Review: Fighting Fantasy Book 9: Caverns of the Snow Witch

The ninth Fighting Fantasy book, published in 1984, is Caverns of the Snow Witch, written by Ian Livingstone. The adventure was first written for Warlock magazine, but then expanded for release as a book. I say ‘expanded’, but ‘extended’ is more accurate. The Big Bad dies halfway through [SPOILERS!!], and you spend the rest of the adventure dealing with the consequences of that, which is an unusual approach to a Fighting Fantasy book, where paragraph 400 traditionally has you standing over the corpse of an evil demon/wizard/demonic wizard, perhaps with a promise of material wealth in the very near future.

– No fancy mechanics in this book, just classic Fighting Fantasy Skill/Stamina/Luck, plus provisions and a freebie potion of your choice.

– Unfortunately, I roll Skill 7. Doomed. Doomed, I tell you.

– Stamina’s a little better, at 17, and Luck is 12. I may need to rely on that Luck score to survive battles with opponents more savage than an inebriated goblin. I’ve got 10 Stamina-restoring meals worth of provisions in my backpack, so I opt for a Potion of Skill, since any reduction to Skill 7 is going to be lethal.

– I’m still recovering, emotionally, from the carving up of my Skill stat in Deathtrap Dungeon, clearly…

– The first sentence of the background passage: “Winters in northern Allansia are always cruel and bitter.” Boom, that’s Allansia’s first name-drop. Before now, the fantasy stories have referenced locales from previous books, with Port Blacksand, for example, being mentioned in both Deathtrap Dungeon and Island of the Lizard King, after its titular appearance in City of Thieves, but the region was never given a name.

– Scorpion Swamp, as I noted in my review of that book, made a little effort, referencing ‘the kingdom’ (without naming it), and introduced a King’s Highway, plus a couple of towns and Scorpion Swamp itself, but didn’t name-check any of the places from previous books. (American Steve Jackson seems to have been given a bit of leeway in adding to the setting, but British Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone apparently had their own ideas and eventually placed Scorpion Swamp on the southern continent of Khul, rather than rolling it into their nascent Allansia.

– The rest of the introduction talks about how the protagonist has been hired to protect Big Jim Sun’s trade caravan as he heads through the frozen wastes, only to discover that something big and nasty has attacked one of the trading posts and killed everyone there. Don’t worry, Jim, in exchange for 50 gold pieces, I’ll track down this monster and destroy it.

– Did I mention, I have Skill 7?

– Before I go, I tell Jim that I’ll be back later that day. I suspect that this will not be the case…

– There’s an illustration of Big Jim in this introduction, emblematic of the art style of this book. The illustrations, by Gary Ward and Edward Crosby, have the look of medieval woodcuts, but were (according to the Titannica fan wiki) done using black felt tip on A3 paper. Some of them work better than others, but on the whole I much prefer the more realistic art styles of Ian McCaig or Martin McKenna. Ward and Crosby didn’t illustrate any other Fighting Fantasy books, so the series never sees this style again.

– My journey begins with an ice-bridge over a crevasse, which requires me to test my Luck. That’d be great, wouldn’t it, if I were to die within two paragraphs of starting the adventure? I mean, what is this, Beneath Nightmare Castle?

– A pair of snow wolves attack me. They’re pretty minor opponents, stat-wise, but unfortunately, I’m a pretty minor hero.

– Interestingly, there’s an error in my edition of this book: the snow wolves’ stats are presented as STAMINA and then SKILL, rather than the usual SKILL and then STAMINA, so it’s unclear what the actual numbers are meant to be. I’ll just assume it’s the headers that are wrong, and the numbers are meant to be in the columns they’re in.

– I manage to kill the first wolf (they politely attack one at a time), although I’m very badly mauled due to bad dice rolls and having the same Skill stat as my opponent.

– The second wolf bites me. I die.

