[LP] Fighting Fantasy: Creature of Havoc

[Starmaker]

(Impressive.)

Reference 333 time?

[Mr Shine]

Reference 333 time?

This. If the reference makes no sense in context then refuse.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The club is only usable in battle, which we are not.

[Starmaker]

The club is only usable in battle, which we are not.

Then provoke one by refusing.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Refuse (although I am curious to see what happens if you give him the box.)

EDIT: and then use the club.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Marr's eyes open wide. 'But you may not refuse!' His anger is mounting. 'For I am your creator! You may not defy me. Do you not think that, if my power is sufficient to create you, it is also sufficient to punish you? Very well. I give you a glimpse of the living Hell I may make you suffer.' His eyes roll backwards and he mumbles a few incomprehensible words, pointing his hands out of the mirror at you. You wait apprehensively to see what happens. Did you bathe in the magical Elven Dust?
• Yes? √
• No?

I am shocked that's not another secret number reference.

Marr casts his spell, but it has no effect. A startled look appears on his face and he searches his memory for a way you could be immune to his magic. 'Of course,' he nods finally. 'The Chattermatter failed to entice you. That incompetent fool Hannicus! His instructions were to keep the Elven Dust walled in. Nevertheless, I am sure that your little act of defiance will be reconsidered in view of the riches I may offer you...' But you have other ideas. It is now your turn to attack, and you have decided on your target. You will not go for the Necromancer himself, but for his mirror.

• Do you have a crystal club? √
• Or not?

If you picked up a crystal club during your adventure, you will have been given a reference number to turn to should you wish to use it. Do not turn to this number now, but instead add it to the number of this reference. Turn to the reference corresponding to this total.

You pick up your club and step towards the mirror. When Zharradan Marr sees your weapon, his confident manner becomes a little nervous. 'So, my offspring of marrangha,' he says, though perhaps a little too eagerly. 'You choose to turn against your creator. Do not be hasty. Let me first tell you of my plans for us. Whatever future you wish, it can be achieved.'

'Our partnership will be supreme in Allansia. Together we shall rule. If it is riches you desire, then you shall have all the wealth you can use. If your lust is for power, then I shall give you western Allansia as your own empire.' His words are spilling out with mounting anxiety. But you are not listening. Instead you are preparing to swing your club. 'Do I waste my words?' he screams. 'Then think on this/ If I should be lost, how will you regain your former self? Will you be content to remain a beast for the rest of your days, constantly feared, hated, and even hunted by your own kind?'

This time, his words stop you. You consider them. Should he disappear for ever, perhaps you will spend the rest of your days banished from civilization, an enemy of your own race. But then what guarantee do you have that Marr's experiments are reversible? None! You glance back up at him just in time to catch him wiping the smile from his face. He has been playing for time! His image is disappearing! Furiously you grab your club. Your eyes narrow; you grit your teeth. A low growl comes from deep in your throat. As Marr's image fades you move quickly. In a trice you have grabbed the club and swung it. The room is filled with the sound of breaking glass as the mirror shatters into tiny fragments before you. The portal from his land of limbo has been destroyed! He may never return to your world!

You turn towards the door. A bolt of pain shoots up from your foot! You have cut yourself on a splinter from the glass. But this should not be! The thick scales on your feet should not be scratched by such tiny fragments. You look down. And then you realize what has happened.

Your greeny-brown, scaly foot is no more. Instead the foot is pale-skinned and vulnerable. The claws have gone too! Your hands have returned to their human form and, when you look at your reflection in a fragment of mirror left hanging in the frame, a familiar face stares back wide-eyed at you! Marr's experiments were performed by sorcery, not surgery, and when he disappeared, the spell was broken!

As your memory returns, you remember the bitter struggle high over the Moonstone Hills, when Zharradan Marr and his winged Tooki forces bore down on your Galleykeep in overwhelming numbers. Like a raging stormcloud, the dark Tooki – a specially bred race of War Griffins – swooped down on the ship, their mounted Blood Orc archers raining arrows and killing many of your crew. The surprise attack was so quick, and so deadly, that you had no option but to surrender. As Zharradan Marr stepped down off his own richly adorned Tooki on to the deck of the Galleykeep, you swore you would avenge this defeat. But Marr had other plans for you...

The tables have now been turned. You are back in your position as Commander of the Galleykeep. Marr's brainless creatures will respect your authority. Though Marr may have shown you a mercy of sorts, you in turn gave him the mercy he deserve: none!

Missed content coming up at some point. Also taking questions.

