Douglas Niles - Career

Career

A few years later, one of the players in Niles' D&D campaign went to work for Dragon magazine. According to Niles, “One day, he told me that TSR was hiring editors, and I applied for a job. I took the editing test, which consisted of a 14 page manuscript I was supposed to mark up. I only found three things to change. . . and flunked the test. But TSR was also hiring game designers, and so, armed with a half-written novel and some notes from my campaign, I applied for a design job. I went through five interviews, and gradually convinced them that I could do the job.” Niles was hired by TSR in January 1982, as a game designer. “For the first few weeks I reviewed and critiqued outside submissions, and I wasn’t too good at it. I kept pestering my boss, Al Hammack, for a design assignment, and finally he gave me an old brief for a novice-level module, Cult of the Reptile God, and told me to write it. I completed it in four weeks, and it was published. I don’t know whether they liked it because it was good, or because I did it in only four weeks.” Niles worked on more than just D&D for TSR, “In the summer of 1982, I designed my first game, the Knight Hawks rules for the Star Frontiers game, with much help from my editor, Steve Winter.”

Niles produced several modules for the D&D game, including X3 Curse of Xanathon, B5 Horror on the Hill, CM1 Test of the Warlords, and H1 Bloodstone Pass, and Dragonlance modules DL2 Dragons of Flame, DL6 Dragons of Ice, DL9 Dragons of Deceit, and DL11 Dragons of Glory. Niles worked on the Battlesystem Supplement, Star Frontiers modules SF4 Mission to Alcazzar and SFKH1 Dramune Run, Indiana Jones module IJ2 Raiders of the Lost Ark, the World War II Game, the Sirocco Strategy Game (with Zeb Cook), and the Endless Quest books EQ #26 Tarzan and the Well of Slaves and Super EQ #3 Escape From Castle Quarras for TSR. Niles also co-authored The City of Greyhawk boxed set with Carl Sargent, for which he designed the 96-page booklet Greyhawk: Gem of the Flanaess. Niles has also written numerous novels, mainly for the Dragonlance series.

Niles wrote the very first Forgotten Realms novel, Darkwalker on Moonshae, as well as the subsequent titles in the Moonshae trilogy and two further trilogies in the Forgotten Realms. He has won both the H.G. Wells award and the Origins award for his work in developing adventure games. In 1990, he left TSR to write fantasy fiction.