(26/41: 1997) JOHN WICK (1968–)
The Settings Outlived the Designer
John Wick created two of the most beloved RPG settings of the late 1990s. Both won Origins Awards. Both spawned card games, supplements, fiction lines, and decades of devoted play. Both eventually passed out of his hands — through sales, acquisitions, and handoffs — and continued thriving under other publishers.
This is the pattern that defines his career. Wick builds worlds so compelling that they become infrastructure — living systems capable of hosting RPGs, card games, fiction, and community publishing across multiple corporate lifetimes. Then the worlds outgrow the one-man operation that birthed them, and the custody chain begins.
It’s a strange kind of legacy. Most designers on this list are remembered for the systems they built. Wick is remembered for the places he made you want to go — and for the controversial philosophy about what should happen to you once you got there.
The Diceless Advocate Who Joined AEG
Wick’s professional entry point was a defense of diceless role-playing published in Shadis Magazine, which caught the attention of assistant editor D.J. Trindle and led to a staff writer position at Alderac Entertainment Group in 1995. The irony is perfect: his first published argument was against dice. He would spend the next three decades designing systems that used them — but always in service of the story rather than the simulation.
At AEG, Wick became Continuity Editor for the Legend of the Five Rings Collectible Card Game. This was not a design role in the mechanical sense — the CCG’s game design was credited to Dave Williams. What Wick managed was the living narrative: the storyline infrastructure where real-world tournament results determined the fictional history of the Emerald Empire of Rokugan. Players didn’t just compete for prizes. Their victories decided which clans rose and fell, which characters lived and died, which wars were won.
This was one of the first “living storyline” models in gaming, and Wick’s oversight of it established him as a master of narrative architecture before he ever designed a dice system.
Roll-and-Keep
In 1997, Wick and David Williams co-designed the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game. The system they built — Roll-and-Keep — was a genuine mechanical innovation.
The concept is elegant. When a character attempts an action, they roll a number of ten-sided dice equal to one attribute and keep a number of dice equal to another. Roll seven dice, keep three. The tension between breadth and focus — how many dice hit the table versus how many count — created a specific mathematical feel that no prior system had achieved. A character with high Trait but low Skill rolls many dice but keeps few, creating wild variance. A character with high Skill but low Trait rolls fewer dice but keeps most of them, producing reliable precision.
More importantly, the system encoded Rokugan’s lethality. Combat was fast and deadly, reflecting the reality of samurai cinema where a single duel can end in one cut. This wasn’t an accident of math — it was a deliberate design choice that made the game feel like Kurosawa rather than Tolkien.
The L5R RPG won the 1997 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game. It would go on to support multiple editions across twenty-plus years — though subsequent editions were designed by other hands.
7th Sea and the Swashbuckling Engine
In 1999, Wick co-designed 7th Sea with Jennifer Wick and Kevin Wilson. The game adapted the Roll-and-Keep chassis for a different genre entirely — swashbuckling adventure in Théah, a fantasy analog of 17th-century Europe.
The adaptation worked because Wick understood that mechanics should encode genre. Where L5R’s combat was lethal and abrupt, 7th Sea’s combat was cinematic and prolonged — because swashbuckling stories are about elaborate fights, not sudden death. The system encouraged players to swing from chandeliers, duel across rooftops, and make dramatic speeches mid-combat.
Vodacce’s Fate Witchery drew from the life of Veronica Franco. Montaigne’s Porté magic expressed the nation’s colonial arrogance through literal doorways torn in reality. Wick wasn’t just building a setting. He was building emotional textures — specific feelings attached to specific places, expressed through mechanical differences.
7th Sea won the 1999 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game. Two Origins RPG wins in three years. Very few designers in the hobby’s history have matched that.
Orkworld and the Philosophy of Pain
In 2000 — the same year Wizards of the Coast launched D&D Third Edition — Wick released Orkworld through his independent Wicked Press imprint. It was, deliberately, the opposite of everything D&D represented.