[Starmaker]

What possessed Steve Jackson to utterly sabotage / cannibalize / subject this apparently fan-favorite book to evil magical breeding experiments three years later?

[angelfromanotherpin]

What possessed Steve Jackson to utterly sabotage / cannibalize / subject this apparently fan-favorite book to evil magical breeding experiments three years later?

No idea what you're referring to.

[Starmaker]

What possessed Steve Jackson to utterly sabotage / cannibalize / subject this apparently fan-favorite book to evil magical breeding experiments three years later?

No idea what you're referring to.

I googled around and it looks like Steve & Co reused the ending scene of Creature of Havoc for the Trolltooth Wars novel trilogy (which I theoretically own, but it's lost between Germany and bumfuck nowhere): specifically, some other guy boards the Galleykeep and smashes Marr's mirror.
sadface.jpg

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Trolltooth Wars is a standalone novel. It's part of a series starring Chadda Darkmane as generic fantasy action hero, but there isn't a whole lot of continuity between the books. I quite liked it, it's about a war between Zharradan Marr and Balthus Dire, and Darkmane gets brought in by the kingdom of Salamonis because they're getting caught in the middle. Yaztromo and Zagor also guest star - heck, Darkmane basically does a run of Warlock of Firetop Mountain along the way. It's not great literature, but it's a lot of fun and a very decent attempt at Fighting Fantasy: The Novel. I only read one of the sequels and found it much less entertaining.

Darkmane's final confrontation with Marr is sufficiently distinct and also cool enough in its own right that I don't think it really impacts Creature of Havoc.

Darkmane gets on the Galleykeep with a bomb, but he's caught and brought before the mirror, and the bomb is found and defused. So he grabs the mirror and jumps off the ship with it. Apparently the fall is enough to break the mirror. It's also enough to kill Darkmane, which I'm pretty sure was the intended ending, but he gets saved in the epilogue.

[Starmaker]

So, in the grand tradition of evil overlords, Zharradan Marr got owned twice by exploiting the same weakness? ...this explains the raid guide.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Just going through the book in order...

There's a segment where if you go into Dree, you get netted by curse-ingredient hunters and carved up for neck glands.

There's an ending where you go into the training grounds and end up a guard on the Galleykeep, kept loyal by a steady supply of hobbit-and-Droneweed broth. Along the way you have to prove your worth against Thugruff from Marr's quirky miniboss squad. He's a good teacher, good for +2 SKILL (Initial and current).

The rope Rosina gave us is good for one escape from a swampy sinkhole.

There are a few other Hobbit encounters, and each time you go all Zoidberg on them. It's particularly disturbing when you try not to eat them, and can hold out just long enough for them to have hope, only to have it dashed when you can't control yourself. Eating a Hobbit is always a full heal, though.

Giving Marr the backpack is the least bad bad ending. You become Marr's Commander-in-Chief, and your first assignment is murdering the previous CiC. Whether you win glory or are betrayed by your evil looking-glass is left ambiguous.

Another quirky miniboss is Marr's physician, Quimmel Bone, a classy skeleton who camouflages himself as an anatomical study in his own office. He's one of two infinite death loops. He's not a very skilled combatant, but every victory leads you to another reference where his bones reassemble themselves and attack again, and when you see a reference number you've seen before, well, you know you're doomed. The alternative to fighting him is to pretend you've come for medical assistance, and he paralyzes you with a potion, cuts out your heart, and lets you watch it stop beating.

The other infinite death loop is a Black Elf with a whistle who summons an unlimited number of Chaos Warriors to fight you one at a time until you die.

There's a notable fight with the 'Master of Hellfire' (SKILL and STAMINA 14!). Winning is rewarded with two choices that both lead to being blinded by heat vision and tortured to death.

One of the more horrible deaths involves putting on a cursed Cloak of Hunger, devouring everything you can reach, then lingering for days as you starve to death.

There's a few endings where you wind up as stew on the Galleykeep.

There's a witch whose servant has become infirm, so she lures you in, spikes your soup with a Potion of Obedience, and feeds the servant to you.

There's a full-page illustration of an otherwise ordinary bird who can talk and insults the hell out of you. It's mostly weird because there are so many things which deserved an illustration more than a visually-unremarkable bird.

Using the crystal club will instantly win any fight, but also shatter the club and thereby leave you incapable of defeating Marr. It's a nasty trick, but fortunately you should never need to use it.

