I knew today was the release date for the new official Dungeons & Dragons coloring book (you wouldn’t believe how hard it is for me to spell it that way… “coloring” with the poor u just dropped from the word). Wizards announced it some time in Apri [link] but I didn’t hear much else about it. [Edit: Oops, turns out the release date is September 22nd, not August 22nd, so this is a month early!]

But today I got a package in the mail.

First of all – I’m happy the U is back in the title. Maybe that’s just for the European printings (mine showed up from Europe). And it is full of exactly what I expect in the new “adult” colouring books combined with the excellent memories of the classic 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons coloring book.

But then I had to wonder why I received this book in the mail… I’ve had zero contact with Wizards of the Coast over the years. But I DID have contact with another company who was making a colouring book and got in touch about using my maps in it.

So a quick flip through the book and we come across this:

Sure enough, it’s the company who had negotiated the use of my maps in the colouring book who just never quite mentioned that it was an official D&D colouring book they were putting together!

I really like how they cut out most of the interior of these maps, opening them up for the owner to redraw them as they please – totally in keeping with the style of the colouring book and a method that even turns on my creative juices and sense of imagination and the unknown (particularly the pyramids and structures on the right page of the bottom photo there… I think they made it WAY better than my original map of the buried pyramids in the desert!)

So, yeah… I’ve been published in an official Dungeons & Dragons product! How fucking cool is that?!

I can’t wait to break out the colouring pencils!