Sunday, 12 March 2017

Broken Gamebooks: Realm of Chaos




Way, way back in the mists of time of, erm, about three months ago, when I first started this blog, my very first post extolled the virtues of the GrailQuest adventure gamebook series. What I didn’t mention at the time is that some of the later books in the series suffer from serious playability issues and a lack of proofreading… which they (for me) get away with because of the series’ wit and creativity. So, because heaven knows this blog isn’t niche enough as it is, why not try and summarise those issues and see if they can be fixed?


Right, the first such afflicted entry in the series is the sixth book, Realm of Chaos (1986), in which you have to break a curse that has been placed on Camelot. Each part of this article quotes the problematic section, and is followed by my own explanation as to what exactly the trouble is and how/if it can be fixed.

Section 16: Honest Albert
This will not be a fight to the death, Pip, since Albert isn’t a murderer, only a lunatic – and even then only a lunatic because of the Curse. If he brings your LIFE POINTS below 15, he will leave with honour satisfied. If you bring his LIFE POINTS to 15, he will run off screaming abuse.

Fairly straightforward, this one: you fight Honest Albert in this section, or at least you’re meant to but the book accidentally forgets to give you his combat statistics, which should presumably go between the first two sentences.

Section 75: A Range of Wooden Doors, All Alike
The north/south corridor ends north in a block of six securely-bolted cell doors running east/west.

Right, pay attention, because this next bit is significantly more complicated. The section gives you the option of opening any of these doors; you can leave the room without opening any of them if you like. (Or, alternatively, you could never find it at all as it’s in the middle of a rather nasty maze.) Behind cell number 5, at section 126, is a fairly important character by the name of the Wizard Kran. It’s important to meet Kran because the plot won’t make any sense without him, as he gives you most of the important exposition you need and the rest of the book assumes you know everything he tells you. He also informs you that you need the Universal Key to open the chest containing Pendragon’s Mirror Shield, without which you cannot defeat the Great Guardian Wyrm. Fortunately, he happens to have the Universal Key with him and is happy to give it to you.

So, this seems pretty straightforward: the book makes sure you meet Kran by having him give you an item that is needed to progress in the game, hence avoiding the possibility of accidentally missing him and rendering the whole adventure incomprehensible. Or so you’d think. Remember that you get the Universal Key from Kran for now, and we’ll come back to this later.

Section 78: The Iron Maiden
You bend forward to examine the lock, which is numbered 1 to 9. Your experience tells you it must be a simple two-figure combination to release the lock. But which two figures? And in what order?

When (if) you discover the two figures which will open the Iron Maiden, add 100 to them and turn to the section number this indicates.

I suppose this isn’t strictly speaking an error, but it seems rather curious to me. The answer to this puzzle is completely random guesswork – there’s nothing anywhere in the book to indicate what the solution might be, so the only way to solve it is by checking each section between 111 and 199 until you find it. (The answer’s 34, incidentally.)

Section 134: The Poetic Fiend
Once you’ve released the Poetic Fiend from the Iron Maiden, he gives you the following instructions for finding the Mirror Shield:

Climb steps from here and steps again
Turn right, then left, then right again
And enter in the second door
(Be very careful of the floor)
Then solve the puzzle of the purse
Before your situation gets much worse
And your quest shall not be in vain!

The first two lines of these instructions bear absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to what you actually have to do. Not least because it uses ‘left’ and ‘right’ when literally every other reference in the book uses compass points for directions.

Section 188: A Big Hand
This also isn’t really an error, but is an interesting curiosity. In this section you’re grabbed by a giant hand in mid-air (it makes sense in context), and the section is accompanied by an illustration of this. However, the illustration shows the hand in completely different surroundings: namely, a cell door very much like one of the ones seen at section 75. A breakdown in communications between author and illustrator? An illustration originally intended for another part of the book and co-opted for this section? A late change to the text? Who knows, or indeed, cares very much?

Section 216: The Mirror Shield
Half buried beneath a set of old encyclopaedias (Roman Edition) is a wooden case tagged ‘Property of Uther’. Inside, as you throw it open you can see a fearsome adventurer, armed to the teeth and –

No, wait a minute – of course there’s no fearsome adventurer in the case: it’s your own reflection in a highly polished shield. Property of Uther? This must be it – Pendragon’s Mirror Shield!

Yep, as you’ve probably guessed, this is the bit where you find the Mirror Shield. And you don’t need to have the Universal Key at all, in spite of what Kran says. This creates the gamebook’s big problem: it is entirely possible to go through the adventure and never meet Kran, and hence never learn the truth about the curse on Camelot and most of the plot. The rest of the book presumes you have met Kran and know what you need to do, so it doesn’t make sense if you miss him; if you’d needed the Universal Key like he said you did, this would have been avoided.

The actual finding of the shield is very straightforward and simple, merely requiring you to check every room in an area until you find the one with the shield in it; given this and the error that is introduced by not needing the Universal Key, I strongly suspect that author JH Brennan originally intended the shield to be more difficult to get (beyond just needing to find the key), things got simplified at some point and he forgot to go back and rewrite some earlier sections so the book still made sense. The result is a strange example of Sequence Breaking in a book.

