The Silliest Post About Adventure Gamebooks Imaginable

In the third GrailQuest gamebook, Gateway of Doom, one of the new spells Pip is given in their Second Spell Book is Pip's Amazing Legume Spell, which will give an automatic Friendly Reaction from any attacking vegetable. (Ordinarily, a Friendly Reaction requires you to roll three dice for yourself, and one die for your opponent; if the combined total of your three dice is lower than your enemy's single roll, they're friendly and you can proceed as if you'd won. All spells only require a roll of 7 or better on two dice to succeed.)

You may very well think that this is quite a specialised spell which doesn't come into play much.

You may even think that J. H. Brennan included it solely to set up the joke that if you accidentally rescue a Vampire Carrot (which takes quite a bit of effort on your part, incidentally) it turns out such an absurd spell is the only thing that can save your life.

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.

R.I.P. J.H.

As a small tribute to J. H. Brennan, who I was very sorry to belatedly learn went to 14 last month, I would like to share with you section 123 from the third GrailQuest gamebook, Gateway of Doom, which I read not long after discovering the concept of adventure gamebooks when I found a boxset of the first three books in a second-hand bookshop, and is one of the funniest things I have ever read.

There's a man eating plant in here.

The plant he's eating is a carrot and it's screaming for help. This Ghastly Kingdom gets more like a loonybin every step you take.

'Help!' screams the carrot.

'Ignore it,' remarks the man, with a friendly nod in your direction. 'This is one of the most appallingly evil carrots ever to pollute the face of the globe. I shall die instantly when I finish eating it, but I willingly sacrifice myself for the good of humanity which will be all the better for the demise of this evil carrot.'

'I'm not evil! I'm not evil!' shouts the carrot. 'I am a beautiful young princess bewitched by an Invisible Wizard who haunts this Ghastly Kingdom. Please rescue me!'

'You will be making a terrible mistake if you try to rescue this carrot,' says the man mildly. 'It's a vampire carrot.'

'He's lying,' shrieks the carrot desperately.

But is he? Or is it? Or are they both? Desperately you look around for some clue to help you make your decision. Your eye catches a prominent notice on the southern wall. It says:

RESCUE THE CARROT!

You reach for EJ, but then you catch sight of a second notice on the western wall. It says:

DON'T RESCUE THE CARROT!

You allow your hand to fall away in confusion. You glance upwards. A huge poster painted on the ceiling says:

PLAY YOUR XYLOPHONE!

Which seems as sensible a course as any in this lunatic situation, provided, of course, you brought an xylophone.

So what will you do?

If you decide to rescue the carrot, go to 112.

If you decide to ignore the whole affair and try to find a saner room, go to 143.

If you happen to have an xylophone with you and feel like playing it, go to 149.

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part III

If you've just joined us, over the previous two articles of this series I've been listing all the monster encounters in the GrailQuest gamebooks of the 1980s; Part I and Part II can be found in those links I've just made, and this concluding article starts off with the last two books in the series.

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part II

Last time, I set out to write a complete guide to all the monsters and foes you could face in J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo fantasy gamebooks, but it quickly became apparent I would have to split it up into multiple parts; Part I includes a recap of how the combat system worked (as well as, courtesy of Ed Jolley, one of the greatest comments ever left on this blog), and here comes the part of the Bestiary covering adventures four through six, kicking off with Voyage of Terror -- which, owing to Merlin's Net Spell going wrong, sees a sideways move from Camelot to Ancient Greece, a consequence of which is that all your usual magic and equipment (including Excalibur Junior) are not available to you...

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part I

Whilst J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo adventure gamebooks were principally meant to be a more comedic take than usual on the idea, he also came up with one of the best combat systems I've ever seen for an RPG -- simple to understand, but allowing for a diverse range of encounters. Unlike other series of the time, in fact, a complete guide to all the monsters and villains you could fight across the series' eight titles would probably make for quite fun reading. So here we go.

Revision Quest II

A few weeks back, I compared the 1997 and 2011 editions of an obscure adventure gamebook called Egyptian Quest, the latter of which was self-published by the author and contained several intriguing additions compared to the original printing.

