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Fighting Fantasy #23
Masks of Mayhem
The safety of the earth is in YOUR hands!
Morgana, the fell sorceress of Krill Garnash, is poised to let loose her dreaded Golems, which none are able to resist. For she has equipped them with the Masks of Mayhem, which give them power over all things. Only YOU can end her evil designs - but beware: peril and treachery await you at every turn, and help is hard to find.
Two dice, a pencil and an eraser are all you need to make your journey. YOU decide which way to go, which dangers to risk and which monsters to fight.
Morgana, the fell sorceress of Krill Garnash, is poised to let loose her dreaded Golems, which none are able to resist. For she has equipped them with the Masks of Mayhem, which give them power over all things. Only YOU can end her evil designs - but beware: peril and treachery await you at every turn, and help is hard to find.
Two dice, a pencil and an eraser are all you need to make your journey. YOU decide which way to go, which dangers to risk and which monsters to fight.
208 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 1986
123 people want to read
About the author
Robin Waterfield
110 books697 followersRobin Anthony Herschel Waterfield is a British classical scholar, translator, editor, and writer of children's fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 23, 2015
A very tricky gamebook indeed
10 August 2012
I must say that this is one of the hardest gamebooks that I have read and when I scanned some reviews of it (which, unfortunately are not on Goodreads, nor can I find the webpage anymore) I discovered a very mixed reaction: from brilliance to rubbish. In this book you are the ruler of a land that is under threat from a witch who is trying to acquire what are known as the Masks of Mayhem. With them she can create powerful golems and thus overrun your lands and others there about. As such, you set off on what turns out to be a very long quest across the land to confront, and hopefully destroy, her creations.
I will start out with what I liked and then outline what I didn't like. This gamebook is epic in scope in that the adventure, in game time, appears to take at least a couple of months to complete. Now, I must admit that as I am not using dice and a pencil as I make my way through these gamebooks namely because I am trying to complete them as quickly as possible so that I can assess them and write up a review. Some might say that I am cheating: let them. The second thing is that food plays a much more important role in this gamebook than in others. In others you eat, regain your stamina, and on you go. However, here you must keep track of your food because if you run out bad things can happen.
Now for the bad parts of this book, and I will start off with the issue of food. While it plays an important part at the beginning, it seems to suddenly drop off, and then vanish at the end - there is no consistency. Secondly it can be very hard to actually find out what you need to do to complete the quest. At one point there is a vague reference to something you have to do somewhere, however it does not become clearer until after you have either got, or missed, one of the items required. Mind you, choices play a very significant role in this book, and even a choice such as moving or waiting can seriously effect the outcome of the game.
One of the items you will only stumble across by chance, and that is if you make the right choices to get there. Once there, it all comes down to the roll of a dice as to whether you find it or not. However once you have found it, and you know what you are looking for, you will know the choice to make. It comes down to what items you get and what people you meet. As with other gamebooks, if you have missed an item then the game becomes impossible to complete. However, the most annoying thing about this book is discovering the identity of the real villain. I will not give any hints, but I noticed that I was not the only one to be sent on the completely wrong track.
While not giving away the identity of the traitor (and the number you have to turn to is hidden in his name; another hint: you need to consider each of the characters that you have encountered to find it, however the name, you will note, is quite odd indeed). Anyway, the character that I (and many others) thought was the traitor is little more than a red herring, but I suspect that all of the bad things that happen in this location are designed to throw you off the path. However, the hint I will give you is that there is only one ruler, and that is you, so if you are the ruler, then no other rulers can be the traitor. However, the problem is that it is only when you know the name of the traitor that you turn around and confront the person. I would have thought that you would have been cunning enough to turn around whether you knew the identity or not.
I will give this a higher rating because it is really tricky, and finding the numbers can be difficult indeed. There are a lot of things hidden in the text and you will need to take meticulous notes of what you have acquired (right to the location of the paragraph where the item was described). I read that apparently when Steve Jackson asked for feedback there was a lot of 'make them harder' and I guess once we arrived at Masks of Mayhem, they seemed to have gone overboard with the difficulty level.
