Ree Soesbee is an American game designer of collectible card games, role-playing games, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), as well as a writer of primarily fantasy novels.
After Soesbee's mother died when she was 6, a relative gave her a copy of the 1983 red box edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Her father, believing that the game led to demon worship, refused to let her play and hid it away. She became fascinated by the game as a result, and a pattern ensued where she would find it and play, and her father would hide it again. At the same time, she and her father watched episodes of Star Trek together. These two factors early in her life helped to develop an interest in both role-playing games and science fiction.[1]
She continued to play various role-playing games through her childhood and early adulthood, including Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and Paranoia.
Soesbee completed her MA in English Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina, writing her thesis on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
While she was working on her doctoral thesis about Edo period literature, she started to write short fiction stories based on the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game. She submitted some of them to the game's publisher, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), and she was subsequently asked to write a sourcebook for the game, Way of the Crane. She completed that as freelance work while still working on her thesis. AEG then asked her to join their staff full-time to work on more sourcebooks as well as the Legend of the Five Rings collectible card game (CCG). She subsequently made the decision to leave school without finishing her thesis.
One of her first projects at AEG was to help her roommate Kevin Millard design the CCG Warlock. She also wrote or provided material for many Legend of the Five Rings projects including the adventure Code of Bushido (1998), Night of a Thousand Screams (1998), and The Book of the Shadowlands (1998) in addition to continuing to write short fiction and novels for the setting.
She was also a contributor to sourcebooks and adventures for other role-playing games, including
On her own, Soesbee also designed a number of different projects:
In 2000, AEG decided to publish a series of seven Clan War novels based on Legend of Five Rings, and Soesbee was asked to write two of them, The Crane (2000) and The Dragon (2001). Tom Findlay of The Sun-Herald gave The Dragon a positive review.[2] This was followed by the five-book Four Winds Saga series, and she again wrote two of them, Wind of Honour (2002) and Wind of Truth (2003).
In 2002, Soesbee, John Phythyon and Mike Bennighof wrote Celtic Age: Roleplaying the Myths, Heroes, and Monsters of the Celts, a d20 System sourcebook published by Avalanche Press detailing the Celtic people of Great Britain. It won the 2002 Origins Award for "Best Role-Playing Game Supplement".
Soesbee then moved from the Japanese background of the Legend of the Five Rings universe to the swords & sorcery setting of Dragonlance. Starting in 2004, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) published the New Adventures series, young adult novels set in their popular Dragonlance world of Krynn. The first eight novels, the Spellbinder Quartet and Dragon Quartet, followed the adventures of a band of eight young adventurers. Soesbee wrote the first book of the Dragon Quartet, Dragon Sword (2005).
When the two initial series finished, WotC then commissioned various authors to each produce a trilogy of novels based on one of the members of the original band of young adventurers. Soesbee wrote the "Elidor" trilogy about the elven thief Elidor: Crown of Thieves (2005), The Crystal Chalice (2006), and City of Fortune (2006). Crown of Thieves was included on Maja Beckstrom's recommended list of books about elves for young readers that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.[3]
She then wrote the Elements Trilogy about another member of the band, the young wizard-in-training Nearra: Pillar of Flame (2007), Queen of the Sea (2007), and Tempest's Vow (2008). She also wrote one book of the eight-book Dragon Codices series, Black Dragon Codex (2008).
In 2006, Soesbee was hired by ArenaNet to work on developing campaigns for the MMORPG Guild Wars. Her first project was adding material to the Guild Wars Nightfall campaign that had been developed by Jeff Grubb, as well as material for . She also created "hero chatter" — comments made by a player's entourage of heroes when the player enters various areas.[4]
She then started working with Grubb on Guild Wars 2 as Narrative, Lore and Continuity Designer, creating an expanded version of the game with the Guild Wars storyline pushed 250 years into the future; after several years of development, Guild Wars 2 was released in 2012.
ArenaNet also released a line of novels based on the Guild Wars 2 setting; Soesbee wrote the third novel in that line, Sea of Sorrows.[5]