Another one in my attempt to catch up to books that fell by the wayside in this project, we jump a few months back to October 1983 to find the second of the children’s gamebook series Fantasy Forest. This one is written by a true TSR veteran, Mike Carr who was there from the start with Gygax and Arenson and ended up designing Fight in the Skies. He was also the writer of In Search of the Unknown, which led to some interesting internal politics seeing as Carr was making quite a buck from that module being bundled with the basic set, which eventually led Gary Gygax to replace it with Keep on the Borderlands that he penned himself.

Well, this must have been one of the last Carr publications for TSR because he left the company this same year, and it’s a simple story of a boy who works as a kind of squire for his brother, a knight, and who leave on a quest to defeat Nightshade an evil skeleton king.

A fun book, with considerably better illustrations by Michael Fishel than the first volume in the series. These Fishel illustrations are a bit creepy for young kids though, the Zombies and Skeletons are particularly horrific and the grotesque drawing style doesn’t help, I kind of like them though, I know that if I had this as a kid, I would have been fascinated. The cover is by Jeff Easley, and great as usual.