TSR, $2.95, ISBN 0-88038-308-9
Fantasy, 1986
The Sorcerer’s Crown is a genuine sequel to Sceptre of Power, so it is best played after you’ve completed that other one first.
You’re back as Carr Delling, a mage that has since risen a few levels after your successful recovery of the Sceptre of Bhukod. Six years have passed, and now you are haggard—but still hot and sexy, presumably—due to your zeal in amassing knowledge and power so that you can live up to your late father’s reputation as the mage supreme.
This deterioration of your physical prowess allows for a sneaky justification as to why you should reroll most of your stats for this campaign, instead of just porting them over from the previous one, but it however doesn’t explain why you need to re-roll your Intelligence score. Perhaps Carr sustained a few blows to the head during his training?
At any rate, in this one, your old enemy has also risen in power and is now the cooler person because he not only controls paladins and stuff, he also has amassed an army to attack your people! He does all this while you’re sitting on your rear end growing feeble from overwork with nothing to show for it. Sadly, no, you can’t play as the other character.
It is, of course, up to you and your tag-alongs to save the day, and you can choose to do this with or without taking the Sceptre of Bhukod. Will you succeed or will the cooler person prevail?
Well, the good thing here is that the storytelling element is pretty good, thanks to Morris Simon’s prose. This campaign has many instant deaths and just as instant failures, of which you will have little control over, but most of them are pretty violent or gruesome or just plain cruel, so you probably won’t feel so bad subjecting a bore like Carr Delling to these ignominies.
However, this is also a pretty old-school campaign in the sense that there is only one true route to victory, and you will not be given ample clues to make educated choices to discover this route. No, you’d have to just make choices and hope for the best. This allows for replayability, of course, but you may feel that it’s tad unfair that you don’t have much agency over your character in this campaign. Still, that’s basically the whole deal with gamebooks back in those days, though!
A more annoying aspect of this campaign is the presence of your obnoxious and frequently intrusive hangers-on, especially your pseudodragon familiar that seems to exist just to lecture or harangue you. Sure, this is to be expected had this been a “lesser” Endless Quest entry, but this is supposed to be the more “advanced” entry that has supposedly outgrown the necessity of irritating cutesy hangers-on!
At any rate, this one feels more like a standard gamebook campaign with tad less charm and novelty value compared to the previous entry in the Kingdom of Sorcery trilogy.
Still, it’s alright, provided one doesn’t mind a linear campaign buried under numerous misdirection options and some annoying baggage that your character has to drag along for the ride.
