Born | Bruce Robert Cordell 1968 (age 55–56)[ citation needed ] Watertown, South Dakota, U.S. |
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Occupation | Game designer, novelist |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Colorado |
Genre | Role-playing games |
Bruce Robert Cordell (born 1968)[ citation needed ] is an American author of roleplaying games and fantasy novels. He has worked on Dungeons & Dragons games for Wizards of the Coast. [1] He won the Origins Award for Return to the Tomb of Horrors and has also won several ENnies. He lives in Seattle.
Bruce Cordell played Dungeons & Dragons as a youth, and even recalled playing the original Tomb of Horrors adventure with future fellow game designer Monte Cook when they were in high school together. [2] Cordell was a wrestler and a debater, and also earned a degree in biology from the University of Colorado. [2] Cordell once worked in the biopharmaceutical industry, where he learned to synthesize DNA. [3]
Cordell worked on freelance game design while working in the scientific field, and was eventually hired as a full-time game designer by TSR in 1995. [2] Cordell created the Far Realm for the adventure The Gates of Firestorm Peak (1996). [4] : 299 He authored the Sea Devils Adventure Trilogy, The Illithiad, The Shattered Circle , Bastion of Faith , the Dungeon Builder's Guidebook, and the adventures Die Vecna Die! , Return to the Tomb of Horrors , and Return to White Plume Mountain for the AD&D game, as well as the Tangents sourcebook and The Killing Jar adventure for the Alternity game. [2] Cordell and Steve Miller worked on Die Vecna Die! (2000) together, an original adventure that brought an end to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line. [4] : 284 Cordell was also one of the designers working on the first new adventures for the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons game, beginning with The Sunless Citadel . [2] Cordell and Rich Baker wrote a new version of the Gamma World Roleplaying Game (2010), which was based on the fourth edition D&D rules. [4] : 302
He won the Origins Award for Return to the Tomb of Horrors , and ENnies for Mindscapes, If Thoughts Could Kill, and his work on the Manual of the Planes . [3] Bruce wrote the novels Oath of Nerull, Lady of Poison, Darkvision, Stardeep, and the Abolethic Sovereignty trilogy. [3] Short stories he's written have appeared in various anthologies, including "Black Arrow" in Realms of War. [3]
Bruce Cordell's RPG work includes many scenarios and sourcebooks; many of which are directly or indirectly concerned with monsters of a Lovecraftian bent (particularly mind flayers and psionics).
Cordell frequently references certain characters, ideas, and organizations in his RPG works, creating a private continuity between various supplements. For example, The Illithiad references the character of Strom Wakeman and the organization known as the Arcane Order (an organization detailed heavily in another of Cordell's works, College of Wizardry). Wakeman was quoted occasionally in Planescape books by Cordell, such as A Guide to the Ethereal Plane, and was instrumental to the course of events in the adventure Dawn of the Overmind (books which were themselves also connected through a phenomenon called an ether gap). Meanwhile, the Arcane Order returned in Tome and Blood as a detailed organization and the basis of a prestige class.
Most of Cordell's work for Malhavoc Press has followed similar patterns, creating a sort of story arc across When the Sky Falls, If Thoughts Could Kill, and Hyperconscious, connected by the god-like Dark Plea and, to a lesser extent, the kureshim race. In an interview with Monte Cook, Cordell himself described his style as including "subtle story threads that connect seemingly unrelated projects". [5]
Cordell co-designed the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide , [3] and Gamma World Seventh Edition. [6]
After working for a few years as a designer on the fifth edition of D&D, Cordell left Wizards in July 2013. [7] In August of the same year he joined Monte Cook at Cook's company Monte Cook Games, LLC (also called MCG) as Senior Designer. [8] Not long after, MCG Kickstarted another RPG, The Strange. [9] The Strange, co-written by Cordell and Cook, was published in August 2014. [10]
Third-Party d20 System Sourcebooks
5th Edition D&D
Bruce Cordell has appeared in the following newspaper and magazine articles, websites and podcasts.
