Rob Heinsoo

Rob Heinsoo
Game designer Rob Heinsoo
Born	1964 (age 52–53)
Occupation	Game designer
Nationality	American
Genre	Role-playing games

Rob Heinsoo (born 1964) 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.

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 Nexus.Chaosium hired Heinsoo in 1996 to manage their Glorantha licenses. He was laid off by Chaosium in 1997.

Heinsoo joined Wizards of the Coast (WotC) 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.