#14 - "Temple of Terror" by Ian Livingstone (1985)

Somehow I'm here again, volunteering for another suicide mission.

'We need a fearless young warrior who is willing to risk life and limb to save us all. Is there one among you who would volunteer?'
[...]
With a wry smile on your face, you raise your arm in the air and offer your services. Yaztromo sees you and says, 'Haven't I seen you somewhere before?'

Well, it was like ten years ago, and I think I wouldn't have been  wearing a crown, can't remember exactly when I started doing that but it was maybe later, and, ah - oh yeah -  probably also I had no wings back then and I was not continuously on fire, but yes, we have met before, Yaztromo. You were my boss.

Some folks got a great memory for faces I guess, or in your case Yaz, something more like a memory for silhouettes, what with my body being a more or less totally charred and blackened husk after the last mission you sent me on.


But hey, Yazza - it's good to see you. Nice to be working together again.


Hello, my friends - today we are playing Temple of Terror, and because it's a direct sequel to Forest of Doom, I'll be playing as THIS GUY:

"Never mind," says Yaztromo, "you look like the kind of person we want."

Background

So, to back it up a little - I am cooling out in Stonebridge, "after the rigours of a recent quest... enjoying the merry company of the Dwarfs... the local blacksmith has honed the blade of your sword as only Dwarfs can".

Hooray! A statement which was intended innocently by the author, can instead be interpreted as a sex thing!

Since, as diligent readers will recall, I did not win Forest of Doom, but instead turned into a FIRE DEMON and took over management of an underground mushroom farm entirely staffed by wizened, inscrutable CLONES, I will say that my "recent quest" was, like, I had a mushroom delivery for King Gillibran and I needed to hit the general store to pick up thirty kilos of baking soda to re-up my cloning vat.

I don't remember what were the supposed consequences of failing to recover the Hammer of Gillibran in Forest - but, we can safely assume they were not as bad as everyone thought. Though given that I'm a fire demon, psychopath, and someone who just wears a big evil crown 24/7, perhaps it caused some crazy shift in societal norms, a greasy slide into moral decadence that enables Yours Truly to somehow avoid the status of a total pariah, and thus be gladly getting on that Merry-Merry with my main Dwarfs - as only Dwarfs can.

Pictured: Flair dish-washing, a merry dwarfish pass-time.
The nihilistic/annoying lyrics are because they didn't get their dumb hammer back.

It is against this background that Yaztromo comes "huffing and puffing" into the Stonebridge town square like a database administrator who's been cajoled into a fun run. He must have jogged all the way from his tower - up the "Footpath", past the "Hills", over the "River" and then over the other "River" - which is quite a stretch for an old feller.

I'll say it again - this is one shitty fuckin' map.

So, this gasping, sweat-soaked, hairy recluse - whose only reason for maintaining contact with the outside world, Ian tells us, is his love of cupcakes - this known weirdo clambers up on a soapbox in the town square and starts telling everyone about a conversation that his pet crow overheard.

 

The artwork in Temple is pretty hit-and-miss but I will say this portrait of Yaztromo is mmm-mmm *chef's kiss* mwah, delizioso!

The gist of his story is; there is a guy called Malbordus who was abandoned by his mother and raised instead by "Darkside Elves" in Darkwood Forest (Darkwood Forest has a Dark Side, apparently). These Very Dark Elves have been grooming him as an evil wizard and war-leader, putting up motivational posters of Balthus Dire on his bedroom wall and whatnot, and now as a final test of his excellence in evil, they are sending Malbordus to the Lost City of Vatos in the Desert of Skulls to find five ancient dragon charms which can totally turn into Real Actual Dragons. The plan then being that he will fly his five magic dragons back to Darkwood Forest, and in the meantime, the Elves will have raised a huge army, and then they will invade Poland.

What I enjoy about this set-up is that it reveals Allansia's baddies also have no problem with pinning their entire hope on one guy completing a fetch quest all by himself. I imagine the Darkside Elves sending Malbordus out the door with 10 x PROVISIONS and a pat on the bum, before turning to the enormous effort and cost of raising their army while they wait for him to return. Potentially a massive waste of effort should Malbordus fail to e.g. pick up a ball of beeswax that was inside the mouth of an ornamental soap dish shaped like an alligator, in a room three doors down a side-corridor that he breezed straight past because it looked, and I quote: "a bit slimy".

So! Yaztromo was tipped off after his crow overheard one conversation that covered all this stuff.. Possibly it was someone's dying words, already proven to be the densest unit of information in Allansia.

Predictably, Yaztromo's genius counter-gambit to the Dark Elves' plot is to send his own wandering swordsman to Vatos to grab up those dragon charms before Malbordus does. Which is where I come in.

That's me! Willing, and... able? Ish? Definitely willing anyway!

Rolling Up My Dude

Let me address the baluchitherium in the room - it has been a LONG-ASS TIME since I completed a post! I apologise to those who had already mourned my death. In fact, there have been two previous attempts to write up Temple of Terror, about three years apart maybe, both honouring the original rules of play, rolled up in regulation style, and both ate shit almost immediately, in exactly the same way.

