Item - Night of the Nazgûl

This book, the first in the Middle-earth Quest series, takes place during the early part of the War of the Ring. Taking his cue from a side note in the first Lord of the Rings book, The Fellowship of the Ring, that Strider had used agents to warn the Shire of the coming of the Black Riders, the author weaves the story of a stablehand from the Prancing Pony who must bring his dire message to Hobbiton. Strider himself gives you your mission and your starting equipment.

The Middle-earth Quest series included a map card with each book, with numbered locations. Each location has a "Time" value to the upper right of the paragraph; in the Advanced Game, you were to keep a running total of this value to gauge the total time required to complete the mission. In Night of the Nazgûl, this is a key factor, since you are in a race against the agents of Sauron. The longer it takes you to get to Hobbiton, the better the chances that Sauron's agents will have beaten you there. In addition, the time used must be minimized to gain the maximum possible Experience.

Because Night of the Nazgûl has such tight time requirements, the utility of the map card is minimized. Playing the Basic Game, where time is not tracked, it is possible to explore the entire map board and have all the encounters; by playing the Advanced Game, you really have to choose carefully whether any potential encounter is worth the time wasted or not. Missing the target by as little as fifteen minutes is a real possibility, since you will not be able to avoid all the time-wasting encounters. This heightens the suspense dramatically.

Aside from this, there are a huge number of possibilities for exploration here. The map covers the Barrow-Downs, with huge numbers of dead kings buried with jewels and items of power; the Old Forest, the haunt of wild animals and Tom Bombadil; Green Hill Country, inhabited by elves; and the towns and villages of the Shire. Many areas have the potential for enriching the character, but again, time is of the essence.

All told, this is a strong entrance into the gamebook field. With a strong plot, the opportunity to interact with fairly well-known fictional characters, and a lot of semi-random encounters that may or may not be found, it has a lot of replay value. This is probably one of the best gamebooks made in the Eighties, a strong member of an interesting line.

More reviews by AlHazred

Night of the Nazgûl is a unique gamebook. Along with Lone Wolf and Fabled Lands, it stands out as being forward thinking and plays more like a computer game than a gamebook. Night of the Nazgûl (NotN) is the first in what was a planned series of thirteen Lord of the Rings gamebooks; because of licensing issues only seven got printed.

The story begins as Strider asks you warn the hobbits across the river of the coming of the Dark Riders, the Nazgûls. He would do it himself but he is waiting for Frodo and party. It's up to you to warn your village. Strider says to hurry but to stay off the roads. NotN is a great gamebook because of two things: hex-map movement and time pressure. Many gamebooks have maps as a reference, allowing you to look up your whereabouts occasionally. In NotN, by contrast, you move across the map and use the book as a reference, making movement like a top-down view of a computer game. Every space you move into takes time, and further exploration of each area also takes time. Because of curiosity, you will want to explore and make up the lost time via road travel. However the road is a perilous path, full of patrolling bandits.

The game system is also flexible in terms of complexity: you can play with Basic, Advanced, and RPG rulesets. In the Basic rules, you have limited stats, and no time pressure, while the Advanced rules have complex combat, spells, skills, and time pressure. Finally NotN can be played with the full tabletop roleplaying rules from its publisher, Iron Crown Enterprise -- the Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game system. So depending on your desire for realism versus of ease of play, you can play in any of three ways.

Managing the conflicting goal of exploring leisurely versus rushing towards your village is tense. It is amazing how one element, time pressure, can add such intensity. NotN is one of the best Lord of the Rings licensed games, and I hope it becomes an iPhone app someday.

Originally posted on Play This Thing!.

More reviews by chaosbreaker

[Rating: 0/10]
[Recommended? NO]

An opening disclaimer: I am a huge fan of epic fantasy works, especially from the 1970s and 1980s, although I have NEVER been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien's landmark The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings; said books are, to me, emotionless, stale and uncompelling at best, and needless to say I was anything but compelled to give these gamebooks a go considering how there seems to be a strong correlation between my disliking of a work and the extent to which it was inspired by Tolkien's Middle Earth. (Don't get me wrong; I highly respect the man and give credit where it's due; he's had a significant lasting impression on millions of minds as well as innumerable genre developments. I for one consider the two Peter Jackson film trilogies to be more amiable, though faulty due to the source material's weaknesses.) With all that being said, my extensive personal history with the genre hasn't ever held me back before from trying out something so predicted-as-incompatible-with-my-tastes as the Tolkien Quest series sounded, I jumped right in to "Night of the Nazgul" with high hopes and low expectations.

The verdict was quick to reach; I correctly predicted many of the factors that would contribute to me not enjoying the book whatsoever. There was needless complexity to the game system (including almost thirty pages at the beginning of rules!), heavily derivative narrative drama, unoriginal setting usage (even in the light of the Middle Earth setting), and... well, to be perfectly fair, the book read through like a bad fanfiction condensed and abridged by a befuddled editor who didn't ask the author what he originally intended to pull off/narratively convey. The result of reading the book - even before getting to the interactive elements - left me despondent and my imagination already dry, even before the most supposedly immersive component was supposed to kick in. And - need I say more? It didn't. Not one bit.

This book has perhaps the single least enjoyable gameplay system I've ever encountered in an interactive work, and this all stems from the designer's creative decisions. With few creative liberties separating the originality of the story itself from Tolkien's familiar-to-many tonal approach, this tangled, time-consuming web of unenjoyable matrixed mapmaking, chart-monitoring and statistical fact-checking is tedious, tedious, TEDIOUS. And there isn't much payoff to any of the story's "accomplishments", I tell you. But rather than go on and on about why I didn't like this story or the design scheme that held it back, let me leave you with this piece of advice: the law of conservation of detail, when applied to interactive works, will always dictate when emphasis is misplaced between the aspirations of the author and the readability of the text... and it will almost always be the hallmark of unclear intentions from the creator when BOTH components are equally bad.

Since I found "Night of the Nazgul" to be awfully unhinged, meticulously draining and imaginatively stagnant, there's no need to be creative in stressing how thoroughly I suggest you all avoid this book (and the series as a whole, for that matter). Perhaps the intensive production problems which plagued this series were a good thing in hindsight; to quote a certain song by Enya, should you come across a copy of this book, "may it be you journey on". ^^

(Mysteriously disappears into the shadows.)

More reviews by Shadeheart