Dungeons & Dragons creative team hires game designer James Haeck
Co-author of beloved adventures like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus has officially joined the team.
Published 3 hours ago
A co-author on some of 5e's best adventures just assumed a major role
James Haeck joins Wizards of the Coast as senior D&D game designer
In Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, constructs participate in festival parades.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
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Wizards of the Coast has hired longtime Dungeons & Dragons writer James Haeck as a senior game designer, bringing one of 5th edition’s most prolific contributors fully in-house as the D&D team continues to evolve.
Haeck announced the news on a Dec. 31 episode of the Eldritch Lorecast podcast, where they noted that the role marks a shift away from freelance and third-party work and into leading future D&D books from within Wizards of the Coast.
The move follows a period of major change for D&D’s internal design team. In the middle of 2025, veteran designers Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford departed Wizards to join Critical Role’s publishing arm, Darrington Press. Wizards has since begun staffing senior creative roles with designers who came up during the peak 5th edition era, with Haeck as the latest staffing change.
Haeck is best known for their work on some 5e's better hardcover adventures. They served as lead designer on Call of the Netherdeep, the first official D&D campaign set in Critical Role’s Exandria, and also co-wrote Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, which is also set in a Critical Role realm. Haeck also served as co-author on Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. The former is one of 5e's most versatile starting adventures built around intrigue rather than dungeon crawls. Dragon Heist depicts Waterdeep as a living city of rival factions that gives Dungeon Masters an unusually flexible urban sandbox to work with four different seasonal versions of the adventure that allows for some replayability. is a metal-as-hell adventure with memorable demons and devils as the villains, a hunt for a very cool sword wielded by a fallen angel, and "Infernal War Machines" you drive that make it feel like in Hell.