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Literature / Masks of Mayhem

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WHERE. IS. MY. MOISTURIZER???

Masks of Mayhem is the 23rd entry of the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, written by Robin Waterfield.

YOU are a monarch of Arion, a wise and benevolent ruler respected by all. One day, your court wizard Ifor Tynin informs you of a terrible peril: the fell sorceress Morgana is preparing to invade Khul, using a series of twelve magical sigils to animate twelve monstrous Golems that will do her bidding. Powered by masks infused with the power of mayhem and holding the essence of all things, these undead monsters will be unstoppable, but she still lacks the final sigil which will allow her to set her plans in motion. It's up to you, skilled in the arts of war, blessed by the land and nearly impervious to the arts of magic, to venture north, towards the towering peaks of Krill Garnash. You must find Morgana's lair and kill her before she finds the last sigil. That being said, this is not going to be an easy task, for many evil creatures lurk in the lands between Arion and the peaks, not to mention the sinister plot against your very life...

Masks of Mayhem overall plays like a standard Fighting Fantasy adventure: you need to recover precious items that will save your life and follow a specific path to obtain enough clues to successfully complete the adventure.


Masks of Mayhem provides examples of:

  • Above Good and Evil: Most animals you encounter are immune to the Horn of Hever, which hurts "evil creatures", since they're not truly evil, only hungry.
  • Attack of the Monster Appendage: If you camp on the shore of Lake Nekros, a Kraken will attack you with its many tentacles, which you have to fight from the shore. In a slight subversion, the head will eventually peek out of the water, giving you a shot at slashing it open and killing the beast instantly.
  • Big Bad: Morgana, evil sorceress of Krill Garnash.
  • Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: An Ice Hulk appears in the story: these creatures are related to Yetis and literally brainless. Unfortunately, the one you meet wants you for a meal.
  • Boisterous Bruiser: Hever is the lord of Fallow Dale and the owner of the evil-weakening Horn of Hever. He's a large man and a friendly, genial guy who greets you as "cousin" since you're both royalty. Like you, he's also more than ready to throw down in battle and can help you fight the Hellfire Spirit.
  • Cavalry of the Dead: If you slay the Kraken, the souls of the great warrior Galrin and his men will be released from their torment and swear to come to your aid if you find yourself in danger. Their help is essential to destroying Morgana's Golems.
  • Cool, but Inefficient: The Horn of Hever, which is played up as a legendary weapon your quest is doomed without. It makes enemies suffer a small Skill penalty, but not all enemies, and oh the hoops you have to jump through to get it. Mainly you have to kill a saber-tooth tiger that's been ravaging the countryside, the fighting of which is challenging and a little weird, but which might've been one thing if that was all. To even be able to fight it, you have to succeed in a Luck-Based Mission that involves rolling dice to see if you track it down within a few turns. Oh, and entering a certain pair of coordinates on the hunting map leads to insta-death.
  • Cool Sword: Besides your starting sword, you can obtain an ancient broadsword from a Wight you kill.
  • Death Mountain: The lair of Morgana, the five peaks of Krill Garnash, with plenty of monsters, dangers and barbarians serving the sorceress.
  • Disability Immunity: Ice Hulks, large Yeti like monsters, are so dimwitted they don't really register pain; the narrator suggests they literally have no brain. This works in their favour in combat, at least in the short term, as they continue attacking when hit rather than hesitate as most beings would.
  • Disc-One Final Boss: The Hellfire Spirit sent by your enemy to stop you at Hever Castle around halfway through the plot, which also suggests that there's someone else working with Morgana.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: While The Many Deaths of You is surely no stranger in this series, the rather short and terse description of your deaths can come off as rather sudden and out of the blue, such as being struck down by a random thunderbolt in a marsh or being bitten by a tiny venomous snake hiding inside an anonymous pouch.
  • Dungeon Crawling: Near the beginning of the game, you can go through a series of underground caverns in the hills, which actually lead you to a valuable item. Subverted with Morgana's lair: there's only a short passage to reach her and her Golems, the other ways/doors leading to deadly traps.
  • Elemental Weapon: The Hellfire Spirit wields a fiery whip in combat.
  • Enchanted Forest: Affen Forest is a wood infested with spiders, spriggans and, luckily, Elves open to dialogue.
  • Enemy Civil War: If you confess to the two barbarians who caught you that you're here to kill Morgana, they'll start fighting against each other and you must test your Luck: if you're Lucky, the barbarian who wins supports your plan and lets you go.
  • Evil Plan: Morgana intends to gather twelve magical sigils, imbued with the essence of nature itself, and turn them into the titular masks of mayhem, using them to power her Golems to conquer the world. Ifor also neglected to mention that you carry the last sigil, and the "quest" was actually a way to deliver that sigil directly to Morgana.
  • Final Boss: Not Morgana herself, but the mysterious Traitor, a.k.a. Ifor Tynin, trying to do you in with a dagger.
  • Foreshadowing: The introduction mentions your innate distrust of sorcerers, despite the presence of your loyal advisor Ifor Tynin. Turns out you were right to be wary.
  • Giant Spider: You can encounter a massively bloated Bloodsucking Spider in the forest.
  • Golem: Morgana wants to use the power of the Masks to empower her twelve magical Golems, which, in spite of being described as made of rock and earth, are also referred to as "Undead" for some reason.
