Chris Pramas

Chris Pramas is an American game designer and writer, as well as a founder of Green Ronin Publishing. He is best known as the designer of the Dragon Age RPG, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (second edition), and Freeport: The City of Adventure.

Career

Pramas began his career in the game industry as a freelancer in 1993, contributing to games such as Mayfair Games' Underground, Pariah Press' Dangerous Prey supplement (1995), and Hogshead Publishing's The Dying of the Light (1995) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign. He also contributed to the game Over the Edge. In early 1996, Pramas acquired The Whispering Vault rights from Mike Nystul and formed Ronin Publishing with his brother Jason Pramas and their mutual friend Neal Darcy; Jason Pramas left before long, and Ronin Publishing only successfully published The Book of Hunts (1997) before the rights to The Whispering Vault were transferred to another company. In August 1997, Pramas moved to Seattle, Washington, and made freelancing his full-time occupation. Pramas worked on Blood of the Valiant (1998), a Feng Shui sourcebook for Daedalus Games; when that company went out of business, Pramas instead got a license to publish the adventure, which became Ronin Publishing's second and final book. Pramas accepted a job offer from Wizards of the Coast in March 1998. Working as an RPG designer for Wizards, he designed Dragon Fist, a wuxia-inspired version of AD&D, which was released as one of the company's first PDF releases in 1999. Pramas also contributed to several AD&D products and co-authored the Dark•Matter adventure The Final Church (2000), another PDF-only release. Pramas was then pulled into Wizards' new miniatures division as the creative designer for the Chainmail Miniatures Game (2001). Pramas designed the world for Chainmail, which he called the "Sundered Empire"; he originally intended this to be a standalone setting but management asked him to place the Sundered Empire in Greyhawk, so he made it into the subcontinent Western Oerik.

Pramas founded Green Ronin Publishing in 2000 with his wife Nicole Lindroos, and by 2001 they had brought on a third member of the team, Hal Mangold, to do freelance graphic layout for the company. In March 2002, Pramas was laid off from Wizards of the Coast. Toren Atkinson of the band The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets arranged with Pramas to have Green Ronin publish his RPG Spaceship Zero (2002) based on one of his band's albums. Pramas asked Steve Kenson to design a new d20-based superhero RPG for Green Ronin, which resulted in Mutants & Masterminds (2002). In 2004, Green Ronin was incorporated as an LLC, with Pramas, Lindroos, and Mangold coming on as the three partners. Pramas designed the second edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2005) for Games Workshop. For Green Ronin, Pramas wrote The Pirate's Guide to Freeport (2007) with Patrick O'Duffy and Robert J. Schwalb. While continuing to lead Green Ronin Publishing, Pramas is a content designer for the Pirates of the Burning Sea massively multi-player online game at Flying Lab Software. Pramas designed the simple class-and-level system for the RPG Dragon Age: Set I (2009).

Chris also worked as the lead writer for Warhammher 40,000: Dark Millennium Online at Vigil Games.

Pramas' work for Dungeons & Dragons includes: Slavers (2000, with Sean K. Reynolds), Guide to Hell (1999), Apocalypse Stone (2000, with Jason Carl), Vortex of Madness (2000), as well as some work on the third edition Player's Handbook (2000) and Dungeon Master's Guide (2000).

Pramas was a notable guest at Trinoc*coN in 2005, and a guest of honour at Ropecon 2008 in Dipoli, Espoo, Finland. He has also been a guest of Pacificon in 2015, and OrcaCon in 2016.

In 2012, he appeared on two episodes of the web series TableTop running his Dragon Age roleplaying game for host Wil Wheaton and the show's guests. Since 2012 he has also been one of the curators of an annual "Art of RPGs" art show featuring the work of artists whose work have appeared in role-playing games.

Media Mentions

Chris Pramas has appeared in the following newspaper and magazine articles, websites and podcasts.

Podcasts

• Caustic Soda: Episodes "Hitler" (2011), and "Regicide, Part 2" (2013)
• RPG Countdown: Chris appeared on these episodes: 22 April 2009 (Warriors & Warlocks), 1 July 2009 (Sigmar’s Heirs), 15 July 2009 (GM Pack and Toolkit).
• TableTop: "Dragon Age", Parts 1 & 2 (Season 1, Episodes 19 & 20 (2013)
• Titansgrave
• Vigilance Press Podcast