You see, a little while after Yaztromo sends you trudging off towards the desert on foot, he gets on Reddit or something and reads a bunch of horse-shit about how Gandalf could've clocked Lord of the Rings really quickly by summoning a giant eagle to carry Frodo to Mt. Doom. You might think that sounds quite sensible, but: it is a very bad idea and you are dumb for liking it.

Why, you ask? I will let my dude the Grey-dogg break it down directly, and in his own inimitable style.

So yeah it's PTERODACTYLS. That was the reason.


Yaztromo though, is just a third-rate knock-off of ya boy the Shadowfax Kidd and he doesn't get it. If you decide to walk all the way to Vatos (like an idiot - you can take a boat instead) - he will send a Giant Eagle to give you lift.

Well, sure enough once you have been flying through the air for a bit a "hideous PTERODACTYL" attacks. The annoying thing about this combat is that it's between the GIANT EAGLE and the PTERODACTYL - apart from one round of ranged combat if you have a bow or the right spell, YOU cannot contribute. And because this is probably the same dumb fukken eagle that dropped the Hammer of Gillibran in Darkwood Forest, the PTERODACTYL has higher SKILL, making it mathematically very likely that you're going to eat shit.

Anatomy of a Wack Situation

 
Anyway here's my dude, a strong little on-fire man from Forest of Doom:

 

SKILL - 12
STAMINA - 15
LUCK - 11

Plus on each combat round, roll 1d6, on a 1 or 2, I hit the bad man with my whip for an extra 1 STAMINA damage.

Is this cheating??? Nope! Just very great role-playing! 

The Adventure

Yeah so you get to his tower and Yaztromo, that slapdash motherfucker, makes a big deal out the ten flimsy Level-1-ass spells that he knows, only lets you learn four and then boots you out the door with 25GP pocket money.

I decided to opt for utility spells over combat options, since I already hit like a goddamn tyrannosaur.
Detect Trap - in case there is trap!
Create Water - for when I'm thirsty!
Language - for Google Translate!
Light - in case it gets dark!

These spells cost STAMINA points to use by the way, with the exception of Create Water, which is nice 'cos it's the only one that turns out to be useful.

Yaztromo's crow - whom he unsentimentally addresses as "crow" - escorts you for the first three hours / six sentences of the journey, which to be fair is a lot more support than you usually get as a lone adventurer with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Thanks, "crow"!

So, we gotta make our way to the Desert of Skulls. Dare I hope some of the skulls will have boney bodies attached? (gentle whisper: "SKELETONS"). But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Our first big choice is whether to travel downriver to Port Blacksand and try to take passage by sea, or just, you know, walk. Walking is clearly the dumber option, which triggers an exasperated Yaztromo to send his crappy Giant Eagle to come help you. I'd rather thumb a ride with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper than go through that again, so instead I jump onto a barge with these "rough-looking characters":

A realistic depiction of ordinary British men circa. 1985. This is what half the dudes on BBC TV looked like back then.

The captain is a little surprised that someone is willing to pay to go to "the city of thieves" (Ian Livingstone:😉); but otherwise doesn't seem to mind ferrying an on-fire demon-boy with a spooky crown, so we're golden.

I reached Port Blacksand by the evening of the same day.  It's a brief stopover - there's not a lot of Port Blacksand content in the book - but nevertheless I manage to get swindled and jumped by ne'er-do-wells twice before booking passage out. I'll spare you the details, but as a general piece of advice, if "suddenly an old man in tattered clothes jumps out of a doorway" with an offer that seems too good to be true - it probably is!

Paying off a bartender gets me a seat next to the first mate of the good ship Belladonna, who introduces himself as Gargo. And I introduce myself as Dread Lord Rantastuphan, Master of Mushrooms AKA the Clone King AKA The Embodied Flame AKA Candle Guy. Gargo shakes me down for ten geeps and puts me in charge of loading cannonballs during the voyage south, because, hey why not put the permanently on-fire man right next to the powder magazine.

Turns out the most famous namesake for First Mate Gargo is "Gargo the Vampire Man" from the Galoob line of toys and 1981 TV cartoon called Blackstar, which I guess was some kind of Masters of the Universe precursor. I'm sure everyone reading this will assume I know all about Blackstar but I never heard of it until one second ago.

So, I'm supposed to be working for my passage (on top of paying 10 GP, the bloody cheek of it!!!) You'd think that just loading cannonballs wouldn't really be a full-time job, but this is Fighting Fantasy, so of course we get into a naval battle pretty much immediately and the Belladonna is unavoidably sunk.

I chose not to swim towards the ship that sunk us in case they execute me for being a presumed pirate and/or presumed mid-level boss of an MMPORG. So after taking 2d6 STAMINA damage from getting wet, I wash up on the shore of the Desert of Skulls itself.

