The Line Nobody Wanted

After Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer left TSR for New Infinities Productions, Basic D&D became the product line nobody wanted to touch. It carried institutional stigma—Mentzer’s association, a reputation as the “kids’ version” of AD&D, and a management team that didn’t see the point. Freelancers were producing the supplements without any internal champion. The Known World—the loosely sketched setting behind Basic D&D’s adventure modules—had no coherent guide, no setting bible, no one maintaining continuity.

Bruce Heard was the Acquisitions Coordinator, the person in charge of managing freelancers. Which meant he was, by default, the person running the Known World. Shannon Appelcline documented the institutional accident plainly: nobody else was interested, so Heard could do whatever he wanted.

That neglect became creative freedom. The product line TSR’s management largely ignored became, under Heard’s direction, one of the most innovative supplement series in D&D history.

The Format

Heard’s single most important contribution to the hobby was not a mechanic. It was a publishing format.

The Gazetteer series (1987–1991) treated the Known World nation by nation, each supplement combining cultural detail, geographic information, political systems, economic structures, and unique mechanical subsystems tied to the specific region. GAZ1 covered the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. GAZ2 covered the Emirates of Ylaruam. Fourteen supplements in total, each following the same organizational template but written to feel culturally distinct.

Before the Gazetteers, setting supplements at TSR were irregular in structure. The World of Greyhawk boxed set and Lankhmar: City of Adventure offered loose precedents, but nothing approached the systematic rigor Heard imposed. He set the format standards, contracted the freelance authors, maintained setting coherence across writers working independently, and designed the visual layout—including two-color printing and background page imagery that was, as Appelcline noted, in advance of what TSR was producing at the time.

The format became an industry standard. Forgotten Realms regional sourcebooks, 3rd Edition regional supplements, and numerous third-party publishers adopted similar approaches to geographic worldbuilding. The nation-by-nation geographic supplement is now so common that its origins are invisible. Nobody thinks about who invented the idea of treating each region of a fantasy world as its own sourcebook with its own cultural identity and unique rules. That anonymity is the ultimate evidence of propagation—and also the reason direct citations of Heard’s GAZ series as inspiration are rare in published products.

The Solo Work

Heard personally designed three Gazetteers. The other eleven were written by freelancers under his editorial direction.

GAZ3: The Principalities of Glantri (1987) was his first and most ambitious. He deliberately expanded the format from 64 to 96 pages, later explaining that he had ideas he wanted to try out and thought it would work better to design one product entirely rather than explain everything to freelancers. Ken Rolston’s review in Dragon #129 called it the best-developed D&D game city he had seen, excepting Lankhmar.

Glantri’s mechanical centerpiece was the Seven Secret Crafts of Magic—specialized advancement paths (Alchemists, Dracologists, Elementalists, Illusionists, Necromancers, Cryptomancers, Witches) available to magic-users who joined the Great School of Magic. These functioned as proto-prestige classes, thirteen years before D&D 3rd Edition formalized the Prestige Class concept in 2000. The structure—separate advancement tracks with unique abilities layered onto the base class—is remarkably close to the later model. No documented direct line of influence connects the Secret Crafts to 3E’s prestige classes, but fan communities frequently note the resemblance.

GAZ10: The Orcs of Thar (1988) introduced comprehensive rules for playing Kobold, Goblin, Orc, Hobgoblin, Gnoll, Bugbear, Ogre, and Troll characters. Monstrous PCs had appeared in earlier D&D in ad hoc fashion; Heard provided a systematic, balanced framework for an array of humanoid player characters. This anticipated trends that became mainstream in 5th Edition’s embrace of diverse playable species.

These two supplements—plus CM7: The Tree of Life (1986), M1: Into the Maelstrom (1985, co-designed with his wife Beatrice), and the much later Calidar line—constitute the core of Heard’s personal design output. Everything else was editorial direction.

The Travelogue

The Voyage of the Princess Ark ran monthly in Dragon magazine from issue #153 to #188 (1990–1992). It was Heard’s creative zenith.

