O quinto título da colecção Aventuras Fantásticas, é assinado por Ian Livingstone, seu único autor, e faz-nos regressar ao mundo fantástico-medieval, que é, indiscutivelmente, a imagem de marca da série.

This might be my favourite FF book, and I've played it through many times, though never spent the energy to map it out and try and see how to get to all the paragraphs. Maybe that's the next job! Anyway, YOU! are an adventurer who is hired to lay one on Zanbar Bone, undead magician, animal trainer, and sex pest. To do this you need to negotiate Port Blacksand, a villainous hive of piracy and libertarianism and generally the sort of failed state that is looming in all our near futures. Blacksand contains a number of items you need to collect and people you need to speak to. As far as I can tell, there is only one correct path and there are few opportunities to deviate from it and see other bits of the city whilst still succeeding in your quest. Despite my experience with this book I still missed out on seeing the tattooist the first run last night, leading to a failure. But of course, an experienced adventurer like me wouldn't have given up, he'd have found a new way back into the city somehow and got that epic face-tat. Perhaps by swimming in down the river, or bribing a fisherman, or hiding under a cart or something. YOU! wouldn't have gone home, nope. Anyway, once you've claimed all the bits you might need, and made your one-in-three selection of the appropriate ingredients combo (be greedy), its off to Zanbar's tower to lay down some righteous adventuring. This is the dungeon crawl bit (tower crawl?), but its very quick as Zanbar tends to rely on being a bit tasty and having horns rather than hundreds of minions to die for him. I'd recommend not messing about here, get up to the right floor before you start opening doors. But don't go straight to him, you need a final item first. Zanbar is fairly easy to kill, provided you've got all the right bits and your luck holds, making this pleasingly tricky but not impossible to beat. A true classic. ( )

The fifth book in the series and from what I remember, one of the better ones. To me it seems that the books Forest of Doom, City of Thieves, Deathtrap Dungeon, and Island of the Lizard King were, to me, the more memorable books in the series. The first one was obviously experimental, as was Starship Traveller and Citadel of Chaos, but it feels that with the books that I have got to now, the writers had settled down on a style that seemed to work. However the ones that came after I have little memory (with the exception of Scorpion Swamp).
In this book you are a seasoned adventurer who has arrived in a small town that is being bullied by an evil undead warlock named Zanzar Bone. You are approached by the mayor and asked to go and find a friend of his who lives in the city of Port Blacksand, the city of thieves that the title of the book derives its name. However, there is a little twist because when you do find Nicodemus, he simply tells you that he is too old to go off adventuring so he tells you how to kill Zanzar Bone and sends you on your way.
While the majority of the book is set in Port Blacksand, it moves away from the other books slightly in that the end game begins once you have left Port Blacksand. Zanzar Bone does not live in the city, nor is he the ruler of the city, rather your adventure in the city is simply one of locating somebody, who then tells you what you need to search for to be able to defeat your enemy. It is actually a reasonably easy book, and while they talk about a one true path, it is quite easy to find it. However, there are a number of other objects that you need to collect (such as the Skeleton Key) which will make your quest significantly easier. The one item I could not find (though I suspect that it is located somewhere near the start) is the merchant's pass.
One could suggest that this is another assassination job, though it is clear that Bone is a bully and needs to be taught a lesson, and of course you are the one who has to teach him a lesson. One of the interesting things is that these books tend to be very black and white, particularly with the fantasy ones. In a lot of fantasy novels I note that the settings are generally black and whiteL the good hero goes out to fight and kill the evil villain. I guess it is reflective of our desire to see and compartmentalise the world into black and white as opposed to the shade of grey that exists in. I guess it is also something pushed down upon us from above, so that we will always see our country as being the white, and anything opposed to our country as black. Unfortunately it is not necessarily the case because there are instances where an immoral government uses this concept to bring the population on side.
I want to finish off with something about undead. In many novels the undead are always protrayed as evil. I suspect that this may have something to do with our Christian heritage, as the Bible clearly puts necromancy into the realm of evil. That may be the case, but what about the idea of animating corpses? Is that necessarily evil, and is animating a corpse generally evil? Personally I think it comes down to our attitudes towards the dead. To a culture that sees a corpse as nothing more than a diseased shell to be destroyed, with the spirit being disconnected from it, then maybe it is not. However to a culture like ours that, while believing that the soul breaks away from the corpse, our treatment of the corpse reflects our attitudes towards that person in life. The Greeks would defile or respect corpses depending on where they wanted the dead to land up. A defiled corpse (for an example see Antigone) would wonder around the Earth as a half-man for eternity, while a properly disposed of corpse would return either to Hades, or any other realm that the deceased achieved in life. Personally, it really comes down to culture, and what the culture does with the corpse really is what that culture believes. I question the right that we have to insist that an alien culture treat a corpse as we expect it to be treated. ( )

Jusqu'ici, je n'ai fait que dire du mal de Ian Livingstone. Il faut dire que ses nombreux forfaits me font presque oublier qu'il est aussi capable de faire de bons épisodes. Voire même, dans le cas de la Cité des Voleurs, d'excellent.

Comme son titre l'indique, l'essentiel de l'aventure se passe dans une cité - les livres dont vous êtes le héros se passant en milieu urbain sont assez rares pour que cela mérite d'être souligné, où votre personnage, enrôlé par le maire d'un village pour éliminer le sorcier qui les terrorise, devra d'abord chercher un sorcier, puis les objets nécessaires à la destruction du méchant de service.

Livingstone évite les défauts qui émaillent ses mauvais opus : pas de monstres à 12 points d'habileté à chaque coin de rue, pas d'objets vitaux ramassés par hasard sur le bord de la route ou dont on décide de s'en servir comme ça, par caprice (le sorcier recommandé par notre commanditaire nous indique exactement les objets nécessaires et comment les utiliser). Trouver la localisation desdits objets est un peu délicat, mais il ne faudra pas beaucoup de tentatives pour y parvenir. De même, la confrontation finale est bien gérée : on a de bonnes chances de réussite si l'on sait éviter deux ou trois pièges.

Bref, la jouabilité est au rendez-vous, de même que l'ambiance; un grand classique des défis fantastiques. ( )