Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Sorcery!

My copy of the Sorcery! campaign module arrived in the mail today.


It is probably fair to say that I waited for years for this, after Myriador failed to deliver the fourth instalment of the series. Feels good to have the product in my hands now.

Inside the covers the text and illustrations are familiar...


But therein lies the problem - not all of the encounters and puzzles from a solo gamebook lend themselves well to being converted to an RPG format, where the options available to the players are not limited to two or three offered by the author. The way some spell components, artifacts and clues and hints are deposited for the players to pick up and use also seem fortuitous.

While I appreciate that the authors have kept the stories true to the original, almost thirty years have passed between when I first played the first book and today, and I have to say that both my prospective players and I may prefer a more... "realistic" setting and experience.

That is not to say that I won't use the module - I will just have to go through the whole series to make the storyline less linear, take out the more... childish elements (yes, I wasn't complaining about that thirty years ago now, was I ?), and maybe give the whole setting a darker, grittier atmosphere.

2 comments:

fatgoblin said...

sprinkle some grimdark powder?

I actually don't mind childish :)

Have you seen the first few books of the previous release? Is it much different?

captain arjun said...

I think the Myriador ones were less true to the original material.