Identify this book? Dungeons and Dragons novel.

Cafe Society
1

OK, I can actually provide more information than some of these threads. However, I can not provide enough to make it super easy.

  1. This was a Dungeons and Dragons paperback novel. I believe it said “Advanced” Dungeons and Dragons on the cover. There were tons of these novels. Paperback. I think they were all paperback, actually. I had no idea there were a lot these when I read this one.

  2. In the one I’m talking about, there is a scene where the main character meets a guide who tells him he must take a fork in the road ahead. As the main dude goes one way(can’t remember if was left or right), he can hear the guide behind him say, “I would have gone the other way…”, but he keeps going.

  3. There is a secondary main character who is not human. I can’t remember what kind of creature he was, but he turns into a dragon at the end and accompanies the main character. I think this guy’s name started with “M”, but not sure.

  4. I read it between 1988-1992, I’d say. Can not confirm the publishing date. It may have been older or fresh. I think all those books were straight to paperback.

It was kind of thick. A few hundred pages for sure. Standard length for these books, I believe.

Anyway, does this provide enough information for anyone to identify it? Thanks.

2

Was it part of the DragonLance series? I read all of those in like 6th grade, which was about 1986. I don’t remember much more than that, tho…maybe there were twins, one was a sickly mage who eventually turned evil?

3

I think it was Dragonlance now you mention it, but I can not be for sure… I don’t remember twins or a sickly mage.

It is possible it was part of a series(like a trilogy or something), but I only read it and viewed it as a stand-alone.

4

“The Legend of Huma” is a Dragonlance novel that made the New York Times bestseller list back in 1988, and has a which-way-will-you-go bit for the main character – who, as you’d maybe expect, has three secondary-character friends: one is obviously inhuman, one eventually turns into a dragon, and one has a name that starts with an ‘M’.

5

Hmmmm. Maybe. Who becomes the dragon?

6

The main character’s girlfriend, Gwyneth; his brawny pal is Kaz, the Minotaur; his brainy pal is Magius, the wizard; his commanding officer is Rennard, a knight who looks really grim. No, grimmer than that. Wait, are you picturing Daniel Craig in a movie about the Holocaust? That’s almost the right amount of grim.

7

For some reason, I had it in my mind that a male character became the dragon, but I could be wrong. You might have it.

8

The main villain – a male character – becomes a dragon near the end.

9

Thanks, but my memory is that the main dude actually gets “possession” of a dragon in the sense that a friend of his becomes one and he “gets a dragon of his own”(that’s close to a phrase that is used at one point).

Still, you may very well be right and my memory is wrong. The dates and so forth line up well.

10

Kaz eventually teams up with a bronze dragon (they take to each other “like two old soldiers”) and so starts riding around on [del]horseback[/del] dragonback.

11

OK, very cool. I am guessing you got it. I’ll have to find a copy somewhere and re-read it.

12

Not that any of the DL books are literature for the ages but, as I recall, The Legend of Huma was one of the few books outside the Weis/Hickman core trilogies that was remotely worth reading. Most of the spin-offs/prequels were dire.

13

At the end of Dragons of Spring Dawning, Fizbin turns in to his Dragon form, Paladine, and Raistlin, now fully evil, gets on the back of a Green dragon and flies off. maybe you were conflating those two events?

14

I only read one book, though, being unaware it was a series. I was only 10 or 11 years old.

15

This sounds like the one I was thinking of.