The Forest of Doom: Retrospective

      Grenkins almost didn't pry the great beast's hands apart. She very nearly died right there, pressed against the stone wall. It would have been a very strange end to the game of "Hide and Stab". When she popped the hands free and fell into the growing swamp of blood she attempted to inhale the entire room, every scrap of air in it.

      Eventually the burning in her lungs stopped, and she was able to return to some semblance of calm. She sat there, legs splayed and crooked feet sticking in the air. The blood was beginning to scab up all over the floor.

       Grenkins stood up. The blood on her green scales were still red, but growing brown. She opened the backpack the giant had been wearing. It was full of strange potions and weird objects. They were all labeled with little white scraps of paper and a strange scrawl. Grenkins didn't know any magic at all, let alone reading. There were also four gold pieces. Not worth as much as the ingot she'd found in her hiding spot, but easier to carry.

       Grenkins's considered the ruined furniture and the stained room. Her housemates were going to have a fit. A very stabby fit. With this in mind, Grenkins decided to haul it up and out. She lugged the tremendous sack over her tiny shoulders. Then she noticed something else around the giants neck. A little necklace with a locket. She opened the locket and saw a strange image of a giant woman, wearing a blindfold. It looked nice, so she grabbed it up. The others would be playing Hide and Stab for her for quite a long time to come, she reckoned. 

        She washed the blood off in the well water, and then climbed up with the bag. She crossed the river a little later. She paid the centaur three coins for the help, and he took them gratefully. On her way further South, Grenkins stumbled across a strange tower with a great door. There was a man out front, tending a herb garden. Grenkins came up to him, and he looked at her bag. He seemed at once to recognize it.

        "I take it the woman I sold the bag to didn't make it," he said blandly.

         Grenkins nodded at the giant.

         The giant puffed his pipe and considered. "I'll buy what you have in the bag. Just let me see it first."

          Grenkins, exhausted from carrying the bag, poured it out. The man gave her a gold piece for each potion and trinket inside, except one. "I didn't make this," he said, handing the gremlin the glowing red potion, "Don't know what it is, so I won't put coin on it."

        Grenkins looked at the potion. Its red was the same perfect red as the blindfold of the lady in the necklace. She shrugged, uncorked it, and downed the potion in one go. She felt good afterwards. She felt lucky.

*          *          *

      I always seem to be particularly late with retrospectives and introductions. Still need to make that buffer.

      So... what is there to say about The Forest of Doom? Not much, I suspect. Right now, I'm three books in, so I have an opinion on each. But, by the end of this series, I fully suspect The Forest of Doom is going to be amongst the more forgettable. The thing I'm most likely to remember is kicking myself for not drinking the Luck Potion when I got under 6 Luck. I would have beaten the Gremlin if I had! But, such are my bad decisions.

     The Forest of Doom doesn't really expand on the formula established in the first books. It makes a lateral move by replacing spells with Yaztromo's shop. They serve the same purpose and are functionally not terribly different. The change from "chosen star pupil saving the region from war via assassination" to "wanderer caught up in a quest way out of their league" feels like a step backwards. Not that being a stranger to the situation can't make for an exciting narrative, but here it reduces things back to the contextless adventurer we saw in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

      I think The Forest of Doom does improve on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, if not on The Citadel of Chaos. Firstly, a forest makes a lot more sense than a warlock's mountain cave for a place where a bunch of random encounters are crammed together. Monsters and people just live in the woods, it's not a controlled environment in the same way Firetop Mountain at least should have been. The story at least does make an effort to establish more motivation than 'mug the Warlock'. You're trying to find a hammer to enable a monarch to justify a war to his people. And you're doing it for a big pot of money. Hardly respectable, but the book also establishes the YOU as a mercenary loner who seems not terribly caring for other people, so it works.

       I did love the frog thing, though, and part of the problem with these reviews is I am playing the game very much wrong. I haven't see all that much of it, and I continually complain about minor references that would be at least mildly important if I kept a map. Though, on that subject, the inability to backtrack is really glaring when I'm searching a wood for not one, but two objects. For both of the previous books I always felt like the goal was forward, by at least some metric, so going back made no sense. Here, however, I have no reason to think I haven't missed something. Searching a wood for two random objects really demands a more thorough investigation of the forest, not a constant forward trajectory.

        There really is just nothing grabbing about The Forest of Doom. It feels more a holding entry than an exciting new one in the series. Nothing wrong with a well made staple for an ongoing series, I suppose, but if you're not beholden to whatever is in your local library or a decision to play the entire series, I'd probably skip this one.