Sarra Scherb is a writer for Wizards of the Coast and has written and designed Characters & Quests to have a similar appearance to D&D rulebooks and the other Young Adventurer series books, but it is slightly larger than the other books in the Young Adventurer series, yet still smaller than the D&D rulebook standard. This will likely be a downside for any OCD readers who like their book collections to be orderly. One upside, I guess, is that you can quickly find this book among other books from the Young Adventurer series. Additionally, if you use the book as a workbook for documenting a character from your gaming sessions, then you may want a second (or third) copy of the book to do the same with other characters you play. At that point, you would have multiple books of this height, so it would no longer be a one-off. And, if I were actively playing games of D&D these days and price wasn't an object, I would probably consider doing just that.
Inside, you'll find explanation of the rudimentary aspects of a character, including race and class, and a simple version of a character sheet (without actual character stats), along with prompts to help you tease out your character's backstory, from where and how your character grew up and what led them to a life of adventuring.
The way in which the exercises and activities in Characters & Quests are structured, they can be used to help define, build and chronicle the adventures of your character that you're playing in a D&D game - or to imagine such a character, even if you're not actually playing a game of D&D. Either way, the book can help you to cultivate the imagination and creative thinking skills needed to create imaginative works of fiction.
Using the prompts and exercises in this book will greatly help you to fill out a backstory for your character, define how your adventuring group works together, how they met and became an adventuring party, and what motivates them. You'll also delve into what your character loves, what they hope to achieve and what they desperately desire to avoid at all costs. These little extra bits of information can really bring a character to life and, in some cases, make it easier to decide what actions would be appropriate for that character.
Again, if you're already playing with an existing character, this book can help you explore the edges of the character that you might not have looked at and dig a little deeper into the character and how they work in the adventuring group. It also serves as a tool for documenting some of the exciting adventures you experience as you go along. For those creating a new character or simply using the workbook as a way to develop a character without stats (perhaps for a creative writing project), the prompts will help give you starting places to spark your imagination.
As it is a workbook, there is a lot of whitespace in the book, for you to record descriptions of an adventure or fill out long-form answers to probing questions - or even to draw your own pictures of your adventurer. And, with so much white space, there aren't a lot of pictures, but the illustrations that are in Characters & Quests are from official D&D sources and the style of the book has the appropriate D&D manual-esque feel, as well.
This book might be great for a young would-be adventurer who hasn't yet played D&D and is developing his first character or someone who doesn't balk at the price and wants to journal their character and party's adventures a bit. If you're looking to work on a lot of character development, for writing or populating an adventure you're writing with interesting NPC characters, for example, you may want to also check out The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide: Expanded Genres Edition, which has a lot of story prompts and exercises, but isn't in a workbook format.
