The Gaming Den

The fifth Dragon Warriors book, The Power of Darkness was written by Oliver Johnson, who also wrote the third, The Elven Crystals. Apparently he also came up with the name "Dragon Warriors", Dave Morris wanting to use "Dead Men and Heroes", but later agreed that that name didn't say "fantasy" or "buy this product" the way something with the word "Dragon" in it does.

As an aside, what's with that cover? The first introduced Knights and Barbarians as adventures and has a picture on the cover of a Knight and a Barbarian in an adventure, the second was about magic stuff and features a magician on the cover, the third involves (in part) fighting dark riders from a castle and has a picture of an adventuring party fighting a dark rider near a castle, the fourth introduces Assassins and new monsters and the cover has some monsters in it (but I don't think she's supposed to be an Assassin). This book has a Knight on horseback ride up to a ledge over a fiery chasm to face a wizard who is standing on the hand of a giant monster, or maybe a statue of one.

Elementalists
Not Chapter One: Elementalist, and not Chapter One: The Masters of the Elements or something, this book is set out a teensy bit different from the Morris ones. Anyway, while I mentioned in my review of the previous book, Out of the Shadows, that Assassins seem over-powered, I'd give a funny look to anyone who said the same of Elementalists. Or who said that they were as good as Sorcerers. If they said they were better than random humans you met at an inn, I'm not saying I'd totally disagree, but I might have to think about it. A normal human that follows you for 6 underworld adventures gets promoted to a Rank 1 Knight, and an Elementalist that does the same stays an Elementalist, albeit they'd probably be Rank 2 or 3.

At first glance, the Elementalist looks a lot like the Sorcerer (which makes judging their relative worth a lot easier, comparing apples to apples rather than aardvarks). They have the same requirements for Intelligence and Psychic Talent, get the same beginning stats (the book stats these increase with Rank the same as the Sorcerer), they get Magic Points scores. That's scores, plural, you pick one of the four classic elements as your main one and get 3 MPs for that, and the two others that aren't opposed to your main (fire being opposed to water, and earth being opposed to air) get 1 MP each. So, while a Sorcerer starts with 4 MPs, an Elementalist starts with a total of 5. A 1st Rank Fire Elementalist, for example, can cast their Fire spell 3 times, their Earth spell once and their Air spell once before having to recharge. That's spell, singular. For each element, there is one, and only one, spell per Rank. That's not very good.

A 1st Rank Sorceror can cast their only fire based spell, Dragonbreath, up to 4 times per day (or, you know, any 4 of their 6 spells in whatever combination they want), whereas the 1st Rank Fire Elementalist can only cast their only fire spell 3 times before recharging. Dragonbreath is an attack spell that lets Sorcerers shoot fire at their enemies, doing a not inconsiderable amount of damage if it hits. The 1st Rank Fire Elementalist spell is called "Candle". It creates a magic candle only they can see. This is not a useless spell to have, but if you could pick either Dragonbreath or Candle as the one spell you got to cast, you'd almost certainly pick Dragonbreath. Sorcerers don't have to pick one, of course, they get six. The 1st Rank Water Elementalist spell "Rain", creates light rainfall in a 5m radius. The Air Elementalist is creating a gentle breeze, and the Earth Elementalist is producing one piece of fruit per round until the spell expires. The other adventurers are less than impressed. The don't get any offensive spells until Rank 3, the Fire Elementalist can cast a spell on an enchanted arrow and turns it into an Attack 20, (d10, 10) thing briefly. Which is not too bad if you have a bow and an enchanted arrow, I guess. Earth and Air Elementalists don't get offensive (by which I mean "spells to cast at an enemy", not even limiting it to those that'd directly hurt something) spells until Rank 4, though if you'd majored in either of those you'd minor in Fire and Water, so at Rank 3 you'd be able to cast you offensive spell 3 times before recharging for Fire or Water, and your two offensive spells once each for Air and Earth. This is also not very good.

