How Dungeons & Dragons Inspired The Spiderwick Chronicles

Legendary artist Tony DiTerlizzi’s work on Dungeons & Dragons directly led to the creation of his bestselling novel series The Spiderwick Chronicles. While Tony DiTerlizzi’s work on the legendary Planescape setting has immortalized him with Dungeons & Dragons fans, he’s perhaps best known as the co-creator of The Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of children’s novels that have been adapted into a movie and a soon-to-be released Roku Channel TV series. While speaking with DiTerlizzi about his work on the new Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, ComicBook.com asked the artist whether his work on the first Planescape campaign setting books inspired any parts of The Spiderwick Chronicles. “It’s funny you bring up Spiderwick, DiTerlizzi said. “Because Spiderwick’s ties to Dungeons & Dragons run very deep.”

DiTerlizzi explained that one of his earliest projects as a child was working on a field guide inspired by both Dungeons & Dragons and his love of nature. “If we rewind back to the early ’80s and Dungeons & Dragons is everywhere and I’m 12 years old and I’m obsessed with D&D, my mom hands me Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Faeries book which was such a mind blower and such a monumental book in that time….And I also, growing up in South Florida, was a Boy Scout and I loved being out in nature. So, I would go bird watching, I’d collect insects, I would catch snakes and lizards and so I had all these little field guides to those things. So, at some point, when I was 11 or 12, I synthesized these two ideas and made a field guide to dragons and trolls and goblins in a three-ring notebook paper from school and then forgot about it.” 

Much later, he remembered his fantasy field guides and pitched a concept to TSR, with the Monster Manual reimagined in the style of an Audubon field guide. “I literally mocked up a couple pages and pitched it to TSR, what would become Spiderwick,” DiTerlizzi said. “I pitched the idea to them and said, ‘I have this idea and it uses handwritten calligraphy and it’s very much this beautiful Audubon coffee table book.’” However, TSR told DiTerlizzi it wasn’t the sort of product they really were interested in, leading to DiTerlizzi thinking it was a dead end. 

However, the project was resurrected in the early 2000s after DiTerlizzi won the Caldecott Award for Spider and the Fly. “Spider and the Fly was also my first New York Times bestseller and so I had the publisher’s attention,” said DiTerlizzi. “They were really interested in what I wanted to do next and they said, ‘If you could do any kind of book, what would you do?’ And I just thought of what would 12-year-old Tony want, and I thought of that field guide and no one had really done one yet. So, the idea of this field guide, it totally has its roots and inspirations from Dungeons & Dragons.”

DiTerlizzi also noted that he met his collaborator Holly Black on The Spiderwick Chronicles thanks to tabletop gaming. “In the late ’90s, I got interviewed for this magazine out of Philadelphia called d8 which was a gaming magazine that mostly focused on White Wolf and FASA and non-D&D games,” DiTerlizzi said. “This interviewer came out to interview me for my work in gaming and her name was Holly Black who I ended up creating Spiderwick with because she was so brilliant and she still is to this day. We’re still great friends and she’s a huge gamer.”  

DiTerlizzi noted that Dungeons & Dragons was really a gateway for his love of folklore and mythology and fantasy, all the things that feed into The Spiderwick Chronicles. “My passion for reading folklore and mythology all stem from Dungeons & Dragons,” DiTerlizzi said. “And fantasy, really, when I think back on it. I didn’t read Tolkien until after I played Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t read Elric, I didn’t read Piers Anthony or Conan. I read all that stuff, all of it came after Dungeons & Dragons for me. It opened up so many doors for me.” 

Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse is available at bookstores now.