The Dissertation That Became a Game

Reed’s path to tabletop design runs through interactive fiction, computational linguistics, and social simulation. His early work—Blue Lacuna (2009), a massive parser-based interactive novel, and Prom Week (2012), a social dynamics game co-developed at the Expressive Intelligence Studio—established his core conviction: that juxtaposing unexpected textual elements produces more imaginative results than pre-authored content. He discovered indie RPGs around 2008, when he won a copy of Ben Lehman’s Polaris as a prize and was, in his words, “blown away.” He studied these games analytically rather than learning through community osmosis.

Archives of the Sky emerged from a specific research question: can a GM-less game allow players to be simultaneously immersed in character and thinking about narrative structure? Games like Microscope achieved coherence by removing character attachment entirely. Games preserving character immersion often produced incoherent narratives without a facilitator. Reed’s proposed solution was the Epic/Intimate role system—rotating meta-narrative positions that formalize both modes of engagement simultaneously, requiring players to maintain cosmic grandeur and personal emotional detail at once.

The game’s most original mechanic is the Trove: a resolution system where players copy single evocative words from science fiction novels they bring to the table, building a deck of index cards unique to each group. When an uncertain event needs resolution, a player draws a card and uses that word as creative inspiration to narrate the outcome. No prior RPG used player-sourced literary vocabulary as a randomizer. No subsequent RPG has adopted it either.

The Infinite Below

While developing Archives, Reed was simultaneously building something entirely different. Downcrawl grew from his personal D&D campaign’s Underdark exploration—a concrete, system-agnostic toolkit for procedural world generation, operating in a completely different design tradition from the abstract story-game lineage of Archives. Where Archives asks what your civilization believes, Downcrawl asks what lies in the next cavern.

The Crawl system’s core innovation is what Reed calls “just-in-time generation.” Approximately eight hundred words spread across twenty-plus tables combine in pairs—”haunted + volcano,” “cruel + glaciers”—and human imagination fills the productive gap between them. Nobody, including the GM, knows what lies ahead. Reed used Python scripts to check for duplicate and synonym words across tens of thousands of permutations during development, bringing computational rigor to analog design in a way that reflects his background more than any other single decision.

Skycrawl (2020) ported the system upward—floating lands instead of underworld caverns—and added Orcery, a wind-alchemy resource system that turned exploration itself into the fuel for continued exploration. Downcrawl’s second edition (2024) expanded the original fifty-nine pages to a hundred and forty, adding the Sliver of Fate engine (an ultra-light resolution system explicitly derived from Evil Hat’s Fate), GM-less and solo play modes, and a full accessory line of card decks and adventure zines. The crowdfunding campaign raised $106,548 from 958 backers—fourteen times his first campaign’s total.

The Trove and the Table

Reed’s mechanical signature is consistent across all his tabletop work: procedural text as creative engine. The Trove draws words from novels. Downcrawl’s tables marry unrelated prompts. Even his fourteen micro-RPG entries for the 2018 200 Word RPG Contest explore constrained textual generation. The connecting thread—linking his interactive fiction background, his PhD research on “storywrighting” (story construction, “in the sense of a shipwright”), and his tabletop output—is the conviction that combinatorial surprise produces better fiction than prewritten narrative.

The innovations are genuine. The Trove has no documented precedent in RPG design. The Epic/Intimate role system addresses a specific structural problem in GM-less games that no prior design had solved in quite this way. The values-as-the-only-character-mechanic represents an extreme distillation of character design toward pure moral conflict—characters defined entirely by competing beliefs like “We explore” and “We always help those in need,” with natural narrative arcs emerging from their erosion.

But the innovations exist in isolation. This is not a matter of quality. Reviewers consistently praise Reed’s structural elegance. DriveThruRPG user reviews are uniformly enthusiastic. The ENnie judges selected Archives specifically for their Spotlight award. The work is well-crafted. It simply hasn’t been picked up by the wider design community.

The Empty Bibliography

This is the defining fact of Reed’s position in tabletop design history. Extensive searching across DriveThruRPG, itch.io, RPG forums, designer interviews, and game bibliographies produced the same result: no third-party supplements exist for any Reed game. No published games list his work in their bibliographies or “inspired by” sections. His prominent contemporaries in the GM-less and story-game space—Ben Robbins, Jason Morningstar, Avery Alder, Caroline Hobbs—have not publicly commented on his work. Actual play presence is minimal.

