The Prep Gap

By 2010, sandbox play had become the philosophical holy grail of the Old School Renaissance. Every blogger agreed: open worlds were better than railroads. Let the players drive. Respond to their choices. Build outward from the table.

The problem was practical. Running a sandbox campaign required hundreds of hours of preparation. You needed a sector full of worlds, each with history, factions, and adventure hooks. You needed political organizations that moved and clashed while the players weren’t looking. You needed random encounters that felt intentional, not random.

The OSR had philosophy. It didn’t have tools.

Kevin Crawford, a research librarian cataloging antique documents at the Yale Divinity School, looked at this gap the way a librarian looks at a disorganized archive. The problem wasn’t creative—it was procedural. Sandbox play didn’t need more inspiration. It needed systems.

The Tag System

Crawford’s first innovation was deceptively simple. In Stars Without Number (2010), every generated world receives two randomly determined “tags”—Feral World, Heavy Industry, Alien Ruins. Each tag provides a packaged set of Enemies, Friends, Complications, Things, and Places. Roll two tags for a planet and you have instant adventure hooks that feel specific rather than generic.

The genius is in the packaging. Random tables had existed since the earliest days of the hobby—Traveller generated subsectors in 1977. But Traveller’s tables produced atmospheres and populations. Data points. Crawford’s tags produce stories. A planet tagged “Theocratic State” and “Abandoned Colony” isn’t just two data entries. It’s a tension. A question. Something happened here, and the players are about to walk into it.

The tag format has since been replicated across the indie RPG space. Crawford expanded it across every genre he touched—world tags, community tags, ruin tags, court tags. Other designers adopted the concept, though direct attribution doesn’t always follow. The format is now part of the design vocabulary.

The Faction Turn

Crawford’s second innovation solved the static world problem.

In most tabletop RPGs, nothing happens when the players aren’t present. The villain waits in their lair. The political crisis holds its breath. The world freezes between sessions like a video game on pause.

Crawford built a background game. The Faction Turn gives the GM a mini-strategy system—organizations with Force, Cunning, and Wealth attributes, assets they deploy, monthly turns where they expand, attack, or scheme. The GM plays it between sessions. When the players return, the world has moved.

This wasn’t entirely new. TSR’s Birthright (1995) had domain-level play. Pendragon had seasonal turns. But Crawford’s synthesis was specific and portable—abstract enough to run quickly, concrete enough to generate playable events. A faction seizes a planet. A cult expands its network. A corporation buys out a rival. Each action becomes an adventure hook the players stumble into without knowing the machinery behind it.

John Harper has publicly credited the Stars Without Number faction turn as the primary mechanical inspiration for the gang-tier and faction system in Blades in the Dark (2017). Friends at the Table broadcast it to their actual-play audience during the Counter/Weight season. Adam Koebel streamed it live for 43 episodes of Swan Song, demonstrating the system to tens of thousands of viewers.

The faction turn may be Crawford’s most significant single contribution to the hobby—and also his most paradoxical. Community polling suggests many fans admire the system but rarely run it as written, finding it complex for sustained use. Crawford heard this feedback and refined the system in his Revised Edition.

The One-Man Archive

Crawford’s publishing model is an anomaly in the modern RPG industry.

Every Sine Nomine product is designed, written, edited, laid out, and published by one person. The only external contributions are commissioned illustrators—whose work Crawford then releases under Creative Commons for other publishers to use. There are no co-designers, no developers, no editorial team. Seventy-seven products over fifteen years, and every word is his.

This isn’t ego. It’s engineering. Crawford controls every variable because he treats each book as a system, and systems break when too many hands touch the transmission. His library science background shows—the books are organized for retrieval, not for narrative pleasure. They are reference tools that happen to contain role-playing games.

The attribution clarity this creates is extraordinary. In an industry where credit disputes are common and team-designed products make individual contribution impossible to evaluate, Crawford’s catalog is a clean signal. Every design decision, every mechanical choice, every sentence—his.

The Craft Arc

Crawford’s evolution as a designer follows a pattern any craftsman would recognize.

Phase one was foundation. Stars Without Number (2010) began as a layout exercise—Crawford teaching himself Adobe InDesign. The design philosophy was already fully formed, but the execution was rough. Black-and-white interior, modest art, dense two-column layouts. The writing was pragmatic, the production workmanlike.

Phase two was exploration. Between 2013 and 2016, Crawford pushed his sandbox framework across radically different genres. Spears of the Dawn brought it to African-inspired fantasy. Scarlet Heroes introduced solo play rules—a genuinely unusual design space. Silent Legions adapted the faction turn into cult turns for Lovecraftian horror. Godbound scaled it to demigod play. Each game proved the methodology was genre-agnostic.

Phase three was refinement. Stars Without Number Revised (2017) and Worlds Without Number (2021) represent the mature Crawford. Full-color offset printing. Cleaned-up skill systems. Overhauled starship combat. WWN’s 353-page free edition was a statement of confidence—here’s the whole book, decide if you want the deluxe version.

