Powers & Perils

Avalon Hill Enters the FRPG Field
The art on this box cover has always intrigued me, which together with the Avalon Hill name probably prompted me to purchase this game back in 1984. It very much has that sword & sorcery look of a Frank Frazetta book cover illustration. It pulls me into the scene, evil sorcerer and his snarling pet lizard is confronted by our barbarian hero, assisted by a pretty femme fatale. The illustration has some depth to the composition and even though it isn't great art, there is action and excitement here, just the sort of thing I would have been looking for in an adventure game at that age. Published by Avalon Hill, the originator of and at the time still the biggest name in cardboard counter and map wargames, Powers & Perils (P&P) held the promise that Avalon Hill would deliver the same quality to its fantasy role-playing game (frpg) that I had come to expect in wargame purchases.
Inside the box are five paper booklets (The Character Book, The Combat and Magic Book, The Creature Book, The Book of Human Encounters and Treasure, and County Mordara) and some dice. The booklets follow a general organization pattern familiar to anyone who has read their wargames. (That is they have numbered sections like 12.1.4 and so on.) Despite being broken into four rule books and a scenario, and introducing the rules in the order players are likely to use them starting with character generation and also using the familiar wargame rules organization technique, I recall having difficulty rolling up a character and grasping the mechanics back when this game was new. The interior illustrations are all b&w and are generally less impressive than the cover illustration, although the Frazetta influence is still in evidence.
I believe this game sat, unplayed, on my bookshelf for several years, until I finally sold it about a decade ago. I purchased P&P at a time my group was looking for something "more realistic" than White Box, although I continued to run White Box as well as experiment with other games. The group finally settled on RuneQuest 2nd ed. as our "more realistic game", but again, I continued to run White Box (often using Red Box, if that makes any sense). I recently saw a nice used copy of P&P for sale and purchased it (the above image). Maybe I was drawn in once again by that box illustration, maybe by the fact that many games I found "unplayable" in my youth now make sense to me upon reading them again and I am wondering if P&P might be one of those. Maybe it's pure nostalgia - a powerful drug to a middle-aged guy.