#5 - "City of Thieves" by Ian Livingstone (1983)

After the interstellar shenanigans of "Starship", book 5 of Fighting Fantasy lands us squarely back in both the fantasy land of Allansia and the ever-fashionable business of slaughtering wizards. In this case our target is grinning right there on the cover, thorny old Zanbar Bone, his tough-guy facade only slightly undermined by a Kermit ruff and kitten eyes.

Behind him is depicted the gates of Port Blacksand, the titular "City of Thieves", with the spiked head of thespian William Hartnell in the foreground as a grisly rebuke to those who would meddle in thiefly business.

"Forest of Doom" was notable as the first wilderness adventure in the series - City is the first to feature an urban environment and as we'll see it's a rather more interesting setting than Darkwood Forest. However, against expectations, Zanbar Bone doesn't actually reside in Port Blacksand, it's just a place we'll be stopping by to run a few errands on our way to the boss-battle at his lifestyle block some several kilometres upwind of the Outer Suburbs of Thieves. More on that to come.

William Hartnell in happier times - inset: doom.

As has become my habit, I present for your fleeting amusement the U.S. cover for City of Thieves:

Zanbar's monobrow is out of control.

Study it well.


Background


Much as in Forest, in City our protagonist is a solitary swordsman who wanders about taking on contract killings and relieving harmless monsters of their dignity, treasure, and lives.  As the story begins he arrives in the prosperous merchant town of Silverton which has a small problem with "Moon Dogs" dropping by every evening to urinate on the legs of distracted businessmen, steal strings of sausages from the butcher, and (perhaps most importantly) devour any unfortunate person who forgets to lock their doors and latch their windows. It's no overstatement to say that Silverton's night life has suffered, with anyone caught in the pub after sundown stuck there all night while Moon Dogs sniff around the door (reminds me somewhat of clubbing in Tokyo).

There's a quiet dignity in the eyes of tag-team wrestlers "The Moondogs", Spike and Cujo.

Nightfall finds our hero in that very predicament,  locked in Silverton's "Old Toad" pub, thinking to himself about how famous he is as a monster-killer and feeling slightly miffed that none of the locals have "come over to hear tales of adventure". Shortly after your arrival the town mayor suddenly scrambles in through a cat flap, the seat of his pants comically chewed out by a Moon Dog, and buys you a roast goose for dinner.

Take a moment to consider - when's the last time you ate roast goose for free? Exactly. Soon enough, Mayor Owen is launching into his hard luck story - ten days ago, a couple of sketchy dudes rolled up on black horses with fiery red eyes and asked the mayor whether he'd object to his daughter attending a slumber party with Zanbar Bone - "no doubt you know that he is the Night Prince", Owen adds.

Zanbar Bone - he's kind of a big deal.

It is never made clear what Zanbar intends with the mayor's daughter but it is presumably some kind of  G-rated magical rite / midnight sacrifice type deal - the dude is a skeleton after all, it won't be anything raunchy. Nevertheless, Mayor Owen isn't having a bar of it and he sent the messengers packing - thereby drawing Zanbar's creepy old curse upon the town. The Moon Dogs showed up that very evening, and every night since, eating 23 hapless townsfolk over the course of ten nights (a period which the people of Silverton have apparently spent waiting for some hobo with a sword to show up).

Owen's plan is to send you to Port Blacksand to hit up his old pal Nicodemus, a "wise old wizard" who has apparently taken up residence in the notoriously unsavoury city precisely to avoid people asking favours e.g. could you please kill the Night Prince, Nicodemus. Owen pays you with 30 Gold Pieces and a shiny new sword, which, in an echo of that crazy son-of-a-bitch from Forest of Doom, you appear to fall immediately in love with ("You have never wanted something so badly in your life before" - yes that refers to the sword, not the roast goose nor indeed Mayor Owen Carralif, whom Ian Livingstone takes unusual pains to describe as fat, bald and sweaty). Then you have a kip and set off for Port Blacksand in the morning.

Despite the mayor's one-sided exposition and all the off-putting detail we are given about  his glistening pate, I will say this is easily the most evocative and entertaining of the Backgrounds I've read so far. I recall that the protagonist's night upstairs at the tavern, "more than once woken by the sniffing, scratching and howling of the roaming Moon Dogs outside" left quite an impression on me as a child. (This may be because there would often be dogs on our lawn at night, as my parents had a habit of throwing carrion out the window - not joking).

