David Cook (game designer)

• 1. Introduction

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  David Cook is known to the gaming world as Zeb, a nickname he earned from a room full of high school students. They noticed that his signature was dominated by a stroke shaped like a Z. They also thought he looked like Zeb Macahan, the character James Arness played in the TV series How the West Was Won. The teacher in that classroom grew into an American game designer, best known for his work at TSR, Inc., the company behind Dungeons & Dragons. How does a man with an English degree and a theater minor end up writing rules that thousands of players follow? What did he build once he got there? And where did his career lead after the dice and paper gave way to screens?

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• 2. Iowa Farm Roots

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  David Cook was born in East Lansing, Michigan, but he grew up on a farm in Iowa. His father was both a farmer and a college professor. In junior high school, Cook played wargames, including Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg and Afrika Korps. He later described that stage of his life this way: "I was primarily a wargamer, but there wasn't any role-playing available then." That changed in college, where the gaming club at the University of Iowa introduced him to Dungeons & Dragons. In 1977 he earned a B.A. in English with a minor in theater. He married his high school sweetheart, Helen, and the couple had one son, Ian. Cook then took a job as a high school teacher in Milligan, Nebraska, though an advertisement in a gaming magazine was about to change his plans.

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• 3. Answering the Ad

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  The advertisement ran in Dragon magazine, and it called for a game designer at TSR. Cook wrote a sample section of a module and completed the designer test the company used at the time. He passed, and he became the third full-time game designer TSR had hired. Lawrence Schick was head of design and development then, and he brought Cook aboard while the company was growing fast. Cook stayed for more than fifteen years and rose to Senior Designer. He kept a plain view of the work. In his words: "Game designing is hard work … but everything worth doing is hard work. The important thing is to do it well, and to have fun while you're doing it." His output over those years was broad, covering role-playing games, modules, family board games, card games, rulebooks, and party mystery games.

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• 4. Beyond the Dungeon

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  Games Magazine named the first Partyzone game one of the Top 100 Games of 1985. Cook created the Partyzone mystery line, along with a scenario called The Spy Ring. His work for TSR also reached into licensed and genre games. He contributed to the role-playing games Conan the Barbarian, Crimefighters, The Adventures of Indiana Jones, Star Frontiers, Sirocco, and Escape from New York. Adventure modules were another strength. Cook wrote several influential early ones for D&D and AD&D, including A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity, I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City, and X1: The Isle of Dread. Three more, X4: Master of the Desert Nomads, X5: Temple of Death, and the others in that run, formed what fans call the Desert Nomads series. He also worked on M1: Blizzard Pass, B6: The Veiled Society, and CB1: Conan Unchained! His modules even crossed into other TSR games, such as TS005: Orient Express for Top Secret and BH2: Lost Conquistador Mine for Boot Hill.

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• 5. Expert and the East

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  In 1980, Tom Moldvay wrote the second edition of the D&D Basic Set, and Cook picked up where it stopped. His Expert Set took characters past third level, giving players a way to keep going. A later book pulled him toward a very different setting. Cook was the primary author of the original Oriental Adventures, ostensibly under the guidance and direction of Gary Gygax. The book introduced non-weapon proficiencies into AD&D, a rule that gave characters skills beyond fighting. Cook also designed Kara-Tur, the far eastern setting that anchored the book. His reach extended to the computer screen as well. Together with Jim Ward, Steve Winter, and Mike Breault, he co-wrote the adventure scenario that was adapted into the game Pool of Radiance.

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• 6. Rewriting the Rules

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  Dragon issue 118, dated February 1987, carried a column by Cook titled "Who Dies?" In it, he discussed which character classes might be thrown out in a revision of the game. He wrote it with a clear intention, which was to provoke a response from readers. The revision in question was the second edition of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, and Cook served as its lead designer. The column worked as an open test of what the community would defend. Cook would soon lead another major project for the same game, and it began as an idea that sat on a shelf.

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• 7. Birth of Planescape

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  When Spelljammer ended, TSR went looking for a setting to replace it. Slade Henson suggested building a new campaign setting from the original Manual of the Planes. The idea went unused for a year. Then Cook took it over, and the result was Planescape, with Cook as lead designer. One reviewer called it "the finest game world ever produced for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons". That praise made Planescape the high point of his tabletop career, and it came just before he left the company.

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• 8. Pixels and Pensions

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  In 1994, Cook left TSR to work in electronic media. He worked on the game Fallout 2. In 2001 he was inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame. Then came City of Villains in 2005, a computer game for Cryptic Studios on which he was lead designer. After leaving Cryptic, he joined Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment as lead systems designer for the video game Stargate Worlds. By 2013 he was working as a Content Designer at ZeniMax Online Studios on The Elder Scrolls Online. When the Elsweyr expansion for that game was released in June 2019, he was credited as a Senior Product Owner for Bethesda.Net.

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