The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
The Adventure
Intrepid adventurer that I am, I take it upon myself to ransack the home of a reclusive and (for all I know) benign Warlock, who - fiendishly! - is minding his own business and posing no apparent threat to anyone. Well, that sort of behaviour obviously cannot be allowed to stand - it's like he wants to be robbed and murdered! Maybe I make a career out of this sort of thing? I'm explicitly told I'm a 'likeable sort of person'; am I a confidence trickster by trade, or just a common housebreaker?
Either way, the Gods obviously like a rogue, as I roll up a respectable Skill of 11 and Strength of 20. It's a low-key start to my home invasion, though it soon kicks into a higher gear when I slaughter five salaried orcs in the guards' mess - take that, Zagor! I hope the 'death at work' indemnities cripple you!
I find a fellow burglar languishing in a prison cell and release him back onto an unsuspecting world, though I'm too late to save a safe-cracking dwarf from dying of torture. Things are looking good by the time I reach an underground river - I've keys, gold, a shiny silver bow and spiffy new shield - but stopping for a sandwich nearly proves my undoing, as a hungry Sandworm erupts from the banks and, galvanised by the smell of my fish paste sarnie, whittles my health down by half. The meal takes me up to less health than I had when I got to the river! That was one costly lunch...
Heedless of the old advice about swimming after eating, I doggy paddle through to the next cavern. Without enough gold to pay the ferryman, I take a decidedly dodgy raft across to the far bank, and then... wham! Someone does me dirty from behind, and the lights go out. (It's fine - the occasional cosh is an occupational hazard for a housebreaker). Waking up in a room full of zombies, I heft my trusty sword and head into battle once more - and the first zombie makes absolute mincemeat of me. Recklessly knocking down doors with my shoulder earlier in the labyrinth means my Skill is now 9, which - while respectable - is obviously not enough against the undead. My supposedly magic shield doesn't save me from a single point of damage (I suspect, too late, that I've been sold a turkey) and I can only land a single, flailing hit before the cadaver ends my home invasion once and for all. The next brave burglar will be facing five, not four, zombies...
The Verdict
Not a favourite, but more fun than I remembered from my only previous playthrough (I suspect that's because I died before I got to the bloody maze). What hamstrings it for me is the total lack of narrative - it's just an opportunistic dungeon crawl, with no scene-setting or background to speak of, and not much forward impetus beyond a chance of loot - and the sheer amount of paragraphs that amount to 'You are at a crossroads, and can go east or west.' If you're a player - like me - who just likes to role play the books (What would I do in this situation?) and isn't making painstaking little maps, then those passages are an exercise in tedium. And I hadn't
even got to the bloody labyrinth yet...!
I think you need the nostalgia factor to get the most from this one. Thanks for making me replay it, though - been meaning to stuck back into the FF books for months. What are we playing next, then - Return to Firetop Mountain...?