Phase four is the universe. Cities Without Number (2023) and Ashes Without Number (2024–2025) extend the family into cyberpunk and post-apocalypse. Cross-compatibility is now a selling point. Crawford has settled into a rhythm: one major corebook every one to two years, each expanding a shared system that spans genres.

The improvement from phase one to phase four is visible on every page. Layout, mechanics, production values, design sophistication—all demonstrably better. This is what the Mastery pillar measures. Not fame. Not influence. Craft refinement over time, documented in the work itself.

The Business of Utility

Crawford’s commercial model deserves attention because it reflects his design philosophy.

Every core game ships in two editions: a free version (complete and playable) and a paid deluxe version. The free edition of Worlds Without Number is 353 pages—a full game. This wasn’t standard practice in 2010.

The logic is pragmatic, not altruistic. Crawford has said directly that people buy his games and then use the tools for their own favorite systems—5e, Savage Worlds, Fate, whatever they’re running. The free edition is the demonstration. The paid edition is for people who want the full toolkit.

Thirteen Kickstarter campaigns. Every one delivered on time or early. Gross backing exceeding $1.7 million. Cities Without Number raised $366,698 from 5,825 backers. First-year profit as a publisher: approximately $8,000. Sine Nomine has never had a year in the red.

Crawford left Yale in 2017 to make game publishing his full-time career, returning to 130 acres in Benzie County, Michigan. He runs a small orchard alongside Sine Nomine. The man who systematized sandbox play for thousands of GMs systematized his own life the same way—sustainable, self-sufficient, no dependencies.

The Honest Assessment

Crawford’s innovations are structural and procedural, not mechanical. He says so himself. The core chassis is deliberately conservative—proven components from B/X and Traveller, stress-tested by millions of players over decades. What Crawford invented was the workflow around that chassis: how to generate worlds, how to simulate factions, how to turn sandbox philosophy into repeatable practice.

This means his Invention score reflects the specific nature of his contributions. The tag system and faction turn are genuine innovations that opened new design space. But they operate primarily within the OSR and indie ecosystem. The broader industry didn’t adopt them as standard practice the way it adopted deck-building or worker placement. Innovation noticed and adopted within a significant subfield, but not wholesale across the industry: that’s a 7.

Architecture faces the same dual test that defined Greg Porter’s score. Crawford’s “Without Number” family is well-engineered—modular, cross-compatible, supporting deep extended play across multiple genres. The quality is real. But the propagation question asks whether other designers built their games on his system, and the answer is: modestly. Stellagama Publishing created third-party supplements. Fan-made generators exist. But the ecosystem is small compared to D&D, BRP, or even Savage Worlds. Excellent within scope, not a template for the industry: Architecture 7.

Mastery is where Crawford earns his strongest marks. Seventy-seven solo-authored products over fifteen years. Demonstrable craft refinement across four distinct phases. Identifiable design voice. Peer recognition within the OSR community. The 8 threshold asks whether craft improvement is demonstrable—and the progression from SWN original to WWN is a textbook case of a designer getting better at the thing they already understood.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Kevin Crawford treats game design as information architecture.

Most RPG designers think in terms of fiction—what story does this game tell? What experience does this session create? The book serves the narrative.

Crawford thinks in terms of retrieval—what does the GM need, when do they need it, and how fast can they find it? The book serves the workflow. His games are organized like research libraries because Crawford is, at his core, a research librarian who happens to design games.

This is why his tools work across systems. A 5e GM can use Crawford’s faction turn because it’s not built on any specific mechanical foundation—it’s built on information management. Generate inputs, process through a simple system, output usable results. The game system is incidental. The procedure is universal.

It’s also why his games feel different from other OSR products. Where Raggi provokes, Milton minimizes, and Norman codifies, Crawford systematizes. He doesn’t ask what the game should feel like. He asks what the GM needs to do, then builds the system to do it.

The librarian’s instinct: organize the archive so anyone can find what they need.

What Remains

The Tag System as design vocabulary. The Faction Turn as the mechanism John Harper built Blades in the Dark upon. Thirteen Kickstarter campaigns delivered on time or early. A free 353-page rulebook that proved generosity was good business. Seventy-seven solo-authored products from a man who started by teaching himself layout software.

Crawford solved the prep gap. He turned sandbox philosophy into sandbox practice, giving thousands of GMs the tools to run open worlds without burning out. He proved a single designer could build a million-dollar publishing operation by doing one thing—pragmatic GM utility—with relentless consistency.

The OSR began as an act of preservation. Crawford turned it into an act of engineering.

The archive is open. The catalog is complete. The system works.

Total: 27 points. Year: 2010.

Total: 27 points. Year: 2010.

The archive is open. The catalog is complete. The system works.