– It seems that having a low Skill score is the biggest impediment to playing a Fighting Fantasy book, since even run-of-the-mill opponents can become Dark Souls-lethal. Considering that, in most books at least, the protagonist is meant to be an experienced warrior, perhaps generating Skill using D6+6 is too ‘swingy’, with a potential range of results from ‘crap’ to ‘awesome’. A more appropriate method (at least for the books where you are an experienced fighter) would be D3+9, giving a range of Skill 10-12, or if that’s too high, roll two dice and add 6 to the highest result, which would make Skill 7 protagonists far more rare.

– Anyway, griping over: my replacement character is Skill 11 (that’s more like it), Stamina 21 (nice), Luck 7 (thud). I choose a Luck potion this time around; for reasons never fully specified, potions of Luck increase your Initial Luck by one point when you drink them, so that Luck 7 won’t last forever.

– …Before I go, I tell Jim that I’ll be back later that day. I suspect this will not be the case…

– I decide to walk around the crevasse this time. It’s a bit meta-gamey, perhaps, but I don’t want to trust my Luck on that bridge.

– Oh, FFS! A dark shape looms out of the blizzard. It’s a Skill 10, Stamina 11 woolly mammoth, and it’s not happy to see me. I kill it, but have to eat two lots of provisions to recover the damage. Looks like this route avoids the snow wolves though.

– The blizzard gets worse and I’m forced to dig out a snow shelter and eat two more portions of provisions to keep warm. Nice. Provisions are generally regarded as ‘spare Stamina point storage’ in Fighting Fantasy, hence my recurring (i.e. beaten to death and then I keep going) joke about plugging wounds with bread and cheese. It’s good to see provisions used as something more food-like.

– When I resume my journey, I find an abandoned hut. I bet that would have been warmer than sitting in a hole in the snow. Anyway, remember the first rule of Fighting Fantasy: if you find a house, burgle it.

– This trapper’s hut has been recently occupied as well, as I can heat up the stew in the pot and eat it. If I get attacked by three bears, I will be very unhappy.

– I don’t, but I do find a warhammer and a spear under the bed, so I steal those. I mean, I guess once I’ve found the beast I’m hunting, I can come back this way and put them back, right?

– Oh. Maybe I don’t need to, because I’ve just come across a trapper being mauled by a badly-drawn yeti. I bet he wishes he took his spear and warhammer with him when he went trapping.

– Or whatever it is trappers do in the arctic wastes.

– I throw the spear at the yeti and promptly roll a 1. The spear lands harmlessly in the snow. I draw my sword and do it the hard way. This is another brutal fight, with the unwounded version of the yeti having Skill 11 and Stamina 12. In other words, it’s an attritional roll-off.

– I get lucky though, and kill the thing that slaughtered the trading post. 50GP reward, here I come!

– Wait… that trapper’s still alive. With his dying breaths, he tells me a story about how he’s spent years searching for the Crystal Caves, cut out of a glacier by the followers of the Snow Witch, only to accidentally find it just yesterday. (Unlucky!) Apparently, she’s wanting to bring about a permanent ice age so that she can take over the entire world, which is a bad thing.

– I mean, she lives in the Allansian equivalent of the Arctic Circle, and hasn’t even managed to conquer her own neighbourhood yet, so I’m not convinced the world has much to worry about.

– The Snow Witch is described in the text as ‘beautiful yet evil’. Really? I didn’t think that beautiful people could be evil. I thought all beautiful people were good, and only smelly uggos could be megalomaniacal psychopaths. Caverns of the Snow Witch is challenging my mainstream perception of beauty, 1980’s style.

– I don’t get the chance to ask the trapper how he knows all of this exposition, since he dies. I decide to ignore his silly story and go and get my money from Big Jim.

– Just kidding. The story doesn’t even give you that option for a voluntary early game over. (It’d be like selling the Brass Ring to Poomchukker at the start of Scorpion Swamp.)

– Poomchukker.