The series blended serialized adventure fiction—in-character ship’s log entries from Prince Haldemar of Haaken—with monthly rules content: new monsters, spells, magic items, and playable races, all embedded within a continuous narrative. Each installment introduced mechanical material tied to the narrative location the skyship visited. It was worldbuilding as travelogue, rules delivery as storytelling.

Heard cited Star Trek and Asterix as explicit inspirations for the exploratory structure. The Princess Ark originated from a practical frustration: the map of Brun in the Masters’ Set didn’t make sense to him, and the series became his vehicle for filling in the blank spaces of the Known World with culturally rich nations drawn from real-world analogues.

The format was innovative for Dragon magazine—blending fiction and rules content in a sustained serial had no direct precedent. Players followed the Princess Ark’s monthly adventures the way television audiences followed episodic dramas. An EN World commenter later called the series the best content Dragon Magazine ever published. Champions of Mystara (1993) compiled the Princess Ark material into a boxed set, though the skyship construction rules in its Designer’s Manual were designed by Ann Dupuis, with Heard as product supervisor.

The Showrunner

The critical distinction in evaluating Heard’s career is the line between what he created and what he managed. He is, in the truest sense, a showrunner—the creative director whose individual vision gave coherence to a collective effort.

He conceived the Gazetteer series concept and contracted every freelance author. He co-created the basic format with Aaron Allston for GAZ1, then maintained that format across thirteen subsequent entries by twelve different writers. He originated the Hollow World concept—an interior world preserving extinct cultures—but contracted Allston for the primary design. He was the driving force behind the Rules Cyclopedia’s existence, though Allston compiled it. He maintained the setting bible and timeline coherence across all Mystara products.

Aaron Allston was his most important creative partner. Allston wrote GAZ1, GAZ6, Dawn of the Emperors, Hollow World, Rules Cyclopedia, and Wrath of the Immortals. Their working relationship defined the Mystara line’s best years. But the authorial credits are unambiguous: Allston designed those products. Heard directed the line.

This is genuinely valuable work. Without Heard’s editorial vision, the fourteen Gazetteers would not have maintained their remarkable thematic coherence despite being written by over a dozen authors. Each GAZ presents a culturally distinct nation with its own feel, yet they fit together on the same continent with consistent timelines, shared history, and compatible mechanics. That coherence is Heard’s achievement.

But this methodology scores game design—mechanics, systems, architecture—not editorial stewardship. The distinction matters.

The Lost Years

When TSR went bankrupt in 1997, Heard could not follow his colleagues to Wizards of the Coast in Seattle because his wife could not relocate. He spent the next sixteen years outside the gaming industry entirely—working at US Web, a web development firm, and United Airlines at O’Hare Airport. He described those positions as work that took most of his time and energy and prevented any meaningful involvement in the creative field.

Sixteen years is a long absence. The entire d20 revolution happened without him. 3rd Edition, 3.5, 4th Edition, the rise and fall of the OGL, the emergence of Pathfinder, the Old School Renaissance—all of it passed while Heard was working at an airport.

He launched his blog in October 2011 and began posting Mystara expansion content. When Wizards of the Coast denied his request to create official Mystara products, he pivoted to Calidar—a new setting that was transparently a spiritual successor to Mystara with the serial numbers filed off. Skyships. Cultural gazetteers. Exploration-driven narrative. The same design DNA, freed from corporate ownership.

The Return

Calidar (2014–2023) proved that Heard’s creative vision remained sharp. Five Kickstarter campaigns raised approximately $97,935 from 1,611 backers. Reviews were uniformly excellent—5 out of 5 on EN World across multiple titles, 97% on EN World’s Certified Chart, 90% on RPG.net. The worldbuilding was dense, imaginative, and faithful to the gazetteer approach he had pioneered decades earlier.

But Calidar also demonstrated the limits of that approach without TSR’s institutional support. Backer counts declined from 397 on the first campaign to 296 on the final one. The line ended in 2023 due to limited sales. The system-neutral design philosophy—deliberately avoiding mechanical commitment to any specific rules engine—drew mild criticism for insufficient crunch. An RPG.net reviewer noted wanting Calidar-specific mechanics to really own the rules it ran on.