Now, in fairness, there is some decent stuff once you hit higher Ranks. The Rank 8 Earth Elementalist spell, "Give up the Dead" gives you some Skeletons. Oddly, you don't cast it at dead people like you'd expect, you cast it at the ground and hope someone is buried there. 95% chance of 1-12 Skeletons in a burial ground, 10% chance of 1-2 in open ground. Odd way of doing it. Finally you can stop the Sorcerer from making fun of you, they've been raising 1-6 Skeletons with one of the six Rank 5 spells for ages. And will be able to raise a permanent one (or rather, one at a time) when they hit Rank 9 (though, with 1 less Attack than normal, but I think that's a typo). The Rank 10 spells are legitimately powerful, though, the Water Elementalist creating a (narrow) tidal wave that goes half a mile inland, good for fire and forget removing entire villages of annoying NPCs, the others summoning a rather nasty monster. The Air Elementalist monster goes away after it kills person, though, the other ones last for an hour, again good for mass NPC removal. Of course, you don't want to bump into a Rank 10 Sorcerer in a dark alleyway either.

There's a couple of other problems with Elementalists. To regain MPs, Sorcerers just have to wait til midnight and they immediately go back to maximum again. Elementalists recharge by performing a Ritual of Recovery, one for each category of magic they have. They have to have used all their MPs in that category first, which doesn't really matter, but makes me think there'd be a lot of light rainfall and fruit suddenly appear to empty their batteries before recharging. The rituals have to be done at specific times of day, and you can't do more than one in a 24 hour period. So, if you are an Air Elementalist and you've created lots of light breezes, you'd do your Ritual of Recovery at noon. You won't be able to do another until noon the next day, at which time it's too late to do your Ritual of Recovery for Fire, because that has to be done at sunrise. Wait another day for that. Doesn't say how long the rituals take, and it would really be annoying to be in the middle of something and miss your opportunity. The real adventures are off having real adventures while you are trying to get the ability to make candles back. This is also, also not very good.

And another thing. To be able to cast a spell normally, you have to have some special equipment specific to your element. I think you just need the one for your main element and it works for the minor ones as well, it's a bit unclear. If you don't have it, your spells cost twice as much. So your Rank 1 Fire Elementalist can make one magic candle before recharging at sunrise, and that's it. It doesn't give the availability for this equipment like it does for the normal stuff in the first book, nor does it say which count as items for encumbrance. It does give the prices. 5 florins for the stuff for the Earth or Fire Elementalists, 1 GP (10 Florins) for Water, 10 GPs (100 Florins) for Air. That's not very fair, and Elementalists start with only 2-20 Florins. This is also, also, also not very good.

Oh, and in the review of the last book, I mentioned being underwhelmed by the special abilities you get when you reach high ranks. None of that here, Elementalists don't get any of that, no special abilities at all. Maybe Johnson didn't know about what Morris put in the previous book?

On the plus side, Sorcerers start off with a Shortsword or a Staff (and will pick the Shortsword), whereas Elementalists get both a Sword and a Staff. And a Shield and Hard Leather Armour. Good thing, as they'll want to fight in melee combat, not because they are good at it (average human combat stats), but because that's all they can do. So, that's a plus, just a really, really small one. Especially as the Sorcerer starts off with two magic potions. And also a Dagger, which I always thought would be useful to throw at people if they wanted to stay out of a melee whilst contributing somewhat to a fight when they've got no magic to cast. Elementalists not having any useful magic to cast, a Dagger in their starting equipment may have been very useful.

So, that's either "awful" or "a characterful NPC profession" depending on how charitable you feel. I've have no idea how Johnson didn't see the problems there. Ok, maybe you might overlook the problems with the Ritual of Recovery and the special equipment you need if you weren't paying too much attention, but surely you'd notice the 1 spell per Rank thing and the spells being weak? Would require quite a bit of mucking about to get things balanced, perhaps there was a deadline he was struggling with, apparently they had problems with that sort of thing. Myself, I'd get rid of the Ritual of Recovery stuff, you want all your MPs back the same as Sorcerers get, and you want your working day to be the same as others in the party. Probably get rid of the special equipment stuff, looks sorta cool, just doesn't work. You could make it part of the starting equipment and have nobody care about it, or maybe something you need to get at some point but doesn't matter, say, before Rank 3. You could lose the separate amounts of MPs and have spells from your main element cost half as much. You could have more than 1 spell per element per rank. But, just 1 per element per Rank comes out as 50, and doubling that makes 100 spells and only 2 per rank, a lot of effort to create and still not that many options in the way things are set up.

