Frank Mentzer

American writer and game designer

Jacob Franklin Mentzer III is an American fantasy author and game designer who worked on early materials for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role playing game. He was an employee of TSR, Inc. from 1980 to 1986, spending part of that time as creative advisor to the chairman of the board, Gary Gygax. He also founded the Role Playing Games Association (RPGA) during his time with TSR. After Gygax was ousted from TSR at the end of 1985, Mentzer left TSR as well and helped him to start New Infinities Productions Inc. (NIPI). When this venture failed, Mentzer left the gaming industry, eventually becoming the manager of a bakery. In 2008, he closed down this business and, two years later, returned to the gaming industry as a founding partner of a new publishing company, Eldritch Enterprises.

Frank Mentzer was born in the Philadelphia suburb of Springfield, Pennsylvania, the older of two children; his sibling is Susanne Mentzer. While attending Springfield High School, he started to play folk music. He played his first paid folk music concert at the opening of the Visitors' Center for the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall in downtown Philadelphia at age sixteen. Immediately after Mentzer graduated from high school in 1968, his father, who worked for the National Park Service (NPS), moved the family to Maryland in order to work at Catoctin Mountain Park.

In the mid 1970s, Mentzer and a friend taught themselves how to play the new role playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and he became part of a group of eight to twelve players who played several times a week. In 1979, TSR, the company that published D&D, advertised for a designer and an editor. Although Mentzer was initially uninterested since he had no editorial or design experience, fellow player David Axler, who would go on to write an article for the December 1981 issue of Dragon magazine about how to determine the weather in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting,—urged him to apply. Mentzer finally relented Mike Carr of TSR had been contemplating starting a TSR sponsored D&D fan club. Shortly after Mentzer won the DM Invitational, Carr approached him about taking on that task. Mentzer agreed to form some sort of group but, rather than a simple fan club, he was interested in promoting better quality role playing, especially during scored D&D events at conventions. Mentzer felt that the system as it stood rewarded those players that stayed quiet at the table, in effect punishing good role players. He came up with a scoring system where the dungeon master and the players all voted on who had been the best role player at the table. Mentzer wrote four RPGA tournament adventures set in his home campaign setting of "Aquaria", which he had been running since 1976;

Mentzer became involved with the auction of hobby gaming materials at Gen Con in 1983, and was involved with what is now called the world's largest game auction every year until retiring after Gen Con 50 in 2017. Mentzer was soon promoted to Creative Director at TSR, and one of the tasks he was given was to collate and revise the various rules sets for Basic D&D in such a way that no rules, monsters, or other material that had been developed specifically for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), were borrowed. Mentzer's third edition of the D&D Basic Set (1983) was used to launch a series of five rules boxed sets that ultimately allowed characters to advance from first level to godhood. Further annual editions were planned, but when Mentzer left TSR, the project was shelved. Mentzer expanded Gary Gygax's Village of Hommlet adventure into the adventure module T1 4 The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985), the first of a new format of 96 page to 128 page squarebound paperback supplements, which allowed more space to detail settings and adventures. Mentzer, who had worked closely with Gygax for six years, and shared his vision of the direction for D&D, was unwilling to work for Williams, and left TSR in 1986. Gygax quickly formed New Infinities Productions, Inc. (NIPI) to create new products for the role playing game market, and Mentzer joined as Design Executive. Mentzer, together with Gygax and Kim Mohan, formed the Creative Committee. The company's first product was the science fiction themed Cyborg Commando, with Mentzer as the primary designer using notes from Gygax, which was published in 1987. It was originally to have been called Dangerous Dimensions, but the name was changed in response to the threat of a lawsuit from TSR, Inc. who claimed that the "DD" abbreviation would be too similar to "D&D." When the product was released by Game Designers' Workshop, TSR immediately sued for copyright infringement. The suit was eventually settled out of court, with TSR buying the complete rights to the Dangerous Journeys system from New Infinities and then permanently shelving the entire project. This led to the demise of NIPI, and Mentzer decided to leave the game industry.

For some years afterwards, Mentzer did a bit of writing, including Kam's Cooking Without Fire with Paul Kamikawa (1992), and "Trust at the Gaming Table", part of the Origins Award winning Game Master Secrets Vol. II (Grey Ghost Press, 2003). He also became a collector of hobby games, and an expert on their worth at auction. In 2000, he and his second wife Debbie moved to Minocqua, Wisconsin and opened a bakery. His wife became the baker while Mentzer acted as manager. This operation eventually expanded to include three bakeries. However, running the bakeries was time consuming, and by 2008, faced with other demands on their lives, the Mentzers decided to shut down their bakeries and move to Rockford, Illinois.

In November 2010, Tim Kask announced at the KC Game Fair that he, Mentzer, Jim Ward and Chris Clark had formed Eldritch Enterprises, in order to publish a variety of general works as well as new creations for roleplaying games written by the partners. Eldritch Enterprises was incorporated in April 2011, with immediate plans to publish a children's book series, a work by Mentzer's wife Debbie on baking techniques, recipes, and anecdotes, based on their time at The Baker's House, and various hobby game projects focused on "Old School" roleplaying systems such as the original D&D rule set and Jim Ward's seminal science fantasy game Metamorphosis Alpha. Frank Mentzer has retained the intellectual property rights to and is launching a Kickstarter for his Empyrea on October 2, 2017. As of October 18, 2017, the Kickstarter has been indefinitely suspended.