Bruce Nesmith is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games. He was Creative Director at TSR, working on a variety of games including Dungeons & Dragons, and is a senior game designer at Bethesda Game Studios, where he has worked on AAA titles such as Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and , and was lead designer on Skyrim.
Career
hired Bruce Nesmith in 1981 to do computer games on the Apple II+. He soon moved on to be a writer of Dungeons & Dragons modules. After the original Dragonlance group began, the Dragonlance Series Design Team was later expanded to also include Margaret Weis, Douglas Niles, Bruce Nesmith, Mike Breault, Roger Moore, Laura Hickman, Linda Bakk, Michael Dobson and Garry Spiegle. Nesmith designed ', which extended the ideas behind the Hickmans' original Ravenloft adventure and sought to make AD&D competitive with games like Call of Cthulhu and Chill. Nesmith and Andria Hayday designed the DragonStrikeboard game, which was published by TSR, Inc. His other design work for D&D includes The War Rafts of Kron, Sabre River, Dragons of Desolation, Master Player Screen Featuring The Spindle, The Book of Lairs II, Tales of the Outer Planes, Monstrous Compendium, Volume 2, Monstrous Compendium, Volume 1, Hall of Heroes, Monstrous Compendium Spelljammer Appendix, Monstrous Compendium Greyhawk Appendix, Monstrous Compendium Dragonlance Appendix, Greyhawk Ruins, Touch of Death, Monstrous Compendium Forgotten RealmsAppendix II, Goblins' Return, Darklords, Unsung Heroes, From the Shadows, Forbidden Lore, Van Richten's Guide to Werebeasts, House of Strahd, The Created, Ravenloft Campaign Setting, 2nd Ed., Hour of the Knife, First Quest, Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium Appendix II: Terrors Beyond Tyr, Psionic Artifacts of Athas, and Domains of Dread. Nesmith was one of the guests of honor at "Winter Fantasy 18" in 1994. In 1995 Nesmith moved into the computer game field, contributing to ' computer roleplaying game, and Terminator computer games. He then became a senior game designer for Bethesda Game Studios, where he worked extensively on and its expansion, The Shivering Isles. The video gameFallout 3, for which Nesmith did some of the quest writing, was nominated for an award for videogame writing at the Writers Guild of America Awards 2008.
