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YARD Fri Sep 15 16:13:10 2023 Below Zero Point 
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Well, I have recently been complaining that an unfortunate number of stories here end up too short. This is particularly acute when they happen to be at mere 50 refs, but some of the 100-200 ref stories can also feel "cramped", with completely reasonable choices or important detail left out. This happens to be the absolute first time when I felt the opposite - finding that the story really, really drags and wishing it would end already. And no, it's not length in and of itself: this work is at 380 refs, while A Princess of Zamarra is at 500 refs and is so far my favourite work on here (though I expect/hope Ulysses Ai's sci-fi series & The Diamond Key to at least give stiff competition once I get to them!) Further, Soul Tracker is at 400 refs and Outsider! is at 458: I have some notable misgivings about both, yet altogether, they are both interesting and impressive works (at least as far as genre fiction goes), which make great use of their length and are consistently exciting throughout. Not so here - I don't use the word "tedious" lightly, but it fits this story all too well. I won on the 4th try
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And I audibly muttered something unprintable in disappointment by the time
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The plot is just really uninteresting, since you are fighting completely random terrorists who do not seem to have any real cause for the longest time - and the one passing reference to their goal being to cause a "new dark age" around halfway point hardly helps to make them more compelling. Everything about them feels completely arbitrary, and there is so little reason to care. The sidekick isn't the worst, I suppose, but the banter is nowhere near as good as in Soul Tracker and not enough to keep you invested - not when the antagonists are completely lackluster and the supporting characters are usually those who blurt out ridiculous amounts of helpful information after hardly any prompting to you, strangers they have just met. Ref 134, where massively important secrets about the terrorists are revealed over drinks in a night club controlled by said terrorists, in full earshot of anybody who could have taken interest, is the absolute worst for this. The descriptive writing is not bad, but it feels stronger in many other gamebooks on here, and is certainly not strong enough to save this one. (Out of comment space, continued below.) |
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YARD Thu Sep 14 14:06:26 2023 Garden Of Bones
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Another one of the bite-sized 50-ref adventures on here. I maintain that the format is nearly always too small, and at least 70 are needed (i.e. Lair of the Troglodytes) to help avoid the right path feeling insubstantial, as seen with many comments here. Perhaps the only exception I recall is The Cold Heart Of Chaos, which had a more reasonable main path length due to being a lot more linear (and heavy on skillchecks) than this and most other stories of this size. Well, and I guess Impudent Peasant! felt good at 50 refs and quite a bit of freedom, but it did seem to have a lot more text per ref than is usual for these stories as well. The background here is VERY heavy on references to canon books, possibly setting a record of sorts. The adventure itself feels like Bad Moon Rising where your character can actually die - and not just because both are set in tombs! Besides that, I found the writing of some "action scenes" really reminiscent - refs like 6 or 45 (or the ultimately doomed alternative to 45) are just really cool. Generally, the writing flows well, there are a lot more incidental characters than you might expect from its length and they all do their best to leave an impression, and the final bad ending is actually quite impressive. I also like that unlike too many other stories, this one has been pretty thoroughly proofread already. At the same time, I am really glad that there are two possible ways to win - in part because viable choices are good, sure, but mostly because one of those ways makes absolutely no sense.
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Some other encounters also seem weird, particularly considering your stated background.
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Some comments on the mechanics as well.
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Lastly, I mentioned that the story has already been proofread quite well, so there's not much for me to point out this time.
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letícia Wed Sep 13 23:24:10 2023 Above The Waves
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foi legal |
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YARD Wed Sep 13 07:05:08 2023 Rebels Of The Dark Chasms |
And I once again ran out of comment space, so proofreading has to be in a separate comment.
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YARD Wed Sep 13 07:03:58 2023 Rebels Of The Dark Chasms
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So, this was quite an adventure. Neither the best nor the worst on here; in fact, quite far from either! There's a lot of good atmosphere: I particularly liked how the skill checks took your non-human nature into account, or how companions could force you into doing things the certain way. In general, the encounters felt very appropriate to the location. At the same time, there are also no memorable characters to be found, and few surprises in writing. There are some unwelcome surprises in gameplay, though, as while the choices directly in front of you usually lead to logically predictable outcomes for once, (in sharp contrast with something like Hellfire/Riders of the Storm, where the opposite of logical action was more often than not the right one), it is only through blind luck or the process of elimination that you are going to discover which path and series of turns in the road will actually let you win. I.e. the most important item needed to win is found in an incredibly contrived manner. Perhaps Chasms of Malice somehow justifies that find, but I doubt it.
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There are other encounters where the 150-ref size feels limiting, as your choices seem overly constrained - i.e. that moment early on when our only options after encountering a goblin are to stay and watch or leave, and no way to just attack immediately while he's distracted? Granted, most of them are on paths that are already dead-ends, but they still stick out in the moment. I.e.
