Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Retrospective: Dungeon of Dread

It's increasingly my contention that the years between 1982 and 1984 are among the most interesting in the history of TSR. It's during these years that the company is clearly struggling with the faddish popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, trying to find ways to harness that popularity for both immediate and long-term profit. Consequently, the period is one of wild – and often absurd – experimentation, one not inaptly encapsulated in the metaphor of "throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks." 

There were a lot misfires during this time period, as TSR seemed to adopt a two-pronged approach to broadening the market for their products. On the one hand, there were the bizarre craft items, like D&D-themed needlepoint sets, targeted at non-gamers, while on the other hand, there were the toys and storybooks, aimed at children, presumably with the goal to seed an interest in the kind of fantasy that D&D offered. As a somewhat self-serious middle aged man, it's easy for me to cringe at both these approaches, but, from a purely business perspective, they're not inherently flawed. Indeed, focusing on younger children had great potential, even if I might balk at the specific products that TSR approved for sale under the banner of the Dungeons & Dragons brand.

Part of this strategy involved the publication of a series of "choose your own adventure" style books in a series called Endless Quest, the first four of which appeared in June 1982. All of these initial offerings were written by Rose Estes. I know nothing of Estes prior to her work on this series, except that she was apparently employed by TSR and may have worked under James Ward in the company's Education Department. A few months ago, I wrote a post about this, in which Ward makes reference to "a simplified version of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game … geared for the people who have never heard of the D&D game, and don't know how to play it at all." If this is correct – and I have no way of knowing if it is – this "simplified version" of which Ward speaks evolved into the Endless Quest series.

The concept of solo adventure books was not a new one. The aforementioned Choose Your Own Adventure series began in 1979 (based on the earlier Sugarcane Island book by Edward Packard) and Tunnels & Trolls released its pioneering Buffalo Castle in 1976. Producing D&D-branded versions of the same was actually a very good idea, one that Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone also had, releasing The Warlock of Firetop Mountain a couple of months later in the same year. I'd been an avid reader of the early Choose Your Own Adventure books, to which I'd been exposed by a librarian several months prior to my introduction to D&D. Had the Endless Quest books been available at the time, I have no doubt I'd have been a fan of them as well. As it was, they came out a little too late – I was almost thirteen at the time – and scoffed at them as yet another example of "kiddie D&D," tween-age boys being almost as insufferable as middle-aged men.

A few years ago, I picked up a used copy of the first entry in the series, Dungeon of Dread, and read through it. The book assumes that the reader is an adult human fighter, described rather specifically as 5'9" tall and weighing 150 pounds, outfitted with a sword, a dagger, leather armor, and a collection of typical adventuring gear, like rope and flasks of oil (no 10-foot pole, alas). Your adventure begins as you awaken one morning to find a halfling, named Laurus, rifling through your belongings, looking to steal them while you slept. He begs for his life and tells you about an evil wizard named Kalman, whose prisoner he once was, and whose lair is filled with equal amounts of treasure and danger. Naturally, you decide to seek out his lair and explore it with the halfling, hoping to defeat Kalman and enrich yourself in the process.

While far from a great work of fantasy literature, Dungeon of Dread, isn't awful, especially when compared to, say, the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The prose is more sophisticated and the numbered sections longer, more like that of a light novel aimed at older children, than a mere gamebook. Again, I should emphasize that it's nothing spectacular as a work of fiction, but it certainly achieves its goal of painting a picture of what adventuring in the implied setting of Dungeons & Dragons might be like, aided by Jim Holloway's illustrations. The dangers the reader encounters are a mix of classic monsters, along with a goodly supply of vermin, which, I think, firmly anchors it in its time period. Overall, I think Dungeon of Dread is more forgiving in its choices than either Choose Your Own Adventure books or Fighting Fantasy, but I also think that's at least partially a function of its more novelistic style, which sets it apart from its competitors.

