I loved it for nostalgia reasons alone. It's true that it's not a good design for a campaign book; it almost looks like they took the 4 game books and just turned them into this... It doesn't really give you the resources to run the game, or direction on what to do, just the numbered areas. Your players can wander through the areas like they couldn't in the books. But the Sorcery Crown of Kings novels were a huge part of my childhood, and so I loved this book.

As a fan (from way back) of the original Sorcery! series, as well as the recent excellent video game adaptation, I was very disappointed by Crown of Kings - The Sorcery Campaign. This adaptation from gamebook to tabletop RPG campaign ends up being far too literal. What worked as a gamebook in 1985 does not translate well to the roleplaying tabletop in 2016. The GM info on how to handle each encounter is straight out of the book, with no explanations for seemingly illogical NPC actions. While this behavior may have contributed to a kind of unpredictable fairy tale logic in the original books, here it leaves a GM with little understanding of how to run an encounter that ends up straying outside the expectations of the text. The adventure is presented as a pure pointcrawl, with no notion of what to do if the adventurers try to travel overland.

As an example, the PCs can creep by goblins and an ogre to infiltrate a goblin mine. If they are seen, they will be immediately attacked, with no real explanation of why. What if the PCs want to parlay? It's hard to know how they would respond, unless the GM just decides that they keep attacking no matter what the disposition of the party or the odds. Later on, the party can encounter a goblin overseer, who will challenge the party if he sees them, but let them leave safely if they immediately withdraw. Why doesn't he attack immediately? Why does he just ignore the party if they withdraw? Why does he ever attack? It makes no sense, and good luck trying to GM that as anything but a narrated gamebook.

Another example: When the party infiltrates the city of Khare, the GM is instructed that the PCs must be captured and temporarily incarcerated by the watch upon entry. It is explicitly stated that this is important to the plot! On top of this, even though the party should be captured, they will not be disarmed or otherwise divested of their possessions. Honestly, I've never before seen of such an extreme instance of railroading the PCs.

For what it's worth, it is a faithful adaptation, complete with the original artwork. The layout is pleasing and very readable, and the writing is fine. I just think that this product compares very poorly with the highly imaginative Sorcery! adaptation to video games. It's unfortunate when a video game exceeds a tabletop roleplaying game in terms of demonstrating what can be accomplished by taking the source material in new directions. There are a lot of missed opportunities with this book, unfortunately.