YMMV / Sagas of the Demonspawn

• Awesome Art: The book covers by Geoff Taylor and Stephen Bradbury are gorgeous, depicting some spectacular cold and threatening landscapes that make good use of a white/blue/purple palette.
• Cult Classic: An unusual and obscure but appreciated gamebook series. As long as you leave the "game" out of it.
• Demonic Spiders: The Alchiller enemies make The Crypts of Terror nearly unplayable. They attack in packs, never miss in combat, can cast multiple spells and are immune to Doombringer's life-draining ability. Fortunately, they're a lot easier and more balanced in the computer version.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The series has gotten some acclaim for having a well-written plot and narration, with extensive paragraphs and atmosphere. But the gameplay is so convoluted and difficult that most readers prefer to give up and just read the books as they are.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The series is infamous for this. Even if you manage to get around the dice/combat system, the fights will definitely break you.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The whole combat system! Many stats are taken into account for attacking, who strikes first, how many rounds a fighter can go through before they need to stop to take a breath, and how much energy Doombringer sucks out and takes in. Not to mention, Fire*Wolf has a strong chance of being weaker than most of the enemies he fights, so it makes throwing dice and taking scores a chore. The whole idea of gamebooks was to take tabletop RPGs and make it simpler for the casual reader. Thus, it's no wonder many readers prefer to just read the books.
  • Tin Man Games' computer version is much easier to work with. It removes the rules on exhaustion and spellcasting failure, trims down the number of stats players keep track of, re-balances most enemies so their strength is more in line with Fire*Wolf's, and gives enemies AI scripts that actually determine when they cast spells.

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