At least I've reached my destination. Or rather... the vicinity of my destination. Which is to say, I've manage to strand myself in a pitiless sea of dunes, a bone-dry death trap that stretches from horizon to horizon, and somewhere within is my destination: the Lost City of Vatos. One speck of gold in a fistful of sand! And why is it called the Lost City of Vatos? Cos nobody knows where it is! It's worth taking a pause here to step back and evaluate - WHAT THE FUCK WAS MY PLAN ACTUALLY?!?!? Wander around the desert alone until I just stumble across the Lost City?

Apparently: yes, that is the plan. Might as well get to it.

If Nathan Drake can do it why not me? We're both lovable, mass-murdering rogues.

Wandering through the desert doesn't go too badly, all things considered, since I can magically create water at will. And I found some coconuts (?) on the beach (??) of the desert (???). That takes a lot of tension out of the situation! Though I do cop a bit of heat-stroke damage since I don't have a knotted hankie to keep the sun off my head. Some NEEDLE FLIES attack me - one at a time, which is very considerate - and they're not really a problem. I take 2 damage from a sand-storm and find a brass hand-bell poking out of the sand afterward. A guy on a camel says what's up. All iconic desert vibes, you know.

ICONIC DESERT VIBEZ

Further aimless roaming gets me to a nomadic trader's tent. The proprietor, Abjul, is a stand-up G who comps you a kebab with the works. He's selling a bunch of antique store tat with no indication of what any of it does. I spent the rest of my cash 'cos you cannot take it with you when you die - which is more than a platitude in the Fighting Fantasy context since I am very likely dead within the next ten paragraphs. 

All of the items he sells are conspicuously featured in the accompanying art. This necessitates the "Crystal Key" being about the length of Abjul's forearm - it's like the big novelty "Key to the City"  which Buster would get from the mayor for, I don't know, saving a cat from drowning in the canal or some similar act of working class childhood heroism. And if that reference is too bewilderingly specific - let me remind you that you're reading a blog that deep-dives into a gamebook series that about 0.01% of the population has any awareness of, let alone fondness for. You knew what you were getting into.

Here's what I scooped from the lucky dip:

Silver Mirror - because even if it's not enchanted, mirrors are kind of useful, e.g. for touching up those  weeping cracks in the skin of your blackened, smouldering face

Bracelet of Mermaid Scales - Abjul assures me this is the real deal, "straight off of a mermaid's butt". Probably lets you breathe underwater or whatever. Knowing my luck with magic items, it transforms your head into a fish's pee-hole.

Ivory Beetle Charm - 'COS I <3 BUGS ;)

 

"Welcome effendi! Please inspect all my clearly-depicted, novelty-size wares!"

Abjul is even kind enough to give me directions, of a sort. He "thinks Vatos lies in the southern part of the Desert of Skulls". Okay well - thanks for narrowing it down, brother.

So I trudge southwards, wondering what further iconic desert encounters I could possibly experience now that nomads, camels, and (uh) NEEDLE-FLIES have already been exhausted. When I feel a rumbling beneath my feet...

"You realise with horror that a Giant Sandworm is about to engulf you with its spiked oval mouth. It is at least twenty metres long and you must fight it."

It's really not clear how this would work in practice, but I manage to kill the titanic worm with my sword and whip. Just stabbin', whippin', and a whole lot of patience I guess. Before moving on, I chip off one of its teeth to use as a knife, because Ian really wants you to know that, yes, he has read Dune. And I immediately use it to saw the crusts off my ham sandwiches because you best believe I need some num-numz in my tum-tumz after taking a few knocks from that big boy.

 

UPDATE - ONE known weakness (i.e. being hit 10 times with a sword)

Moments later, I just stumble across the Lost City of Vatos "less than half a kilometre away" (I guess I was day-dreaming and it snuck up on me). As per the text: "Vatos!" a voice inside you shouts, which is a little bit concerning phrasing since it heavily implies it's somebody else's voice.

These Super Mario themed vatos are yelling the word "VATOS!" in front of the city of Vatos. But you hear it coming from inside your body...!?!?!

The city walls are still in pretty good nick, thus, for lack of appropriate burglary spells, I pretty much just have to ring the doorbell. And who should answer but my dearest darling boy, SERPENT GUARD!

Hiiiiiiiiiii!

"O, SERPENT GUARD!" I say, my eyes welling with tears, "how many years hath it been that thine wildly enthused eyes, and thy unhinged and gaping :D face hath beamed back at me from the tattered copy of Temple of Terror 'pon mine desk, buoying me up, imbuing me with heartful courage - come on mate, come back and finish your blog! You got this mate! I'm here for ya maaaaaaate...!"

 

I'm practically blubbering as the memories crash over me and sweep me up like a storm tide. 

"Come to my embrace, o squamous saint!" My arms spread wide, "BRING IT IN HOMIE!" 

SERPENT GUARD slithers towards me over the pulverised remains of the Fourth Wall and says: "HIIIIIISSSSS!" 

