House of Hell - Attempt 2

I never thought I'd say this at any point in my short span of existence on this mudball planet we call Earth, but I'm kind of sick of House of Hell.  Yes, it's great, maybe one of the greatest gamebooks ever written.  It's been clogging up my blog in one form or another for too long though, and I would really like with this attempt to put it behind me.

My stats for this go around were Skill 7, Stamina 21, Luck 12 and Fear 11.  Those are some respectable scores, but starting weaponless with an effective Skill of 4 is a worry.  Still, with numbers like that I have no excuse for losing.

I've covered it numerous times already, so I'll skim over the opening of the book very quickly: I walked up to the house, knocked on the door, was ushered inside by the butler and enjoyed a lovely meal with the Earl of Drumer before being shown to bed.  In the middle of the night a hunchback brought me some water, so I beat him up and asked him a few questions.  (Last time I had been concerned that I hadn't learned the hunchback's name.  I didn't learn it this time either, despite asking some different questions, so I had that anxiety hanging over me for the whole game.)

I locked the hunchback in the bedroom and set about exploring, and had an encounter with a ghostly bride, who warned me about the evils of the house, and that I'd need the Kris Knife to defeat the Master.  Look, I've described this encounter like a hundred times already.  She gets eaten by ghost dogs.  It's very sad.

(By this point, my Fear was 1, and my Stamina had been reduced to 13 after my fight with the hunchback.)

I fled back around the landing, and opened a door marked 'Azazel'.  It was an old laboratory.  I decided to examine the cupboards, and was shocked to see two fresh corpses hanging from hooks (which raised my Fear to 3).  While I was composing myself two men walked past the room in conversation.  I let them pass by before leaving and heading in the opposite direction.

I passed by a room labelled 'Mephisto', and another named 'Balthus', before opening an unmarked door.  It opened into a short passage with a window at the end.  There was a message written in condensation on the window: 'Mordana in Abaddon'.  I made a mental note of it before returning to the landing.  (The 'Mephisto' room is mostly empty as I recall, and 'Balthus' has a fight with a zombie that I'm definitely too weak to be tackling.)

Further along the landing I came to some stairs leading down, and another unmarked door.  The door opened into a storeroom, where I found a meat-knife and some garlic.  I poked my head through a door at the back of the storeroom, and saw a passage with doors marked 'Mammon' and 'Shaitan'.  Neither of those sounded all that enticing, so I headed back to the landing and continued around.

I walked past an unmarked door, ignored a branching passage, and didn't bother to open the 'Tuttivilus' room (even though it sounded much more fun than any of the other rooms in the house).  Eventually the passage ended at a choice of three doors: 'Belial', 'Abaddon', and another that was unmarked.  I chose the 'Abaddon' room.

Inside was an old lady in a bed, surrounded by plants.  I tried to shake her awake, but she was dead (a revelation that raised my Fear to 5).  The old lady demanded that I leave, but I insisted on asking her some questions.  Instead, she summoned her ghost dogs, which I was forced to fend off with my meat-knife.  Scooby 1 and 2 had a real run of luck with the dice, and by the time I defeated them I was left with a mere 3 Stamina.

After my battle I continued searching the room, and the old lady grew frantic whenever I got near her plants.  With threats to destroy them I continued my questioning, but she refused to answer unless I knew her name.  "Aha!" I shouted.  "It's Mordana!  I saw it written on a window by someone for reasons!"  The old lady begrudgingly answered my questions about secret doors, telling me that the Master's most trusted hiding place was under the cellar stairs.  I would need a password, though, and apparently only someone named Shekou knew the current one.  I took my leave, determined to hunt down this Shekou.  (For plot reasons, it probably makes sense to have talked to the Man in Grey before this, because he's the one who first mentions that the Kris Knife is hidden in a secret room.  It's not strictly necessary though, and was another fight I didn't need to tackle with my Skill so low.)

At this point I decided (or more accurately, the book decided) to head downstairs to the entrance hallway.  There was a door on either side of the hall, as well as the front entrance.  The door on the right was locked, so I opened the one on the left.  It opened into a cosy drawing-room, with a fireplace and a decanter of brandy on the table.  (I'm pretty sure this is where I had some drinks with the Earl of Drumer.)

