Don Turnbull (game designer)
| Don Turnbull | |
|---|---|
| Born |
2 June 1937 Preston, Lancashire, UK |
| Died | 5 August 2003 (aged 66) Ribble Valley, Lancashire, UK |
| Occupation | Journalist, editor, game designer |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Period | 1965–2003 |
| Genre | Wargaming, board games and role-playing games |
| Spouse | Margaret Pilkington (m. 1966) Pamela M. Turnbull (m. 1972) Diane Muzzy (USA) Terry L. Schmidt (m. 1994) |
Donald Joseph Turnbull (2 June 1937 – 5 August 2003) was a journalist, editor, games designer, and an accomplished piano and pinball player. He was particularly instrumental in introducing Dungeons & Dragons into the UK, both as the managing director of TSR UK Ltd and as the editor of the Fiend Folio.
Turnbull married four times and had two children.
Don Turnbull's early career was as a high-school teacher of mathematics in the north of England. However, he was an early and enthusiastic follower of wargaming, subsequently winning awards as a designer. A feature which assisted his work as a game developer was the use of correspondence to run board games.
In July 1969 he published the first issue of Albion magazine, one of the first European zines, supporting correspondence play of the board game Diplomacy. Although it only had a few subscribers, Albion was influential and ran to fifty issues. In 1974 it won the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Amateur Wargaming Magazine. It was an informal publication that provided games reviews and gave an account of ongoing games. In October 1970, Turnbull started another zine, Courier, which was used to discuss the active correspondence games, with Albion turning into a review magazine, covering a range of board and war games. After Albion went defunct in 1975, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone of Games Workshop sent copies of their first issue of Owl and Weasel to the subscribers of Albion to drum up business. After pioneering work with Diplomacy, Don began to write for the magazine Games & Puzzles, before becoming involved with the new role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons.
Turnbull was a contributor to Owl and Weasel and one of the founding contributors to the magazine White Dwarf. This influential magazine did much to develop role-playing games in the UK. His first contribution to White Dwarf was the "Monstermark" system, a way of assessing the relative strength of monsters that might be encountered in a role-playing world. He quickly became a regular reviewer and by issue six was the editor of a regular feature, "The Fiend Factory", which presented descriptions of monsters that readers had created for themselves. In these early issues he published sections from his own "Greenlands" dungeon. After his work for Games Workshop, Don was hired by Gary Gygax to manage the UK operations of TSR, Inc.
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