous feeding/healing mechanic.

The Adventure


You wake up in the morning to find that the weather is shitty and fresh snow has covered the beast's tracks. You are, of course, undeterred and just start walking in a direction. Your first challenge is how to pass a crevasse in the ice. You can walk around it, or cross an "ice bridge" that has naturally formed across it, which if you think about it, would be fucking crazy. I was reminded of the first choice in Scorpion Swamp, where you could walk around the puddle or jump it. This isn't the sensible, predictable world of Scorpion Swamp though - when I decided to play it safe and walk around the crevasse, Ian hit me with a goddamn WOOLLY MAMMOTH (SKILL 10, STAMINA 11).

For fuck's sake.

A MAMMOTH, featured in the popular television game, "Skyrim".

Despite being evenly matched on paper, the MAMMOTH only got one good shot in before I chopped all of its legs off and rolled it down the hill. After that the weather worsened so I "hurriedly cut blocks of ice out of the mountain-side and [built] a makeshift igloo" and sat inside scarfing PROVISIONS to keep warm - all authentic survival lore I think - only to clamber out a while later to find that I'd been a few metres away from a trapper's log cabin. Naturally I busted in and ran a Goldilocks up on that joint, eating the trapper's stew and nicking a couple of weapons that were lying under the bed, i.e. a spear and, believe it or not, a war-hammer that I guess the trapper kept handy in case he needed to fight someone in plate armour. I left, following the fresh footprints that led out from the front door (yes, it was clear that the hut was actively inhabited - I was mentally prepared to feign anger and inform the trapper that I don't see your name on it and it's a free country and he should've locked the fucking door if he should happen to recognize his war-hammer poking out of my pants later on).

Now, some readers of the blog might be intrigued as to the identity about the killer beast that I was tracking - let me inform you now that if you're actually reading the book, this mystery is almost immediately ruined in Paragraph 1 when Ian informs you that "you set off towards the mountains where you hope to find the abominable killer beast"  - any six-year old with a passing interest in cryptozoology now knows it must this guy:

Eeeeeeek!

Yes, that hairy snowman who has been single-handedly keeping the word "abominable" alive for the last five decades or more - the YETI. This picture kinds of bugs me out by the way. It's well drawn, but very awkwardly composed. The YETI is standing at the bottom of a cliff or something? It's also clear that the artist's sympathies lie with the YETI, with its innocent labrador eyes, and its posture that of a 1950s TV housewife encountering a mouse, combined with the poise and gravitas of a surprised kitten.

See what I mean. 

The YETI inadvertently eviscerates the trapper while flapping its wrists, squealing and looking away with its eyes screwed shut - "incensed by the vicious attack, you scream at the Yeti and run through the snow to attack it". Before engaging, you get to chuck the spear, if it you have it - perhaps the trapper has a moment of baffled recognition as it flickers past his dying gaze - and if you manage to skewer the YETI it turns an unavoidable SKILL 11 STAMINA 12 fight into an unavoidable SKILL 10 STAMINA 9 fight (yeah, cheers Ian). I won the fight but the YETI got a few solid hits in, amidst all the effeminate shrieking and hopping about, so I'll confess that I was already chewing on a chicken drumstick from my PROVISIONS as I knelt at the side of the dying trapper.

Guy from "Final Fight" demonstrates best practice in the healing arts.

"With great effort he reaches up and grabs you by the neck, pulling you down so that you can hear his dying words." As I did for Mungo in Lizard King, I have taken the liberty of imagining what these might have been. "In terrible pain he struggles to whisper his story..."

Trapper's Last Words

"Ahem. Stranger, as you know, the Icefinger Mountains are a cold and inhospitable land, but for most of my life I've made them my home. I've earned my living hunting and trapping beasts. I eat the meat that I kill and scrape the furs for trade. But all that's behind me now, since, as must now be quite obvious to you, I am dying in agony. Perhaps five years ago, I first heard tell of the Crystal Caves, a great warren carved into the face of glacier, so-named for its abundance of valuable water crystals.  It is home to the wicked Snow Witch, Shareella, and her cult of followers. Now, the Snow Witch, as you may have heard, is a beautiful yet evil sorceress, who is trying to use her dark powers to bring on an ice age so that she can rule supreme over the whole world - can you imagine that? Well, it's more than a right-thinking trapper like myself can stand. So, since that day five years ago--"


Hold up, hold up, hold up - actually, no. You know what? I can't be bothered. There is honestly so much exposition in this trapper's dying words. He's worse than Bigleg in Forest of Doom. Somebody needs to let these guys know that when it comes to last words, pithiness is what gets you over. You shouldn't be glancing at your wrist-watch during a guy's dying words. You shouldn't start wondering what might be for dinner. You shouldn't have to interrupt to clarify whether the man is, in fact, actually dying at all, or whether there might still be enough time to drag him down off the mountain or e.g. invent all of modern medicine.

