Songs in the Key of Doom

This is the first of the four maps you use to navigate the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead in the third GrailQuest gamebook, Gateway of Doom. You start in room 65, the one with the four secret doors, and will eventually want to make your way over to 80, where you will find a map showing the remainder of Level I.

As you may have noticed, you can't get to 80 without passing through 100 no matter what route you take, and in 100 there's an unavoidable fight with a monster who is guarding a chest containing the key to the Gateway into the Ghastly Kingdom, which you need in order to close and lock it at the conclusion of the book, so stopping the spread of monsters and plagues and whatnot passing through the Gateway into Avalon.

Buzz Words

In January 1973, D. C. Thomson launched a new weekly humour comic for children into a market that already looked pretty crowded; they were already producing the Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper and Sparky at the time, and to introduce a sixth comic into this mix seems ambitious. Like its stablemates the Beezer and Topper, Buzz was published in A3 size, making it twice the size of many other comics of the time, but this didn't mean it would be a big hit: just two years and 103 issues later, Buzz would become the publisher's first mayfly when it closed.

A mayfly which I am now about to pin and mount to the wall. (I don't think that's what you do with mayflies, but just go with it.) The issue I have scanned in is from just over halfway through its life, number #59.

Coach and Horses

The second Lone Wolf gamebook, Fire on the Water, is quite heavy on setting up the series' lore, and features an expansive plot where Lone Wolf must travel halfway across the Lastlands to retrieve the fabled Sommerswerd. Perhaps because of this, there are a few moments where it seems to struggle to fit everything into 350 sections.

During one sequence, you travel by coach to Port Bax, with five other passengers -- Ganon and Dorier, two brothers who are knights in the Order of the White Mountain; Halvorc, a merchant; Parsion, a priest; and Viveka, a young adventuress for hire. The journey is interrupted by your discovery that one of the five is an assassin in the pay of the Darklords; after you survive an attempt to serve you a tray of poisoned food during a stopover at a tavern, you storm into the bar where they are all waiting, are asked which one you think is your would-be killer, and do battle with them. (Take a look at the illustration that accompanies this section, and you should be able to spot the vital clue as to who the Darklord agent is even without the context of the rest of the book. Even the picture above might be enough.)