Narrated by: Jonathan Sleep
Series: Caverns and Creatures, Book 1
Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
Release date: 09-02-14

Very immature, pretty damn funny.

Here’s the publishers summary:

Tim and his friends find out the hard way that you shouldn’t question the game master, and you shouldn’t make fun of his cape.

One minute, they’re drinking away the dreariness of their lives, escaping into a fantasy game and laughing their asses off. The next minute, they’re in a horse-drawn cart surrounded by soldiers pointing crossbows at them.

Tim now has the voice and physique of a prepubescent girl. Dave finds that while he lost a foot or two in height, he somehow acquired a suit of armor and a badass beard. Julian’s ears have grown ridiculously long and pointy. And Cooper… well Cooper has gotten himself a set of tusks, a pair of clawed hands, and a bad case of the shits. He also finds that he’s carrying a bag with a human head in it – a head that he had chopped off when they were still just playing a game.

Shit just got real, and if they want to survive, these four friends are going to have to tap into some baser instincts they didn’t even know existed in their fast-food and pizza delivery world.

It’s fight, flight, or try to convince the people who are trying to kill them that they don’t really exist.

©2012 Robert Bevan (P)2014 Robert Bevan

Compared to other similar books + Story

Concept is a tried and true one, or maybe this was original when it was released and I’m just late to the party, but it’s a good one.

It differs to others like this, see NPCs, as so far the characters are the main thing holding it up rather than the promise of something amazing in the future.

NPCs book series by Drew Hayes has Easter eggs wrapped up in other series, plus taken from the view of  the Non Player Characters becoming aware that their universe runs parallel to the gamers one. An interesting concept for sure.

This just straight forward takes the gamers view and sinks them into the fantasy world. They are very annoying and immature and constantly making ‘your mum’ jokes.

Plus, the writer seems to put as many disgusting things in as possible, especially for the character of Cooper the half Orc who has a charisma score of 4.

The language used and descriptions including similes and metaphors seems to be unnecessarily vulgar.  Most people probably won’t enjoy this, but for me it’s just so obviously done, almost to annoy those that would disapprove that it ends up just being funny.

Here’s some examples:
-The taste of fart was present, but not overpowering.

Lowly guard- “But they killed Thadius.”
Lead guard- “Thadius was a dick. Can you honestly say you miss him?”

I don’t wish to spoil the ending of this first book, but it seems that this is another great story that doesn’t follow ‘the heroes tale’. The kind where you know where it’s heading after 20 mins of story, think Star Wars movies.
It sets up a premise, has brief interaction with some keys things and then essentially spends most of the time exploring the world, getting into shenanigans due to the quality of the player’s characters, and interacting with the basic, quirky and more interesting elements /components of the game’s rules, structure, workings and logic.

All the characters are great.

Cooper the half Orc with a charisma level of 4 constantly gets the group into terrible situations.
Tim the … Munchkin?  Or gnome or something?  I’m not sure, I don’t play these games..
Dave the Cleric with healing power.
Julian the player new to the game, playing as an Elf that’s a sorcerer as well as a wizard who constantly uses his powers in unconventional ways, such as using horses as cannon fodder.
And Mordred, the game master…Who is all kinds of weird.

Great, and really funny conversations between characters and NPCs continues to make this an entertaining book and series.

This book is Written by Robert Bevan, one of the players in the Author’s and Dragons podcast. It seems that many of my favourite authors hail from this group, so I’ll be, and I recommend YOU should all be checking these people and their books out more soon.

Drew Hayes, Robert Bevan, Rick Guelteri, Steve Weatherell.. and a few others that I’ll be checking out for sure.

Narration

All the voices are done well and in keeping with the personality and race of each characters.  The way some NPCs speak is just funny by itself.

For example- Tim: This lock’s a piece of shit, it should be easy enough to pick
Greely: haha, what’re you going to pick it with? Your willy?

Julian, by far is my favourite character and he sounds a lot like a young Keanu Reeves, everything has an upward intonation.

Recommendation

This book is pretty vulgar, and its only funny if you can get past that and all the blatant purposeful disgustingness that some characters bring to the table.

I would NOT recommend it for everyone. If you want to tune out to some ‘your mum’ jokes, fart jokes, and other stuff…then maybe this is the book for you.

Whilst I really liked it, I would guess that most would not.

But then again, I like this book and series for the fact that you CAN just zone out whilst the characters go around and explore the world… the author has set up a premise that doesn’t neccearily have to finish.

So… I’ll be listening to this whole series eventually, but I doubt many people will be.

Get a free trial of audible with 2 free books, listen to books like this for free, & then if you want….just quit before 30 days & you get to keep everything… sounds like a pretty good deal to me.