Ross Maker

Ross Maker was the first person to play a Dwarf Character in an RPG. He played that same character for roughly 40 years. As part of the Blackmoor Bunch, Ross witnessed the invention and evolution of Arneson’s fantasy campaign. In his real life career he has been a game designer and computer programmer. As a founder of the 4D Interactive team he helped port many games produced by Coleco such as Zaxxon.

Ross Maker has been gaming for some sixty years and designing games for nearly all that time. He was a member of the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA), a group of wargamers and friends based in St. Paul, MN, that included Dave Arneson, Mike Carr, David Megarry, Maj. David Wesley, and several others that would go on to design a number of popular wargames.

Ross played the original dwarf in Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign, a game that incorporated much of the Fantasy Supplement of Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren’s Chainmail Medieval miniature wargame but innovated with concepts of roleplaying individual characters, experience gains, levels, and most importantly the fantasy dungeon adventure.

In 1978 he was co-designer with David Wesely of Source of the Nile, which won two Charles S. Roberts Awards, two Strategist Club Awards, a Game Designers’ Guild Select Award and was named to the Games Magazine 100.

More recently he was the editor for the unpublished 4th Edition of Don’t Give Up the Ship, and designed the Of Czars and Sultans module for Sergeants Three’s Bring Up the Guns.