Anyway, he does eventually die. One of the many things he tells you before doing so is that he found the entrance to the Crystal Caves and marked it with a scrap of fur (the entrance has an illusion cast on it so it looks just like a wall of ice), and he begs you to go and kill the Snow Witch, and just in case you aren't civic-minded, "legends say" that there are treasures frozen into the walls (SPOILER - this is a dirty fuckin' lie). The book then tells you that you consider going back to Big Jim Sun to collect your 50 Gold, but "the thought of an quest through the Crystal Caves beneath Icefinger Mountains excites you, and you decide to set off to find them". I would've preferred to be given a choice here actually - could've been a nice "bad ending" for the narrative, you go get your 50 GP and invest it in starting up a one-stop apothecary in Port Blacksand that sells hag's hair, black pearls and lotus flowers, then a couple of years later Shareella's Ice Age hits and you're left starving out in the tundra with nothing for breakfast but old acorns and cursed Turkish Delight. Big Jim Sun, as a fur trader, gets to retire a millionaire, but everybody else is having a rubbish time, I bet you wish you tried to stop the Snow Witch when you had the chance: Your Adventure Ends Here.

I wish it was written that way, but instead you just get herded to the Crystal Caves by your overwhelming excitement.  When we arrive, we get the to books first T-junction! I thought it would never come - I went left. I bumped into a MOUNTAIN ELF in the corridor but I was just like "oh hey, what's up" and he was like "you know, maintainin', tryin' to get over" and that was that. Then I fell into a pit trap, which does 1d6 damage - in my case, a full 6 STAMINA damage. I reached into my PROVISIONS for a can of corned beef even as I ruefully rubbed my bruised tail-bone. Here I was stuck in a pit, surrounded by a fortune in precious water crystals! Yet I would trade it all for a step ladder, or even a good, solid, rope.

Then looking up I saw these two goofballs:

It's the guys who really did the singing for Milli Vanilli!

These GOBLINS threw down a rope and ordered me to throw my sword up to them, which I did. They wanted to take a prisoner, which in their shoes, would not have been my strategy. If I was the GOBLIN here, I would've run and hid in a box. I may lose a lot of Fighting Fantasy books, but the day I die because something a GOBLIN did? There ain't a calendar for that. What happened next is basically my favourite option in the whole book: If you wish to pull hard on the rope in an attempt to pull them down into the pit, turn to 314. 

You have to Test Your Luck to make it happen - really you'd think the GOBBIES should be testing their luck though - but if you make the roll, one of them lands on his head and doesn't get up, the other is a SKILL 5 STAMINA 4 fight which is pretty dang easy even when you're penalised for having thrown your sword away like a ding-dong. You're still at the bottom of the pit afterwards, which is kind of a minus, but we already established the heroes miraculous powers of ice-working when he assembled an igloo in five minutes during a blizzard, so it's no real surprise that you're able to hack a staircase out of the wall with one of the dead GOBLIN's daggers.

So, back on track then. Next up? A PUZZLE ROOM. The situation is that there's a sword and a spear poking out of these cute little circular pools in the ground. Someone carved a poem in the ice in front of them:

Sword or spear

Strength or fear

How to choose

Win or lose

I had to look up "doggerel" in the dictionary just now because I thought it meant "poetry that a dog would write" - not really, as it turns out, but near enough.

Plus there's the frosty corpse of an ORC pointing at the sword.
He has an honest face, don't you think?

You can choose to take one of them with you or just write the whole thing off as a bad joke if you like - after all, it's hard to imagine someone setting something like this up outside of the context of a birthday party or a game show. It's not a very good trap, since there's an even chance of getting a really good weapon with zero consequence. So my working theory is that someone who lives in the Crystal Caves set this up as a fun surprise for their best friend to find, the whole set-up including the dead ORC has some kind of special in-joke meaning between these two good buddies, balloons were gonna come down from the ceiling, et cetera, but like an asshole you have just blundered in and ruined it.