Rolling Up My Dude


SKILL - 12
STAMINA - 18
LUCK - 7

Skill of twelve, again - I did mention I wasn't cheating right? I'm not cheating, really. Might be I'm just good at throwing dice. There aren't any variations on the rules in "City", although I noticed that healthful Provisions weren't mentioned in the instructions this time so I assumed I didn't have any (though later I had the option to swap "all my Provisions" for a silver arrow, and I was like "damn, I coulda been eating Provisions?")

The Adventure

The first of many fine, lovingly detailed illustrations in this book - note the artist's inclusion of a "background", basically a first for the series.

The adventure proper begins as you arrive at the gates of Port Blacksand and are offered this rather prissy challenge by an otherwise daunting guardsman:

Now imagine Queen Elizabeth II is saying these lines with her voice pitched up two octaves.

It's not clear how he knows you weren't invited but I guess that's his business. As this was written by Ian Living-"stone-them-to-death" you are of course given the option to immediately attack the guard - but since I more or less exhausted the possibilities of role-playing a psychopath in Forest of Doom I decided to follow my more natural inclination and bluff my way in. I have embellished the resulting dialogue but the gist of it is true to the original:

Me: (approaching the gate, sideways) "Yooooooooooooooooooooooo--"
Guard: "Who would enter Port Blacksand uninvited? State the nature of your business or go back the way you came!"
Me: "--ooooooooooooooo! My man!" (goes for high five, is left hanging, effortlessly turns it into a little point-and-shoot gesture) "Did you you say something about a invitation? Do I got the wrong town? This is Port Blacksand, yeah? AKA, the 'City of Thieves', am I wrong? Be real with me, brother. What do you think it says on my business card, I give ya one guess."
Guard: (grips pike uncertainly, looks about for his supervisor but does not see him) "Um..."
Me: "Here's a hint, it rhymes with 'fief'. Which means a tenure of land subject to feudal obligations; but, you knew that, right? Rhymes with 'fief', the word is.... thhhhhhhhhh--, thhhhhhhhhhh-- ief. Thief. The word is thief."
(pause)
Me: "I am a thief."
(pause)
Guard: "You're saying you're a thief."
Me: "That's correct."
Guard: "Have you ever stolen anything?"
Me: "Have I ever sto--? Have I ever--? What, did the Port Blacksand City Council change the name to 'The City of Wasting-My-Fucking-Time'? Come on, be real with me hombre. Have I ever stolen anything. Man, I stole stuff yesterday. My backpack is just full of uh, silver chalices, silver candlesticks, silver, ah, silver ashtrays, you name it. And all of that stuff is stolen, no doubt."
Guard: "Where'd you get 'em?"
Me: "Silverton, maaaaan! I tell you, they love silver in that place! They got silver doorknobs, silver letter-boxes, just, just all kinds of silver in that place, man! I even saw a dude with silver belt, man, holding up he silver drawers. Not even joking - I was going nuts, just stealing everything! You couldn't hold me back! I was thiefing the hell out of that place, son! Now listen, you just let me through and hip me to a good spot to unload all this silver and it might be that I got a 1 Gold Piece that I'm kind of sick of carrying 'round with me, you know...? "
Guard: "Hmph. Silver chalices, huh. Silver doorknobs. Let me see."
Me: "Oh, you want to see...? Well... about that." (sucks air through teeth) "The silver's all cursed. Yep, totally cursed. Really, really cursed. Probably need to have a wizard look at it first. No idea what might happen otherwise. Something pretty bad, probably." (frowns speculatively)
Guard: "Oh, cursed, he says, from a whole town made out of cursed silver, I suppose. Citizen - I believe you're lying."
Me: "Okay, maybe I am and maybe I ain't. But consider this - what is a liar... if not the Thief of Truth? I'm still a thief either way. Come on, bro. Be. Real. With. Me."
Guard: "Hmmm. Thief of truth, huh. I suppose you got a point there. Alright. Come on in."
Me: (executes a perfect Morris Day slide into Port Blacksand)

While not quite so long-winded, let me re-iterate that this is actually how the conversation plays out in the book - you pretend you have silver chalices to fence, the guard asks to see it and you are given the option of laying down a weak line about it being cursed, whereupon the skeptical guard decides you are  "just the same as all the rest inside this city" and admits you. Evidently Port Blacksand is such a bad place that it's actually Bizzarro-evil, with guards at the gate to let thieves and liars in, and turn honest folk away. Good is bad and bad is good, and citizens get put in the stocks for being "ye Goody-Two-Shoes"

That woman in the foreground with hands like Dolly Parton gives you an egg to throw, but she also picks your pocket. The thought of those ghastly talons sliding into one's purse is much worse than the fact of the theft.

