bloomer's Deathtrap Dungeon review

Nice to see a review for DTD up here! I once-upon-a-time owned the original book. Think I sold it, though... did you ever get into Lone Wolf, Bloomer?

I never had the Deathtrap Dungeon book (or game, for that matter), but I did buy the "sequel" to it, which took place in a revamped Deathtrap Dungeon ("Trial of Champions"). Of the Fighting Fantasy series, that particular one basically took its flaws and multiplied them times about 6,000,000,000,000.

To survive the dungeon, you had NO ROOM for error, as you had to collect all of these gold rings, find three sets of numbers; solve a riddle or three AND conclude with about 2-3 battles against foes that were at the maximum difficulty level you could get in those books. Evil stuff...

That was kind've the point of Fighting Fantasy, though, right? The game style was "the one true path" and the challenge was finding that path over multiple play throughs. You almost never made it on the first go. The cruelest (but also probably the coolest) of the series was Creature of Havoc where you don't even know what you are and your instincts take over in the form of random rolls that decide which direction you go in certain paths.

Of course, some of these paths make the book unbeatable which means you have to roll the right random number in order to proceed.

Different from, say, Lone Wolf, which had one true ending but multiple paths to get there.

Yes and no. Yes in the fact that FF games were "one true path" games and you would need to go through them a few times to get them, but No in the sense that Trial of Champions took things to a truly sadistic level.

In the other 2-3 FF books I went through, there was at least a little margin for doing things a bit differently. There always were certain items and stuff that you needed to get, but there was a bit of non-linearity to them. In this one, you have NO wiggle room. You have to essentially find the correct path and not deviate one inch from it, as going down this corridor instead of that one would mean you'd miss a gold ring (of which there were 8-9) or set of numbers. And that would mean you would die eventually.

I guess my problem with that book was that it eliminated ALL aspects of you having any control over things. You had to follow a set path perfectly while, of course, surviving luck-testing rolls and winning battles (some of which were among the most brutal in FF series' history).

I never made it to Trial of Champions, so my knowledge is limited, but it reminds me greatly (from the sounds of it) like Citadel of Chaos, with those damn... what were they called?... Gamgees?

I've played a number of FF books over the years and recently (well, two years ago, heh) picked up a couple that I found for cheap. The margin for error varies per book, and is usually on the steep side, but I remember Deathtrap Dungeon as being particularly nasty.

One of my all time favorites, City of Thieves, has a couple of moments where taking the right path is necessary to collect the items you require to proceed to the endgame. At that point, if you follow the rules to the letter, you have three ingredients and have to make a choice of two of them to mix a poison for the Big Bad out of. Of the three possible combinations, only one is correct, and only at the very end (if you get that far) do you find out if your choic worked or not.

Of course anybody who does play the game and makes the wrong choice at that point just flips back through the pages and tries again until they get it right, rather than starts from the beginning. But that kind of cheating is not just extremely common in CYOA style books, I think it is kind of expected too.

Recall, too, that the video games that existed at the time when these books first came out were on the level of pacman and donkey kong. Great games, but not something to fill your evening with. Having a reason to read an adventure over and over was appreciated back then.

We're a faster-paced culture now, but gamebooks seem to be making a comeback! Joe Dever (creator of Lone Wolf), in an interesting interview, said it's because books have suddenly become convenient again. You can shove them in a bag or a pocket, they don't weight 25 pounds or cost 3,000 dollars, and you can read them in the bath with little fear of damaging them or the need to plug them in.

Anyway, they'll always have a place in my heart. There was a period in my pre-teens where Lone Wolf and Choose Your Own were the most common books to see in my hands.

The three best Fighting Fantasies out of the first 21 (because that's all that the US got -- I never even knew the series continued until my Australian friend brought some with him to college):

Forest of Doom
Deathtrap Dungeon
House of Hades

Note -- those are in order of release, not in order of greatness. I actually created a ROM 2.3 MUD area based on House of Hades, my love for that book was so great.

//Zig

Hades? That must be 'House of Hell' but with the name changed to 'Hades' for the US market.

Thanks for reading another of my 10 years ago reviews Zipp. I reread it and it's alright for y2k vintage.

Re: what Sash was saying, FF's vary enormously in (non-cheating) difficulty depending on the author. The best known of the least forgiving ones were mostly written by Ian Livingstone. Everyone here mentioned Deathtrap Dungeon, and Trial of Champions - those are both his. Crypt of the Sorcerer is also superbitchy. There's a remarkable section where you have to go out of your way to behave badly (-3 luck points for disturbing a gravesite, etc... the book seems to send signal after signal that you are doing the wrong thing) but that's all just preamble to getting an item essential to prevent death later.

