Series - Dragontales

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Language:	English
Publisher:	Signet -- United States
Categories:	Complexity Level : Basic (No Game System) Format : Paperback Genre : Fantasy Genre : Romance Target Age Group : Teenagers Writing Style : Present Tense Writing Style : Second Person
Translated Into:	Dragontales (Spanish) Sortilèges (French)

These fantasy adventures are a bit longer than average for basic-style gamebooks, being about two hundred pages in length. There is little explicit continuity between the books, but they do take place in the same fantasy world. An interesting characteristic of the series is that the odd-numbered books feature white covers and female protagonists while the even-numbered ones have black covers and male protagonists. Many of the adventures feature a romantic element in addition to the usual fantasy heroics.

Some books from the series were later reissued first as the paperback Dragon Pathways and then as the e-book Dragon Roads.

Gamebooks

1. Sword Daughter's Quest
2. Runesword!
3. Challenge of the Pegasus Grail
4. The Towers of Rexor
5. The Unicorn Crown
6. Black Dragon's Curse
7. Spellbound
8. The Dungeons of Dregnor
9. Aphrodite's Mirror
10. Hall of the Gargoyle King
11. Maiden of Greenwold
12. Storm Rider
13. Pledge of Peril
14. Secret of the Sphinx

Related Links

Emily Drake [archived page]
This page was the official site for Dragontales author Rhondi Vilott, who now writes non-interactive fantasy novels under a pseudonym.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040924172919/http://www.magickers.com/ (last verified: 2004-06-09)

User Comments

This series follows in the footsteps of Endless Quest, in that you play a named and developed young character and almost all of the books are set in a recognisable D&D-style world. However, it is a bit closer to the cartoon D&D world, with elements of Alice of Wonderland thrown in.

The most interesting aspect is that the series alternates between male protagonists (in the even-numbered, black-covered books) and female (odd-numbered, white-covered books). Most books, particularly the female led ones, tend to have romantic elements, similar to the Heartquest books.

I haven't read all of them, but they vary in quality from good to not so good. They all tend to exist in this fantasy setting without the variety of settings offered in Endless Quest. Not until the final book, Secret of the Sphinx, does the author have the really interesting idea of a time-travelling, historical and mythological setting, making it a pity that it was the final book in the series.

Overall, it's a decent substitute for the old school Endless Quest books.

--Kveto

These books do seem beefier than the usual CYOA fare.

--Naniyue

Fascinatingly made yet all too difficult to find, the Dragontales gamebooks, garnering moderate recognition both on release and retrospectively, are often decent in pulling off what they set out to do. The enjoyable, thought-out fantasy world is explained and explored just enough to get the reader's imagination spinning, the characters are handled believably enough, and the compatibility of the easy-to-understand path-choosing system with the choices themselves show how intelligently-designed these books are. Collectively, I'd say the good outweighs the bad, even if there's an overabundance of tropes at times and the series soars around average. It's a shame that more often than not the books seem well-balanced but ill-suited for such a simple system (lots of untapped potential, maybe?), but in all, it's a somewhat recommendable series that get overlooked too often (and is tough to find). In retrospect, though, it's incredibly important to note that the series was very poorly reissued - later editions are pathetically illustrated, cheaply put together and inferior in every regard. Nevertheless, the original copies are actually worth your time, both visually and experientally.

--Shadeheart