Monte Cook

Life

Monte Cook was born on January 29, 1968, in Watertown, South Dakota. He has worked as a professional game designer since 1988, almost his entire adult life. He is also a trained fiction writer, a graduate of the 1999 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, and has published novels, short stories and a nonfiction book, The Skeptic's Guide to Conspiracies.

Work

Cook started at Iron Crown Enterprises in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he spent four years, two freelance and two on staff. He edited the Rolemaster line and the Hero System's "Campaign Classics" books, and wrote Dark Space (1990), a mix of fantasy, science fiction and horror. In 1992 he began freelancing for TSR, Inc., writing for a Marvel Super Heroes line that was cancelled before publication, and in 1994 he joined TSR as a staff designer.

At TSR he did much of his best-known early work in Planescape, the setting of planar cities and philosophical factions. He wrote or co-wrote dozens of its supplements, including The Planewalker's Handbook (1996) and Dead Gods (1998), as well as adventures such as A Paladin in Hell (1998). In 1999 he designed the conspiracy-horror game Dark•Matter.

After Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, Cook became a senior designer and one of the three authors of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, with Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams. All three contributed to every core book; Cook wrote the Dungeon Master's Guide (2000). He was especially proud of what Gary Gygax told the team: that the new guide would help him become a better DM. Cook called it satisfying "in a 'completion of the circle' sort of way." He also wrote Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and worked on the d20 edition of Call of Cthulhu (2002).

Cook left Wizards in 2001 to take advantage of the new The Open Game License. His imprint, Malhavoc Press, published through White Wolf's Sword & Sorcery Studios. The Book of Eldritch Might (2001) was the first commercial book from a print publisher sold only as a PDF. Its immediate success is credited with showing that digital publishing could work for roleplaying games. Malhavoc's Arcana Unearthed reworked the d20 rules for Cook's own giant-ruled world of the Diamond Throne. Ptolus (2006), a huge city setting, was based on the home campaign he had run to playtest 3rd Edition. After Ptolus he announced that he was stepping back from RPGs for fiction, though he later released more work, including Monte Cook's World of Darkness (2007).

In 2011 he returned to Wizards, and in January 2012 he was named lead designer of the next edition of D&D, then called D&D Next. He left in April 2012 over what he called "differences of opinion with the company," not with his fellow designers. The edition was completed by Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford as Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

Later in 2012 Cook and Shanna Germain founded Monte Cook Games. Its first project, Numenera, is set a billion years in the future, on an Earth built over the ruins of eight earlier civilizations whose technology now looks like magic. Its Kickstarter raised more than $500,000, over 25 times its $20,000 goal, and the game appeared in August 2013. Cook has said that Planescape was a major influence. Its streamlined Cypher System, in which players make all the rolls and the game master complicates events through "intrusions," also powers The Strange (2014), the surreal Invisible Sun (2018), and the children's game No Thank You, Evil! (2015). The Ninth World of Numenera also became the setting of inXile's computer RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera (2017), a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment.

Legacy

Cook's career follows the business history of roleplaying games over three decades: the old TSR's settings, the Wizards-era rebuild, the d20 boom, PDF publishing and, finally, crowdfunding. His Dungeon Master's Guide taught a generation of 3rd Edition game masters. The Book of Eldritch Might helped establish digital storefronts as a mainstream route for RPGs. Numenera's success showed that a veteran designer could build a sizable independent company directly on crowdfunding. The route from Planescape's weird philosophy to Torment: Tides of Numenera also shows how his tabletop ideas carried over into computer RPGs.