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One of the worst things, though, is that
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Some other weirdness.
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YARD Tue Sep 12 06:21:04 2023 The Ravages Of Fate
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Masterful. Simply masterful. Very strong descriptive writing, a convincing low-magic world, and simply excellent characterization of everybody. Even the single-scene POV character who appears for just the final ref is better written than the pivotal characters of too many other works. It works well at what it sets out to do also, as even though there's a lot of text and relatively little room for choice in the opening stretches, it feels far more natural here than in, say, Above the Waves or Any Port in a Storm, which felt outright stifling. And of course, there's the battle which is perhaps not as extensively written as the author would have liked, but still has a fair room for variation (it felt amazing when, trying out a few things after already winning twice before, I actually managed to win without seeing the combat interface.) There's perhaps only a little weirdness which may not be intentional.
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And of course, the now-traditional proofreading section. This wor
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YARD Mon Sep 11 14:06:34 2023 Golem Gauntlet
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As I have been getting more and more (re)acquianted with Titan's canon, I began to wonder how well the stories I have already seen on here fit. Upon closer look, I discovered that not only does the ref 109, which makes you fight two ettins as part of a group fight, arrive with zero context (you are literally told nothing about the creatures outside of their stats), but it seems like ettins are one of the seemingly few fantasy/folklore creatures to exist in D & D but not in Titan's canon to date. There's also the Formorian Giant (?) At the same time, it's also technically possible this story isn't actually set on Titan in the first place, but rather just in Forgotten Realms or the like? The only thing which might place it in Titan seem to be references to Atlantis (when you get the steel body), but that seems to be in every fantasy setting anyway. And once again:
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YARD Mon Sep 11 13:37:37 2023 Above The Waves
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This would have been so, SO good if it had more refs to flesh out each episode/location (perhaps as few as 50 extra would have done the trick) and used the Skill system of either Soul Tracker (optimally) or The Word Fell Silent (easier to implement, though probably less suitable than Soul Tracker's for a "combatless" gamebook)! As it is, this Windjammer entry still boasts an unusual setting with some clever writing and a great cast of characters. Other than what seems like a bug or a typo (more on it below) there's a nary a bug or a poorly written moment, there's very considerable variety that's both background-dependent and skill-dependent, and even two viable endings. Alas, the way skills are all-or-nothing means that if you get the right combo, you'll see the run dominated by stretches where they carry the character on their own, without even needing your input. (The one other time on here I recall something like this was in Any Port in a Storm.) Now, the aforementioned bug/continuity-breaking typo seems to be this:
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The other typos I spotted.
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| Regarding reference 9, I think you're right, it should just say Richard rather than Marlowe and then it all makes sense. Thanks for pointing these things out. |
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YARD Sun Sep 10 16:10:14 2023 Riders Of The Storm |
And the last set.
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YARD Sun Sep 10 15:59:02 2023 Riders Of The Storm |
The first set of typos is apparently caught in the filter, so here's the next one (200-300), anyway.
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YARD Sun Sep 10 15:52:17 2023 Riders Of The Storm |
Now, here's a link to a ref where a really strange bug had occurred once:
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And typos - at least as many as are going to fit in this one comment.
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YARD Sun Sep 10 15:43:21 2023 Riders Of The Storm |
And as far as "gameplay" goes, I suppose I had to cheat here less than I did in Hellfire, which probably counts for something. I did not start looking at this comment section for hints until getting to Hell Demon, and I only started "right-clicking" around that point as well. There are only so many choices of direction in a row one can take when they typically come with zero indication of which would do what (a surprising devolution from Hellfire, which at least tended to leave more hints about its tunnel entrances), or which is the core and which is the branch (Hellfire at least kept pretty strongly to "north = leave area, try it last rule" and the sequel enjoys messing with it at all turns), which would let you backtrack and which won't and which would have unavoidable consequences as soon as you turn to that ref - even if in the narrative, IT WOULD SOMETIMES TAKE SEVERAL MILES OF WALKING before you get to the point that kills you or massively punishes you. Another thing which makes the narrative here so annoying, and the protagonist so hard to relate to, is just how much the Warrior is now a total plaything of whatever enchantments happened to be around the place this time. Being randomly thrown around the first few exits is not too bad once you realize that there is nothing crucial to skip over that way, but even much later on, there are still those infuriating auto-choices where the character is suddenly "oVeRcOmE wItH eMoTiOn" and either has to deal with