DragonQuest is a fantasy tabletop game first published by Simulations Publications (SPI) in 1980. It was designed by Eric Goldberg, Gerard C. Klug, Davud James Ritchie, Edqard J., Woods, and Redmond A. Simonsen, and was one of the first games to emphasize skills rather than character classes, allowing players greater freedom in customizing their characters. Any character may learn any skill in this game, while vocations may be acquired by spending experience points.
The original working title was Dragonslayer, but it had to be changed to avoid a conflict with the Disney movie of the same name. In 1981, SPI published a board game called Dragonslayer as a movie tie-in. In a hilarious turn of irony, the DragonQuest trademark that SPI thus gained kept the unrelated Dragon Quest series of video games from being published in North America under that title in turn; the video game was thus retitled Dragon Warrior for the North American Market.
After the first edition of the game was published in 1980, a second edition was published by SPI and Bantam Books in 1982, while a third edition was published by TSR after they acquired SPI; the game's final print run was made in 1989 (and TSR then produced a "Dragon Quest" boxed starter set in a similar board game format for its flagship Dungeons & Dragons game in 1990). As of the new millenium, the game belongs to Wizards of the Coast, though WotC's abandonment of the trademark of the name has left Square Enix free to publish Dragon Quest video games under their original name in North America.
Adventures
- The Palace of Ontoncle
- The Blade of Allectus
- The Enchanted Wood
This game contains the following tropes:
- Adjective Animal Alehouse: In The Enchanted Wood, the PCs will meet the person hiring them for a mini-adventure in the Purple Palfrey Inn.
- Character Class System: Averted here, to focus more on skills and customization.
- Combat Tentacles: In The Enchanted Wood, the PCs will encounter a giant squid-like monster living in a pond, which will lash out with several pairs of tentacles if anyone tohes the water, trying to drag them in.
- Concealing Canvas: In The Enchanted Wood, the Ruined Tower has a painting on the fourth floor over the fireplace mantel. Behind the painting is a safe with a lot of dangerous traps, all guarding the treasure inside the safe itself.
- Dig Attack: One of the dangers of the Enchanted Wood is the Spike Root plant, which waits underground until a creature passes overhead, whereupon it sends spikes out of the ground to impale the victim so it can drain the victim's blood.
- Giant Spider: Ares magazine #13 adventure "The Treasure of Socantri". One of the new monsters included in the adventure is a man-sized intelligent spider covered with long hair and capable of casting many spells of Earth Magic.
- Hostile Weather: The Enchanted Wood contains unnatural weather that is uniquely designed to kill characters, including hail is several deadly types (including explosive) razor sleet that cuts creatures to ribbons, evil fog that tries to strangle you, corrosive black rain, and a particularly aggressive sun that saps your strength and dehydrates you.
- Vampiric Draining: As expected, the evil strangling fog of the Enchanted Wood, as well as Will O Wisps that lead PCs into deathtraps and then drain their life energy.
- Weird Weather: See Hostile Weather, above.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: The Enchanted Wood has a Faerie Ring encounter with this effect. If PCs spend any time inside the ring, when they leave any amount of time up to ten years will have passed outside.
- Your Heart's Desire: The Enchanted Wood has a living bog that generates illusions of desirable things to lure victims in.
