Dave Morris (writer)

Dave Morris (born in 1957) is a British author of gamebooks, novels and comics and a designer of computer games and role-playing games.

Dave Morris is a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Physics from 1976–79.

He is co-creator of the Fabled Lands series, and also wrote for the Virtual Reality, Blood Sword, and Golden Dragon series, as well as penning a single Fighting Fantasy gamebook, (The Keep of the Lich Lord) and a number of TV and movie novelisations.

He also wrote, with Oliver Johnson, the book series Dragon Warriors (1984–1986) for Games Workshop.:46 Dragon Warriors is a role-playing game but is often mistaken for a gamebook because of its paperback format. The game, a cult hit for Transworld in the 1980s, was republished in 2009 by Magnum Opus press.

Morris has frequently collaborated with other gamebook writers, notably Jamie Thomson (Fabled Lands:46 and The Keep of the Lich Lord) and Oliver Johnson (Blood Sword, Dragon Warriors and Golden Dragon). He has worked with many illustrators including Russ Nicholson, Siku, Iain McCaig, Leo Hartas, and Martin McKenna.

His original novels include Knightmare (a historical fantasy adventure series set in the early 13th century that ties in with the television series of that name), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the contemporary horror novel Lost Souls. Another horror novel, Florien, was published as an ebook in 2010. In 2008 his episodic comic strip Mirabilis began weekly publication in Random House's subscription-based magazine The DFC. Working with artist Leo Hartas, Morris founded electronic publisher Mirus Entertainment and published Mirabilis for the iPad in December 2010.

In addition to his more than seventy published books, Morris is a leading developer of the Empire of the Petal Throne gaming system (created by MAR Barker and published by TSR), creating a playable rules system (Tirikelu) and editing a fanzine.

Morris also co-authored a book on the computer gaming industry, having worked as a game designer for Eidos and Microsoft, and is a former mentor in the American Film Institute's Digital Content Lab. In April 2012, he published an interactive reworking of Frankenstein in which the reader is able to give advice to the first-person narrator of the story.

Morris' Dragon Warriors game was licensed to James Wallis of Magnum Opus Press, who published a new 1.1 edition of the game with supplements from 2008–2011; a new company called Serpent King Games picked up the property after the license lapsed.:307