 

Then he hits me with his weirdly dainty, long-handled axe! It's like a back-scratcher but for if you wanted to chop up the hard to reach spot between your shoulder-blades with an axe! (Seems like the kind of thing you could buy on Wish, probably?!?) And I can't help but notice his combat power is exactly equivalent to the twenty metre long giant sandworm that I just fought. Crazy!!!!

I think I misread this situation!

Anyway, then I snap back into character with the audible crack of a fiery whip: wha-PEESH! 

I temporarily forgot that I'm the psycho fire demon from Forest of Doom - so of course I mercilessly ram my sword down the throat of the SERPENT GUARD and step on his corpse on the way through the doorway. Not so irrepressible now, eh motherfucker?

So! My lunatic behaviour of wandering around aimlessly has again been rewarded with success, and I've made into the long-lost city - specifically into a featureless courtyard behind the main gate. On the opposite side of the square there is a large stone archway. It seems as good a place as any to start your search for the Dragon artefacts. Yeah it does. 

It's never clarified who was responsible for hiding the Dragon artefacts in Vatos and for what reason, but it's basically an Easter egg hunt from this point onwards, except in a trashy old city full of death-traps instead of your grandad's back yard. Below (spoilers!) I list where the richly detailed Frankton Mint commemorative pewter dragon figurines are to be found:

Gold Dragon - inside the mouth of a bronze statue of a dog

Ebony Dragon - hidden in crack in a carving which depicts Vatos under attack from three GIANT SANDWORMS

Crystal Dragon - a GNOME has it. He'll swap it for a telescope

Bone Dragon - inside a bucket of bones hanging from a rope attached to the ceiling of featureless room where a CENTIPEDE lives

Silver Dragon - fuck knows, couldn't figure it out even by cheating

 

So you can see that we'll be falling back on some classic FF Bizzare Search Behaviour. But! It gets complicated when this dude shows up: 

MESSENGER OF DEATH

Not long after you arrive in Vatos, this creep taps you on the shoulder and gurgles the word "death" in your ear, then vanishes. That in itself is super grody and more than enough to spoil your week - but it gets worse. Evidently the MESSENGER has a bit of a rep because the protagonist already knows what's up:

The Messenger of Death is a sadistic killer who plays games with its victims. Staying ahead of you, it will place each letter of the word 'death' in various locations. Should you come across and read all the letters of the word, the Messenger of Death will reappear to revel in the sight of your life draining away.

  

So now it's more like an Easter egg hunt in a trashy old city full of death-traps where half the eggs have razorblades stuck in 'em, plus the Easter Bunny has a penchant for revelling in the sight of my life draining away, and there's snot leaking out of every hole in his fluffy wee head. No good! 

 

I already have to toss the whole city in case someone left a Dragon Artefact hidden in the toe of an old boot, and now whenever I try I might accidentally find a cursed letter A fridge magnet instead. It's a real situation.  

Failure and Death

I can take some small spiteful satisfaction that the MESSENGER didn't get to do any revelling and wasted the rest of his day sneaking about painting letters on the inside of chest lids and whanot, because not long afterwards, I died of unrelated causes. Though I did manage to find the Bone Dragon artefact from the aforementioned innocuous bucket.

What a normal and fully acceptable room.

A scant few direction choices later I was dead, thanks to this big squidgy polyp!

 

 

EYE STINGER

Evidently EYE STINGERS are a well-known hazard as FIRE DEMON MAN is already familiar with their modus operandi - hypnotise with the eye, petrify with the stingers. Thinking myself fabulously clever, I whip out the mirror I bought from Abjul to reflect its gaze back on itself, but, that's not a thing apparently. In fact it's so useless that I just drop the mirror onto the floor, shattering it and losing a LUCK point. Inconveniently, I must then Test My newly-depleted Luck in order to stab the levitating kina without meeting its gaze, and I fail.

 

That naughty echinoderm's pokey bits brush my face and I am quickly turned to stone. Later that day the Serpent Guards will take you away to join the other gargoyles on the city walls - there's a nice symmetry in that thought, that I shall become an art object for SERPENT GUARDS to ogle and enjoy, even as I ogled and enjoyed their cute little faces in life. Plus I already have demon wings, so, probably one of the better gargoyles up there I reckon! Easy come, easy go!

Notable Encounters

Well, I did want to mention this dumb corridor:

This is so dumb I can't even think of a bit about it. Like... what if they gave you high-fives instead? Is there a gag buried in that idea, somewhere?

Right near the end of the adventure a poor half-dead dwarf from Stonebridge shows up because apparently Yaztromo and King Gillibran started second-guessing themselves for leaving the whole impending apocalypse for a local mushroom farmer to handle. Also Yaztromo forgot that you would need the Hammer to be able to destroy the Dragon artefacts (I swear half the wizards in Allansia are senile).

 

"Sorry about that... we decided... to take this shit... more seriouslyyyy, ahhhhhhh" DEAD

I imagine he came in on the giant eagle, he looks like the local TERODACTYLS have really had a go at him.  