You will note that I said 50, not 40 there, because in any depiction of the four classical elements written after Zoroaster you have to have more than four. Aristole had aether (and thus he's to blame for GW's Tau Ethereals), Captain Planet had heart, Vampire Academy had spirit, the Fifth Element had Milla Jovovich and so on. The Power of Darkness has...ok, you can probably guess, it's in the name.

Darkness Elementalists kinda save the whole thing, taking it from "I wouldn't play an Elementalist, but they might make an ok NPC I guess" to "I still wouldn't play an Elementalist, but they'd make for cool villains". They are described as being really evil (so you shouldn't want to play them) and have serious drawbacks (so you actually won't want to play them), but the drawbacks are part their appeal. You can't pick Darkness as a minor element, it has to be your major, but you can pick any two as your minor. Their magic is better than that of the normal Elementalists (admittedly, a low bar), but there are costs to using it. After the tenth time you cast the spell to increase your stealth, you permanently lose your shadow. If you use the spell that creates a zone of darkness that can drive people made, but roll badly and nobody does, you get affected yourself. That's nice and characterful, you are playing with dark forces after all.

Additionally, when you cast one of spells for your minor elements, they get an evil power up. You don't create fruit, you create nice looking, but poison fruit. You don't create rain, you create mildly acidic rain. Your magic candle creates darkness around you that increase your Evasion and Defence. Your light breeze carries voices of false rumours and conspiratorial whispering. On the other extreme, your Rank 10 summon fire monster spells doesn't just give you a monster that serves you for an hour and then disappears, it serves you for an hour and then stays for a second hour killing everyone it can.

Either way, not at all a viable PC choice, but useful as NPCs or villains. Their special equipment is something created by an 8+ Rank Darkness Elementalist in the Lost City of Nem, so they are sorta region locked in a way everyone else isn't. As an aside, 8th rank is when you start to get extra abilities in Out of the Shadows, so maybe Johnson had read that after all, and that's their ability?

Madness
After that, another 6 pages of "not very good". Never been big on having rules for mental illnesses in games, but that might just be me. Presumably it could be done well for DW (the book says "good role-playing is required"), either in the sense of dealing with the serious issue of mental health or in the sense of having fun rules to use, but that'd be something that requires more than 6 pages of barebones stuff. Either put a lot of effort in to do it right, or skip it. Hard nope from me.

After all that, the rest of the book is "seven interlinked adventure scenarios". Now, I liked the ones Johnson did back in The Elven Crystals, and I remember these being alright, if very long. Which is odd, as this book turns out to be the same length as his previous one, and has a lot more space taken up by rules. Re-reading it, this one seems so long because it just drags, there's a lot of random stuff that follows other random stuff and now I'm feeling disillusioned. Also, while it's nominally 7, "The Hall of the Frost Giants" is a hall (containing Frost Giants) and 6 adjoining rooms that's stuck onto "The Mountains of Brack".

There's some decent stuff in there, the whole thing begins with some predictable, but competent backstory in the form of local legends. Balor, the Prince of Darkness lived up north, he got defeated and imprisoned in ages past. A Prince went missing looking for him, he came back as an undead monster. Some not-Roman Legionairres also went looking at some point and none came back. Nothing great, but fair enough.

The King's Tower
The party gets hired to guard the King's tower (containing sacred fire) during the one time in the year he comes out on the balcony and is seen by the public, cause they always get foreigners to do that for some reason. The King only comes out once a year, leaving the ruling of the kingdom to the Steward, officially because he's become a hermit, but really cause the Steward secretly killed him and made him into a zombie because the Steward is in league with the undead Prince. Also nothing great, but also fair enough.

Everything goes dark and the place is attacked by the giant evil birds of Balor, who steal the King and the sacred fire and fly off north. It goes dark because of magic the Steward used (because he's a Darkness Elementalist), which works differently to the spell descriptions earlier in this book. I'm going to interpret this as evil magic being hard to pin down, not that the author is fudging the rules they just introduced. You get to look in the tower very briefly and then the PCs (and heir to the throne, the King's Nephew whose name isn't spelt consistently, but who is an adventurer with about the same Rank as the PCs and a drinking problem) are blamed and exiled from the city unless they can get the (presumed dead) King's body and sacred fire back.

