Robin Laws | |
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 Laws at the 2012 ENnies | |
| Born | October 14, 1964 Orillia, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation | Writer, game designer, author |
| Genre | Role-playing games |
Robin D. Laws (born October 14, 1964 in Orillia, Ontario, Canada) [1] is a Canadian writer and game designer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of a number of novels and role-playing games as well as an anthologist.
Robin D. Laws has been a professional game designer and an author since the early 1990s.
Robin D. Laws has been playing role-playing games since he was a teenager and has worked as a game designer since the early 1990s. [2] John Nephew of Atlas Games convinced Jonathan Tweet to publish a game which he had been writing about in Alarums & Excursions ; Laws corresponded with Tweet about the game in A&E and when the game was being works on for publication Laws made contributions to the game as well, the result of which was Over the Edge (1992). [3] : 253 Daedalus Games got its start when Laws came to Jose Garcia in 1993 with an idea for a role-playing game based on Hong Kong action cinema; while Garcia liked the idea, his first priority was Nexus: The Infinite City which was published in 1994 with Garcia as the primary designer and developer, and Laws, Bruce Baugh, and Rob Heinsoo as additional authors. [3] : 256 Daedalus Games was then incorporated as Daedalus Entertainment in advance of publishing the Hong Kong action setting Laws had envisioned, but beginning with a collectible-card game to take advantage of that then-booming market. [3] : 256 Laws therefore designed the collectible card game Shadowfist (1995). [4] With the income generated from Shadowfist, Daedalus Entertainment published the role-playing game by Laws as Feng Shui (1996), which utilized a variation of game rules from Nexus, and began to publish supplements. [3] : 256 [4] However, Daedalus had to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1997 when the CCG market crashed; when the company sold some of its properties a few years later, Laws re-acquired Feng Shui. [3] : 256 Nephew told Laws that he like to reprint Feng Shui, so when Laws got the rights back he brought the game to Atlas Games, in a deal announced on March 22, 1999. [3] : 256
Meanwhile, Laws was active throughout the 1990s as a freelance writer for games including GURPS , Underground , Talislanta , Earthdawn , and Vampire: The Dark Ages , and later for supplements to the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons .[ citation needed ] In 1998, Greg Stafford asked Laws to create a new role-playing game based on his world of Glorantha, which became known at first as Hero Wars , published in 2000 as the first fully professional product for Issaries, and later expanded and re-published in 2003 as HeroQuest . [3] : 361 A second edition was published in 2009; [3] : 354 Laws was then able to provide additional scaffolding for players to construct setting-appropriate narratives with the rules provided. At the same time, Laws was engaged in some more experimental RPG design. Hogshead Publishing published his Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games (2000) as one of the company's "New Style" RPGs, [3] : 306 while Atlas Games contracted with Laws to design the Rune (2001) role-playing game, based on the Rune computer game. [3] : 257 [4] Laws determined that for Rune, "the game would need to have a big point of difference to distinguish it from the many other fantasy games available"; in this case, the game would allow players to swap roles with the Game Master (GM): "You can win! And when you're not the GM, it's not boring because the GM can win!" [4]
Pelgrane Press revealed on January 20, 2000 that Laws was going to be the primary author for their licensed role-playing game based on the Jack Vance stories in the Dying Earth setting. [3] : 383 Laws was the senior designer for The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game . [4] As Pelgrane Press expanded, they launched the GUMSHOE system, designed by Laws based on the claim that investigative gaming had been introduced to RPGs under the mistaken assumption that acquiring clues should be treated as a contingent reward; the new system ensured that players would learn the clues needed in order to proceed with their investigations. [5] The Esoterrorists (2006) by Laws was the first release with this system, supported by his sourcebook The Esoterror Factbook (2006); the next year, Pelgrane released Fear Itself (2007) by Laws. [3] : 384 Laws has also contributed supplements to Ken Hite's Trail of Cthulhu line, [3] : 385 notably the randomized Armitage Files resource and the Dreamhounds of Paris campaign frame, in which players take on the roles of actual surrealist artists as they confront horror in the Dreamlands. Laws also designed Mutant City Blues (2009) and Ashen Stars (2011) as investigative games in the superhero and space opera genres. [3] : 385 His RPG Skulduggery (2010) extrapolated the treatment of conflict, especially interpersonal conflict, from the Dying Earth setting to a variety of other contexts, and the Gaean Reach RPG (2012) cross-fertilized Dying Earth and GUMSHOE rules in Vance's sci-fi setting.
