Item - Assassins of Allansia

I use the iphone app by Tin Man Games for some of these books so when this popped up on there for $4 I went for it. As I went over in the Caverns of the Snow Witch review, the app is very handy for keeping track and automating everything for you, plus you can bump your dice rolls a few times to pad your opening stats & your enemy fights. There are also difficulty settings that allow more cheating, but I never use those so the fudging of the dice is the only bending of the rules used. Anything you haven't collected, or done, will not be an option on the app as it is programmed to keep track of your progress so there is no claiming to have things or done things if you don't have or haven't done them.

My expectations for this book were pretty low, but it was interesting enough that I started coming back to see if I could figure out the path through it. The premise is pretty silly as you take a bet that you can survive on Snake Island for a month, and if you do Captain Samuel Crow will pay you 20 gold pieces. Apparently this connects Port of Peril to Deathtrap Dungeon, so hot off of disposing of Zanbar Bone in Port of Peril, this story picks up. This appears to me to be Ian's Fighting Fantasy spin on John Wick because it's just a matter of assassins coming after you one after another through the entire book. The story is that Lord Azzur has ordered a hit on you for killing Zanbar Bone.

The book starts off bland and boring with the typical Ian Livingstone outside settings and on an island. It's not long before the first assassin comes along in the middle of the night and you're given a pretty clever intuitive decision to make about him. The next morning another one comes along having forced Captain Crow to take her to the island. After you dispose of her Captain Crow explains why there are people attempting to kill you. From there you set sail to decide where to go and what to do about all the assassins that have been unleashed upon you. The assassins are all from a guild that carries the same scorpion pendant necklace. These are the items you have to collect in order to beat the book. Why all assassins would openly wear identifying marks like that doesn't make sense, but whatever. Normally you don't see the pendant until after they're killed as they are hidden under their clothes, but one assassin is given away by your own observation of their pendant.

The choices of where to go are pretty thin. You can go to Port Blacksand, but that makes no sense except for the fact that in order to get every assassin you must kill, you have to go there first, but your stay there is short, then it's on to the Red River estuary which will eventually lead you to Kaad. This is where the bulk of the book takes place. There are wanted posters everywhere so pretty much everyone knows who you are. There are some people who side with you because they don't like Lord Assur, but many will rat you out. The potential of this book is in the encounters and how different assassins are dealt with, but for the most part, these encounters are fairly generic. Some were well thought out, but many others it's just like John Wick running into them one after another as the pop out of nowhere. They're not particularly hard to dispatch either. The items you can get early on in this book pump up your skill level to 20 or more. I was running around with 19 skill with a max of 21 for most the book. No one was a threat to even land a hit on me for the most part. Unless Tin Man games misread the rules when they programmed this, you clearly can easily get a skill level that high because the app let me do so. It's an oddly unbalanced aspect of this book, but I guess Ian makes up for it with the one true path nature of this book where if you miss any assassin you're basically screwed.

In the end you make your way to Fang where the kickoff to the Trial of Champions is underway. The last assassin is a strong one, but no match for the skill level you can achieve, but in order to drop the Throm cameo into the book, you're forced to a cut scene after 5 rounds being told that the massive brute is just too strong and then Throm from Deathtrap Dungeon randomly saves you. From here you put on a helmet to hide your identity then end up standing near Lord Azzur and Baron Sukumvit as the ceremonies for the Trial of Champions are underway in the leadup to the challengers entering the dungeon. You are told to remove your helmet which I did, then once Lord Azzur sees who you are, he decides to ask how many assassins you have dispatched which is where the pendants you have collected come in. The number is 13 which is a standard occult number with the 12 astrological ages and the Sun as the 13, but the entire ending is just silly and makes no sense. So if you do have the right number, you gain his respect to an extent and he nominates you to go into the dungeon for him with him getting the reward if you win and you getting your freedom.

In the original Deathtrap Dungeon book, other than yourself, there are 2 barbarians, one elf woman, a ninja, and a guy in armor. The only thing that makes sense here, not that Ian takes the time to make sure everything makes sense in the larger context of the series, is that in this book you are the guy in armor from Deathtrap Dungeon and this was your tragic story because you obviously didn't make it in the dungeon.

Final Thoughts: This wasn't a very good book. It was very contrived to connect Port of Peril to Deathtrap Dungeon. The assassins should've been a feature not a requirement as in if you didn't run into all of them, you could still have a way to win or even have different types of endings. Maybe having an advantage based on how many you dispatched, but being faced to fight all the ones you missed at the end. The final scene should've had you arrive in Fang the night before the Trial of Champions and from there have a story for how you work out what your plan to get your freedom from Lord Azzur would be. Then you could have a night before part in some bar somewhere and more interesting things going on in the story, but many times I think Ian is just dialing it in and saying to himself, 'good enough'.

More reviews by JDMorgan