I had a hypothesis for those additions -- specifically, that they were written for the nineties edition but that had to be pared back to hit a strict word count -- and I had also intended to cover Egyptian Quest's sibling, Aztec Quest, in the same post. However, it turned out that there were far more changes than I was expecting, and I was able to make a much stronger case for my theory than I was expecting to from just the first book. So, like some weird DVD extra nobody asked for or watched, here are a selection of the changes between versions of Aztec Quest.

Revision Quest

Adventure gamebooks, as I have discussed on many previous occasions, were massive in the 1980s, but then towards the end of the decade the market for them apparently suddenly tailed off. Whilst a few of the hardier ranges straggled on into the 1990s, and the genre has been revived several times in the following millennium, many of their authors ended their careers in interactive fiction around then. One such example is J. H. Brennan, who authored several series of gamebooks, most of which had their tongue firmly in their cheek, between 1984 and 1986.

Over a decade later, however, Brennan returned to the genre for an imaginatively titled series called Adventure Gamebooks. The four titles in this series were Egyptian Quest, Aztec Quest, Greek Quest and Roman Quest, and, as you might be able to guess, all four featured a player character who either travelled back in time or already lived in that time. These were significantly shorter than Brennan's 80s gamebooks, aimed at a younger audience, and were largely a genuine attempt to educate readers about the history of the period.

In 1997, Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest were published in England. The other two titles, for whatever reason, never were; Greek Quest and Roman Quest only saw physical releases in France (a country with a very large role-playing scene, and where Brennan already had an existing fanbase), a few years later in 2000. Over a decade later, however, Brennan self-published all four titles as eBooks.

Now, comparing the eBook editions of the latter two titles is probably going to be beyond me, unless a bilingual French gamebook enthusiast happens to come across this blog. But I can compare the 1997 and 2011 editions of Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest -- because Brennan's self-published versions had some significant differences compared to the ones released fourteen years earlier.

The 14 Museum

One of the most prolific adventure gamebook authors of the 1980s was J.H. Brennan. You may remember that his gamebooks were, in fact, the subject of the first ever post of this blog over five years ago. But to recap, he wrote three series of gamebooks at the height of the craze in the 80s: GrailQuest, which was set apart from most other series of the time by being incredibly funny; Sagas of the Demonspawn, which by contrast was played absolutely straight; and the Horror Classic Gamebooks, which fell somewhere inbetween those two extremes.

But, apart from the occasional cross-series reference, there was one thing which all three series had in common, and that was what happened when you died: you were directed to another section which described what happened afterwards. That section basically functioned as the gamebook's afterlife. Originating in GrailQuest as one of its many running jokes, this metatextual section was (at least in that series) always section 14, and was often referred to by the book as "the dreaded 14" whenever the player was directed there. You may think the use of the number 14 was a deliberate joke about how you'd expect the obvious number for such a section to be 13. And you'd probably be right. But if you look at how the idea was used in all three series you can, among other things, more or less prove that for certain. So here, then, are all the deep -- and not-so-deep -- hereafters that Brennan ever wrote.

Broken Gamebooks #1 ½: Realm of Chaos Redux

Way back in the first ever Broken Gamebooks article, nearly five years ago now, the inaugural adventure gamebook under discussion was the sixth GrailQuest book, Realm of Chaos. I have some startling new revelations to share with you, which were provided by commentator Ed Jolley. (Ed has also left some thoroughly interesting notes on some of my other posts, which you would be well-advised to seek out.)

Broken Gamebooks #17: Voyage of Terror

We covered the fact that several of the later adventures in the GrailQuest suffered from major playability issues and a serious lack of proofreading in some of the very earliest Broken Gamebooks articles. But let's go back to the fourth book in the series now, to look at an interesting, albeit small, design flaw.

