(28/41: 1988) Christopher Perkins (1968–)
Christopher Zarathustra
In 1988, a teenager from Canada submitted an adventure called “Wards of Witching Ways” to Dungeon magazine. He used the pen name Christopher Zarathustra. Issue #11 published it. He was twenty years old.
The adventure was competent. It was not remarkable. But the act of writing it — of studying the magazine’s format closely enough to match it, of understanding at twenty what most hobbyists never learn about pacing and encounter design — told a story about how this particular mind worked. Christopher Perkins didn’t start with inspiration. He started with analysis. He read what others had built, identified the patterns, and reproduced them.
That instinct would define everything that followed.
The Editor’s Education
Perkins joined Wizards of the Coast in 1997 as the editor of Dungeon magazine. The timing was precise: TSR had just been acquired, the D&D brand was in transition, and the magazine that published adventures from the community needed someone who could evaluate hundreds of submissions and shape the best ones into publishable form.
For years, Perkins read every adventure that crossed his desk. He saw every failure mode — the railroad that strangled player agency, the sandbox that dissolved into aimlessness, the dungeon that forgot to give players a reason to care. He saw what worked: the encounter that rewarded lateral thinking, the NPC whose motivation generated emergent drama, the map that invited exploration without demanding it.
By the time he was promoted to editor-in-chief of Wizards periodicals, Perkins had processed more adventure design than almost anyone alive. He had a mental database of what goes wrong. When he eventually turned from editing other people’s adventures to designing his own, that database was the foundation.
The Story Manager
Before fourth edition launched, Perkins became D&D’s story manager — responsible for the narrative architecture that connected individual products into a coherent world. He worked on the Star Wars Saga Edition while 4e was in development, then joined the SCRAMJET team led by Richard Baker that updated D&D’s cosmology and setting structure for the new edition.
This was infrastructure work: building the narrative scaffolding that adventure designers would build within. It required a different kind of craft than writing encounters — the ability to think in systems of story rather than individual scenes. How does a campaign setting generate adventures organically? How do factions create conflict without authorial intervention? How does a cosmology support both sandbox play and dramatic arcs?
The answers Perkins developed during this period would surface in his 5th edition adventure design, where strong narrative spines support genuine sandbox exploration — the synthesis that defines his mature work.
The Actual Play Pioneer
In 2007, Perkins began DMing the Acquisitions Incorporated live-play sessions at PAX — Penny Arcade’s convention series that drew tens of thousands of attendees. For eleven years, he ran D&D before audiences that grew from hundreds to thousands, demonstrating the game as performance and spectacle.
The cultural significance is difficult to overstate. Acquisitions Incorporated was instrumental in launching the actual-play phenomenon that would later produce Critical Role and Dimension 20. Fans who had never played D&D watched Perkins DM and decided to try the game. The format — skilled DM, entertaining players, real stakes, genuine laughter — became the template that a generation of streaming shows would follow.
Perkins stepped down from Acquisitions Incorporated in 2018, citing the anxiety of live performance and travel. From 2016 to 2019, he DMed Dice, Camera, Action on Twitch, running his players through the same adventures he was designing for publication — Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, Waterdeep — in real time.
His blog, “The Dungeon Master Experience,” ran for over two years on the Wizards of the Coast website, documenting his design philosophy through the lens of his homebrew world Iomandra. It was a masterclass in transparent game design thinking, delivered weekly.
Curse of Strahd
The adventure that defines Perkins’ career is a reinterpretation of someone else’s work. Tracy and Laura Hickman created Ravenloft in 1983. Perkins took that foundation — the gothic horror castle, the tragic vampire lord, the mists that trap the players — and rebuilt it for 5th edition with a structural innovation that changed how the community thinks about published adventures.
The Tarokka card reading. At the start of each Curse of Strahd campaign, a fortune-telling scene randomizes the locations of key items and the identity of a crucial NPC ally. The adventure’s spine remains the same — Strahd is the villain, Barovia is the prison — but the specific path through it changes every time. It is genuinely replayable published adventure design, something the industry had talked about for decades but rarely achieved.
Community polls consistently rank Curse of Strahd among the top post-1985 published adventures. The horror pacing — the slow build from village dread to castle confrontation — demonstrates a command of genre that goes beyond mechanical competence into narrative art.
The Honest Assessment
Perkins worked within D&D for his entire career. He never designed an original system, never published under his own name outside the Wizards ecosystem, never tested his skills against a blank page with no brand behind it. Every product he led was Dungeons and Dragons. Every audience he addressed already loved the game.
This is not a weakness — specialization at the highest level produces mastery that generalists cannot match. But it means the scoring reflects excellence within a single franchise rather than across the field. An 8 in Mastery inside D&D is not the same as an 8 across multiple systems and genres.
His design credits are also collaborative by nature. Curse of Strahd lists Jeremy Crawford as co-lead designer. Tomb of Annihilation credits Will Doyle and Steve Winter alongside Perkins. The 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual are team products. Perkins directed these efforts, but attribution is shared. The editor’s craft — shaping other people’s work into a coherent whole — is both his greatest skill and the hardest to score individually.
