Author

Frank L. Cole

Frank L. Cole
  • Another role-playing game of Champion’s Quest awaits our young champions, but this time they are tricked into leaving the real world and tossed into the fantasy game that is a dangerous trap filled with new and challenging foes.

    Teammates Lucas, Miles, and Jasmine—known as the Wild Crows—have been summoned by the wizard Gamemaster, Hob, to play another magical, adventurous game of Champion’s Quest. When the three friends are ambushed and forced into their second game, Lucas and his friends are ill-prepared to face what feels like an impossible quest—confront an evil centaur and outsmart a villainous, shapeshifting Questmaster to rescue a powerful magical ally.

    An unexpected team member, Sierra, joins the Wild Crows to complete their band of champions. Can she be trusted or is she a spy? But Lucas has bigger problems to worry about. For starters, he struggles to keep his panic attacks in check as he leads his friends on a journey across unexplored lands filled with shadow elves, wyverns, hobgoblins, giants, and evil trees.

    Using their wits, their powerful weapons, and hoping for some luck when rolling the magical game dice, the Wild Crows know what’s at stake: Complete their quest before time runs out, or the world of Champion’s Quest will be destroyed.

  • It’s a strange and intriguing place—Hob & Bogie’s Curiosity Shoppe. It’s a gaming store, but instead of carrying the latest in cool gaming gear and gadgets, the store is filled with board games, including role-playing games featuring hundreds of miniature warriors, wizards, and monsters, models of dragons, and lots of various-sided dice.

    The store windows were too tempting for twelve-year-old Lucas and his foster brother Miles to pass by. Immediately, they’re greeted by one of the store owners named Hob, an elderly gentleman with a long, gray beard. Miles thinks he could pass for a wizard. Lucas doesn’t want to stay long, not when he’s running away from his foster home, where he doesn’t feel like he fits in.

    Hob invites the boys and another girl, Jasmine Bautista, Lucas’s classmate, to play a curious RPG game called Champion’s Quest. The game does sound interesting. In it, players assume different character roles and are given dangerous challenges as they earn treasures, acquire weapons, and gain experience points to defeat harder, more menacing monsters to ultimately win.

    When Vanessa from the foster home tracks them down, she insists the boys go home. As they walk out the front door, they immediately discover they’re no longer in West Virginia, but transported right into the Champion’s Quest game—a wild fantasy world of dangerous trolls, brutish minotaurs, and powerful magic.

    The four kids—Lucas, a fiercely independent boy who suffers from panic attacks; Jasmine, a feisty girl who struggles to make friends; Miles, a book-smart boy with a wide-eyed innocence; and Vanessa, a perpetually grumpy sixteen-year-old girl—are suddenly immersed in this world as their new RPG characters.

    They must work together as a team, overcome their real-world weaknesses, and believe in themselves and each other as champions if they are to outwit, outplay, and survive their foes in this ultimate quest to defeat a treacherous, three-headed monster.

    Champion’s Quest: Die of Destiny is a middle-grade fantasy with themes of friendship, cooperation, perseverance, overcoming anxiety, and the emotional need to feel accepted.

  • In the final adventure in the thrilling Potion Masters trilogy, four young members of B.R.E.W., a secret society of elixirists responsible for most of the greatest inventions in history, will battle a covert organization determined to overthrow the potion-making community and control the world.

    Gordy’s grandfather, Mezzarix, who is a powerful, evil elixirist, stole the Vessel, the source of power for all potion masters. He fled to Florida to establish a headquarters, declare his manifesto—No More Prisons. No More Rulers. No More Secrets—and launch his final attack. Gordy, an apprentice elixirist, has been hiding in a safe house with his family and friends, but his mom has become increasingly concerned for their safety. Despite her worries, Gordy and his friends enter the underground network known as the Swigs, a haven for renegade potion masters and black-market potions to secure support in the fight against Mezzarix.

    Scourges, the name given to potion masters imprisoned by B.R.E.W. but who have recently been freed by Mezzarix, attack the Swigs, and Gordy barely escapes with this life. He has to leave his family behind. He heads to the house of his best friend, Max, where his other friends, Sasha and Adilene, join him in making a plan to help find Mezzarix’s secret location.

    As the fight intensifies between B.R.E.W. and the Scourges, it falls to Gordy and his friends to find Mezzarix and prevent him from corrupting the Vessel, which would plunge the world back into the Dark Ages. With some help from new friends, Gordy realizes it will take a new way of thinking about magic and the art of brewing potions in order to stop his grandfather, save the world, and unite the potion-making community.

    The world of Potion Masters is full of fantasy and adventure as Gordy and his friends learn the power of friendship and loyalty, and to trust in their own individual talents.

  • It has been nine months since Gordy and his friends, Max and Adilene, stopped Esmeralda from destroying B.R.E.W. and the Vessel. Gordy is starting the eighth grade, where he meets another Dram, Sasha Brexil, whose mother is the new President of B.R.E.W. Gordy has also been practicing new brewing techniques, and has even taken some of his potions to school—something expressly forbidden—but when he starts zoning out during practice, he knows something is wrong.

    Strange things are also happening at B.R.E.W., because after Wanda confronts the dark Elixirists, she is unexpectedly fired by Mrs. Brexil. And in Greenland, Mezzarix is offered a chance to escape by an old friend, who is working for the mysterious Ms. Bimini. The woman reveals that she needs Mezzarix to replicate an unusual solution known as “Silt.” Mezzarix agrees on one condition: that Ms. Bimini uses the power of Silt to destroy B.R.E.W. forever.

    Gordy and his friends continue to work on their potions, but when Adilene learns she will never be able to brew potions—that the only reason she had ever come close was because Gordy was Projecting his ability through her—she is crushed. Against her better judgment, she uses an invisibility potion given to her by her new friend, Cadence, to spy on Gordy.

    As Gordy’s potion-making talents increase, so does the frequency of his blackouts, which raises a troubling question: What if Mezzarix attacks during one of Gordy’s blackouts?

    Both B.R.E.W and the Vessel are in danger, and with the potion world in chaos, it’s up to Gordy, Max, and Adeline to rally the remaining Potion Masters before it’s too late.

  • Twelve-year-old Gordy Stitser is one of the few people who knows the truth about the secret society of potion masters, because not only is Gordy’s mom on the Board of Ruling Elixirists Worldwide (BREW), but she has also been training Gordy in the art of potion-making.

    Gordy is a natural, and every day he sneaks down to the basement lab to invent new potions using exotic ingredients like fire ant eggs, porcupine quills, and Bosnian tickling juice.

    One afternoon, Gordy receives a mysterious package containing an extremely rare potion known as “The Eternity Elixir.” In the right hands, the Elixir continues to protect society. But in the wrong hands, it could destroy the world as we know it.

    Now, sinister potion masters are on the hunt to steal the Eternity Elixir. It’s up to Gordy, his parents, and his best friends, Max and Adeline, to prevent an all-out potion war.

  • An encouraging collection of short stories by bestselling middle-grade authors.

    This one-of-a-kind treasury brings together the talents of nearly two dozen bestselling middle-grade authors including Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, Ally Condie, and Jennifer A. Nielsen—who have created original short stories and modern-day fairy tales, based on the lives and dreams of children they have met who all have two things in common: they have very big hopes and dreams, and they are all cancer patients.