A Talk With Sean K Reynolds

A 30th Anniversary Interview

Sean Reynolds came to TSR right as the company was preparing to have a big 25th anniversary celebration (this was longer ago than five years ago, though -- it's complicated). It was a pretty lavish affair with a big tent outside, lots of food, and a big display of TSR products, including the licensed products including a wide variety of stuff such as action figures, stuff from the cartoon show, and (my favorite) the wrappers from D&D bologna.

My first memory of Sean was when Sue and I met him and kind of dragged him to the celebration (it was during a work day, in the middle of the day, on office grounds, so it wasn't far). He'd just been hired to work on the TSR website. Since he was just starting, I think he felt a little out of place. I liked him right away.

Fast forward to the spring of 2001, where Sean and I are sitting in a room together at Wizards of the Coast. We've just been selected to work on what the business team called the "R&D choice" product, which meant we could do whatever we wanted, on whatever subject we wanted. This didn't happen often (read: never) at Wizards, so it was a real treat. The finished product was, of course, the off-beat Ghostwalk.

I like working with Sean. He's very imaginative and creative. Although an opinionated guy, he's not close-minded, which isn't a combination you come upon very often. He's also diligent and dedicated. Most of all, though, I just like Sean. He's funny, extremely friendly, and very generous. And he doesn't mind the occasional good-natured ribbing about his idiosyncrasies.
I'm pleased to be able to ask him some questions in honor of the 30th (now 31st) Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.

Monte Cook: How did you come to start playing D&D?

Sean K Reynolds: My local community college had a summer program called College for Kids, intended to give gifted kids the opportunity to explore subjects they wouldn't normally get to do in a public school. The summer after fifth grade I took a class on astronomy and one on Dungeons & Dragons. I played a wizard named Golgo in a 15-person game run by a young college instructor who happened to be a big Tolkien enthusiast. My character died twice over the course of the summer, but I had a lot of fun. Later my cousin David and I convinced our respective parents to get us the D&D Basic and Expert sets, and we played the rest of the summer and after school.

Monte: What did you do before coming to work at TSR? Did it prepare you for a job dealing with roleplaying games?

Sean: TSR was my third official job as a college graduate. Job #1 was a long-term substitute teaching earth science and honors biology in an inner-city school; that gave me some experience dealing with a large number of unruly people. Job #2 was as the webmaster of a small educational and games software company (Time Warner Interactive, a.k.a. TWI); in an amazing bit of luck it taught me everything non-gaming that I needed to know for my job at TSR (more on that in a bit).

Monte: You didn't start as a designer at TSR but as webmaster. How did that come about?

Sean: I heard about the job from a want ad posted to a fan AD&D mailing list (I say "a fan AD&D mailing list" because it wasn't owned by or associated with TSR). I applied, didn't hear anything for a few weeks, and forgot about it. One day I came home from work to find a message on my machine saying they'd like to do a phone interview. I did it the next day and they wanted an in-person interview. That happened the next week. I got a tour of the building, met some of the staff, talked with Rob Repp (the guy who would be my boss if I got the job), and went to lunch. It was all incredibly surreal -- here I am at age 24, a gamer since I was 10, and two weeks earlier I had no idea I'd be interviewing for a TSR job in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Even more surreal, Rob told me, "I have a few other candidates to look over, but that's pretty much a formality, you have the job if you want it." I told him I'd need a few days to discuss it with my girlfriend and family, did so, said yes, gave notice at TWI, and two weeks later I was driving to Wisconsin from southern California.

At TWI I built and maintained an AOL forum and website, answered incoming email, updated product information, and so on. TSR wanted the same thing (they already had an AOL site, but not a website). Of course TSR was a bigger company, and I started working there right in the middle of an Internet flamewar over TSR's very controlling online policy (which at the time was effectively, "If you describe it in D&D stats, we own it, and posting it anywhere is a violation of our copyrights"). Then, my second day on the job, Rob Repp (my boss) gave his two-weeks notice, and the management said he could leave that day. Suddenly I'm the guy in charge of this whole mess!

It took a lot of repetition and patience (and boiling over a couple of times despite my best efforts) to get everyone to calm down and realize that just a few days earlier I was arguing against TSR's position, and just because they hired me didn't mean I suffered a massive personality shift. Things calmed down. I caught up on the hundreds of emails backlogged from before I was hired, and the hundred emails a day from angry players slowed to a trickle as they realized I wasn't the bad guy. My 12-hour workdays became 10-hour workdays and then 8-hour workdays, and suddenly I had time to socially interact with some of the interesting people at the company. Gamers who would become my friends.

Monte: What were your impressions of TSR, both as a new hire?

