Broken Gamebooks #23: Talisman of Death

Talisman of Death was only the eleventh book in the original Fighting Fantasy series, and one of the earliest (the second, in fact) to be sourced from an outside writer after it became apparent that the range's creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, could not possibly hope to write quickly enough to meet the huge public demand the books generated. The writers in question were Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith, who took the book outside of Allansia to set it on a fantasy world called Orb, which they would later use in their own gamebook series, The Way of the Tiger, effectively making Talisman a sort of pilot for that series (which came from a totally different publisher).

Thomson and Smith went on to write many more gamebooks -- apart from two other Fighting Fantasies, Thomson's credits range from two early-nineties offerings based on The Crystal Maze to co-authoring Can You Brexit?, an adventure casting the reader as the Prime Minister in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, whilst Smith's CV is shorter but he also collaborated with Thomson on the highly ambitious Duel Master series and the sci-fi Falcon books, aimed at a slightly older audience than most gamebooks -- and from playing Talisman, their very first foray into interactive fiction, it's not hard to see why. Talisman is a well-designed, well-written tome impressive in its scope and scale, with its authors coming up with several innovations new to the range at that point... which unfortunately leads to one of its most memorable errors!

Most "game overs" in the first part of the book direct you to section 109, where your spirit floats gently towards the Valley of Death, but is intercepted by the two beings who summoned you to Orb in the first place, who (if you so wish) return you to the point where you were first transported to Orb, with only the possessions you started the adventure with, and your statistics back at their Initial values. (Exceptions include non-fatal endings, dying in combat, or deaths at the hand of similar deities.) There are two possible ways to abuse this loop:

1. As with many other FF books, amongst your starting equipment is one of three potions: you can choose from a Potion of Skill, a Potion of Strength and a Potion of Fortune, each of which will restore one of your statistics back to its Initial value. However, the Potion of Fortune not only restores your LUCK to its Initial value, but increases it by 1. Since the Potion is returned to you when you go back, and the book states that your statistics are returned to their Initial values without specifying whether or not it means your current Initial value or the value it was at when you started the book, you could use this loophole to drive your LUCK score up as high as you like.

2. In the city of Greyguilds-on-the-Moor, there is an alchemist (at section 372) from whom you can buy an Elixir of Life which will restore your STAMINA to its Initial value and increase that value by 2; this is a harder loophole to abuse, but it comes early enough in the adventure that you could viably use it to get infinite STAMINA.

You may think this is an overly pedantic and specific reading of the text people have come up with, and that Smith and Thomson couldn't reasonably have expected anyone to interpret it in such a way, and you might well have a point, but the way the section is phrased, talking about the deities interrupting the journey of your spirit rather than just saying time reverses to the start of the book, does leave it open to interpretation at the very least.

If you die at any point after leaving Greyguilds, then most such deaths will direct you to section 43, which is similar to 109 except you start back at the exit to the city instead of the very start of the adventure, and you keep all your possessions you had when you died except for a few specific items which you cannot retain. Passing through the city is thus effectively the book's Save Point, a rare use of this mechanic in an adventure gamebook. However, this section also states that you respawn with 15 STAMINA points; it seems odd to have a condition which could be better or worse for you depending on what your maximum value is, not least since this could be higher than your current maximum (your starting STAMINA being determined by rolling 2d6 and adding 12 to the roll).

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Moving on from such timey-wimey shenanigans, the other major oddity with the book is a sequence where the Talisman of Death has been stolen from you and you are attempting to break into the Temple of Fell-Kyrinla to retrieve it. You can persuade a group of bandits to help you in your raid on the Temple via a Dialogue Tree-based puzzle; section 370 is the consequence of telling them the fabulous treasure you're after is in the Temple, and they kill you instantly on the grounds that now they know where to look and have no further use for you. In section 333 you can also tell them about the Temple but that doesn't get you killed, and there's no apparent reason for the bandits to spare you in those (more-or-less identical) circumstances. (The Fighting Fantasy Wiki also quibbles with them not killing you in 276, where they agree to help you in your raid, but in that case you've specified the treasure is the Talisman of Death, and they may have reasonably decided that your knowledge of such an important artifact is rationale to spare you for the time being.)

There are a few other small misprints and mistakes, but only one really seems worth noting: At section 366, you are robbed, but your mugger only takes "the ring you fond on Hawkana"; given the circumstances, it may well have been the authors' intention that it was specifically this that the thief was interested in and nothing else you had, but it's possible to have never found this item and the book doesn't make provision for if you didn't.

And that just about wraps up another Broken Gamebooks; there are two slightly different and mutually exclusive ways to fight one monster, and it has different STAMINA values in each section for no apparent reason, but this doesn't have any impact on the combat since it ends once you've hit it four times, and section 362 accidentally mixes up the number you roll in a round of combat with your Attack Strength (i.e. the adjusted roll with your SKILL added to it), but it's obvious enough what the book meant to say.