What was his crime, politeness? Attempting legitimate commerce? How Port Blacksand manages to operate with such systematically inverted mores is a real question - how can a city that is literally of, by, and for thieves work as a going concern? Having said that, my theory of Port Blacksand as a Bizzarro town isn't wholly consistent with the facts - or perhaps the facts themselves are not consistent with each other. At one point a burglar fired a crossbow at me because he thought I was a guard, and in another sequence  guardsmen are chasing an escaped murderer. So evidently there is some kind of conventional law enforcement going on.

At any rate, as you wander the town in search of Nicodemus it rapidly becomes a real challenge to hang on to the 30 GP you got from Mayor Owen - I was almost killed within about 200m of the gate when a gang shot me full of arrows after I refused to hand over my purse. There are cutpurses, thugs and fraudsters a-plenty - e.g. a kid selling phoney magic potion from a barrel, or a goblin mugger posing as an injured child. Even if you avoid mishap, your funds tends to be frittered away in the shops, out of anxiety that one of the items on sale will prove necessary to win the game. Not to mention the shopkeepers who are also fraudsters and thugs, such as the chandler who will drug you and leave you kidney-free in an ice bath if you agree to take a look at the "special candles in the back room". Readers will no doubt be pleased but unsurprised to learn that most times when you enter a shop you're also given the option to attack the owner (hey, they're probably evil shop-keepers, right?)

Attack him! He's a MAN-ORC for crying out loud. Might as well just attack him. GO ON ATTACK HIM.  

And if theft and shopping somehow aren't sufficient to empty your purse, there's also street gambling. I lost 5 GP in a game of toss-the-cannonball, a contest of manhood to rival Top Gun's beach volleyball scene in its homo-eroticism.

That'd be me lying crumpled on the ground there then. Why wasn't I offered an option to attack this guy?

Much as in other books you are given the option of popping into all sorts of random places seemingly on a whim - I have fond memories of clambering down a well in Forest of Doom, like Ed Hillary said, "because it was there" - but in a city, the strangeness of this behaviour becomes truly stark. Here's a passage for example:

105
Most of the houses in the street are joined in a long terrace, but you see one on the left that stands alone and is set back. There appears to be a large wooden kennel outside the heavy oak front door. If you wish to approach the front door, turn to 64. If you wish to keep walking north, turn to 304.

So what's going on in the protagonist's mind here? "Man! All these joined-up houses. This street is boring.  Wait a second! That house stands alone! And it's set back! And there's a kennel, so I'll maybe get attacked by a DOG! I think this could be the house where I find Nicodemus!" - but seriously, why this house and not any of the others? I have decided to call this syndrome  "Bizarre Search Behaviour" (BSB) and I very much suspect I will be applying this term again in discussion of future books.

Regardless of which streets you choose to walk down and whether you perform indiscriminate home invasions along the way, the book eventually herds you to Nicodemus, who is living in a wooden hut, under a bridge, next to stinking, polluted river, with the words "KEEP OUT" painted on the front door (hardly auspicious). Nicodemus answers the door despite his apparent misanthropy, and although he says he lives "here under Singing Bridge in Port Blacksand to escape pleas for aid from people fallen on hard times", he still has love for his boy Owen Caraliff and agrees to help. (Quite what qualifies as "falling on hard times" in Nicodemus' opinion is unclear, given his own circumstances). Nicodemus doesn't much fancy going toe-to-boney-toe with Zanbar personally, so instead he explains to you how to kill Zanbar Bone yourself, illustrating the key points with his pipe smoke "in case you're a visual learner".

Nicodemus - "BLAZIN' THA CROP"

How to kill Zanbar Bone
by
Nicodemus, Wizard

1) Six to twelve hours before you kill Zanbar Bone, take a mortar and pestle and grind the following ingredients into a fine paste that can be stirred without clumping:

• Black pearl
• Lotus flower
• Hair of a HAG

Keep aside in a sealed container.

2) Next, shoot Zanbar Bone in the heart with a silver arrow. This will paralyse him temporarily.

3) Once Zanbar Bone is adequately paralysed, take the paste you prepared earlier and rub it into his eyes, enough to cover each eye to about the depth of the first knuckle of your index finger.

4) You will definitely notice results within a few seconds.  If Zanbar Bone does not rapidly decompose into a small pile of dust, repeat steps 1-3 above.

