I pass up the option to turn north, and walk around an iron bell which is probably a trap. I decide that if three people went west, three people will have tripped traps and killed monsters. There’s an arrow on the wall pointing west, and three sets of wet footprints heading that way. Ahead there’s the first of the inevitable T-junctions. Inside are two gold coins and a note telling me that I’ll need to find special items to make it through alive. The first thing I find is a table with a box for each contestant. The dim light provided by glowing crystals in the roof is barely enough to see by. I step inside the dank, rat and spider filled corridor. It’s probably too late to back out now, but the dungeon is compelling me to enter. I’m going to be the fifth contestant to wander in to certain doom. So we’re probably not teaming up in the dungeon, then. She smiles back, and then draws her finger across her throat and points at me.
There’s a knight in full plate mail, a couple of barbarians, an elven woman with more daggers than anyone could possibly need, and someone who is probably an assassin. I’m led down to the entrance to Deathtrap Dungeon, where I see the other contestants.
Someone promptly knocks on my door and reminds me what that stupid thing was. Either way, I get to drunkenly party like it’s the end times for a few days, and then I wake up with a hangover and the nagging feeling that I did something stupid. Or possibly to show that I’m a dangerously suicidal lunatic. I register my entry in the competition and am given a violet scarf to signify that I’m a heroic adventurer prepared to risk it all for fame and wealth. I arrive in Fang three days before the dungeon is opened to adventurers.
It’s not the 10,000 gold pieces, or the freedom of Chiang Mai province forever, but the fact that no-one has ever won the Trial of Champions that makes this venture so attractive to me.
So I set off, heading to Port Blacksand, travelling north by ship, and then rafting up the river to the town of Fang. Even then, the reputation of this one is usually enough to make most adventurers successfully overcome the dungeon crawling urge. Deathtrap Dungeon, being the most enormous and dangerous underground complex on the continent, exerts an adventurer attracting force that exceeds five hundred mega-dungeons. This explains that nagging feeling I’ve been getting that I should be travelling north. It says that there’s a big dungeon and I can win a lot of gold if I survive it. So I’m chilling out in the wilderness, wandering around, and then I find a note nailed to a tree. So it’s time for me to roll some dice and take on the ultimate dungeon crawl…Įquipment: Sword, shield (bonus item!), leather armour, backpack, 10 provisions, potion of fortune, and a death wish. It’s one of the most mangled of the FF books in the public library so I suppose the kids still love the idea of being slaughtered in Baron Sukumvit’s evil labyrinth.
It’s actually fun because it totally lives up to expectations, and thus no-one can complain. Actually, this book results in some of the funnier entries in the playthrough genre since it’s so colossally unfair but never pretended to be anything else. Almost everyone knows all this, and it’s not hard to find out if you read some of the other playthrough blogs. A lot of the names in the book are stolen from Thailand.
There was a computer game based on it, which was not very good and was probably one of the earliest sexist marketing campaigns in computer game history. It’s the most well known and possibly the most successful Fighting Fantasy book. The whole town throws a party to laugh at the morons. Every year adventurers, being idiots, turn up and try to make it through for the prize of 10,000 gold pieces. So, the plot of this book? There’s this town, and the local lord built a huge, trap-filled, monster infested, puzzle-riddled dungeon that no-one has ever come out of alive. Mel Grant’s cover is pretty good, really.