Book Review: A Practical Guide to Dragons, by Lisa Trumbauer
If you're a D&D fan with kids, you need this book. I mean, you can't be letting your kids read the monster manual, even though they really want to, because they're not supposed to know how many hit dice that beholder has, right?
A Practical Guide to Dragons is perfect for kids. I scored a copy from Stacy Whitman, the Mirrorstone editor at Wizards of the Coast (we met at LTUE), and hadn't opened it myself when my 11-year-old daughter captured it and hauled it off to her bedroom.
She has read the monster manual (that's what I get for leaving these dangerous tomes just lying around where anybody can see them) but eagerly plowed into this "lighter" volume and reported back that it was much better, since there weren't tables of numbers detracting from the enjoyable blocks of text. Besides, the blocks of text were a lot longer, and far more fun.
After reading (and enjoying) the book myself , I found another use for it -- it is possible that a tome very like this one could actually be "player knowledge," and could be worked into your next campaign as both a prop and a resource. There's even a little table of Draconic words you could drop into your campaign, forcing your players to do some research with the book rather than just throwing a d20 against "Knowledge: Draconic" and hoping they don't pooch the roll.
And at Amazon's $10.36 price tag it's a lot cheaper than the rest of your D&D sourcebooks.