Archway Paperback, $2.25, ISBN 0-671-55490-5
Fantasy, 1986

You are Sagard the Barbarian, back once again for another session of hacking and slaying. If you may remember, you have lost your girlfriend despite putting up a fight to find and rescue her. Now you are slumming it out in the Middle-Eastern influenced city of Tabu-Bel-Abu, “the city of minarets and treachery”. Has there any depiction of a land influenced by the Middle East not to associate the people there as treacherous vermin? Let me know if you ever find one.

So, in this campaign, you learn of Sanda-Uul, the Lost City of Ivory, in the jungles ruled by the evil Ushad-I, and the treasures allegedly stashed away in this place. With Sultoon Fakkadi putting a price on your head and every enterprising vermin in the place trying to get that valuable head of yours, you have to leave town anyway, so you decide to hire a bunch of men to join you in a trip to locate this Lost City

The Fire Demon is the last gamebook in the Sagard the Barbarian series, but it offers little sense of closure to the series. While there are some interesting storytelling elements in this campaign, the whole thing is a disjointed series of encounters. It doesn’t help that you behave like a true pig here, killing people at will and breaking the laws while suffering no repercussions for your actions because those Middle-Eastern people clearly deserve to be treated badly, snort.

A racist campaign is one thing, but this one is made worse by the presence of very easy combat encounters and an ability to heal every other turn of the page. This is a meandering conclusion to an overall disappointingly bland series.