10 August 2012
I must say that this is one of the hardest gamebooks that I have read and when I scanned some reviews of it (which, unfortunately are not on Goodreads, nor can I find the webpage anymore) I discovered a very mixed reaction: from brilliance to rubbish. In this book you are the ruler of a land that is under threat from a witch who is trying to acquire what are known as the Masks of Mayhem. With them she can create powerful golems and thus overrun your lands and others there about. As such, you set off on what turns out to be a very long quest across the land to confront, and hopefully destroy, her creations.
I will start out with what I liked and then outline what I didn't like. This gamebook is epic in scope in that the adventure, in game time, appears to take at least a couple of months to complete. Now, I must admit that as I am not using dice and a pencil as I make my way through these gamebooks namely because I am trying to complete them as quickly as possible so that I can assess them and write up a review. Some might say that I am cheating: let them. The second thing is that food plays a much more important role in this gamebook than in others. In others you eat, regain your stamina, and on you go. However, here you must keep track of your food because if you run out bad things can happen.
Now for the bad parts of this book, and I will start off with the issue of food. While it plays an important part at the beginning, it seems to suddenly drop off, and then vanish at the end - there is no consistency. Secondly it can be very hard to actually find out what you need to do to complete the quest. At one point there is a vague reference to something you have to do somewhere, however it does not become clearer until after you have either got, or missed, one of the items required. Mind you, choices play a very significant role in this book, and even a choice such as moving or waiting can seriously effect the outcome of the game.
One of the items you will only stumble across by chance, and that is if you make the right choices to get there. Once there, it all comes down to the roll of a dice as to whether you find it or not. However once you have found it, and you know what you are looking for, you will know the choice to make. It comes down to what items you get and what people you meet. As with other gamebooks, if you have missed an item then the game becomes impossible to complete. However, the most annoying thing about this book is discovering the identity of the real villain. I will not give any hints, but I noticed that I was not the only one to be sent on the completely wrong track.
While not giving away the identity of the traitor (and the number you have to turn to is hidden in his name; another hint: you need to consider each of the characters that you have encountered to find it, however the name, you will note, is quite odd indeed). Anyway, the character that I (and many others) thought was the traitor is little more than a red herring, but I suspect that all of the bad things that happen in this location are designed to throw you off the path. However, the hint I will give you is that there is only one ruler, and that is you, so if you are the ruler, then no other rulers can be the traitor. However, the problem is that it is only when you know the name of the traitor that you turn around and confront the person. I would have thought that you would have been cunning enough to turn around whether you knew the identity or not.
I will give this a higher rating because it is really tricky, and finding the numbers can be difficult indeed. There are a lot of things hidden in the text and you will need to take meticulous notes of what you have acquired (right to the location of the paragraph where the item was described). I read that apparently when Steve Jackson asked for feedback there was a lot of 'make them harder' and I guess once we arrived at Masks of Mayhem, they seemed to have gone overboard with the difficulty level.
August 19, 2014
So ridiculous difficult...
September 13, 2020
Morganna the Witch has devised a set of twelve masks that she's going to use to raise twelve unstoppable golems. You, as king of Arion, have to stop her. Not with army or knights or anything, but by traveling across the wilderness to her lair, single-handed.
By personal standards at least, this is not a good gamebook. It does what a lot of the more difficult checklist gamebooks do--that is, it appears open in terms of choice, but when you try to actually complete it, you'll find that your path is gated by a number of items you need: an orb, a sceptre, advice from a bard, a page of history, advice from a dying woman, a ghost army that owes you a favor, a healing potion for that dying woman, a helmet, and a tusk obtained by intruding on a family in a cave and murdering the family patriarch. That's mostly fine (the murdering isn't great, but pretty common evil = I can kill it with impunity thinking typical to this era). It also has the usual checklist feature where there's no real way to know that you need these items, except by trial and error. Again, not particularly enjoyable, but at least normal. (It does have a meta-interesting twist where the item it flags the most, a Horn, turns out to be pretty not useful, despite having a substantial quest associated with it.)
