The Short Version

Hi. I’m Jason Tondro. I’m a Senior Designer and project lead on the Dungeons & Dragons team, working for Wizards of the Coast. I live in the Seattle area and I have a dog named Otis. That’s all most people want to know. If you want to know more, keep reading.

The Long Version

I grew up in Southern California. Anaheim and Riverside mostly but, as a child of divorce, I moved around a lot. I was in Vegas attending sixth grade when I first encountered D&D. The older kids at the Junior High were starting a D&D Club and because these were the same kids who ran the Chess Club I figured Dungeons & Dragons must be some kind of chess variant. Like maybe the castles were the dungeons? But then what was the dragons? I couldn’t figure it out. Turns out they had the white box and the Monster Manual, which had just come out. I made a monk. We did okay in our first dungeon until we met a shadow, which could only be harmed by magic weapons. We didn’t have any magic weapons, so the shadow was unstoppable, and for a year, shadows were the ultimate monster as far as we were concerned. First impressions, people. They’re important.

My folks got me the Holmes Basic Set and the Players Handbook when it came out, and I spent a year or so trying to figure out how to make this game work, until the DMG finally came out. We tried Traveller, Gamma World, and other games that we made up ourselves. Sometime around ‘83 I moved back to Riverside to live with my Dad, and I discovered Champions. This game let me design my character from scratch and I fell in love with it. I graduated in ‘85 from La Sierra High. I lettered in Drama.

My undergraduate education was at the University of Nevada, Reno. I ran a ton of Champions and GURPS and somewhere in there got familiar with Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Arthurian legend. I skipped D&D 2nd edition entirely. I mean, I had the books, but I never got to actually play it. Too busy with other games. I spent a semester in London in ‘89 and let me tell you that was an amazing time. But I didn’t even know what grad school was—I didn’t really have anyone advising me on things like that—so after graduation I ended up working and running bookstores.

In the mid ‘90s I was managing a bookstore in Vegas when I quit and moved back in with my Dad and step-mom in Riverside to try my hand at making RPGs full time. I had a plan with the Hero Games team to be the lead on their Fantasy Hero line, creating a setting book, adventures, and more. I was writing part of a Champions book for Hero Games, too. I had some articles coming out in Pyramid, Shadis, and the Hero Games house organ. But almost as soon as I moved, all those magazines went out of print and Hero Games went bankrupt. My friend Steve Long bought the company and threw out all the plans for Fantasy Hero that involved me. I can’t blame him. If I bought a game company, I’d want to rewrite all my favorite books too.

I was working as a substitute English teacher when I met the woman I would soon marry. She was in an MfA program in Vegas, so I packed my shit and we got an apartment together. I discovered that it was possible to be an academic and study all the stuff I enjoyed, namely comics and Arthurian literature. I applied to a dozen grad programs across the country. I was accepted to three, but was on the waiting list for my first choice: University of Wisconsin in Madison. I’d never failed to get something if I wanted it badly enough, so to Madison we went.

I never made it in. I took a year of Old English and translated every line of Beowulf before the Graduate Dean told me he’d never admit me because I was “more interested in comic books than teaching.” During this time, D&D’s 3rd edition came out. The Player’s Handbook hit store shelves on an October morning. I shoveled snow away from the garage so I could get there at opening. I learned 3e by using the rules in the DMG to create a village and a stat block for literally every inhabitant. I called it Anville and made a nearby Orc tribe with a hammer theme. Get it? That was a fun campaign. We used to cook brats on the patio during the game.

I still needed a PhD program, so I went to University of California Riverside. UCR had accepted me the first time and they had a fantastic comics collection, the Eaton Collection. My work with comics was embraced there. By this time, the OGL had come out and I started to publish my own stuff. I created the first OGL product for Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition (Escape from Alcatraz!, 80 pages), a D&D adaptation of Julius Caesar, and a couple of other things, but I hated the administrative aspects of self-publishing. I wanted to write games, I didn’t want to worry about sending royalty checks every month.

