Endless Quest: Dungeon of Dread

Awesome cover = awesome book, right?

Author: Rose Estes

Publisher: TSR Hobbies, Inc

Published: 1982

Kids are idiots and I am (or was, to be more accurate) no exception. Case in point: the fond childhood memories I have of TSR's Endless Quest books. My elementary school library had a surprising selection of these pick-a-path adventures and I spent much of the 5^th grade devouring them. So, imagine my excitement when I recently stumbled upon a copy of Dungeon of Dread and a few others at a garage sale for 25 cents apiece. Not only was I going to relive the swords and sorcery adventures of my youth, the thought had crossed my mind that I might even map out the dungeon and, with a little tweaking, make it into an adventure I could run. It was going to be great...

The wine-guzzling, suicidal baboon: a common
 stock character in children's literature.

Going through the introduction I was struck with the disturbing realization that my constant portrayal of NPC halflings as cowardly, shiftless thieves inevitably came from reading this as an impressionable youth. The depiction of Laurus, the halfling companion, is so ridiculously bigoted that it sounds like something that old, racist uncle of yours might say at Thanksgiving dinner after a few too many beers. “Ya gotta watch out for them halflings, Billy. Thieves, the whole lot... They're the Puerto Ricans of Mystara!” Hatred toward fictional humanoid races aside, the plot is so ludicrous I almost stopped reading five pages in. Said thieving halfling sneaks into evil wizard's mountain home, gets caught, evil wizard is like “Look at all my treasure! Pretty bitchin', right? Now I'm going to release you because no one will believe your story,” and you're all “Sounds legit, lets go kill this dude and take his stuff.”

"To prance this well, I had to take 6 years of
Gargoyle dressage!"

Reading through this book has probably killed more brain cells than years of binge drinking. I went through the whole god-awful thing, every choice, but it's not even worth getting into how stupid and terrible they are. About the only memorable part in Dungeon of Dread is the depressed, alcoholic merchant who has been polymorphed into a baboon and commits suicide by provoking you into killing him. That's some heavy shit for a children's book. Oh, there's also a gargoyle that prances when he attacks you. Like, the book twice mentions that the gargoyle doesn't walk or run, it prances. As for my idea of mapping the dungeon out to turn it into a playable adventure, that's not going to happen. There are numerous bottlenecks to certain choices that make the dungeon impossible to physically exist. One dude did attempt to make a map and it looks like some kind of M.C. Escher nightmare on graph paper.

Rereading Dungeon of Dread has convinced me that 10 year-old me was a dumbass for thinking the Endless Quests were so great. Or, maybe, I've just grown jaded & snarky and feel like taking a piss on a book written for children. I do have to admit there is still a bit of nostalgic appreciation for it, no matter how stupid I've come to realize Dungeon of Dread is. Jim Holloway did the interior illustrations and Elmore did the cover, so that's something. And, the 'water weird-key reflection' trap was kinda rad. Even so, it seems highly unlikely that I will be revisiting the other Endless Quest books anytime soon...