Stephen Herbert Perrin, often simply known as Steve Perrin, is a game designer and technical writer/editor. Perrin is best known for creating the role-playing gameRuneQuest for Chaosium.
One of his first contributions to the world of RPGs was "The Perrin Conventions" in 1976, a set of alternative rules for Dungeons & Dragons combat, which led to his work on RuneQuest. Perrin was interested in getting more involved with the RPG industry, and with Jeff Pimper he talked with Chaosium about publishing a D&D-based monster manual, which they called All the Worlds' Monsters, which beat TSR's Monster Manual to market. Perrin - along with Steve Henderson and Warren James - began working on an idea for an original gaming system for Glorantha, and were soon joined by Ray Turney from the original failed design team; this system was published as RuneQuest. Perrin officially joined Chaosium in 1981, although he just stayed a few years. He was one of several authors who contributed to Thieves' World. Perrin's Worlds of Wonder was the third release under Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing system. Superworld, one of Worlds of Wonder's worlds, became its own game, although it was only moderately successful and Perrin later acknowledged that it was too similar to Hero Games' Champions. Perrin's Elfquest, based on the black and whiteElfquestcomic book, was another BRP release. While at Chaosium he also created Stormbringer, and contributed to Call of Cthulhu.
Later career
published its sixth RPG, Robot Warriors, by Perrin. He also wrote the 1987 Champions role-playing game supplementThe Voice of Doom. He worked at Interplay Productions, Maxis, and Spectrum Holobyte, doing game design, playtesting, and writing manuals for such computer games as , SimCity 2000, and Flight of the Intruder to name but a few. He has also worked freelance for many of the major players in the games industry including TSR, FASA, Hero Games, West End Games, and Iron Crown Enterprises. Steve Perrin's Quest Rules is the latest Steve Perrin role-playing game, which he sells independently through Chaos Limited. In 2004 he collaborated with Taldren on Black 9 Ops as a paper and pencil accompaniment to the company's Black9 PC and Xbox game, which fell afoul of developer-publisher friction and now looks to be unlikely to be published. Perrin decided to make Black 9 Ops available for free and provides pdfs to anyone who asks. In 2010 Perrin began creating PDF adventures for the games Icons and Mutants & Masterminds. He has completed several scenarios for Vigilance Press and Fainting Goat Press. In 2019, the current administration of Chaosium asked him to return to the company as "Creative Consultant," which he gladly accepted. In 2020 he contributed to the Wild Cards novel American Hero.
