Sunday 31 March 2019

Broken Gamebooks #13: Night Dragon


There are three mistakes worth noting here, and for some reason I find the biggest one really, really funny, which is mostly why it's getting covered.

Just to get the littlest one out of the way first - sections 186 and 288 both direct you to 32 if you want to go to the town of Carnex, but you should really go to 8.

Next up, section 260 requires you to barter bottles of firewater when trying to buy a shield, and in an attempt to dissuade cheaters, you need to prove you really did get the firewater: "If you do, you know how many degrees proof the firewater is; multiply that number by three and turn to the paragraph with the same number." This would be fine, except when you're first given the firewater you're not told what its proof is, and it's entirely possible to not find that information out before you need to trade it for the shield.

And finally, the inexplicably really funny one: at section 388, if you wish to use a pair of Winged Boots, you need to prove you do have them by converting the name of the man who had them before you into numbers, then multiplying the total by three. The man's name was Harlequin, so (8 + 1 + 18 + 12 + 5 + 17 + 21 + 9 + 14) * 3 = 315. Except that's not what the book thinks. The book thinks it's section 291... which would be correct for the name "arlequin". This must have been introduced by human error, with author Keith Martin working out the sum but somehow missing out the first letter. Mr Martin's books do admittedly have form for screwing up these alphanumeric codes, but the two previous examples appear to be printing errors rather than mathematical ones.

Keith Martin (who sadly passed away late last year) has five other Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to his name which we have not yet profiled in this series, at least one of which contains a further variation on the "screwing up a secret code" error... but I'm pretty sure I can get a whole other post out of at least two of them, so stay tuned for that!

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