- Erick Wujcik
Erick Wujcik is a designer of both role-playing games and computer role-playing games, and co-founder of Palladium Books. He started off as head of the gaming society at Wayne State University, and then as a computer columnist for "The Detroit News" from 1979 to 1981, where he wrote their weekly "Computer Column".
- Kenneth Hite
Kenneth Hite (born September 15, 1965) is a writer and role-playing game designer. He holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor's degree in Cartography. He has been writing games since 1981 and full-time since 1995. He writes the "Suppressed Transmission" column for "Pyramid" magazine, …
- Gary Gygax
Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American writer and game designer, best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson, and co-founding the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, Inc.) with Don Kaye in 1974. Gygax is generally acknowledged as the father of the role-playing game.
- Kevin Siembieda
Kevin Siembieda (born June 1956) is an American writer, designer, and publisher of role-playing games, as well as being the founder and president of Palladium Books. Palladium Books, founded in southeast Michigan, claims to be the first to implement a role-playing system intended to work for all genres and to introduce the perfect-bound trade paperback format to the RPG industry.
- Steve Jackson
Steve Jackson (born ~1953) is an American game designer. After working for many years at Metagaming designing such games as "Ogre" and "The Fantasy Trip", he left to found Steve Jackson Games (SJ Games) in the early 1980s. He designed many of the games published by SJ Games, such as "Car Wars", "GURPS", "Munchkin" and many others.
- John Wick
John Wick is a 20th and 21st century role-playing game designer best known for his creative contributions to the Alderac Entertainment Group properties Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea. He self-published Orkworld under the Wicked Press banner, and later co-founded the Wicked Dead Brewing Company with Jared Sorensen. His games under that company include Cat, Schauermärchen, Enemy Gods, and Thirty.
- Jonathan Tweet
Jonathan Tweet is a game designer who has been involved in the development of the role-playing games "Ars Magica", "Everway", "Over the Edge", "Talislanta" and the third edition of "Dungeons & Dragons". He currently works at Wizards of the Coast. He has many short cultural and political essays on his website with a particular focus on religion and atheism.
- Monte Cook
Monte Cook is a professional table-top role-playing game game designer and writer.
- Greg Stafford
Francis Gregory Stafford (born February 9 1948), usually known as Greg Stafford, is an American game designer, publisher and shaman.
- Steve Kenson
Steve Kenson (born June 16, 1969) is a writer and designer of fantasy role-playing games (RPGs) and related fiction. His most notable creation is the d20 System superhero roleplaying game Mutants & Masterminds for Green Ronin Publishing, which won multiple ENnie awards. He also designed True20 Adventure Roleplaying and the Freedom City campaign setting for Green Ronin. He has written material for many RPGs, including: Aberrant, Champions, DC Universe, …
- Dave Arneson
David L. Arneson (born September 30, 1947 in Minnesota, United States) is an American game designer. In the early 1970s, he co-created the "Dungeons & Dragons" (D&D) role-playing game with Gary Gygax. He is a University of Minnesota alumnus, and began working on role-playing games (RPGs) at Coffman Union. He has kept a relatively low profile and has been called an "unsung legend" in the early development of role-playing games.
- Vincent Baker
Vincent Baker is the designer of the Indie role-playing games Dogs in the Vineyard, kill puppies for satan, Mechaton and others. His publishing imprint is called Lumpley Games. He currently resides in Greenfield, Massachusetts. He is the father of three children and is the husband of Meguey Baker, also a roleplaying game designer.
- John Tynes
John Tynes (born 1971) is a writer best known for his work on role-playing games such as Unknown Armies and Puppetland, and for his company Tynes Cowan Corporation, which under its imprint Pagan Publishing produces third-party books for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game under license from Chaosium as well as fiction and non-fiction books under its imprint Armitage House.
- Michael Stackpole
Michael Stackpole (born 1957) is, among other things, a science-fiction author best known for his Star Wars and Battletech books. He was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, but raised in Vermont. He has a BA in history from the University of Vermont.
- Erik Mona
Erik Mona has been the editor-in-chief of "Dragon" magazine since 2004 and "Dungeon" magazine from 2004 to 2006; both magazines are published by Paizo Publishing. He has edited, authored, and co-authored several products for the "Dungeons & Dragons" role-playing game, including the "Living Greyhawk Gazetteer", "Faiths and Pantheons", and "Armies of the Abyss". He is also the former editor of the "Oerth Journal", …
- Greg Costikyan
Greg Costikyan, also known as Designer X, is an American game designer and science fiction writer. Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including hex-based wargames, role-playing games, boardgames, card games, computer games, online games and mobile games. Several of his games have won Origins Awards.
