Nic Kelman

Nic Kelman is the former Director of Entertainment Development of Wizards of the Coast.

Leader of the creative team

Kelman was hired in August 2017 as Senior Narrative Designer, and eventually promoted to Director of Entertainment Development. He left Wizards at the end of March 2021. His job was initially to lead the creative team who created Magic’s lore and story but evolved to overseeing the conversion of all Wizard's IP, including Dungeons & Dragons, to film, television, and fiction publishing.

On the narrative side, he worked with the world-building and digital teams to plan out Wizard's non-game story expressions. On the business and marketing side, he looked for and developed new opportunities for Wizard's story-telling and coordinated with the Marketing team to promote that work.

Kelman was responsible for the outsourcing of the Magic web stories to established fantasy authors, and also served as the business contact at Wizard's for the externally published Del Rey Magic novels which were disappointing according to many fans.

Other work

Kelman is a writer of novels, short stories, non-fiction, screenplays, and essays in his own right. His first book, a novel about toxic masculinity, Girls, A Paean, was a critically-acclaimed, international bestseller and a San Francisco Chronicle and New York Journal Best Book of the Year 2003. His second book, Video Game Art is claimed to be the first book of Art History on the topic. In 2011, Kelman's first screenplay, Genneris, was purchased by Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks Studios. Since then, Kelman has written original screenplays for several major studios. His latest book, an illustrated novel, How To Pass As Human, was published by Dark Horse Books in 2015.