Kenyon and St. Olaf
Mark Rein-Hagen (he styles it Rein•Hagen) was born August 30, 1964, in Ohio, and grew up in Kenyon before enrolling at St. Olaf College in Northfield. At St. Olaf he met Jonathan Tweet, and in 1987 the two founded Lion Rampant, a small publisher whose first game, Ars Magica, they designed in nine months.
White Wolf and Vampire
When Lion Rampant ran short of money in 1990 it merged with Stewart Wieck's White Wolf magazine to form White Wolf Game Studio, with Rein-Hagen and Wieck as co-owners. On the drive to GenCon that summer he conceived Vampire: The Masquerade, published in 1991: a game of personal horror in which players are vampires hiding in modern cities. It sold in numbers no role-playing game since Dungeons & Dragons had matched and spawned Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992), Wraith: The Oblivion (1994) and Changeling: The Dreaming (1995), the shared "World of Darkness." He wrote and produced Kindred: The Embraced, the 1996 Fox television adaptation.
Later work
He sold his White Wolf shares in 2007 and left the industry for a time. In 2008 he was living in Tbilisi, Georgia, with his family during the Russo-Georgian war and founded sosgeorgia.org to track international coverage. He has since returned to design with Democracy (2012), I Am Zombie (2015) and continuing projects. Vampire: The Masquerade, now in its fifth edition, remains in print thirty-five years on.