So, that’s it for Realm of Chaos, a book that you can accidentally render nonsensical gibberish. (I hope my systematic surmising of all the book’s flaws don’t put you off the series; it’s still great, even in spite of the problems that plagued the later volumes.) I’ll revisit the last two books in the series in due course, as well as various other flawed gamebooks; I can think of a couple of others already, but do let me know if there’s one you’d like me to check out.

4 comments:

  1. The puzzle at section 78 isn't completely random. The Iron Maiden's name was given as 'Freda' earlier in the section, and if you convert 'Freda' to numbers using the a=1, b=2 etc. system beloved of gamebook authors, they add up to 34.

    One oddity you didn't mention is the transition from section 42 to section 13. You make the decision to attack the Nerd, and suddenly find yourself pronouncing an incantation that teleports you away. I own a copy of the French translation of Realm of Chaos in addition to the original text, and that adds section 222 to more smoothly bridge the sections. I don't know if it was written by Brennan himself or added by someone working on the French translation who cared about such things. My French is a little rusty these days, but to summarise the additional material: you threaten the Nerd, who kicks you on the tibia for 4 LIFE POINTS' damage. You then fight the Nerd, who has 28 LIFE POINTS and, being a karate expert, hits on 5 and does +2 damage. If you bring his LIFE POINTS below 9 without killing him, he starts rolling around on the floor, repeatedly muttering 'Pliclpoc 13'. The section concludes by suggesting that it might be worth repeating the word and turning to 13. (Decoding the form which is the other way to learn the magic word - or the only one in the English text - also gives 'Plicploc' in the French translation, though in English it's 'Gobbleplunk'.)

    Oh, and the French translation adds at the end of section 16 that 'poor Albert only has 19 LIFE POINTS'.

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    1. Well I never. I don't think there's another alphanumeric puzzle in the GrailQuest (I'm not sure how to meet the Fiend in Gateway of Doom really counts as one) but seems a bit off I never thought of that. In my defence, it's not exactly an intuitive thing to think of doing...

      The information about the French translation is very welcome - I would *suspect* that it was added by the French translator, rather than being based on any input from Brennan himself (foreign language translations of adventure gamebooks were liable to re-engineer the books if they noticed problems, or if there was a puzzle in the original version that wasn't translatable).

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  2. Other Erratas of note include such sections as SECTION 149, wherein one faces the Vampire; the section mentions "he hits successfully on a 3 or better and does + __ Damage with his teeth"; unfortunately it leaves blank exactly what " + " number it is. Also SECTION 120, wherein Pip faces the Crawman; the section mentions its Lifepoints and natural body armor deducting 4 from every hit by Pip, BUT it omits what the Crawman needs to hit PIP (usually the combat statistics of opponents list "hits on a __ or better, etc."). The same happens with the Namwarc opponent in another section.

    *Additionally, I noticed that although great emphasis was placed in Section 2 regarding carefully choosing 6 items from a list for possible use in this adventure, there were very few instances where any of these items could be used!

    **Furthermore, in reference to section 126 and the possibility of technically not meeting KRAN at all during the adventure, I noticed ANOTHER possibility whereby one could theoretically go through the entire adventure and not meet the Poetic Fiend at all! The sequence is as follows: at Section 91, Pip has the choice of descending the downward-leading steps or continuing along the corridor...if he does not immediately choose to descend the stairs, he won't get another chance, since following the corridor leads away to other vital areas, including the ascending stairs which take pip to the area containing the Mirror Shield and then outside the castle. So, interestingly enough, one could miss the Poetic Fiend entirely, leading one to wonder how Pip could possibly meet him later on in other adventures if he was presumably stuck in that Iron Maiden being tortured (to death?) by Boris the Torturer...???...

    >>on a personal note, finally completing REALM OF CHAOS was an anticlimactic triumph for me, since this particular gamebook had bedeviled me decades ago. I suspect it was the infamous Section 58 which had stopped me cold back then (I even ordered another copy of the gamebook at the time, thinking that it must be a case of typo or something; but when I got the other copy it was the same thing!). I simply couldn't progress beyond Section 58, and looking through the rest of the gamebook at the time, I couldn't find where it led to (other gamebooks with apparent dead-ends, like in Lone Wolf or even certain Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, I could usually "reverse-engineer" them at the 'dead-end' sections to discover where they actually led to). When I replayed REALM OF CHAOS this time around, I learned about reverse Cipher and sol was finally able to decipher that form given to Pip by the Nerd!!

    [I completely appreciate and enjoy your Ludicrously Niche errata notes; what was what that Link whereby one may donate to the cause??]

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    1. I tend to assume that an opponent needs 6 or better to strike if it's not specified, since that's the default in "The Castle of Darkness", but I *might* be being a little over-generous to Brennan there.

      I also think the list of items in section 2 includes deliberately ridiculous items similar to "Gateway of Doom", and possibly Brennan may have intended some of them to come into play but the book ended up getting rushed to meet a deadline and he wasn't able to.

      My Kofi link is at the bottom of the right-hand column, under 'Links', please rest assured any contributions will go towards tracking down and buying copies of more obscure adventure gamebooks. x

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