Your partner asks you why the little, evil dudes in a certain game called Overlord speak as if they were stolen from a Monty Python sketch. Your terse response--being an evil Overlord while commanding a horde of unruly minions is hard goddamn work, after all--is that someone was paid a good amount of money to make them sound that way. But the question sticks in your mind as the in-game banter continues to amuse, so much so that you find yourself laughing out loud. As the credits roll, you make sure to note the person responsible for the quips and barbs: Rhianna Pratchett. After a quick Google search, you find that she's the daughter of the famous Discworld author Terry Pratchett, and that she began as a gaming journalist before crossing over to write for games rather than about them.

Rhianna Pratchett is a veteran video game writer who most recently penned the scripts for Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider, but today on Twitter she announced her amicable departure from the series. Pratchett helped usher Lara Croft, the franchise's legendary protagonist, into the modern era when Crystal Dynamics rebooted the series in 2013. With Pratchett as lead writer, Tomb Raider was nominated for Best Narrative and Game of the Year at the 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards, while Rise of the Tomb Raider won Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing at the 2016 Writers Guild of America Awards and Outstanding Achievement in Character at the DICE Awards that same year. In a series of tweets, Pratchett thanked the Crystal Dynamics team and said she was off to new adventures. Crystal Dynamics, in turn, wished her the best.