Monte Cook

Monte Cook is a professional game designer of some renown.

Cook is one of the three authors of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, along with Skip Williams and Jonathan Tweet. According to the bio on his website, Monte has been a professional game designer since 1988.

Some time after co-authoring the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Cook left Wizards of the Coast to write material for the d20 System independently. His most notable recent work is probably Arcana Unearthed, a product he describes as a "variant player's handbook". Arcana Unearthed enjoyed surprising popularity and high sales shortly after publication.

While many had attempted to sell rpg books in electronic pdf format, Cook was among the first to have major success. By conclusively showing that the gaming market would accept electronic format books, he created an entirely new marketplace for many rpg publishers, both big and small.

He caused controversy in mid-2004 by exclusively selling his electronic d20 material with the DriveThruRPG.com store, which then used only the privacy-protected DRM PDF system. He eventually succumbed to pressure from his customers to sell his products in standard-PDF form, and DriveThruRPG has more recently done the same.