TSR, $2.95, ISBN 0-88038-286-4
Fantasy, 1986
Tamper your excitement. Sure, this campaign is called Nightmare Realm of Baba Yaga and it’s published by TSR, but it is not about the Greyhawk version of Baba Yaga. Hence, no Iggwilv, no Graz’zt, no Iuz, none of the fun things. The hut with chicken legs and Baba Yaga being a disgusting-looking cannibal crone of great power remain, though.
Oh, and your character is a warrior named Jerrak Kimbal. You’re a fighter, which means no cool spells or rogue tricks, sigh. Still, you have a sword that can negate magical spells, so that is some compensation to being such a boring class, although the success in using that sword is never guaranteed. You also has a sidekick, a dwarf named Mjolnir (“Joles” for short). He’s chatty, clearly a rogue, and he’s as much a help as a liability, so yay.
Baba Yaga stole a gem that contains the soul of a wizard, a gem that has been in the possession of your family for ages. Well, you and Joles are now going to find a way to get into the old crone’s hut and get the gem back.
The early parts of this campaign forces you to make so many die rolls, with the results deciding how embarrassed you are going to be in the next entry, that it will make you feel like Jerrak is on the incompetent side if he had to make a die roll just to take a step forward without tripping. Things fortunately get better later on—clearly, Roger E Moore designed this campaign to drive away as many people as possible within the first 20 entries, perhaps on a dare—as puzzles and interesting dilemmas start to show up, but you’d have to hang in there and, if necessary and you feel like it, use the gamebook reader ability of going back to the previous entry and pick the other route.
The campaign is a pretty standard dungeon crawl, which can be amusing considering that all you want to do is to break into a damn hut, but it has its interesting moments.
Unfortunately, the best things about this one are the bad endings. There is a fun scene where you and Joles fall into Baba Yaga’s trap: a room full of treasures that causes you and Joles to willingly starve to death as you do nothing but to count gold coins, play with diamonds, and roll around in luxury to your last gasp of breath. There is another awesome bad ending written like a fantastic ending to a horror fantasy novel, which sees you and Joles becoming the new guardian skulls of Baba Yaga. Compared to some of the marvelous bad endings here, the good ending feels anticlimactic.
You’d likely have fun playing this one, as much of it feels like an above average Fighting Fantasy campaign. Funny, isn’t it, how this gamebook line is shaping up to be a serious contender? Who would’ve thought that will ever come to be.
However, it is also an odd campaign in that it’s far more fun to die or come to a bad end than to actually succeed. Odd, because this campaign is also designed to be played several times, with you getting 2 more points in Experience, that will let you improve the odds of your various rolls, when you do a plus one playthrough. You may just end up doing that, not to succeed, but to find more fun ways for Jerrak and Jole to come to bad ends!
