Ray Winninger

Ray Winninger
Winninger in 2008
Born	Ray Winninger
Occupation	Writer, game designer
Nationality	United States
Genre	Role-playing games, miniature wargaming, fantasy

Ray Winninger is a game designer who has worked on a number of roleplaying games, including the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game.

Ray Winninger was a competitive chess player as a child, and at age nine he discovered Avalon Hill games and Dungeons & Dragons while looking for chess opponents at a local hobby shop/game store. He designed his first game as "a futuristic man-to-man miniatures system", and by the age of fourteen he had designed an enormous campaign world for the Dungeons & Dragons game system. His first published work was an adventure called Countdown! for FASA's Doctor Who role-playing game. He worked for TSR, including work on Dungeons & Dragons, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

Winninger was the co-designer of DC Heroes and Torg. He then worked at Mayfair Games, and became Mayfair's Editorial Director following the release of Chill. He resurrected the Role Aids line, determined to recreate it with AD&D material that was more sophisticated than what TSR was offering at the time. Winninger designed the Underground (1993) role-playing game for Mayfair Games.Underground was set in the year 2021 and "allowed players to assume the roles of superhuman, genetically enhanced soldiers fighting a patriotic war to take their society back from a corrupt government"; when Mayfair Games withdrew much of its support of the game despite its popularity, Winninger moved onto other projects. Mayfair was also to produce a game called D.O.A. by Greg Gorden with major contributions by Winninger, but the game was never published. He worked for Dragon magazine, first taking over the "RPG reviews" column from Chris Pramas, before moving on to "Dungeoncraft", a column for guiding Dungeon Masters to create their own campaign worlds. He also worked as a contributing editor of Dragon magazine.