Featuring a great cover by Keith Parkinson and some really great interior illustrations by the renowned fantasy artist George Barr, to which I will dedicate a later post featuring only those illustrations, The Sceptre of Power is also the first book in this series to be part of a longer story.

The first volume in a trilogy, entitled Kingdom of Sorcery, it has a story that might feel very familiar to us now. You play as an orphan whose father, a famous magician, died in mysterious circumstances, so you go on to the Academy of Magic to learn not only spells but also what actually happened to him. 

Any similarity to a famous series of books featuring a young man who is an orphan and goes off to a magical school in order to eventually learn what happened to his parents is surely only a coincidence, and if I say otherwise I will be sued by a very bitter and litigious author, “she who must not be named”, so I won’t say otherwise. It’s a fun story, even if in terms of gameplay there isn’t anything that great here, but I am looking forward to the remainder of the series.