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, 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.
Career
Heinsoo began playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 at age 10, using the original edition. His interest in games informed his interest in science fiction and fantasy, and vice versa. Heinsoo was hired by Jose Garcia for Daedalus Games to work on the RPG ; some of his work for Daedalus Games' Feng Shui RPG was later published by Atlas Games. Chaosium hired Heinsoo in 1996 to manage their Glorantha licenses, but he was laid off the following year. Heinsoo joined Wizards of the Coast as a member of the "D&D Worlds" team, with his main focus being the third-edition version of Forgotten Realms. With WotC, Heinsoo was involved with a number of Dungeons & Dragons game products. Other Forgotten Realms works include the sourcebook Monsters of Faerûn. He also helped write the third edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, which reached the top 50 of the non-fiction bestsellers in Canada in 2002 and won an Origins Award for best roleplaying supplement of 2001. He is the designer of Three-Dragon Ante, a card game. While at Wizards of the Coast, he also led and contributed to various miniatures gaming projects. Heinsoo enjoyed playtesting the Chainmail game and soon became a member of the Chainmail team, and contributed to the Chainmail column in Dragon magazine writing about tactics and rules. Subsequent to the release of the Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Game, he took over as lead designer on that project. He was also one of three designers of Dreamblade, for which he was nominated for an Origins Award in 2007. Early in 2005, Bill Slavicsek organized a team to work on some early designs for a fourth edition of D&D, which was headed up by Heinsoo and also contained Andy Collins and James Wyatt, with Heinsoo leading the teams working on the design and development in 2005 and 2006. The Player's Handbook for this edition was nominated for an Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game in 2009. His teammates referred to his role on the 4th Edition team as the "mad genius". His book Monster Manual 2, co-written with Chris Sims, was a Wall Street Journal bestseller in 2009. Heinsoo was laid off by Wizards in 2009. After Wizards, Heinsoo designed the 13th Age RPG. He designed 13th Age with Jonathan Tweet, the lead designer of 3rd Edition D&D. Heinsoo and Tweet are close friends who have played tabletop games together for years. Rob Heinsoo also contributes to Alarums and Excursions.
