1. The King's Demon
Author: Graham Staplehurst (with Paul Mason, uncredited)
Illustrator: Russ Nicholson
First Published: 1987
ISBN: 0-14-032294-9
Length: 400 sections
Number of Endings: 11 (not including failure by loss of points)
Plot Summary: You are Robin Hood. News reaches you that Sir Jean du
Melusine, a dangerous Frenchman, has arrived in England to assist the evil
King John. Obviously, you decide to do something about this unfortunate
event...
Translation: Italian
My Thoughts: This is a nice start to the series. It's not too hard,
giving lots of opportunities to heal up and avoiding too many pointless
instant death situations, but it's challenging enough that it's unlikely to
be won on the first attempt. It took me about five tries to claim victory,
but I never found the book too frustrating or repetitive. Although the
major events of the story take place in roughly the same order each time
through, there are enough choices that the reader can interact with the set
events in a number of different ways; it never just comes down to an
irritatingly-hard series of dice rolls, as far too many gamebooks tend to. I
also very much enjoyed the game system used here -- the mechanics add
excitement to the story rather than just slowing it down. I wasn't too
pleased by the wound diagram illustrations, though -- they're so detailed
that they're not very useful for keeping track of anything; in fact, without
referring to the rules on wounding, I could never have figured out which
boxes went with which body areas, or even which parts of the pictures were
supposed to be boxes. I wasn't overly impressed by the story at first,
perhaps partially due to my lack of familiarity with the Robin of
Sherwood TV show, but once a few pieces fell into place, I enjoyed it.
My biggest complaint, apart from the hard-to-use wound diagrams, is that
victory seems to come rather quickly if it comes at all; perhaps I was just
lucky, however. In any case, flaws or not, this is a book worth reading.
2. The Sword of the Templar
Author: Paul Mason (with Graham Staplehurst, uncredited)
Illustrator: Russ Nicholson
First Published: 1987
ISBN: 0-14-032295-7
Length: 400 sections
Number of Endings: 2 (one victory, one generic failure led to by many sections)
Plot Summary: You ambush a mysterious Templar Knight who possesses a
powerful black sword, and you are compelled to learn more about him...
Translation: Italian
My Thoughts: The first thing that struck me about this book was that
it doesn't contain rules for using the character from the previous volume.
There's no character advancement, and it doesn't seem that you can bring over
Power of Light and Darkness points or equipment from the prior adventure.
This makes sense, since doing so would probably throw off the game balance a
bit, but it's still a little disappointing; I like continuity of character.
Upon reading the book, I also found that there's no real continuity with the
first book's story, either; you could read the books in reverse order and
barely notice the difference (except that some characters can apparently die
in book two even though they can't in book one). Reaching the book's
victorious ending is no more difficult than it was in the previous volume,
but achieving a perfect score is much harder, requiring you to go on a couple
of sub-quests. This design sounds good, but I didn't particularly like it;
once I had successfully finished the book once, it seemed a chore to go back
and figure out where I had missed things on previous trips. After a dozen or
so attempts, I got bored and gave up. Because of this, I didn't feel this
book was as strong as its predecessor; however, other people may like it more
for exactly the same reason. The positive comments about the system (and
negative comments about the wound diagrams) that I made about the previous
book also apply here; there's also a lot of clever use of special items to
keep track of where players have been and who they have met. A decent book,
but not as impressive as I had hoped it would be.