(19/41: 2014) MICHAEL PRESCOTT (c. 1975–)
The Coaster That Failed
In 1995, Michael Prescott would have been roughly twenty years old. The Coaster Proclamation was seven years behind him—behind the industry, that is, not behind Prescott. He was not part of that generation. By the time he began publishing adventures in 2014, the designer-credit battles had been won, the OSR was in full bloom, Google+ was the community’s living room, and the One Page Dungeon Contest had been running for five years.
Prescott arrived at the contest and won it three consecutive years. First place in 2015. Grand prize in 2016. Winner again in 2017. Then he stopped entering, because what he was building had outgrown the format.
He had started the Trilemma blog in 2009, writing general RPG theory. His first adventure, Stellarium of the Vinteralf, co-authored with Michael Atlin, appeared in January 2014. By the end of that year he had published thirty-three blog posts and established a monthly adventure cadence that would sustain itself for five years. The Toronto-based software professional had found his second vocation—not designing game systems, but designing the containers game systems play inside.
The Two-Page Spread
The format was deceptively simple. One adventure. Two pages. An isometric map. System-neutral text. Bold key phrases for scanning. Red italic cross-references linking described elements within each location. Enough creative density for a full session, compressed to the point where a Game Master could open the book and run the adventure in minutes rather than hours.
Prescott did not invent this format. The One Page Dungeon Contest had existed since 2009, and compact adventure design was already a recognized niche. What Prescott did was prove the format could sustain a body of work. Forty-eight adventures published free on his blog over five years, each maintaining the same structural discipline, each set in a shared world called Tristhmus where three continents meet. Individual spreads worked as one-shots. Stacked together, they became a sandbox campaign.
The Trilemma Adventures Compendium Vol. I (2019) collected all forty-eight into a 178-page book with seventy pages of bonus content: an illustrated bestiary of ninety-seven creatures, magical items, six regional overviews, two full-color campaign maps, and a complete index. The Kickstarter raised CA$96,345 from 2,248 backers—3,854% of its modest CA$2,500 goal. One DriveThruRPG reviewer reported getting over two hundred hours of gameplay from the book. Tenkar’s Tavern called it “literally a campaign or more of material.”
The format was the argument. You did not need thirty-two pages to run a compelling evening of play. You needed two pages, drawn by someone who understood that a map is not decoration but interface.
The Q*Bert Problem
Isometric maps in RPGs were not new. Ravenloft had one. Tomb of Horrors had one. But most isometric dungeon maps suffered from the same problem: overlap. When dungeon levels stack vertically and corridors cross behind each other, the three-dimensional perspective that makes the map beautiful also makes it unreadable.
In May 2014, Prescott published his solution. By arranging dungeon layouts so that all elements sit roughly equidistant from the viewer—like the classic Q*Bert game, where stairs descend at approximately forty-five degrees—overlap is eliminated while the three-dimensional impression is preserved. He called it Q*Bert Topology. The technique used isodot graph paper, blue pencil underdrawing, waterproof pen inking, and digital cyan removal. He taught it through a YouTube tutorial series of at least nine videos beginning in September 2016.
He did not claim to have invented isometric RPG mapping. What he did was solve a specific structural problem within the form and then apply the solution consistently across forty-eight adventures, demonstrating that isometric maps could be a primary navigation tool rather than an occasional illustration. The Sky-Blind Spire—called by BlackCitadelRPG “one of the greatest one-room dungeons of all time”—used non-Euclidean geometry and vertical shifts as the core puzzle, with the isometric map serving as the mechanical interface.
In 2020, the Compendium won ENnie Gold for Best Cartography and Silver for Best Adventure. Ben Milton of Questing Beast, who won Silver in the cartography category that year, wrote: “I’m also happy to have lost out on the Cartography Gold to Trilemma. If anyone deserves that, it’s Michael.”
Nothing at the Bottom
In February 2021, Prescott published a blog post that would generate more community response than anything else in his career. He titled it “Nothing at the Bottom: MOSAIC Strict RPG Design.”
The concept was a design specification for radical modularity. The acronym: Modular, Optional, Short (1,500 words or fewer), Attested (the text must declare itself MOSAIC Strict), Independent (no mechanical references to any other game text), and Coreless (assumes nothing beyond freeform play). A MOSAIC Strict text could not reference “Saving Throws” or “Strength scores” because those concepts belong to external systems. The text must use natural language or define its own internal parameters. Every module interacts with every other module only through the fiction—through what the characters experience and the players narrate—never through shared mechanical state.
It was, in essence, containerization applied to RPG design. Each rule module is a self-contained, independently deployable unit. No dependencies. No imports. The Unix philosophy for tabletop games.
Prescott was characteristically modest about the idea: “Q. This sounds stupid, how does this make a better game? A. I doubt it will!” He published the specification and moved on. The community did not.
As of the research date, 139 tagged MOSAIC Strict items exist on itch.io. The Tiny Library Mosaic Game Jam in 2023 received 120 entries. Paul Czege—designer of My Life with Master and The Clay That Woke—was among the earliest adopters. Chris McDowall, creator of Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, discussed the framework on his Bastionland Podcast. A companion specification called CERAMIC Strict emerged from the community. Prescott later reflected that MOSAIC Strict had “probably the highest ratio of effort to community response of anything I’ve done.”