– I decide to set off towards the Crystal Caves, whether the reader likes it or not, and promptly dodge an avalanche. I do like the atmosphere of this sequence set in the snowy wastes. The prose never lets you forget that the going is tough, and you lose the occasional Stamina point simply because you’re outdoors.

– Hehehe. I was in this quest for the money. Now I’m just in it for the dying of exposure.

– I find the Crystal Caves and head inside. I’m walking down a tunnel carved from the ice. No mention of how gods-damn slippery the floor is.

– I encounter a follower of the Snow Witch. He’s an elf. Nice. Subvert expectations by throwing ‘good’ creatures at us as villains.

– Rather than risk a fight, I tell him I’m here to enter the Snow Witch’s service. He points out that I’m an idiot and the only reason he’s here is that he’s wearing a magical metal obedience collar. Maybe it’s not a subversion after all. Ian Livingstone’s already used the trope of the villain having a load of slaves from the ‘good races’ in Island of the Lizard King. I tell him I’m actually here to kill his boss, and he gives me directions and lends me his cloak as a disguise.

– It’s probably a more plausible disguise than the cloak I wore on Fire Island to free the Lizard King’s slaves.

– The elf’s directions lead me to the kitchen, where a neanderthal kitchen-hand is being bossed around by a gnome.

– Quick side-track here: Neanderthals, aka homo sapiens neanderthalensis, are so-called because the first specimen identified as being of that species of human was located in the Neanderthal Valley in Germany in 1856. Personally, if I was going to feature supposedly-primitive hominids based on the neanderthals, I’d probably come up with a different name (even ‘cavemen’) and just imply through physical description what real-world creatures they’re meant to be analogous to.

– From the illustration, the gnome definitely isn’t wearing a collar, and it doesn’t look like the neanderthal is either. They’re baddies, but the gnome just gave me a bit of stale cake, because I look like I need it.

– The next chamber I enter is a shrine to a giant ice effigy of a demon, surrounded by grovelling cultists. In my cloak disguise, I saunter through… and fail my Luck roll. “Oi, you, why didn’t you stop and sing praises to the Frozen One?”

– I reply, “Let it go,” and run, pursued by a dozen neanderthals, orcs and goblins. One of them tries to trip me with a whip, while another shoots a dart at me. I fail a Luck test and, in a nice play on the usual mechanics, whether the dice roll was odd or even determines which of those two attacks hits. I get a dart in my arm but successfully escape from the cultists.

– (Out-of-character, I’m getting the feeling that I’ve screwed this book. See, I remember that there’s a cupboard in that kitchen, only accessible if you murder the gnome and the neanderthal, that contains a variety of items that come in useful later on. This is an Ian Livingstone story, so if I miss a single item, I’ll probably get eaten by something nasty, but I couldn’t justify my character murdering a pair of kitchen workers, particularly after being given cake.)

– I find a dwarf in a pit, being bombarded with blocks of ice by unseen spectators in a higher cavern. I help him escape, and gives me a sling with three iron balls and warns me to beware of the white rat.

– Which white rat? All white rats? A particular white rat? And why? Does it have rabies? Plague? Is it six feet tall? Bloody hell, what is it with people only telling me half a story? And this guy doesn’t even have the excuse that he’s dying, since I just saved his life.

– Oh, it’s the old ‘which of the three illusionists is the real one’ conundrum. Unfortunately, there’s no indicator as to which one is the real illusionist. I picked randomly and stabbed the correct guy.

– If I recall, there’s a neat variant on this puzzle in the climactic confrontation in The Rings of Kether.

– A genie? He’s a bit far north, isn’t he?

– I attack a frost giant. Wait, you know your old Bible stories, right? What’s the best way of killing a giant? Yep, that’s right. I shoot Frosty Goliath in the head and he drops like a wheelie trying to ice skate. The giant is in possession of a bottle of perfume and three rings, each of which has a different effect when you wear it.

– As with so many such situations in Fighting Fantasy, there is zero indicator as to what these rings do until you put them on. Awesome: I’m now immune to extreme cold, can summon a warrior to aid me, and… lost 4 Skill and 9 Stamina. Jesus, that’s harsh.

