Christopher Perkins, a senior D&D designer, director, and the mind behind 5e’s Curse of Strahd, retires after 28 years at Wizards of the Coast

Christopher Perkins, a senior D&D designer (and, recently, creative director) has retired from Wizards of the Coast after 28 years at the company—as announced on his Bluesky profile late last week:

“Today I retire from Wizards after 28 years,” Perkins writes. “With D&D’s 50th anniversary wrapping up and the revised rulebooks doing gangbusters, this is the perfect fairytale ending for me. I can’t wait to enjoy D&D purely as a fan again, knowing the game’s in good hands. See you in the Feywild!”

To underscore something: While you might’ve seen my name on an opinion piece that’s been very harsh on D&D‘s last 10 years doing the rounds, I still think Perkins is leaving a damn fine career behind him on the whole.

The designer started working for Wizards of the Coast in 1997—the same year it bought D&D—and has had a strong hand in shaping it into the system that has, for all my grumblings, dominated the TTRPG space for over two decades. Before that, he was writing adventures for Dungeon Magazine in the ’80s, under the pen name “Christopher Zarathustra”, which is about as old school as you can get.

He’d eventually go on to become the senior producer for D&D, and while he was a story producer on the game’s much-maligned 4th edition (which I generally think gets a bit of a bad rap—skill challenges are solid, and a lot of systems I like, such as LANCER, have been inspired by it) he’s also responsible for some of the game’s best modules and settings.

He was the lead story designer on Curse of Strahd, for example—which, next to the Forgotten Realms setting, is perhaps one of the most iconic 5e modules. As someone allergic to modules myself, even I’ve played it, and I had a great time. Mostly because my rogue got to be the one to swing the Sunsword, though the titular Strahd has an excellent legacy as one of D&D’s great villains thanks to his authorship.

Perkins has also had a solid presence in actual play, too. He’s been the Dungeon Master for Acquisitions Incorporated—a set of popular games run at the Penny Arcade Expo—but he’s also DM’d Dice, Camera, Action, and has guest-starred in shows like Critical Role. I distinctly remember him playing a pitch-perfect kobold named Spurt who threw a jar of bees at a fire giant, screamed “I win”, and then got flattened into a fine paste.

Make no mistake, Wizards of the Coast is losing a huge industry talent in Perkins—though I don’t think his departure has anything to do with the direction the system’s taking, mind. While I might have my own issues with that, the man is 57 years old.

It’s best not to speculate—and who knows, maybe some fresher minds will be a good thing for the system on the whole. Given the 2024 ruleset’s only just fully arrived, though, it might be a while yet before we see what a D&D without Perkins’ guiding hand looks like.