A semi-feral shape-changer, recently enslaved to the warlike Dwarfs of Mirewater, escapes from its imprisonment into the sinister wilds of the nearby Darkwood Forest. There it finds itself drawn into an intrigue to revenge its poor treatment on King Rancibrawn of Mirewater and at the same time save the just Dwarfish people of King Gillibran of Stonebridge on the opposing side of the forest.
A fan-written prequel to Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy gamebook #3, The Forest of Doom, this amateur 500-section gamebook takes some important steps toward making fuller use of its new medium (beyond its Word document and PDF brethren) by making full use of hypertext Choose-Your-Own-Adventure navigation, adding background music and implementing an automatic Java die-roller. The player must still, however, keep track of their inventory and statistics themselves (the old classic Fighting Fantasy standbys SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK, as well as logging the passage of time), optionally on an Adventure Sheet provided. In a couple of places a classic FF plot dynamic is retained, providing instructions to players who keep careful notes about reaching paragraph numbers they should investigate without explicitly telling them where to go.
The player controlling an atypical shape-changing protagonist, an additional play dynamic permits the player character to impersonate others or at least mask their own monstrous appearance at a cost to their own health, through exhaustion.