It's presumed that at some point you'll expose the Steward as evil, and I like that it doesn't have to be at a set point in the adventure. You can have a crack at him right away, but you have to fight all his guards because you've got no real evidence. If you win, the city Elders decide they agree with you, but try to get you to go north to do the rest of the adventure anyway. Apparently the Steward was well-regarded, and I don't see how killing him proves he is evil, and the book doesn't give any reason for the Elders to side with you then. So, looks a lot like murder hobos just pulled off a coup. In which case, they shouldn't have to do the adventure alone, they could get some troops to go with them. Even if the Elders just take your side, you should be able to do that.

The Inn of Chang
If you don't defeat the Steward, his two Barbarian bodyguards escort you out of the city and part of the way north. I like that it mentions that they are fairly loyal due to being well-payed, but aren't going to die for him, rather than being mindless loyal mooks. Anyway, they try to get you to stop at Chang's inn (which doesn't seem to have its own name). If you did defeat the Steward, I guess the GM tries to railroad you into there?

What happens next is mostly up to the GM. In that, there's stats and a map and a timeline and stuff, but if the GM makes it seem like a flavour text inn, like every other inn in every scenario in the books up til then, everyone will die. OTOH, if the GM starts talking about how there are two sets of lock on the doors, and the people who brought you to the inn avoid the food and drink...yeah, everyone seems likely to stay in one room and set watches at best, or jump straight to the murderhoboing at worst. If you were super lucky, maybe everyone gets drugged, but it only affect some PCs so the Chang (who is a vampire) is a challenge when the other PCs almost immediately spot what's happened. I get what this scenario was going for, but don't see how it'd work in practice. It's also a bit bare bones and generic, just a random inn run by a vampire, could stick it into almost any game.

The Siren Woods
Assuming you survive, you get some flavour text about traveling north (the Barbarians might have nicked your horses) and find a village (which also hasn't got a name) and go to the inn (which has). After the last one, I like to imagine the players keep interupting the GMs to ask questions about the layout of the inn and how fierce the inhabitants look.

Anyway, the landlord tells you that a rider went north into the Siren Woods, but that you shouldn't go after him because everyone who goes into the wood gets killed. But if you do go after him, you should stick to the path, because if you stick to the path you'll be perfectly fine. Erm...?

As an aside, assuming nobody goes north (despite there being a path), this would make the village the northern border of the Kingdom, which means it consists of one city, one inn (now without an owner, presumably) and one nameless village. Compares favourable to Ereworn in The Elven Crystals, I guess.

Anyway, presumably the PCs will follow the random horse rider, believing him to be connected with giant birds that abduct zombie kings. If they do so, they will encounter 4 things on the way to the village of Mimir to the north. Yeah, those 4 things (an entire 6 pages, and a picture) are the majority of one of the scenarios, that's how he got to having 7 of those. I do like how you can stick to the path (as advised) and basically skip them. Especially as they are pretty underwhelming, random magical stuff that, again, you could stick into almost any generic game. Feels a bit like an early Fighting Fantasy book that hasn't settled on a consisten theme (Oliver Johnson did The Lord of Shadow Keep for them). Some decent treasure to pick up, though.

OTOH, I rather like one of them, you get ambushed by some elves that shoot darts from blowpipes at you (or rather, near you, as they all miss, because you are on the path), if you leave the path to go after them you go straight into a magic spiderweb thingy and get stuck while they shoot at you some more. You can't catch the elves, because they move too fast, but if you can get one with missile weapons or magic they stop to protect the wounded. You've got a good reason to leave the path, the ambush is simple but logical, they elves are trying for hit and run, but it falls apart for them if they have to extract a casualty under fire. The darts are poisoned, but they don't kill you, just cause some weird effects. Was going to say the effects were terrible, as the descriptions say things like "irreversible", but reading it again it also says that a Dispel Magic cures the permanent ones. So, as long as you have a Sorcerer of 6th Rank or higher, they are unusual annoyances, not unusual ways of not being able to play that PC anymore.