those fits of fear or grabs obvious traps in the form of food or gems. One might suspect that the thing which would separate "a Chosen One" from a merely skilled Warrior is being able to resist such influences, whether initially or learning to do so over the course of the trial. Yet, apparently being able to guess the path through unmarked trails (since "canonically", the Warrior would have had to have known which path to take the first time, every time) is a far more important skill to determine. And of course, there's the similar design as in Hellfire, where you get a bunch of items that often sound cool, but are at best useful in one highly specific circumstance, and at worst are not useful at all. Here, it's arguably worse, since you do NOT need a particularly massive list by the end like in Hellfire, but the story is good at pretending that you do. Compared to the approach of Shrine of the Salamander or even A Princess of Zamarra, it just feels so impotent, especially when it results in the totally logical plotting like this:
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YARD Sun Sep 10 15:42:00 2023 Riders Of The Storm |
Narratively, there is also the simple fact that canonically (since you cannot win in any other way), "the Warrior"''s first reaction upon seeing unarmed, chained-up, wounded woman begging for help was to slit her throat, alongside doing the same to Rhino Man begging for mercy, and pulling a sword on a frightened old man. Ergo, he cannot possibly be a very nice person - so it's mystifying to see him approach a living die with "can I be of some service?" and talking to that ridiculously suspicious die as a friend moments later. Same goes for his general demeanor in conversations with other suspicious entities, or suddenly talking to Trinitour as a friend, (mostly once you figure out in which puzzles he is meant to be invoked) which clashes badly with the seething hatred anyone who had actually staggered through Hellfire is likely to feel for him. Besides, the protagonist had also lived through some six weeks of "the dead came back, the seas boiled, reality turned upside-down and people disappeared all over the place", as the background cheerfully informs us.) The one "I'm truly sorry for the things I've done in the past ... there's no real ... excuse" is...belated, to put it mildly. Yet, the last two times Trinitour is in the narrative are even more WTF.
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Even the final, mostly triumphal stretches, where you finally get to (mostly) relax and reap your narrative rewards are surprisingly compromised by not just typos (more on them later) but similarly dissonant and illogical writing.
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Before I move on from the primary narrative, I should mention that this story's relationship with canon appears to be really questionable. To be fair, it's not the only one: Outsider! was very obviously written as urban fantasy with little regard to fitting with the rest of the setting, and the complete absence of, say, any Hashak's progeny, seems remarkable even for an Old World location. Here, though, everything to do with demons and religion owes far more to real-world Christianity than the rules of the setting. After Hellfire, I had to double-check that there ARE crucifixes in the setting, but at least they are meant to be a collective representation of all good deities. Here, there are numerous mentions of an obviously monotheistic God, Hell is described more monotheistically than like the Planes of the setting, and there is a mention of a single Devil, as opposed to the demonic pantheon. And one of the refs mentioning literal Christmas is about as inexcusable as the sudden outburst of atheism near the end of Outsider! that completely contradicts characters' own actions. |
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YARD Sun Sep 10 14:59:14 2023 Riders Of The Storm
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Well, I didn't enjoy Hellfire much, but it did have SOME things going for it, like violence feeling more consequential than usual. And as much as I hated the shopping list for the boss itself, the feeling of things finally coming together at the end as you got to negate all the other enemies right before him if you approached things right actually was really satisfying. This, on the other hand, was just incredibly bad. OK, I'll acknowledge that there is one thing it does a lot better than the first, and very well altogether, and that is the location descriptions. That island really is beautiful and a great step-up from yet another cave of the original. Its vistas are inspiring, with the bodies of water like lakes and even fish ponds a particular highlight. I am not sure how I would rank them next to, say, Andrew Wright's descriptions, but frankly, both are good. It is therefore most unfortunate that even as the locale descriptions soar to new heights, the dialogue plumbs new depths. I remember being surprised, to put it mildly, that Gavin Mitchell decided to directly follow up his initial, rather dark (and frankly edgy too) work, Outsider!, with New Day Rising, which had a far lighter tone and was filled with not just rather childish humour, but hugely distracting meta humour as well. For whatever reason, Phil Sadler decided that this story really needed those same elements too, but should also be more of an "epic". And so we get brilliant exchanges like "But why - Because it has been prophesised.", alongside pre-kindergarten-level jokes about tossing an obviously-suspicious anthropomorphized dice into nettles and cowpats. Even worse is the way the protagonist is written now. Hellfire tended to be very economical with internal monologue and the like - and this turned out to be a blessing. It kept banging on and on about BrAvErY, and there was no way to complete it if you (and by extension, the character) did not, in fact, heed it. Yet, here, we keep on reading and reading how the slayer of Trinitour and plenty other beasts keeps getting