– Time for a snack or two. My provisions are getting low.

– Oh yes. I have Skill 7 again. I’m going to die.

– And here’s the thing that’s going to kill me: an animated statue of quartz, with Skill 11, Stamina 13.

– Did you not go into that trapper’s hut and steal the warhammer from under his bed? Then you can’t hurt this thing and will die.

– Actually, you get a second chance: The genie that you found can help you out.

– I’m going to cheat. I’m clearly, in my cursed condition with a Skill score four points lower than my opponent, not fit to fight this golem, so I’ll call on the genie.

– It’s called roleplaying.

– So the genie makes me invisible and I sneak away from the crystal guardian, before being given a blind choice between left and right in the tunnel.

– I kill a zombie. That’s about the toughest opponent I can face at this moment in time , thanks to that bastard cursed ring.

– I loot the storeroom the zombie was guarding and come away with some ground minotaur horn, a dragon’s egg and some garlic.

– In our world, garlic is a herb that you add to food to make it awesome. In Allansia, garlic is a warning that, in a very short time, you will confront a vampire.

– I’ve mentioned in previous posts how, if I ever write a gamebook, you’ll find the garlic after you’ve been forced to use other methods to kill the vampire, or you can find silver bullets in an adventure that doesn’t include werewolves, or there’s holy water that does nothing because the priest is a notorious sinner.

– The other two items are from a list of various items, of which I can carry three.

– Oh, look, a white rat. That doesn’t seem particularly scary. And then it starts growing, so I sprinkle powdered minotaur horn over it, because of an old legend that this interferes with metamorphosis spells.

– See, here’s another of these blind choices. I, the reader, only find out about the powers of powdered minotaur horn a short time after I chose it from a list of items I could pick up. Why not provide me with that information at the time I had to make the decision?

– Incidentally, if I’d not taken the minotaur horn, that rat would have turned into a dragon. With my cursed Skill, there’s no way I could have killed it.

– With the rat neutralised, I open the sarcophagus it just jumped out of.

– Whoa. It’s the Snow Witch, who i just now discover is a vampire!

– Yes, this was foreshadowed by the presence of garlic, but I do like the twist that this evil sorceress, otherwise cast from the same megalomaniacal mould as Balthus Dire or Zanbar Bone (though not, pre-retcon, innocent victim of home invasion, Zagor), is something different.

– I whip out the garlic, and then have to look around for something to ram through this vampire’s heart.

– Remember the gnome and the neanderthal? The ones I didn’t attack because there was no need to do so? If I had, I’d have fought the neanderthal while the gnome ran off to find reinforcements. I would then have been given the option of searching the store cupboard, even though the book warns the reader that the gnome could return with reinforcements at any second. He doesn’t, but the fact remains that the text explicitly deters the player from searching the kitchen.

– One of the items in the pantry is, for some reason, a rune-carved stick. This is the ‘stake’ you need to kill the Snow Witch.

– Wait, there’s a bit of garlic in the zombie-guarded storeroom of spell components, but an enchanted stake in the kitchen pantry? Why would you put them that way around?

– Anyway, I cheat shamelessly to avoid the instadeath of getting my throat turn out by a vampire, and attempt to shove a stake through her heart.

– Interestingly, if you have Skill 10 or more, you stake her automatically. Anything less than that, and you have to Test Your Skill (no, it’s not called that yet) to succeed. Of course, with Skill 10 or more, you’d probably pass that test anyway, so there’s no real point to that bit of mechanics.

– The Snow Witch is dead(er). This being a Fighting Fantasy book, I go and steal her treasure. This goes badly, as the first statue I pick up stabs me repeatedly until I smash it to bits.