I chose to pick up the sword, because they rhymed spear with fear in the poem, plus the ORC was pointing to it. I had to make some assumptions about what the ORC was thinking when he died, I mean if it had been a SKELETON instead then the pointing would definitely mean "I'm going come back to life and get you if you even touch that sword" but since it was an ORC I thought he probably just meant "oh wow, look at that brilliant sword". This proved to be a sound line of reasoning as it was a Sword of Speed, giving +1 SKILL. I then had the option to rifle through the ORC's belongings - and since no Livingstone adventure would be complete without the opportunity to eat something nasty, you find a moldy loaf of bread - eat, Y/N? "What the hell, I could use the penicillin", I thought and tucked in - when you break it open you find a key inside, "oh great a key", and then you just throw the bread away like you were never seriously going to eat it in the first place. (This bothered me and I also never found out what the key was for).

Further up the tunnel you come across an incongruous sight at a side-entrance:

Your view into the cave is partially blocked by an old tattered animal skin hanging down over the entrance, but you can see the lower torso of a man wearing green and purple hose, and pointed red slippers. [emphases mine]

"Oh shit" I thought, "we got us a HARLEQUIN".

"Mother and Child with HARLEQUIN", 18th Century (artist unknown)
There is so much to make fun of in this painting that I actually better not even start.

Despite their garish clothes and fabulous manner, HARLEQUINS cannot be trusted as is clear from the evident cuckoldry in the historically accurate painting above.

That HARLEQUIN's been doing more than just helping out in the kitchen!
(Though it also explains why hubby was acting like he'd never seen a tit before)

A HARLEQUIN can also get you by doing some unexpected flamboyant shit that you can't even decipher but then a long time afterwards you realise he was dissing you and it was so deadly.

Days later, I knew I had been dissed so hard.

Finally, one can never underestimate the sexy allure of an accomplished HARLEQUIN and their expertise in deploying those wicked wiles to sow confusion and discord among their foes.

I should mention that doing a Google Image Search for the word
HARLEQUIN will net you 50% fan-art of the Harley Quinn character
from Batman, and 50% medical photos of harlequin ichthyosis.

I don't recommend it. 

With all this very much in mind I steeled myself for the deadliest encounter yet as I flung aside the gross ratty old animal skin curtain, ready to confront my chequy fate. But fortunately I was spared - before me stood nothing more fearsome than a MINSTREL (yes "MINSTREL" is capitalized in the book). You have the option of attacking him - but you can also "ask him about his music". If you've spent much time hanging out with musicians then like me you'll know that's it's not always clear which is the more dangerous course of action. I asked him about his music and steeled myself.

The MINSTREL is pathetically grateful for your acknowledgement and has a quick gripe about how under-appreciated he is before playing a magic song which gives you 4 STAMINA points (putting it on par with a bowl of cornflakes in the Fighting Fantasy system). Then he sends you on your way, though I would've liked an extra paragraph where the reader could give him carefully worded feedback.

The MINSTREL strums the last chord and looks at you expectantly in the ensuing silence. What do you say?
    "I liked the loud parts." - turn to 83
    "You looked like you were having fun." - turn to 177
    "Wow, you are fully, like, the male Jewel!" - turn to 204


I daresay any of those answers would net you an encore of his other song - it's the one he plays if you attack him, it paralyses you and then he slaps a slave collar around your neck. I haven't mentioned it previously but basically everyone you meet in the Crystal Caves is wearing these iron collars (like the ORC on the cover) which will give the wearer a gentle throttling if they disparage the management, try to escape or worse yet, unionize. It says little for the Snow Witch's leadership qualities that she is unable to inspire a genuine cult of personality among the various GOBLINS and TROGLODYTES in her employ. It's also worth noting that the MINSTREL is the only guy we've seen so far who isn't wearing a slave collar, roped in instead by the merest sniff of patronage from the Snow Witch (or "beloved Snow Queen" as he enthuses) - because, hey, forgetting the megalomania, and the eternal Ice Age thing - a gig's a gig, right? It kind of reminds me of the New Zealand marching band that was commissioned to play at Colonel Qadaffi's birthday party some years back, but that's another story (it was in Wikileaks).

You'll never make General now, Colonel Qadaffi. 