In 2012, Laws also ran a Kickstarter for his game Hillfolk , featuring his new Dramasystem. The goal was $3,000, but raised over $93,000, [6] and it went on to win the 2014 Diana Jones Award. [7] After another successful Kickstarter by Atlas Games, Laws released a second edition of Feng Shui twenty years after its original release, removing obstructive rules and marking a "critical shift" in the game's background. Laws has since published the specialized Cthulhu Confidential (2017), offering a modified GUMSHOE system for roleplaying with one player and the GM, and the Yellow King RPG inspired by Robert W. Chambers (2020), also for Pelgrane Press.
Robin D. Laws published his first novel Pierced Heart in 1996, set in the world of Over the Edge; [8] it was released as an e-book in 2014. [9] His subsequent novels included the original The Rough and the Smooth as well as novels set in the game settings of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay , City of Heroes and Pathfinder .[ citation needed ] Laws also had stories published in Synister Creative's pulp magazine, and in the fiction anthology The Book of All Flesh for the All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG: "The first is a light-hearted adventure, and the other is really, really dark". [4] Laws wrote Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering (2002) for Steve Jackson Games [ citation needed ] and edited 40 Years of Gen Con (2007), a book of interviews and photographs, published by Atlas. [3] : 260 Laws also wrote Hamlet's Hit Points (2010), published by small press company Gameplaywright, [3] : 260 and is currently working on a second volume, applying the same approach to narrative structure with a focus on fiction and screenplay writing. [10] Laws is also the editor of the Stone Skin Press fiction imprint from Pelgrane Press. [3] : 385
In other media, he contributed to the King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages [11] computer games and wrote for Marvel's Iron Man with Mike Grell in 2003. He writes an irregular advice column for role-players called See Page XX, and releases a weekly podcast with Ken Hite for Pelgrane Press, Ken and Robin talk about stuff.
Robin Laws is frequently invited to be a guest speaker at conventions around the world, having made appearances at Gen Con Australia [12] and Ropecon [13] [14] in Finland.
Laws attends Gen Con Indy and the Toronto International Film Festival every year. He has stated that he often cannot attend Fan Expo Canada because that convention often takes place too soon after Gen Con and too soon before TIFF, but he likes to attend it whenever he can. He was Fan Expo's gaming guest of honor in 2005 and 2010. [15]
Since 2010, Laws has participated in Dragonmeet in London as a guest of Pelgrane Press.[ citation needed ]
A partial list of works by Robin D Laws:
For 13th Age :
For Dungeons & Dragons :
For the Earthdawn RPG:
Feng Shui: Action Movie Roleplaying
For the Firefly Role-Playing Game :
Gaean Reach RPG
For Greg Stafford's Glorantha setting
For GURPS :
Jack Vance's The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game
Nexus: The Infinite City (et al.)
OG: Unearthed Edition
For Over the Edge :
Pandemonium!: Adventures in Tabloid World (Contributor)
Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games
Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering ( ISBN 1-55634-629-8)
Shadowfist Players' Guide (Volume 1) (with Rob Heinsoo)
Star Trek RPG (et al.)
Star Trek: The Next Generation RPG (et al.)
