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Dungeons & Dragons: Endless Quest #16
The Dragon's Ransom
The reader's decisions will determine whether the treasure needed to pay the Golden Dragon who controls the land of Oon will be gathered in time.
First published April 28, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 29, 2013
I'm puttin' on my "FALSE ADVERTISING!" angry face!
The Dragon's Ransom has "dragon" in the title and there's a dragon on the cover, so why is this book so nearly dragon-free?
And the cover...There's a hero depicted as a brawny, bronze-skinned, golden-haired warrior….
Yet, inside the hero appears as a spotty git who can't afford a decent haircut…
In this D&D oriented "Choose Your Own Adventure"-styled book, as the reader you play the role of a young cleric, a catch-all synonym for holy man. Go ahead and grab a D&D player. Once he's done shaking and wetting himself from the perceived attack, he'll tell you that the cleric class was the most boring character to play in the game bar none. It's like making the football team, but being made to play punter.
So let's get this into perspective: In this adventure you are a lowly priest who's tasked to get a bag-worth of gold from hobgoblins (one step up in fierceness from goblin...and that ain't very fierce) and the gold is to be used as tribute to a mostly benevolent dragon. Wow, not a terribly promising start. But from what I remember reading this as a kid, it wasn't so bad, so let's give it another go!
Well, the first thing I notice is that there are many lost opportunities for reader choices. It's like Laura French had a linear story in mind and she didn't want to veer away from it. Flipping through the book, I see now that there are only 18 possible endings. That's not a good sign, since many of those original CYOAs had 36.
Here are the adventures I recently went on in preparation for this review...
1) I take three companions with me: a fighter, thief and wizard...yep, the good classes. We head out of the village and kill a trope, er rather, I mean a bridge-guarding troll. Then we avoid a nixie (a water faerie) trap. (Note: Every adventure you go on in this book forces you to read through both of the previous encounters, and that equals large amounts of lame.) We then find and investigate an orc village where we locate a bunch of treasure in a dungeon. Snuck out w/it safely, but then got greedy for more and got killed by a war party.
2) Me and the gang made it to the underground hobgoblin lair. Found a treasure horde. Got greedy for more...and got it! BOO-YAH!!!
3) Me and my pals kill the troll, burn down the orc village, and then wake up in the middle of the night to a werewolf tearing into my throat. CONSEQUENCED!
4) I go it alone this time and try to use magic on the bridge-guarding troll, but it doesn't work. The End. Wait a second...So that means there's no way of succeeding unless you go with the group? Wow. That blows super bad. I'm starting to recall the annoyance I once felt about this book back when I first read it....
End Note: There are multiple occasions in which whatever choice you make will lead you to the same conclusion. Literally, you are eventually sent to the same page as a consequence of either choice, and this happens more than once. What's the point? It's just bad form for these kinds of books.
The Dragon's Ransom has "dragon" in the title and there's a dragon on the cover, so why is this book so nearly dragon-free?
And the cover...There's a hero depicted as a brawny, bronze-skinned, golden-haired warrior….
Yet, inside the hero appears as a spotty git who can't afford a decent haircut…
In this D&D oriented "Choose Your Own Adventure"-styled book, as the reader you play the role of a young cleric, a catch-all synonym for holy man. Go ahead and grab a D&D player. Once he's done shaking and wetting himself from the perceived attack, he'll tell you that the cleric class was the most boring character to play in the game bar none. It's like making the football team, but being made to play punter.
So let's get this into perspective: In this adventure you are a lowly priest who's tasked to get a bag-worth of gold from hobgoblins (one step up in fierceness from goblin...and that ain't very fierce) and the gold is to be used as tribute to a mostly benevolent dragon. Wow, not a terribly promising start. But from what I remember reading this as a kid, it wasn't so bad, so let's give it another go!
Well, the first thing I notice is that there are many lost opportunities for reader choices. It's like Laura French had a linear story in mind and she didn't want to veer away from it. Flipping through the book, I see now that there are only 18 possible endings. That's not a good sign, since many of those original CYOAs had 36.
Here are the adventures I recently went on in preparation for this review...
1) I take three companions with me: a fighter, thief and wizard...yep, the good classes. We head out of the village and kill a trope, er rather, I mean a bridge-guarding troll. Then we avoid a nixie (a water faerie) trap. (Note: Every adventure you go on in this book forces you to read through both of the previous encounters, and that equals large amounts of lame.) We then find and investigate an orc village where we locate a bunch of treasure in a dungeon. Snuck out w/it safely, but then got greedy for more and got killed by a war party.
2) Me and the gang made it to the underground hobgoblin lair. Found a treasure horde. Got greedy for more...and got it! BOO-YAH!!!
3) Me and my pals kill the troll, burn down the orc village, and then wake up in the middle of the night to a werewolf tearing into my throat. CONSEQUENCED!
4) I go it alone this time and try to use magic on the bridge-guarding troll, but it doesn't work. The End. Wait a second...So that means there's no way of succeeding unless you go with the group? Wow. That blows super bad. I'm starting to recall the annoyance I once felt about this book back when I first read it....