So anyway, next stop down the hallway was a room with ten guys it (an assortment of GOBLINS, ORCS, and NEANDERTHALS, if you must know). Since I've never seen a Fighting Fantasy paragraph that bothers to give you rules for fighting ten guys, I decided to sprint past them. One of them hiffed a dart at me and another tried to smack me with a whip, but once I got to the other side of the room they didn't bother to give chase. That's what you get if you put slave collars on your staff - they were just doing enough to be able to say they'd tried.

They could've got the better of me too, since I ran straight down a dead-end. There was a pit at the end with a dwarf trapped in it, having large water crystals dropped down on him from a shaft in the ceiling by giggling school-goblins. I helped him out despite the fact that he pretty much dared me to walk away ("Curse you, stranger, if you do not aid me!")  In his gratitude he gifted me a sling with three bullets and yelled "Beware the White Rat!" as he ran away. There's a white rat later in the book that turns into a SKILL 12 WHITE DRAGON - which this dwarf must've known, but apparently couldn't spare the breath to add "...cos it turns into a Dragon!" as he took to his heels. It's one of those useless hints, like the Delphic prophecies, where you get to think "oh so that's what he was talking about" later on - i.e. when you're relaxing in the DRAGON's belly. I just saved this miserable dwarf's life, I don't want the spoiler-free version of the goddamn hints. So we can agree that this guy was a bit of a tool.

Then while I was on my way to the next T-junction I came to a spot where the tunnel split into three instead, which almost never happens. And out from one of the tunnels comes my high school physics teacher in his dressing gown.

When did you get your ears pierced, sir?
It's a hot look for you. 

Turns out this maroon is an evil ILLUSIONIST - the prism is not actually a prop for an optics lesson, it's magic. He pulled out that old classic of creating illusionary copies of himself. "Oh no, which one is real, and which is but an illusion" I said in a bored voice as I expertly skewered the real ILLUSIONIST (it was  just a lucky guess but you have to back yourself in these situations). I smashed his prism and a genie came out, the ILLUSIONIST went running back up the tunnel shrieking, and the genie said 'Boy do I owe you a favour! Get at me later and I'll do you a solid! Invisibility, baby! Ciao 4 now!'

Then he vanished. I shrugged and went right.

As soon as you enter the tunnel, an iron grille drops behind you, barring your retreat. It is impossible to lift and there is nothing you can do but find out what lies at the end of the tunnel. You soon arrive at another iron grille which blocks your way forward.

There's a lever on the other side of the grill (grille?) which you can't reach but could maybe throw something at, like, I dunno, a dagger. So the book asks you if you have any daggers. If you don't, you lose.

This "U GOT DEATHTRAPP'd" message is brought to you by Ian Livingstone,
and Ian Livingstone's cameo as a novelty rubber mask.

At this point I pretty near flew into a rage, since I'd just been given a sling and three bullets, which would be an equivalent, if not better, method of hitting the lever from the wrong side of the grill.

Uh-uh, no.


Failure, and Death

About a day and a half later I suddenly remembered that I had used one of the GOBLIN's dagger to climb out of that pit trap earlier. I checked, and the book doesn't say that you throw it away, so presumably I still had it. Though I was still pretty pissed at Ian for not letting me use my sling bullets, I decided that my duty to this blog must come first, so I picked the book up again and Tested My Luck to see if I could hit the lever with my one dagger.

I made the shot and immediately after escaping ran into this hombre:

CRYSTAL WARRIOR - SKILL 11, STAMINA 13, GLEAMINESS 178 thousand million

He is "made of quartz" and is the first and only actually crystal thing in the Crystal Caves (putting aside my snarky references to water crystals) - perhaps there were once crystals lying all over the place but someone gathered them up and stuck them all together to make this guy. He's invulnerable to edged weapons so the book asks if you might've perhaps stolen a war-hammer from under someone's bed earlier, and if so you can fight him. I had the hammer on my side but not the dice - he killed me, the end.


Monsters, Combat, Noteworthy Encounters

Somehow in the course of writing up this post I've ended up describing every encounter I experienced in my adventure, in the order they happened. Not usually my modus operandi - I feel bewildered, like a man waking up on the floor with gaps in his memory and blood on his hands. Most times I have more to talk about in this section, but I guess I can comment on a couple of the other encounters I noticed when glancing at paragraphs I wasn't supposed to.

This book is once again full of tough combat which seems to give the lie to Fighting Fantasy adage that the "one true path" can be walked by even a useless old SKILL 7 knucklehead. The YETI is an unavoidable SKILL 10 fight at minimum - other fights are merely hard to avoid, such as the CRYSTAL WARRIOR who did for me.

