Half of the short lived, two book Battle Quest series, Caves of Fury was written by the prolific Stephen Thraves and published back in 1992. In common with the rest of the Hodder & Stoughton Adventure Game Book series (entirely written by Thraves), the original book came with a host of additional specially printed playing items including custom dice, password cards, decoding overlays and treasure/strength counter devices. That probably accounts for the high price at the time - £5.99, which is about £13 in today's money accounting for inflation.
Three decades later and its hard to come by the full pack in its complete form. Many of the big second hand internet book sellers will list Caves of Fury at between £4-£6 but at that price you're probably just getting the book only. Complete sets of some H&S books in good condition can sometimes go for up to £50 on eBay. But the Caves of Fury full kit can usually be bought for about £12 if you're lucky.
Here at Adventure Gamebooks we were lucky enough to buy a copy of Caves of Fury on Music Magpie for just £3.44. It unexpectedly came with all the additional pieces except for the treasure counter, which isn't strictly needed for playing the game - you can just write down the number of treasures you get on paper. In terms of devaluation, losing the pieces to these books is equivalent to writing in pen on a Fighting Fantasy adventure sheet.
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| No Treasure counter |
Crazy Old Cave Men
Off into the caves we go! We are a barbarian hero off into a shadowy, mythical world to fight big monsters, outwit cunning wizards and find some treasures. Standard fantasy fare. Finding more treasures equals a better game result, and we should be aiming to get at least 6 out of the maximum 8 treasures available in the book to consider our adventure complete.
After a long sea voyage we arrive on shore to meet Sageor, a stereotypical fantasy old man. He's made a plea for a big strong warrior to come out and go to the Island of Fury, run by stereotypical fantasy bad guy Cragcliff. The island is apparently a Deathtrap Dungeon type scenario, where Cragcliff has filled his lair with a load of treasures and wants greedy young warriors to go and die there.
It seems that the treasure filled island is incredibly tempting as Sageor has lost all four of his sons to its deadly dangers. Well three sons, with one of them having come back home as a petrified mute. You would have thought that the third son at least would have been a bit hesitant in going off to the island after it claimed two of his brothers. "Er dad, don't you remember what happened to Gartax and Throgdalon?" But four is just silly. It seems that Sageor is just as bad as Cragcliff in encouraging buff young men to go off to their doom.
Does Sageor want the island lord dead for the loss of his sons? No. Apparently the only way he can get revenge is by taking Cragcliff's treasures away. And you, the adventurer, can keep them. Ok old man, I accept this bizarre quest. But I ain't coming back this way for a party if I get out alive.
Strength, Strikes, Spells and Scrolls
Mission accepted and we get our instructions. We have 6 strength points to start with and set these on the special counter. Points are lost by being wounded by a monster, strenuous activity or just being silly (being hit by an old man's stick maybe).
The battle rules are given (more on that later) but in summary, to have a fight we roll the special dice provided with the book to find out the outcome of an attack round. Monsters will have a certain number of hit points needed to kill them but we must scarper after taking only one hit - that does not sound heroic!
On our journey we might come across some other equipment and magic spells - represented by the rest of the things in the game kit - but we don't start with any. Finally, we have a treasure counter (actually we don't) to keep track of how much booty we can snaffle from the furious island. As this wasn't included in the game kit we'll just write it down.
Cavern Club
With Sageor creepily watching us, we get back on the water once again before we've even had the chance to dry off our naked muscular torso.
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| Got an umbrella mate? |
There's a storm a'blowing so we make the wise decision to row ourselves over a mile to the Island of Fury in a, we kid you not, "little rowing-boat". We're not doing anything here to counter the stereotype that barbarians are a bit thick. Surely that decision should mean a strength point lost at least (and a stupidity point gained) before we've even got to this titular angry island.
In the distance we spy three cavernous entrances to the island and get our first blind choice of the book. Shall we use our aching biceps to row towards the left, central or right chasm? With no clues given as to which is the better choice we arbitrarily choose the middle route.
Our choice is seemingly a good one and we end up on a narrow beach in front of the caverns where we're given the chance to have a rest or do a bit of exploring. Acting on the call to adventure we decide to have a shufti round the shingles. While bloodcurdling howls come from the caves we stumble upon a password scroll in an old bottle. Bonus! Somewhere along the way the practically naked hero depicted in the image above has somehow acquired a haversack, into which we put the scroll - meaning we can use the password card from the adventure pack from now on.
G-ape-ing chasms
Now into the caves themselves its not long before we come across our first monster. An pointy toothed, slit eyed, flared nostrilled ape like creature. It's telling here that the monster isn't given a specific name like in the Fighting Fantasy books, where you also get the name in capital letters (GIANT PIXIE) to know you're about to have a scrap. Here, we just get a general description, and a bit of not much more than incidental art of the monster.
