Amanda Hamon: The Designer Who Built Rooms Inside the Cathedral

Amanda Hamon’s Hellknight Hill begins with a fire emergency. Players can confront creatures or turn their attention to rescue. Before the adventure has gone very far, the group has something to do beyond choosing an opponent and attacking.

The opening offers a concrete way into her work. Across Pathfinder, Starfinder, and Dungeons & Dragons, Hamon has written adventures and helped develop shared game lines. Her credits include books featuring relationships, heists, and high-level journeys through the multiverse, created with teams of other writers and designers.

I see a useful thread through those projects: situations that give players reasons to pay attention to the people and surroundings as well as the fight. The rules are already there. An adventure gives the group something worth doing with them.

An Adventure That Starts with an Emergency

Paizo released Hellknight Hill in 2019 as the first installment of Age of Ashes, Pathfinder Second Edition’s first adventure path. Hamon is its credited author.

For an adventure arriving with a new edition, the fire makes an understandable starting point. A group has an emergency to respond to, and rescue is one of its possibilities. In my reading, that lets the adventure introduce more than combat: movement, attention, and decisions about how to help can belong to the same game.

Environmental encounters and rescue scenes existed before Hellknight Hill. Hamon’s contribution here is the particular adventure she wrote, using that emergency at its opening. It gives a referee a situation to present and players choices to make within it.

The value is practical. A published adventure needs to become an evening another group can run. Its situations have to offer enough guidance to be usable while leaving the players room to act.

Writing and Development

Hamon came to tabletop work through writing. Her professional-writing background led into freelance assignments, adventure support, sourcebook contributions, and organized play. Public Paizo material places her on staff in the mid 2010s, followed by growing responsibilities in development.

Fortress of the Nail was her first Paizo adventure. Its authorship is an early part of the same career that later produced Hellknight Hill. The social encounters fit this profile’s interest in situations beyond a straightforward fight, without requiring a claim that she invented a particular social subsystem.

Development adds another kind of work to the picture. In general, a developer may help outline a product, coordinate writers, reshape a manuscript, check continuity, consider difficulty, and make material easier to use. Those tasks explain the role; they are not a record of every task Hamon personally performed on a particular book.

A referee can see the value at the table: an idea may be appealing yet difficult to use. Development helps bridge that distance between a manuscript and something another person can run.

Helping a Shared Game Grow

The Starfinder Core Rulebook credits Hamon within a large project involving creative direction, design, development, editing, and other contributions. Her work belongs to that collaboration, with development and stewardship forming part of her Paizo career.

Starfinder took the d20 inheritance into science fantasy, with starships, new classes, equipment, and a setting that could accommodate different kinds of adventure. It places her development work in a setting larger than a single scenario.

An ongoing line has to remain usable as new material joins it. In my reading, stewardship contributes to that continuity: helping a shared body of work hold together while it grows. The documented team credit supports Hamon’s place in the undertaking without assigning a particular Starfinder subsystem to her.

She left Paizo for Kobold Press in July 2020. Her move into Dungeons & Dragons work at Wizards of the Coast came later.

Relationships, Plans, and Secrets

Hamon’s collaborative D&D credits include Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos, Keys from the Golden Vault, Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, and Vecna: Eve of Ruin.

Strixhaven includes a light relationship system, giving social play explicit structure in its magical-school setting. Rivalry and romance have a place on the page alongside other parts of the game. Those are features of the team-built book, rather than individual subsystem credits assigned to Hamon.

Keys from the Golden Vault approaches adventure through heists. Press coverage identifies Hamon as a co-lead designer alongside Christopher Perkins and quotes her discussing mission briefings and teamwork. The anthology also includes the work of its many adventure contributors.

A heist gives information and preparation something to do. Players can gather what they need to know, build a plan, and adapt when it goes wrong. The mission offers a purpose for paying attention before a fight begins.

Phandelver and Below and Vecna: Eve of Ruin add other collaborative studio work. Vecna’s high-level, multiverse-spanning adventure gives secrets a role within its particular premise. The books offer different situations, with Hamon’s participation remaining part of their shared creative work.

Together, these projects provide several ways to use familiar rules: relationships to navigate, a mission to prepare for, or a larger adventure whose secrets matter. The variety is the contribution I see across the credited work.

More to Do in the Room

Public profiles and press coverage from 2023 and 2024 present Hamon as an active D&D designer at Wizards of the Coast. Her credited books give readers a route into her work across Pathfinder, Starfinder, and D&D.

The cathedral in this profile’s title is a metaphor for those established games and their inherited rules. The rooms represent the situations a group can enter within them. It is a way of looking at Hamon’s contribution, not a claim about her private intentions or sole authorship of the systems.

Hellknight Hill gives us one such room in concrete form: an adventure opening with an emergency and a choice to help. Her later collaborative work offers other kinds of situations for a table to explore.

The work adds something worthwhile to games. Players can arrive knowing the rules and still find something new to consider together. Amanda Hamon’s writing and development work has helped put those possibilities in front of them.

References

1. D&D in a Castle, Amanda Hamon profile. https://www.dndinacastle.com/dungeon-masters/amanda-hamon
2. Amanda Hamon, professional profile. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandahamon
3. Nerdvana, Keys from the Golden Vault interview coverage. https://nerdvana.co/gaming/rpg/keys-from-the-golden-vault-adventure-anthology/161668/
4. Wargamer, Vecna: Eve of Ruin interview coverage. https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/vecna-eve-of-ruin-consent
5. CGMagazine, Vecna: Eve of Ruin press coverage. https://www.cgmagonline.com/news/vecna-eve-of-ruin-dnds-50th-anniversary/
6. Paizo Blog, Amanda Hamon author archive. https://paizo.com/blog/author/AmandaHamon
7. Paizo Blog, “Welcome Amanda Hamon Kunz.” https://paizo.com/blog/welcome-amanda-hamon-kunz
8. Paizo Blog, “Farewell Amanda.” https://paizo.com/blog/farewell-amanda?feed=atom1
9. D&D Beyond, Ravenloft: The Horrors Within credits. https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/rthw/2181-credits
10. Gary Con, Amanda Hamon featured guest. https://garycon.com/amanda-hamon/