Lisa Smedman

I played my first Dungeons & Dragons game back around 1980. My character was a hobbit who, in our first adventure, was turned to stone. For the rest of the evening, the others in the party hauled me around, using me as a battering ram to open doors.

We never did find anyone to reverse the spell, and that character was subsequently retired.

I still have the figurine, however.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, I was hooked. I immediately ran out and bought the "Red Box" Starter Set, and began to DM. Soon, I began writing my own adventures and rules tweaks. Many of these found a home in Dungeon Magazine, and Dragon Magazine.

Then I got "the call" from TSR. As with any momentous event, I can still remember exactly where I was sitting when the phone rang. Would I design a series of side quest adventures for a larger, boxed set for the Dark Sun world? And get paid for it? You bet! The result was Dragon's Crown.

Dark Sun remains my favorite AD&D world. It's a harsh, desert planet where the act of casting magic sucks the life force out of everything around it. A wonderful precautionary tale for what we're doing to our real world.

Over the years that followed, I wrote a host of adventures and sourcebooks for TSR, many of them for the Ravenloft world. One of these was Castles Forlorn, my very own boxed set. It's a strange place, a castle co-existing in multiple time periods simultaneously. The most fun was designing the kilted goblyns, who like to eat brain pudding, play "toss the arbor" and make music on "dronepipes." (Any guesses what real-world culture was the inspiration?)

A host of other RPG design gigs followed. I came up with aliens for Games Workshop's Star Wars game; contributed source material and an adventure focused on journalists (my day job) for R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk game; co-authored a sourcebook on terrorism (long before 9/11) for the RPG Millennium's End; and created adventures for West End Games' Indiana Jones game that drew inspiration from my travels through Mexico and Guatemala. I also did design work and wrote stories for Deadlands, a very cool western-meets-horror mashup with some of the sweetest RPG mechanics for encouraging players to game "in character" that I've ever come across.

Together with other Vancouver-based RPG designers, I co-founded Adventures Unlimited, a magazine that offered adventures that tied into a number of popular RPGs. The magazine's no longer around, but it sure was fun while it lasted.

After TSR was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, I continued to do work for the AD&D line, but in a different capacity: writing Forgotten Realms novels. (You'll find those on the BOOKS page of this website.) I also wrote a number of Shadowrun novels.

I'm still playing - and still designing. The 5e Dragonlance campaign caught my attention, and I designed "Dragons of Gloom" as an extra scenario for that campaign. My gaming group is playing through all of the original Dragonlance adventures (a three-year odyssey, so far!) and I love the 5e remix of this 1980s classic.

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You'll find a complete list of my RPG design work below.

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