I get the impression that, of all the strategies TSR attempted to appeal to a younger audience, the Endless Quest series was one of the most successful. Over the course of five years, the series swelled to three dozen entries by a number of different writers and encompassed multiple game lines besides Dungeons & Dragons, as well as licensed properties like Tarzan and Conan. I don't doubt that they succeeded in their intention of introducing a new generation of kids to roleplaying games.

17 comments:

  1. I owned this book as a child, probably when the extent of my D&D exposure was the Mentzer Basic and Expert sets. Dungeons of Dread in particular I found very evocative, with images that lasted in my head until adulthood, such as the initial campfire meeting with Laurus, the quite nightmarish scene of being strangled to death by a decapitated troll, the water weird in the well, and the bizarre malformed demonic creature at the end. Maybe it was just one of those "in the right place at the right time" things, but for me, this book played a huge role in defining my image of what a D&D dungeon crawl experience could be like.

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  2. I liked these books i was looking up info on them just the other day.

    My favorite I owned was Mountain or Mirrors and read it multiple times. As Jesse says above it shaped my vision of D&D As a young kid. Plus you died a lot which held true to older editions. I also had a Gamma World one, which i dont think i enjoyed as much even though i loved Gamma world as a kid.

    Last the cover art is often great.

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    1. Assuming you read the 1980s era Gamma World EQs (which weren't great even as a kid) you might enjoy the two that came out in the mid-90s - 24-Hour War and American Knights, both by Nick Pollotta. They're YA but not bad YA by any means, and Pollotta's quirky sense of humor makes them pretty enjoyable reads. I'd recommend most of his work in general, particularly the Bureau 13 series and Illegal Aliens, although the stuff he wrote under the pen names James Axler and Don Pendleton are...less good. He's at his best when doing tongue-in-cheek scifi/fantasy/urban supernatural stuff, not "Men's Adventure" tripe.

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    2. I was really excited to read the first Gamma World Book (Light on Quest Mountain) - the title and the cover work were very awe inspiring to me. However, I felt a great let down with the interior artwork and story. Paging through it now, I still feel quite let down by it.

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  3. I got into D&D in 1983 at age 11. This was a weird and wonderful time when l didn’t really know what constituted “real” D&D and what didn’t. I somehow got a copy of Mountain of Mirrors, and l remember not knowing if this was part of D&D or not, meaning if part of playing the game meant reading these Endless Quest books. My sole official book outside of that was A4: In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, and l remember reading that in total bewilderment over what abbreviations like AC meant. It was all such a new and baffling and exciting experience, something magical that can never be replicated.

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  4. I loved choose your own adventure books when I was a kid, but the one and only "gamebook" I ever encountered was Jody Lynn Nye's "Encyclopedia of Xanth." I had already been playing D&D for a year or so by the time I discovered it, so it wasn't a gateway to role-playing games for me, but I loved it all the same; it was single-player D&D (with the same stats and everything) set in the world of Xanth, which I was, at the time, in love with.

    Had I known there were dozens of gamebooks out there, I'd have been in heaven. ;-)

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  5. A very nice post James - I am quite fond of the Choose Your Own Adventure series (I own several of them) but when I read them now, I am often laughing out loud about the ridiculous prose and the silly decisions.

    I also have a fairly large collection of the Endless Quest books. I remember getting books 1,2,3, and 11 for Christmas one year, and I was happy to have them. I liked that the character that was portrayed in the first book was an adult (like a D&D character typically would be) and that the decision making was similar to that. I also loved the cover art. I enjoyed the second book for a similar reason, even though the character is portrayed as quite youthful.

    However, the trend then became that the main character (you) was a child and typically had very little to do with what a D&D character would be. I remember opening "The Spell of the Winter Wizard", which is book 11, and becoming dismayed of how the story went (compared to what the cover sold to me).

    Last winter I read through #11, completing most of the adventures in it, for nostalgia reasons. It wasn't quite as bad as I had remembered as a youth, but it still wasn't great.

