For those who need reassurances that their readings of this novella will be untainted by people of poor opinions, spoilers may follow.
Okay, now that that is out of the way, we can move on to a discussion of this novella. The Savage Caves is a hard book for me to place in perspective: on one hand, it’s a Dungeons & Dragons novella and is almost destined to break novel sales records; on the other hand, it reads like poorly written juvenile literature.
The novel is brief, light on detail and quick on action. While a nice change of pace from some other works in the fantasy genre that I’ve been reading, the novel’s author seems to be uncertain of the target audience.
Throughout the prologue and most of the first chapter, I felt that this book was meant to be shelved next to one M. Potter in the kids’ section of the bookstore. The writing was trite and seemed in-line with how a younger mind would view the genre, until the halfling starts breaking out in a tourette syndrome-like tantrum. Then the adult section kicks in, while Lidda (the aforementioned halfling) starts getting bawdy with the role of the mayor of the cross-roads village she’s about to be hung at. If I wasn’t lulled into a sense of youthful fantasy, this would be fine, but why strike the reader out of the blue?
The novel gains speed quickly as heroes Jozan and Regdar (iconic cleric and fighter, respectively) rescue Lidda (iconic “rogue”) from the noose, offering to investigate a weird incident with spiders, while dispatching the eight-legged beasts, the three meet up with Naull (a wizard). The party enters a series of caves and encounters a tribe of goblins and some other nasties along the way.
While quick and a light read, the novella leaves me wanting more, more detail and more character interaction, as the group separates quickly while underground.
The novella’s strengths lay in its ties the roleplaying game, as its mentioned on other sites, this novella is meant to be seen as a way of connecting with the rules engine and how the game can be played. As such, the book is like peering into a live game being played with the iconic characters and seeing the results.
The book’s weaknesses also lie within its ties to the game. In connecting the reader with how the game is played, the characters are left poorly defined and developed for those wishing more from a story. The first meeting between Jozan, Regdar and Lidda is stilted and difficult for such a short work to labor over. The author seems awkward in handling characterizations and making the characters stand beyond their illustrations in the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks.
The author gets better towards the work’s end, but the shortness of the work only heightens the stilted style in the beginning—had the book been longer, the meeting and characterization probably would have been a portent of a solid ending. As it stands, the book needs work, and hopefully future stories from the author do not suffer the same stilted styling that seems almost destined to make of the rest of the series.
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