Pro tips

• Don't let Zanbar Bone touch you! You'll die.
• Normal weapons do not harm Zanbar Bone!
• Zanbar Bone has an entrancing stare! To ensure best results, you should not attempt to kill Zanbar Bone without first tattooing  a white unicorn in a yellow sun upon your forehead.

------------------------------------------------------

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand that last point is a definite "WAIT, WHAT" moment for me. You have to realize that by the end of Nicodemus' monologue, your half-day mission for 30 GP and a fancy sword has gone from:

FIND NICODEMUS! ONLY YOU CAN DO IT!

...to:

Find Nicodemus. Then go hunt down a bunch of weird/expensive crap from various dangerous places. Attack a skeleton wizard and his allies on his home turf. Make a perfect shot to the heart with only once chance, against a guy who can kill you with a tap on the shoulder... and then walk around for the rest of your life with a fucking unicorn tattooed on your forehead. ONLY YOU CAN DO IT.

Preferable.

I should also mention that if you get far enough in the book (I didn't), Nicodemus will send you a note saying that he fucked up and you're only meant to use two of the three aforementioned ingredients to make Zanbar's eye-drops, and he can't remember which two. Meaning you have to guess. So take everything I just said about the mission and then add a random 2-out-of-3 chance of failure at the very last moment. In game design circles I believe this is called "a Dick Move".

Needless to say, if I had the option at this point I'd be going straight back to Silverton to re-negotiate the fine points of my deal with Mayor Lumpy, or more likely just slide some adoption pamphlets under his door and slink out of town. But since I'm a "hero", I persevere with this lunacy. Nicodemus off-handedly mentions that you can get all the ingredients you need in Port Blacksand "if you search hard enough [read: bizarrely enough]" which segues us nicely into the second part of the adventure, a scavenger hunt around Port Blacksand.


I was actually able to find all three of the black pearls, lotus flower and HAG's hair, but only because I vaguely remembered where to look from playing the game as a child. Bizarre Search Behaviour reaches a new high when you sneak onto a pirate ship at the docks and steal black pearls from the neck pouch of a sleeping sea dog. And then this apogee of BSB is massively exceeded about a street and a half later:

363
In the middle of the street you see a large manhole cover. If you wish to lift the manhole cover to see where it leads to, turn to 48. If you wish to keep walking walking east, turn to 205.

I just love the impulses that cross this guy's mind. If you go down the manhole, "you realise, much to your disgust, that you are standing in a sewer" (and what did you expect?). It's also the only sewer I'm aware of where someone is paid to go around mounting flaming brands on the walls for light, but anyway that's where you gotta go if you want to kill a HAG and chop her hair off.

Monsters and Combat


While Port Blacksand is quite an interesting setting the monsters you encounter are mainly the same stock models, GOBLINS, GIANT RATS and the such like, with fairly vanilla combat situations. The fight with the HAG is worth mentioning since she will cast an illusion on you so that you "think you are being burned alive with a crowd of skeletal faces looking on gleefully" which made me want to count SKELETONS but I don't know how many a "crowd" is or whether illusionary SKELETONS even qualify.

Probably the most intriguing monsters you face are the LEAF BEASTS who defend the Lotus Flower, which incidentally is the only anti-Zanbar ingredient that you'll find somewhere that a sane person would look for it - the public gardens.

What marvellously sculpted hedges! Why, they look like they could just leap right out and attack you!

Incidentally entry into the public gardens of Port Blacksand is via a gold coin donation in an honesty box (I know?!) - not exactly in keeping with the theme of the city, but the magically animated hedges that attempt to "crush and smother" you if you pick a flower are rather more in the spirit of the place.

While I'm on the topic of encounters I'd like to point out the single weirdest thing that can happen, should your Bizarre Search Behaviour lead you into a certain house on Candle Street...

You blunder in on two identical old ladies dressed in little girl's clothes arguing with knives over a wooden duck.

Probably my favourite thing in this or any book.

Okay maybe except for APE-DOG and DOG-APE.

Failure, And No More Christmas Cards From Mayor Owen Carralif

Your path through Port Blacksand will eventually lead to an unavoidable encounter with two TROLL guards which will result in either your death, or ejection from the city. I managed to not die, so, after being turfed out of the city I mentally ticked off the things I needed to kill Zanbar Bone and realized -- UH OH -- I forgot to get a unicorn tattooed on my face.

Regrets are funny things.

