Fighting Fantasy #30: Luke Sharp’s Chasms of Malice. I don’t really want to turn these posts into reviews -- mainly, I just wanted post scans of the best pictures as I go through the series -- but this one requires some comment. At the risk of being a little hard on the pseudonymous Mr. Sharp, this book is just not fun. A lot of people have complained about the difficulty: there’s a lot of random instant deaths and an almost endless series of 50/50 dice rolls. Okay, so that makes the book very difficult, but in a completely arbitrary, random way. For example, the last stretch of the book puts you through a series of paragraphs where in each you are given two options, one of which will lead to instant death. So if you pick the wrong one, just go back to the previous paragraph and pick the other. What a game! So whereas Steve Jackson’s most difficult books will have (sometimes impenetrable) puzzles that take many replays to crack and Ian Livingstone will require you to pick up a huge shopping list of specific items to beat the big bad, their most difficult books are still fun, challenging adventures. What lets down Chasms of Malice isn’t its insane and silly difficulty, but the fact that it’s so boring. Like, the whole thing is just a slog through a series of grey, nondescript caverns. But even then, the underground environment is not fleshed out at all. There’s barely any description, and as a result, no sense of place. You just go from one boring chamber to another. The interior art is by Russ Nicholson, which elevates the book somewhat, but even he seems to be phoning it in (lots of repetitive orc and goblin pictures, whereas the original monsters are generally not illustrated). Cover art by Les Edwards is adequate, but I have no idea who that is (it doesn’t look like the Orghuz shown in the interior). The four-horned horse (koyunlu) is pretty cool, though.
