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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9565715" data-attributes="member: 7737">Commentary:I guess Dalris handles the entire rest of the college by herself, because she shows up in the next book none the worse for wear.---Earlier [USER=42856]@Jfdlsjfd[/USER]  joked that Dalris is too old to be a Disney princess. Age aside, Dalris is a princess, which is just one of the similarities between Sceptre of Power and a certain highly influential space opera movie. Consider:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The protagonist is a naive boy who grew up in a rural area.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A mighty teacher of mystical power was betrayed by his own student.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The protagonist longs to wield the same mystical power as his father.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The protagonist leaves home after his family dies. He seeks out someone to teach him the mystical power.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Along his journey, the protagonist meets a rogue and a princess.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The protagonist makes an enemy of a dark figure.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The protagonist takes up his father's weapon and uses it against his enemy.</li> </ul>There are places where the correspondence isn't exact: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Han (and Chewie) join Luke on his adventure while Thayne doesn't join Carr (at least, not in THIS book); </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Luke rescues Princess Leia, while in this book instead Dalris arguably rescues Carr; </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Luke doesn't kill Vader, while Carr does kill Beldon; </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Vader is Luke's father, while Beldon is Carr's uncle. (And also… Beldon isn't Vader… but to say more would be a spoiler.)</li> </ul>Still, there are a lot of similarities.---The cover art by Keith Parkinson depicts a snarling wizard doing a ritual in front of the crypt thing, who's wearing a purple robe (like royalty, instead of the brown robe described in the book) and holding the sceptre on its lap.<img src="https://gamebooks.org/gallery/add07.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The way the WIZARD is depicted screams "evil!" to me, which would mean it's Beldon, but that doesn't make any sense because no such scene ever happens in the book.The way the SCENE is depicted, it could show Landor binding the crypt thing. Landor's robe should be the pure white of an archmage, not off-white with a blue cape, but that could be artistic license.Regardless: it's Keith Parkinson, so of course it's great.---Overall I enjoyed this book despite my numerous rants along the way. The plot is full of more holes than Swiss (goat) cheese, but the written words themselves are of high quality, the characters are well drawn, and the number of arbitrary unavoidable deaths is on the low end for CYOAs.Speaking of deaths: I am reasonably confident it is impossible to die from HP loss in this gamebook, even if you start with the minimum 9. There simply aren't enough passages that force you to lose HP for it ever to be a concern.Credit for the writing and the cool details goes to author Morris Simon. I dug up a little information on him from a genealogy site where he had posted his own mini-biography. He has a doctorate in anthropology and taught at the university level from the 1970s until he retired in 2006. He has six children and a passel of grand- and great-grandchildren.You can sense the anthropological nuance in the text. I mocked some of it as it relates to Bhukod / Kandia, but without Dr. Simon's knowledge of anthropology, there wouldn't be anything TO mock.You can also sense the half-bitter, half-amused self deprecation of the university environment</blockquote>

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