I suppose at this point you could ask someone to lend you a biro and a safety pin but unlike so many other lunatic notions, using his reflection in a puddle to work up a prison tattoo of a unicorn on his own face doesn't occur to the protagonist. So apparently you just walk back to Silverton and shrug your shoulders - and that's the end.

At least I survived.

The SKELETON report

At last!

City of Thieves actually presented me with a few theoretical challenges. First was the issue of whether to count Zanbar Bone, who is never actually referred to as a SKELETON in the text and while plainly constructed of human bones, has features such as eyeballs, scalp thorns and a Kermit ruff that are not considered typical features of SKELETONS generally. In the end I decided I would face all controversy and approbium, come what may, and include Zanbar in the count. His surname is "Bone", for fuck's sake.

The other three skeletons are these jokers, doing what they do best:

"The boys are back in town, the boys are back in town!"

If you make it to the boss-fight with Zanbar Bone he actually conjures them up by pulling out three of his teeth and throwing them on the floor, which for me raises the question of whether to count his other 29 teeth as SKELETONS in potentia. On reflection I thought this would look too much like I was juking the stats so I disregarded Zanbar's remaining teeth.

Finally, in the Background section, Mayor Owen describes Zanbar's two messengers as "skeletal" though apparently they are SPIRIT STALKERS. So I looked them up in my copy of Out of the Pit, the official Fighting Fantasy bestiary - it seems that while they are skinny, SPIRIT STALKERS still have some meat on them and are maybe more like ZOMBIE supermodels in appearance. So they don't count either.

Believe it or not I was given this as a wedding gift.

And check it out - there's your boy Zanbar Bone on the right side of the cover, standing on some other bloke's back. He's the Night Prince as I'm sure you know.

Final Thoughts

Judging from the number of Fighting Fantasy books released in 1983, Ian Livingstone must've written City of Thieves within a few weeks of Forest of Doom and yet, it is a far better book. I have very little hesitation in saying it's my favourite so far - apart from the urban setting, all the constant tricks and thievery create a compelling atmosphere of mistrust. It also features some of the best interior artwork of the early books.

It's pretty clear that the structure of the book is unfair but that's more or less par for the course and it's probably still easier than Starship. I suppose my main gripe is once again the random searching - this would actually be pretty easy to fix. Nicodemus could drop a few hints about where to look for the ingredients which would make it seem less insane to clamber into a sewer for no apparent reason - wouldn't have to give too much away, something about HAGS avoiding the daylight or whatever. Could even throw a roundabout red herring by suggesting that the player search taverns for the black pearls, "where sailors have been known to lose them at games of chance" - despite being a misdirection this would still make your solo raid on the pirate ship more understandable. JUST A THOUGHT IF YOU EVER DECIDE TO REWRITE A BOOK FROM THIRTY YEARS AGO TO INCORPORATE SUGGESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET, IAN.

Anyway thanks for reading (if you've made it this far) - I'll see if I can get through the next one a bit faster eh...

Thanks, "Blogger", for your dodgy design decisions

Apologies to anyone who just had a half-written version of my experiences with "City of Thieves" crop up in their RSS feed - turns out someone decided it would be a good idea to make Ctrl-P a hotkey for "immediately post this blog without confirmation". That's a mite too close to Ctrl-I for italics for my thick-ended, sleepy fingers, with predictable results.

I have deleted the post and will finish writing it and then post it again. You can take this as a sign that the next full post is not far off, for now I shall whet your appetite with this drawing of an Egyptian sarcophagus which ludicrously turns up out of the blue in the Fighting Fantasy universe:

Just one of the many corny props at Zanbar Bone's house.

(He also has an ornamental suit of armour that comes alive and attacks intruders - dude's steeze is all Scoobie Doo and shit)

#4 - "Starship Traveller" by Steve Jackson (1983)

This was actually the first Fighting Fantasy book I ever got, I might've been maybe 6 at the time. I vaguely remember my mother trying to read it to me before getting fed up with the dice rolls and letting me work it out for myself. (Pause a moment to consider this hinge in my life where I might instead have been given a tiny set of golf clubs or TOMY's "My First Cancer Research Laboratory" and sigh for what could have been). My memories on the matter are shaky but I'm pretty sure that despite numerous play-throughs my cheating little ass never won it, for reasons that will become apparent.


