II: Bloody, Bold and Resolute. D&D Next Cook returned to Wizards of the Coast in 2011. On September 20, 2011, Mike Mearls announced that Cook would be taking over his "Legends & Lore" column for the Wizards of the Coast website. In January 2012, it was revealed that Cook was to be the lead designer for the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. In April 2012, Cook announced his departure from Wizards of the Coast due to "differences of opinion with the company" but not "with [his] fellow designers". Monte Cook Games and Numenera Cook co-founded Monte Cook Games, LLC with Shanna Germain in 2012, which is a roleplaying game company that has produced Numenera, The Strange, The Cypher System Rulebook, Invisible Sun, and No Thank You, Evil! which went to press in Fall 2015 after a Kickstarter campaign raised over $100,000 to fund its publication. Numenera is a Kickstarter-funded table-top RPG created by Cook, set a billion years in the future in a science fantasy and post-apocalyptic setting with streamlined rules that prioritize the story, the action, and the wild ideas. It raised over $500,000 (more than 25 times its goal of $20,000). System playtesting was announced on October 30, 2012, and the game was released on August 14, 2013. Cook has stated that David "Zeb" Cook's (no relation) Planescape fantasy world was a significant influence on concepts in Numenera. The Ninth World of Numenera was also the setting for a 2013 release of the Thunderstone Advance deck-building game by Alderac Entertainment Group, as well as the 2017 video game Torment: Tides of Numenera, which was developed by InXile Entertainment after a successful Kickstarter campaign. The Strange is a Kickstarter-funded table-top RPG created by Cook and Bruce Cordell using the same Cypher System ruleset as Numenera. The game, which involves traveling through different worlds known as Recursions, was released in August 2014. Invisible Sun is a Kickstarter-funded table-top role-playing game created by Monte Cook Games, with a street date released of September 20, 2018. It is a surreal fantasy game with many game accessories. Career Author Monte Cook is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's Workshop. After graduating from the 1999 workshop, he has published the novels The Glass Prison and Of Aged Angels. He has also published short stories like "Born in Secrets" (in Amazing Stories), "The Rose Window" (in Realms of Mystery), and