Forest of Doom
Well I'm sure you all know the drill here - it's off into the Forest of Doom to find two halves of a Hammer, to save the dwarven village of Stonebridge...
The Playthrough
This book is mental. Apart from Yaztromo, I don't really meet any characters. I don't solve any puzzles. I don't follow a trail of clues. What I do is kill things. A lot of things. A Shape Changer. A Barbarian. A Hill Man. Another Hill Man. A Cat-woman. A Dwarf. A Giant. Three Death Hawks. A Wyvern represents my first serious test - having gone into the fight with 14 Stamina, I come out on a mere 4! After a rest to eat and recover, I rummage through the Wyvern's nest and discover a gold ring and an iron gauntlet. I've read Tolkien, so I leave the ring well alone, but the gauntlet gives me a permanent +1 to my Skill. Result! Climbing out of the nest, I'm set upon by a group of five bandits, demanding items from my bag. Having single-handedly killed a Wyvern, these sorry specimens hold no terrors for me - add another five souls to the death-count (16, if you're wondering).
Giddy with my own prowess I swagger out of the Forest and into Stonebridge like a Lord, trailing bloody red footprints behind me. Except that, without either part of the Hammer in my possession, the dwarfs don't want to know. And here a neat mechanic kicks in, whereby I'm given the option to go back to Yaztromo's tower and try again, items and skills intact (as opposed to 'Better luck next time!')
The Play through - Redux!
So it's back into the trees once more to clobber things with my sword. A Hobgoblin. Another Hobgoblin. A Sting Worm. An Ogre. The Ogre has a captive Goblin in a cage, and as soon as I open it of course he attacks me (Is nobody in this Forest open to just talking it out? Or has my gory reputation preceeded me?) Anyway, he too falls, and I retrieve from his corpse... One half of the Hammer!
Except that the bloody thing is clearly cursed, for it's at this point that my good luck all deserts me. Looting the Ogre's cave, I get blasted in the face by a noxious gas, at massive cost to both Skill and Stamina points. Mazed and reeking, I stagger onward. Climbing up into a tree house is probably not the wisest idea in my current condition, but the end of the adventure is clearly within grasp and I'm desperate to find the hammer head...
I can't loot the tree house because the Ape-Man who lives here is at home, and - unsurprisingly - he'd rather fight than talk it out. On top of my already lowered Skill, I have to subtract 3 from my Attack Strength every round as the Ape-Man's too agile for me! It's... a pretty one-sided fight. As the darkness closes in and breathing becomes difficult, I look into the Ape-Man's simple, bovine eyes, and find I can't really judge him too harshly. If you had a blood-spattered, sword-wielding maniac attempt an unprovoked home invasion, reeking of death and poison gas, wouldn't you fight back? And I think back on the bloody swathe I cut through the Forest today (21 at final count) and, like David Mitchell's Nazi, I'm finally forced to wonder... Was I the baddie, all along?
The Verdict
The stakes of Forest are very different from the two books thus far, which is a nice change of pace. It's still a fairly basic dungeon crawl at the end of the day - in many ways it even feels like a step back from WoFM. The vast array of offerings for sale from Yaztromo initially seem like they'll almost be the equivalent of Citadel's magic spells, but in practice they don't add much to the gameplay, as you can only use them when told, and some of them don't seem to appear at all. On the plus side, I didn't encounter any insta-death paragraphs, so that was nice, and I liked the mechanic that gives you multiple chances to get your mission right. There are still plenty of redundant 'Do you go east or west?' passages, though - great for map-making, not much of fun narratively.
Fun but... forgettable. 5.5 combat dice out of 10.
