D&D Endless Quest “Choose Your Own Adventure” books transformed into audiobooks

Geek Native has noticed an interesting arrival at Audible.com and this blogger isn’t sure what he’s looking at; but it’s D&D official.

On Audible, with a pre-order date of the 26th of May, you can now find;

• Dungeons & Dragons: The Mad Mage’s Academy
• Dungeons & Dragons: Escape the Underdark
• Dungeons & Dragons: To Catch A Thief
• Dungeons & Dragons: Escape from Castle Ravenloft
• Dungeons & Dragons: Big Trouble

These are all books by established and popular D&D and fantasy writer Matt Forbeck. D&DL Big Trouble, for example, was published in September 2018 and you can still get it today.

So, what’s the puzzle?

These are all ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. If you don’t know the format then, simply put, you’d read a few paragraphs and then have to make a choice. That choice would take you to a different page number, read a bit more, and face another option only to flick elsewhere to the book.

The idea is that you’re the hero taking an active role in the adventure and steering the story.

Can an audiobook do that? It’s surely impossible to tell an Audible audiobook to ‘go to page 29’. That said, there are Starfinder games on Alexa which are a bit like this, you don’t turn to pages, you simply respond to the prompts from the smart speaker.

The publisher, a Dreamscape Media, seems to be suggesting that you can do something similar with these Audible titles. Here’s the last paragraph from Dungeons & Dragons: Big Trouble;

You are about to embark on a journey. To where, only you could possibly say. It is not a journey like any you have been on before, where you start at the beginning and continue on a straight course until you reach the end. Instead, you will be presented with many choices along the way. Each time you are faced with one such choice, given to you by your narrator, make your decision from the options that are given and then follow the directions to continue your adventure. Once your quest has come to an end, either favorably or, as I’m afraid in some instances it is foretold, gruesomely, return to the beginning of the track or the last choice and try again.

Update: io9 have this story direct from Dreamscape, it seems, and are suggesting these are interactive audiobooks!