One AI-augmented storytelling project (Why Are We Like This?, 2024) credits Archives of the Sky for its values-based conflict mechanics. A Reddit user on r/RPGdesign has cited Archives as inspiration for character-belief systems. GMs on forums discuss using Downcrawl and Skycrawl as supplementary tools for D&D and OSR campaigns. This is consumer engagement, not design propagation. Playing someone’s game well is not the same as building on their ideas.

The reasons are structural, not qualitative. Reed entered tabletop design in 2017, arriving from digital games and academia rather than through the Forge or Story Games communities where influence in the indie RPG space typically propagates. He studied his predecessors analytically—his PhD dissertation includes formal mechanical analysis of Polaris—rather than learning through the social networks, conventions, and forum debates that connect indie designers to each other. His academic approach is both his distinction and his limitation: it produces theoretically rigorous design but positions him outside the channels through which influence flows.

The Honest Assessment

Reed’s career makes a clean case for a competent, intellectually serious designer serving a specific niche well. The solo attribution is impeccable—every tabletop title is entirely his own work, no disputes, no ambiguity. The craft evolution from academic prototype to polished commercial product line is real. The commercial trajectory is healthy and growing.

Invention scores 6—”Smart combination.” The Trove is genuinely original. The Epic/Intimate roles solve a defined problem. The values-only character system distills character design to its moral essence. But Reed entered a mature indie RPG ecosystem where Apocalypse World, Microscope, and Fiasco had already established the design vocabulary. His innovations work within that conversation, not ahead of it. The 7 threshold—”People noticed” and “shifted conversation”—overstates his field-level impact. His contemporaries haven’t publicly engaged with his work.

Architecture scores 6—”Good craftsmanship.” Archives is tightly structured with high internal consistency, but narrow: episodic four-hour sessions, characters that naturally exit play. The Crawl games offer genuine replayability through procedural generation, and Downcrawl 2E represents a substantial, polished system. But zero propagation. No designer has built on these systems. No third-party content exists. The complexity context notes that perfect simple games cap at 6–7, and without the propagation that separates 7 from 8, the ceiling holds.

Mastery scores 5—”Working designer, steady hand.” Three core games in one genre over eight to nine years of part-time tabletop design. The broader game design career (digital interactive fiction, AI research, authorship) provides relevant context, and the refinement from Downcrawl 1E to 2E is visible. But tabletop design is a secondary track within a larger career. The body of work is narrow. The 6 threshold—”Competent professional, moments of real craft” with a “sustained career”—asks for more than eight years of part-time engagement can demonstrate.

The Scoring Case

The Computational Imagination

The hidden pattern in Reed’s career is the productive tension between rigor and surprise. He uses Python scripts to test tens of thousands of prompt permutations, then hands the results to players who combine them in ways no algorithm could predict. He writes doctoral dissertations about story structure, then builds games where the story exists in a state of superposition until someone draws a card from the Trove. The computational imagination doesn’t replace human creativity—it creates the conditions for it.

Reed is one of the first designers to successfully port digital narrative theory into analog tabletop practice. Whether that bridge eventually carries traffic in both directions is a question the next decade answers. The commercial trajectory is strong and accelerating. The crowdfunding has grown fourteenfold. A third Crawl setting is teased. The audience is there.

What’s missing is the conversation. Reed builds in a field where influence travels through conventions, forum debates, and design diaries shared between peers. He arrived through a different door—through code, through academia, through the analytical study of Polaris rather than the midnight playtest sessions where story-game designers learn each other’s language. The blueprints are elegant. The building permits are in order. Nobody has knocked on the door to ask for a copy.

Total: 19 points. Year: 2018.

19 points. 2018.

What’s missing is the conversation. Reed builds in a field where influence travels through conventions, forum debates, and design diaries shared between peers. He arrived through a different door—through code, through academia, through the analytical study of Polaris rather than the midnight playtest sessions where story-game designers learn each other’s language. The blueprints are elegant. The building permits are in order. Nobody has knocked on the door to ask for a copy.