Campaigns & Companions: The Complete Role-Playing Guide for Pets is 100-pages long, but is so good it feels like only 10.
This comedy art book is published by Rebellion (the Judge Dredd people), written by Andi Ewington and Rhianna Pratchett, with illustrations by Calum Alexander Watt (there are no RPG mechanics) here) merges pets with D&D.
What if your pets played tabletop RPGs? What madness? Hilarious hijinx, as it turns out! In fact, it’s a significant challenge not just to screengrab the entire book and play it back in the review. It’s that’s hard picking out the highlights.
The Complete Role-Playing Guide for Pets approach
Firstly, to be clear, and despite the name, this is not a guide for encouraging your pets to play D&D or other tabletop RPGs. It doesn’t help you train your dog not to chase dropped dice or the cat to spin randomly to emulate the fickle wheel of fortune.
Campaigns & Companions certainly doesn’t help your hamster get their druid (which can turn into a human) up to level 10.
Instead, Campaigns & Companions looks at what happens in a world where pets already played the games and did whatever they wanted.
The approach is simple; great art combined with punchy text. The page count here is high, at 100 pages, but the word count is low. Sometimes there’s only a sentence or two on the page.
The combination works well. It’s punchy! Each page is a joke, and that’s why it’s so easy to devour all 100 pages and find yourself suddenly at the end of the book.
Now, remember how I said it was hard not to share the whole darn Guide as highlights; I’ll focus on the art as a way to avoid spoilers. However, if you need convincing, then consider this; Campaigns & Companions is low in word count but has two authors, Andi Ewington (Forty-Five45) and Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider). There’s an editor too in the shape of Alex de Campi. Imagine how good each word must be. Really, I doubt there’s a syllable out of place.
Overall
I loved Campaigns & Companions: The Complete Role-Playing Guide for Pets.
I’m not an incredibly moody person, that’s a good defence for my mental health in many ways, but the negative is that I sometimes deprive myself of good moods. Campaigns & Companions was such a pleasant surprise, such a delight, that it put me in a good mood, and I noticed.
Furthermore, Campaigns & Companions solves several Christmas problems for me. It’s the ideal gift. It’s on Amazon as a Kindle and hardcover. It’s also on DriveThruComics, DriveThruRPG’s sister site, with some geographic restrictions. In other words, it’s an easy 100-page of jokes to get into the hands, digitally or not, of fellow geeks.
It’s elementary sending people DriveThruComics purchases, and friends don’t even need an account there.
Apologies in advance if I’ve just tipped friends off to Christmas gifts they get from me in a few months. It’s worth it. The world must know about Andi and Rhianna’s pick-me-up success.
Quick Links
- Campaigns & Companions: Amazon, Barnes & Noble or DriveThruComics.
Disclaimer: My copy was provided for review. I would have bought it anyway.
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