The Dragonwand of Krynn

By Greg Fahlgren and Nancy Fahlgren.

This is a Dragonlance-based entry in the "One-on-One Adventure Gamebook" series, which I played when I was a wee little Karalynn. It was perfect for a pair of siblings who were dragon-obsessed, since it involves two players. I recall making my brother play the role of the big bad Dragonlord, while I got the Solamnian Knight, of course. Our mutual and yet competitive quest: to get the Dragonwand first!

Mechanics: there's a gamebook for each character (who also has a coterie of minions; but they don't get their own books). The players take turns making decisions and flipping to the appropriate pages in their own books. Some of these choices are your basic "Do you cooperate with the guards or break loose?" types of branches, while others are navigational, determining your specific location ("Do you go up the stairs?").

Whenever battle breaks out, the other player takes on the role of your opponent. If you happen to enter the same room as the other main character, the two duke it out and only one continues with the quest. My brother and I used to frantically backtrack if we stumbled into the same place.

I found a lot of the number-crunching annoying (different amounts of damage dealt on alternating turns; juggling up to five characters on the same side in a battle, each with his or her own special rules), and in this reprise with my brother many years later over email, ended up writing a web script to handle the battles. The setting is a slightly prettified dungeon (it's a temple, but it's just a series of rooms where you encounter various monsters; better-lit, but not otherwise elevated). The characters have horribly thin veneers of personality (the main thing I remember about the knight is his mustache); the Dragonlord's better about this, but the knight's companions were a female cleric (of course) and a mischievous kender thief.

And I actually think that it's far too easy to collide with the other main character early in the game — I can see the appeal of this sort of fight, but the loser has to twiddle his thumbs for the rest of the game, which is no fun. I'm not sure how this would be managed, but I'd like to see the competition continue even after the wand is acquired. You still have to make your way out, after all; imagine snatching it from the grasp of the but-recently-triumphant wand-finder! Muahaha.

It didn't play as badly over email as I had feared, but I wonder if that's because there was no gripping narrative. I was perfectly fine setting the book down with my page saved. That said, it was still entertaining, and there's lots of room to trash-talk; that's the extent of the role-playing, but it's still sufficiently interactive to make this enjoyable.