Now we get a chance to fight the beast, which tempts us towards it with a sparkling diamond, potentially our first treasure. There is also the option to avoid it, hoping to find an easier creature to fight. As this is our first encounter its difficult to know how tough the baddy will be to kill so we decide to have a go at it anyway.
As it turns out, it doesn't look like we've chosen wisely. This creature will only be defeated if we get to wound it a rather high 8 times. Remember that according to the rules we have to run away if we get hit only once, so victory doesn't seem likely. After 3 rolls of neutral clashes we get our first hit on the beast and take it down to 7 points. But the next throw after that it hits us, meaning we lose our first point of strength and have to head to the next cave with our tail between legs - the tail sprouted from the same place the haversack did.
Cavernous
Moving on we plough through the dark and gloomy caves, facing yet more blind choices where we generally seem to have a one in three chance of not losing a strength point. Our first chance to use the sandy password scroll comes about and following a successful answer a friendly wizard lets us use a second item - the trance spell. Battling on we reach another creature feature and choose to fight the first one we come across again. Another bad idea as the fanged, muscular brute has 9 hit points and by the 4th throw of the dice we are whimpering away again.
The rest of the book follows a similar pattern - blind choice, item test, colourful characters (including twin goblins, witches and prophetesses), followed by a parade of monsters to choose to fight or avoid.
We soon die on our first attempt at the book but after careful map making and replays we eventually reach the final encounter where we finally meet the bad guy Cragcliff and have the chance to win the diamond from his crown, the largest and most precious jewel ever found. We won't spoil the ending but note that Sageor, the old man who sent us here in the first place, has seemingly been watching us from his clifftop perch the whole time!
Is it any good?
Stephen Thraves is a good writer and in Caves of Fury he does a decent job of scene setting and writing evocative text. Throughout the book you definitely get the feel that you're in some dark, dank caves and that there's a lot of furious creatures in there.
The artwork by Terry Oakes tries to have a go at this but falls just a bit short of the mark. There's only one full page illustration at the start of the book (which is good) but the rest of it is mainly incidental art and just ok attempts at depicting the nameless creatures that you may or may not choose to battle with.
Some gamebook fans think that having the additional playing items like the custom dice and cards is gimmicky but we've always liked this idea and enjoyed using them. Actually using items like your hero does in the game can make you feel more a part of the adventure.
Along those lines, we always thought that a great concept would be if a book publisher partnered with a beer/wine company and you got a few drinks provided along with your gamebook. The drinks would be written into the text, so when you enter a tavern and buy a drink the book would instruct you to open your specially brewed bottle of Orcsblood Ale and quaff it like your character would. Booze Your Own Adventure anyone?
In terms of structure, Caves of Fury follows a familiar layout to the other Hodder & Stoughton adventure gamebooks. There are essentially a number of "acts" in the book which typically start by forcing you to make a three way blind choice - do you take the right, left or middle passage for example. Blind choice means that you receive no clues whatsoever as to which is the best course of action, which is a deeply unsatisfying gameplay mechanic.
Depending on what choice you make there's typically three outcomes with minor variations - good, bad and less bad. In this book the good outcome might see you finding an additional item for your adventure and no loss of strength points during the act. The bad outcome will see you lose at least one and possibly two strength points. The less bad outcome will be either no loss of strength or maybe a 1 point loss.
After the acts finish they converge at a pinch point and then you then progress into a section which has the potential monster meetings. Not choosing to fight a particular monster will move you onto another bad guy until you either choose to fight one or run away from them all. The section then ends at another pinch point and we rinse and repeat again.
Bogus Battles
The worst thing about Caves of Fury is the combat system. When doing battle, every monster you choose to fight is going to have a certain number of hit points needed to defeat it. These range from 2 to 9, but are most likely at the higher end of that as low score monsters are rare. All of the monster sections have a number of high strength enemies (between 7-9 hit points) and only one low strength enemy (between 2-4 hit points).
You'll only know how strong a monster is after you decide to fight it, and there are no clues as to its power beforehand in the given description. To take one example, in the tombs section near the end of the book you first meet a two-headed lizard demon with a muscular human body. Avoid that, and you then come across a horned fiend, with horns sprouting from all over its body, adding to jets of fire blowing from each nostril. Both adversaries sound similarly nasty but the first monster has 9 hit points and the second only 2!
You inflict a wound (one hit point) on the baddy if you throw a certain combination on the two special combat dice (D6) provided in the adventure pack. This now gets a little complicated.
One of the dice is coloured red and represents the battle from the perspective of the monster. Four of the sides of this die show a fanged creature's head, which represent the monster being exposed during the battle. This symbol coming up is at worst bad for the monster and at best neutral for the monster. The other two sides of the red die show a sword, which represent the monster making an attack. At best this is good for the monster and at worst neutral.
But to know the full outcome, you also need to know what's been rolled on the blue die, which represents you the adventurer. Three sides of this die show a shield, whish shows you've defended yourself; two sides are a sword, showing an attack; and one is your face, showing you've (figuratively) exposed yourself.
