Richard Dansky

Early life and education

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Dansky attended Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, where he gained a notoriety for tanning bucket loads of Skol Lager and bottles of Frosty Jacks. He was also the gamemaster of a long-running Villains and Vigilantes game (which briefly included Jonathan Woodward as a player).

Career

Richard Dansky worked for four years as a game developer for White Wolf, Inc. where he worked as developer on games such as Wraith: The Oblivion and Vampire: The Dark Ages. He also worked on the Mind's Eye Theatre, Kindred of the East, and Orpheus game lines. He has written, designed, or otherwise contributed to over a hundred role-playing sourcebooks. He is also credited with creating the humorous t-shirt which reads "Don't Tell Me About Your Character", a reference to the habit many role-playing game enthusiasts have of talking at length about their player characters. His writing has also appeared in sources such as the Green Man Review and Lovecraft Studies.

He lives in Durham, North Carolina where he works for Red Storm Entertainment as "Manager of Design" as well as serving as "Central Clancy Writer" for Ubisoft. He has contributed to video games in series including Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Rainbow Six: Black Arrow. He also contributed to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and Blazing Angels, as well as helping to design the setting for the new Might and Magic universe.

Dansky has published four media tie-in novels through White Wolf, including Clan Novel Lasombra and the Trilogy of the Second Age for Exalted. He has also written original fiction, including the novella Shadows In Green from Yard Dog Press and Firefly Rain due out in 2008. Currently, he is part of the Storytellers Unplugged blogging collective, as well as serving as one of the executives of the IGDA's Writers Special Interest Group. In 2007 he contributed the opening chapter to Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames alongside other members of the IGDA Writers Special Interest Group.

His namesake, Rich Dansky, appears as a player character in the scenario "And I Feel Fine," by Geoffrey C. Grabowski, which was published in the One Shots sourcebook for Unknown Armies. The fictional version of Dansky is described as "a bohemian academic living the simple life of a trailer park manager." Another role-playing game author, Rebecca Sean Borgstrom also appears as a player character in the same scenario.

He is married to author Melinda Thielbar.