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Dungeons & Dragons: A Young Adventurer's Workbook - Characters & Quests

If you're not familiar with the "Young Adventurers" series of D&D books, they have a similar look and feel as the official D&D manuals and folios, but at about a quarter of the size. Further, rather than attempting to provide detailed rules for playing D&D, the Young Adventurer series is more geared toward introducing concepts from D&D to, well, younger, uninitiated audiences and to spark creativity and curiosity in potential players. We have reviewed a few books from the series (see links below) and for the target audience, the books have merit and could make nice gifts for younger pre-players. The only reservations I've had about anything in the series is that, with the hardcover form-factor, the price of the books is necessarily higher than it would be if they were paperbacks. And, given that playing D&D is a hobby that requires the purchase of rule books and encourages the purchase of additional expansion books, this extra cost could have been put toward a rule book to actually play D&D. Up to this point, I have tried not to harp on this, and even here, my goal isn't to belabor the point, but to point it out, so I can move on. However, Characters & Quests: A Young Adventurer's Workbook for Creating a Hero and Telling Their Tale is just that - a workbook. It features lots of area for the reader to fill in their own descriptions or draw their own pictures, based on prompts about character development. I love the creativity of some of the prompts in the book, but I think that a lesser-priced paperback version of this workbook should at least be an available option. Okay, moving on...

Sarra Scherb is a writer for Wizards of the Coast and has written and designed Characters & Quests to have a similar appearance to D&D rulebooks and the other Young Adventurer series books, but it is slightly larger than the other books in the Young Adventurer series, yet still smaller than the D&D rulebook standard. This will likely be a downside for any OCD readers who like their book collections to be orderly. One upside, I guess, is that you can quickly find this book among other books from the Young Adventurer series. Additionally, if you use the book as a workbook for documenting a character from your gaming sessions, then you may want a second (or third) copy of the book to do the same with other characters you play. At that point, you would have multiple books of this height, so it would no longer be a one-off. And, if I were actively playing games of D&D these days and price wasn't an object, I would probably consider doing just that.

Inside, you'll find explanation of the rudimentary aspects of a character, including race and class, and a simple version of a character sheet (without actual character stats), along with prompts to help you tease out your character's backstory, from where and how your character grew up and what led them to a life of adventuring.

The way in which the exercises and activities in Characters & Quests are structured, they can be used to help define, build and chronicle the adventures of your character that you're playing in a D&D game - or to imagine such a character, even if you're not actually playing a game of D&D. Either way, the book can help you to cultivate the imagination and creative thinking skills needed to create imaginative works of fiction.

Using the prompts and exercises in this book will greatly help you to fill out a backstory for your character, define how your adventuring group works together, how they met and became an adventuring party, and what motivates them. You'll also delve into what your character loves, what they hope to achieve and what they desperately desire to avoid at all costs. These little extra bits of information can really bring a character to life and, in some cases, make it easier to decide what actions would be appropriate for that character.

Again, if you're already playing with an existing character, this book can help you explore the edges of the character that you might not have looked at and dig a little deeper into the character and how they work in the adventuring group. It also serves as a tool for documenting some of the exciting adventures you experience as you go along. For those creating a new character or simply using the workbook as a way to develop a character without stats (perhaps for a creative writing project), the prompts will help give you starting places to spark your imagination.

As it is a workbook, there is a lot of whitespace in the book, for you to record descriptions of an adventure or fill out long-form answers to probing questions - or even to draw your own pictures of your adventurer. And, with so much white space, there aren't a lot of pictures, but the illustrations that are in Characters & Quests are from official D&D sources and the style of the book has the appropriate D&D manual-esque feel, as well.

This book might be great for a young would-be adventurer who hasn't yet played D&D and is developing his first character or someone who doesn't balk at the price and wants to journal their character and party's adventures a bit. If you're looking to work on a lot of character development, for writing or populating an adventure you're writing with interesting NPC characters, for example, you may want to also check out The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide: Expanded Genres Edition, which has a lot of story prompts and exercises, but isn't in a workbook format.



-Geck0, GameVortex Communications
AKA Robert Perkins
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