Children of the Dragon; Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, by Rose Estes

[rachelmanija]

Children of the Dragon is a small-scale but otherwise standard story about three siblings and their dragon eggs; ends just as it starts to get interesting, that is, with the hatching. I wonder if a sequel was intended but never written? It certainly read that way.

Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons is an adorable, lighthearted entry in the Endless Quest (same principle as Choose Your Own Adventure), with rainbow dragons, a castle in the clouds, and a bratty princess.

My favorite Rose Estes book, and also my favorite Endless Quest (D&D-based, which I preferred to Choose Your Own Adventure), is still Circus of Fear, which has three totally different and super-fun tracks in which you run away to a fantasy circus and apprentice with 1) fantasy animal trainers, 2) freaks, 3) acrobats. Obviously 1 is best because blink dogs, pegasi, etc., but the other two, with very sympathetic “freaks” and an arrogant acrobat, are fun as well.

Any of you read Endless Quest and/or Choose Your Own Adventure? Which was your favorite, or most memorably bonkers? Anyone else stick slips of paper at choice points to help you backtrack when you ran out of fingers?

Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons (An Endless Quest Book, 6) (Pick A Path to Adventure)



Circus of Fear (An Endless Quest Book, 10)

Comments

[sholio]

Oh wow, it's been SO LONG since I did a Choose Your Own Adventure! Those were such fun. I remember that I also had at least one that included RPG elements where you rolled some character stats at the beginning and then rolled a die to determine the outcome in fights with monsters, etc, which then determined which page you'd turn to (or whether you died).

[rachelmanija]

I had some of those too but found them frustrating as I inevitably lost the dice.

[yhlee]

I liked the Fighting Fantasy ones because they generally printed "dice rolls" at the bottom of each page so that you could flip to a page for a dice roll. This opened things up to happy cheating if you memorized how to flip to high rolls (for you) or low rolls (for the monsters).

[rachelmanija]

Ohh, that's so clever!

[sholio]

I was an RPG nerd, so I always had dice. XD

[yhlee]

I am all here for gamebooks/CYOA/etc.! My favorite CYOA was the The Magic of the Unicorn, specifically the path where YOU turn into a unicorn.

My favorite gamebooks of all time are Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, and my favorite BONKERS bit is in the fourth one, The Crown of Kings, where you discover some (I think) ANT MEATBALLS and try eating them, only to discover that they are poorly labeled MUTANT MEATBALLS that cause things like growing a tail or an extra leg or (fatally) making your brain grow larger (too large to be contained by your skull...).

Joe Dever, late author of the Lone Wolf gamebooks, said that "everybody cheats at Lone Wolf" by sticking their fingers/etc. into choice points when I heard him speak at Gencon several years back. XD

Anyway, I could go on, but I'll spare you. :)

[rachelmanija]

Ooh, how did I miss the one where you change into a unicorn??? Awesome. May have to obtain that.

I read some of the Steve Jackson ones but not that one. That is hilarious.

[yhlee]

Did you ever read Lone Wolf? They might have been up your alley if you could deal with the dice-rolling: you play Kai (I think), lone survivor of an elite order of martial artists, and you go on through like 20 (!) volumes to have adventures and fight villains, etc. The funny bit I remember about the worldbuilding was that Joe Dever switched vowels around to make his names sound "exotic," so, for example, "Sommerswerd" (Summersword), a powerful artifact that actually becomes detrimental at high levels when your own badass martial artist skills become better than using the Sommerswerd's stats.

(I may be a geek...)

[rachelmanija]

No! They sound delightful. Is there also a Wyntyr Shald?

[yhlee]

Bwah! Not that I recall, but my sister and I only got up to like book 14 or so of the physical books.

You can, however, play all of them for free--this was Joe Dever's generous decision to make the set available in various electronic editions. :p

[larryhammer]

Oh HELLO.

[ellen_fremedon]

CYOA books were so short I usually just read them straight through in order so that I could see all the outcomes without having to backtrack. I could usually figure out how the segments slotted together as I went.

[sholio]

My inner 12-year-old is curling up into a little ball of horror at the very idea, LOL. I used to get upset if I even so much as accidentally peeked at a page I hadn't read yet and cheated on one of the outcomes!

[genarti]

I did that too! I always resented it when I got bad endings -- I was a stubborn kid who didn't like to choose the wrong answer -- so I very quickly noped out of the CYOA framework. But I wanted spoilers for what possible endings would have been good ones!

[lilacsigil]

I loved the Steve Jackson ones! My family are all game players of various kinds, so even before we got into D&D there were always heaps of dice around. Also, there were just two Dragonlance ones, which were really good, and had lots of endings that were neither all good nor all bad.

[minoanmiss]

I didn't know about the Endless Quest books! I loved the CYOA books! One of my favorites was the Ancient Greek Mythology one

I would say more but my household is in ferment

[affreca]

I should read Children of the Dragon. The cover looks familiar. I probably read it in my intense dragon phase (in which I read every book in the YA section with dragon in the title, including the non-fantasy Laurence Yep books).

[zeborah]

I read so many CYOAs. I particularly remember one set among the Aztecs(maybe??) where you're running a race and there's a very early death state in which you win the race and therefore get sacrificed. But also I remember one where you have an unfortunate incident with a time machine resulting in your perceptions are running ahead of your body by so many seconds or minutes, which seems survivable and even potentially advantageous until you have to cross a road.

I also attempted to write multiple CYOAs, stymied by the fact that I'm bad enough at finishing stories even once: finishing a story in multiple different ways was well beyond my stick-to-it-iveness. The first couple I wrote as a tween I think, but as a teenI also attempted one in Hypercard that included random number generators and tracked variables based on your decisions and was about you being a spaceship captain in a space war and at some point you'd discover you were actually a surgically modified/amnesia-fied person of the opposing force, it'd be all very angsty. I don't think I'd written very much at all in fact but it still gives me all the feels. As does Hypercard, requiescat in pace.

[rachelmanija]

That's such a great idea! Maybe you should just write it as a regular story.

[helen_keeble]

My favourite CYOA was the utterly bonkers 'You Are A Shark!' in which you somehow soul-jumped into lots of animals in a quest to return to your original body. I vaguely recall something about a mystic artefact/temple in the Himalayas which caused this predicament.

My pre-teen self viewed the "failure" mode in which you failed to return to your original form but re-incarnated as a snow leopard as the true victory condition. Much preferable to the boring official "good" ending where you ended up back as yourself. :-)

In the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, my favourite was the also bonkers (and maddening) Creature of Havok, in which you start as a bestial instinct-driven mutant creature in a dungeon with no memory of your past. For the first few choices you have to roll a dice to determine where you go - you don't even get to pick! And all of the conversations were in cypher - you had to learn the rules to decode it before you could understand what anyone was saying to you. And you had to crack a different cypher in order to learn how to read.

There's an app version on iOS and Android which is a vast improvement over the physical book, since it takes care of all the decyphering stuff for you automatically.

(The book infamously had a misprint that resulted in an infinite loop at one point. And if you don't do ONE SPECIFIC THING in the first ten paragraphs - something which is in no way signposted or marked as significant - then the final fight is unwinnable)

[rachelmanija]

Hahahahaha. I mean of course being a snow leopard is best.

Creature of Havok sounds absolutely maddening. That's a hell of a misprint! (There was one CYOA that did this on purpose when you got sucked into a black hole or a time machine or something.)