Mike Carr

Mike Carr (born September 4, 1951) is a writer and game designer.

Career Early years While still a teenager living in Saint Paul in 1968, Carr created a game called Fight in the Skies (also known as Dawn Patrol). He was invited to present and referee the game at the very first Gen Con convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, but had to convince his parents to drive him to Lake Geneva for the weekend. While at Gen Con, he met the convention's organizer, Gary Gygax, and quickly became an acquaintance.

TSR and Dungeons & Dragons In 1976, at the invitation of Gygax, he joined TSR, Inc., and wrote an introductory Dungeons & Dragons module called In Search of the Unknown in 1979. Since it was included with the Dungeons & Dragons introductory box set, the module enjoyed a sizeable print run. Carr also served as the editor of the three central rulebooks for the more complex Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual, Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook, and he also wrote the foreword that appeared in the early editions of each of them. He also edited Vault of the Drow (1978), White Plume Mountain (1979), The Village of Hommlet (1979), The World of Greyhawk (1980), The Keep on the Borderlands (1981), Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1981), Against the Giants (1981), and Deep Dwarven Delve (not printed until 1999). He additionally co-edited (with Tom Wham, Timothy Jones, and Brian Blume) the first edition of Gamma World. In the early 1980s Carr also authored three children's books which were published by TSR, including one in the Endless Quest series entitled "Robbers & Robots".

Jon Peterson, for Polygon, highlighted that Arneson's 1977 lawsuit over Basic Set royalties led to the creation of Carr's In Search of the Unknown module which showed that "a module like this [...] could bring significant income to its author". "As Arneson's lawsuit loomed, TSR made a very pointed substitution to the contents of the Basic Set" by swapping in Carr's In Search of the Unknown module. Later, Carr spent time as a futures trader, an investment manager, manager of a marketing firm, a marketing consultant and most recently as a freelance writer, authoring snowmobile travel articles for several magazines. He is also involved in the production of Aerodrome, a fanzine founded by Carr in 1969 for devotees of the Dawn Patrol game.

Carr was honored in 2007 as the only person who had attended every Gen Con convention since 1968. His Fight in the Skies game was also the only one that had been played at every Gen Con.