I actually think the most insane ones were written by Robin Waterfield, including Phantoms of Fear and Masks of Mayhem. The latter for instance suddenly asks at the end of the book if you have any idea who the master villain is. If you do, you'll know what paragraph to turn to. The only place the villain's name appeared was back in the introduction to the book, where a paragraph number is embedded in his name.... stuff like that.

I have 45 of the 59 FF's now. Some of them are becoming very expensive to buy on Ebay.

I love Citadel of Chaos. I just felt it had killer atmosphere, especially the illustrations. Yeah, the Gangees drove me insane!

I have 2 Lone Wolf books. Shadow on the Sand I got in year 5 I think, and my friend and I went apeshit over it. But I never had another one til a few years ago, when I picked up the very first Lone Wolf from a 2nd hand book fair. Haven't played it yet.

I also have issues 1-3 of Warlock magazine, which include the original short versions of Caverns of the Snow Witch and House of Hell.

I remember Forest of Doom as actually being fairly forgiving. As I recall, if you make it out of the Forest without the required items, you are allowed to circle back and go through again with the same character, though obviously that has the odd result of all encounters having respawned.

One scene in Forest of Doom that I still remember is where you can end up falling into a pit trap and breaking a leg, forcing you to wait for it to heal - better have enough rations left or you starve right there and then.

Forest of Doom is forgiving. If you're referring to my Ian Livingstone observation, remember this was only the 3rd FF book, and the books didn't even have numbers at that point. When the popularity levels got high enough, they rebranded the earliest books with numbers, brought in more authors to help, and generally the possibilities for really savage or tricky books to cater for experienced players jacked up a lot.

Lone Wolf has had a HUGE revival. Not only are they reprinting all the books, they've also released a few pen-and-paper RPGs and have a video game coming out sometime next year from the makers of Gungrave (there's a long history behind the development that I'm not going to go into right now).

Probably best of all, though, is Project Aon. Here you can play all the original Lone Wolf books for free online, in a handy HTML format. This is thanks to Joe Dever letting the license go to the project so they could do this.

Play Lone Wolf online

That reminds me that every so often I have vague plans to turn one of the books into text adventure format, obviously also handling character creation and having a combat engine. I really need to put that idea into practice someday. Maybe with Warlock of Firetop Mountain. It can only turn out better than the DS game from what I hear.

I started to make a text adventure out of Talisman of Death. I didn't get very far, as I was significantly expanding each scene, but it does feature the following:

* trolls and living statues!
* a combat system that incorporates graphical lifebars and MUD-style battle messages!
* an old wise man, who you can beat the shit out of!
* the old wise man's corpse, which you can beat the shit out of!
* a maze of twisty passages, all alike!

I'll dig it up and post it for download/playing sometime, although it is terribly unfinished.

//Zig

I've only done 3 Fighting Fantasy books, Zipp, so that Citadel of Chaos deal is unfamiliar to me. What's the issue with that monster or whatever you mentioned?

My three were "Trial of Champions", which I've described my feelings about.

The "Snow Witch" one, which was more lenient, although still brutal, was kind of neat. You kill the Snow Witch about 2/3 of the way through it, but you and one of two prisoners you rescued are cursed by a slow-acting poison-curse deal, which leads to you having to get cured before the gradual loss of HP kills you.

A Samurai one I have kicked ass. You also had "Honor" as a stat and if you acted in a way that stripped you of all your honor, you immediately "game over'd". It was really neat in that you had two plot branches. Each one potentially gave you 3/6 of the book's summons. Late in the book, you fight a demon who summons three monsters. You have to guess what summon to use on what monster. You get all three right and you only have to fight the demon. BUT, you only auto-lose the book if you didn't get any of the three summons from your path (you get overwhelmed with the battles).

Also have about 3 Lone Wolf and 3 spin-off Grey Wolf books. Lone Wolf is a series that you either do ALL the books or you cheat, as I learned because the first book I played was the third. You get the Sommersword in the second. In the third (and future books), there are a number of times where you are disadvantaged (or simply fucked) if you don't have it. And of course, being able to add new powers for each book you do is HUGE. That's what makes Project Aon so awesome...I can do the books like they were meant to be done, instead of pretending I had all the stuff you're potentially able to obtain throughout earlier books.

