Broken Gamebooks #9: The Crimson Tide

This is another famous Fighting Fantasy faux pas that no series called "Broken Gamebooks" would be complete without mentioning, and also an important lesson in proof-reading.

The Crimson Tide (published in 1992) is another FF book well-known for its unusually high difficulty level, ambition and mature storytelling. It has one of the most complex stories of the series, and requires the player to follow an incredibly narrow, specific path, by means of a secret message hidden in certain paragraphs on the one true way through the book. To make up for the restrictions, author Paul Mason (no, not that one) also includes a few unusual non-fatal endings other than the "golden" one, such as giving up your quest to become a monk.

TCT also includes another unique mechanic: Age. The player character is initially just 13 years old, and the gamebook is set over a number of years, following the character's progression towards adulthood. As the character's age increases, their FEROCITY score (another unique statistic in this book) drops (and they obtain 'inner peace' once it reaches 0), and their maximum SKILL level increases. This means that initially, the player character's highest possible SKILL score is just 6, which is obviously much lower than normal. (Additional rules beyond the basic system devised by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone weren't unusual, but The Crimson Tide almost certainly adds more to it than any other entry in the series. Other books included a 'time' mechanic, but these would measure days or hours, not years, and simply reminded you how much time you had left to complete your quest rather than impacting on anything else; TCT was considerably more ambitious.)

The series editor, Marc Gascoigne, was unaware of the additional rules when he was editing the book. One of the first enemies you have to fight on the 'true' path through the book is a Giant Mudworm, which Mason intended to have a SKILL score of 6. Not realising that the player character's maximum SKILL score at that point would also be 6, Gascoigne increased the Mudworm's SKILL to 12, making the combat more or less mathematically impossible to win without cheating. The moral of the story: Always read the introduction, and don't presume the rules are always the same.

When fans came inquiring about the error, Mason branded Gascoigne a "dingbat" and a "total idiot". (This did not end his Fighting Fantasy career; he wrote one more entry for the series, Magehunter, and was planning another, The Wailing World, when Puffin cancelled the series.)

The Mudworm error was never corrected in any of Puffin's reprints. Revenge of the Vampire, the penultimate book in the series, had an error which was corrected in one of the few reprints before the range was cancelled, so they had the opportunity to do so if they really wanted, and Gascoigne was reportedly very upset when he realised his mistake, so it seems a little strange this wasn't fixed. TCT also hasn't been reissued by Wizard or Scholastic, and one of my frustrations with the modern-day reprints (apart from the appalling new artwork used in the Scholastic books) is that the number of times they've restarted it means we do get the same few books over and over again, when revised versions of some of the later ones would be quite welcome. (See also Creature of Havoc, which did have its own infamous game-breaking error fixed when it was reprinted by Wizard.)