Roll on Adventure - Immortal Reckoning review

 

Hello gamebookers. I don't normally do reviews here, but my lovely tutor group bought me this book, so I thought I would review it. 

The Roll on Adventure series is written by Phillip Harvey who has written four books in the series. I got book 1, Immortal Reckoning.

I had a great time with this gamebook. It is definitely more game than book as you are an adventurer who decides to explore a dungeon. You go through different locations, facing increasingly powerful opponents and obtaining increasingly powerful items. There were lots of numbers to crunch and lots of options available, which is something I love.

The book has pretty standard stats. Prowess is your combat skill, health is your hit points. Combat is determined by rolling 1d6 for you and adding to your prowess and 1d6 for your opponent and adding to their prowess. The highest score wins and the winner reduces their opponent's health by their damage score.

So far, so familiar.

However, Phillip has decided to add lots of ways of manipulating the rolls. You also start with 20 Prowess points. Before the combat round begins, you can spend any number of Prowess Points to increase your roll and damage by that amount for that round.

You also have lots of die rolls that determine most things, such as which room you go to, which treasure you find and how much damage you receive from hazards. These can be changed by spending Merit points. Merit points go up and down a lot. You get Merit points for almost all locations. You can then spend them to determine which location you go to next. Merit points are designed to be spent a lot as you get a lot of them.

Each location has an illustration and a description. The aim is to make your way through the dungeon to the boss monster. Once I had worked out that spending Merit is really important, I almost got to the end.

I would recommend the book to anyone who loves crunchy resource management type games and I had a great time with it.

Happy gamebooking!