D&D Team Hires Lyla Fujiwara as Senior Game Designer
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Article Summary
- The Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast has just hired Lyla Fujiwara as a Senior Game Designer.
- Fujiwara is an award-winning designer who served as the project lead for the Cosmere RPG at Brotherwise Games.
- She also worked as a lead on the Cosmere RPG’s first official campaigns: Stonewalkers and Mistborn Legacy.
- Fujiwara is the latest addition in a wave of recent hirings for the internal D&D design team.
The official Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast continues to grow, having just added award-winning tabletop RPG designer Lyla Fujiwara as a Senior Game Designer. Fujiwara confirmed the move on LinkedIn and in a larger post on her Substack.
Fujiwara has spent the past two years at Brotherwise Games, where she served as project lead for Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG, overseeing a team of 20 creatives working on 14 different products. She also served as a lead on the game’s first two campaign expansion, Stonewalkers and Mistborn Legacy. Before working Cosmere, Fujiwara built her reputation as an indie designer, creating the fantasy karaoke-themed TTRPG Jukebox and publishing several well-received titles on DMsGuild.
So just what D&D projects will Fujiwara likely be working on? Below, we take a closer look at everything we know so far.
Who is Lyla Fujiwara?
Lyla Fujiwara is a Massachusetts-based game designer who took a less traditional route into the tabletop RPG industry. She began her career as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching computer programming to high school students at Gashora Girls Academy in Rwanda, before spending eight years in the tech industry. That included creating online Android development courses, working as a Senior Developer Advocate at Google, and later serving as an Android engineer on the Google News app.
After moving into tabletop design, Fujiwara quickly made a name for herself, producing a number of DMsGuild products, including Encounters in the Radiant Citadel. She was later named a 2023 Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate and a 2023 Big Bad Con POC Scholar. She also freelanced for Evil Hat Productions, Gamehole Con, Bob World Builder and Jeff Stevens Games. Her Broadway-inspired Jukebox: The Karaoke Musical TTRPG landed on several best-of-the year lists from both Polygon and Dicebreaker. In 2025, she was also named a Diana Jones Emerging Designer.
Notably, Fujiware maintains an ongoing Substack called Jar of Eyes which details her design work.
What D&D products will Fujiwara be working on?
It’s not clear what particular products Fujiwara will be working on, or whether she’ll be contributing to one of the upcoming D&D books or an as-yet-unannounced product. Given her extensive background leading large-scale projects, however, she’ll likely be taking a major role.
Notably, a number of new designers have been brought on to contribute to the extensive amount of material that is being produced for both D&D Drops and D&D Encounters programs, although Fujiwara has not publicly confirmed if this is the case.
Final Thoughts
The past year has seen a massive hiring boom for the official Dungeons & Dragons design team, with Wizards of the Coast bringing on a roster that includes Erin Roberts, Leon Barillaro, James Haeck, Taylor Navarro, Shawn Merwin, Celeste Conowitch and now Lyla Fujiwara. What she’ll be working on her, however, remains to be seen.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story in the days ahead and will update this page with new information as it’s made available.
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Jason Volk is the Publisher of Dungeons & Dragons Fanatics and lives in the wilds of Western Canada. He has been playing D&D for over 25 years and is a huge fan of Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms. His favorite character of all time was a Necromancer named Neek who spent most of his adventuring career resurrecting the corpses of slain monsters. When he’s not playing TTRPGs, Jason enjoys video games, Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer 40K, watching football and spending time with his wife and adorably nerdy children.
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