Anyway, you reach the village of Mimir and rescue the locals from an evil messenger carrying a message from the evil Steward to the evil Prince about how evil he is. Getting that back to the Elders proves him to be evil if you've not fought him already. The villagers also tell you that there's a Temple of Mimir nearby, which has nothing whatsoever to do with anything (beyond some of the not-Romans from ages ago went there, and they also went to the place the scenario after this is set), but you probably want to have a look for no reason.

The City of Mimir
The book callled it a temple before, now it's a city. A city that's about 100 metres by 50 metres, and dug underground so most of that is solid rock. That is not a city. It is, in fact, a dungeon, of the "one random thing after another for no reason" type. Sigh. It's got nothing to do with the rest of the adventure, and the individual parts have nothing much to do with each other.

You either have to listen to a ghost or solve a puzzle to get in. The puzzle being "Find the 14 upright of the 26", those being the 14 capital letters in the alphabet that have upright strokes in them and decode something based on that. Which means that the ancients wrote in modern English, I guess, and I wonder how much they had to rewrite that when translating the book into other languages. I could imagine the PCs getting stuck for ages on that one and probably give up, there's no other clues.

Everything in here is "meh" at best, and a lot is just bad. For example, there's Succubi in there, which are described as being pink, having 4 arms, tails and a monkeylike face. He's taken the name of a monster (one which fits the DW theme and setting pretty well, except it's aimed for a young audience), and stuck it on a totally unrelated monster. And one that's neither interesting in of itself, or is doing anything more interesting than sitting round in the end of a passageway in an abandoned City/Temple/Thingy waiting for adventurers to attack. Again, lots of treasure though, but you are unlikely to need it.

The Mountains of Brack
The book explicitly asks if you want to continue with adventuring north, or going back to confront the Steward (if you haven't already), and then presumably being sent back up here to continue. I like that it's avoiding forcing you on an almost linear path.

If you go north, you are forced on a almost linear path through the mountains. If I squint my brain a bit, this scenario looks a bit better than the last two. Johnson is trying something here. He's not really succeeding, but I can respect some kind of effort. The not-Romans tried crossing the mountains, and all got killed off in the process. Which, ok, that's not a bad idea, but it's not really developed beyond walking past lots of dead-Legionairres in this one. Apparently the Legion just marched through the place, people getting killed one at a time or in small groups and being abandoned by their comrades who just kept marching on til something killed them in turn. There's a thematic link of cold to the monsters here. In that they tend to have "Ice" in their name. Ice Spectre, Ice Statue, Ice Snake, Ice Octopus. There's an Ice Octopus. Sigh. There's also a Rime Wraith later on, when Johnson got tired of using the word "Ice". This monster looks particularly annoying as it has a special ability where if you make a successful attack roll (that is, hit it in combat), you've got a 50-50 chance of you not hitting it, it just appears behind you so you miss and it auto-hits you. It can't auto hit you if you miss, so if that happens you'd have been better off if you rolled badly. Also annoying in that there's another monster which a differently written version of the same ability a bit earlier.

You do have competent sections, such as some of the dead Legionairres you're walking over being brought back to life by a monster. That is by no means original or inventive or clever or anything, but it's not bad, much better than random monsters with "Ice" in front of their name sitting round at points in a linear tunnel.

Also, quite a few ways to get instakilled here, because you didn't work out the puzzle (or realise there was one), or because you've got stuck alone on a slippery ledge over a giant cliff without any warning. Some half-hearted attempts to be more than "meh", but didn't really get there.

The Hall of the Frost Giants
This is a hall (containing a pair of Frost Giants) and 6 adjoining rooms that's stuck onto "The Mountains of Brack". I like how you can get into there from two different points in the Mountains of Brack, and there's a part in there that teleports you back to that scenario. Though, to the Rime Wraith and plummet to your death part. You can also skip the whole pointless thing, so, that's nice. Yeah, I'm scraping the barrel looking for the silver lining.