What elevates the gamebook into exceptionally annoying is that one of this item set, the orb. To find the orb, you have to go west, not east along a canyon, and decide to attack an alligator from below, without any sign that either choice is a particularly good one. That puts you in position to realize a glittering thing underwater--but only if you roll two dice and come up with a total of 2, 3, 11 or 12. That's a 5 in 6 chance of failing, which means an 83% chance you'll fail the gamebook even if you follow the correct path. Diegetically, it's not entirely unrealistic, but in terms of play, it's a bad design.
The second big knock is that Morganna herself is not a particularly interesting villain. She's absent from most of the book, and she doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the land, save a few fringe touches--a ruined village, enthralled tribesmen, and a missing bard. It's an interesting minimalist approach, but it just drives home how a strong presence from a charismatic villain can really shape one one of these books, and how their absence is felt. She does have a pretty nifty plan, in that there's a bit of a twist involved, but its execution feels sloppy. And her lair itself is pretty dull, involving some instant death corridors. She's overly difficult too; she has a skill of 11 and not many mitigating factors, which limits success to some exceptionally lucky dice rollers.
The book's saving grace is that Waterfield is frequently creative in the individual encounters. The overall theme is generally coping with the natural environment, as the events explore in great detail travelling through forests, plains, icy mountains, rapids, and canyons. I think the only terrain the book misses is perhaps deserts. An early battle with a lake kraken feels appropriately epic yet appropriate for an early encounter. The hunt has some unique rules, even if the battle resulting is a bit much. And there's a lengthy section devoted to escaping a plains fire that is fairly unique for the series. Add to it some interesting encounters, like the treasure ants or the terminally dim-witted ice hulk, and at least it's usually not boring.
It's a very flawed gamebook, though. It squanders what could have been much greater.
By personal standards at least, this is not a good gamebook. It does what a lot of the more difficult checklist gamebooks do--that is, it appears open in terms of choice, but when you try to actually complete it, you'll find that your path is gated by a number of items you need: an orb, a sceptre, advice from a bard, a page of history, advice from a dying woman, a ghost army that owes you a favor, a healing potion for that dying woman, a helmet, and a tusk obtained by intruding on a family in a cave and murdering the family patriarch. That's mostly fine (the murdering isn't great, but pretty common evil = I can kill it with impunity thinking typical to this era). It also has the usual checklist feature where there's no real way to know that you need these items, except by trial and error. Again, not particularly enjoyable, but at least normal. (It does have a meta-interesting twist where the item it flags the most, a Horn, turns out to be pretty not useful, despite having a substantial quest associated with it.)
What elevates the gamebook into exceptionally annoying is that one of this item set, the orb. To find the orb, you have to go west, not east along a canyon, and decide to attack an alligator from below, without any sign that either choice is a particularly good one. That puts you in position to realize a glittering thing underwater--but only if you roll two dice and come up with a total of 2, 3, 11 or 12. That's a 5 in 6 chance of failing, which means an 83% chance you'll fail the gamebook even if you follow the correct path. Diegetically, it's not entirely unrealistic, but in terms of play, it's a bad design.
The second big knock is that Morganna herself is not a particularly interesting villain. She's absent from most of the book, and she doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the land, save a few fringe touches--a ruined village, enthralled tribesmen, and a missing bard. It's an interesting minimalist approach, but it just drives home how a strong presence from a charismatic villain can really shape one one of these books, and how their absence is felt. She does have a pretty nifty plan, in that there's a bit of a twist involved, but its execution feels sloppy. And her lair itself is pretty dull, involving some instant death corridors. She's overly difficult too; she has a skill of 11 and not many mitigating factors, which limits success to some exceptionally lucky dice rollers.
The book's saving grace is that Waterfield is frequently creative in the individual encounters. The overall theme is generally coping with the natural environment, as the events explore in great detail travelling through forests, plains, icy mountains, rapids, and canyons. I think the only terrain the book misses is perhaps deserts. An early battle with a lake kraken feels appropriately epic yet appropriate for an early encounter. The hunt has some unique rules, even if the battle resulting is a bit much. And there's a lengthy section devoted to escaping a plains fire that is fairly unique for the series. Add to it some interesting encounters, like the treasure ants or the terminally dim-witted ice hulk, and at least it's usually not boring.