Probabilities of Terror

The final boss of Crypt of the Sorcerer, the twenty-sixth book in the original Fighting Fantasy series and published in 1987, is the titular Sorcerer, Razaak. His combat statistics are SKILL 12 and STAMINA 20 - more or less the highest possible scores the player character can have. This is compounded by the fact that if Razaak wins two combat rounds in a row, you die automatically. Somebody actually did the maths on this thing and, provided you have the same or slightly higher statistics as Razaak when you fight him (i.e. you rolled the highest possible SKILL score, and near enough the highest possible STAMINA score, and are still at full health) then your chances of winning are 5.5%... which would obviously diminish the lower your scores are. This is an impossibly one-sided encounter.

Cahiers Classiques d'Horreur

Image recycled from previous article owing to obscurity of subject matter

Way, way back in the first ever post I wrote for the blog, nearly two years ago, I reviewed the short-lived Horror Classic Gamebooks series by J.H. Brennan.

I have recently discovered several references on the Internet (primarily on TV Tropes) to an unofficial third book in this series. It appears that the two books in the original series were hugely popular in France, to the point that a fan wrote their own entry in the series and managed to get it officially printed. (One wonders if J.H. Brennan was ever aware of the existence of this; I suspect not.)

The book was entitled La Malédiction des Baskerville, which translates as "Curse of the Baskerville", and allows you to play as either Sherlock Holmes or... the Hound of the Baskervilles. (One presumes the author felt the 'villain' character should be a monster of some kind, following the lead of the two 'official' books, hence why it isn't Moriarty.)

If you happen to have any more information on this (especially if you know any way I could get an English translation of it), I would welcome it.

Broken Gamebooks #6: Legion of the Dead

Been a while since we did one of these, so I thought I'd finally finish up the GrailQuest series. Legion of the Dead is the series' grand finale - according to author JH Brennan, the gamebook market suddenly started to tail off at this point and the series was cancelled, although Fighting Fantasy was only halfway through its original run at this point. Brennan was well aware that this was to be the series' swansong, as the book is upfront about being the final volume from page 1. It's certainly got a plot to suit it - Zombie Merlin is leading the titular Legion, hell bent on destroying Avalon!

Now, Legion of the Dead is quite a curious thing. It's not actually a broken gamebook, as far as I can tell. However, whilst it avoids some of the inconsistencies noted in the previous two books, there are certain things which lead me to believe it was written in something of a rush.

Broken Gamebooks #3: Tomb of Nightmares

The gamebook doctor is in again, and he’s diagnosing the penultimate book in the GrailQuest series, Tomb of Nightmares. Whilst the series generally existed to be a bit of a laugh, Tomb is a bit more puzzle-orientated (though still very funny)… because the entire gamebook is basically one big maze (that has a really evil tendency to randomly teleport you back to the same section over and over again, which the book ends up amusingly lampshading). Not only does the adventure feature a large number of monster encounters and precious few opportunities for healing, it also features an extra ‘secret doors’ mechanic, which works like this:

To search for a secret door in any section, throw one die. Score 4, 5 or 6 and you are entitled to check the secret door table which starts on page 186. Score less than 4 and you have missed any secret door that might be there.

(Curiously, a few earlier sections offer you the choice to check for secret doors in the text as well as using the secret doors table, which seems a bit odd.) Anyway, it’s a tricky book, and I was forced to map it by using a spreadsheet for this article.

Broken Gamebooks: Realm of Chaos

Way, way back in the mists of time of, erm, about three months ago, when I first started this blog, my very first post extolled the virtues of the GrailQuest adventure gamebook series. What I didn’t mention at the time is that some of the later books in the series suffer from serious playability issues and a lack of proofreading… which they (for me) get away with because of the series’ wit and creativity. So, because heaven knows this blog isn’t niche enough as it is, why not try and summarise those issues and see if they can be fixed?

Horror Classic Gamebooks

The year is 1986, and adventure gamebooks are hugely popular in Britain. (You might also know them as ‘interactive fiction’ or ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’.) The genre was popularised in Britain by the Fighting Fantasy series, which launched in 1982 and inspired dozens upon dozens of similar series. Some of these were great; some of them were The Cretan Chronicles. One gamebook author whose work definitely lands in the first category is J.H. Brennan.