There's nothing much bad here, because there's nothing much here. There is a Darkness Elementalist they've caught who was going north, so, foreshadowing maybe? Also, how do Darkness Elementalists go north with all the Ice (insert random monster name here) to fight through?

The Temple of Balor
More or less everything between The King's Tower and the Temple is just padding, random things you do before you get to where you are going. You could swap it with entering a moose wrestling contest and as long as a Darkness Elementalist or evil messenger or two were also competing it'd not make any real difference to the adventure.

Before you actually get to the temple, you have to climb down the mountain, and try not to fall off. Difficulty 14, compared to Reflexes I guess, but it doesn't actually specify what Stat to use. If you call off, you get instakilled unless you thought ahead and are roped together. If you don't take everyone else with you when you fall, they can roll to bring you back up. If you fail...presumably something bad happens, but it's not specified. The book mentions cutting the rope rather than rolling, so presumably it's worse than just the one person falling (or Johnson wants you to start randomly murdering each other). If it's the whole party, that's a total party kill with just two bad rolls near the end of the adventure, ouch.

You also get some random encounters to fight (while roped together, which presumably should affect things, but doesn't. Do monsters have to worry about falling off as well?). A few notable possibilities, you can meet a Frost Giant from the last section if you haven't already, the ghost of the leader of not-Romans, the Yeti from book 3, a monster you'd otherwise find later guarding the temple, an Ice Snake. Not the same as the Ice Snake you met a little while ago, that was a giant constrictor that breathes Freeze spells at you, this one is small and has Freeze spells instead of venom. They are two different monsters and he didn't give a better name than "Ice Snake" to either of them. I do like the idea of fighting monsters wandering round you'd otherwise have to fight at the temple, though, instead of wandering monsters being totally random things that just appear out of nowhere. This section does illustrate that DW struggles with having enough normal monsters for each terrain type, Snow Apes and Frost Giants are about it, with the odd real animal like Bears or stuff you make up for the adventure to pad it out.

When you reach the temple, it's a giant maze. To the extent that there's a maze at the end of the book players get shown and have to (quickly) work their way through. If they get it wrong and walk past certain dead ends, they get attacked by up to 3 Assassins and maybe the undead Prince. If they get it right, they get attacked by the assassins anyway, but all at once in the middle of the maze, which is a location that favours them. Yeah, might want to rethink that, bit pointless at best.

The assassin stats are a bit weird, in particular the Armour Bypass and damage scores. I think Johnson meant for one of the assassins to have bonuses due to high Strength, but didn't state this was the case (NPC Strength scores aren't usually given) and included bonuses some of the time but not others. The Prince has all the permanent negatives from being a Darkness Elementalist, included one that isn't normally permanent. And that one blinds him if he suddenly sees bright light, so he gets reduced from a threat to a pushover if anyone happens to cast Dragonbreath or something at him. Or if he uses any Fire magic. Fire is one of his secondary elements. Erm. Also, this is the lost City of Nem you are in, the only place from where Darkness Elementalists get their special equipment from, and this guy is the only one there to get it from.

Anyway, when you get to the middle theres's a pool of acid you want to avoid, as it burns you and permanently damages armour. Or maybe it permanently burns you as well, bit unclear. Permanently damaging your nice armour is something that'd really annoy players, but I guess it might make them care about the otherwise superfluous magic armour lying around.

To get to the next part of the temple, you have to get magically attacked by a darkness totem and either fail the roll to resist or intentionally fail, which I don't remember being a thing you could do. If you successfully resist you get chucked in the acid pool, if you don't you get teleported away (the rest of the party possibly thinking you got instakilled and wanting to avoid falling to the magical attack). There's fire, air and earth totems to play with and they just hurt you if they can, there's no reason to think that you should try failing to resist the evil magic attack. Yeah, could see people getting stuck on this bit for a while.

The next level down is not quite one of those dungeons where it's one random thing after another. But it's close. Of particular note is another weird pool, except bad things happen if you don't get in it this time, and there's no real hint of this given.