Probably the most outrageous of all though is this ludicrous-looking inbred who has, can you believe this, SKILL of 12:

BIRDMAN, motherfucker!

And reminiscent of the IMITATOR in Deathtrap Dungeon, we meet another hastily re-branded refugee from the D-and-D Monster Manual, the "BRAIN SLAYER":

Unfortunately, "mind flaying" is a licensed process under patent held by TSR, Inc.
But if you'll bear with me a moment I believe I achieve comparable effects by slaying your brain
without incurring additional delays or license fees.

The SKELETON Count

Again! By this time I'm sure the pressure all the SKELETONS pent up in Ian's psyche must've been growing to astronomical levels. Certainly the artist was feeling the strain, the suppressed desires for loads more skellies worked its way onto the page in the form of dozens of skulls doodled into the detail of the artwork.

For example if you scroll back up to the picture of the ILLUSIONIST you should be able to count nine skulls in his dressing gown plus the massive one in the background - at a total of 10 skulls, it's the most thoroughly skull-saturated drawing in the book, but it's not alone.

More typical is this drawing of a barbarous MAN-ORC with just 3 skulls.

"Get out of here! This tree-house is for MEN-ORCS only!"

In total...

...and that includes the FIVE on the cover - though I won't guarantee that I found all of them.

Final Thoughts

Well, the good thing about this book is probably the story, though I only survived through the shitty parts of it. The boss fight with the SNOW WITCH takes place halfway through the book as I noted earlier, it involves playing a literal guessing game with her and looks like it would be a pretty horrible experience. But after that you are left suffering the effects of a curse, you have to escape the caves and then you go on a cross-country journey with two companions, trying to find someone to lift the curse as your life slowly drains away - along the way you get embroiled in events that reveal this book is actually a prequel to Forest of Doom, and paragraph 400 ends with you watching the sunrise from the summit of Firetop Mountain and reflecting on how good it is to be alive. It's all quite different from the run-of-the-mill and looked pretty fun as I skimmed it.

I praised the plot of Lizard King too (inasmuch as I praise anything I guess) and it seems like the story aspects in Ian Livingstone's books seem to improve very quickly after the first couple.  From a design point of view though, there's a lot of technical sloppiness here - I already expressed myself regarding the iron grill trap, but I'll point out that I do recognise that, very obviously, a gamebook author can't allow for every idea a reader would have about how to deal with a situation. However if you set up a situation where one essential item could very easily be substituted for another, but that isn't allowed? You will provoke frustration.

Another gripe relates to that GENIE that suddenly burst out of the prism and said he could turn me invisible if I wanted - pretty handy, but the only way you can ever invoke this is if you encounter the CRYSTAL WARRIOR and you don't have the war-hammer - only in this case can you ask the Genie to turn you invisible and you can sneak past. Your third option is to sit on the floor and weep as the CRYSTAL WARRIOR laminates himself in your pulverised viscera.

Again in this book we have the situation where each item has only one correct use and only one opportunity to use it. There are cases where an essential item crops up only one or two encounters before you have to use it (e.g. an item that lets you deal with the White Rat/Dragon is an example), which feels contrived. I get the sense that there wasn't much going on in the way of play-testing and review at this stage (in 1984 I still imagine Jackson and Livingstone as emaciated youths clad in flour-sacks, furiously typing away in a garage somewhere, that first cheque for one hundred million pounds still in the post).

So, thanks for reading. Next time we will be back in the ever-sadistic clutches of Steve - the real Steve, not that American guy who makes his books too easy - with the first book in the series which I have never previously played: House of Hell.

#6 - Deathtrap Dungeon, by Ian Livingstone (1984)

Near as I can tell, Deathtrap Dungeon is far and away the most famous Fighting Fantasy book. Could its renown stem from a classy execution of that absolutely archetypal role-playing scenario, the dungeon crawl? That's quite likely. Or could it derive from the debut of that cherished character "the BLOODBEAST", since 1991 a mascot of Japanese baseball team the Moritaka Petrochemicals Bloodbeasts? Maybe so. Could it be because of the characterisation and dialogue? No, definitely not. Whatever the reasons, more than any other FF book it has left a dent in the culture.

