Cityport Knocking

In 1982, the British games designer Steve Jackson co-writes the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. His masterstroke is a puzzle requiring three numbered keys you have to find to unlock the Warlock's treasure chest; use the wrong keys and unlocking the chest is impossible, or even fatal!

Jackson has an interesting -- not to mention highly ambitious -- tactic of cheat-proofing his gamebooks like this by requiring the player to take options that are not directly given by the text. He went on to use a not dissimilar puzzle, but with intergalactic coordinates, in Starship Traveller. He put a secret room in House of Hell. Appointment with F.E.A.R. has multiple possible solutions depending on which superpower you choose to play with. He throws the literal kitchen sink at Creature of Havoc, with multiple examples of reference modifiers to allow the reader to take a nonstandard action, and even going so far as to make up a cipher which all English language directed at the player is initially given in, which the player can't decode at first.

Without really meaning to, I have written about nearly all these elaborate puzzles Jackson came up with to ensure that only someone playing the book fairly could beat it.

Except for one.

Kharé -- Cityport of Traps is the second book in Jackson's four-book Sorcery! series -- written at a higher reading level than the main Fighting Fantasy range (also boasting illustrations heavily influenced by Goya) and expressly marketed as being "for adults", in which each book could be played as a standalone but also formed part of a greater whole if played in sequence. These books frequently use the author's patented reference modifiers, but Kharé is unique. The player must pass through the titular cityport on their journey to the unforgiving Baklands, but the gate leading out of the city is wizard-locked so as to protect it against raiders, and can only be unlocked by reciting a four-line spell. There are four 'leading citizens' scattered throughout the city, each of whom knows one line of the spell; only by finding all four can the player exit the cityport to the next stage of their adventure. Whilst the concept is similar to the keys in Warlock or the coordinates in Traveller, the execution is a little different.

I don't see the need to write out the solution to the whole book, but the player should first find Lortag the Elder to get the line "So tumblers two sealed deep inside", next the priest in a chapel for "I bid you, portals, open wide", then investigate the crypt for "One lock made out of Golem's hide". Finally, a blind beggar you can give a gold piece to turns out to have once been the Seventh Noble of Kharé of who has now fallen from grace:

My memory is fading, but I believe the line was... "By Courga's grace, and..." He hesitates. "And someone's pride. Damn! Who's [sic] pride was it? One of the gods. "By Courga's grace, and someone's pride." I'm sorry, stranger. My memory fails me. I cannot remember which of the gods it was.

I very much enjoy interactive fiction authors engaging in some light trolling. Only by solving the puzzle within the Shrine of Courga, the God of Grace (which is what the picture at the top of this post is, incidentally) can you learn that the God of Pride is called Fourga. (Solving the puzzle allows you to ask one question of Courga; only if you've found the incomplete line would you think to use it to ask the name of the God of Pride.)

Each holder of a spell line also has an associated problem you must solve to get their line; Lortag and the priest require you to solve brainteasers, the crypt is guarded by a Wraith you need a silver weapon to harm, and the Seventh Noble's one I've always found particularly interesting: before you even know who he really is, he is attacked by two Harpies and you have to fight them whilst also rolling on behalf of him, trying to keep him alive in the ensuing combat in spite of the fact he only has a SKILL score of 2.

Once you have all four lines and manage to reach the gate, you must not only identify the three numbers (which I trust you can find without me highlighting them) contained within the lines, but put them in the correct order to identify the secret section you must turn to. Sections are provided for all possible combinations, with all the others proving fatal as you trip the magical protections on the door; one wonders if Jackson might have originally intended to include some fake spell lines held by imposters (there is one character who seems almost tailor-made for such a thing), but this part of the puzzle made it impractical.

It's not Jackson at his most elaborate, perhaps, but there's some genuine thought involved in putting the lines in an order that scans, and breaking the last line in two is an obvious but still clever trick. He's also refining the process as to how you find the keys (be they metaphorical or literal) required to beat the book: there are clear lines of logic for searching out the 'leading citizens' (compared to, say, the coordinates in Starship Traveller), and on a few occasions he allows you to retrace your steps through Kharé depending on how many spell lines you've found so far (it seems worth noting most of these are only available to you if you are playing the books in sequence, as finding them is dependent on choices made in the first book). I think Kharé is an underrated piece of interactive fiction, perhaps overshadowed by the next two books in the sequence; the entire gamebook is unusually devoted to searching through a single city, and this plus the greater scope and scale of the Sorcery! series (Kharé runs to over 500 sections) really brings the quest to life.