When Doug Niles was in his
early teens, he read all the Tarzan
books three times each. “Did you
know that Tarzan once visited Wisconsin?”
he said.

Doug was born on Dec. 1, 1954, in
Brookfield, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee,
and moved to Nashotah, a
small town to the north, when he was
twelve years old. In addition to his
early interest in heroic fantasy, Doug
discovered wargaming, and played
Luftwaffe and France 1940 with his
brother for hours on end.

“I also wrote a number of short stories
in high school,” Doug said.
In his senior year, Doug

made a short film, “The Further
Adventures of Sir Charles Percy Harrington-
Warsfield Ill: The Search for the Brown-Bellied
Swamp-Stomper,” in which his
overweight shaggy brown poodle played
one of the title roles.

“I played the hero,” Doug said, “but the
film was mainly an excuse for my best
friend Fred and I to get out of school in the
afternoon and tear around the woods in his
father’s jeep. The movie never won an Oscar,
but I did get an ‘A’ for it.”

Doug went to college at the University of
Wisconsin at Oshkosh, where he majored
in speech and minored in English. There he
met Chris Schroeder, whom he married
three years later. They have one daughter,
Allison, age 4, and have a second child on
the way.

After graduation, Doug got a job teaching
Speech and English at Clinton (Wis.)
High School, about 30 miles away from
Lake Geneva.

“One day, one of my students came up
and said she had a note to get out of class
that afternoon because she was going to be
interviewed by People magazine. Her name
was Heidi Gygax. I asked her why People
wanted to interview her, and she told me
that her father had invented the
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game. Well, I
had heard of D&D, but didn’t know that the
designer lived so close to me. The next day,
Heidi brought me a copy of the original
D&D Basic Set, and two days later, I got
some friends together and played my first
game. I was the DM.”

“I went on to run a thoroughly forgettable
campaign over the next few years, but everybody
had fun.”

Doug didn’t realize that this coincidence
had changed his life. “A few years
later, one of the players in my campaign,
Gali Sanchez, started working for DRAGON
magazine,” Doug continued. “One day, he
told me that TSR was hiring editors, and I
applied for a job. I took the editing test,
which consisted of a 14 page manuscript I
was supposed to mark up. I only found
three things to change. . . and flunked the
test. But TSR was also hiring game designers,
and so, armed with a half-written novel
and some notes from my campaign, I applied
for a design job. I went through five
interviews, and gradually convinced them
that I could do the job.”

In January, 1982, Doug left his teaching
job and came to work for TSR as a game designer.
“For the first few weeks I reviewed
and critiqued outside submissions, and I
wasn’t too good at it. I kept pestering my
boss, Al Hammack, for a design assignment,
and finally he gave me an old brief
for a novice-level module, Cult of the Reptile
God, and told me to write it. I completed
it in four weeks, and it was published. I
don’t know whether they liked it because it
was good, or because I did it in only four
weeks.”

“In the summer of 1982, I designed my
first game, the Knight Hawks rules for the
STAR FRONTIERS® game, with much help
from my editor, Steve Winter.”

In a crowd of extroverts, Doug’s modest,
unassuming personality makes him one of
the best-liked people at TSR. “I feel extremely
lucky to have had the chain of coincidences
that brought me here,” he said.
As an ex-teacher, Doug’s advice to wouldbe
designers is to pay attention in school
and learn the fundamentals. “I was able to
capitalize on the writing experience and
classroom training I already
had,” he said. “Without it, I
would have had a much harder
time.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God
STAR FRONTIERS® Knight Hawks Rules
X3 Curse of Xanathon
B5 Horror on the Hill
DL2 Dragons of Flame
DL6 Dragons of Ice
DL9 Dragons of Deceit
DL11 Dragons of Glory
SF4 Mission to Alcazzar
SFKH1 Dramune Run
IJ2 Raiders of the Lost Ark
CM1 Test of the Warlords
AD&D® BATTLESYSTEM™ Supplement
H1 Bloodstone Pass
WORLD WAR II™ Game
SIROCCO™ Strategy Game (with Zeb Cook)
EQ #26 TARZAN® and the Well of Slaves
Super EQ #3 Escape From Castle Quarras