The cover depicts three stalwart crewmen from the Traveller locked in gladiatorial combat with a "Man-Slayer Robot", a scene from the book that I didn't experience on my play through. There are several details about this illustration that baffled me as a kid, and they yield no more readily to the bludgeoning of my adult mind. Take homeboy with with the blue cut-off top for example - his left arm's been amputated at the elbow. And it's not like the Man-Slayer chopped it off just now either, that there's a stump, cleanly healed. Weird detail. Or the third fellow, lying on the ground hugging Lt. Blue's trackie bottoms - his eyes are glowing red? -- yessir we definitely playing a sci-fi book this time out, 'cos that shit right there is some space-type shit.


Also in evidence here is the Illustrator's Bane, AKA the irrational fear of drawing feet.

Lt. Blue's left foot is obscured by an unnaturally thick cloud of space dust, while his right is, um, behind a spiky thing (what is that thing?) Warrant Officer Red-Eyes doesn't have any feet since his lower body is presumably stuffed into the same car-boot as homeboy's forearm. But the Grand Prize for Foot Avoidance has to go to the feller in red, whose legs seems to just be evaporating from the knees down.

But on the other hand, there's always the U.S. cover:

So crap, and yet, they have feet.

Background


In one of several departures from the standard format, this book doesn't have a Background section. But basically the concept of this book is that you are the captain of the Starship Enterprise, the pride of Starfleet -- uh, sorry I mean: the Starship Traveller, the pride of - erm - "AstroNavy". Yeah, this book wears its Star Trek influences very much on its sleeve and I don't doubt that Steve Jackson would've just gone whole hog and bootlegged it as a Star Trek adventure were it not for the fear of Gene Roddenberry’s legal hit squad.

A rare "posse shot" of Gene Roddenberry's lawyers

Rolling Up My Team


Steve Jackson got tinkering again and came up with a bunch of different rules for various science-fictiony scenarios such as have a spaceship fight or shooting lasers at HUMANOIDS. You have to roll up stats not only for yourself but also for your ship and several members of your crew, who can accompany you on missions and get themselves killed. Here's what I rolled:


The Starship Traveller
WEAPONS STRENGTH - 12
SHIELDS - 16


(This was irrelevant since I never got into any ship-to-ship combat).


Captain
SKILL 7
STAMINA 19
LUCK 12


Science Officer
SKILL 11
STAMINA 19


Medical Officer
SKILL 12
STAMINA 17


Engineering Officer
SKILL 9
STAMINA 20


Security Chief
SKILL 10
STAMINA 16


Guard 1
SKILL 9
STAMINA 20
 
Guard 2  
SKILL 12
STAMINA 21



First thing you notice about this crew is that everybody's more competent than the captain, kind of a space Dilbert scenario. I think of the Captain as just this Mr. Magoo-ass dude with a father-in-law high up in the admiralty at AstroNavy. “Guard 2” on the other hand is proof that sometimes, cream sinks to the bottom. Guard 2 spends most his work-day rushing about frantically opening doors and stacking up mattresses every time the Captain steps onto a stray roller-skate. He is like Hong Kong Phooey’s cat. “Long-suffering” doesn't begin to describe it for Guard 2.


The Adventure
The adventure begins with our Captain, the nonce, driving the starship into a black hole (or being “sucked through the appalling nightmare of the Seltsian Void”, if you prefer)

See the black hole? It's the black bit. Don't drive into that bit.

But, instead of being ripped apart by tidal forces in a rapidly cascading sequence of ever more delicate dismemberments, everyone just staggers from one side of the bridge to the other for a while before blacking out.

The crew awakens, with bleary eyes and thick tongues, to the sight of strange constellations glaring through the portholes. “WTF THIS SHIT IS NOT ON OUR SPACE MAPS” the Navigation Officer announces unconvincingly, and after some chin-stroking the Science Officer concludes that you must have wound up in a parallel universe... might as well take a gander at some solar systems nearby. There’s one straight ahead, one to the port, and one to the starboard – yes, despite the great three-dimensional void of trackless space, the Starship Traveller is in fact situated at one of the classic mainstays of Fighting Fantasy – a T-junction. Deciding between destinations - say, visiting a green star versus a blue star - is Starship's spin on the left-or-right, live-or-die direction-choosing action we expect from Fighting Fantasy. What's a little bit neat about Starship is that that each celestial encounter plays out as its own little self-contained challenge, rather like episodes of a TV show (albeit one that gets cancelled midway through the first season) - accordingly, I have written up my experience of the book as a phoney episode guide (just bear with me on this concept okay).


