Rob Donoghue

Rob Donoghue is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games. Together with Fred Hicks he created the Fate system and has been designer or lead designer of numerous award-winning role playing games. He was a lead designer of the role-playing games Spirit of the Century and a designer of The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, and has also worked closely with Cam Banks on the Cortex Plus games, a lead designer for Leverage: The Roleplaying Game, and as a designer for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. He has also contributed to Dungeons & Dragons 4e.

Career

Rob Donoghue was a friend of Fred Hicks, and one of the people that Hicks was working with in 1999 to run LARPs at AmberCon NorthWest. While on a trip to Lake Tahoe, Hicks and Donoghue talked about Hicks's desire to run an Amber game, and their conversation about fixing some of the problems with FUDGE led them to develop Fate, which they released to the internet through Evil Hat. Donoghue and Hicks released a complete first-edition of FATE through Yahoo! Groups in January 2003, and then cleaned up the technical writing to produce a second edition in August 2003. Donoghue was the primary author of Spirit of the Century (2006), with key support from Leonard Balsera. Hicks and Donoghue joined with Chris Hanrahan and Justin D. Jacobson to form the company One Bad Egg in 2008 to publish PDFs for Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. Donoghue and Hicks were two of the nine authors who were ultimately writing for The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game. Donoghue co-designed Leverage: The Roleplaying Game (2011) with Cam Banks, Clark Valentine, and others for Margaret Weis Productions.

His Dungeons & Dragons design work includes Dungeon Master's Guide 2 (2009) and Adventurer's Vault 2 (2009).