Finally I'll touch on the named boss characters in this book. Firstly, while it's not super clear what the community situation is in Vatos, this chick named Leesha seems to be in charge. She has a VIP lounge where you have to pass through a golden shower (Ian, really?!) which neutralises all your magic spells. 

An unperturbed Leesha about to get clouted across the back of the head by the 1985 Coro Street version of Vin Diesel.

Oddly enough, when you face her in battle you are asked if you want to attack her with the Giant Sandworm Tooth, which is the only time this option is offered. You know, use it as a knife? Like in the novel Dune by Frank Herbert, now a major motion picture? And it just so happens that this is her only weakness! How did our protagonist intuit this? Were those inner vatos shouting hints at your brain again? Probably, who knows!

Unlike our old mate the Lizard King, Leesha is smart enough to bug the hell out when somebody is brandishing the only object in the world that can harm her. You can chase her but she gets away - AFAIK she never shows up again in subsequent books but you know what? She's pretty cool, I hope I'm wrong about that. 

Malbordus, on the other hand - when he finally shows up - turns out to be just a really gross nerd. Here he is, inexplicably popping up out of the floor in a featureless room, busting out the special intense stare that he practices in the mirror while squeezing zits and reciting self-affirmations that he really is just as good as Zagor & Balthus Dire (untrue).

Hello, it is I, Malbordus, a definitely credible and impressive villain who doesn't have any self-esteem issues. I was waiting underneath the floor for you to arrive.

 

 

If you find all the Dragons and wipe out this loser, your reward is that you get to walk back to Stonebridge where you assume Yaztromo MIGHT deign to teach you some more spells (you hope). Whoop-de-fukken-do mate. 

 The SKELETON Count

 Here's a couple of bonnie boys, you can just bump into them somewhere in Vatos. It's a basic "wandering undead guards" encounter, which is a classic use of SKELETONS in fantasy that I completely endorse. There's nothing especially notable about the encounter, other than the fact that they're wearing armour which leaves their pelvises exposed. I feel that's somehow obscene in a way that doesn't apply for a fully nude SKELETON.

 

Meanwhile - what to make of these dirtbags?

 

SKELETON Count or SLAMMIN' BODZ Count? Or both???

 

Like Skeletor, these SKELETON MEN have skull heads and beautifully muscular male human bodies. They can talk (they get precisely one line) and are guards outside of Leesha's boudoir. I'm excluding them: but I know in my heart that if it wasn't for those unambiguously genuine SKELETONS elsewhere in the book, I probably would have talked myself into counting them. And what does that say about me? Very troubling. 

Final Thoughts

Back when I was a young scumbag in my 20s, I flatted with a number of like-minded scumbags. Thanks to our deeply held anarchist principles, we never instituted any chore roster, and this combined with the inherently perverse and slovenly nature of young scumbags soon meant that we were squirming in our own filth like a RAT KING, each waiting to see who would break first and clean something (anything).

 

This stand-off deteriorated to the point where I announced that I was hiding the letters D-I-S-H-E-S in secret spots around the house, and whosoever was the first to accidentally see them all was going to have to do the dishes.

 

My plan was deeply flawed because of course nobody ever moved any objects and revealed the hidden letters since it would have been an activity somewhat adjacent to "tidying up". Besides, at this point in our descent, we would soon become fully engaged in chewing up aged mandarin peels and carpet fluff and adhering ourselves to the walls in cocoons formed from the resultant paste.

Flatting - I do not miss it. But the actual point of the story is that it's only mostly exaggerated, this book really did leave a strong impact on me as I child and I expected people to just get it and fall into line when I tried to invoke the authority of the MESSENGER OF DISHES. The Messenger is certainly the most interesting and novel thing in Temple, and in case I neglected to mention, he does have slime ceaselessly pouring out of his eye sockets and mouth. It makes an impression. 

 

Of coure, his mechanic only really makes sense in a world driven by Bizzare Search Behaviour. I thought City was getting pretty wild with the searching, but Temple makes you search most bizzarely even to even find the dungeon that you're supposed to do your main searching in. And then once you're in there it adds this whole layer of meta with the Messenger. Truly bizotic behaviour! Will we see anything to top that?

 

Anyway I'm back. Type in BOM if you want to give me another chance!

 

 

 

 

#3 - "The Forest of Doom" by Ian Livingstone (1983)

Apologies all, a month of distractions of every stripe, personal and professional, has kept me secluded from the central business of my life, which I ASSURE YOU remains the hard-hitting analysis of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and the enumeration of Skeleton-men. Let us pray that my life can struggle on free from incident for another three years or so, and perhaps the Great Work can be accomplished.

I should begin by pointing out that as a youngster nothing got my blood up like this cover portrait, entitled SHAPE-CHANGER, Beckoning, Steps Over A Log. There is no more elegant nor effective way to convey that concept the French know as "malédiction de la forêt" - I really do hope that the original is hanging spotlighted on a huge white wall somewhere, observed by grand men in tuxedos as canapes are served. However, like most of the early titles in the series the cover art was changed a few times over the release history. In the case of "Forest", you have to assume that there were commercial considerations at play since all adjustments seem to have been to the worse.