Remember that knight who tried to tell his shaman friend to control your mind? Well, if you don't take out the shaman first, his spell works and you spend the rest of your life under a Control Creature spell. (Man, that Vapour that gave us self-determination was weaksauce, I'd expect it to grant immunity to mind control, but like half the bad endings are mind control endings.)

Remember that ** by the messed-with roadsign? It was the signal that you were no longer drunk from visiting a bar and getting ale'd by the locals.

This is a pretty good visual. Unfortunately, the liquid is poison. It comes up in a nasty bait-and-switch, where you get covered in strangling vines, drink the 'potion' and they let go. You think you've found a potion of plant repulsion or something, but the vines just don't eat poisoned meat.

The polyglot Chattermatter that failed to entice us is not the guy with the bag on his head, but rather the shiny mass above him. The picture is sort of a clue, but it's cunningly composed to draw the eye towards the bag-headed man (a previous victim) and away from the suspicious web above.

Legionnaire Twenty-Nine is a rhino-man who hates his boss and was held to his job by his hostage sister. The rhino-man's we met gave us a message to let Twenty-Nine know his sister had escaped, and he will help you escape from the Training Grounds. Unfortunately, he'll stumble into a Galleykeep trap and become stew... and you'll go with him if you try to save him.

Oh, and the Vapour of Tongues comes with an illustration of what they're supposed to look like.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Remember that knight who tried to tell his shaman friend to control your mind? Well, if you don't take out the shaman first, his spell works and you spend the rest of your life under a Control Creature spell. (Man, that Vapour that gave us self-determination was weaksauce, I'd expect it to grant immunity to mind control, but like half the bad endings are mind control endings.)

Legionnaire Twenty-Nine is a rhino-man who hates his boss and was held to his job by his hostage sister. The rhino-man's we met gave us a message to let Twenty-Nine know his sister had escaped, and he will help you escape from the Training Grounds. Unfortunately, he'll stumble into a Galleykeep trap and become stew... and you'll go with him if you try to save him.

These two are so UK Steve.

Also, am I the only person who is amused that some of Zharradan Marr's henchmen are as hard (or even harder) to kill than he is? I mean, this is common in a lot of FF books (not just UK Steve's) but it's kind of ridiculous here because Marr is a puzzle monster.

I hope my undead Half-Elf who is immune to everything but a magic ring or my indestructible regenerating skeleton doctor never read the raid guide in my dungeon which one of them works in.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I assume that being a necromancer keeps the undead in line.

[Darth Rabbitt]

I assume that being a necromancer keeps the undead in line.

Fair enough.

In other news, not sure how I missed this gem:

There's a notable fight with the 'Master of Hellfire' (SKILL and STAMINA 14!). Winning is rewarded with two choices that both lead to being blinded by heat vision and tortured to death.

This is even more UK Steve than the other two things. And it's also super fucking bullshit. I hate it when you get two (or more) choices that both lead to death. And UK Steve always has at least one of those.

[Starmaker]

I looked through my copy, which is a Green Zigzag and is probably the first printing (given that it says "first printing 1986" and lists the 23 previous books in the series). For what is probably the most unusual FF book, the actual physical book doesn't look unusual at all; despite the beefy intro and 460 paragraphs, it's thinner than Portal of Evil. My copy looks read but has no notes and no markings on the character sheet, which makes it a better collector's item but is honestly kind of disappointing. The inner back cover advertises FF 20-23, The Riddling Reaver, and, bizarrely enough, Creature of Havoc itself.

First, the mirror is actually proofed against breaking, and while leaving both the club and usage instructions in the dungeon is completely unconscionable on Marr's part, at least the facts line up.

Many deaths are pretty offensive, design-wise, but none are as creepy as that fucking Vlodblad.

There's a third death loop at dungeon's exit. The marvel that is the editing job conceals a guard room and a metal door which does not open without a key, which the guard has but our fingers are too clumsy to use.

Going to the cemetery instead of the church is one of those non-obvious losses, in which case getting killed by an infinite zombie horde is the easiest way out as these go. It's also possible to escape into the crypts, which lead back to the pre-Darramouss section, which is of course a super-size infinite death loop without the amulet.

Out of the four "wrong" doors, the one with the snowflake (so, one of the two obviously wrong doors) does not end in death - it's the room of the Weather-Mage Nimbicus, who's fed up with all that business and wants to desert the ship, and it's possible to simply leave him in peace and try another door. Judging by his disposition, he might have been a member of the original crew and wisely decided not to opt into monsterhood. Persisting at pissing him off has him summon a small but vicious tornado, the end.

