The Teacher Who Gave the Old School a New Syllabus

Ben Milton is a fifth-grade teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, who happens to have designed the most widely hacked RPG in the Old-School Renaissance.

That sentence contains the whole tension of his career. He is not a full-time designer. He does not have a sprawling catalog. He teaches children during the day and publishes games, reviews, and newsletters in the margins. But the games he publishes — Knave, Maze Rats, a handful of adventures — have become load-bearing infrastructure for an entire design community. Not because they’re comprehensive. Because they’re so clean that other people can build on them without tripping over the foundation.

His YouTube channel, Questing Beast, is one of the most influential voices in the OSR. His newsletter, The Glatisant, reaches over twenty-two thousand subscribers. His games are released under Creative Commons. The combination of design, curation, and open-source philosophy has made Milton something unusual in tabletop history: a designer whose influence exceeds his output by an order of magnitude.

The After-School Campaign

Milton came to game design through the classroom. He ran after-school D&D clubs for children, tried various systems — Pathfinder, Dungeon World, World of Dungeons — and found them all too heavy for the context. What he needed was a game he could print on a sheet of paper, hand to a ten-year-old, and start playing in five minutes. No character classes to explain. No spell lists to memorize. No ability scores that required a statistics degree to understand.

So he built one. Maze Rats (2016) stripped the RPG to its chassis: three stats (Strength, Dexterity, Will, borrowed from Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd), a random-table magic system that generates spells on the fly, and character creation you could finish in two minutes. The game fit in a zine. It became a DriveThruRPG bestseller and, more importantly, the gateway drug for an entire generation of players who’d never touched a twenty-sided die.

The design philosophy behind Maze Rats wasn’t just minimalism for its own sake. It was pedagogical. Milton understood that the barrier to RPGs wasn’t complexity of play but complexity of entry. If you could hand someone the rules and they could start playing immediately, the game would teach itself. Every design decision served that thesis: random tables instead of memorized spells, three stats instead of six, rulings instead of rules.

Knave and the Inventory Revolution

Two years later, Milton published the game that would define his design legacy. Knave (2018) asked a question nobody had quite answered this cleanly: what if your character wasn’t defined by a class but by what they carried?

The answer was a classless RPG where inventory slots were the primary mechanical resource. Carry a sword and armor, and you’re a fighter. Carry spellbooks, and you’re a wizard. Carry lockpicks and rope, and you’re a thief. The character sheet was a backpack, and the backpack was the character. Take enough damage, and it starts filling your inventory slots — forcing you to drop gear, lose spells, abandon treasure. Survival horror through resource management, elegant enough to fit on a single page.

Milton released Knave under a Creative Commons license. This was the decisive move. By making the game open-source, he transformed it from a product into a platform. Within months, the OSR community was publishing Knave hacks, Knave adventures, Knave settings, Knave supplements. The classless inventory system became a template that dozens of designers adopted and modified. The game propagated not because Milton marketed it but because he gave it away and it was built to be modified.

Knave: Second Edition (2023) expanded the toolkit into a full sandbox campaign framework — hexcrawl procedures, dungeon generation, faction systems. The Kickstarter funded in five minutes and raised over four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A $2.99 PDF had become a half-million-dollar campaign, and the teacher from Phoenix was still teaching fifth grade.

The Labyrinth and the Mansion

Milton’s work outside his own systems demonstrates the same instinct: strip the game to what matters, then make that thing sing.

Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: The Adventure Game (2019), co-designed with Jack Caesar for River Horse Games, won ENNIE Gold for Best Family Game and ENNIE Silver for Best Cartography. It’s a licensed RPG about the world of the 1986 film, and its most radical design choice is the absence of combat mechanics. The game is entirely about problem-solving and teamwork — navigating the Labyrinth through cleverness rather than violence. For a designer who built his career on accessibility, a combat-free RPG for families was a natural extension of the thesis.

The Waking of Willowby Hall (2020) is a mansion-crawl adventure that became an object lesson in adventure design. Funded through Zinequest at 449% of its goal, it earned an ENNIE nomination and became a DriveThruRPG bestseller. The adventure’s innovation is structural: a control-panel layout where every encounter is visible at a glance, interactive elements that chain together in unpredictable ways, and a giant rampaging through the mansion as a ticking clock. The design treats the adventure document itself as a usability problem to be solved — the same pedagogical instinct that drives Milton’s RPG design applied to how GMs read and run published material.

The Curator as Designer

Milton’s influence cannot be measured by his games alone. The Questing Beast YouTube channel has become one of the primary vectors through which the broader tabletop community encounters OSR and post-OSR design. His reviews don’t just evaluate games — they articulate a design philosophy: clarity over complexity, usability over comprehensiveness, player agency over mechanical scaffolding. He is, in effect, teaching a masterclass in game design criticism one video at a time.

The Glatisant, his Substack newsletter, reaches over twenty-two thousand subscribers and functions as the unofficial news aggregator for the OSR ecosystem. Five years of monthly curation — new releases, design essays, community projects, historical analysis — have made it an institutional resource. When Milton highlights a designer or a product, the community pays attention.

This dual role — designer and curator — is unusual in tabletop history. Most influential designers influence through their games. Milton influences through his games, his reviews, his newsletter, and the open-source philosophy that makes his work a commons rather than a product. The question of where design ends and stewardship begins is, in his case, unanswerable. They’re the same act.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Milton designs the way he teaches. Every game is a lesson plan.

Maze Rats is the introductory lesson — here are the three things you need to know, now let’s play. Knave is the intermediate course — you understand the basics, now let’s see what happens when your character is defined by choices rather than categories. Knave 2E is the advanced seminar — you’ve mastered the system, now here’s a world to explore with it. The Waking of Willowby Hall is the teacher’s edition — the adventure designed so that the GM can run it without studying it first.

The pedagogical instinct explains everything. Why the systems are minimal: because complexity is a barrier to entry. Why the games are open-source: because knowledge should be shared. Why the newsletter curates rather than gatekeeps: because a teacher’s job is to show you what’s out there, not to tell you what to think about it. Why the inventory system replaces character classes: because identity should emerge from what you do, not what you’re told you are.

The deeper pattern is that Milton treats game design itself as a teaching problem. The question isn’t “what’s the most elegant system?” — it’s “what’s the fastest path from never having played to playing right now?” The answer, consistently, is subtraction. Remove the classes. Remove the spell lists. Remove the barriers. Hand someone a sheet of paper and a pencil and say: you’re in a dungeon. What do you do?

What Remains

Maze Rats (2016) — the gateway drug, the zine-sized RPG that proved you could teach someone to play in five minutes. DriveThruRPG bestseller. The game that launched a thousand after-school campaigns.

Knave (2018) — classless, inventory-defined, Creative Commons. The most hacked RPG in the OSR. The game that became a platform.

Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: The Adventure Game (2019) — ENNIE Gold. A combat-free RPG for families. The proof that accessibility and depth aren’t opposites.

The Waking of Willowby Hall (2020) — adventure design as usability design. ENNIE nominee. The mansion that taught GMs how to read a module.

Knave: Second Edition (2023) — the system grown into a sandbox toolkit. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars raised in thirty days. A fifth-grade teacher’s side project that became a movement.

The Glatisant. Questing Beast. Twenty-two thousand subscribers. Five years of curation. The unofficial syllabus of the Old-School Renaissance.

Total: 20 points. Year: 2016.

20 points. 2016. The teacher who gave the old school a new syllabus.

The Glatisant. Questing Beast. Twenty-two thousand subscribers. Five years of curation. The unofficial syllabus of the Old-School Renaissance.