By 2008 I had finished my PhD and had found a freelancing home with Chuck Rice’s Vigilance Press. Chuck published my game Arthur Livea!, an urban fantasy of Arthurian reincarnations originally using the d20 Modern system. I did more work for Chuck and for Mike Lafferty, who founded Fainting Goat Games, including the Field Guide to Superheroes, the Super Villain Handbook, and the Great Game, a cosmic superhero sourcebook. All of this dealt really heavily with superhero archetypes, something I thought about a lot for about a decade.

It took me years to find a permanent teaching job and when I found one, it was in rural Georgia. By 2018 I was divorced and writing more than ever. A lot of my work was academic, including a book on comics and the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. After a long incubation period, I revised Arthur Lives! to use Evil Hat’s FATE system; Mike Lafferty published that right around the time I lost my teaching job. That was a huge blow to me. I had thought I was going to be a professor for the rest of my life. I didn’t know what the future held for me. I wasn’t sure I wanted a future at all.

That’s when a friend of mine I’d gone to grad school with suggested I get into the RPG business full time. She sent me a link to two job openings at Paizo, in Seattle. One of these jobs was a developer on the Organized Play team. I’d played Pathfinder Society precisely once, so i didn’t even try for that gig. But the other job was on the editor team, and that was something I felt I could do. I mean, I’d been editing student papers for fifteen years. I applied and it wasn’t my education that got me to the editing test, it was my list of 40 RPG publications. The test was 8 pages and I had 72 hours to do it. I cleared the dining room table and went academic on that MF. That got me to the interview. I didn’t get the job. They offered it to someone else, but she could not move to Seattle immediately. So a week later they circled back to me and said the job was mine if I could be there in two weeks. Well, I already had movers hired for my backup plan (substitute teacher in Portland), so all I had to do was change the delivery address.

I was an editor for Paizo for a year and a half. I was not very good at first but I had patient and careful instruction. I got to work on a lot of wonderful products, starting with War for the Crown and going through the release of 2nd Edition. Because I was in the room when decisions were made, I got to pitch myself for writing assignments that I turned in on time, leading to more assignments. When two people left the Starfinder team, I applied for one of them and spent the next two years making adventures for that game. By this point, I’d written a Pathfinder Adventure Path volume, a Starfinder Adventure Path volume, and an Organized Play adventure every year for three years, so when Paizo decided they needed a Senior Developer who could work on both games at the same time, I was the obvious choice.

I was a Senior Developer at Paizo for only a couple of months when Wizards posted several openings for the D&D team. I wasn’t going to apply, as I felt I was still learning the ropes at Paizo and I was starting projects I cared a lot about. But my partner at the time convinced me I was wrong. I wasn’t surprised when I got an interview, because every developer at Paizo was applying for these gigs and we all got interviewed. But I was shocked and elated when they asked me to join them as a Senior Designer—the only position I had applied for—at more than twice my Paizo salary.

As a Senior Designer on D&D, I am assigned projects, but I then have very broad latitude on how each project manifests. I outline a project, write as much of it as I want to write, and assign the rest to members of the design team. Once writing is done, I develop and rewrite the entire manuscript. I work with the edit team to improve and clarify the manuscript. I write art orders for the art team and do early layout in In Design, a process we call “bookbuilding.” I review the galleys when they come in and, after all errors have been found, I’m the one that goes into the files to make the changes. When a product is released, I create presentations for our marketing department and outside distributors, and I appear in video interviews talking about the product. In short, I have tremendous influence over a project, transforming it from a one-page summary into a 256-page adventure, a rules update, or—in the case of the Deck of Many Things—a boxed set.

And that’s where I am today. Still in the Seattle area, with my dog Otis, writing about dragons and dungeons and getting paid for it. Life is good. I try not to take that for granted.