LotR left me unable to perceive hobbits as anything other than monster food, and the book fully supports this. I wish there were more Hobbits to nom on the one true path.

There's a completely average tunnel where failing a luck check means falling to your death into the Bilgewater and succeeding at a luck check means cracking your skull on a rock just before the splash, trololololo.

The Shadow Stalker is an bsshplf, and trying to make peace just gets you killed. Some monsters are just monsters.

Finding a sack at a specific reference allows to ignore instructions to only take one item from a room. To my knowledge, no other sack does it, and it matters precisely never because it's past both the amulet and the crystal club rooms.

The bad:

- Bizarre bullshit deaths, made worse by choosing between two clearly inadvisable options and/or failure hardcoded in ("Do you want to touch the probably dangerous circle? *Yes -> you step in and it eats you! *Avoid -> you accidentally step in and it eats you! trolololo").

- Inadjudicatable and flavorless choices, the #1 example being picking directions in a maze that is impossible to navigate except as a flowchart.

- Despite an extensive background, character list and rogues' gallery, all the notable women are witches, which is entirely explicable given the target audience. Still, sigh.

- No compromise endings. All of them, except being Marr's right-hand man (which is only a dip in the elven dust away from actual victory), are just plain bad. In a book that's explicitly about making your way the world, this sucks.

- The plot doesn't run off consequences. The one true way (which wouldn't be bad with compromise endings) is made up of a string of completely random events which line up only because the sections do. The only example of a consequence is Grog being killed by the villager if we're late, but without earlier precedents, there's no way to arrive at the scene actually thinking "damn, if we hadn't been to the apothecary, we could have interfered".

- Because of the above, no individual right or wrong player choices and no way to reward the player. To illustrate, if we had gone to the cemetery (fail condition) and chose to desecrate a necromancer's grave, we would have been attacked by zombies and could have fled to the forest and its dozen of bad endings or hid (and died) in a crypt. Not desecrating the grave automatically shutters the player to the crypt branch - so, a more sensible choice is "rewarded" with earlier failure.

- "You get caught in a trap and end up as stew" crops up just about everywhere, and the fact that the one true way also features getting caught in a trap (the Training Grounds is not a valid option) is plain inexcusable.

- Fun stuff is shuttered off to bad ending branches. With all the hidden references, the book could have been hard to win but still relatively open to roam.

- Instawins that don't fvckjng work. Don't fvckjng write "if you reduce your opponent to" sections which depend on decremental hp accounting if you gave the player two ways to fvckjng kill people.

The good:

- premise.

- Secret paragraphs are actually kind of cool, and the one with Grog and giant frogs was nothing short of epic. They could've been made even better by starting the secret paragraph with an indication it's actually correct (so as not to make the player actually read it to determine if it works in context); there's something to be said for being rewarded for having the idea to use the item without an explicit "if you have X" prompt. Obviously, allowing the player to use items "wherever" means having to answer for not having accounted for other possible uses, which is a problem prompt-based books don't have.

- Contextualizing the infodump at the beginning works well as a simulation of gradually regaining memories and reason.

- Character and player motivation align and make sense, which is a notable improvement over both "you decided to risk arbitrary death for money" and "Meet Bob. Bob ate your wife, raped your dog, and posted it on youtube. You want revenge on Bob. Proceed".

- The code is neither too difficult nor too obvious. I doubt I would have solved it if I had been playing the paper book. Still cool, though.

[Darth Rabbitt]

So I take it that it's not possible to kill any members of Marr's quirky miniboss squad other than Darramouss (certainly it's not possible without winning)? If so, that's a real shame; fighting Yaemon's quirky miniboss squad was one of the best parts of Avenger and this book really got my hopes up on something similar.

I kind of feel like UK Steve is better at premises than actual books. Things like "you're a wizard's apprentice going on a mission to assassinate an evil wizard before he can attack a nation with his army," "you're a normal person in a haunted house fighting monsters and demon-worshipers," and of course "you're a literal monster off to find your destiny" are all great ideas, but they all have at least a few glaring flaws, even by the standards of the series.

[angelfromanotherpin]

So I take it that it's not possible to kill any members of Marr's quirky miniboss squad other than Darramouss (certainly it's not possible without winning)?

In the ending where you give Marr the knapsack, you go off to kill Vallaska Roue, which is implied to be successful. And you can fight Thugruff, but not finish him off; and that involves going into the training area of no escape. But yes, not a lot of throwdowns with named guys.