  • Guest-Star Party Member:
    • When Kevin tries to warn you about the traitor, you can either think about it by yourself or go ask Hever about it. If you go talk to Hever, he'll become trapped within the Hellfire Spirit's wall of fire along with you. He'll assist you in the fight, allowing you to do 3 points of Stamina damage instead of just 2 whenver you win an attack round.
    • When your helmet is stolen by a group of Morgana's orcs, you can get Hever to send some of his troops to help you confront them. When you catch up to the orcs, Hever's soldiers will fight most of them for you, leaving you with only one fairly easy enemy.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: In a village you meet a man who's large enough to make you suspect he has Troll blood in him. Enemies include the Blackhearts (Dark Elves-Orcs hybrids) and the Doragar (Troll-Orcs hybrids).
  • Have a Gay Old Time: A travelling merchant's carriage is described as "gaily coloured".
  • Hopeless Boss Fight: Morgana's Eleven Golems, if you don't know how to summon Galrin and his men.
  • Invisibility: You can obtain a Cape of Temporary Invisibility which, as the name suggests, does make you invisible, but only for a short time.
  • Kick the Dog: The Traitor casts a deadly spell on your good friend Kevin when he tries to warn you of his presence and forcibly turns him into the fiery Hellfire Spirit, which you then have to kill.
  • Kidnapping Bird of Prey: A Giant Bloodhawk tries to devour you on your way to north.
  • Living MacGuffin: You have the last Sigil with you, the Sigil of Royalty.
  • Living Shadow: At one point, your shadow turns into a monstrous silhouette and tries to kill you.
  • Loud of War: The Horn of Heven is an item you must recover to succeed, which weakens evil creatures in combat.
  • Luck-Based Mission:
    • The "tiger hunt" section. You are shown a map divided in a series of squares and have a limited number of rolls. Each roll determines the direction you move and the direction the tiger moves. Once you're both in the same square, the battle begins. If you don't meet each other in time, the tiger escapes.
    • One of the most infamous in the entire series. After a fight with an alligator, you roll 2d6, and you must roll a 2, 3, 11, or 12 to get an item required to win. This by itself is only a 1 in 6 chance of being able to win, regardless of your stats. This is one of the few books where the chances of winning the book are almost entirely independent from your character stats - with a max Skill, Stamina and Luck only having a 11% chance of completing the book successfully, but a significantly weaker Skill 10, Stamina 14, Luck 10 character having only a 5% chance to win.
  • Meaningful Name: The traitor's name conceals a numeric code, hiding the word "forty" in "Ifor Tynin". This is the secret reference you must turn to in order to confront him when you have the opportunity.
  • The Mole: Halfway through the adventure, you learn of a traitor who's secretly helping Morgana and hindering your quest. Namely, Final Boss Ifor Tynin.
  • Never Smile at a Crocodile: On the way north, you may fall in a river and have to defend yourself from a ferocious alligator.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Your entire quest is a lie invented by the traitor in order to give Morgana the last sigil she needs.
  • No-Sell: Ifor Tynin mentions that you're naturally resistant to magic and impervious to both good and evil spells.
  • Orcus on His Throne: Morgana won't leave her lair at all, except for one encounter in Pikestaff Plains where she can cast a curse on you.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Morgana's hideout is guarded on the outside by a massive Ice Dragon, which sports feathery wings and shoots ice from its nostrils.
  • Our Elves Are Different: The Wood Elves you meet are the typical guardians of the forest, and are willing to help you in your quest, especially if you killed some Spriggans earlier.
  • Panthera Awesome: Your visit to Fallow Dane includes hunting a massive Saber-tooth Tiger and killing it in combat. If you win, you get to keep her claws as a memento.
  • Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Venomous snakes, alligators, dragons... reptiles are not your friends on this quest.
  • Royals Who Actually Do Something:
    • You play as the ruler of Arion who risks their life in person to stop a threat to the entire continent of Khul.
    • Hever, the ruler of your northern neighbor of Fallow Dale, can help you fight the Hellfire Spirit if you ask him about Kevin's warning.
  • Sand Worm: Or rather, Snow Worm: the Chion encountered in the snowy peaks.
  • Sealed Good in a Can: Vashti, the sorceress locked in a mystical dimension in the Maiden Vale, whose help you must seek halfway through. You can end up trapped inside her dimension if you don't know how to leave though.
  • Squishy Wizard: Subverted with Morgana: her Stamina score is quite low for a Big Bad, at only six. However, her defensive spells are so powerful that you can only deal 1 point of damage per hit, which essentially makes it as hard as a normal battle against a standard foe with 12 Stamina.
  • Take Over the World: The ultimate goal of Morgana herself.
  • Taking a Third Option: Early on, you have to go to Fallow Dane either by crossing a lake, Affen Woods, or some hills. But which way is correct? All three of them, in the mentioned order (in Affen Woods, the Elves will teleport you to the hills).
  • Title Drop: The titular masks imbued with the force of Mayhem are mentioned right in the intro.
  • The Undead: You can encounter skeletons, Wights, a wall made of grasping corpse claws, the Hellfire Spirit, and apparently, Morgana's Golems.
  • We Have Reserves: Surprisingly enough, Morgana with her Golems. If you manage to destroy them, she scoffs, telling you that she can make more to replace the fallen ones.
  • A Winner Is You: Sadly enough, the terse and short style mentioned above also applies to the writing of paragraph 400, which makes the whole series of events after Morgana's fight come off as hastily written and unsatisfying. note 

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