Egg of the Phoenix

Ken Rolston reviewed Egg of the Phoenix for Dragon magazine #133.^[2] He felt that the first three scenarios were "original, challenging, and entertaining, particularly in their exploitation of the peculiar logic of the AD&D game universe", but had reservations about the final scenario, which "despite having a plausible game rationale and logical self-consistency, strikes me as gross and overly busy rather than lean and elegant".^[2] He felt that assembling these tournament scenarios into an epic campaign was not very successful, because Mentzer had not designed them as a sequence, and they originally had nothing to do with one another. He said, "the narrative frame isn't particularly persuasive, nor do the supplemental encounters or transitions match the tone and theme of Mentzer's original tournament designs", and "the introductory motivations for involving the PCs in the epic quest are rather arbitrary".^[2] Rolston also noted some careless production errors, such as a number of typos in the first few pages, and that the text refers to the map book as a twenty-page center pullout. Despite his complaints that the campaign frame and the production quality were not satisfactory, Rolston concluded by saying: "There's some very good stuff in here: nine sessions or more of solid and occasionally brilliant material. The tournament-based adventures may be the strongest of Mentzer's peculiarly original AD&D game designs."^[2]