Sean: It was really, really weird. In some ways it looked like a typical business. My part of the building was where they did the advertisements and book layout, so it looked much like a modern and normal office: color monitors on the computers, printers, little offices branching off the hallways, and an "executive row" where the bigwigs plotted and schemed. Then you'd wander into the cafeteria past the gigantic wire and foam dragon head sculpted by [cover artist] Jeff Easley. Or to where the designers, editors, and creative directors worked, where you'd find a maze of red cube walls, gaming-related posters, monochrome monitors on ancient PCs, and a shared desk entirely covered by plastic action figures in a different configuration from day to day. Or upstairs to the warehouse area of the Mail Order Hobby Shop, where you'd find stacks of old Dragon magazines, boxed games from the early eighties, and even weirder things acquired from other companies. I grew up playing 1st Edition AD&D (we switched just a few months after we learned Basic/Expert) and my group never really made the switch to 2nd Edition, so I had almost no exposure to 2nd Edition products other than the Spelljammer line (which I liked because it was weird) and a handful of D&D novels (Dragonlance Chronicles and Legends, Forgotten Realms Icewind Dale).

Most of the people in "Creative Services" (as TSR called the game designers/editors/creative directors) weren't from the 1st Edition days, so I didn't have any hero-worship going on as I interacted with them; it was easy to make friends with them because I didn't have any "gods of game design" preconceived notions. The two exceptions were Jeff Grubb and Roger Moore, two names I recognized (Jeff from Spelljammer, though he had, of course, worked on many things before that, and Roger from his days as editor of Dragon) and so every once in a while after passing their cubes or talking to them I'd do a double-take and think, "Man, I'm working at TSR, how crazy is that?" Remember that I'm only 24 at the time and it's still pretty new to be out in the
"real world."

But everyone was nice. You and Sue invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner. [Game designer] Colin McComb and [Dungeon editor] Michelle Vuckovich and I became friends due to similar interests (and unlike most guys -- who started at TSR and went after Michelle as a possible girlfriend -- I had a girlfriend already, so she and I could be friends without any of that awkwardness). [Designers] Bill Slavicsek, Ted Stark, Thomas Reid, and I played walleyball two to three times a week. [Editors] Cindi Rice and Jeff Quick and Stan! and I were the same sort of goofy. I really felt like I fit in; our interest in gaming was just one thing we had in common, and as Lake Geneva is such a small tourist community, our best opportunities to meet people we'd want to talk to were right there at TSR.

Monte: How did you eventually become a game designer?

Sean: I was sneaky.

Every year, the Creative Services team would pitch in to write and edit one collaborative product. Everyone donated their freelancing fees for the book to a common pool, which they used to throw an invite-only party at Gen Con. This particular year (I think it was 1996, after I had been at TSR for a year) I told them I'd like to help out, and they let me write a short adventure for what eventually became Children of the Night: Ghosts for the Ravenloft setting. At some point after that the RPGA Network started its "Adventurer's Guild" program, where they'd pick a few key products each year and have someone write short adventures tied to them; people could play the adventures in their local game stores and be encouraged to check out the key products. I wrote a couple of them (for a Birthright sourcebook on the Vos, for Bruce Cordell's Illithiad) and a few other little things for the RPGA.

Fast forward to 1997, Wizards of the Coast buys TSR. I join the Wizards web team. Having accomplished my goals at TSR (fix the Internet policy, get TSR a website), I tell my boss (Marc Schmalz, now one of The Game Mechanics) that I'm going to look for work elsewhere in the company. My friends in Creative Services let me know there's going to be a new designer job created soon. I apply. And wait. And wait. And they close my webmaster job because they reduced the web team's budget (but that's okay, I told Marc that the position was redundant at that point, and eliminating that empty job meant someone else on the web team didn't lose theirs). Not wanting to let me slip away, I was shuffled between the facilities department (who had me updating resource maps of the building for a few days), training department (where I built their intranet training/education website), and finally as Peter Adkison's temporary assistant while his regular assistant was out on maternity leave. Harold Johnson and Lisa Stevens did a tug-of-war to see if I'd end up on his team (and work on Dragonlance) or her team (and work on Greyhawk) and Lisa won. Suddenly I'm "Greyhawk boy," writing more than half of the last ten 2nd Edition Greyhawk books.

Monte: Although you worked with TSR/Wizards for a long time, when you think back, what's the most memorable period?

Sean: I have to say that the period right around the release of 3rd Edition was the best. While [some] in upper management continued to badmouth TSR, the R&D staff knew we had something really great coming with 3rd Edition, and we were proud to be part of it. Fan enthusiasm was high (if cautious at times), we had great ideas for new products, and everyone was still flush with "Pokemoney." In some ways that's the pinnacle of my writing career: I wrote all of the god-info for the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, the first time ever that many of those deities had more than a line in a table devoted to them. I wrote some of the early parts of the 3rd Edition Monster Manual and brought up a lot of questions about monsters that the 3rd Edition team didn't yet have answers for. I co-wrote Into the Dragon's Lair, the first official adventure for 3rd Edition (and while it's not my best work, there were a lot of interdepartmental shenanigans regarding that book that made it a problem child). And I co-wrote the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, which is a beautiful, well-crafted book that did exactly what it was supposed to do: get people to come to the Realms (whether a return trip or a first-time visit), not have to worry about the previous ten years of products, and play -- not read, not leave to rot on a shelf, but actually play.

