Dungeon of Justice - Final Thoughts

I probably said this when I covered "The Dervish Stone", but I expect very little from these fan-written mini-adventures.  As non-professional efforts, I'm happy enough for them to present a straightforward adventure that isn't doing anything new or interesting with the format.  I'm not expecting Creature of Havoc or Shadow on the Sand when I sit down to play one of these.

For the most part, author Jonathan Ford provided exactly what I expected with "Dungeon of Justice".  Being placed on trial is a novel (if nonsensical) way of getting your adventurer into the action, but from there it's just a straight-up dungeon crawl with a macguffin to hunt.  The FF rules are used well enough, the encounters are drawn from standard fantasy tropes, and it all holds together solidly enough to justify its existence as a mini-adventure in the middle of a magazine.  Except, of course, for its one crippling flaw.

There was no way that this wasn't going to be the major talking point of this review, so I'll get to it right away: you have to fail a roll against your Skill to find the idol and beat the adventure.  On the one hand you could say that this is a clever subversion of game design principles, and an ingenious way to disguise the path to victory.  I've played a lot of gamebooks over the years, and I sure wasn't expecting it.  On the other hand, it does feel very, very cheap.  With any sort of game design there's a certain amount of trust that has to exist between the designer and the player.  If you're playing a board game, you expect the rules to be clear, and for every player to have an even chance of success.  If you're playing a video game, you expect that it will be relatively free of glitches and that the game can be beaten fairly.  The same goes for gamebooks, and technically "Dungeon of Justice" can be beaten fairly, and with better odds of success than many of the main series books.  But requiring a failure to succeed just feels wrong.  It's more like being tricked by the author than challenged by the adventure, and for me it breaks that player/designer trust.

It's a shame because "Dungeon of Justice" is otherwise a decent amateur effort (despite some smaller design flaws and weird tangents).  This is a real case of one major flaw overshadowing a work that is - if not outstanding - at least solid.

COOL STUFF I MISSED

The only encounter I missed that springs to mind is a magic mirror that forces you to fight a replica of yourself.  It brings up the twisted notion that killing your mirror image might end up as a form of suicide, but never does anything with it.  Other than that I covered everything else the dungeon has to offer.

MISTAKES AND RED HERRINGS

There were a bunch of errors in the PDF that I was using, with a number of choices pointing to the wrong section.  I don't want to bring those up specifically, because I don't know if they're in the original or just a result of bad OCR.  The page for "Dungeon of Justice" at the Titannica wiki has some errors listed that I assume are from the original magazine.

There are a few items that are only here as treasures to be won, and serve no purpose within the adventure.  Some other items, such as the golden and brass keys, only unlock areas that lead to death and danger.  Everything else serves a purpose somewhere, but aside from the idol there are no items required to win.

BEST DEATH

This adventure has 14 instant death sections, and some of them are fantastic.  Whatever flaws Jonathan Ford has as a writer and designer, he's great at creating memorable demises, giving them a level of over-the-top gore or macabre detail that sticks in the mind.  I had a number of contenders here, but the passage below gave me a good chuckle with how over-the-top horrific it is.

S.T.A.M.I.N.A. RATING

Story & Setting: The notion of being put on trial and forced to prove your innocence by surviving a dungeon is nonsensical, but fun in a pulp fantasy sort of way.  There are some nods in the adventure itself towards making it a prison of sorts, but otherwise it's a generic dungeon with the usual assortment of orcs, monsters and giant creepy-crawlies.  The set-up is interesting, but it barely matters except as an excuse for the player to do some dungeon-crawling.  I'll give it an extra point for making an effort to integrate it with the setting of Allansia. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Toughness: It's decently balanced in terms of combat, with lots of weaker foes and some more difficult ones in area that are harder to get to.  It probably errs on the side of being a little too easy, statistically speaking.  The Golden Idol is deviously well-hidden; I do think that putting it in the river - usually the sort of area that would result in an instant death - is somewhat clever.  All the good points, however, are overshadowed by the requirement to fail a check to succeed.  That's enough to knock this one down to a low rating.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Being stuck in the middle of a magazine never does these mini-adventures any favours, but Warlock always benefits from the presence of the Games Workshop artistic stable.  In this case it's Bob Harvey, whose work we've previously seen in Talisman of Death.  This is a step down from the work on display in that book, with far too many illustrations depicting mundane things such as books, traps, and sleeping old men.  Harvey excels at grotesquerie, and his monsters here are great.  It's a shame he didn't get a crack at drawing the Mud Dragons; the Christos Achilleos painting on the cover that depicts one isn't as fantastical as I'd like.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: This adventure uses the standard instructions copy-pasted from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, with no embellishments.  This means there's an error in the rules from the start, because it says you can only eat provisions when instructed; the adventure never says you can do so.  There are also a few links pointing to the wrong section, and a couple of other bits of rules weirdness (I'm thinking specifically of an awkwardly worded Luck bonus that ends up being a penalty if interpreted literally).  There aren't any game-breaking flaws, but there are enough small ones to add up. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: There's very little going on here that hasn't been seen before. Rating: 1 out of 7.

NPCs & Monsters: For the most part the monsters in this book are drawn from the standard FF/D&D list: orcs, hobgoblins, giant spiders, and the like.  Galon the Birdman is named, as is the two-headed dog Xlaia, but neither are presented differently from similar monsters in earlier adventures.  The Mud Dragons are the only unique monster, but they don't do anything that would make you think of them as actual dragons; in effect they're just large mud-dwelling lizards that can swell themselves up with swamp gas.  There are a few NPCs in the dungeon, but none of them show much personality. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Amusement: This is a weird one, in that I was finding it mildly enjoyable right up until I learned what I had to do to win it.  It's not a classic by any means, but I'm a sucker for a dungeon-crawl.  It was never going to rate super-high in this category, though.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The above scores total 14, which doubled gives a S.T.A.M.I.N.A. Rating of 28.  That makes it the lowest-rated gamebook on the blog so far.  Without its major flaw it might have scraped in ahead of "The Dark Usurper" and "The Dervish Stone" - I certainly enjoyed it more than "The Dark Usurper" - but in the end it was too big a flaw to ignore.

NEXT: I'll do an Exploring Titan on "Dungeon of Justice" and then it's on to The Rings of Kether.