Review by C.J. Bunce
Whether you’re a fan of Dungeons & Dragons and trying to balance life issues, or you just got pregnant and are a gamer without an instruction manual for humans, podcaster Shelly Mazzanoble has you covered. Her experiences being a D&D gamer and going through a pregnancy and rearing a kid are the subject of a book coming out this winter: How to Dungeon Master Parenting: A Guidebook for Gamifying the Child Rearing Quest, Leveling Up Your Skills, and Raising Future Adventurers. It’s available for pre-order now here at Amazon. Mazzanoble is also the author of Welcome to Dragon Talk: Inspiring Conversations about Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Love to Play It, available here, where she revisits moments from the official D&D podcast she hosts with Greg Tito, who is co-author of the book.
Would you like to play a game? How about the ultimate game–the game of life? In Welcome to Dragon Talk, Mazzanoble and Tito recount conversations and podcast interviews with familiar celebrity D&D gamers like Matthew Lillard, and recommending TV series with D&D tie-in’s like Dan Harmon’s Community series (soon to fulfill its “six seasons and a movie” promise). The chapters are brief, some only four pages, but some dig into deeper topics, like the game and its impact on players with depression and other issues.
The book is not so much a script of episodes of the podcast as much as the hosts recounting key highlights from their series that may have some meaning for gamers that are fans of the included celebrities. These are the “usual suspects” that fans of the game who follow D&D Direct videos, online games, and the wider D&D community will be familiar with.
Mazzanoble, who wrote solo How to Dungeon Master Parenting in a very freestyle, stream of conscious manner, seems almost frenetic at times in her approaches to parenting. She ties her steps in parenting directly to being a Dungeon Master, and the book is full of direct analogies between the levels of game play and being a good DM. Of course parenting books have been written for centuries, trying to find a way to address over-parenting vs. under-parenting. Mazzanoble wants to make life fun, and doesn’t overplay the idea of life as a game. Her approach and comparison remind me of Akela being the mother figure in Cub Scouts–derived from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and the den mother trying to both reel in kids and give them the opportunity to learn and try new things.
You can tell Mezzanoble threw her hands up more than once, and was personally grasping for help, lucky to find the game she loved as a guide. She shares the ups and downs with readers in her book.
If you’re a D&D player and fan of the D&D celebrity players, Welcome to Dragon Talk may be for you. If you’re a roleplayer and grasping for a how-to manual for kids, How to Dungeon Master Parenting may be what you need. How to Dungeon Master Parenting: A Guidebook for Gamifying the Child Rearing Quest, Leveling Up Your Skills, and Raising Future Adventurers is available for pre-order now here at Amazon, with a publication date of November 12, 2024. Welcome to Dragon Talk: Inspiring Conversations about Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Love to Play It is available now here at Amazon.
