Former D&D designers Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford join Darrington Press

Tabletop RPG fans who have followed the names of the various folks associated with Dungeons and Dragons — especially its 5th Edition and the more recent revision of that edition — are probably familiar with the names Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford. Both of them have a fairly long association with the brand; Perkins joined Wizards of the Coast in 1997, originally starting as the editor of periodicals for magazines like Dungeon, while Crawford came from Green Ronin Publishing (where he co-designed and edited the award-winning Blue Rose RPG); both of them were important voices in D&D 4th Edition, as well, with Crawford being the rules manager for that game; Perkins was working on Star Wars: Saga Edition at the time, but the two teams communicated ideas back and forth freely. Eventually Chris would be lead story designer for D&D through a lot of the 5th Edition era, ending as its creative director, while Jeremy was the lead rules designer and eventually the game director.

With such a long pair of careers in the tabletop industry, after leading revisions to produce new revised editions of the 5th Edition core books in 2024, fans were surprised to hear that Chris and Jeremy would both be leaving Wizards of the Coast. Chris Perkins referred to his leaving as “a retirement” after twenty-eight years at the company, while Crawford’s departure was more open-ended. However, whether or not both of them would continue to work in the tabletop industry is a question that was answered today, as Darrington Press — the publishing arm of Critical Role and producers of (among other things) the newly-lauded tabletop RPG Daggerheart — announced that Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford would be joining their team.

This isn’t the first intersection of these two with the Critical Role team — Chris and Jeremy both worked on Call of the Netherdeep, an adventure set in the Critical Role universe of Exandria, and Jeremy Crawford was an editor on Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, another Exandria-focused D&D supplement. At Darrington Press, the two of them will work on concepts for new games, as well as expansions on existing Darrington Press games. It should be interesting to see what two industry veterans with long and fairly successful careers can bring to the table (pun fully intended) working for an entirely new game publisher — especially one whose own fantasy tabletop RPG seems poised to go head-to-head with the eight-hundred pound gorilla of the industry that is D&D.