Forgotten Realms is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. Commonly referred to by players and game designers as "The Realms", it was created by game designer Ed Greenwood around 1967 as a setting for his childhood stories. Several years later, it was published for the D&D game as a series of magazine articles, and the first Realms game products were released in 1987. Role-playing game products have been produced for the setting ever since, in addition to novels, role-playing video game adaptations, comic books, and the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, illithids are monstrous humanoid aberrations with psionic powers. In a typical Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, they live in the moist caverns and cities of the enormous Underdark.
Ed Greenwood is a Canadian fantasy writer and the creator of the Forgotten Realms game world. He began writing articles about the Forgotten Realms for Dragon magazine beginning in 1979, and subsequently sold the rights to the setting to TSR, the creators of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, in 1986. He has written many Forgotten Realms novels, as well as numerous articles and D&D game supplement books.
Monte Cook is an American professional tabletop role-playing game designer and writer, best known for his work on Dungeons & Dragons.
Vecna is a fictional character appearing in the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Vecna has been named one of the greatest villains in the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.
Tomb of Horrors is an adventure module written by Gary Gygax for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-playing game. It was originally written for and used at the 1975 Origins 1 convention. Gygax designed the adventure both to challenge the skill of expert players in his own campaign and to test players who boasted of having mighty player characters able to best any challenge. The module, coded S1, was the first in the S-series, or special series of modules. Several versions of the adventure have been published, the first in 1978, and the most recent, for the fifth edition of D&D, in 2017 as one of the included adventures in Tales from the Yawning Portal. The module also served as the basis for a novel published in 2002.
The Underdark is a fictional setting which has appeared in Dungeons & Dragons role-playing campaigns and Dungeons & Dragons-based fiction books, including the Legend of Drizzt series by R. A. Salvatore. It is described as a vast subterranean network of interconnected caverns and tunnels, stretching beneath entire continents and forming an underworld for surface settings. Polygon called it "one of D&D's most well-known realms".
The Expanded Psionics Handbook is a sourcebook written by Bruce Cordell for the 3.5 edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game that contains rules and options for integrating psychic powers into the game. Along with its predecessor, the Psionics Handbook, the Expanded Psionics Handbook expands and adapts the psionics concept with a new emphasis on balance and playability.
Richard Baker is an American author and game designer who has worked on many Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings.
Sean K. Reynolds is an American professional game designer, who has worked on and co-written a number of Dungeons & Dragons supplements for Wizards of the Coast, as well as material for other companies.
Die Vecna Die! is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D 2nd edition) module released in 2000 by Wizards of the Coast. The module is divided into three sections, each taking part in a different campaign setting: Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Planescape. It was one of the last official adventures released for the 2nd edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
The lich is an undead creature found in the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. Liches are spellcasters who seek to defy death by magical means.
In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, a vampire is an undead creature. A humanoid or monstrous humanoid creature can become a vampire, and looks as it did in life, with pale skin, haunting red eyes, and a feral cast to its features. A new vampire is created when another vampire drains the life out of a living creature. Its depiction is related to those in the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood Dracula and monster movies. In writing vampires into the game, as with other creatures arising in folklore, the authors had to consider what elements arising in more recent popular culture should be incorporated into their description and characteristics.
Ptolus, subtitled "Monte Cook's City by the Spire", is a fantasy role-playing game campaign setting published by Malhavoc Press in 2006 that details a single city and the dungeons that lie beneath it. Ptolus uses the rules of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons — the d20 System — under the terms of Wizards of the Coast's Open Game License. At 672 pages, it was the largest D&D supplement that had been published up to that time.
Colin McComb is an American writer and game designer, who is best known for his work designing the Planescape setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, and as the creative lead for the role-playing video game Torment: Tides of Numenera. He is the co-founder of 3lb Games, a virtual reality gaming studio.
Sigil is a fictional city and the center of the Planescape campaign setting, for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game.
Return to the Tomb of Horrors is a boxed set adventure module for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game released in 1998 by TSR, Inc.
Robert J. Schwalb is a writer in the role-playing game industry, and has worked as a game designer and developer for such games as Dungeons & Dragons, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Shadow of the Demon Lord, and many other RPG supplements.
Malhavoc Press is an American publisher of role-playing games, specializing in third-party material for Dungeons & Dragons' third edition.