In Orkworld, orks are the protagonists. Humans, dwarves, and elves are the genocidal monsters. Wick built an entire cultural anthropology for the orks, grounded in the “Philosophy of Pain” — the belief that pain is a sentient link between all living beings. The mechanical expression was “Masochistic Feats,” which allowed characters to channel damage into strength.
Orkworld was Wick’s first fully independent design, and it announced his core creative identity: genre deconstruction through mechanical inversion. Take the thing everyone assumes about a fantasy race. Reverse it. Build a system that makes the reversal feel inevitable.
Houses of the Blooded: The Anti-D&D
If Orkworld inverted fantasy’s moral assumptions, Houses of the Blooded (2008) inverted its structural ones.
The game was set in Shanri, a pre-Atlantean world inhabited by the Ven — powerful, tragic nobles destined for destruction. Characters started wealthy and powerful. Treasure was irrelevant. The focus was domestic politics, romance, revenge, and the slow accumulation of tragedy.
Wick called it the “Anti-D&D,” and the mechanical innovations matched the label. Players earned “Style Points” for making their characters vulnerable — for choosing weakness over strength. On successful rolls, the player — not the GM — narrated the outcome. This transfer of narrative authority was radical for its time.
The color system encoded social meaning: Red meant Romance and Revenge. Black marked shame. Yellow was forbidden. Every mechanical element carried narrative weight. Every rule was a piece of worldbuilding.
Houses of the Blooded was never a mass-market hit. It was an influential indie RPG that demonstrated how far the medium could be pushed toward narrative control, tragedy as gameplay, and world-as-system.
The $1.3 Million Raise
In 2015, Wick reacquired the rights to 7th Sea from AEG. The following year, he launched a Kickstarter for a completely redesigned second edition. It raised over $1.3 million — one of the most successful RPG crowdfunding campaigns in history at the time.
The second edition was a philosophical overhaul. Wick replaced Roll-and-Keep entirely with the “Raise” system — an action economy where the question was never “do you succeed?” but “how much can you accomplish?” Players rolled dice pools, assembled sets of ten, and spent Raises to achieve objectives, avoid consequences, or create advantages. Binary pass/fail was eliminated.
The 7th Sea 2nd Edition Core Rulebook won Gold ENnie Awards for Best Rules and Best Free Product in 2017, plus a Silver ENnie for Product of the Year.
But the scale of the Kickstarter exceeded the operational capacity of John Wick Presents. In 2018, Wick was forced to lay off his entire staff. In 2019, Chaosium acquired the 7th Sea product line. In July 2025, Studio Agate took over development, preparing a 3rd Edition.
The setting survived. The designer’s institutional control did not.
Play Dirty and the Breaking of the Fifth Wall
No assessment of John Wick’s career is complete without addressing “Play Dirty” — his controversial philosophy of game mastering, originally published as a column in Pyramid Magazine and later collected in two volumes.
The core concept is what Wick calls “Breaking the Fifth Wall.” TTRPGs, he argues, are the only storytelling medium where the author and the audience are the same people. The GM’s job is not to be a neutral referee but an active antagonist — not against the players, but against their characters’ comfort zones.
In practice, this meant using a character’s Disadvantages and Resources as weapons. If a player invested in a family, that family would be threatened. If a player created a rival, that rival would escalate. The philosophy drew significant criticism — detractors argued it was manipulative, that it prioritized the GM’s narrative over player agency.
Whether you agree with the philosophy or not, its influence is undeniable. The Play Dirty discourse shaped how an entire generation of GMs thought about their role at the table. It prefigured later conversations about player consent, safety tools, and the boundaries of narrative authority.
The Boutique Designer
Between and around his major works, Wick produced a stream of small, focused games through the Wicked Dead Brewing Company and other indie imprints.
Cat (2006) cast players as domestic cats protecting their human families from supernatural threats. The Shotgun Diaries (2009) used a minimalist d6 mechanic to simulate zombie apocalypse desperation. Wilderness of Mirrors (2011) explored spy-genre paranoia. The Aegis Project (2011) brought narrative philosophy to mech combat.
