Demons of the Deep

YOU become fish food, when your ship is attacked by pirates! Your crewmates are killed outright, but captain Smellybeard has a special treat for you… walking the plank. With a sword and a sack of food.

You sink down to the city of R’lyeh, grow gills like in Dagon, and put into motion your plan to amass an army of the living dead… to wreak a bloody and humiliating revenge on captain Smellybeard.

Review and Opinion

This one was a lot of fun! One of my favorite properties of the book, is multiple outcomes. There are several outcomes where you get home safely, or destroy the ship and get your revenge, in addition to the big finish where you ride in with a legion of skeletons. Even the big ending, can be had with varying degrees of difficulty: if you don’t get enough Black Pearls you’ll have a harder fight on your hands, but you can win.

The map isn’t completely one-way, and isn’t at all straightforward. You’re channeled into moving forward, but with a surprising number of diversions and backtracking allowed. I enjoyed that, and it made the mapping more complex.

The undersea theme was cool too. Around our house, we’re big fans of hammerhead sharks and of dolphins. We were disappointed that there were no hammerhead sharks, but got over it.

The game mechanics are pretty straight and plain: no spells nor magic items, 10 Provisions. Still, the writing was enjoyable and the not-always-linear play and multi-win thing really made this one a winner.

Maps

Publication

Written by Steve Jackson

Illustrated by Bob Harvey & Peter Shen

1984

Book 19 in the series

Tags to Other Adventures

1984 Allansia Bob Harvey Fighting Fantasy Ocean Peter Shen Pirate Steve Jackson Titan

The Comments Section

One comment

Rask says:

January 18, 2023 at 8:44 am

I, too, enjoyed this book. The multiple endings that Steve Jackson/Yank puts in his stories are incredible. Also gotta love it when “section 400” does NOT equal victory.

I particularly enjoyed the toolfish, the experience with the dolphin, the gambling pits, Cyrano, and the fight with the Demon. By the way, anyone who wants to worship said demon(s) might as well roll up two characters at the beginning, because Character A ain’t gonna be long in this world. (I cheated with the thumb-on-page just to see what would happen. Shudder)

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