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| Red die: "Grrrrr this battle system is shit". |
Good - you hit the monster.
Neutral - neither side hits each other.
Bad - the monster hits you.
Getting the probability calculator out, the way the Battle Quest fighting system has been designed means that the odds of you wounding any monster you face in any one attack round (good outcome) are 1 in 4.5, around 22% of the time. That's any monster, from a flame belching, metal plate armoured dragon to a 2ft tall, straw pants wearing gnome.
Meanwhile, the odds of any monster hitting you in one attack round (bad outcome) are 1 in 18, or just over 5%. This simply does not make sense and takes no account of the strength and skill of the enemy you are facing.
Adding to the bad design is that a neutral outcome, no hit on either side, is going to happen just over 72% of the time. So most of your rolls are going to result in no hits whatsoever. Where's the fun in that? Just keep rolling rolling rolling...
The odds may seem in your favour overall if you're around 4 times more likely to make a hit on your opponent than they are on you. But no. No no no.
Perhaps the worst thing about the Battle Quest fighting system is that all it takes is for you to "lose" the battle is by getting just one hit from the monster. For the monster its a fight to the death. But for you, the hero, its a fight to the scratch.
The rules state that if you are wounded at any point during a battle you must "prudently take flight at once". This results in losing one of your strength points and while the monster might not kill you outright, you lose the chance of gaining a treasure and completing the game with all 8 of the available sparklers.
The flee on one hit rule makes the probability of victory against the monsters very low. To illustrate this, we simulated 100 fights on an Excel spreadsheet against a maximum 9 wound creature, of which there are many in the game, using the die roll probabilities. The results are depicted in this chart.
The chart shows that the neutral die roll outcomes (depicted in yellow) completely dominate the game. Yawn, yawn, yawn. This causes one of the simulated fights to last a snooze inducing 54 rolls!
To reflect the game rules, each simulated fight ends either when the monster hits you (red colour) or nine hits are scored against it (green colour). The simulation results showed that in only 12 of the 100 fights was the monster defeated.
We might have gone into a bit too much detail here but the point is that to complete the game fully you have to get all eight treasures, which you get by killing eight monsters. It states in the intro, "when you have obtained the maximum score...then you have indeed completely mastered the Caves of Fury". But if you end up fighting even just one 9 hit point monster during your quest, where in that fight alone there is only a circa 1 in 8 chance of victory, then your odds of complete mastery are very very slim. The low chances of success suggest that either the book was not play tested properly or that the author was suspiciously sadistic.
Bad
Other points of annoyingness crop up elsewhere in the book, which in no particular order are:
- The back of the book says, "YOU, o fearless warrior, must employ your mighty strength and supreme battle skill to fight the evil monsters...". But there is no skill involved in the game's battles, its just random dice rolls which take no account of the fighting ability of either you or the monster.
- Too many blind choices.
- At some points when you need to use the password scroll you're given a list of 3/4 choices by the person asking for the password. What's the point of having a password if you have a few options to choose from? Why not just pick a random number or toss a three sided coin?
- Dying when told to lose your last strength point and not having the death fleshed out is unsatisfying. One of the most memorable things about the Fighting Fantasy books was the way your gruesome deaths are explained in all their glory detail. From tumbling down forever into a bottomless pit, to an agonised death standing up in a vertical cage in House of Hell, the text really brought to life the end of your adventure. But in Caves of Fury you don't ever get to read a single line saying your adventure is over. Its just, lose a strength point, oh yeah I have to stop now 'cos the rules said so. There are no instant deaths, which some may feel is a good thing, but this means there are no opportunities for deathly descriptions.
- Cragcliff the bad guy is a name only. His back story or reason for creating his danger cave is never given and his appearance in the book is fleeting.
- None of your adversaries are given names, they're all simply called a "creature".
- The formulaic book title, which is just another, "The [Geographical feature X] of [Negative/scary noun Y]". Have a go at making up your own name for the unpublished third book in the Battle Quest Series - The Mountain of Despair, The Esplanade of Sorrow, The Oxbow Lake of Disappointment etc...
Conclusion
On the whole, Caves of Fury is a frustrating and formulaic but sometimes enjoyable book. It seems a whole lot more could have been done with it given that the writing is very good, evocative and the setting is classic fantasy fare with room for expansion.
Just some minor tweaks to the battle system would propel it from being an overall average book to a moderately good book. But as it, Caves of Fury is practically impossible to complete on the first few read throughs. If you feel like playing it more than once, the key is to make a map, and find out where the bonus items and low strength monsters are.
It gets an extra bonus point for the trance spell card having a swirly image on it.
RATING
Story & plot - 4/10
Illustrations - 5/10
Gameplay system - 2/10
Writing - 7/10
Atmosphere - 7/10
Nostalgia & subjective enjoyment - 6/10
OVERALL - 31/60
To read the full solution to Caves of Fury - CLICK HERE
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