A bug-eyed but strangely endearing angel creature hands you the Aleph, asking you to protect it. It's not quite clear from whom or what you should do with it, but it IS quite clear that you should avoid the spectral stalkers, scary long-legged phantom creatures that arrive in short order to investigate the dead bug-eyed angel, at all cost.
The Aleph takes you on a random ride through dimensions, each of them a mini game world. You start at the library in limbo, have a talk with the dragon lady at the counter, grab some intel, and then it goes on: In short order, I ended up as a sacrifice for some cult of the undead, a literal pawn in the game of two god-like creatures in the sky, a customer on a pottery market recruited to save a master potter from his own golem, a specimen liberator aboard a space station, an unwelcome guest in a god's dream of a hunt, and several other things. I also had a memorable conversation with a scientist who tried to convince me that there's no such thing as magic.
Just as all of this starts to feel just a little bit to random, poof, I end up on the Ziggurat World, ruled over by the wizard Globus who may or may not be the big bad. I meet the mantir, very nice insect people who herd grazing insect bulls, the vaskind, lovely monstrous amphibians, and the significantly less lovely winged black shadows and ophidians and elegant and deadly silicate snakes.
If this sounds like nothing more then a whole lot of crazy to you, you're only half-right. I'm usually pretty obsessed with setting ecology, and I can say that luckily, Spectral Stalkers' author, Peter Darvill-Evans, obviously feels the same way. All of this makes so much sense. I'm the kind of person who can't write or even run a dungeon without knowing what the people/creatures living there eat, how they get from A to B, why they are where they are and why they do whatever they are doing. And Spectral Stalkers explains all of this, hardly ever entering infodump-mode. It just comes up naturally. The mantirs are herders at the bottom rung of their society. The black shadows are enforcers who eat their prisoners. The ophidians wear glass armor to protect them from the acid of the silicate snakes, who they domesticate, and they don't bother to put guards at the entrances of their caves because they can only be reached either flying or with their special climbing gear.
If you ask me, that's what's most important about weird settings. That they make sense. I don't want them to be realistic, but they have to be real places where real people/creatures interact with each other. Spectral Stalkers delivers that far beyond the extent you would expect from a 400 paragraphs Fighting Fantasy solo gamebook.
It also makes great use of the format. How I do lament the early notion in FF books that "there's only one true way" to win them. Why? Cant we have two, five, ten ways? Spectral Stalkers isn't super easy, but I found at least three very distinct ways of reaching your goal (which one will work depends in part on which dimensions you will have encounterd beforehand and what you have picked up there). They are all the outcome of real decisions about who to trust, what to say and which way to take beyond going "left" or "right". There's tons of clues. If you read carefully, you'll be able to make informed decisions, and the results make sense. This goes especially for the ending (if you happen to run into Semeion, LISTEN to him. It will make reaching the end so much more satisfying if you realize why you have won!).
Also, you don't have to fight. You can, but I'm pretty sure it's possible to get to the end without grinding STAMINA, which is the single most tedious thing about Fighting Fantasy books (I'm fine with the rules engine, it's great for RPGs, as Troika! and Advanced Fighting Fantasy prove, but it's just stupid for solos). There's some dice rolling along the lines of testing your LUCK and SKILL, but even that can be minimized.
Have I mentioned how well this is written? It's concise, funny, at times deeply atmospheric and even touching ... after "winning" this book, I've already went back to explore two alternative paths just for the joy of reading it, and I'm sure I'll return to it again. I also want to map the Ziggurat World and use it as a sphere for Troika! It will feel right at home.
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