Item - Kharé - Cityport of Traps

After a relaxing romp through the Shamutanti Hills, the city of Kharé is bound to come as a bit of a shock. Not only does the Cityport of Traps provide a multitude of opportunities to be gutted, shanghaied, shoved headlong into the sewer system (repeatedly!), roasted alive by laser-eyed teenagers, guillotined by an innkeeper with a peculiar recipe for stew, and suckered into tongue-kissing a poison-dart spitting statue, but through it all, the player is required to track down four lines of a poem in order to finish the adventure, and failure to do so results in a one-way-ticket right back to the beginning.

In a word: fantastic.

This is the book where the Sorcery! series hits its stride, and the intensity of narrowly avoiding death after death while struggling to meet seemingly insurmountable goals becomes the defining character of the series from this point forward. The monsters are unique and interesting to fight (my favorites being a decomposed corpse that dismembers itself and then swarms you with its various still-battling limbs, and, in the sewers a - well, a poop monster), and the puzzles are thematically appropriate and reasonably challenging.

I only have two criticism, really. Firstly, tracking down the lines of the poem is a real pain, and damn near impossible to do in the first go-round. Secondly, author Steve Jackson really seems to want the player to just out-and-out steal for no good reason; there are at least two encounters where it's just assumed that the player will steal from characters that have done him no harm, no choice is even given to not do so. I actually found myself refusing to add loot to my inventory because it seemed wrong to take it.

Those are minor quibbles though, and all-in-all the book is a true classic.

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