In working on those books I got to interact with some really interesting people. [Dragon and Dungeon magazine editor] Erik Mona used to work for me as a TSR online host on AOL, and there we were writing the first Greyhawk campaign setting in almost ten years. As a Monster Manual designer I got to work with the 3rd Edition team (and had many informative discussions with Jonathan Tweet over a cube wall). With Dragon's Lair I got to work with [designer] Steve Miller*, the only man I know who ever caught on fire at one of your and Sue's Christmas parties. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting teamed me up with [designers] Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams, and newbie Rob Heinsoo, working with Realms goddess Julia Martin and sharp-witted [editor] Michele Carter, and butting heads with Birthright's [designer] Rich Baker over creative issues. It was the first time I was allowed to be really creative in prose and rules for my game books, and it was awesome. And you and I wrote Ghostwalk, the first time we had ever worked together after years together at TSR.

Monte: While you weren't on the primary 3rd Edition design team, you made a lot of contributions to the design (both directly and indirectly). What was that process like?

Sean: I've always been nitpicky about rules. When they told the R&D staff we were going to do 3rd Edition, I wrote a critique of the first three levels of spells in the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook and presented it to the 3rd Edition team designers; not just how the spells worked but the language used, the spell format, what they said, what was redundant, and what was left out. Every time they sent us a new section of the rules, I read it and asked a lot of questions. Sometimes those questions led to small changes, sometimes they led to new rules.

I joke that I'm the guy who "broke darkvision"; in an earlier version of the rules, darkvision worked a different way, but I found some problems with how the rules presented it (mainly interactions with gaseous, incorporeal, and invisible creatures) and the designers decided to change it to its present form. It was thrilling. A few years earlier I was ranting about TSR's online policy, and here I am having an effect on the next generation of D&D.

Monte: Since you experienced it first hand, how about a funny or interesting story involving the buyout of TSR or the move to Washington?

Sean: I met [Wizards of the Coast founder] Peter Adkison for the first time on the weekend after Wizards announced the buyout. I was at Game Towne, a Lake Geneva game store, playing Mythos (the Chaosium Cthulhu-mythos card game) with Lester Smith and some other guys. Peter walked in the door, we invited him to try out the game, and he did. That's how I knew things were going to be better under Wizards ... the CEO was a gamer and loved games (by contrast, [TSR's owner] Lorraine Williams was proud that she wasn't a gamer and thought them beneath her).

Monte: Will you share with us a funny or interesting story about designing for D&D?

Sean: My girlfriend Willow isn't a gamer but she's on the periphery of gaming (she likes fantasy movies and paints miniatures). Whenever I get in a deadline crunch, she always offers to help. Unfortunately, her help is always the same strange but funny story, which goes like this (and you have to imagine it in a fake little girls' voice):

"There was a little dwarf. He had a red hat and pointy shoes. He had a friend who was a wizard. The wizard had a pointy hat and a cape with stars. One day they went on an adventure. They went out to buy a pop -- I mean 'mead.'"

I really need to work that into a book someday. :)

Monte: You left Wizards of the Coast a few years ago. What have you been doing since?

Sean: A lot of different things. I wrote two books for Malhavoc Press, one for Troll Lord Games, one for Silverthorne Games, and started working on an book for Reaper Miniatures. I worked at a computer game company (Interplay) where I designed for two games that would have been awesome but got canceled because of management stupidity and started work on a third and fourth game that died when Interplay ran out of money. I started my own game company and took a job at Upper Deck Entertainment working on the next world they'll turn into a cartoon and card game. I'm incredibly busy, which seems to be the way I like it.

* In December 1996, TSR's financial problems came to a head, and the company laid off a significant percentage of its work force. These layoffs happened to occur on the Friday we were planning our annual Christmas party. At first Monte and I thought we ought to cancel it - surely no one would be in the mood to celebrate at such a gloomy time. However, everyone we talked to about it told us that the very opposite was true: That having the party was more important than ever, to give everyone a chance to be together. So we laid in extra booze and held the party, and it was our best turnout ever. One of our guests, Dragonlance and Ravenloft designer/editor Steve Miller, had been let go earlier that day. The first I knew there was a problem, book department editorial assistant Liz Baldwin strolled into the kitchen and commented, "Did you know that Steve Miller was on fire?" Sure enough, Steve had been standing a little too close to a window sill with a candle burning in it, and had caught the sleeve of his sweater aflame. He was just in the process of discovering this as I arrived, and he got the sweater off mostly unscathed, just a few cinders on the carpet to remind us of the incident. Today, almost ten years later, if you get enough "old TSR" types together at a party, this story is sure to come up. (Sorry, Steve.) -- Ed.

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