End Note: There are multiple occasions in which whatever choice you make will lead you to the same conclusion. Literally, you are eventually sent to the same page as a consequence of either choice, and this happens more than once. What's the point? It's just bad form for these kinds of books.
April 16, 2016
It was a very funny book!!!
March 5, 2017
This was the last “Endless Quest” book I read as a kid. I was outgrowing them, but furthermore they had gone down a path that didn’t interest me. About the time I read this, I discovered City of Thieves and the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series that was much more in line with what I wanted from a choose-your-own-adventure model. Whereas Fighting Fantasy emphasized re-playability and player control, the “Endless Quest” books tended to be very limited in their choices and to get stale quickly. Furthermore, although “Endless Quest” started, like a D&D campaign, with an adventure that let you play a human adventurer in the D&D world, they had more and more limited themselves to young adult male protagonists.
This book follows that basic error, setting you up as “Loendal,” an apprentice cleric (male, 13 years old). But there are some improvements over the previous “apprentice” characters. For one thing, this book allows you to form a party, with each of the essential four character classes (cleric, fighter, magic user, thief) from D&D. This allows you to explore the strengths and weaknesses of each of the classes and to make decisions based on who will be best for a given task. They even make an effort to simulate the “first level” experience by giving each of the spell-casters only a couple of relatively weak spells, although the book lacks any mechanism to limit how many times you use those spells, and makes the “Burning Hands” spell of the magic user rather more devastating than it should be.
However, it is a very limited storyline, with several “false choices” at the beginning that actually railroad you into a single thread that takes about 20 pages each time you want to re-start the adventure. This is boring, and is one reason the book is not as re-readable as a better constructed choose-your-own-adventure would be. There are two alternate “real” adventures to choose from - one decidedly more dangerous than the other – and both can lead to success or failure, and it is even possible to do both in the course of a single session. You do get to meet monsters from the D&D canon, and the book was so up-to-date as to include some from the “Monster Manual II,” which was just published that year. Once again, the “dragon” in the title is basically a distraction: you don’t meet the dragon or fight it in any storyline, it serves only as a motivator for your quest.
In all, the book probably made a reasonably good introduction to D&D concepts for young people who didn’t know them well, but it didn’t satisfy a long-time gamer geek like myself. It’s not the worst in the series, but it’s far from the best, and it didn’t do much for me even at the time I was the age of its target audience.
This book follows that basic error, setting you up as “Loendal,” an apprentice cleric (male, 13 years old). But there are some improvements over the previous “apprentice” characters. For one thing, this book allows you to form a party, with each of the essential four character classes (cleric, fighter, magic user, thief) from D&D. This allows you to explore the strengths and weaknesses of each of the classes and to make decisions based on who will be best for a given task. They even make an effort to simulate the “first level” experience by giving each of the spell-casters only a couple of relatively weak spells, although the book lacks any mechanism to limit how many times you use those spells, and makes the “Burning Hands” spell of the magic user rather more devastating than it should be.
However, it is a very limited storyline, with several “false choices” at the beginning that actually railroad you into a single thread that takes about 20 pages each time you want to re-start the adventure. This is boring, and is one reason the book is not as re-readable as a better constructed choose-your-own-adventure would be. There are two alternate “real” adventures to choose from - one decidedly more dangerous than the other – and both can lead to success or failure, and it is even possible to do both in the course of a single session. You do get to meet monsters from the D&D canon, and the book was so up-to-date as to include some from the “Monster Manual II,” which was just published that year. Once again, the “dragon” in the title is basically a distraction: you don’t meet the dragon or fight it in any storyline, it serves only as a motivator for your quest.
In all, the book probably made a reasonably good introduction to D&D concepts for young people who didn’t know them well, but it didn’t satisfy a long-time gamer geek like myself. It’s not the worst in the series, but it’s far from the best, and it didn’t do much for me even at the time I was the age of its target audience.
September 12, 2022
These D&D choose your own adventures were a big part of my childhood. I have a few still, and was looking for something quick so decided to give it a try.
These books are always very short, and a little shallow. I enter hoping for some interesting choices and encounters, and maybe a cool scene or two.
This one... sort of delivered. A lot of the choices are pretty painfully "good choice" or "Bad Choice" or even worse "no noticeable difference". There were a few times choices led to different sections that both went to the same end result, which was frustrating.
There are some good parts, you are given a decent basic description of your protagonist and your party making choosing stuff to best suit them easier.
Overall, this was ok, not amazing
These books are always very short, and a little shallow. I enter hoping for some interesting choices and encounters, and maybe a cool scene or two.
This one... sort of delivered. A lot of the choices are pretty painfully "good choice" or "Bad Choice" or even worse "no noticeable difference". There were a few times choices led to different sections that both went to the same end result, which was frustrating.
There are some good parts, you are given a decent basic description of your protagonist and your party making choosing stuff to best suit them easier.
Overall, this was ok, not amazing
September 7, 2023
This was a interesting story but almost lack luster I guess you could say. Maybe if I was younger I would have liked it more.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews