Item - Treachery in Drakenwood

I've only made a cursory first attempt at playing this book, but for the most part, I like what I see. There's remarkable freedom of movement thanks to the game's mapping system and the multiple approaches to the object of your quest; it almost seems more like a computer-based text adventure than a traditional gamebook due to the tone of the area descriptions and the non-linearity. Still, while I found playing the game quite entertaining, it was also disheartening in a way -- because of the openness of the adventure, there's a certain feeling that you're looking for a needle in a haystack; the frequent random encounters don't help either, since repetitive combat doesn't do much to get me excited about a gamebook. The biggest obstacle for me, though, was the grid-based mapping. The hex-based outdoor mapping works perfectly and is lots of fun for a map addict like myself, but once you get into the dungeons, things don't seem as well-thought-out. The map segments shown in the text don't include a grid, so it's hard to copy them to graph paper with accuracy. Even if you do copy them exactly, they don't always connect (following one passage, for example, leads to a message about twisting and turning passageways and sticks you somewhere completely different on the map). Once my character was killed, I decided that it would be too time-consuming to make a really serious effort to finish the adventure, and I returned it to the shelf. I'll almost certainly play again someday, as this book has a lot going for it; for the moment, though, it's just a little too much for my schedule.

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