Puffin Books, £3.99, ISBN 0-14-032156-X
Fantasy, 1986
The Riddling Reaver is technically not really a gamebook. Well, you can play it as a gamebook if you wish, but it’s actually a dungeon master’s manual, allowing you to lead a tabletop RPG campaign involving the Riddling Reaver and his nefarious plot. While this is based on the setting of Titan, the fluid nature of tabletop RPG games means that there is nothing to stop you from setting this adventure anywhere else from Faerun to Golarion.
The campaign is basically like this: a bunch of adventurers are looking for fame and fortune when they decide to pass through the city of Kallamehr, a prosperous merchant town. Talk about great timing – they arrive just in time to interrupt a fight between the city’s ruler, Baron Bluestone, and the Riddling Reaver. They fail to prevent the death of Baron Bluestone, and now they will accept the request of the Baron’s widow to stop the Riddling Reaver before he causes more trouble. The chase is on as the campaign takes the heroes into four different acts. Act One involves the heroes trying to solve a riddle, the goodbye present from the Riddling Reaver, Act Two is a sea voyage, Act Three is a trek through a deadly jungle and into a mysterious shrine, and Act Four sends the heroes deep into the Riddling Reaver’s HQ in the Realm of Entropy.
This one uses the same adapted Fighting Fantasy combat and spell casting rules adapted for tabletop RPG. Naturally, nothing is stopping any DM from running this campaign using their favorite rules, so I won’t be dwelling more on the game system here. Instead, let me just talk about the campaign.
Act One starts out very promisingly as it is far from a standard hack-and-slash event. Instead, it forces players to solve a series of riddles and embark on a fun scavenger hunt, and the whole act features a very nice balance of levity and gravity. The plot isn’t much, with little of the Riddling Reaver’s plans is made clear here, but Act One is fun to play.
Act Two on the other hand is a standard hack-and-slash event, and it gets worse in Act Three, a really boring and linear sequence of combat sequences involving encounters that often make little sense. For example, in the Shrine of Destiny, it is pretty clear that very few people pass through the labyrinthine passages of that place in recent time. Yet the Shrine is thriving with hungry monsters! How do these monsters thrive in an ecosystem that is clearly unable to support them?
Act Four manages to capture a little of the magic of Act One, but the encounter with the Riddling Reaver is designed to be anticlimactic and unsatisfying. The players will finish the whole campaign wondering why they went through all the trouble for nothing.
The campaign isn’t designed to be difficult, but the sheer number of combat encounters would eventually wear down any character with low stats unless this character can be propped up by sturdier members of their adventuring party. The Riddling Reaver makes an entertaining read even if you aren’t planning to actually run the campaign, but reading and playing the campaign are two different things. Given the unimaginative two middle acts and the overall unsatisfying loose-ended nature of the campaign, this one ends up being a pretty average kind of fun.
Maybe this one will be good if you want to ease some gamebook readers into the world of tabletop gaming – Acts Two and Three, if you ask me, can be skipped, with Acts One and Four segued together for a quick campaign run that can be finished in a single session. But I don’t think this one has anything new to offer more established tabletop gamers.