Also, a bit where there's some writing on a wall that mentions something about SPEED (written in caps the way SPEED stat is), and then 5 numbers. Those being the 5 SPEED stats of something you are about to encounter. The in-universe people who built the temple wrote stuff about the the rules of the game. That...no. Now, admittedly, they wrote those numbers in base 5 and didn't hint at what they are doing, so you probably won't know what all that's about. Though I am imagining Adam West's Batman playing this with the Riddler as GM and spotting it right away. If you get past the 5 things, you get a +3 suit of Plate Armour, and this one counts as hardened leather for encumbrance. Now, not sure what encumbrance means, does it mean that you only get the stealth penalties of hardened leather? That you only get the combat penalties of hardened leather if you're one of the Professions that don't use plate (everyone other than Knights)? That it doesn't interfere with Sorcerers (or Elementalists if anyone bothered with them) casting spells? All of those? Any or all of those would make that thing really valuable to various people, on top of +3 being the highest bonus you can get for armour and Plate being the best. I'd expect everyone not a Mystic to have a big argument over who gets this.

You also have to get past some monsters you instakill if you can make "one successful strike" against. No Defence value is given, so is that supposed to be 0, roll under you Attack to hit? In a few places you take damage from things, but "armour protects"...sometimes this is specified to mean you subtract your Armour Factor from the damage, othertimes I guess that's what he means but he's forgotten that bit? There's a lot of little bits like this that need tidying.

You also meet the undead King who tries to suicide bomb you, and you can put out the fires that is melting the ice Balor is locked in. If you forget to do this, you can still "win", but he'll get out and mess things up. Don't know if this is supposed to be just this kingdom of one city and one village, or if that's the world. Also, it says that the Prince was going to use the 10th Level spell to awaken Balor, which is not quite what the spell does in the rules, and seems to be unnecessary if he can just leave the fire going. Go back and the King's Nephew gets to be the new king if alive, or one of the PCs if not. Better hope the next book has rules for being a king then (spoilers: it does not).

And that's the book. All in all, not very impressive. The individual parts have concepts that average out as "alright" (the bit with the not-Romans is better, the random city of Mimir is worse), but they just aren't developed beyond the first one which is just setting things up.

I want to like it, but this book just doesn't really work. The rules for Elementalists needs a big re-write, the rules for madness should probably be dropped, each adventure scenario beyond the first needs a rewrite to be more than just one random thing after another. Lots of tidying up and editing and silly little things to fix as well.

Now, I know Johnson struggled with deadlines on some other projects with Dave Morris, this might be some more of that. A new type of Sorcerer with element based magic is an alright idea, and evil version is a decent idea, adding madness rules is a defensible idea and an adventure about cultists trying to awaken a Prince of Darkness is a reasonable idea. But, coming up with the idea is easy, but putting the work in to make it function, and function in an established setting, that's obviously the hard bit. Looks like he gave it a go, just couldn't get it to stick. May as well just skip this book.

I've got the new-version Dragon Warriors version "Prince of Darkness" published by Mongoose, which expands on the "kingdom" a bit.

It also has the adventure in it, but I don't remember it being as bad as the version in the original gamebook. Maybe they improved it; I'll have to dig it out and have a look.

Elementalists aren't in it, I think they might be in the core rulebook. They are still crap, obviously.

The adventure seems to be word for word the same as the original, though with the exception that they've added Reflexes scores for the monsters, which is a big improvement. They've also got new artwork.

The expansion stuff for the kingdom doesn't seem bad, but it doesn't seem to gel well with the old DW stuff. OTOH, I do like the idea that Balor's Temple is only part of the big Lost City of Nem, just cause some adventurers have messed that place up doesn't mean there aren't other places there with Darkness Elementalists up to no good. As it's the home of Darkness Elementalists, this is a big plus. Though it says they don't play well together at all, which they'd sorta need to do.

All the Professions got put in the core rulebook, yeah. Elementalists seem to have kept their spells much the same and still have the need to have their special equipment, but they did loose the rituals to get MPS back, so there's that. As well as spells, they also can use MPS as "raw elemental force" to attack people (for which there are rules) or for element-related things for which there are examples but no hard rules. They also get protection from their related elements, but unless if it's another Elementalist using it at them, this is at the GM's discretion.

Which looks like they've recognised and tried to correct them being under-powered, at the expense of rules that are under-defined. Shame, as they seemed to be on the right track.