Chris Perkins (game designer)

• 1. Introduction

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  Christopher Perkins was born on the 29th of February 1968, which means his birthday falls on the calendar only once every four years. That quirk of timing fits a career defined by patience and long games. For 28 years, Perkins shaped the world's most recognized tabletop role-playing game from inside Wizards of the Coast. He held nearly every creative role the company offered, from editor to senior producer to Game Architect, before retiring in April 2025. But what does it mean to be the architect of a game that millions of people play in their living rooms, at their kitchen tables, in convention halls? What goes into keeping a fantasy world coherent across editions, supplements, and decades? And how does a person who spent nearly three decades at one company decide to walk away, only to return to the industry a few months later? Perkins's career answers each of those questions, and the answers start not at Wizards of the Coast but in the pages of a small gaming magazine.

• 2. A Pen Name and a Beginning

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  Under the name Christopher Zarathustra, Perkins wrote his first published adventure in 1988. That piece, titled "Wards of Witching Ways", appeared in issue 11 of Dungeon magazine. It was a freelance contribution, not a staff position, but it placed his work in print before most people in the industry knew his real name. The pen name itself suggests someone who was thinking carefully about identity and presentation from the very start of his career.

  Almost a decade passed before Perkins joined Wizards of the Coast officially, starting there in 1997 as an editor for Dungeon. Editing is often seen as invisible labor, but for someone learning a game system from the inside, it provides an unusually complete view of how adventures are built, where they fail, and what makes them memorable. Within a few years, Perkins was promoted to editor-in-chief of Wizards periodicals, a role that put him in charge of the publications that carried Dungeons and Dragons fiction and adventure content to subscribers. That vantage point set him up for the larger design and production work that would define the next phase of his career.

• 3. Building the Fourth Edition

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  By 2007, Perkins was serving as story manager for Dungeons and Dragons, a position he held as the fourth edition of the game was being developed. His own desk work at the time was focused on the Star Wars Saga Edition, a separate role-playing game system, but the division between projects was permeable. Ideas moved freely between Perkins and the fourth edition team throughout that period.

  Perkins also worked on a team called SCRAMJET, which was led by Richard Baker and included James Wyatt, Matthew Sernett, Ed Stark, Michele Carter, and Stacy Longstreet. That team's assignment was to update the setting and cosmology of Dungeons and Dragons for the new edition, which meant deciding which parts of the game's deep lore would carry forward and which would be reshaped. Cosmology in a fantasy role-playing game is not abstract philosophy; it determines which planes of existence characters can visit, which gods hold power, and what the fundamental structure of reality looks like at the table. Working on that foundation while simultaneously contributing to a licensed Star Wars product speaks to the range of creative problems Perkins was managing at once.

• 4. The Dungeon Master in Public

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  Perkins ran a blog called "The Dungeon Master Experience" on the Wizards of the Coast website for more than two years. The blog used his personal homebrew campaign, set in a world he called Iomandra, as a lens for discussing the craft of running a game. He shared specific tricks and practical advice drawn from his own sessions, treating Iomandra not as a showcase but as a working example of how a Dungeon Master thinks through problems.

  In the penultimate post of March 2013, Perkins announced that the next entry would be the last, at least for a while. The blog then went inactive. That particular post has a valedictory quality to it, a signal to readers who had been following along that the ongoing conversation was closing, without a clear statement of when or whether it might reopen. The silence that followed extended well beyond "a while".

  Beginning in 2008, Perkins also served as the Dungeon Master for Acquisitions Incorporated, a series of actual play games held at the Penny Arcade Expo. Those games started with the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons and later shifted to the 5th edition after the newer rules released. Perkins remained at the head of the table for Acquisitions Incorporated through PAX Unplugged 2018, when Jeremy Crawford took over the Dungeon Master role. Perkins continued to make occasional appearances in the series after stepping back from the primary seat.

• 5. Curse of Strahd and Senior Design

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  In 2016, Perkins served as Lead Story Designer for Curse of Strahd, the adventure module that brought the Ravenloft setting into the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Ravenloft is one of the game's oldest and most atmospheric settings, built around gothic horror and a vampire lord named Strahd von Zarovich. Incorporating it into the new edition required balancing nostalgia for longtime players with accessibility for newcomers.

  By 2018, his title had shifted to senior story designer for Dungeons and Dragons. From 2016 to 2019, he was also running a Twitch show called Dice, Camera, Action, a live-streamed playthrough of Dungeons and Dragons storylines that ran concurrently with the official product releases. Playing through the game's own narrative content on a public stream placed Perkins in an unusual position: a senior designer experiencing the stories he helped create as a player-facing Dungeon Master in real time. He also appeared twice as a guest on Critical Role, the streaming show that became one of the highest-profile examples of actual play in the industry.

• 6. Game Architect and Departure

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  In a 2024 interview, Perkins described his role as Game Architect for the Dungeons and Dragons brand. His primary responsibility, as he framed it, was managing the team of designers and editors who make the tabletop game products, along with supporting other Dungeons and Dragons teams and business partners. The title reflects a kind of meta-design work: less about writing individual adventures and more about maintaining the coherence of a system built by many hands.

  In October 2024, Perkins stated publicly that the Dungeon Master's Guide released that year was the last official Dungeons and Dragons book in which he would be credited as a product lead. He noted that he had made substantial contributions to the Monster Manual planned for 2025 and a forthcoming starter set, but framed the Dungeon Master's Guide as a closing chapter. He later clarified that his role at Wizards had already shifted from Game Design Architect to Creative Director before his exit.

  In April 2025, Perkins announced his retirement after 28 years with the company. He had said he was committed to staying through Dungeons and Dragons' 50th anniversary, which gave him time to work on what he called succession planning and exit strategies. That deliberate pacing meant the transition was not abrupt; it was a handoff he had been preparing for.

• 7. Darrington Press and Daggerheart

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  In June 2025, Darrington Press, the tabletop game imprint of Critical Role Productions, announced that Perkins and Jeremy Crawford would both be joining the company. Perkins became Creative Director; Crawford became Game Director. Both titles matched their former roles at Wizards of the Coast, which made the pairing read as a reunion of colleagues as much as a pair of new hires.

  Perkins described what pulled him back from retirement as the chance to work with Crawford and the people at Critical Role on projects he believed could have a lasting and positive impact. In July 2025, Darrington Press announced that Perkins would be creating an interconnected adventure supplement for their tabletop role-playing game Daggerheart. That game had already appeared at PAX Unplugged 2025, where Acquisitions Incorporated played their session using Daggerheart rules, with Crawford continuing as gamemaster. The franchise that Perkins had run for years was now operating in a system he would be helping to build.