Ready for a tragic tale of success and failure? Behold, the herald of one of TSR’s biggest successes and, ultimately, its doom: the Endless Quest series of D&D-based gamebooks.

Rose Estes pitched the series, based on Bantam Books’ Choose Your Own Adventure series, in 1982. This is the first, Dungeon of Dread (1982), and you can see the CYOA influence clearly in the cover design (the games also followed the structure of the CYOA books, favoring simple narrative choices to move the plot forward). Gamebooks of this sort were a booming fad at the time, and Endless Quest was a huge success, running over 36 volumes and spawned several spin-off series.

Gonna be honest with you – even as a kid who was always fiending for his next D&D fix, I found the Endless Quest books deadly dull. They never felt enough like D&D, the monster choices were odd, the art flat and, even for children’s books, they seemed corny and over-focused on teaching a Valuable Lesson ™. The cover art tends to be the best thing about them.

This one is a pretty straightforward dungeon crawl in search of treasure. There are some interesting monster choices (gotta love a water weird). I feel like in most Endless Quest books, you have a pet. In this one, you have a cowardly halfling. It is actually is a pretty good entry into what D&D is about, but something about it still leaves me cold.