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Author Topic: The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon` review by Doom  (Read 2824 times)

Doom

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The Necronomicon Gamebook: Dagon` review by Doom
« on: October 16, 2019, 06:16:43 PM »
H.P. Lovecraft's works have made for great reading, hit-and-miss movies, and a slew of decent board and role-playing games. While not immediately obvious, The Necronomicon Gamebook is a "choose your own adventure" book set in the Lovecraft universe of elder gods, circa 1920. I've played many of these "if you go left, go to paragraph 39, otherwise go to paragraph 123" type games, but none Lovecraftian, so I was ready to play.

You first create a character, with two stats, Force (i.e., fighting ability) and Will (mental resistance, used to stave off insanity, a feature of any good Lovecraft game). You also have Resilience, i.e., "hit points," lost as you lose rounds of combat. Combat is basically you roll a d6, add your Force, add your weapon bonus, and compare to your opponent's Force. It's simple, but I've never been a fan of such systems--the temptation to cheat is always there, and who wants to go through 50 pages of book, only to have to start over because of rolling low for a few rounds?

Most fights are either pushovers, or slaughters where you didn't have the right equipment/totem/weapon/amulet, so it works well enough (and getting murdered by Dagon itself wasn't so bad, really).

The book does a good job of imitating Lovecraft's prose, with "monotonous undulating" waves and "sharp ensanguined fangs," although more than a few typos sometimes mars the effect. The interior artwork, although black and white, is perhaps the highlight of the book, with many pieces doing a fine job of bringing the short paragraphs to life.

Overall, however, the book is too short, the adventure too easy to "beat" (insofar as you'll generally die or go insane no matter what you do--perhaps your best outcome is to lose to a guard in the opening paragraph and end your days in a cell...). Perhaps 3 read-throughs will get you everything there is to see here, and there are no mazes or major puzzles to work out.

The book does come with a pencil, "diary" (to record your stats), a Cthulhu die, and a nice map of Kingsport (the village where you'll likely go); you don't really need all this, but if you're looking to run a nice Dagon-themed adventure,  there's enough here for an interested GM to set up a game.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2019, 03:06:01 PM by Doom »
(taken during hurricane winds)

A nice education blog.