– There’s a nice nod to reality when I loot the Snow Witch’s hoard, in that her gold pieces are heavy. For every 50gp I take, I have to leave one item behind. I give up my warhammer, because I’m fed up with autocorrect capitalising the ‘W’ every time I write it, and the spear. I still have my sword, and the adventure’s pretty much done now I’ve killed the baddie, right?

– “Two men suddenly appear at the door, a Dwarf and an Elf.” JRR Tolkien would think that that sentence was ungrammatical.

– Turns out this Evil Overlord (Overlady?) had a secret escape passage behind her throne, er, sarcophagus, so I don’t need to go back the way I came. Good thing too, because as the dwarf and the elf explain, all the obedience collars have failed and all the elves and dwarves are fighting the goblins.

– I’m a hero who just sparked a race war…

– Redswift the elf lives in the Moonstone Hills. I don’t know if that’s a region mentioned previously in the series, but Stubb the dwarf is from Stonebridge, the town in The Forest of Doom whose king is so crap that he needs an allegedly enchanted modular hammer in order to persuade his people to defend themselves against hill trolls.

– ‘Stubb’, as in ‘short thing’. Really? I choose not to point this out to the dwarf in question, in case he stabs me in the knees.

– While walking down a corridor, I’ve just spotted a circular metal disc and picked it up, hoping it’ll come on useful. This book is written by Ian Livingstone, so the odds are good.

– Shortly afterwards, some magical elfin boots. Another paragraph refers to Redswift’s ‘elfin intuition’. Is this an early attempt to make ‘elfin’ happen instead of the more traditional/Tolkienesque ‘elven’? Pretty sure it doesn’t stick.

– And now a star-shaped metal disc which, incidentally, I wouldn’t have found if I hadn’t stuck around to fight a caveman to the death and instead taken the option to flee. Since this caveman has a higher Skill than me (thanks to that damnable curse), running would have been the sensible thing to do.

– Incidentally, was this caveman of the same subspecies of human as the neanderthal I met earlier? Or are they different things in Allansia, and if so, why?

– Also, there was a caveman in Deathtrap Dungeon. I wonder if he was recruited/captured from around these parts?

– Great. Redswift and Stubb have been captured by a Mind Flayer… No, wait, this is a legally distinct creature called a Brain Slayer. Unfortunately, my brain also gets slain, to the tune of another two Skill points and six Stamina.

– I’m now Skill 5, if anyone’s counting.

– Although that’s still high enough to speed-read a scroll before it magically fades to blank. Curious use of the Skill stat: how agile I am, how good I am at stabbing, and how fast I can read.

– Oh yes, and a square metal disc.

– Traditionally, discs are disc-shaped, surely?

– How do the logistics of these puzzles work anyway? Do most of the inhabitants of the second part of the Crystal Caverns have to carry around little metal discs at all times, just in case an intruder murders their boss and then tries to escape down the secret escape tunnel? And what is that intruder finds more than one of the same disc? Is it like a Panini Stickers album, where adventurers meet up somewhere to exchange swapsies? “I’ll give you a star-shaped one for that square one.” “Sorry, I’ve already got three star-shaped ones. Do you have any rounds?”

– I find a shield, which boosts my Skill to a mighty 6. Still doomed. It was trapped, of course, so it’s a good job I speed-read that fading scroll earlier.

– I find a scroll on the wall, but don’t understand it, so I ask Redswift to read it, as everyone knows that elves speak lots of languages. Meanwhile dwarves are dullards who can barely manage one? I’m such a racist.

– Oh crap. Redswift looks quite distressed by what he reads, rips it up and refuses to tell us why.

– I forgot that that’s how that plot element was added to the adventure – a random scroll left pinned to a wall. Considering there’s another encounter with the Snow Witch coming up, that feels like a bit of an immersion breaker – I mean who leaves random spells pinned to doors where anyone could casually glance at them as they passed by?

– Hey look, it’s that second encounter with the Snow Witch, here portrayed as a psychic manifestation within a glass orb. I attempt to demonstrate the design flaw of living in a glass house by throwing a stone (well, firing one from my sling), but it only cracks the orb.

