Masks of Mediocrity

We've talked about great ways to die in adventure gamebooks before. But successful endings can often be just as interesting, for a great many reasons. Sometimes they might be a short 3-line paragraph that makes you feel it wasn't really worth the time and effort. Or there might be a surprising twist. Or they might be so strange and inconclusive that you have no idea what the author was aiming for.

Masks of Mayhem, the twenty-third title in the Fighting Fantasy series, was published in 1986, and at first glance it seems that the ending falls squarely in the first such category. Here is the successful ending to the book, in its entirety:

Victory is yours! The Masks of Mayhem will not be released upon the land - at any rate, not in your lifetime...

Ask for an example of the A Winner Is You trope in any adventure gamebook, and that example is bound to come up time and again. But that sentence and a half by itself is not the whole story. We need to go back a little further in the book to understand why the ending of Masks of Mayhem is what it is.

The plot of Masks of Mayhem is that the sorceress Morgana has tracked down eleven of the twelve titular masks, and fitted them onto undead Golems. She lacks only the twelfth, which binds the others together and makes them effective - find that, and she can unleash these unstoppable monsters on the whole of the world. This is deemed to be a bad thing, so you, the ruler of Arion (which appears to be a city although it's never exactly qualified), are tasked by your court wizard, Ifor Tynin, to go and kill her before she finds the final mask.

Along the way, there are two encounters you may or may not manage to find. One is with a projection of Morgana on Pikestaff Plain, where she refers to "our little plan", and having you "exactly where we want you". The second is if you manage to find a cleverly hidden secret area and manage to speak to Vashti the Ageless, who reveals that your own helmet is, in fact, the twelfth Mask, and your entire mission is a trap designed to deliver you to Morgana. If you manage to find neither of these encounters, you do not realise that one of the other characters in a book is a traitor, and the moment you kill Morgana you are quite literally stabbed in the back by them. You need to find Vashti to be aware there is a traitor - only meeting Morgana previously is not deemed sufficient by the book (although it does give you a slightly different death than if you had neither encounter), but only meeting Vashti is.

Once you work out there is a traitor, you have to figure out who it is (there are one or two other events in the book that act as clues apart from the two aforementioned), and if you do, the book tells you you should know where to turn to (realising there is a traitor, but not who it is, means you still get stabbed to death). Look carefully at Ifor Tynin's name, and you should be able to work it out.

Now, the book is very careful to avoid ever expressly saying that Tynin is the traitor (even in the section where you figure out who the traitor is and confront him, he is not mentioned by name), or even hint at there being a traitor more than obliquely unless absolutely necessary - so the extremely short ending must have been born out of that, as author Robin Waterfield presumably felt he was unable to write anything more substantial without spoiling the twist. The sections between the fight with Morgana and the ending, which ask you about the two encounters and whether or not you have worked out who the traitor is, are particularly terse and designed to give away as little as possible. This does give them a certain air of mystery, particularly on a first readthrough where you haven't found the necessary encounters, but it does compound the short, sudden nature of the successful ending if you have solved it.

Whilst all this certainly means that the twist ending is cleverly hidden, it does still make for a disappointing reward for finding the one true way through the book. So should Waterfield (who was certainly more than capable of writing a satisfying and rewarding end to an adventure, as his other Fighting Fantasy work proves) have sacrificed game design for a better conclusion? Or was it still possible to write a better ending that didn't give the game away?