Rich Burlew
| Rich Burlew | |
|---|---|
| Born | Richard Burlew September 1, 1974 |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Writer, illustrator |
| Pseudonym(s) | The Giant or Giant in the Playground |
|
Notable works
|
The Order of the Stick |
| Awards | Eagle Award, Gold ENnie, Five WCCA awards |
Rich Burlew (born September 1, 1974) is an American author, game designer, and graphic designer. He is best known for The Order of the Stick webcomic, for which he was ranked fifth on ComixTalk's list of the Top 25 People in Webcomics for 2007. He has also written several works for Wizards of the Coast's role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. He owns and operates a small press publishing company, Giant in the Playground, which he formed to publish his comic work.
Burlew developed the basic elements of his stick figure art style at the age of twelve while drawing a comic called Mr. Demon for his lunchroom friends. Burlew first began playing Dungeons & Dragons in high school. He frequently assumed the role of the Game Master, a role he has likened to writing a webcomic, but his interest in the hobby lapsed until 2000 when Wizards of the Coast released the third edition ruleset for the game. Upon running his first adventure with the new rules, Burlew found that he needed several identical miniatures to represent a group of bandits. Instead of purchasing lead miniatures, he used graphic design software to draw simple stick figure cutouts in the style he had developed as a youth. He continued to use stick figure monsters for years in his D&D sessions.
Burlew attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where he earned a degree in illustration. He has noted that, "everything [I] learned about color use or panel composition... [I] picked up at Pratt." After leaving college, Burlew worked for several years as a professional graphic designer in New York, primarily working on elementary school textbook designs and layouts.
In 2002, Wizards of the Coast announced a contest to find a new campaign setting for their D&D game, dubbed the Fantasy Setting Search. From a field of over eleven thousand gamers who sent in one-page descriptions of their worlds, one of Burlew's four entries was chosen as a finalist. He was asked by Wizards of the Coast to produce a one hundred-page setting bible for his world to compete against two other designers. The contest was won by Keith Baker's Eberron setting, with Burlew and P. Nathan Toomey as the other two finalists. Although he did not win the contest, the experience encouraged Burlew to pursue a career in game design. As his entry in the competition remains the unpublished property of Wizards of the Coast, Burlew is prohibited from discussing it by a non-disclosure agreement. However, he was offered additional writing work from Wizards of the Coast the following year in which he contributed monsters such as the "battle titan" and the "shade steel golem" to the Monster Manual III rulebook.
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