Being a bit low on health, I decided to self-medicate with some brandy (restoring my Stamina to 6), and also to fill a nearby flask and take it with me.  Following that I went to check out some letters on the mantelpiece, but my sleeve caught in a wooden carving and exposed a secret button.  Before I could decide whether to press it or not, the fireplace sprang to life, and two Fire Sprites floated out to try to burn me alive.  (No Fear points here.  All sorts of things can scare the hero of this book to death, but he has no reaction to a pair of demonic fire entities coming out of the fireplace.  Perhaps he's just desensitized by this point.)

My instinctive reaction was to douse these sprites with the nearest liquid to hand, but pouring brandy on the fire just strengthened them.  I resorted to my meat-knife, which was inexplicably effective despite the Fire Sprites having no solid bodies to speak of.  (The Fire Sprites deal 3 Stamina damage per hit, but a successful Luck test reduces that to 0.  I burned a lot of Luck points ensuring that I took minimal damage in this fight, and by the time it was done I had a Luck of 5 and a Stamina of 3.)

Now I was free to press the button, which I promptly did.  It opened a panel in the corner of the room, but the panel turned out to be false, and I had stumbled into a trap.  The floor collapsed under me, and I tumbled down to land on a pile of hay in an underground cellar.  (This raised my Fear to 6.  I also had to test my Luck to avoid a wrist injury, which I successfully did.)

Someone was coming, so I hid behind the door and waited.  It was my old friend the hunchback, so I stepped out hoping he would remember that I beat the hell out of him when last we met.  He didn't seem to recognise me, and insisted on showing me the way back upstairs.  I decided to jog his memory, with the aid of a little brandy, and he told me that his name was Shekou.  Pretty soon he was well and truly hammered, and I got him blathering about secret doors.  Most importantly, I learned that the password to the secret doors was the name of the house (Drumer), but mixed up.  After that he wised up, and quickly fled, but I had gotten what I was after.

I decided to stay downstairs and explore, but with stealth in mind I ignored a number of doors as I made my way along the passage.  Eventually I came to a larger chamber, with a staircase leading up.  As I crossed the room I was attacked by a swarm of bats (raising my Fear to 7), and took refuge under the stairs, where they were unable to get at me and my precious blood.

Remembering the various clues I had gathered, I searched around for a secret door.  (There's nothing to prompt this choice, but when you learn about the Master's hiding place under the stairs you're told to subtract 10 from your current paragraph when you want to search.  It's one of the trickier puzzles of the Fighting Fantasy series thus far.)  I found the door, and decided to try a password: MURDER.  (The book provides four options here, so it would be possible to stumble on the answer without finding the relevant clues.)

The door opened into a room with a box on a table.  Inside the box, resting on red velvet, was a wavy silver-bladed dagger with a pearl handle: the Kris Knife!  A note informed me that it had been "fashioned for the glorification and pleasure of the Demons of Hellfire", and that it was never to be wielded in their presence.  I took it (restoring my Luck to 7), and searched the room further.

I found another secret door, which also opened with the "Murder" password.  It opened into a room that was an exact mirror of my present location, with a box on a table.  I stepped inside, and opened the box to find another knife much like the Kris Knife, and a flask of black liquid.  What I also discovered was that I had been trapped, as the only door leading out slammed shut.  With no other means of escape, I opened the flask.  Immediately the liquid swirled out in a black cloud, filling the room before retreating back into the flask - taking me with it!  I had been taken by an evil spirit called a Nanka, and was imprisoned forever.

THE POST-GAME

Well, my memory served me well and then it prove to be my downfall.  Finding the Kris Knife was a definite achievement, one of the trickiest things to get to in this book, and that was aided by my memory from the numerous times I've finished the book before.  What I also remembered is that somewhere, at some point, I need to step through a mirror.  I thought that final room was that mirror, but obviously it wasn't, and I paid the price.  At least I know that next time I have a very decent shot at winning, provided my Fear score is high enough, and getting House of Hell off my schedule for a good long while.