A word first on your over-arching mission in the book - during your journey you find yourself collecting factoids about black holes. Though I don't think anyone really announces it, the crew of the Traveller seem to have a common understanding that the first order of business is to find another likely looking black hole and steer down its throat. The victory paragraph can only be reached by adding two numbers, one representing a black hole location and the other representing the date you decide to fly through it (along the way you also pick up useless facts like the recommended speed of approach for the black hole just so Steve Jackson can make you feel like a tit for writing it down). So during your visits to alien cultures you are often given the chance to rummage among their astronomical charts for dubious black hole trivia.


"Starship Traveller" Episode Guide 

Episode 1 - "What Price, Freedom?"
First aired March 9, 1983
Synopsis: The Traveller away team visits a world without laws, whose citizens obey only their whims, and where all public decisions are made through slow and painfully won consensus. In the dramatic highlight of the episode, the team are attacked by some violence-loving locals and the Captain is nearly beaten to death before Guard 2 can subdue the attackers. Ultimately, the crew of Traveller depart with new knowledge of the strange new universe in which they find themselves (and facts about black holes).


Episode 2 - "Unquiet Spirits"
First aired March 16, 1983
Synopsis: The Traveller orbits a world in ruins. Exploring the surface, the away team experience alarming visions and seemingly spectral visitations and attacks. As a brief comic interlude in an otherwise dark episode, the Captain stumbles while backing away from the imagined shade of his disapproving father-in-law and gets his hand caught in a jam jar. Ultimately it is revealed that the world is still contaminated with a weaponized hallucinogen used in the last days of an apocalyptic war. But the jam jar turns out to be real. 


Episode 3 - "Live Long... and Despair"
First aired March 23, 1983
Synopsis: The away team beams down to Culematter, a dystopian world where the otherwise immortal inhabitants are subject to the depredations of quota-driven death squads called the "Population Controllers". The away team soon run afoul of Population Controllers and are taken to an extermination centre.

This handsome lad shows up for just long enough to explain the plot before Population Controllers burst into the room and ventilate his thorax. 

While trying to contact the ship, the Science Officer inadvertently discovers that the inhabitants of Culematter can be paralyzed by certain broadcast frequencies from his communicator, allowing the away team to make their escape. In a final twist that confused audiences, the Captain accidentally removes the head of a Culematter native while trying to steal its helmet, revealing nothing but a mass of wires and circuitry within.


Episode 4 - "Blame It On The Rain"
First aired March 30, 1983
Synopsis: The away team explores Cliba, a world suffering from endless rainstorms. The primitive people of Cliba worshop an entity they call "the Rain Lord" to whom they attribute the disastrous rains. Travelling to the Rain Lord's castle, the team discover not a god but an alien castaway from a more materially advanced culture who has used weather control technology to establish himself as a despot. However the dial on his weather machine has gone bung and it is now set to permanent torrential rain - the Traveller's Science Officer gives it a heavy slap and all is resolved.
Note: The explanation of the Rain Lord's weather control given in this episode provoked numerous letters of complaint to the TV Guide from meteorologists and other concerned parties.


Episode 5 - "Do We Not Die"
First aired April 6, 1983
Synopsis: Mysterious deaths occur on-ship following a visit to an crash-landed ship that was broadcasting a distress signal. The deaths are traced back to a contagious "poison" brought back with the away team and further deaths are averted through good quarantine practice. 


Episode 6 - "Free Parking"
First aired April 13, 1983
Synopsis: The Traveller is intercepted in deep space by a warship of the Ganzig Confederation, a reptilian species. Acquiescing without a fight, the Captain permits the Traveller to be escorted to a starbase. The Captain meets the Starbase Commander and they have a polite discussion, while the crew of Traveller take some time to relax. Meanwhile, through a porthole in the background of one scene, the Ganzig warship is shown leaving the starbase without further explanation. At the conclusion of the episode the Traveller continues on its way unchallenged.
Note: Known as "The Episode Where Nothing Happened", "Free Parking" is popularly thought to have prompted the sudden cancellation of the series which was enacted before any further episodes could be shown. However this network decision should be seen against a backdrop of lacklustre ratings that had been consistently falling since Starship Traveller's debut.


Failure and Death

Though Starship Traveller failed to attract a broad audience, there was a hardcore group of fans who were appalled by its abrupt termination and campaigned hard to have it put back on air. After more than a year of complaints and petitions, the network approved production of a single episode to resolve the show's dangling storyline. The producers hurriedly re-united those of the show's original scriptwriters not yet debilitated by alcohol poisoning, and pulled together a group of hastily cast stand-ins along with the few members of the original cast who were not already committed under contract for live appearances in chain restaurants. While many key members of the original production crew were able to return, one important element was missing - the model of the Starship Traveller itself, which had gone missing in the interim (the dark gray blanket that was dangled behind it to represent the interstellar void was still in storage, as were numerous Christmas tree ornaments). The ultimate fate of the original Traveller model remains a matter of some speculation and fake mock-ups are still known to appear for sale on e-Bay every couple of years or so, masquerading as the genuine article.

