Like a Circle in a Spiral

In the second book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, Kharé -- Cityport of Traps, you can find a wishing well in the city centre. As you do.

A little further up the road, you come to a well. A rope hangs down from a pulley deep into the well. You walk up to it and, as you approach, you can hear a woman's voice singing. It seems to be coming from the well itself and to be directed at you:

'My dear, your fortune can be told

If you will cross my palm with gold.'

Do you wish to toss a Gold Piece into the well? If so, turn to 217. If you'd rather not bother, continue by turning to 319.

If one does chuck in a Gold Piece, then they will be met with this:

You throw in your coin and wait for several seconds before you hear it plop into water at the bottom. The well is evidently very deep. The voice sings out again:

'If you'll toss one more coin to me

Two wishes will I grant for thee.'

Do you want to throw in another coin? If so, turn to 152. If not, you may continue (turn to 319).

As you may have already guessed, you will never get anything of use from the well: throwing in a second coin, and then another, and then another, will send you to further sections on very similar themes, and eventually loop you back to 152. This can get the player to waste four Gold Pieces (or even more if they don't keep track of section numbers carefully), but is otherwise harmless. But this is an early prototype for something else.

Numbers Game

The Crown of Kings is the fourth and final book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, Jackson's four-volume epic, arguably the pinnacle of the solo gamebook format, and Jackson really goes to town on making it as difficult as possible. One of the author's favourite tricks for cheat-proofing his books is reference modifiers -- at certain sections, there will be a nonstandard action you can take if you have a certain item or piece of knowledge by modifying the number of the section you are on to discover a secret, otherwise unknowable section. Players not in possession of this will not have a clue the option is even there.

Jackson had been developing this idea across his Fighting Fantasy books House of Hell and Appointment with F.E.A.R., as well as the second and third Sorcery! books, but The Crown of Kings is where he really perfects the idea, and the book is stuffed with them. But there are three I want to highlight in particular.

There is a special bonus if you killed all of the titular tuataras in the preceding book, The Seven Serpents. As the Serpents were bringing the Archmage of Mampang a message warning him about you, laying waste to all of them means no word of your mission has reached the Fortress and you have the element of surprise on your side.

This is deployed with the following mechanic: if you ever reach a reference where a character refers to you as 'the Analander', you should deduct 40 from the number of that section and turn to the new number for an alternate version of the encounter where you are not recognised. This is largely very cleverly realised; I particularly enjoy one scenario where you accidentally give the game away by telling someone where you come from and have to stop using the modifier. (This is even more devious than it first appears: there is a secret order of rogue elements elsewhere in the Fortress whom it is a good idea to tell you are from Analand.) Several encounters in the book can be simplified or bypassed entirely in this way, although there is one rather curious part where crucial information you need to win the game can only be found in a way that makes logical sense if you have the not-recognised bonus.

After you have gone so far in the adventure, you meet a character that calls you 'the Analander', and duly subtract 40 from the current section's number...

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.

Broken Gamebooks #5 ½: Return to the Crown of Kings

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! has received a bit of an errata from the blog in the past. But here's something I missed out on the first time round, and I think is worthy of a post in its own right. (It would help to read the original article if you haven't already, naturally.)

Sorcery Code

Well, I have finally played Inkle's video game adaptation of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, a four-volume spinoff of Fighting Fantasy aimed at older readers originally published in the mid-80s and updated, revised and expanded as iOS games released between 2013 and 2015. And let me tell you, they are seriously impressive. They look gorgeous, they play well, they capture the feeling of the originals, they add so much to the original story and display a huge amount of ambition. Each game works as a standalone but you can also carry over your saved game to the next volume via the magic of clouds and local saves. Highly recommended.

As you might expect if you've read anything else this blog has ever done about gamebooks, the thing that intrigued me most is the changes that have been made from the previous books. The first game, The Shamutanti Hills, is a straight adaptation of the original book with virtually nothing changed. When we hit the second game, though, that's where things get interesting. I've highlighted some of the more interesting changes here. SPOILERS follow, obviously.

(NB: I would quite like to compare these games to my Broken Gamebooks article for the original books and see what was fixed. Unfortunately these games are BLOODY MASSIVE and, at time of writing, I still haven't seen an awful lot of them and can't comment on if some of the errors have been fixed.)

Broken Gamebooks #5: Steve Jackson's Sorcery!

Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is probably the greatest single achievement of the Fighting Fantasy range, if not the choose-your-own-adventure genre as a whole. Aimed at an older audience than the main FF range, the four books add up to one massive story with over 2,000 references all told, and are best remembered for some horribly gruesome death scenes, Goya-inspired illustrations and (as befitted the target audience) being really very difficult indeed. But what we’re here for is to discuss the logistical errors in them.

The second book, Khare – Cityport of Traps, has no major errors that I can see – certainly nothing that would render the game (unintentionally) unwinnable. The other three, however...