It's a very flawed gamebook, though. It squanders what could have been much greater.
September 27, 2023
An onerous entry in the Fighting Fantasy series. The story is childish, formulaic even, the mandatory fights very difficult, the puzzles counter-intuitive, the clues buried, the constant left-right/succeed-or-die choices annoying, and several necessary encounters are only found by a single low probability roll of the dice. Rather than challenging, the book is an cynical attempt to thwart meta game thinking and artificially inflate play time. Unforgivable.
August 24, 2021
These books were aimed at children in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I rediscovered them to bring them to my son but let’s not kid myself: I read them for myself now. That’s pretty immature of me but I just love them and think they’re so good!
The muddy-looking cover (by John Sibbick) put me off this one but judging a book by its cover CAN sometimes (tho not often perhaps) be unwise, because I think I’ve found my favourite in the series so far.
Cleverly written by Robin Waterford, a much-published and well-known classical scholar (specialising in Plato, Plutarch and Aristotle), with artwork by the incredibly talented Russ Nicholson, the most beloved of all the FF artists, this, along with a good many in the series, is a valuable and under-appreciated cultural artifact.
The writing is top-quality; the story, with its twists and turns, absolutely engrossing; and the use that’s made of clues is intelligent and keeps you from easily cheating. It’s really hard, too, but not impossible. It took me about ten tries.
There isn’t only one correct path through it (a good thing I think), though you do have to hit certain points to pick up those essential clues and a few crucial items. There are a lot of insta-deaths but they all seem reasonable, and success does in places rely on luck (in this context, dice roles) - but that’s life.
An exemplary gamebook, unfairly overlooked.
The muddy-looking cover (by John Sibbick) put me off this one but judging a book by its cover CAN sometimes (tho not often perhaps) be unwise, because I think I’ve found my favourite in the series so far.
Cleverly written by Robin Waterford, a much-published and well-known classical scholar (specialising in Plato, Plutarch and Aristotle), with artwork by the incredibly talented Russ Nicholson, the most beloved of all the FF artists, this, along with a good many in the series, is a valuable and under-appreciated cultural artifact.
The writing is top-quality; the story, with its twists and turns, absolutely engrossing; and the use that’s made of clues is intelligent and keeps you from easily cheating. It’s really hard, too, but not impossible. It took me about ten tries.
There isn’t only one correct path through it (a good thing I think), though you do have to hit certain points to pick up those essential clues and a few crucial items. There are a lot of insta-deaths but they all seem reasonable, and success does in places rely on luck (in this context, dice roles) - but that’s life.
An exemplary gamebook, unfairly overlooked.
August 28, 2022
A high-quality but frustratingly-hard gamebook featuring intriguing illustrations and a wide variety of ways to get into and out of trouble.
This one is notable for its extreme and unfair difficulty. Right from the first choice you're frequently given choices that lead to instant death. Another cruel touch is several places where you have the option to use an item you had the chance to collect earlier, only to have it be useless or worse. Not only do you need to take the proper path to avoid missing essential items and information, you'll need very lucky dice rolls. On top of some Luck and Skill checks on the required route, in the mid-to-late game there's a point where you have only a 1/6 chance to obtain a needed item. So, it's not recommended to actually *play* the gamebook (without fudging dice rolls or skipping around) unless you're willing to re-try the correct route several times.
This one is notable for its extreme and unfair difficulty. Right from the first choice you're frequently given choices that lead to instant death. Another cruel touch is several places where you have the option to use an item you had the chance to collect earlier, only to have it be useless or worse. Not only do you need to take the proper path to avoid missing essential items and information, you'll need very lucky dice rolls. On top of some Luck and Skill checks on the required route, in the mid-to-late game there's a point where you have only a 1/6 chance to obtain a needed item. So, it's not recommended to actually *play* the gamebook (without fudging dice rolls or skipping around) unless you're willing to re-try the correct route several times.
January 7, 2023
Poor effort, with at least one annoying clue which is likely to point you to the wrong answer. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
February 10, 2020
So so entry from Fighting Fantasy I thought this was average at best!!! The fire thing was a complete joke and the twist at the end was just laughable!