For instance, the version below obviously takes the original as a jumping off point but alloys it with kind of an underground hip-hop vibe:

The Reptilian Shape-Changer rap (contains spoilers): "MC I-C-K-E the name, that's how it spelt -- I seen alla y'all staring at the pouch on my belt -- got a SKILL of 10, and STAMINA too -- draw your steel on me, y'all wind up in a stew -- seasoned with some mushrooms that I found on a logg -- don't act like we friends, mayne, 'cos you ain't my dogg -- disguised as a goblin wit' a handle round my neck -- I come real stealth and I come correct -- leave you wit' brown stains on your Fruits of the Loom -- 'cos you should'na oughta come to THA FOREST OF DOOM" 

In this case the new cover isn't really bad, it's just a bit unnecessary. But there's worse yet:

There's just so much DOOM in this picture!

I guess this is from an American release or something because I've never seen an FF gamebook that remotely resembles it. There's such on overabundance of absurd and doomful detail in this illustration that I could easily expend another thousand or more words on it, but, to keep things moving fluidly let me merely highlight a few details for the reader's edification.

As an artist, it's easy to become a victim of Too Many Good Ideas.

Background

From the introduction to "Forest" I inferred three notable innovations, departures from the preceding "Warlock" and "Citadel":


1) You don't have to assassinate a wizard.
2) You (the protagonist) can be charitably described as a socially maladjusted loner with a talent for violence, or less charitably, as a batshit-crazy psychotic who takes his coffee with milk and two lumps of SWORD-MURDER.
3) This time - you're in a forest.

Point 2 may raise some eyebrows given that this is supposed to be heroic fantasy, but I think the text bears it out. In the Background, we are told of your avoidance of company and how you have "always spurned the dullness of village life" (read: INABILITY TO CONNECT WITH OTHERS / DISDAIN FOR NORMS OF COMMUNAL LIVING), your dreams of troll-slaughter (read: HOMICIDAL IDEATION), and your loving fascination with your sword (read: CRAZY SWORD MURDERER).

"There's a full moon, and the light sparkles on the blade of your broadsword skewered into the ground by your side. You gaze at it, wondering when you will next have to wipe the blood of some vile creature from its sharp edge."

And then there's the fact that you're roaming about the wilderness, alone, just searching for things to kill, which sort of clinched it for me: Nutcase.

So one night a dwarf called "Bigleg" (no, really) bumbles into your campsite with a gutful of poisoned crossbow quarrels, and with his dying breath he begs you to carry on his quest to find "the hammer" and deliver it to the village of Stonebridge. This appeals to you as it promises violence, so you take up the mission without much reflection. In fact Bigleg's last words are fairly expansive as he also bequeaths you some money, recommends a place to go shopping for magic items, relives exciting moments from his recent past ("Ambush! Ambush! Aargh!"), badmouths "little people" (kind of rich coming from a dwarf) and finally hands over this map:

That's one shitty fuckin' map, Bigleg.

So sure enough section 1 kicks off as you arrive with your purse jangling at Yaztromo's Tower, which seems to have been architecturally inspired by a Hawkwind album cover. Yaztromo himself waddles down to the door and invites you up to shell out your dead dwarf's gold in exchange for enchanted curios. The protagonist is such a piece of work that he immediately considers whipping his sword out and running the old man through... since I try to stay in character, and my character was plainly psychotic, I drew my sword. Yaztromo warned me that he could "do magic" and so reluctantly I restrained the wholeseome and natural impulse towards wizard-murder and meekly truckled my way into the Forest of Doom gift-shop. 

(I didn't really believe our protagonist would've backed down, but I also didn't want to end the adventure prematurely. I took a peek later on and as I suspected, if you press the attack, Yaztromo PUTS YOU DOWN HARD. In fact he turns you into a frog. This definitely shows a lot of class on Yaztromo's part, along with a wry, "old school" sensibility. But fear not, and read on - my exceptional role-playing skills and commitment to the authenticity of the character would purchase my fate before "The Forest of Doom" was through)

Yaztromo has an inventory of about twenty magic items and you start with enough money to buy roughly half of them, so I picked up all the butch sounding ones ("Armband of Strength" yep - "Glove of Missile Dexterity" yes, please - "Potion of Stillness" and "Nose Filters", you can stay right there on the shelf). Yaztromo then politely inquires as to your business, leading to the embarrassing admission that you are looking for an unspecified "hammer" to take to "Gillibran", a character you know nothing about. This launches Yaztromo into a shaggy dog story explaining that the macguffin in question is a sacred war-hammer without which dwarven king Gillibran is "unable to arouse his people", because,  see, some other dwarven king sent an eagle to steal it and the eagle got the hammer and was flying back over Darkwood but then some "death-hawks" flew up and attacked the eagle so he dropped the hammer and then some goblins found it and... anyway it's a pretty dumb story and you have to wonder why Yaztromo knows the full sequence of events in all their silly detail. The upshot is that the handle got unscrewed from the head and the two parts of the hammer are lost somewhere in the forest, maybe in the possession of a couple of goblins... Yaztromo's intimate knowledge of the narrative suddenly evaporates at the point where he could've told you something useful. Too dim to be deterred by this news, our sociopathic hero wanders off into the trees, fondling the grip of his sword.