The original 1983 Starship Traveller

The hasty replacement used for new exterior shots in the '84 Christmas special, a bowl.

From this position of disadvantage and against an aggressive deadline, the producers' frantic labours to provide a satisfactory conclusion to the grossly truncated Traveller saga resulted in the now notorious "Starship Traveller 1984 Christmas Special".


Starship Traveller '84 Christmas Special 
First aired December 21, 1984
Synopsis: The episode opens at a Christmas dinner in the mess hall of the Traveller. The Captain - now plainly wearing a girdle beneath his uniform - proposes a toast to the diginity of the humankind as embodied by the Christmas spirit, and to absent friends - in the process briefing the audience on the various crew members who have been sold into slavery, died by standing too close to volcanoes et cetera in various adventures assumed to have happened since the last broadcast episode, "Free Parking".


The mood around the dinner table is glum as the parallel universe substitutes for turkey and glazed ham are convincing neither in appearance nor taste. Talk turns homesick, and as the space brandy flows, mutinous and dark. Guard 1 speaks first against their Captain, pointing at him with a hyperspace turkey drumstick, and soon other voices chime in on his many disastrous decisions and the toll these have taken in lives. Stammering, the Captain is only able to salvage the situation by announcing that he has determined the co-ordinates of a black hole that he is "99% sure" will transport the Traveller back to their home universe.
The remainder of the episode depicts the various moments of emotional conflict and closure as the crew conduct their preparations to travel through the black hole with a tenuous and brittle optimism, including a sub-plot in which Guard 2 attempts to puzzle through the Captain's astro-navigational calculations in a spreadsheet. Some of these scenes were passably well-written but audiences were confused by the many substitutions of new actors into old roles, as evidence by the title of one critic's review - "Who Are These People And Why Are They Kissing".

Ernest Borgnine Jr., who stood in for the iconic "Science Officer" character in the ill-received '84 Special, was given no lines and was not even listed in the credits. 

Tension ramps up as the command crew strap themselves into their seats on the bridge and commit the course into the heart of the black hole. Well wishes are murmured out like farewells as the whine of straining machinery increases to a shriek. Suddenly, Guard 2 bursts into the room, wild-eyed, and delivers the now famous line "Wait, there's been a mistake in the rounding", abruptly cut off by the sound of an explosion and fourteen seconds of dead air. Finally, the credits roll over footage of the remorseless void (i.e., a dark gray blanket) as a tinny, reverbed version of Bing Crosby's "I'll Be Home For Christmas" plays to fade.


The Starship Traveller 1984 Christmas Special is generally regarded to be the most depressing Christmas Special ever.

The SKELETON Report

So obviously there aren't any magically animated SKELETONS in space. Nor are there any barely obscured genitalia as per Forest of Doom (unless I was misidentifying the anatomy of various aliens). The only things I noticed that was worth counting were interpretive dancers.

There were 4 of those.

Final Thoughts

Starship Traveller really is an odd one out among the early Fighting Fantasy books. There were a few things I liked - the greater sense of interactions between characters - the fun ideas underlying some of the "episodes", and their comparative depth considered against the short encounters in the preceding three books - the fact that in several cases, when presented with a problem I could deduce the likely outcomes of my options based on logic and common sense and select accordingly (compare this with the baffling item-choices in Citadel - should I give the GANJEES a tub of ointment or a spider in a jar? What?) 

But the adventure felt a bit unsatisfactory overall, which mainly arises from the annoying victory conditions. My depiction of the "final episode" is not far off how it plays out in the book - after a while the crew will simply demand that you fly into a black hole, and if you refuse they begin committing suicide (!) - surely if the Bounty mutineers could tolerate life on Pitcairn Island, the crew of Traveller can stand having a whole new universe to explore? Coupled with that is the sheer difficulty of getting the numbers for the "good" black hole you have to fly through and then guessing the right combination of time and place out of the various possibilities - replays ad nauseum would be required to legitimately win this one I suspect. 

Anyway, I'll see you in a few weeks' time for the next exciting installment - City of Thieves - which, hearteningly, features a SKELETON right there on the cover.

#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"...