The Scoring Case
Invention (6): “Published designs work — someone noticed.”
Perkins didn’t invent adventure design, but he refined it into the 5e model that became the industry standard. Curse of Strahd’s Tarokka card reading — randomizing key locations and NPC alliances per campaign — created genuinely replayable adventure design. Tomb of Annihilation’s hex crawl revival brought exploration-based play back to D&D after editions of encounter-corridor design. Waterdeep: Dragon Heist pioneered the “choose your villain” structure — four antagonists generating four campaigns from one book. These are meaningful innovations within adventure design, noticed and discussed by the community. But they are refinements of existing forms — sandbox, hex crawl, branching narrative — not new categories. 6.
Architecture (7): “Serious engineering others noticed.”
The 5e adventure hardcover format — roughly 250 pages, strong narrative spine supporting sandbox exploration, lavish production — was largely Perkins’ architectural template. Curse of Strahd is the proof case: it supports hundreds of hours of play, generates different experiences through the Tarokka system, and holds together structurally despite enormous player agency. The adventure design shows genuine engineering: encounter balance accounting for non-linear progression, faction systems generating emergent gameplay, horror pacing that builds across levels. Community polls consistently rank his adventures among the best published since 1985. The quality is real, the influence is documented. 7.
Mastery (8): “Proven master.”
Thirty-seven years from “Wards of Witching Ways” (1988) to the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024). Clear four-phase craft evolution: teen magazine contributor, then Dungeon magazine editor learning from hundreds of submissions, then story manager directing narrative architecture across editions, then lead designer of the most acclaimed 5e adventures. “The Dungeon Master Experience” blog documented his philosophy with unusual transparency. The Acquisitions Incorporated live-play sessions demonstrated mastery at the table before audiences of thousands. Range spans adventure design, setting development, monster design, and editorial direction across three editions (3.5e, 4e, 5e). Dozens of significant D&D products across a twenty-eight-year career at Wizards of the Coast. 8.
Adjustments (+7):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 — 1988–2025, thirty-seven years of published designs spanning teen contributor to creative director.
- ■ Full-time career: +1 — Game design and editing as primary profession since joining Wizards of the Coast in 1997. Twenty-eight continuous years.
- ■ Awards: +1 — Curse of Strahd won Gold ENnie for Best Adventure (2017). Multiple D&D products under his leadership won ENnies across categories.
- ■ Branded name: +0 — Known and respected within the D&D community but not recognized by non-gamers. Perkins is a designer’s name, not a consumer brand.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +0 — Exclusively D&D and RPG work. No board games, card games, or wargames credited to Perkins.
- ■ Commercial success: +1 — Curse of Strahd alone has sold millions of copies as part of 5e’s record-breaking commercial run. D&D 5e products under his leadership contributed to the brand’s billion-dollar era.
- ■ Design propagation: +1 — The Tarokka-style randomized adventure structure has been adopted by third-party publishers. The 5e hardcover adventure template became the industry format for published campaigns. Format-level propagation, not full mechanical framework adoption — +1 not +2.
- ■ Field stewardship: +1 — Acquisitions Incorporated pioneered actual-play as a gateway to tabletop RPGs, directly inspiring Critical Role and Dimension 20. “The Dungeon Master Experience” blog taught adventure design publicly for two years. Dungeon magazine editorship shaped a generation of adventure writers through direct editorial mentorship.
Total: 28 points. Year: 1988.
The Hidden Pattern
Christopher Perkins is an editor who became a designer. His superpower isn’t invention — it’s curation. He spent years reading every adventure submission to Dungeon magazine, learning what worked and what didn’t from hundreds of other designers’ attempts. When he finally directed adventures himself, he had a map of every failure mode.
Curse of Strahd didn’t come from inspiration. It came from twenty years of knowing exactly what goes wrong. The Tarokka reading exists because Perkins had seen a thousand adventures that played the same way every time. The horror pacing works because he had edited a hundred adventures that fumbled their tone. The sandbox-within-a-spine structure holds because he had read every version that collapsed into either railroad or chaos.
The editor’s education. The most undervalued path in game design.
What Remains
Twenty-eight years inside the world’s largest RPG. A magazine editorship that processed more adventure design than any single person had read before. A live-play series that helped launch the streaming revolution that brought millions of new players to the table. A blog that taught the craft in public. And a handful of adventures — Curse of Strahd chief among them — that the community ranks alongside the best the hobby has ever produced.
In 2025, Perkins retired from Wizards of the Coast and joined Darrington Press — Critical Role’s tabletop imprint — as Creative Director. The editor who helped build the actual-play phenomenon now works for the company that perfected it. The circle completes.
28 points. 1988. The editor who read every adventure and then wrote the best ones.
He didn’t invent the dungeon. He read every dungeon anyone had ever written — and then he built Barovia.