- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Puffin Books; paperback / softback edition (26 July 1990)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140340572
- ISBN-13: 978-0140340570
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 11 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 491,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Latest in the Fighting Fantasy series, this book is part game, part novel. Its multi-option adventures involve the reader in role-playing and creating their own adventures. The authors wrote "The Riddling Reaver", an introduction to creating fantasy games and have worked for the Games Workshop.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Like all of its kind, this Fighting Fantasy gamebook is part story part game, with the reader playing the role of a first-person character in the story and having to solve puzzles, fight enemies and make dice rolls to succeed. The setting is high-fantasy with a Chinese inflection, but a lot of the interaction is with humans and humanoids, and the monsters and magic included are very atypical of the series.
Be warned - this is possibly the darkest, most disturbing gamebook in the series. Powers of mutation which fuse living people into a living, heaving mass, maddened convicts set adrift in monstrous inflated bladders, people frozen in place into a mass of mud and parents entombing their child alive are just a few of the things a player will encounter, not to mention similarly disturbing illustrations, and the fact that the player character is unaware of his identity for most of the book. The majority of characters encountered are either tragic, treacherous or insane. If the aim was to create a psychoscape of confusion and misery, the authors have succeeded magnificently.
The book has considerably more of a story than most gamebooks - the player character wakes up in a tomb with no idea of who he is, and fumbles towards recovering knowledge and ability as the story progresses. The story even incorporates a "flashback" like sequence where the character is taken back in time to make choices which will affect the future outcome. Unusually for a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, the story is not simply a series of miniquests and encounters, but involves existential choices and "character development" issues of a kind more familiar from novels.
As a gamebook however, it is very frustrating. The correct path is narrow and extremely linear, and the book is quite cruel to the reader - wrong choices, missed items and failed rolls lead to sudden death with alarming regularity, and there is little predictability or discernable structure. Basically the reader is left trying to guess (not figure out) the correct path and quickly dying if s/he fails to guess correctly. Very often for instance, the player is faced with a choice between using five different magic abilities; usually, one of them is successful, and all the others are fatal. Given the sparsity of alternative routes in most of the book's structure, and the resultant length of the correct path, this becomes frustrating well before the eventual resolution is reached. There's a ridiculously long list of items, skills and allies the reader has to accumulate to succeed. Amazingly, the reader even has to fail one dice roll to successfully complete the gamebook.
In addition, the setting is geographically dubious - flat agricultural plains fuse into dense tropical rainforest, temperate woodlands and rocky areas without any apparent regularity. And the Chinese names for magic spells add more confusion than atmosphere.
Be warned - this is possibly the darkest, most disturbing gamebook in the series. Powers of mutation which fuse living people into a living, heaving mass, maddened convicts set adrift in monstrous inflated bladders, people frozen in place into a mass of mud and parents entombing their child alive are just a few of the things a player will encounter, not to mention similarly disturbing illustrations, and the fact that the player character is unaware of his identity for most of the book. The majority of characters encountered are either tragic, treacherous or insane. If the aim was to create a psychoscape of confusion and misery, the authors have succeeded magnificently.
The book has considerably more of a story than most gamebooks - the player character wakes up in a tomb with no idea of who he is, and fumbles towards recovering knowledge and ability as the story progresses. The story even incorporates a "flashback" like sequence where the character is taken back in time to make choices which will affect the future outcome. Unusually for a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, the story is not simply a series of miniquests and encounters, but involves existential choices and "character development" issues of a kind more familiar from novels.
As a gamebook however, it is very frustrating. The correct path is narrow and extremely linear, and the book is quite cruel to the reader - wrong choices, missed items and failed rolls lead to sudden death with alarming regularity, and there is little predictability or discernable structure. Basically the reader is left trying to guess (not figure out) the correct path and quickly dying if s/he fails to guess correctly. Very often for instance, the player is faced with a choice between using five different magic abilities; usually, one of them is successful, and all the others are fatal. Given the sparsity of alternative routes in most of the book's structure, and the resultant length of the correct path, this becomes frustrating well before the eventual resolution is reached. There's a ridiculously long list of items, skills and allies the reader has to accumulate to succeed. Amazingly, the reader even has to fail one dice roll to successfully complete the gamebook.
In addition, the setting is geographically dubious - flat agricultural plains fuse into dense tropical rainforest, temperate woodlands and rocky areas without any apparent regularity. And the Chinese names for magic spells add more confusion than atmosphere.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Black Vein Prophecy, is very similar to Creature of Havok, where by you beging the adventure not knowing, who you are. And awkening within a tomb.
With the storyline set within the Isles of Dawn and very little background infomation, this puts the reader in to quite unfamiliar territory and with the strange names for the diffrent spells, this book at times is one of the harder, adventures within the fighting fantasy world.
All in all, the storyline is quite good, even if the book does seem very similar to Creature of Havok which is the better out of the two books
Format:Paperback
Most fighting fantasy novels open up with the good hero knowing what threat they are up against (usually a giant monster of some kind from th outside) and vanquishing it in physical combat. Black Vein prophecy is different: when you start you have no idea who you are (having woken in your own grave), the evil is not from the outside (without giving the game away)and if you kill the enemy, you become as bad as he is.
The other stuff mentioned is true: spells mutating people into a living mass, most allies tuning on you at some point, parents burying children alive and maddened criminals.
I was always more of a flicker through the FF books so got more into the story and ideas (as a kid I always remembered BVP being eerie and tricky) than completing them. I do get the feeling that this is one of the tricky ones with some grisly ways to go (mutated beyond all recognition, eaten by killer grubs, betrayed by allies and becoming the evil oppressor to name but a few).
The way to get the good ending is more tricky and clever than most FF, suffice to say it works in a sort of Mobius strip/Terminator 2 way.
I was always a fan of the more offbeat FF where physical combat didn't always bring victory(this, Creature of Havoc and the Hammer Horror themed Moonrunner) but yeah, eerie...
The other stuff mentioned is true: spells mutating people into a living mass, most allies tuning on you at some point, parents burying children alive and maddened criminals.
I was always more of a flicker through the FF books so got more into the story and ideas (as a kid I always remembered BVP being eerie and tricky) than completing them. I do get the feeling that this is one of the tricky ones with some grisly ways to go (mutated beyond all recognition, eaten by killer grubs, betrayed by allies and becoming the evil oppressor to name but a few).
The way to get the good ending is more tricky and clever than most FF, suffice to say it works in a sort of Mobius strip/Terminator 2 way.
I was always a fan of the more offbeat FF where physical combat didn't always bring victory(this, Creature of Havoc and the Hammer Horror themed Moonrunner) but yeah, eerie...
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