Anne Gray McCready

Anne C. Gray McCready (born July 7, 1960) is a game designer, writer and editor who worked on a number of products for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game published by TSR, as well as designing several board games for TSR. She later became a freelance writer and editor as well as manager of her husband Ben McCready's portrait business.

Early life Anne Gray was born in Williams Bay, Wisconsin and went to the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. She majored in biology, then switched to marketing after a year, then switched to English the following year, earning her B.A. in English in 1982. Her first job was keylining ads, business cards, and menus for a printing company, where she also got interested in graphic design. Gray also created Crosscheck for TSR by combining Scrabble with crossword puzzles. It was not as big a hit as All My Children, but TSR licensed Datasoft to produce a computer game version that proved to be popular.

At the same time, just after Christmas 1984, Gray's mother convinced her to go on a blind date with Ben McCready, a portrait artist whose career was just starting to take off after several commissions by popular actors and American presidents. Gray McCready stepped down from TSR and became a freelance editor and writer, as well as her husband's business manager.

They stayed in Whitewater until they son grew up and married, then followed Bo to DeForest, Wisconsin so they could be closer to Bo's family. Their final move was to Georgetown, Texas,

Works Gray McCready worked as an editor on several Dungeons & Dragons game products from 1984-1986. She also did design and writing for D&D adventures such as Mystery of the Snow Pearls and Red Sonja Unconquered. Her editing work included products from the Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Birthright product lines. She also designed the board games All My Children and Crosscheck.