For Talislanta :
For Trail of Cthulhu
For the Underground RPG :
For Vampire: The Dark Ages :
For Vampire: the Masquerade :
For Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
Chaosium Inc. is a publisher of tabletop role-playing games established by Greg Stafford in 1975. Chaosium's major titles include Call of Cthulhu, based on the horror fiction stories of H. P. Lovecraft, RuneQuest Glorantha, Pendragon, based on Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and 7th Sea, "swashbuckling and sorcery" set in a fantasy 17th century Europe.
Glorantha is a fantasy world created by Greg Stafford.
RuneQuest is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James, and set in Greg Stafford's mythical world of Glorantha. It was first published in 1978 by The Chaosium. Beginning in 1984, publication passed between a number of companies, including Avalon Hill, Mongoose Publishing, and The Design Mechanism, before finally returning to Chaosium in 2016. RuneQuest is notable for its system, designed around percentile dice and an early implementation of skill rules, which became the basis for numerous other games. There have been several editions of the game.
Francis Gregory Stafford was an American game designer, publisher, and practitioner of shamanism.
HeroQuest is a role-playing game written by Robin D. Laws first published as Hero Wars by Issaries, Inc. in 2000. It has its roots in Greg Stafford's fantasy world of Glorantha, but was designed as a generic system, suitable for, but not tied to any particular genre.
Rob Heinsoo is an American tabletop game designer. He has been designing and contributing to professional role-playing games, card games, and board games since 1994. Heinsoo was the lead designer on the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (2008), and is co-designer of the 13th Age roleplaying game along with Jonathan Tweet. He has also designed and contributed to role playing, miniatures and card games, and a computer game.
Issaries, Inc. was a game publisher incorporated in California in 1999 by Greg Stafford to control and manage products using Stafford's fictional world of Glorantha. It partnered with Moon Design Publications to develop the flagship roleplaying game Hero Wars. In 2003, it acquired the HeroQuest and RuneQuest trademarks from Hasbro, which led to the licensing of a new edition of RuneQuest. The company's last statement was in 2013 and is now listed as Dissolved.
Kenneth Hite is a writer and role-playing game designer. Hite is the author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents role-playing games, and lead designer of the 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade.
John Scott Tynes is an American writer best known for his work on role-playing games such as Unknown Armies, Delta Green, Puppetland, and for his company, Tynes Cowan Corporation. Under its imprint, Pagan Publishing, Tynes Cowan Corp. produces third-party books for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game under license from Chaosium as well as fiction and non-fiction books under its imprint, Armitage House.
Pelgrane Press Ltd is a British role-playing game publishing company based in London and founded in 1999. It is co-owned by Simon J Rogers and Cat Tobin. It currently produces GUMSHOE System RPGs, 13th Age, the Diana Jones award-winning Hillfolk RPG, The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game, and other related products. It publishes fiction under the Stone Skin Press imprint.
Chris Pramas is an American game designer and writer, as well as a founder of Green Ronin Publishing. He is best known as the designer of the Dragon Age RPG, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and Freeport: The City of Adventure.
The Gumshoe System is a role-playing game system created in 2007 by Robin Laws, designed for running investigative scenarios. The premise is that investigative games are not about finding clues, they are about interpreting the clues that are found. The Gumshoe System is used in various games published by Pelgrane Press. As a result of the Hillfolk kickstarter, the SRD for the Gumshoe System has been made available for use under two open licenses: the Open Game License (OGL) and Creative Commons Attribution.
Different Worlds was an American role-playing games magazine published from 1979 to 1987.
Free RPG Day is an annual promotional event by the Tabletop role-playing game industry. The event rules are fairly simple: participating publishers provide special free copies of games to participating game stores; the game store agrees to provide one free game to any person who requests a free game on Free RPG Day.
13th Age is a d20 fantasy role-playing game designed by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet, and published by Pelgrane Press. 13th Age has been well supported with over 25 supplements published since its 2013 release, the most recent in 2022.
The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game is a tabletop role-playing game published by Pelgrane Press in 2001.
Jeff Tidball is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Jose Garcia is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Daedalus Entertainment was a Canadian game company that produced role-playing games and game supplements.
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