– She’s hamming it up, claiming to have already beaten me. Dude, which of us has a stake rammed through their heart? Whose army is tearing itself apart through internecine conflict? Who’s currently extant solely as a possessed snow globe?

– The Snow Witch in a Snow Globe summons two… Zombies? They’re described as zombies, but they’re more undead clones of Stubb and Redswift, who are busy being suffocated by their obedience collars. Whatever they are, I have to fight them while Snow White thinks up a new game to play with me.

– This fight is simultaneous. Just pretend you’ve read my usual grumble about the rules for simultaneous combat being included in the main text rather than the actual rules at the start of the book.

– We’re playing a game called Discs. It’s basically a slightly more involved version of Gollum and Bilbo’s ‘What has it got in its pocketses, my precious?’, mashed up with stone, paper, scissors, and allegedly made up on the spot by a megalomaniacal undead souvenir, and not at all seeded through the last few encounters by giving me a trio of different-shaped discs. The game’s simple – I conceal one of the discs in my hand and she calls out a shape. If my disc’s shape beats hers, she let’s Stubb, Redswift and myself leave alive.

– Bearing in mind that this piece of damaged merchandise from the Crystal Caverns Gift Shop doesn’t have eyes any more, how do I know she can’t already see what’s hidden in my hands?

– This isn’t a game of skill. Like too many of the puzzles in early Fighting Fantasy, it’s entirely a matter of luck, with a 33% chance of success.

– Fortunately, as with the illusionist earlier, I pick the correct one of three options. The Snow Globe explodes (cheap and nasty gift shop tat that it is) and the Crystal Caverns start to cave in.

– Ding dong, the witch is dead. Again, I mean, and she was already dead before I found her, being a vampire and all. By my count that’s three times she’s died now, which could qualify her for a lead role in Supernatural.

– The three of us escape the collapsing caves (no mention of what happens to the hundreds of other humans, elves or dwarves (or even the goblins and orcs) that the Snow Witch had in her thrall.

– I decide not to bother catching up with Big Jim Sun and claiming the bounty on the badly-drawn yeti, because he probably assumes I’m dead. I’m not sure of the logic there, but I’ll make a mental note to get my 50gp from Jim the next time I see him.

– Instead, we go to Stubb’s home town of Stonebridge. I ran out of provisions several fight scenes ago, so I’m not sure what I eat in the two days we travel south until we reach the River Kok. The Trial of Champions isn’t on at this time of year, so Fang, fifty miles upstream, would apparently be as dull as ditch water.

– Oh look, there’s Firetop Mountain in the distance. It’s a small world. I expect to enter the Vale of Willow, from Citadel of Chaos, any day now.

– A passing traveller warns us that hill trolls are gathering near Stonebridge. What’s the continuity here? Is this taking place before or around the same time as Forest of Doom, or do hill trolls regularly attack Stonebridge?

– We’re attacked by birdmen. The one I fight has an obscene Skill of 12. This is an unavoidable encounter, in which five out of every six players will be at a disadvantage in the fight even at full Skill, and that sixth one will struggle if they’d suffered one of various Skill losses over the course of the story. Ian Livingstone seems fond of reducing Skill through injuries and curses, but not at restoring it, except through picking up things like armour or shields.

– There’s a logical flaw in the mechanics of the game there. The shield I picked up granted me +1 Skill, but only to my current Skill, not my initial Skill, so essentially magical swords or helmets or whatever are actually a form of healing, not an enhancement to your abilities. That bonus also applies to running, jumping and climbing trees, all of which are things that carrying a shield actually impedes.

– A more logical effect for equipment that aids me in combat would be to add +1 to my Attack Strength, rather than Skill.

– In future books, in addition to the slender way of rolling for Skill I pondered earlier, I might treat Skill bonuses from weapons as being bonuses to Attack Strength instead.

– These are, after all, solo games, so there’s no such thing as cheating.

– I cheat and kill the birdman.

