Taylor Navarro Joins Wizards of the Coast as D&D Designer

Wizards of the Coast has hired yet another D&D game designer - this time UK-based designer Taylor Navarro. Navarro announced that she was joining the D&D team this week on BlueSky. Navarro notably was a winner of the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award back in 2024 and has worked for Ghostfire Gaming and Evil Hat in addition to working on several DMs Guild projects. Some of her most notable works was contributing to the DMs Guild publication Journeys Beyond the Radiant Citadel and publishing Not Yet: A Romantic Duet TTRPG.

Navarro is the fourth D&D game designer to join Wizards of the Coast in recent weeks, with James Haeck, Leon Barillaro, and Erin Roberts also announcing that they've joined D&D in a similar game designer capacity. Additionally, Justice Ramin Arman was promoted to Game Design Director of the group.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Personally I dont read the credits. I don't like Strixhaven or Descent into Avernus. No idea who to blame for them.

Aside from a general blame on WotC (as folks are keen to do), even if you had read the credits, you wouldn't know who to blame. It's really difficult to say who screwed up any given product. Even when they're good, they could have been better if not for X (with only sometimes any consensus on what part counts as X). They're never perfect, after all.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There was already a robust enough design team without this new hires. Although it is weird we don't have news about the 2026 road map.

I think the old guard was mostly focused on the 2024 core books and probably didn't have much left in the tank for the 2026 books.

I am guessing Justice and company have stuff coming, but probably later in the year and, initially, stuff that won't be a ton of work.

The big stuff, once this team is onboarded and starts dreaming big, will come in 2027 and 2028.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Out of morbid curiousity - why this over the AGE or Proto-True20 editions?

Because these are people for whom 5E is their first and only edition of D&D and want to continue playing the same characters. (I am working on having them try Shadowdark, Pirate Borg, Eat the Reich and other games, too.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Aside from a general blame on WotC (as folks are keen to do), even if you had read the credits, you wouldn't know who to blame. It's really difficult to say who screwed up any given product. Even when they're good, they could have been better if not for X (with only sometimes any consensus on what part counts as X). They're never perfect, after all.

The amount of collaboration in professional writing is hard to convey to people who haven't done it.

And that's before you add the extra problem that there are almost always people who don't get mentioned who have had big impacts on things. They could be family members or friends who "took a look" at a draft and offered incredibly important feedback or actual company employees who, for reasons that probably vary per company, don't get officially listed in the credits.

Figuring out who to credit or blame for a final project, especially one with as many known cooks in the kitchen as a WotC D&D book, is a fool's errand.

 

[Zardnaar]

Aside from a general blame on WotC (as folks are keen to do), even if you had read the credits, you wouldn't know who to blame. It's really difficult to say who screwed up any given product. Even when they're good, they could have been better if not for X (with only sometimes any consensus on what part counts as X). They're never perfect, after all.

Yeah I mostly blame WotC but its also hard to fo longer APs and higher level stuff.

Ive got around 1000+ adventures. Good modern ones dont change the basic template last 30 odd years.

 

[bedir than]

I think a decade or so ago I generally was well enough informed that I’d at least heard of the people WotC or Paizo hired.

I might have known about them from a Dragon or Dungeon article, or work they’d done from a 3rd party company or another RPG, but at the very least it would be a name I’d heard before.

Now the names are completely new to me (and I tend to be great at remembering names, even ones I’ve only come across in passing). It’s likely that I’m no just longer across the 3rd party producers in the 5E space.

Two of the now-four new hires are from EN Publishing, right here!
Three were already featured in official WotC products.
Two wrote for one of the earliest DnD Beyond Partner projects.
One won the Diana Jones Award.

While the names might not be familiar they should be more well known than someone who wrote a couple of articles in a magazine barely anyone read.

 

[Charlaquin]

There are also some dark Radiant Citadel adventures. The Godsbreath adventure is a horror story that surprised me in how much it spooked my players. And it's not the only one.

And many more of the adventures are pretty dark when you pick at the scabs a bit. There's rebuilding after generations of slavery, refugees, old political tensions boiling over into violence, religious oppression, gender-based oppression, catastrophic environmental disasters, Animal Farm-style new elites replacing vanquished colonial powers and continuing to oppress the poor, etc.

Yeah, but the art is bright and colorful and has people smiling in it, and people told me the setting is a socialist utopia, so it must be pandering to people with dyed hair and pronouns!

 

[Charlaquin]

The amount of collaboration in professional writing is hard to convey to people who haven't done it.

And that's before you add the extra problem that there are almost always people who don't get mentioned who have had big impacts on things. They could be family members or friends who "took a look" at a draft and offered incredibly important feedback or actual company employees who, for reasons that probably vary per company, don't get officially listed in the credits.

Figuring out who to credit or blame for a final project, especially one with as many known cooks in the kitchen as a WotC D&D book, is a fool's errand.

Also true of video game development

 

[Zardnaar]

Two of the now-four new hires are from EN Publishing, right here!
Three were already featured in official WotC products.
Two wrote for one of the earliest DnD Beyond Partner projects.
One won the Diana Jones Award.

While the names might not be familiar they should be more well known than someone who wrote a couple of articles in a magazine barely anyone read.

Youre aware those magazines had over 100k maybe 200k subscribers? Perkins and Mearls were both published in said magazines. More people were subscribed at the pesk than most rpgs lifetime sales lol

These days no one reads the books apparently and if its 3rd party may as well be the moon for a lot of people.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah, but the art is bright and colorful and has people smiling in it, and people told me the setting is a socialist utopia, so it must be pandering to people with dyed hair and pronouns!

Nothing is more happy-go-lucky that going to war with a religious tyrant angel who can no longer hear his god's voice. So uplifting!