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.
The curious thing is: On the second map, you'll eventually want to get to 138 (separated from 69 by a large velvet curtain, if you were wondering). Behind the curtain is a door to Level II (and Map 3), which is locked and can only be unlocked by the same key that closes the Gateway. The reader is instructed that, if they have not yet found the key, they should turn around and continue exploring this Level until they do find it... the issue being that it is impossible not to have the key by this point.
The most likely explanation is that J. H. Brennan hadn't quite nailed down what all the maps would look like when he was actually writing the book, he hadn't made the decision that the room with the key would be unavoidable, and forgot to delete this bit of insurance that you can't reach the Gateway without the key further down the line. (You can also find a key in Level II which specifies it isn't the key to the Gateway, which seems even stranger.)
But it's an odd decision to curtail the amount of freedom and interactivity the book has -- the only reason you would need to backtrack and explore the earlier maps in the book as published is if you are forcibly teleported back there.
It's also worth noting that of the three sections where you find a new map, only the start of Level II -- right after the door you need to unlock with the key to the gateway -- says that you can go back to the previous map if you want to. This section clearly wasn't proofread correctly, as it tells you that when rolling for wandering monsters on Level II, you should check the appendix on "page 00" -- obviously nobody replaced the placeholder with the actual page number, which raises the possibility the line giving the option to return to Level I via the stairs was a hangover from a previous version that got left in by accident.
If you look at the Level II map above, you may notice that upon leaving the first room (74) you have to enter 129 first -- which turns out to be a maze of 10' x 10' rooms. The map notes that the door out of the maze is one-way, but the section itself says you can go back through the maze if you want, even though the only possible reason for doing that would be to return to Level I. This could just be a mistake on the map, though.
It feels very much like going back to previous maps was going to be a bigger part of the book (or, at minimum, the key to the Gateway was going to be much harder to find -- perhaps you'd originally have needed an item from a later map to get it and would need to come back once you'd found said item?), but for some reason the gameplay was simplified to take a lot of that out. Until you get to the Level III map.
Big though Level III looks, many of the rooms are teleport traps which will immediately transport you elsewhere the moment you enter them. Here is an annotated map, showing exactly which rooms and where they send you:
184, 176 and 167 all teleport you back to previous Levels; another character in one of the rooms adjacent to 176, which sends you back to the middle of Level I, can warn you "don't go into 176 or you'll regret it", a piece of trolling topped only by by 153 and 160 casually noting "Isn't that irritating?" after the dozen-plus Wandering Monster rolls you'll have needed to get there.
Note that the game's final battle is in room 200... which of course has no doors in or out of it. Apart from the teleport trap at room 193 (which, unlike other methods of reaching 200, will take you immediately to the showdown whether you're prepared for it or not), you can also find a secret route to it in 179, or win a free pass there from the Deadly Maths Teacher at 198. (Also note the Zone of Darkness at 164, which is clearly trying to sucker people not only into entering that room to check if there's a way in from there, but also spending as much time as possible on the wrong side of the map.)
There is also an amulet you can find on this Level which will allow you not only to teleport yourself to any room on any Level you have already visited up to three times, but can also be used to stop any attempt to teleport you elsewhere up to six times. The former property seems to even more strongly suggest that re-exploring previous Levels was meant to be a bigger part of the book but got taken out for some reason, especially taken in conjunction with an artefact you can find in Level II which will stop you encountering any Wandering Monsters in the corridors between rooms for the rest of the Level, but has only two charges.
Gateway of Doom is really a remarkable piece of engineering. But I can't help but feel it got simplified from something even more ambitious.
No comments:
Post a Comment