Rich Burlew

American author and game designer

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, 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 As his entry in the competition remains the unpublished property of Wizards of the Coast, Burlew is prohibited from discussing it by a non disclosure agreement.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. Burlew was able to take advantage of the attention and popularity he got from the Setting Search contest by launching his "Giant in the Playground" website and the comic The Order of the Stick.

GiantITP. com languished for several months until Burlew added a webcomic to bring in recurring traffic. He started The Order of the Stick, a stick figure fantasy webcomic, in September 2003 by transferring the images from the stick figure miniatures he had produced for his D&D game into a page long comic. He announced the publication of the first strip compilation in December 2004. Shortly thereafter, he reported that pre orders for the book had been so successful that he was prepared to quit his job as a graphic designer and commit himself full time to comic and game writing. Since then, he has produced five additional compilations and three black and white prequels for The Order of the Stick that are not featured on the website. In November 2005, new strips of The Order of the Stick began appearing in Dragon Magazine, significantly extending the potential reach of the comic. Burlew described the feeling of seeing his work on the same page that once held the comic What's New with Phil & Dixie as "awe inspiring" and "weird". The comic ran in the magazine until its final print issue. These strips were later published in the compilation book called Snips, Snails and Dragon Tales. Burlew also drew a short lived webcomic for the Role Playing Game Association (RPGA) website, Five Foot Steps, that featured more traditional cartoon art instead of stick figures. These depicted a diverse role playing game group at the fictional Rollmoore College. The strip only lasted for five installments for reasons that have not been made public. In January 2012, Burlew launched a Kickstarter campaign to get The Order of the Stick: War and XPs back into print, which eventually raised enough money to reprint the whole book series. The drive was the most funded creative work in Kickstarter up to that point, getting more than twenty times the original goal for a total of $1,254,120.

Burlew has an undisclosed chronic illness which sometimes impedes his ability to draw comics and causes periodic delays in schedule. Due to his illness, Burlew reiterated on his website on July 10, 2011 that The Order of the Stick webcomic is produced on "a random schedule depending on [his] ability to work." In September 2012, Burlew seriously injured his right hand in an accident that required emergency surgery and prevented him from drawing for an extended period. Despite physiotherapy, he has said that he does not expect to fully recover from the injury. Forbes highlighted Burlew's open communication on the impact of his injury on the delivery of his Kickstarter rewards: "a great example of both fantastic communication and how a project can get derailed through no fault of anyone’s is Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick. [ ] Burlew sliced his thumb open on a piece of broken glass, severing tendons and requiring emergency surgery. Worse, it was his drawing hand. [ ] There’s no telling how long it’s going to be before Burlew is able to write again, let alone draw, but the way that he has continued to communicate with his backers has engendered nothing but sympathy and support".

Monster Manual III, Contributed. (September 2004, )
Explorer's Handbook, with Frank Brunner and David Noonan. (August 2005, )
Spell Compendium, Contributed. (December 2005, )
The Order of the Stick Adventure Game: The Dungeon of Dorukan, with Kevin Brusky. (October 2006, )
Dungeonscape, with Jason Bulmahn. (February 2007, )
Tome of Artifacts , Contributed. (June 2007, )

"Fantasy Setting Search Closes in on Finalists", December 9, 2002. "Geeklabel Radio Podcast: Unedited Interview with Rich Burlew", October 25, 2006. "The Order of the Stick: Rich Burlew", March 1, 2007. Geekademia interview, February 2012.