Puffin Books, £3.99, ISBN 0-14-036978-3
Fantasy, 1994
Oh no, King Rannor of Ruddlestone is dying. No, he didn’t get an STD or a mortal combat wound. Rather, his health and that of the land are apparently one, and something is messing up the land bad. According to the court advisor and wizard Aranadus, this was because there was a giant portal that pooped out a “band of dark warriors” that bear the arms of “the Chaos Knights of Caer Skaal”. With a name like that, these are definitely the bad guys: the minions of an ancient enemy of the land, Belgaroth the Dread Lord.
As a Warrior-Priest of the Templar Knights of Telak the Swordbearer, naturally you volunteer to scout the grand evil and act as a distraction while the rest of your buddies try to marshal an army. Well, isn’t that fun? They help you stock up on weapons, Gold Pieces, etc though but don’t be fooled, this is a campaign by Jonathan Green.
You have to pick four special skills from each of the Priest and Warrior special skill sets, with at least one from each category. You have to also keep track of additional points: Time and Honor. You start to break a sweat, because the more things you have to keep track of in a campaign by Mr Green, the more he will eff you up for laughs because he’s that kind of person.
Oh boy, and how right you are. You need to lose a skill test to get a must-have item, something you’ll find out only after you sit on this book and let out a big explosion of intestinal gas on it before looking online for a walkthrough or something to ease your pain. For someone on a race against time, you need to make counter-intuitive detours to get good stuff that will make your life easier or, more often than not, keep you alive. That’s the same issue you had in Spellbreaker, which, coincidentally enough, is also by Mr Green. The combat encounters are tough and even crazy unfair at many instances, and oh boy, there are so many of them.
It says something that the opening paragraph is already making you test your Luck (and hence lose 1 Luck point just like that) because apparently all your skills don’t count when trying to dodge an attack. Indeed, this isn’t you enjoying yourself as much as you are dancing through Mr Green’s hoops, as he cackles and comes up with all kinds of stupidly unfair ways to kill your character off. In fact, you start to think, after your most recent character death (and you have lost count of how many times your character has died), that this is the most ridiculous thing in the list of ridiculous gamebooks the author has pooped out to date.
At the same time, this campaign has fantastic moments, good storytelling, a great setting (Ruddlestone is a fantastic place for fans of horror and fantasy), and a fantastic good ending. All of these only mean that Mr Green should just write a novel, of course.
Like all his past gamebooks, Knights of Doom will only make you wonder what the eff is wrong with Mr Green, rather than enjoy your latest visit to Ruddlestone. The only way to enjoy this thing even a little is to cheat, cheat, cheat. That’s not the way to do a gamebook, surely.
