Broken Gamebooks #12: Legend of Zagor

Pointless fact: The main part of the cover illustration was done by one artist, and the four portraits of the heroes by another.

There are three major things to cover here. I'll get the easy one out of the way first - if you have a Puffin edition of this book, then section 120 directs you to 233, when it should be 223. (An earlier version of this article had the latter two sections the wrong way round -- see comments for more) This particular error was fixed for the Wizard reprint in 2004.

Secondly, and slightly curiously, at section 260 there is one of those alphanumeric codes where you convert letters into numbers (where A = 1, B = 2, C = 3 and so forth). It appears that some editions of the book omit the final instruction to subtract 100 from the total you arrive at - the Fighting Fantasy Wiki makes it sound like this affects all printings, but it appears to be present and correct in my Puffin edition. If you have more information about which versions of this book contain this error, please let me know.

And finally, there's a rather interesting plot hole. The object of the game is to get to Zagor's chambers, where you fight and hopefully manage to kill him. In this book, you play as one of four pregenerated characters - Anvar the Barbarian, Braxus the Warrior, Stubble the Dwarf or Sallazar the Wizard. (As noted in a previous article, these were the four major characters from the non-interactive Zagor Chronicles series, which served as a prequel to LoZ - except Sallazar, who was the brother of Jallarial the Witch who died prior to the events of the Chronicles. This means that the chronology of the books is very confused indeed, and that the player of LoZ can only choose to play as a man, making it a very rare example of an adventure gamebook where the character's gender is specified.)

Anyway, the Wizard has the option of bypassing the final few encounters before Zagor's chambers by means of teleporting, although they cannot teleport back after they've killed him. However, once you kill Zagor, you have to destroy his body completely - which means you need to leave the chambers and retrace your steps, as the only way to accomplish this is by throwing him into the Heartfires, elsewhere in the castle. If the Wizard used teleportation to get to Zagor, then they have no way of knowing exactly how to get back to where they were, but it seems Keith Martin never thought of this! (The player character automatically takes the route back to the Heartfires, even if they're playing as the Wizard and hence shouldn't know what it is; the challenge is in working out how to get there in the shortest time possible.) Not only that, but the monsters the Wizard skipped by teleporting are never accounted for either, even though they should be waiting for him on his return journey!

Note that choosing to play as the Wizard makes the game significantly harder, as Sallazar is a classic Squishy Wizard. If your statistics are too low, then you will fail in attempting to throw Zagor in the Heartfires, as you will either run out of time and he will regenerate before you reach them, or you will manage to throw him in but then accidentally fall in after him due to a lack of strength. These outcomes are far more likely to happen to the Wizard, as his maximum statistics are far lower than any of the other characters. So I suspect Martin may have meant to put an option to teleport back to make the endgame a bit easier for Sallazar, but it just slipped his mind.

(A quick notice: I'd like to look at some non-Fighting Fantasy books for this series in the future, so please give me recommendations!)