– Thanks to Redswift’s awesome elf vision, or possibly a cultural appreciation of seeing dead dwarves, he sees a dead dwarf. Stubb knows him; it’s Morri the Ironsmith.

– There’s a thing I’ve experienced in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, where dwarves have a tendency to charge into battle and screw things up for the rest of the party. Stubb, although in Allansia rather than the Old World (the other Old World, not the continent on Titan), lives up to that reputation and hurls himself axe-first at six hill trolls. Redswift and I sigh and dive in after him, taking two each, simultaneously. That’s two Skill 9 opponents, each attacking me in every round.

– The only person hurt by cheating in Fighting Fantasy are the other players, and in Fighting Fantasy there aren’t any.

– We get to Stonebridge and it turns out that the dwarves are all depressed because King Gillibran has lost his hammer and they’ve lost their will to not get cooked and eaten by trolls. (Wait, I’m getting deja vu…) Stubb’s friend, Bigleg, tells him an eagle dropped it over the Darkwood Forest and the two dwarves head off to find it. (It’s bloody Bigleg!)

– I’m sure Stubb will be fine, and won’t due horribly at the hands of wild hillmen or pygmies…

– Also, it’s an interesting decision to set this book overlapping and slightly prior to the events of book 3, Forest of Doom. Unlike, say, Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf or Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, Fighting Fantasy never tries to build protagonist continuity between books. Even in the case of Armies of Death, where you play a winner of the Trial of Champions, there’s no mechanical link to either of the previous Deathtrap Dungeon books.

– But if a reader was playing the books that way, and reading the books in order, this revelation upends continuity.

– Or maybe Gillibran foolishly lost his hammer again, he has a spare Bigleg, and the eagles suck at carrying hammers over trees.

– Anyway, with Stonebridge being a bit of a downer of a village at the moment, what with the invading trolls and depressed dwarves, Redswift and I decide to go his place in the Moonstone Hills.

– Big Jim still owes me 50gp for killing that yeti, but I get the impression I’m done with snow and ice for now. I’ll grab him when he’s on the way back from his trade expedition, maybe.

– Oh look, another simultaneous combat against two hill trolls. Painful.

– I actually quite like this Stonebridge sequence. It let’s us explore the conflict in a way that Forest of Doom never did, however it doesn’t do it in any depth. Maybe if Redswift and I did something other than randomly encountering patrolling trolls as we try and enter or leave the area, and actually contributed to the war effort in some way, it’d feel more meaningful.

– Redswift sits me down. “You know how, several days ago, we both read that bit of parchment nailed to the door in the Crystal Caverns?”

– “Right?”

– “Well, what I’ve not mentioned is that it was a Death spell and we’re both dying, faster than I expected as well.”

– Bloody Redswift has known about this for days, but didn’t think to mention it because, what, he didn’t want to upset Stubb?

– Well, at least Stubb is going to live a long and healthy life, after he and Bigleg get back from finding Gillibran’s hammer…

– We need to find a healer, specifically a man called The Healer, but first of all, did I drink a particular potion belonging to a dark elf?

– I’m not sure. I don’t recall meeting any dark elves, either in the Crystal Caverns or afterwards. So, I tell the book no, and promptly instadeath.

– Oh, that potion. That dark elf. I remember now. (Good job I started cheating even while I was still underground.)

– Redswift accepts my apology for making him read the scroll, commenting that a few days of freedom was better than ending his life in an obedience collar, and then dies.

– I keep looking for the Healer, periodically losing a Stamina point as the spell drains me.

– It doesn’t help that I get bitten by a friendly passing rattlesnake as I go. Really? Life’s hard enough already with my rapidly haemorrhaging Stamina. I don’t need a mouthful of venom in my calf.

– In the noble tradition of City of Thieves or Forest of Doom, I wander into every house, cave or other dwelling that catches my eye and kill the occupants of they don’t look like The Healer.

