D&D Young Adventurer's Guides - Pitch Documents (Patreon)

Hey, gang. 

It's been a crazy summer. Thank you, as always, for your support. In the coming months I'll be posting scripts for the Dungeons & Dragons: Infernal Tides and Rick and Morty VS D&D II mini-series I'm working on, but also wanted to keep content rolling here by showing you something different - these are the initial project proposal documents for the recent Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer's Guides published by Ten Speed Press/Wizards of the Coast. (More info HERE.)

These guides have been a really unique project, a way to engage brand new players, especially young readers ages 7-11, in the core creative 'ingredients' used in tabletop RPGs. It's been a real passion project for my co-writers and I and really feels like bringing the excitement of discovering D&D for the very first time when I was 8-years old to a whole new generation.

When I put together the core concept and proposed a format for these, I felt good about the possibilities but wasn't sure the D&D community would embrace them. They're not rule books, and it was crucial that we made that very clear up front. It's the precepts of roleplaying broken down into well organized and easily digestible of information with all new text and art. 

Thankfully, the response to these first two books has honestly been incredible. Getting photos of kids clutching these books and hearing from parents, teachers, and librarians that their gaming group/school clubs are making good use of them means so much to me and our team.

So, with that in mind, I've attached the original short pitch documents. They are shorter than you'd typically have for an extensive project like this, but since Wizards of the Coast asked me to be involved a lot of the initial planning was done on conference calls rather than me having to 'cold pitch' and convince them it was worth pursuing. Still, as basic organizational documents you'll see how they sort of follow the approach I use for my comic story pitches - short and organized, making it as easy as possible for an editor to understand the core without flooding them with information right off the bat.

The Monster book proposal includes a quick doodle I did to illustrate how each two-page spread might work as a template and you can see the final spread of the Beholder in the actual book for comparison as well - It's a really close match.

I hope you find them interesting and, if you get a chance to read the finished books, please let me know what you think!