TSR, $2.00, ISBN 0-88038-054-3
Fantasy, 1983

Hello there, kiddies! Today, in Spell of the Winter Wizard, you are Omina, the stepchild of Alcazar, the Wizard of Eternal Spring. That’s right, winter is bad, while spring is good. Your stepfather is not feeling too well, so you skip out into the woods to gather herbs for his soup. Then… oh no, he’s captured by his hated rival, Warzen the Winter Wizard and that villain’s orc army! Now, you and your retinue of intelligent, talking animals have to sneak into the Ice Cavern to save him.

That is, if you are older than ten, and if you are, you face the risk of death from permanent cringe from all the cloying, saccharine cuteness of the whole thing. The talking animals (yes, there’s even a talking clam), the “You too! You not!” kind of tone to all the conversations here, cute stumpy creatures in the woods… oh sweet scented undergarments of Sune, this entire setting is like Wonderland on aspartame. Hence, when you get gored to death by a boar or is eaten by a carnivorous plant, you may end up screaming, “Wait! I thought everything here is cute, cuddly, and precocious!”

It gets better: even should you manage to defeat Warzen and rescue Alcazar, you need to do it the right, gentle way in order to get the best happy ending. You may argue that it makes no difference between turning that villain into a daffodil or sending him off with a loud kaboom, as both still end up destroying Warzen anyway, but this campaign begs to differ. You can destroy your foe, yes, but you must do it in a cute Tinky-Winky Dipsy La-La way that makes babies clap and kittens meow. That, kiddies, is the true way of the warrior.

Needless to say, the whole thing about Spell of the Winter Wizard is a beautiful kind of bloodthirsty bonkers, kind of like Maria running up the hills singing about the sound of music when the plants around her are secretly man-eating Venus flytraps waiting to burst into their own song. The encounters are inexplicably memorable, and when you die, the impact is ten times more shocking because it’s like seeing that horse actually die in The Neverending Story movie: you find yourself thinking, “But this is a kid’s story… nobody dies, right? Right?”  You wait for a few minutes, blinking in a daze, and then you realize with a shock, “Oh my god, it’s DEAD!”

This one is quite the eccentric work of art, although whether this is by design or by accident, who knows.