None achieved the commercial success of L5R or 7th Sea. But they established Wick as a designer willing to work at every scale — from major licensed properties to parlor games designed for a single evening’s play. Each one reinforced his core belief that mechanics should be metaphors: every rule should tell you something about the world it describes.
The Honest Assessment
John Wick created two Origins Award-winning RPGs. That’s genuinely rare. The Roll-and-Keep system endured for over twenty years across multiple editions and genres. The Raise system was a bold mechanical reinvention that won ENnie Gold for Best Rules. Houses of the Blooded pushed the boundaries of player narrative authority. The Play Dirty philosophy, for better or worse, shaped how GMs think about their craft.
But the institutional story is one of brilliant creation followed by operational difficulty. L5R passed from AEG to Fantasy Flight to Edge Studio. 7th Sea passed from AEG to John Wick Presents to Chaosium to Studio Agate. The settings survived — thrived, even — but under other stewards.
And the design innovations, while genuine, were part of a broader movement. Houses of the Blooded’s player-narrated outcomes paralleled work by Vincent Baker, Luke Crane, and others in the indie scene. The Raise system’s elimination of binary pass/fail was part of a wider trend. Wick was one important voice in that chorus, not its sole originator.
The draft scored Wick at 23 with only +2 in adjustments. The methodology corrects the adjustments upward — three binary triggers were missed entirely. The pillars hold. The fact checklist doesn’t.
The Scoring Case
Invention (7): “People noticed.”
The Roll-and-Keep system was a genuine mechanism invention — roll X dice, keep Y — that created a specific mathematical feel encoding both capability and expertise in a single roll. It was original enough to support two distinct genres on the same chassis. The Raise system eliminated binary pass/fail in favor of resource-allocation resolution. Houses of the Blooded’s player-narrated success mechanic was an early, influential implementation of narrative authority transfer. Multiple genuine innovations across multiple games. But the 8 vs 7 inflection asks: did others ADOPT it? R&K wasn’t copied outside its own product lines. The Raise system is too recent and niche. The narrative authority ideas were part of a broader indie movement Wick participated in, not one he solely originated. Meaningful innovation, noticed by the field, not adopted as standard. That’s a 7.
The Hidden Pattern
John Wick builds worlds that become bigger than the person who built them.
L5R’s Rokugan has survived four publishers. Théah is heading into a third edition under its fourth steward. The settings keep going. The designer keeps letting go.
This is not failure. It’s the natural consequence of worldbuilding-as-infrastructure — of creating places so rich and so structurally sound that they can host new games, new editions, new creative teams. A world that can only exist under one designer’s control is fragile. A world that survives transfer is robust.
Wick’s gift is not durability. It’s generativity. He builds worlds that generate stories — not just through the fiction, but through the mechanics. R&K makes you feel the weight of a single sword stroke. The Raise system makes you feel the cost of every choice. The Play Dirty philosophy makes you feel the consequence of being a character in a world that’s actively trying to change you.
The worlds survive because they were built to survive. The mechanics encode the emotions. The settings contain their own futures.
What Remains
Roll-and-Keep — the mechanism that made Rokugan’s lethality and Théah’s swashbuckling feel fundamentally different, even running on the same engine.
Rokugan — a fictional civilization that has hosted RPGs, card games, and tournament-driven living narrative across four publishers and twenty-eight years.
Théah — a swashbuckling continent heading into its third edition under its fourth steward, still generating adventure.
The Raise system — the elimination of binary pass/fail, the idea that every roll is a question of how much rather than whether.
Houses of the Blooded — the proof that an RPG can be built around tragedy, vulnerability, and the deliberate surrender of narrative control.
Play Dirty — the most controversial and most influential GM philosophy column in the hobby’s history.
Two Origins Awards. Three ENnies. $1.3 million in crowdfunding. Thirty years.
Total: 26 points. Year: 1997.
26 points. 1997. The settings outlived the company. The mechanics outlived the settings. The philosophy outlived them all.
The Fifth Wall is still broken.