- R. Sean Borgstrom
Rebecca Sean Borgstrom (Born: March 3, 1966?) is a roleplaying game writer. She is the author of "Nobilis" and "The Game of Powers" (the LARP version of Nobilis), as well as co-author of several source books for "Exalted", the Weapons of the Gods RPG, and other works. She currently resides in Seattle, Washington. Borgstrom graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 1988, …
- Marc W. Miller
Marc W. Miller (born 1947) is an American game designer. Miller was one of the founding partners of the Game Designers' Workshop (GDW), and the original creator of the Traveller science-fiction role-playing game. After GDW folded, the Traveller rights reverted to him, resulting in three more editions of the game, administered by his company Far Future Enterprises: * Marc Miller's Traveller (aka T4) - "set in the early days of the Third Imperium".
- James Wyatt
James Wyatt is a game designer and a former United Methodist minister. He works for Wizards of the Coast, where he has designed several award-winning supplements and adventures for the "Dungeons & Dragons" roleplaying game. Wyatt received Origins Awards in 2003 for "City of the Spider Queen" and in 2005 for the "Eberron Campaign Setting", which he co-authored with Bill Slavicsek and Keith Baker.
- Greg Stolze
Greg Stolze (born 1970) is an American novelist and writer, whose work has mainly focused on properties derived from role-playing games. Stolze has contributed to numerous role-playing game books for White Wolf Game Studio and Atlas Games, including Demon: the Fallen. Some of Stolze's recent work has been self-published using the "ransom method", …
- Adam Powell
Adam James Powell (born December 20 1976 in Newport, Wales) is the co-founder of Neopets. He and Donna Williams launched the website on November 15, 1999. The concept for Neopets was based on an idea for a web site Adam had at Nottingham University in 1997. Prior to founding Neopets, he was also involved in Shout! Advertising, a UK-based advertising company which operated the third largest click-through program on the Internet by mid-1999.
- Peter Adkison
Peter D. Adkison is a game developer, one of the founders of game companies Wizards of the Coast and Hidden City Games. Peter Adkison is the current owner of Gen Con. His work includes "The Primal Order", a "capstone system" for use with any of a number of different role-playing games. From 1993 through 2001 Adkison was CEO for Wizards of the Coast. In January 2001 he sold Wizards of the Coast to Hasbro.
- Donna Williams
Donna Williams (born December 10 1978 in England) is one of the co-founders of the Neopets web corporation, along with Adam Powell. Williams mostly works on daily content, artwork, storylines, marketing and merchandising while Powell's emphasis is programming and the creative side. Prior to Neopets, Williams was a marketing manager for Shout! Advertising from September 1997 to July 1999, responsible for internet advertising, sales and services, graphic and web design.
- Sandy Petersen
Carl Sanford Joslyn Petersen (born September 16, 1955) is a game designer. Petersen was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended University of California, Berkeley, majoring in zoology. He is a well-known fan of H.P. Lovecraft, whose work he first encountered in a World War II Armed Services edition of "The Dunwich Horror and other Weird Tales" found in his father's library. In 1974, "Dungeons & Dragons" brought his interest to role-playing games.
- Colin McComb
Colin McComb (b. May 1970) is an American writer and game designer born in Evanston, Illinois. He is married to musician Robin Moulder. They currently live in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, with their two children. He has a degree in Philosophy from Lake Forest College, from which he graduated in 1991.
- Emily Care Boss
Emily Care Boss is a Indie roleplaying game designer and publisher. She is the author of "Breaking the Ice" and "Shooting the Moon". She currently resides in Plainfield Massachusetts. Boss graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst with a bachelors degree in Social Thought and Political Economy and masters degree in Forestry. She is currently a forestry consultant in the woodlands of western Massachusetts.
- Steve Long
Steven S. Long is a role-playing game author and one of the owners of Hero Games. In December 2001, he founded DOJ, Inc. along with Darren Watts and other investors, and purchased the rights and assets of Hero Games from Cybergames, Inc. In addition to being an ownerof DOJ/Hero, Long also works for the company as HERO System Line Developer, where his duties include planning, writing, editing, and developing manuscripts for publication.
