I can still recount many of the more intriguing sections of the book. Take the time when the heroes were trapped by the evil machine called Com-Pewter (notice the pun?) and had to fight for their fate in a game reminiscent of old text adventures. You see, Com-Pewter could change the structure of its immediate reality with text prompts, and the heroes were supposed to enter their own prompts, with the goal of getting out of the lair in a set number of turns. Noting that Com-Pewter had countered their move of finding a safe passage without any dragons by introducing a dragoness, the heroes made a cunning plan. This time, they stated that they would find an exit with nothing dangerous in it and particularly no egrets, and when the Com-Pewter inevitably answered that there was an egress waiting for them, thinking it would be a mean female egret, the heroes could simply take the egress, which is just another word for exit. Besides, egrets are just harmless birds.
I think what finally sold me was the ending. I mean, how many fantasy books spend time explaining what the Prisoner’s Dilemma is all about and how to solve it?! Being those days an avid fan of the works of Douglas Adams and Monty Python, with their, let’s say, more refined type of humour, this seemed like more of the same kind.
