Steve Perrin

Steve Perrin (January 22, 1946 – August 13, 2021) was a game designer and writer and an influential early designer of the Forgotten Realms.

Career
As well as being a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Steve Perrin is known best for creating the RPG RuneQuest in 1978 and contributing to Thieves' World, Call of Cthulhu, and other RPGs with Chaosium in the early 1980s. He detailed his own Superworld setting from Chaosium in Dragon #90. Thereafter, he freelanced for several other RPG publishers.

Among them was TSR, Inc. in the late 1980s and early 1990s for Dungeons & Dragons and its campaign settings. For the Forgotten Realms in particular, Perrin was the author of Under Illefarn in 1987, an early adventure module that first showed Daggerford and parts of the the North, and Dreams of the Red Wizards in 1988, which first detailed Thay and the Red Wizards, among other sourcebooks. His earliest contributions to D&D, however, were "The Perrin Conventions", a set of custom rules for D&D combat in 1976 and Chaosium's All the Worlds' Monsters, a collection of homebrew monsters for D&D from 1977–1980 that predated the first Monster Manual.

Working with Interplay, Perrin was also a designer of the video game Descent to Undermountain, which was released in 1998.

In the Realms
On the world of Earth, Steve Perrin and Ed Greenwood "spent many long days" working with the great sage Elminster of Shadowdale researching spells, spellbooks, and magic items. At Elminster's bidding, they compiled this lore into The Magister.