Rolling Up My Dude

Starting stats:
SKILL - 12
STAMINA - 15
LUCK - 11

Another good SKILL roll! Low STAMINA, but starting from this book, the restrictions about eating provisions are gone (i.e. only one meal at a time and only when explicitly told you can eat it), which makes STAMINA a deal less important.

The Healing Power of Food: By eating ten meals simultaneously you can recover utterly from the brink of death three times over. This is what 40 STAMINA points worth of hot dogs looks like.

The Adventure

Darkwood Forest turns out to be rather a lot like the dungeon from "Warlock" only with pathways instead of corridors - lots of random direction choosing. You wander from encounter to encounter and are occasionally asked if you possess one of Yaztromo's wares, in which case it will confer some fleeting advantage.  Structurally speaking, it is not a particularly interesting adventure as you really are just roaming around at random hoping to stumble across the two pieces of the warhammer - there's no sense of tracking, or looking for clues. So, I gadded about the forest for a time, out into the hills, back into the forest,  up a tree, down a well, etc - west, north, east, north, south, west - just blundering from fight to fight until I emerged blinking from the trees to this:

Stonebridge! At last! Now what was I supposed to be doing again?

My search methodology of crashing through the trees attacking anything that reminded me of my mother had the expected results, i.e. I had neither hammerhead nor handle. At this point, the protagonist of "Warlock" would probably have sat down and had a little weep, however in "Forest" you are instead given the chance to go back to the beginning - walking around the edge of the forest to return to Yaztromo's tower - i.e. paragraph 1, the start of the adventure. Once again you can, if you please, menace him with your sword, be warned off, and sit through his dubious tale about the hammer-thieving eagle. I went through this charade and bought out the remainder of his inventory before continuing into the forest, trying to choose new paths and avoid awkward deja vu. I confess that I had become pretty sick of "Forest of Doom" at this point, and so I had my eye out for a suitable demise for my disagreeable anti-hero - quite convinced, by this time, that he was merely an axe shy of "axe-wielding lunatic", and that it really would be best for all concerned if he were to end up face-down in the shade somewhere. I'll relate the results in a moment, but first, a few of my more notable encounters...

Monsters and Combat

There is a lot of combat in this book - especially since, even if a creature is not initially hostile, you're almost always given the option to just go ahead and attack it. And playing true to the character, that's exactly what I did. This led to a few entertaining situations, e.g. in the case of this GNOME...

Get your hand off it, GNOME.

...you first awaken him with "a gentle push" before being given the option of attacking him in a panic after he frowns at you. (Better yet, when you do so, he magicks your sword into a carrot - this was one of the forest's few denizens whose life I was unable to end, but I could at least petulantly throw my carrot at him).

Another wretch who got away was this CENTAUR. The text did a lot to talk up his fine qualities, describing him as both "noble" and "magnificent" and suggesting that I might like to ride on his back across the river.

This noble CENTAUR appears to be molded purely from magnificent  porridge and beard.

Naturally, I foamed at the mouth and charged him with sword aloft, prompting him to loose an arrow at me and then gallop away shouting "NEIGH NEIGH" in Belgian-accented English. "Maybe fighting the noble centaur is not such a good idea after all" the text chided, to which I responded: "Maybe you can ask a pigeon not to shit, but if you wanna be sure,  you gotta press your finger on his bum" and left with my head held high in the ensuing silence.


Murder-inspired home invasion was another of my protagonist's vices. The image below shows what happens when you clamber uninvited through the window of an APE-MAN's treehouse just when he's running a bath.

APE-MAN draws aside the shower curtain and, OH MY GOOOOOOOD, it's the fright of his life!

Elsewhere, you can burst into a hut to find an old woman sitting in a chair reading a book. Once again you are invited to draw your sword and slay her...and even should you choose not to, here's what you're told:


The old woman throws back her head and roars with laughter as you start to make conversation. She is an evil woman. Lose 1 LUCK point and draw your sword.

You don't like the quiet ones. No sir. But the worst ones, the ones that really get to you, those are the ones who laugh. (And there I was thinking I was gonna to have to work to make the case for Fighting Fantasy protagonist as homicidal maniac).

A final honorable mention goes to these clueless BANDITS who wanted to mug me for "five objects from [my] backpack". Just any old "objects", huh? This is a gang with low aspirations - four rubber bands and last Sunday's "whoopsie" Y-fronts, coming right up.

"Might be rude to point this out, miss, but you got yourself one sorry-looking gang of peckerwoods. And if you'll pardon my saying so, they don't scare me a lick. So why ain't you just move along 'fore somebody decides to pluck that lil' hatchet out your dainty grip and put it to a finer purpose."

