In the olden days, when I was but a wee nut and still in short pants and reckoned that all girls had the lurgie, I was a reader of Fighting Fantasy game books and other paper-based interactive fiction. With two dice, a pencil, and a rubber, I morphed from the Not Popular kid in class (due to being Fat and Gay, well, according to my fellow kids anyhow) to Ravn Gorionsson, a Nordic hero with a huge sword which was constantly wet with the blood of his slain foes and whose... other... sword was constantly wet with... other things.

Lots of other nerdish kids did the same. Mary Smith from the other side of town with the buck teeth and the frizzball hairdo became Zenobia the chainmail-bikini'd amazon, and Graham Barr, he of the NHS specs, from up the road became the mystical Thraxis, journeyman mage fighting for truth, justice, and the right to fireball orcs in a built-up area during the hours of darkness. They may have been unpopular at school, last picked on the sports team (in my case, if I was picked for your football side it was as if I was a negative team member) but in their own fantastic imaginations they were the biggest badasses in the entire world, bar none.

Then the nerdish kids all grew up, lost the NHS specs, divested themselves of the braces, started looking more in proportion to their girth (oo-er), went to university, discovered the opposite sex / same sex / both, and got office jobs.

The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain, by Alex Jenkins and Stephen Morrison, is an attempt to recapture the magic (not to mention the SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK) of those green-spined tomes of legendry, while still remaining relevant to today's workplace.

So whereas in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain you had to storm the dungeon, slay the evil wizard, and leave with his treasure, in this one, you have to brave a temp job in an office, confront the Regional Accounts Director, and get your timesheet signed. It all starts when you get a job doing data entry at Firetop Mountain PLC in an abandoned office building on the wrong side of the tracks, and you get in there, and you find that there's a blade sticking into your chair. Your job is literally bleeding you dry! So with a red office curtain around your shoulders, your sleeves rolled up, and similar, you enter the bowels of the building to find out exactly what is going on here. And in doing so, you find that all the monsters and suchlike from legendry and fantasy games have all got office jobs as well, and they all hate them. So, there's a labyrinth inhabited by a Minotaur Intern, a group of merfolk trying to create a marketing campaign for a pink holepunch, and a bunch of wizards who are all lads lads lads after a night out on the town. Also the Photocopier Repair Gorgon, the Witch who curses you to be promoted to middle management, and a Hydra whose seven heads are trying and failing to have a departmental meeting amongst themselves. The Hydra incidentally is also the guardian of the One File which contains staff payroll.

There's also various parodies of role playing and Choose Your Own Adventure tropes as well. For instance, having to complete riddles with a numerical answer to get to the right paragraph, falling mast type instant death traps (including memorably one area where you encounter some Drow Elves and the book prints those sections entirely in Elvish without a translation and wrong choices can lead to a block of elvish text followed by "your adventure ends here," and also one ending where you can end up having a nervous breakdown in a cubicle farm) which you could not possibly have seen coming, and, of course, testing your luck and/or skill. However the book does this with rather unusual things. For instance, one section has you test your character's willpower and resolve by challenging the player to make a cup of tea, then press the warm spoon against the neck of a work colleague as a prank. If you do it, you pass; if not, you fail. While another has you hold the book out at arm's length for 60 seconds and if someone asks you what you're doing, you fail. A third has you take off your shoe and throw it at an object the size of a gorgon's head, and if you succeed you defeat the Photocopier Repair Gorgon and are treated to the decapitated gorgon singing a song about how she's put her head in a bag. There's also a classic shopping list of plot coupons which affect which ending you get, as if you get your timesheet signed but fail to learn how to properly work the fax machine, you won't get paid.

I thought it was quite funny anyhow. Well, certainly one death sequence which ends "soon you will die of a seizure while attempting to bum a fax" made me giggle for hours. Also the idea of an office drone with a curtain round his neck as a cape rampaging around the Admin of the Underworld in search of a wage feels both strangely familiar and faintly awesome at the same time.

(IRON NODER 2023 #11)

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