Last Roll of the Dice

The label on the jar has ripped and hangs half off. When she folds the torn piece back into its proper position, the blood drains from your cheeks. You are eating from a jar of Mutant Meatballs! 

Mutant Meatballs were concocted originally by an apothecary from Throben aligned to a rebellious Prince of Brice. On discovering their effects, they designed a plan of conquest. These potent little balls taste delicious, but are quite deadly. They wreak horrible mutations on whoever tastes them. The Prince of Brice planned to seize the throne, his troops manned by experimental mutants, bred for their bizarre powers. And you have just eaten a handful of the balls! Slowly, you will begin to mutate. What will happen to you? The effects are never predictable, usually harmful, sometimes fatal and sometimes useful.

If you are foolish enough to eat from the larder of the Mampang Fortress in the fourth book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, The Crown of Kings, then you should roll two dice and turn to the section given to determine what happens to you.

The possible outcomes are:

Roll	Effect
2	Complete reorganisation of the internal organs (instant death)
3	Grow a third arm (causes 2 STAMINA points of damage, but allows you to have two attacks to your opponent’s one in all future combats)
4	Gain vast amounts of weight (lose 2 SKILL points and 3 STAMINA points, and permanently reduce your maximum SKILL by 2)
5	Loss of memory (may not use spells for the rest of the adventure)
6	Turn into a reptilian-like creature (with a permanent and deadly phobia of reptiles; if you encounter a reptile of any kind for the rest of the adventure, you drop dead on the spot)
7	Natural immunity (no effects)
8	Grow an extremely long, proboscis-like nose nose (lose 2 STAMINA points, and permanently reduce your maximum STAMINA by 2)
9	Right leg turns into a tail (permanently reduce your maximum SKILL by 3)
10	Physical appearance changes into something resembling the Mampang guards (gain ability to use the not-recognised modifier if you don’t already have it)
11	Grow a horn in the centre of your forehead (if fighting without a weapon, lose only 1 SKILL point)
12	Brain grows too large for your head (instant death)

It's easy enough to see how Jackson designed this piece: rolling a 2 or 12 (the statistically least likely numbers when rolling two dice) were designated the 'instant death' outcomes, 3 and 11 (the next least likely numbers) gave actively beneficial effects, a 7 (the statistically most likely number) allows you to go on your way unmutated, and then he filled out the remaining numbers with various, primarily harmful effects.

The effect of rolling a 5 is a curious one, though: there is exactly one moment in the rest of the book where you need to cast a spell in order to win. Suffering amnesia from eating the meatballs effectively renders the game unwinnable.

Whilst this is not the only time a Jackson gamebook can be rendered impossible to complete but allow the reader to continue playing for quite some time, this particular example is almost certainly an oversight on Jackson's part. There is an item you can use as an alternative to casting a spell on that occasion, but it is only available if you are playing as a Warrior and not a Wizard, and the opportunity to obtain it is long gone by the time you are inside the fortress anyway. There are also problems caused by the way the meatballs allow you to use the not-recognised bonus compared to the way you usually obtain it, which does suggest he didn't think through the possibilities of a random result in a room you may not even enter in a successful playthrough.

That one spell you need to cast is the one and only opportunity the game gives you to cast the ZED spell, when you are locked in the Archmage's prison tower -- a spell nobody in the world knows the effect of, as the only person who ever tried to cast it before you disappeared without trace. You can find out what the spell does before casting it in a way that is very difficult to miss, but if you do happen to cast it without knowing what it does, you discover that ZED is a spell for time travel the hard way, when it randomly transports you somewhere in time. Bungling the ZED spell works much the same way as eating the meatballs -- roll two dice and turn to the indicated section:

Roll	Result
2	Transported centuries into the past (game over)
3	Reference 110 of Kharé – Cityport of Traps (i.e. around halfway through book 2)
4	Reference 48 of The Seven Serpents (i.e. near the beginning of book 3)
5	Reference 539 of The Crown of Kings (i.e. near the beginning of the book)
6	Reference 102 of The Crown of Kings (i.e. shortly before you were thrown in prison)
7	Reference 195 of The Shamutanti Hills (i.e. right at the end of book 1)
8	Reference 321 of The Crown of Kings (i.e. immediately before you were thrown in prison)
9	Reference 136 of The Seven Serpents (i.e. right at the end of book 3)
10	Reference 1 of The Shamutanti Hills (i.e. right back at the beginning of book 1!)
11	Reference 254 of Kharé (i.e. right at the beginning of book 2)
12	Transported either to a point in time before the Fortress was even built, or long after it has been destroyed (game over)

As with the meatballs, rolling a 2 or 12 is a critical failure, but that's where the similarities end -- perhaps Jackson was trying to second-guess people who tried to guess what the 'correct' outcome was? There are two 'optimum' results, as rolling a 6 or 8 will get you more or less where you want to be -- know how to control the spell and you can directly go to just before you were thrown in prison, indicating Jackson considered that the ideal, but there's really not much difference between the two. The ZED spell requires you to fix an image of where you want to travel to in your mind, and the reason the player casts the unknown spell is a desperate attempt in extreme circumstances to escape, so maybe this has an in-universe explanation that the spell is trying to send the player where they want to go anyway.

Of the rest, there are two which will require you to replay most of The Crown of Kings; one which requires you to replay most of The Seven Serpents as well; and four which send you to various points in the first two books which are Jackson actively trolling the player, and/or punishing them for casting a spell they didn't know the effect of. (Amusing though the one that sends you back to section 1 of book 1 is, it's functionally no different to a 'game over' if you think about it.)

Jackson clearly didn't consider what to do with your inventory items when the book was first published, but in the 2003 reprint, all of the sections which send you back to previous books were changed to include references to your possessions going missing to account for the fact that you can have several spellcasting items, but are still not able to use the relevant spells because the books don't know you've travelled back from another one. Given the whole point of the ZED puzzle is to replay a previous sequence with knowledge you could not have at the time, it seems a little odd Jackson didn't think of that in the eighties, but I guess he really was just having fun here more than anything.