I killed them all and laughed.

Failure and... Death?

So, partway through my second meander through Darkwood Forest, I decided to jump into a dark tunnel that I found inside a hollow tree trunk (getting some mileage out of Yaztromo's "Rope of Climbing" in the process). Because, why not, that dang old hammerhead's just as likely to be down there as anywhere else.

What I found instead was a underground society of mute, wizened little men who grow green- and red-topped mushrooms.

In a twist ripped from today's headlines, it is revealed these fellows are all CLONES.

After decapitating one of the CLONES to the general indifference of its peers, I yelled at two of them to give me some green-topped mushrooms before realizing that they weren't going to respond, and  helping myself, ripped great fistfuls of green mushrooms from the floor, forcing them into my slavering mouth. Truly a defining moment - my thuggish protagonist bellowing impotently for these tiny emaciated men to bring him some mushrooms is, for me, one of the book's enduring images.

Wandering upstairs from the mushroom cavern bought me a brief encounter with some military-caste CLONES who presented little challenge. Waiting one landing up however, was the local swinging dick:

A FIRE-DEMON: That'd be gouts of white hot flame shooting from his nostrils, I suppose.

This balrog-wannabe may have worn out the artist's pencil with all that shading but he didn't wear out my god-given talent for slaughter as I put him down despite his SKILL of 10 and annoying extra rules about hitting you with a whip. I plucked his crown from his head as he crumbled to ashes beneath it and stood there toying with the thing as I contemplated a previously unnoticed "magnificent throne", flanked by two grovelling CLONES. Feigning nonchalance, the book then asks if you would like to maybe sit on the throne or, gee I dunno, put the crown on your head...?

So, duh, that's pretty obviously a big old TRAP, baited with the empty trappings of power. But, I had to ask myself - what would a murdering son-of-a-bitch really do in this situation? Answer - GO FOR THE GLORY. And so, humming  "Princes of the Universe" under my breath, I ascended the steps to the throne, sat down, and donned that fabulous crown.

Two things happen when you do this. One is that you suddenly have a telepathic link with the CLONE slaves and, in a surpassingly odd detail, they ask you what you would like them to do with the latest crop of red-topped mushrooms. The other thing that happens is that you turn into a FIRE DEMON (oops). In that instant, your adventure ends as you embark on a rewarding new career - supervisor at the mushroom farm. I can't help but feel that the crazy bastard would've been more satisfied with his crown and the eternal adulation of mindless thralls than whatever grudging thanks he might've received for retrieving the damn hammer, so I think of this ending as "the psychopath's 400".


Oh, and for what it's worth, let me point out that I had at least found the hammer handle by this point - one of the GOBLINS still had it on him, but he'd been gimped by a CAVE TROLL... can you guess how I got the handle back? That's right, I murdered them both.

An unconventional household.

The SKELETON Report

Another alarming result that throws into doubt everything I thought I knew about Ian Livingstone and his penchant for SKELETONS. Nonetheless, I still predict that when the full accounting is done, there will be an average of at least three or four SKELETONS per gamebook across the series.

Anyway, since the "Forest of Doom" SKELETON Report is another fizzler, I present instead:


The BARELY OBSCURED GENITALIA Report

And here's your host: Christopher Atkins' loin-cloth from the Columbia Pictures feature presentation "The Blue Lagoon"

Bear in mind that I am being pretty stringent in my criteria here - were I to count every goblin or other stock fantasy humanoid in this book depicted swanning about with a scandously short tunic somehow clinging to their bare and spindly thighs the tally would be considerably greater.

I counted the CENTAUR as one - you've met him already. Here are four more contenders, each quite grotesque in their own special way.

And finally, number 6 is my personal favourite, "The Strategically Placed Wave-Shaped Rock":

FISHMAN plays it coy.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, I have to say that I didn't really like "Forest" very much. The setting felt bland and disjointed. The plot is sparse, and such story as there is makes little sense.  The items felt like a wasted opportunity - you are always asked "do you have item X", and never given any chance to try out different items (compare "Citadel" in which the fiendish Steve Jackson delighted in giving you opportunities to waste both your items and your spells). And when you arrive at Stonebridge without the hammer, while the option to go back to the beginning is welcome, it didn't really work since you can keep stumbling onto encounters that you've already experienced. All up, below par. I'm hoping for better in subsequent books.



And At Last, An Admission Of Guilt

Guess what - I'VE BEEN PLAYING COMBAT IN THESE BOOKS STRAIGHT-UP WRONG.  As pointed out by helpful reader uforesearcher, I've been rolling one die to determine Attack Strength instead of two. Basically this increases the random element in combat and means I shouldn't have skipped all the boring GOBLIN fights in "Warlock". I'd already played through "The Forest of Doom" by the time I was alerted to this error, so I guess I'll be playing the dang things properly starting from the next book, our first foray into sci-fi, the notoriously difficult "Starship Traveller"...