Again, we have an excellent folk artsy cover on Whispers from the Abyss (1984). Again, this is about the best the book has to offer.

For some reason, despite this being a later production than the two books I previously covered this week, it is somehow more amateurish. The text is set in a monospace font that is punishing to read and the art, with the exception of the amazing amphibian attack illustration, seems even more low rent somehow. Add this to the continuing issue of poor organization and a seeming hostility to clear summaries and we’ve got all the ingredients for a truly baffling read.

The first scenario…I simply don’t understand what is going on. Players are trying to retrieve a scroll of Egyptian magic from the crew of a zeppelin. That has both a bunch of eagles and a bunch of byakhee secreted aboard? And the eagles are big enough to wear saddles so the villains can escape by flying them? Very little explanation is given for any of this and, frankly, the less I know, the better. I read the sentence that explains there are saddles for the eagles at least five times and I am still not sure that the author realizes Tolkien-esque eagles big enough for riding don’t actually exist in the real world?

The second adventure, preposterously, also involves a ride on a zeppelin. I kind of gave up reading that one because it also involves a cursed diamond and a character named Feldspar and I couldn’t bear to find out whether more characters were named after minerals. Judging from one of the illustrations, there is also a ghost ship and Indiana Jones shows up.

The third scenario, which lends its title to the book, is about an archaeological dig investigating the disappearance of the Roanoke colony. This one manages to reduce a genuine spooky real-world mystery to the most boring solution possible: the colony was wiped out by an entity called the Croaton that can encourage swamp creatures to swarm and eat people. Ooo. The horror.