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    1. I am jealous. I own a bunch, a sideline of collecting RPGs (James post about cleaning out your collection was baffling to me), as they are cheap when you find them, in thrift stores. I did not know there were so many when I started...

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  6. My younger brother and I had several of these titles. I remember ICE jumped on the bandwagon put out a few MERP ones too.

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  7. I never had an issue with these when they came out though I had been playing for 4-5 years. I bought the first four as well as the FF and Sorcery when they showed up. In recent years I've "played' DoD with my little girl, and picked up a couple of the recent WOTC versions. The issue I've had with my two Kids is too many other distractions/outlets now, and neither one of them like to read. My daughter flat out HATES reading anything, fun or or otherwise.

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  8. I read/played a few of these; I definitely think Dungeon of Dread is the best and most evocative. Don't try to be the guy on the cover of Mentzer Basic - we all know how that turns out, even for a mighty Champion (Fighter 3)! :)

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  9. I was the perfect age for these books, and the first 10 or so Endless Quest books were key to my early D&D experience (especially for the first few months when I only had one other friend who played). As a 9 year old kid I was annoyed when the hero of the books was also a kid, and preferred the ones where the hero was a young adult, more like an actual D&D character. "Dungeon of Dread" was the most D&Dish and therefore my favorite. I remember reading it over and over and trying to recreate it as an actual D&D dungeon. I also liked "Return to Brookmere" (about an elf returning to his home that's been taken over by wererats) and "Pillars of Pentegarn" with its undead dragon (even though it was one where the hero was a kid). Without these books, I'm not sure I'd have gotten as quickly and heavily into D&D as I did.

    Because of these books I had an association in my mind that Rose Estes was good, and so I eagerly picked up her first real novel, "Master Wolf," when it was released in the spring of 1987 and was extremely dismayed when it turned out to be excruciatingly awful.

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  10. I still own the Endless Quest books, Pillars of Pentagarn and Revolt of the Dwarves purchased sometime around '83/'84. There was also the Super Endless Quest range by TSR which included a pre-generated character and a little dice-rolling. Escape from Castle Quarras from that range I still have.

    Soon afterward, I encountered the Fighting Fantasy range of gamebooks and the Lone Wolf range of books by Joe Dever, and thought, "Ah, solo gamebooks done perfectly." They really hit the sweet spot, but the Endless Quest books and the Super Endless Quest books were fine.

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  11. I was enthralled as a young reader by the CYOA series, but by the time I discovered Endless Quest books I was already immersed in the world of Fighting Fantasy game books, so the fact that Endless Quest books had no game system attached to them seemed positively retrograde.

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  12. I was born well after these came out, but my uncle was just the right age for these so when I'd visit my grandparents I'd look over the fantasy stuff he'd left behind when he moved out and Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons (book 6, checking up) was one of them. It was the only Endless Quest book he had, though he had plenty of Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I loved the crap out of it. At some point during a trip my grandma found me one of TSR's later attempts at reviving Endless Quest, the Ravenloft branded Castle of the Undead, and I remember enjoying it but it's been ages since I last looked at it.

    I was surprised to learn later that the only Rainbow Dragon TSR did was in a Dragon article in 1989, and they weren't nearly as friendly as in the Endless Quest book.

    I gotta say, I'm very curious about HeartQuest, TSR's attempt to expand the Endless Quest series, and D&D by extension, to teenage girls, but they apparently didn't print many and they can be pricey nowadays.

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  13. Endless Quest books were what led me to Dungeons & Dragons. We had them in my grade school library. A pretty good marketing strategy as far as I can tell!

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  14. These were great! Still have the first 12, plus a couple random ones from later. Will introduce my son to them when he's a bit older (he's only 3). Right now he rolls dice and plays with "Dragonriders of the Styx" toys that I picked up on ebay. You should do a post on them.

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