Gamebooks

[Richard]

Dead of Night playthrough, part 2

Moving stealthily through the organic citadel, I find some Demonic Servants (skeletal figures in black gowns) transporting some human prisoners around. I can either follow them and see where they're going, or investigate where they came from. Since I've just seen six demonic guards moving from A to B, I decide that there will be fewer guards at A, so I head that way.

I find some more prisoners, but there are only two guards. I fight the guards, and it turns out that these Demonic Servants are actually a bit of a pushover! Low skills, low stamina scores, and landing two consecutive blows will finish them off. But the prisoners can't escape. They want to, but the monstrous being we are inside of is telepathically or magically stopping them from exercising any free will. The prisoners are being fed to it. I have to destroy it!

I push on, and I find a chamber containing the giant creature's heart! I kill a guard and interfere with the heart by turning off its feed -- there are three tubes leading to it, each with a tap and using Speak Demon I figure out which one is best to close off. There's no time to close all three taps because as soon as I close the first one, a hideous, many-eyed, tentacled monster appears and I decide to make myself scarce before it can get close enough to attack me. In another room, I find a "Death-Stone", which apparently is the cause of all this trouble. There are also some prisoners beign fed into a furnace, but I surmise that this is a red herring to distract me from what needs to be done, so I focus on getting the Death-Stone. I roll some dice against my Evil score (which is still zero) while the stone tries to corrupt me, and then after a second dice roll against a whole checklist of factors, which I narrowly pass by just one point, I succeed in destroying it. I was very close to an instant death here! And I have used up all of the holy water I was carrying. I hope I won't need that later!

My reward for vanquishing this evil thing and avenging Axmoor is that my current and Initial Luck and Skill scores are increased. I now legitimately have a Skill score of 13, and an Initial (i.e. maximum) Luck of 14! (I'm always unduly excited when an FF book lets me boost my Initial stats! It's something you're usually not allowed to do, like the Ghostbusters crossing the streams.)

Anyway, I head out of Axmoor, and choose to stay on the road north instead of following a stream east (since north is where I'm meant to be heading, after all). I hear a wagon coming, and I hide again. But this time, unlike last time, I get a chance to see the wagon from my hiding place. It's an orc, with some human prisoners in a cage! He's taking them to Axmoor to be fed to the giant beastie! The monster is dead of course, but still, nothing good is going to happen to the prisoners when they get there, so I ambush and kill the orc and free the prisoners. They tell me that the next village has been occupied by a demon army and the whole population has been killed or enslaved. I head there anyway, because I'm a Demon Stalker, and when I get there everything looks perfectly fine, and the friendly villagers greet me cheerfully. Given what I've just been told, I suspect that this is an illusion, and I'm right. It's actually a devastated wasteland, with an Eye of Sauron-type tower with a big red eye like a searchlight.
 
I meet a strange woman who speaks in riddles and tells me that some of what she tells me will be true and some will be lies, and it's up to me to figure out which is which (not right now, but later on, when it may or may not come in useful). I'm pretty sure that one of the true bits is that I have to destroy the tower and the eye though.
 
I find ten orc soldiers, and try to get past them by throwing some gold coins among them to distract them or make them fight each other, but it doesn't work (I didn't throw enough coins). But they're so drunk that four of them fall over and can't even fight me, and the six that can are quite weak specimens and are easily overcome. I reach the tower, give the password the woman gave me, and promptly get arrested, tied up and thrown in a dungeon. (Bitch.)
 
Rather implausibly, I manage to wriggle out of my bonds (this escape was a bit annoying actually; I would almost have preferred an instant death paragraph) and find some orc clothes and helmet to wear as a disguise. Moving up the tower, I pass as an orc officer and avoid having to fight any more orcs. At the top of the tower, I set fire to the eye with some lantern oil, and abseil down a rope to the ground. Offered the choice between heading to a pond, a temple, or a courthouse, I choose the temple, but there's nothing there. I avoid the pond, as I expect there will be a monster there, and go to the courthouse, where I find a statue of a woman similar to the one I met earlier. The statue is carrying the scales of justice; remembering one of the woman's clues, I tilt the balance to the left and am teleported to a forest. I have no idea if that was the right thing to do or not, or where I am.

While I'm taking in my new surroundings, a whole mansion house magically materialises in front of me, and a disembodied voice says "Enter at your peril, Demon Stalker." My reaction:

https://i.imgur.com/0o2Ybby.mp4

I leave the house and head into the forest...

[Richard]

Dead of Night playthrough, part 3

Tomorrow I'll find out if I was supposed to go into the house or not. Meanwhile, I encounter the giant demon on the front cover of the book, and fend him off with my Holy Circle talent. Thank goodness that worked, I didn't fancy tangling with him!



(Cover by Terry Oakes.)

I soon find a tower with a symbol of evil on the door, and since I know that Myurr is in a tower, this looks promising. I am given the choice of either going straight inside, or removing the symbol before opening the door. Either of these could be a trap. I make the wrong choice, and once inside I lose all of my possessions, including my sword!

In the hallway, I avoid another trap, and then there are three doors to choose between. Two of these have ominous noises coming from behind them, so I opt for the silent one. (This was a mistake, because I have since found out that I missed a really cool scene where I get to appear as a ghostly presence at my late brother's funeral years ago when I was still a child, and the priest would have recognised adult ghost me and given me a useful item! I didn't really need that item, but it would have been fun. Also there is a good instant death paragraph there if instead of meeting the priest you foolishly choose to meet your past self, creating a devastating time paradox.)

The door I chose leads into a red room, which turns out to be the first room in a maze of different-coloured rooms. It reminds me a bit of the maze in Stealer of Souls, but is different enough to still be interesting. I had to map my way through this bit, which was a little tricky because the maze doesn't always conform to geographical expectations, but it is a magic maze after all. Sometimes you can get teleported back to the red room at the start. There was one room where I lost six stamina points, but otherwise it is harmless. I eventually found a way through, and left by heading up a long spiral staircase which had this charming fellow to greet me at the top:



Banish Undead didn't work on him, because he was too powerful, so I had to fight him. His Skill of 8 was not as high as that setback or the picture had led me to expect, and that was almost disapointing, although at least no-one could accuse the book of being unfair. I actually found myself thinking that I shouldn't have cheated by giving myself maximum stats at the beginning.
 
The next room had a nasty trap in it, which I won't spoil because it was a cool one. I managed to be paranoid enough not to fall for it, although I think that I might actually have been killed by it back in 1989 and that I just remembered enough to avoid it this time, rather than by being clever.
 
Anyway, in the next room I find my parents, and Myurr! Endgame! Yay! Now, forget what I said about the Horned Skeleton: Myurr is an absolute badass. He has a skill of 14, stamina 25, and two Attacks -- meaning that he can attack you twice in each attack round, while you only get one shot of injuring him. This fight would basically be unwinnable (even if I still had the magic sword I lost earlier), but for two other things you can do instead of fighting him. In each attack round you can throw holy water at him (I didn;t have any left), or you can search for a magic gem hidden somewhere in the room, which is the only thing enabling Myurr to remain on the Earthly Plane. This is where the tarot reading on the river came in helpful, because now I know where the gem is! I smash the gem and exile Myurr to the Demonic Plane! I survive the explosion with a loss of 7 stamina points, and rescue my parents at paragraph 400!

This is a really fun book, a good example of FF done well, and it's not even Stephen Hand's best one! I'm looking forward to those!

[Richard]

[Deleted by author]