TSR, $2.50, ISBN 0-88038-209-0
Fantasy, 1985
Prisoners of Pax Tharkas is the first entry in the Super Endless Quest series, the line for kids that have graduated from the not-so-super Endless Quest ones. While the latter is more of a Choose Your Own Adventure thing, this series is more of the roll-a-die and keep track of your stats affair. This particular campaign is linked to the events in the first Dragonlance trilogy—you know, Tanis Half-Elven, Raistlin, Sturm, et cetera—so if you know what I’m talking about, in a way, you will also have a good idea of the choices you need to make in this campaign to get a happy ending.
You are Bern Vallenshield. Sadly, the name is chosen for you, so alas, Bern is what you will be. You are a ranger armed with a “volcanic steel sword” Fireborn, and you know this is a TSR campaign for older kids because the sword thankfully doesn’t talk.
To start things off, you have at least 31 Hit Points (roll a die, add 30 to it), and when your Hit Points are reduced to zero, that means you’re dead. You have nine skill points, which you can distribute among Fighting, Observation, and… Physical Prowess. That last one is a measure your strength and speed, hmm, which for some reason is separate from your ability to fight. Weird, really. You also roll your die to get your Experience Points, which are like modifiers—you decide when you want to use a certain number of Experience Points, roll the die, and then add these Experience Points to the result. Hilariously enough, when you roll the die the first time around and get anything from 1 to 4, you can roll again to try for a better score. However, once you do this, you must take the second score even if it is lower than the result of your first roll. Eh, who cares, just say you have 6 Experience Points and so be it. Who is going to punish you for cheating anyway?
Combat will be familiar to gamebook players. Take two dice, roll, meet the minimum score and you will hit the bugger; fail and you will miss. When you miss, the opponent automatically scores a hit on you. Nothing really new here.
Back to the campaign, you begin by returning from doing your mighty power ranger stuff, only to feel the Bern when you realize that your hometown, Solace, is burning. Not only did you arrive too late to join the gang and get yourself on the cover of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, your brother Keran has been taken prisoner with the others to an ancient elven fortress called Pax Tharkas. What will you do? Amusingly, you can leave your brother to his fate and run off to join an elven resistance against the army of the evil Dragon Highlord Verminaard, but that means the campaign ends there and then for you. Assuming you choose to rescue your brother, you then go off to do your thing, and if things go the way the campaign wants it to, you will be joined by a kender, Willow Lightfoot, and some elven wizard.
However, one thing you will notice as you play is that this campaign is very linear. Perhaps this is done by design so that players of Endless Quests and other more basic gamebooks will not experience a culture shock here, but it also means that there are many long narrative sections broken up into small sections. This wouldn’t be so bad, normally, as Morris Simon’s prose is on the pretty good side, but the way this campaign is structured means that you will be flipping to an entry towards the end of the book, read two paragraphs, then flip back to an entry at the front end of the book, before being sent towards the back end of the book again. The whole thing can get very annoying after a while.
Worse, you would have wasted your time if you had taken time to remember the combat system, as the combat encounters here are very simple, and you are mostly directed to roll a die and then go to a corresponding entry based on your score. There are no dramatic, long-drawn combat encounters here. In fact, not to spoil this campaign too much, if you find yourself in many such encounters, you are not going to get the best happy ending. In a way, that makes sense, as you shouldn’t be making too much of a fuss and getting ample unwanted attention if you wanted to launch a stealthy rescue mission. However, this also means that you would end up forgoing much of the inbuilt game system to get to this best ending—a truly bizarre design choice, really.
In the meantime, you will likely find yourself reaching various abrupt endings and dead ends, and even the good endings feel like a middle finger up your nose. This is really an odd gamebook, because Morris Simon is one of the better writers judging from his prose here, but the campaign seems to be designed to waste your time and make you feel disappointed for having spent time on this thing.
Oh, and if you have read Dragons of Autumn Twilight, you may recall that the whiny wretch Tanis and his friends would be breaking into Pax Tharkas, so it seems on paper that there is a nice kind of mirror symmetry that you are helping the prisoners break out in the same time frame. Unfortunately, this also means that the bad guys here come off like Wil E Coyote’s more embarrassing less intelligent siblings. Don’t laugh, as you don’t come off too well either: one of the actions you take here, one that you cannot control, include you pushing a gully dwarf to be squashed by a big, burly guard in order to create a diversion. Considering that gully dwarves as portrayed as mentally-handicapped, smelly, and disgusting child-like creatures… you monster.
At any rate, Prisoners of Pax Tharkas may be a decent rite of passage to players looking for something slightly more complex than an Endless Quest gamebook, but not too complex, but folks coming in from more complex gamebook series may find this one a big letdown.
