Donor Spotlight: TTRPGKids

Book Characters Who Play Tabletop Role Playing Games: Youth Seeing Themselves in the Story

By Steph Campbell

I’m Steph, founder of the ENnie awarded TTRPGkids.com, which is a 550+ article resource for families, friends, and facilitators to find TableTop Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) materials and support for their kids.

I’m also a sponsor for International Games Month, donating copies of my book and games, like my latest project StoryGuider, to libraries!

Today, I want to talk about recent chapter books and graphic novels that feature youth characters who are playing TTRPGs within the story (and why that’s important). 

My kid is 7 years old and is a ravenous reader.  Kiddo LOVES graphic novels, especially Dog Man, Star Wars, and ones that feature some kind of cool flashy adventurer creature in a cape on the cover.

We also play a lot of TTRPGs together at home, but most of my kid’s friends aren’t quite into them (at least not yet.)  Most are talking about video games, not tabletop ones, and while some have seen the Dungeons & Dragons movie, it’s hard for kiddo to sometimes explain what the game it’s based on is like.  It can be kind of hard sometimes to just have your parent and the kids you see once a week at the game store be the folks who get one of your “things” instead of your friends you see every day at school.  My kid has brought up that it feels weird.

Recently, though, we’ve been finding more and more graphic novels that feature characters who play TTRPGs as either a core part of the story or a backdrop to the main theme, and this has really helped my kid to branch out in reading and also see that there’s others out there who like the same thing.

Stories of wacky antics are great and do get into some surprisingly deep content, but these books feature TTRPG players.  They’re about kids going to school and making friends and dealing with life as kids… with their challenges related back to their interests in games. 

Table Titans Club (Scott Kurtz & Steve Hammer, Toonhound Studio, 2024,
9780986277917) helped us have a conversation about starting at a new school (which was VERY relevant to us this year), including others in the group, and joining teams.  

D&D Dungeon Club (Molly Knox Ostertag & Xanthe Bouma, Wizards of the Coast, 2023, 9780063039247) facilitated a conversation about bullies and not judging others. 

Just Roll With It (Lee Durfey-Lavoie & Veronica Agarwal, RH Graphic, 2021, 9780593125410) got us talking about mental health for kids and how going to therapy can be a good, helpful thing.

My kid would have probably NOT been interested in any of these books if they did not have pictures of dice and game materials on the cover or if the characters weren’t constantly talking about and relating back to the games they were playing.

Kiddo has also been shy about starting to read chapter books, even though that capability is there.  However, if we see one with TTRPG gear or characters on the cover, like Spellbinders (Austin Auseon, Labyrinth Road, 2024, 9780593482711), there’s instant interest in trying to read it.

That small point of connection, seeing characters who enjoy the same types of games and play, is an important hook for getting into a new book, but then it also just helps with feeling seen and understood too.  At one point, playing TTRPGs was kind of a “nerd” thing, but through movies, TV shows, podcasts, and books like these, it’s become more known and accessible and “normal” for kids to play TTRPGs, and it’s beautiful to see that shift.

For my kid, who hasn’t quite been able to get other kids to connect with it at school, these books show that there ARE kids who like AND maybe sometime in the near future, since most of the protagonists are 8-12 years old… and, with kiddo being allowed to take books into school to share, they give a good opportunity to help get others familiar with the idea of TTRPGs as well.

If you’re looking for some books to add to your collections that focus on characters who play Tabletop RPGs, here’s a few additional titles I’ve checked out and reviewed (in large part, thanks to my local library)!

• Roll for Initiative (Jamie Formato, Running Press Kids, 2022, 9780762481064)
• Whispers of the Voidbringer (M Allen Hall, 2021, 9798985023107)
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor (Maikel Yarimizu, 2016, 9781089876885)

I have posts of all of these, along with a whole bunch of other TTRPG-connected book recs, interviews, and articles that may help, in the “books and library resources” section of the TTRPGkids website. I hope this assists with finding some terrific tomes to add to your collections! 

Please make sure to sign up for International Game Month if you’re looking to add copies of various games and game-related books to your library. Please also check out StoryGuider by TTRPGkids to either donate a trilogy of books to next year’s IGM or get a copy of the series for yourself!