Robin D. Laws (born October 14, 1964 in Orillia, Ontario, Canada) 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.
Career
Robin D. Laws has been a professional game designer and an author since the early 1990s.
Game designer
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. 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). 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. 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. Laws therefore designed the collectible card game Shadowfist (1995). 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. A second edition was published in 2009; 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, while Atlas Games contracted with Laws to design the Rune (2001) role-playing game, based on the Rune computer game. 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!"