In 1998, a video game version for Playstation and PC titled "Ian Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon" was released by Eidos Interactive (not coincidentally, also the company where Ian Livingstone enjoys the Mubarak-esque title of "Life President"). Unlike the source material, it was poorly received in the English-speaking world. For example, it was rated 6.2 out of 10 by Gamespot, an organization that would give a turd 8/10 if it had an advertising budget over $500 (YouTube commentor masteriansun gives the plain English equivalent of a 6.2 from Gamespot - "i'd rather get a blowjob from a lion than play this game again").  On the other hand it was lauded by gaming press in Holland, Denmark and Germany - perhaps due to some cultural resonance in Saxon lands where the likes of DWARVES and GOBLINS are celebrated in "high culture" (opera, public statuary, etc). Holland's "Power Unlimited" magazine gave it 91%, commenting "Eidos heeft weer een vette hit in handen. Ik denk dat Deathtrap Dungeon best eens de populariteit van Tomb Raider zal kunnen gaan evenaren." ("Eidos has another hit in oily hands. I think Deathtrap Dungeon for once the popularity of Tomb Raider will be able to match")

Speaking of Tomb Raider, Eidos had thoroughly learned the principal that "sex sells" from the enormous fame and revenue generated by those two chunky peppermint-coloured dodecahedra on Lara Croft's chest. This, combined with some confusion around the word "dungeon", led to the misleading and inadvertently hilarious advertisement above, replete with bad taste artefacts of the late '90s such as; "X-treme/in-your-face" copy; the lady's latex; the gentleman's shredded capri pants, and; coloured lighting taken straight from the set of  "Batman and Robin" (1997).

While Deathtrap Dungeon has seen numerous fringe theatre adaptations, such as the bawdy cabaret Baron Sukumvit's Daughter, it has yet to be brought to the silver screen. However the cosmic mercy that has thus far masked it from Uwe Boll's attention cannot last indefinitely. Most recently, "Deathtrap" was the first Fighting Fantasy to be adapted into an iPhone/iPad application. I've heard that Ian Livingstone is on the record as saying it's his favourite of the FF books he wrote. Hopefully in this play through I can get a glimmer of understanding as to why the global influence of Deathtrap Dungeon is exceeded only by that of the Holy Bible, the Koran, and almost all of the other normal books where you just read the pages one at a time from left to right.

Background


The book begins some brief explanation of the geography and recent history of the town of Fang, which is on the River Kok in the province of Chiang Mai. All of these are real places in Thailand, by the way. Apparently Ian Livingstone spent some time backpacking around Northern Thailand in 1981 and just couldn't get over how well the place-names adapted to sword and sorcery. (Making up names is the hardest thing about writing fantasy - ask anyone. Or, more specifically, ask the guy that came up "Tybalt Spellcaster" for the latest re-print of Citadel of Chaos)

Thai people celebrating their connection to  Deathtrap Dungeon.

Basically Fang was a no-account town, most famous for the uniquely slow chewing action of its water bison, until one day the town's ruler Baron Sukumvit launched an annual contest called the "Trial of Champions" to be held in his private labyrinth, or "dungeon" if you prefer. (By the way, that's Sukumvit as in Sukumvhit Road, Bangkok). In the first year of the contest, seventeen challengers attempted to pass through the labyrinth, and they all died, falling prey either to monsters or deadly traps AKA "deathtraps". The prize if you win - and no-one ever does - is 10,000 Gold Pieces, which for context is just enough to buy 3,333 lanterns at the Port Blacksand markets and still have a GP left over to bribe the city guard. According to the book, "as the years passed, and the Trial of Champions continued, it attracted more and more challengers and spectators" - not quite sure why this would be since the challengers always die and the spectators only get to watch them walk into a tunnel and not come out again... it doesn't sound like much of a spectacle to me, but then again, some people watch TV about cakes! And some people watch yachting. So what do I know.

By this time, readers of Turn to 400 should be well aware that Fighting Fantasy protagonists are suicidally reckless, without exception. Therefore you will not be surprised to hear that the hero of "Deathtrap" immediately decides to enter the Trial of Champions, "having seen one of Sukumvit's challenges nailed to a tree". I do wonder exactly what the copy was...

...regardless of the specifics, the challenge galvanises our crazy protagonist to throw his tiny, doomed hat into the deadly, deadly ring. The Background briefly glosses over your voyage to Fang, via Port Blacksand - "wasting no time in that [ahem] city of thieves"  - an ostentatious name-drop that nicely indicates the world of Fighting Fantasy starting to stitch itself together (albeit after the manner of Frankenstein).

