Pyramid Review: Sovereign Stone

Pyramid Review

Sovereign Stone

Published by Corsair Publishing and Sovereign Press

Designed by Don Perrin and Lester Smith

168 pages, $25.00

I first heard about Sovereign Stone, oh, three years ago. Maybe it was longer than that. Larry Elmore (still in my mind TSR's greatest of many great fantasy artists) had this idea for a fantasy world, and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (authors of the Dragonlance epic, as well as tons of other fantasy best-sellers) would do the novelizations, and . . . well, it took a while for the project to come together.

But now it's out, and the people involved read like a Who's Who of fantasy roleplaying. In addition to Elmore, Weis, and Hickman, you have lead designers Don Perrin and Lester Smith, plus "Design Assistance" credits for luminary veterans like Timothy Brown, Jeff Grubb, Greg Porter, and Jim Ward. There's as many combined years of experience involved in this project as just about any roleplaying game ever published.

That said, I wish the game didn't seem so much like state of the art for 1988. It's not that I don't like it -- I just had really high expectations for it, and they don't quite measure up.

The game world itself is fairly interesting. It has your standard fantasy mix of humans, elves, dwarves, and orks, but the designers put some good twists on the genre to keep it from being just a Tolkien (or D&D) rehash. The dwarves are more like Mongolian hordes, traveling on horseback, hunting and raiding and generally causing . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: September 10, 1999

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