Hello! Yes, I’ve been delinquent in keeping up with my blogging. I spent most of 2023 juggling my day job with finishing a novel in my off-time. I’m still working for Zenimax Online Studios as a writer on the Elder Scrolls Online game. I did a lot of work for the main story of ESO’s upcoming chapter The Gold Road, so you’ll see that later this year.

As for the novel, it’s an alt-history story with a good dose of science horror, exploring early Soviet mad science. My agent’s got it out to publishers, so we’ll see who wants it!

50 Years of D&D: Birthright

Since 2024 marks the 50^th anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons game, I’m theming my blog posts this year around the part I played in all that. Yes, it’s self-indulgent, but the blog posts where I talk about my D&D work are the posts that get the most views, which suggests that people are interested. I’ve identified a dozen-ish of my contributions to D&D that seem significant to me. I plan to look at these throughout the year, proceeding in chronological order.

First up: the Birthright Campaign Setting (D&D 2^nd Edition).

I began my career as a D&D designer in 1991, when TSR hired me on after I finished my active duty in the Navy. My first assignment was the Spelljammer sourcebook Rock of Bral. From there, I went on to a number of other sourcebooks and adventures. Basically, I worked on whatever was assigned to me, although every year we designers got the chance to request the products we wanted to work on in the upcoming schedule. Once in a while, we got the chance to pitch something Really Big.

A couple of years after I started at TSR, one of those Really Big opportunities came around. The company wanted a new campaign setting. Everybody on staff was invited to write up a pitch for a new D&D world and submit if they wanted. My own submission was “The Sunset Empire”—basically, a world with multiple suns that mashed up the Tekumel of Empire of the Petal Throne with Asimov’s Nightfall, dinosaurs, and more. I remember Jeff Grubb pitched an idea about airships and mountaintop kingdoms, while Jon Pickens had an interesting “patchwork world” idea where you literally didn’t know what was twenty miles away until you went there.

Cool ideas, but none of them took. The powers that be set aside the Design Department’s world pitches, and told us what they wanted: a world where you’re the king.

I honestly don’t know where exactly that directive came from. I don’t think it was anything the rank-and-file creatives submitted. I suspect it was a pitch calculated to appeal to Lorraine Williams, TSR’s president. Lorraine came from money, and lived in a world of lords and serfs. (That sounds awful, but at least she had a sense of noblesse oblige—I know she helped some people who really needed help.) Maybe it was Jim Ward’s way of presenting a world pitch Lorraine would think she came up with, in order to get her on board. I’ll have to ask him sometime.

Anyway, one fine day in 1993, Colin McComb and I were handed the job of “design the next D&D world.” And the only guidance was “this is a world where every PC is a king.” That’s where the world of Birthright started.

I more or less took on the lead writer role. Among other things, I’m a history buff and I played a lot of historical board games. The Domain Rules were heavily influenced by our office lunchtime games of the old SPI game Empires of the Middle Ages. I also had an unpublished fantasy world (my first attempt at writing a novel) which became the Anuirean Empire in the setting. Colin took point on the other cultures and filled in a lot of the Ruins of Empire book. Many other people pitched in with ideas or helped with playtesting—for example, Jeff Grubb suggested the idea of gods dying and leaving behind divine bloodlines. Tony Szczudlo created that epic cover painting. Editors Anne Brown and Sue Weinlein wrangled the sprawling manuscript. And it all came together. The Birthright Campaign Setting wound up winning an Origins Award in 1995.

One of the strange things about Birthright is that the boxed set was stuffed with components … including things that Colin and I struggled to find a use for. We had cardstock reference handouts, a card deck, even a folding box to hold the cards that we didn’t know what to do with. No one seemed worried about the cost of goods, so we shrugged and did our best. I created the Battle Card system (a miniatures game in disguise) to use the cards and give the DM a way to play out big battles. But I wouldn’t have included them in the boxed set if anyone had asked me.

We learned later that the lavish components made the boxed set unprofitable. Why our purchasing department didn’t throw up a red flag, I couldn’t say. The Birthright Campaign Setting had a print run of about 45,000 copies (or so I heard), and each one was printed at a small loss. A Dark Sun-sized print run might have reached a better place with the cost per unit, but that didn’t happen. The run sold out, and because it was unprofitable TSR never printed more—we just don’t know how many they could have sold. Anyway, TSR’s business failings in the 1990s have been examined at great length by people better informed than me, so I won’t try to sort it out here.

So, what was Birthright’s contribution to 50 years of Dungeons & Drgaons?

First and foremost, a lot of people ran Birthright tabletop games. Some have continued for decades—I was just reading about one group that’s kept a game going since 1995! It became a computer game (Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance) and seems to have influenced Pathfinder’s Kingmaker adventure path. Which in turn inspired another computer game, Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

I really can’t claim credit for inventing the idea of D&D adventurers being rulers. That’s been around since fighters in 1^st Edition got to establish strongholds at 9^th level—and before that, characters like Aragorn and Conan became kings. There are elements of Birthright that are pretty clunky and dated these days. (If I were to do it over again, I might try pairing up the D&D adventuring with some kind of strategic co-op boardgame where successful RP adventures added new cards to your deck or unlocked new turn options or something.) It was the ‘90s, and I was still pretty new at the job. I’ve learned a thing or two since then.

Ultimately, tens of thousands of people just loved the hell out of a world I built, and many of them still look back fondly at the games they played there. What more could a writer hope for?