Along those lines...Zipp, what is the bizarre deal with Cauldron of Fear and how the Sommersword is devastating to you for the final battle? If you have it, the dude is 44CS/50life. If you don't have it, he's 34/40...and you get the ability to potentially one-hit him if you have a magic dagger. It goes against the entire grain of the series (that the Sommersword is this holy weapon of goodness) when possessing it makes a villain near-impossible to beat (as opposed to simply very tough...or an auto-win).

One I really liked was the GrailQuest series. Entertaining writing and a neat vibe, where you get TONS of items that give you huge battle advantages over most foes, but there is a HUGE emphasis on puzzle-solving and being thorough (which is marred a bit by a couple cheap auto-deaths just for going everywhere you can). You have the same mandatory-fetch-questing that the most cruel FF games have, but you can repeatedly visit places if you screw up.

I've made one attempt on Snow Witch (a book that was played into my hands because an ex of my girlfriend at the time had left it with her and never reclaimed it so she passed it on). I never reached the Snow Witch, I eventually got killed because I lacked an item I was supposed to pick up somewhere earlier. So straight out traditional stuff. I'll have to retry it, and the other 10 or so unplayed books I have, someday.

Citadel of Chaos is the one where you're a mage's apprentice and you pick out what spells to take along when you create your character, right? Awesome one, that. It also has an anti-cheating measure in that you have to piece together the code to a combination lock to get to the final battle, and when you are at that point in the story, it simply tells you to go to the paragraph number that is equal to the code. Oops. A similar thing is done by sci fi FF book 'Starship Traveller', which also had such other neat features as a crew to pick away mission members from and phaser battles (stamina it not involved - you get hit, you're gone).

Heh, lots of us tried to do the text adventure conversion, then.

I started turning 'Khare, Cityport of Traps' into a computerised version when I was a kid. It had no parser, you just picked options from a list like you would in the book. After doing the first scene from the book the program had already used 20% of the Apple II's RAM. I only know that now, but what was still obvious at the time was -- this is too much work.

Re: Snow Witch...

Yeah, that was Ian Livingstone's savagery again.

The reason that it (weirdly) has you offing the Snow Witch halfway through is that it was originally published as a half-length adventure in the FF magazine, Warlock, which concluded with the Witch's death.

To publish it as a book, they needed to double the length, hence the addition of the post Snow Witch adventure. And maybe some pre, too.

What was cool was the 2 versions had completely different artwork, as well.

Re: Sword of the Samurai (OD's one)

Yeah, that was way cool. I also found it extremely hard. I last played it a year or two ago while on holiday.

The 2 guys who wrote that, and Talisman of Death, took the Ninja-y world they used as their setting there and produced their own series of excellent gamebooks with a Ninja theme, the 'Avenger' series.

There's also an Avenger videogame or 2 for the c64.

That makes sense (re: Snow Witch), then. There is a prelude to her dungeon where you're helping some dudes living in the vicinity with a yeti-like thing, that leads to you getting dumped into her place.

The book is probably 20% prelude to Snow Witch's Lair; 50% Snow Witch's Lair and 30% Post-Snow Witch's Lair. Or 15-50-35.

To OD:

@Citadel of Chaos: First of all, it was written by Ian Livingstone, who has been adequately described as masochistic in his writing. Citadel is one of those book where there are three separate "road blocks" that you have to pass and you can only pass them by having gone the right path, fought the right battles (and run from the right battles, too!) to get all the required items. There may be one place where you can have one or two different items to pass, but I can't recall. Probably not as harsh, still, as the one you describe, but to someone coming from Lone Wolf, where the "one-true-path" is the one you make, it was quite a jolt.

Speaking of which...

@ Lone Wolf: of course this has come up before in fan discussions. I even had the opportunity to clarify it with Dever himself, so we've pretty much got it squared away by this point.

Basically, Joe Dever kind've screwed himself by (as you point out) giving the Sommerswerd too early in the series and having it give too big a bonus, a goddamn +8 to CS! (I would later fix this in my own editions of the series by having the SS give a DAMAGE and not a CS bonus)

Anyway, it gave him a masterful headache in trying to fix the Enemy CS. If you recall, LW can start with anywhere from 10-20 CS. Add the 8 from Sommerswerd and you have potentially a range of 18 to correct for! His answer was to "punish" players with the SS by giving them harder end-of-book fights, thus evening out the difficulty.

It felt forced, though. I personally think he should've had the Sommerswerd stolen or broken somewhere in the Magnakai series (this can actually happen in a couple of books... Castle Death being the first to spring to mind).