Heard’s self-assessment of the return was candid: much of what he had learned during fifteen years at TSR was still there, but much of it no longer matched the self-publishing realities of the 2010s. The fundamental craft—culturally rich worldbuilding organized through the gazetteer format—changed little. What changed was the delivery mechanism and commercial context. Consistency of vision, not evolution of method.

The Honest Assessment

Bruce Heard’s career presents the methodology with a genuinely interesting problem. His most influential achievement—the coherent development of Mystara into one of D&D’s most beloved settings—is fundamentally an editorial and managerial accomplishment. He didn’t write most of the GAZ books. Allston wrote the Rules Cyclopedia. Dupuis designed the skyship construction rules. Rolston, Greenwood, Sargent, Perrin, and a dozen others wrote individual Gazetteers. Heard conceived the format, set the standards, maintained the coherence, and hired the right people.

His personal design output is solid but modest. GAZ3 and GAZ10 are excellent supplements. The Princess Ark is a beloved series. Calidar is well-reviewed. But these represent a handful of products across a career that spanned four decades on paper and twenty-two years in practice, with a sixteen-year gap in the middle.

The Gazetteer format is a genuine innovation—an organizational approach to setting design that became an industry standard. The Secret Crafts of Glantri anticipated prestige classes by over a decade. The serialized fiction-as-rules-delivery vehicle was innovative for its medium. These are real contributions. But they are structural and organizational contributions rather than mechanical ones, and the methodology weights game mechanics heavily.

Heard is a creative director who got scored as a game designer. The methodology is honest about what it measures and what it doesn’t.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Bruce Heard is a curator scored as a creator.

His greatest talent was seeing which freelancers to hire, which format to impose, which threads of continuity to maintain, and which blank spaces on the map needed filling. The Mystara that fans still expand three decades after official support ended is not the work of one designer. It is the work of a dozen designers organized by one editorial vision. Heard was the connective tissue.

The Gazetteer format itself is a curatorial innovation. It doesn’t invent a new way to roll dice or track damage. It invents a new way to organize other people’s creative work into a coherent whole. Each GAZ stands alone. Together, they form a world. That organizational achievement is genuinely remarkable—and it sits in a different register than what this methodology primarily measures.

There’s a parallel to film. Nobody doubts that a great director shapes a movie more profoundly than any single actor or screenwriter. But if you’re scoring screenwriting, the director’s contribution falls mostly outside the frame. Heard directed Mystara. He wrote two of its best episodes. The methodology scores the writing.

What Remains

The Vaults of Pandius, selected by Wizards of the Coast as the official Mystara fan site, housing thousands of pages of content that directly extends Heard’s framework. Threshold Magazine, producing thirty-plus issues of a hundred pages each, creating new gazetteers for regions Heard sketched but never detailed. The Atlas of Mystara, cartographer Thorfinn Tait’s massive project treating Heard’s blog posts as primary sources alongside published TSR material. The Piazza forum, where Heard himself participated as “Ambreville” from 2012 onward.

Few designers at any level can claim such persistent, active community engagement with their work. The Mystara fan ecosystem is one of the most extraordinary in RPG history—a community that has been expanding a setting for nearly thirty years without any corporate support, applying principles Heard established, filling in the map he started drawing.

That is not a small legacy. It is the legacy of someone who built a foundation deep enough that others could keep building on it long after the original architect moved on.

The Gazetteers. The Princess Ark. Glantri’s Secret Crafts. The name “Mystara” itself—from Mystery, Star, and Terra—coined by Heard, first published in Dragon’s letters section, later trademarked by TSR. Calidar as the proof that the vision outlived the institution.

The methodology measures design. The legacy measures direction. Both things are true.

Total: 20 points. Year: 1985.

Total: 20 points. Year: 1985.

The methodology measures design. The legacy measures direction. Both things are true.