August 3, 2024
There are seemingly meaningless choices in about 5-10 different places where 2/3 of the options are just sudden death and you have to start over. This is silly and not nearly as fun as other titles
June 8, 2018
I loved these books as a kid. Must go back and re-read them to make a proper review. But just look at that art work too... amazing!
August 13, 2024
This one’s nostalgic for me. I remember reading this one on the couch of my grandma’s cosy living room in her old Victorian house when it was late at night, one of my earlier Fighting Fantasy experiences. This one is the perfect FF to read in that kind of setting for its beautiful environmental elements and spooky creatures.
July 29, 2019
The consistency of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks slipped sometime after the first 20 or so releases. Maybe the trouble was that the gamebook format is too limiting, or that the editors had lost their publishing deal and thus royalties from the USA, or that the RPG market was flooded with solo adventures and computer games that made the Fighting Fantasy formula seem bland by comparison. Whatever the case, Masks of Mayhem (#23) is a particularly poor entry in the series.
What plot there is concerns a cackling witch named Morgana, who lives in a remote ice fortress where she builds "undead golems" which, any day now, will emerge to wreak havoc upon the world. The "masks" in the title refers to the golems' magic facemasks, without which they'd be powerless, and you, the ruler of a city called Arion, seem to be the only person who can dismantle Morgana's oversized dollhouse before Armageddon.
So you set off alone across a hostile continent. No, this doesn't make sense; as the monarch of a large city, why would you tackle this by yourself instead of taking along, say, a battalion of seasoned troops? The introduction also mentions that your court wizard can teleport himself into Morgana's fortress, so why would you not order him to teleport you? Well, since it's more dramatic to embark on a long, possibly suicidal journey all by yourself.
Perhaps because the story is all bad fantasy tropes, Mayhem tries to create tension by raising the difficulty level to the point of madness. At least one out of every two or three choices you can make causes instant death as you're poisoned/burned/crushed/drowned/eviscerated/driven insane, and you can forget about winning the game honestly if you don't have maximum Skill and Stamina scores and flawless Luck rolls throughout. Failure to follow the linear sequence to acquire needed items and information will kill you as well, and the climax includes a betrayal by a minor character who hadn't even appeared in the adventure proper. Rather than being inspired to continue, I found myself wondering why I should care about the fate of such a pitiless world.
Skip this and play through some of the earlier books.
What plot there is concerns a cackling witch named Morgana, who lives in a remote ice fortress where she builds "undead golems" which, any day now, will emerge to wreak havoc upon the world. The "masks" in the title refers to the golems' magic facemasks, without which they'd be powerless, and you, the ruler of a city called Arion, seem to be the only person who can dismantle Morgana's oversized dollhouse before Armageddon.
So you set off alone across a hostile continent. No, this doesn't make sense; as the monarch of a large city, why would you tackle this by yourself instead of taking along, say, a battalion of seasoned troops? The introduction also mentions that your court wizard can teleport himself into Morgana's fortress, so why would you not order him to teleport you? Well, since it's more dramatic to embark on a long, possibly suicidal journey all by yourself.
Perhaps because the story is all bad fantasy tropes, Mayhem tries to create tension by raising the difficulty level to the point of madness. At least one out of every two or three choices you can make causes instant death as you're poisoned/burned/crushed/drowned/eviscerated/driven insane, and you can forget about winning the game honestly if you don't have maximum Skill and Stamina scores and flawless Luck rolls throughout. Failure to follow the linear sequence to acquire needed items and information will kill you as well, and the climax includes a betrayal by a minor character who hadn't even appeared in the adventure proper. Rather than being inspired to continue, I found myself wondering why I should care about the fate of such a pitiless world.
Skip this and play through some of the earlier books.
August 13, 2023
I died 35 times az least. :). The book btw it good overall, however the fact that at certain cases only the dice throw determines whether I live or die, its annyoing (skeleton under water, bushfire). Another issue there is no ending explanation. The motivstion of the antagonist is vague. And the fact that the king goes for adventure and his chosen heroes is somewhat weird.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews