Item - Eye of the Dragon

This odd little adventure, which has nothing to do with the Golden Dragon Fantasy Gamebook of the same title, isn't brilliant but is still fairly enjoyable. The sections are short, the plot barely even exists and success depends largely on your initial statistic rolls. Still, with a bit of persistance (and mapping), it's not terribly hard to win. This is a nice game to play when you're short on time. As far as I can tell, no further "Fantasy Quest" adventures were produced.

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This short adventure was included in a book which was meant to introduce unfamiliar people to roleplaying games. While it was written by Ian Livingstone, one of the creators of Fighting Fantasy, it uses a different (though equally simple) game system. Two decades later, the adventure would be extended and converted into an FF book as part of the reissued Wizard Books series.

This dungeon crawl has a very similar feel to the first half of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (which Livingstone wrote), consisting of long linear corridors filled with a sequence of rooms which the player can mostly choose to explore or walk past. Also like in that book, the dungeon is designed so that there is only one correct path through it; taking a single wrong turn will result in failure (though in most cases the player will be presented with several battles and traps before reaching a failure ending, in typical Livingstonian fashion). The similarities to TWoFM should not be surprising since this adventure was apparently written and published shortly after that classic FF book. I've read a lot of negative comments about this adventure, as well as its later book-length adaptation, but at least the original version is not as bad as some people make it out to be. True, most of the encounters are not as creatively designed as those in Warlock, and several attempts will most likely need to be made before finding the true path, but most fights can be won with reasonable ease, and only one item needs to be found in order to complete the adventure successfully. Overall, while this story does not match the quality of early FF entries, it's quite a good game to play when you're not in the mood for a longer, more complex gamebook. If I have to complain about something, it is the quality of Russ Nicholson's illustrations, which look really rushed compared to his other work. Oh well....

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