– I don’t murder a sleeping barbarian, as my sneaky elfin boots (stop trying to make ‘elfin’ happen!) are great for sneaking past him.

– Finally, I find a cave with a phoenix carved beside the entrance. That could be The Healer’s place, right?

– Ah, the Healer uses mask magic to deal with the Death spell. He places a Mask of Life on my face, and I lose D6 Stamina. So much for Life…

– I avoid falling down a charm on the way to the second stage of the ritual, and the Healer mixes me an eggnog using that dragon egg I stole from the Crystal Caverns. This is meant to keep me calm while I walk past a banshee, but the howling agitates me enough that I snap and attack her with my sword. Skill 12, Stamina 12. This book loves its obscenely-statted monsters. The banshee is a particularly egregious example, since I’m only attacking it because I failed a Skill test, which means I’m definitely of a lower Skill than it.

– For the final part of the ritual, I need to go to the top of Firetop Mountain, wearing the Mask of Life, and watch the sun come up. If I have anything silver, I can summon a pegasus to take me there.

– Damn. I actually have two magic rings from the Crystal Caverns, but I have no idea if they’re made of silver or some other metal. If the book specified, I didn’t write it down.

– I guess I’m walking then.

– It’s a lot quicker to get to the top of Firetop Mountain when you’re going up the outside of it, rather than through that bastard maze.

– I get to the top, have a little nap, and watch the sun come up. The Death spell is cured.

– I decide to travel back to Stonebridge and meet up with Stubb, assuming he’s back from Darkwood Forest. Wow. The dramatic irony of the reader probably being aware of what happens to Bigleg’s party in Forest of Doom was harsh enough already, but paragraph 400 is just laying it on thick.

– Stubb just got Mungoed off-camera.

– And that was Caverns of the Snow Witch. Overall thoughts? There were too many unavoidable fights against high-statted opponents, the loss of D6 Skill and 2D6 Stamina from a random cursed item is inexcusable, and the reliance on the player having picked up specific innocuous items in order to not die at some later stage in the book was some pretty bad One True Pathism.

– But, the strength of Caverns of the Snow Witch comes from its origins. I believe the original version of the story ended after you staked the Snow Witch. Basically, it was another quest to kill an evil wizard in their lair which, after Zagor, Balthus Dire and Zanbar Bone, is getting a bit old hat. (Okay, City of Thieves spent most of its playing time in Port Blacksand, but the finale was still the aggravated burglary of a wizard’s tower.)

– By icing the villain about a third of the way through the book, even if she briefly (and to my mind unnecessarily) reappears later on, Livingstone upended the usual formula for the series ands stopped it from seeming stale.

– There is no apology coming for the pun in the previous paragraph. It was simply an autocorrect for ‘offing’, I’m glad of it, and I’d do it again gleefully.

– What would I change? Well, Stubb and Redswift were essentially walking stereotypes for dwarves and elves. it probably wouldn’t have taken much more for them to become more rounded characters. Redswift’s death was nicely drawn, but I should have felt some form of grief. A more rounded character would have hurt more to lose. The ironic revelation that Stubb is also going to die very soon, as he joined Bigleg’s quest into Darkwood Forest, hit a little harder. All that said, spending about half the book as part of a trio, only to end it sat alone on a mountaintop, was poignant.

– I know I gave Livingstone some stick throughout this article for using the word ‘elfin’ instead of ‘elven’, but I’ve realised I also use Tolkien’s ‘dwarves’ instead of Fighting Fantasy’s preferred ‘dwarfs’. I’m a hypocrite.

– Next time, we visit the modern day (well, the 80’s, so no mobile phones) and take refuge from the rain in the House of Hell.

– The AI images for this post are mainly the result of me trying, and never quite succeeding, in getting an evil vampire sorceress (I’ve deleted a bunch of them, and kept the better ones with the more weather-appropriate of the outfits). I also used a bit of licence in pitting the protagonist against the Snow Witch in a straight up combat, rather than just murdering her in her bed.