When you arrive in Fang there are three days to spare before the contest begins, everyone is partying like nuts and buying you drinks and such because, after all, you're about to die horribly. Come the big day itself you blink away your hangover and are escorted to the dungeon entrance by (cough) "a small man with slanted eyes". At the entrance there's a crowd of townsfolk, five fellow contestants and the Baron himself, dolled up in his dressing gown and a hat that would've been a better design for the Starship Traveller than the one they actually went with.  The system is that each contestant enters one at a time, in random order, spaced half an hour apart (once again this is right up there with cricket on a rainy day as far spectator excitement goes).

Not even in the dungeon yet and already I can plainly see some howling ghosts through the doorway. 
"YOU IN THE BIG LEAGUES NOW SON"

Your fellow contestants are a glorious mix of incongruities - three of them are protagonists from the greatest film genres of the 1980s - two barbarians, and a ninja. There's also an elf lady but forget her, she gets killed by a boa constrictor anyway. Oh and a knight. That guy gets turned to stone, forget him.



Rolling Up My Dude


SKILL - 10
STAMINA - 15
LUCK - 11


Not bad stats. The rules in this book are as normal and you start with the usual 10 Provisions and a sword. Plus maybe a shield. A lot of these books seem to equivocate about whether you have a shield or not. I might've had a shield. 


The Adventure

Okay things begin when your number comes up, you are fifth to enter, preceded by the knight, the elf, the ninja and one of those lovable barbarians. A few metres down the entrance corridor there's a table with six labelled wooden boxes on it, one for each contestant. So here we are launching straight into an atmosphere of high-stakes tension - "is this just a plain old box or is this gonna be a deathtrap", you have to think to yourself. I had faith that Ian wouldn't insta-kill me off the first paragraph so I opened it up - inside is 2 GP as a reward for your trusting nature and a patronising note from Da Baron in which he reveals "you will need to find and use several items if you hope to pass triumphantly through my Deathtrap Dungeon" - yes, that is his idea of a "hint" (dick), so let's keep our eyes peeled for some... items. Sadly you are not given the option to loot GP from the other contestants' boxes and must instead proceed to your next challenge: a T-junction.

I grouse a lot about random direction-choosing in these books but I have to say that this T-junction was quite a lively conundrum - you can choose to go west, following three sets of footprints and a white arrow painted on the wall, or to follow a solitary set of footsteps to the east. I quickly decided that going west was "too mainstream" and headed east, where I soon had the awkward experience of having to clamber around a giant puffball that was blocking the corridor. I get the sense that this puffball wasn't really meant to be part of the dungeon and someone had painted the arrow back at the intersection to try to head off embarrassment.

Further along the corridor you start to experience a sauna-like heat and are given the option of drinking a clear fluid that you find lying around. I assumed Da Baron had turned up the heat to trick me into drinking poison, but in fact it turned out the heat itself was the trap and they'd left a helpful potion lying around to give you a chance of surviving it - nice fake-out. Fortunately I passed a SKILL roll against the heat with the result that "only [my] immense strength and grim determination prevents [me] falling unconscious to the floor" - not mentioned: my astonishing stupidity, which prevented from me from heading back to the T-junction and going down the other route before the heat started to reach "verge-of-death" levels.

Anyway a little further on and with my pores well and truly open and refreshed, I caught up with the mystery person whose footsteps I'd been following - and it looks like he fell for an extreme version of that old classic gag, "standing on a rake":

Barbarian #1: "U GOT DEATHTRAPP'd!" 

Notably, you are given the option to rifle through his loincloth and devour some "strange-looking dried meat" that you find there - yep, the protagonist's poor impulse control extends beyond his enthusiasm for contests that are known to reliably kill all of their players and into a kamikaze gourmand's urge to eat and drink whatever things are to hand while roaming about underground. I also filched the bait from the trap, a silver goblet, luckily avoiding a second deathtrap in the process. I don't know if the goblet serves any purpose later because I died shortly afterwards.

Failure, and Death

Ian Livingstone's been to Thailand, apparently.

A little further in I came across a statue of the local equivalent of Fat Buddha, given an Allansian twist in the form of those two sidekicks you can see flanking him in the picture (they're Dire Flamingos, stuffed by some especially ambitious taxidermist - but predictably enough they can come alive and attack you under the right conditions). His eyes are made of emeralds, and having played Deathtrap as a child I knew that, just as in the European aristocracy, you need to collect precious stones to win. Clambering up to the idol's shoulders, you are given the choice of chipping out the left or right eye (the third eye shown in the picture is due to artistic license and doesn't really exist apparently). Being right-handed I chose the right eye (much easier to brace against Buddha's nose with my left hand while standing on his protuberant lower lip, leaving my right free to work on the gem). And then...