cold sweats at the sight of monsters (including some that he* had already killed before anyway), how fear literally causes physical damage, or requires tests of stamina (some extremely intensive) to overcome. I could chalk it to PTSD from being banished to the void...except that the conversational dialogue shows no sight of that! Instead, the dialogue has somehow ended up dumbing him down a lot. In refs like 353, it's so, somoronic that he is "blushing and looking up at the sky" after being told that the gods are justifiedly interested after everything he's done to beat Trinitour (not interested enough to help more than in one very specific and confusingly unavoidably encounter, but still) and after the Wizards have already called him "The Chosen One" and brought him back from the literal oblivion. The utterly enormous refs 347 and 268 are probably even worse. I will never understand why multiple authors here apparently thought that arbitrary, completely unbelievable skepticism makes characters more relatable rather than less (be it a werewolf disbelieving in vampires in Rise of the Night Creatures or the "Warrior" suddenly deciding that a fairly generic demon birth story was less plausible than, say, a ghost of a woman warrior dead for 50 years emerging from a painting to him* give a piece of tiger fur to morph into.) (* as according to that bit of dialogue near the end, at any rate.) As usual, I am running out of comment space again, so this is about to end here. Before I continue about more the story and process, I would like to note that having no way to know what each of the three potions offered at the start even does, whether before or even after selecting them, is NOT a good start. I am not sure why one should be expected to read the "self-interview" (not easily available if you click "CONTINUED" at the end of anyway) to know that your healing is now 1D6 and so are the other restorative potions. |
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Kieran Sat Sep 9 14:51:22 2023 A Princess Of Zamarra |
I like Tolkien, just not how he spells dwarfs! Revenant Rising and Songs of the Mystics were both written for the Gamebook Adventures app series so I don't own the rights for either one. I think the former can still be obtained as part of the Gamebook Adventures 4-6 compilation. The latter isn't available anywhere as far as I'm aware. Apart from those, there are a few other 50 sectioner competition entries that I wrote between 18-20: Sanctuary of Souls, Feathers of the Phoenix and Treasures of the Briny Deep. There's also two other Windhammer entries - Behind the Throne (an 100 section Three Musketeers tribute written between Hunger of the Wolf and Waiting for the Light); and The Experiment which is, ultimately, probably best forgotten. I think they're all floating around the I also wrote two gamebooks for the Fighting Fantazine - Prey of the Hunter (Issue 3) and Hand of Fate (Issue 10). You can download them from the fantazine website. I have intended to tweak some of these for uploading here but never quite got round to it! |
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Kieran Sat Sep 9 14:22:57 2023 A Midwinter Carol |
The hero of Deathmoor is promised half the kingdom but I decided that after rescuing the princess, the two of them become engaged. The hero is being hunted by the Pelagines (sort of fish-men) for stealing one of their scarlet pearls so I posited that they eventually caught up with him and killed him which was a contributing factor to the princess' mental health issues. |
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YARD Sat Sep 9 08:37:12 2023 A Princess Of Zamarra |
Hehe, not actually a huge fan of Tolkien myself, let alone some of the legacy he's left on the genre (which, to be fair, might include the plots of the most typical FF books.) Now, I have to ask: Songs of the Mystics? Revenant Rising?! (Mentioned by you in another thread.) Other than the gamebooks already present on here (including To Catch A Thief , which is apparently the only one that still hasn't been digitized) how many more did you write, and is there a reason why they are apparently only available from elsewhere? It's certainly far more convenient for us, the readers when everything is in one place, at any rate. |
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YARD Sat Sep 9 08:23:49 2023 A Midwinter Carol |
Yeah, while on one hand, the ways in which the stories on here manage to work in the canon books are often really inventive, I do feel that multiple stories lean on those connections far too heavily, and unfortunately, this seems like one of them. For the record, I have been checking out the archived canon FF book reviews recently, and the ones for Deathmoor are particularly epic. https://web.archive.org/web/20170905062914/http://user.tninet.se/~wcw454p/docs/ff55.txt Amongst all the other things it brings up, Leigh Loveday's review makes me wonder: was the Princess meant to have gotten married to that book's protagonist after the successful victory? If so, is this narrative then premised on the idea it falls apart due to her PTSD? |
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YARD Sat Sep 9 08:10:00 2023 A Strange Week For King Melchion The Despicable |
Well, to be fair, that dream sequence in Baba Yaga's hut might have been an experiment too far, and I wouldn't be surprised if that contributed a lot to those comments. I would say my main disappointment with the ending(s) is that if you do succeed at the illusion recipe, it is still the same as in the other works, and you never find out if the Davor actually bothered to uncharm those two servants (the one turned to statue, and perhaps more pressingly, the one turned to squirrel), which does add some uncomfortable weight to those events. |
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YARD Sat Sep 9 08:04:12 2023 Waiting For The Light |
Yeah, I read the comments after getting stumped on the military part, so I found someone laying out
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