- Meguey Baker
Meguey Baker is a roleplaying game designer and independent publisher. She is the author of "A Thousand and One Nights" based on the collection of Arabic stories, "The Book of One Thousand and One Nights". She she was born in 1971 in upstate New York, where she started playing roleplaying games in 1978, and she currently resides in Greenfield Massachusetts. She is the mother of three children, and her husband, Vincent Baker, …
- Jeff Dee
Jeff Dee (born May 15, 1961) is an artist and game designer. He is a recognized figure in the role-playing game community and game industry. His illustrative work shows comic book art form and influence. When still a teenager in the late 1970s, Dee illustrated numerous material for the role-playing game "Dungeons & Dragons" (AD&D) including interior artwork for manuals and illustrations and covers for adventure modules for the game.
- Bruce Cordell
Bruce Robert Cordell (born 1968) is an American author of roleplaying games and fantasy novels. He is the winner of the Origins Award as well as several ENnies. He lives in Seattle with his wife and household of pets.
- Eric Burns
Eric Alfred Burns (born January 27, 1968) is an American critic, writer, poet, columnist and Role Playing Game developer who lives in New Hampshire. He is best known as the creator and one of the principal writers of the popular culture and webcomic commentary website Websnark and as the writer of the webcomic Gossamer Commons.
- Aaron Allston
Aaron Allston (born 1960 in Corsicana, Texas) is an American novelist of many science fiction books, notably "Star Wars" novels. His works include those of the "X-Wing" series: "Wraith Squadron", "Iron Fist", "Solo Command", "Starfighters of Adumar". He has also written two entries in the "New Jedi Order" series: "Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream", and "Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand".
- Mike Pohjola
Mikko "Mike" Pohjola is a Finnish author and roleplaying game designer. In Nordic live action role-playing (LARP) circles, he's known as the author of "the Manifesto of the Turku School" (advocating immersive gaming), and as the designer of several experimental LARPs. Roleplaying games written by Pohjola include Myrskyn aika and the Star Wreck Roleplaying Game.
- Steve Perrin
Steve Perrin is a game designer and technical writer/editor. Perrin is probably best known for creating the role-playing game "RuneQuest" for Chaosium. While at Chaosium he also created "Stormbringer", "Worlds of Wonder", "Elfquest", and "Superworld", and contributed to "Thieves' World" and "Call of Cthulhu". He worked at Interplay Productions, Maxis, and Spectrum Holobyte, doing game design, playtesting, …
- Tom Moldvay
Tom Moldvay (1949 - March 9, 2007) was a game designer and author most notable for his work on early materials for the fantasy role-playing game "Dungeons & Dragons" (D&D). As an employee of TSR, Inc., Moldvay authored or co-authored landmark D&D adventure modules such as "Castle Amber", "Isle of Dread", "Palace of the Silver Princess", and "Secret of the Slavers Stockade", all published in 1981.
- Shane Lacy Hensley
Shane Lacy Hensley is an author, game designer, and CEO of Pinnacle Entertainment Group and is currently a resident of Los Gatos, California. He has written several novels and designed a variety of games including miniatures wargames, tabletop wargames, and role-playing games, as well as substantial freelance work writing modules for game systems. He has also scripted at least one computer game.
- Dean Shomshak
Dean Shomshak (born 1964) is the author of supplements for role playing games. Starting his career writing articles for game magazines, he moved on to writing supplements for Hero Games's Champions system, and currently writes for White Wolf Game Studio.
- Mike Young
Mike Young is a game designer, author, and founder of the first independent professional LARP publishing house, "Interactivities Ink". He is the originator of 'Young's Law', which states "LARPS are sold by word of mouth", which has been generalized within small publisher organizations such as the GPA to "games are sold by word of mouth."
- Loren Wiseman
Loren Wiseman is a game designer. He worked with Game Designers' Workshop helping in the design and development of the "Traveller" roleplaying game and was one of the lead designers of the "Twilight 2000" roleplaying game. Mr Wiseman, while in the employ of Steve Jackson Games, ported "Traveller" to the GURPS roleplaying system, and has served as the editor for the online 'zine "Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society".
- Mark C. MacKinnon
Mark C. MacKinnon is a Canadian entrepreneur and designer of roleplaying games. As the founder of Guardians of Order, MacKinnon is best known for his work in the "anime" genre. His initial release, Big Eyes, Small Mouth, led the company to aggressively license anime properties. With the help of David L. Pulver and others, MacKinnon gradually turned the Tri-Stat System into a universal system, including martial arts, superhero, cyberpunk and urban fantasy games.