"Much to your surprise, the emerald shatters on contact, releasing a jet of poisonous gas straight into your face. The gas knocks you out and you release the rope, bounce down the idol and crash on the stone floor. Your adventure ends here."

This "U GOT DEATHTRAPP'd" message is brought to you by Ian Livingstone, and Ian Livingstone's cameo as a mutilated prisoner chained to a wall.
 

Monsters, Combat, Noteworthy Encounters

So yes, my adventure was pretty short this time out. The only combat I actually had was with a couple of ORCS just after the sauna-corridor - they were about as much interest as ORCS ever are, i.e. not worth mentioning unless you're trying to write a thesis about Tolkein being racist.

Flicking through the pages, there seems to be several tough fights some of which I suspect are unavoidable. Your fellow contestant the NINJA, should you fight him, is SKILL 11. There's numerous SKILL 10 opponents, including mainstays such as a GIANT SCORPION. And then there's the PIT FIEND, a SKILL 12 Tyrannosaurus.

Known to children and the young-at-heart as the PIT FRIEND.

My old pal and cover model the BLOODBEAST is SKILL 12 also, this guy is I think maybe the first genuinely original and interesting monster to appear in the series. He's about the size of a large hippo and hangs out in a hot tub full of acidic slime his whole life, slapping at passers-by with his big gross tongue. According to my copy of Out of the Pit, his "one major weakness" is getting poked in the eyes, "so it has evolved hundreds of fake 'eyes' that rise in blisters before bursting open on its head". It's baffling to me that no-one has yet marketed a BLOODBEAST plush toy - this guy has character.

Less original but pretty amusing is the IMITATOR, an (ahem) homage to the classic D'n'D Mimic, i.e. a shape-changer that disguises itself as inanimate objects and then punches you.

Saaaay, what kind of a dungeon is this?

The SKELETON Report

The cover for 1998's Ian Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon, which Life President Ian Livingstone insisted depict a SKELETON head.

Yep, just the one. To the casual observer, this may appear innocent enough, merely the mortal remains of a man who suddenly died while taking his ease. But in fact it is a SKELETON, playing a trick! If you grab at his rolled-up parchment he will get up and attack you, "rising from [his] chair in a series of jerky movements".

If you don't try to take the parchment, he is like "DAMN" and then waits for someone to walk past again in next year's contest.

I should point out that this is almost the most obvious thing a SKELETON could ever do. This is such a classic scenario it's basically a natural law. If you should come home one day and find a dusty skeleton on the couch, clutching your remote control in a death grip, don't touch that mess. I don't care if your "life partner" thinks it's dead. I don't care how much cobwebs it's got on it. Don't be touching that SKELETON. Maybe call the cops. They are trained for these situations.

Final Thoughts

Now you will note that I basically died on a 50/50 coin toss, which is normally the kind of thing I would have a whinge about. But I don't want to come across as a big baby who gets upset 'cos he can't win on the first play through. These books are supposed to have replay value. Also this book is very clear from the outset that it is not trying to be fair. The setting is specifically designed to kill people, it says it right there in the name - you cannot spell "Deathtrap Dungeon" without DEATH, a dungeon, and at least one trap. It is not supposed to be a functioning city like Port Blacksand, or a natural environment / nudist community like Darkwood Forest. The artificiality of the setting in Deathtrap actually saves it from some of the flaws of earlier game-books because the unconnected encounters and your Bizarre Search Behaviour do actually make sense within the "Running Man"-style game show context. Suspension of disbelief becomes a lot easier because the overt rules of the environment exactly align with the unstated rules of the form.

The closest parallel in terms of setting to Deathtrap is probably the original Warlock, also a dungeon full of disjointed encounters. But it exceeds that book in every aspect, mainly through filling your decisions out a little with interesting details, like which set of footprints to follow at that first T-junction. I think the presence of the other contestants in the dungeon also enlivens the book to a great degree as you can stumble across evidence of their activities (including their corpses), fight them, or in one case even briefly team up (that's the ill-fated Barbarian #2, Throm). So by book 6, the series seems to have a good head of steam on - let's see what plays out next in book 7, THE ISLAND OF THE LIZARD KING.