Richard "Rich" Dansky is a writer and a designer of both computer games and role-playing games. He is a former game developer for White Wolf, Inc. where he worked as developer on the Wraith: The Oblivion, Mind's Eye Theatre, Vampire: The Dark Ages, Kindred of the East, and Orpheus game lines. He is the author of 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.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s he attended Wesleyan University, where he was the gamemaster of a long-running Villains and Vigilantes game (which briefly included Jonathan Woodward as a player). He currently 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 Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Far Cry, Blazing Angels, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, 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.
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.