Broken Gamebooks #21: Dead of Night

Sometimes I regret the name given to this series of articles, because Dead of Night -- the 40th entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, written by Jim Bambra & Stephen Hand and published by Puffin in late 1989 -- isn't really broken, it's basically just got two small-ish logistical errors, one of which the player can easily exploit. It's also rightly considered one of the strongest and most memorable entries in the series, owing to its pervading sense of Gothic horror, high quality of writing, innovative additions to the basic gameplay system and having multiple possible ways to get the successful ending.

But you came here for the mistakes.

At one point in the game you are given the option of travelling to one of two villages, Axmoor and Stanford -- there are multiple different paragraphs that find you at such a junction, but section 11 is one of them. If you go to Axmoor first, then upon arrival you discover it has been totally destroyed by that nasty old Demon Prince and villain of the piece Myurr, who has placed a Land-Blight there. A genuinely disturbing concept (really brought to life by Martin McKenna's excellent illustrations), the Land-Blight is a living, sentient building with a heart and circulation, pumping out poison that destroys the surrounding land, whilst the misfortunate inhabitants are fed into the building's furnace-like stomach.

Being a demon-slaying templar, the player character starts out with a Cross as part of their starting equipment, which can be destroyed if they use it to seal the "mouth" of the furnace (which increases your chances of destroying the Land-Blight altogether). However, there are other encounters in the book (most notably defending a farmhouse from a pack of living skeletons in Stanford) that do not take account of the fact that it is possible to lose your Cross forever in this manner.

Managing to destroy the Land-Blight once and for all allows you to add 2 points to your LUCK score and 1 point to your SKILL score -- over and above what the score was initially, even if that takes the scores above the highest you can normally have when rolling your stats up. But here we come to the bigger problem.

Once you've left Axmoor, you can then go to Stanford... and then it is possible to go back to Axmoor again, right back to the start of your encounter with the Land-Blight. The book should presumably mention that you can only go to either village if you haven't already been there, but in this way you can destroy the Land-Blight as many times as you like. (The way the road from Stanford to Axmoor is presented, a first-time player probably won't realise anything is wrong until they end up back at the beginning of the Land-Blight sequence for the second time.)

Some other places which mention this error say that you can get your LUCK and SKILL scores as high as you possibly like, which is technically true, but I do take issue with this claim, because destroying the Blight requires you to increase your EVIL score (a unique statistic for this book which keeps track of all the evil you have committed in your life) by 1 point, on account of the dark magic involved in doing so, and if you keep on driving your scores up in this way, eventually you will turn the book unwinnable, because the very last battle requires you to roll a number greater than your EVIL score on two dice. The instructions state that your EVIL score will "rarely" decrease during the course of the adventure, but in fact there are no opportunities to reduce it at all; we could generously infer that this is intended as misdirection rather than a mistake itself.

(Addendum: As pointed out by commentator Ed Jolley, the EVIL penalty for destroying the Blight doesn't apply if you have the Holy Circle talent; there are seven possible talents, and you can choose any three of them. The final EVIL roll can also be avoided if you choose one specific (but difficult) way of fighting the endgame... so, yes, you can drive your scores up as high as you like, but only in specific circumstances.)

Despite the fact that the errors in this book could easily be fixed by some minor amendments to scenarios that assume you still have the Cross, and specifying that you can only go to Axmoor or Stanford once each, none of them appear to have been fixed in any of Puffin's reprints; DoN was not reprinted by Wizard, and has yet to be reprinted by Scholastic (I am not hopeful of such a thing, but Scholastic are putting out more brand new titles than Wizard did, which is much more desirable, no matter how nice it was that Wizard went out of their way to fix some of the mistakes that had been annoying dedicated readers for up to two decades.)