The book I’ve chosen as my life changing book is the Dungeon Master’s Guide for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. I started playing DND in university about 6 years ago – I drew the ‘short straw’ and had to be the DM (which I wasn’t that upset about!), so I purchased the three main books for 5th edition that were available at the time: the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monster Manual.
After pantsing it for my first session with minimal prep work, I fell in love with being a dungeon master. The ability to create my own world and to craft a narrative that my players interact with and change on the fly was intoxicating. We played about twice a week throughout my second year and managed to clear through the first major act of my campaign in my first homebrew world – with the world undergoing a cataclysmic demon invasion, propelling my players across the continent.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide was an inspirational source of information; I had my head in its pages nearly every evening, drawing maps and creating combat encounters, littering my world with ideas from the book and using the guide sections at the back to create homebrew creatures and dungeons. It lit a fire under my belly for creative writing, reigniting a passion that I had left to wither away during secondary school.
As a child in primary school (ages 4-12), I started writing my own books and short stories; sat in front of my ancient PC with no graphics card hammering away at the word processor for weeks on end. Most of it was (very) poorly written but was always crammed full of ideas I’d been daydreaming about in school. After heading to secondary school, I let it fall to the wayside – getting into game development in my spare time as I slipped into the flash game phenomenon of the 00s; playing and creating flash games consumed most of my early teenage years when I wasn’t doing schoolwork or out with friends playing Halo 3.
DND and the Dungeon Master’s guide had me writing pages of worldbuilding; histories of imaginary countries, important characters, and world-changing events that happened in the world. This spun off into short stories, poems and in-character accounts of the world. In fact, most of the creative writing I do on Hive takes place in my Dungeons and Dragons world, including my work-in-progress novel. So much of my free time since 2015 has been spent thinking about adventures for my players, interesting non-player characters they can interact with and the stories that fill the world; I would be hard pressed to pick any other book that has had such a pervasive and life-changing impact on my life!
Every DND session, the guide comes out – offering loot tables and useful reference material. It’s definitely my most used book alongside the Monster Manual, but the rise of Virtual Tabletops like Roll20 has meant most of my DND book collection has transitioned to digital; where I can quickly search for content online and find monsters to fight my players in no time flat. When thinking about life-changing books my mind initially went to all the different fiction books I had read, but as I glanced over my bookshelves and saw the hard spines of my DND books, I knew that I had to choose them.
If you'd like to participate too, the contest can be found here: @hive-180164/hive-book-club-community-contest-1-what-is-the-one-book-that-changed-your-life-and-how