The propagation is real, documented, and attributed. The question for scoring is what kind of propagation it represents.
The Specification Problem
MOSAIC Strict is not a game mechanic. It is a specification for how game texts should relate to one another. It does not tell you how to resolve a sword fight, build a character, or track hit points. It tells you how to write a rule module that can coexist with any other rule module without breaking.
This distinction matters under the methodology. The Invention pillar measures mechanical creativity—new ways for games to play at the table. MOSAIC Strict changes how games are written and organized, not how they play. It is closer to inventing a file format than inventing a game system. The 139 itch.io items are real adoption, but many are micro-fragments under 1,500 words by definition, produced within a micro-niche of indie RPG designers experimenting with modular design. The game jam produced 120 entries, but game jams are participation events, not evidence of lasting mechanical influence.
The honest assessment: MOSAIC Strict is a genuinely original design specification with documented community adoption. It is not a game mechanic with documented play adoption. The distinction places it firmly in smart-combination territory—a creative framework that reorganizes existing possibilities rather than creating new ones.
The Triple Threat
Prescott writes, illustrates, and maps his own adventures. This matters more than it might seem. When one person controls all three layers of an adventure module—the text, the art, and the cartography—the result has a structural unity that team-produced modules rarely achieve. The isometric map is not an illustration added after the adventure is written. The adventure is designed around what the map can show. Sight lines, vertical relationships, spatial puzzles—all emerge from a single creative process rather than being negotiated between a writer and an artist.
The Compendium’s contributors—Evey Lockhart, Kira Magrann, Skerples, Michael Atlin, Sean Winslow, Stephanie Bryant, Tim Groth—each wrote specific adventures within Prescott’s format and world. But the format itself, the maps, the layout, and the overwhelming majority of the adventures are Prescott’s sole work. Attribution clarity is exceptional. No disputes exist. The few collaborative credits are explicitly documented. His freelance work—illustration for Torchbearer, cartography for Middarmark, cover art for Bedrock Games titles—is clearly credited as art, not design.
For the purposes of this ranking, there is no attribution fog. What Prescott designed, Prescott designed alone.
The System-Neutral Gap
Here is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this evaluation. Michael Prescott has not published a game system.
The Trilemma Adventures are system-neutral locations—they provide situations, maps, creatures, and lore, but no resolution mechanics, no character creation framework, no mechanical engine. The four companion bestiaries (5e, B/X, Dungeon World, Year Zero Engine) translate his creatures into specific systems, but these stat blocks were written by other designers—Johnstone Metzger for B/X, Craig Atkins for YZE. Prescott created the creative content. Others built the mechanical interfaces.
MOSAIC Strict is a specification, not a system. After the Lords of Memory is a stripped-down Burning Wheel hack. The Awful Lights and Coming Apart remain in development or alpha. No Prescott-designed core RPG system exists in published, final form.
This means the Architecture pillar has no mechanical system to evaluate for balance, depth, or extensibility. What it can evaluate is adventure architecture—the structural quality of the two-page format, the information design, the fractal campaign structure. And that adventure architecture is genuinely excellent. Skerples wrote that Prescott “consistently creates these dynamic areas, packed with potential energy for adventure.” The adventures are praised for placing situations “on the edge”—dynamic states where player agency determines outcomes rather than predetermined narratives.
But adventure architecture is not game system architecture. The format is deliberately minimal. The system-neutral approach means there is no mechanical skeleton to stress-test. The quality is real within its scope. The scope is inherently constrained.
The Craft Arc
Prescott’s evolution follows four documented phases, each building on the last.
The foundational period (2014–2016) was defined by contest constraints and technique development. Q*Bert Topology appeared in May 2014. The One Page Dungeon Contest victories established mastery of the compact format. Design thinking focused on non-mechanical difficulty levels and expedition play influenced by Torchbearer, which Prescott said “forever changed how I view dungeon crawls.”
The maturation period (2016–2018) deepened the philosophy. A key blog post articulated the tension between “awesome” play (instant-action narrative) and “tangible” play (frustration-driven obstacle engagement): “A big part of a world feeling real is that it sometimes clings to its own self-consistent logic, refusing to conveniently bend to the needs of a good story.” Collaboration expanded. Cross-pollination with Powered by the Apocalypse design began.
The publishing period (2019–2021) marked the transition from prolific free creator to published author. The Compendium Kickstarter succeeded massively. Then came the theoretical turn: MOSAIC Strict in February 2021, followed by an economic analysis asking “How many RPG fans does it take to support one designer?” Prescott concluded his own sales were “not even remotely close” to supporting full-time work.
The experimental period (2022–present) produced After the Lords of Memory, a stripped-down Burning Wheel-inspired system, and continued development of The Awful Lights, a zombie survival RPG. Blog and Patreon remain active through 2025. The consistent through-line is information compression: more meaning in fewer words, more play in fewer pages, more modularity in fewer dependencies.
The Scoring Case
Invention (6):
“Smart combination.” MOSAIC Strict is a genuinely original design specification with documented community adoption—139 itch.io items, a 120-entry game jam, named designers as early adopters. But it is a specification for how game texts interact, not a game mechanic that changes how games play. Q*Bert Topology solved a real cartographic problem and earned ENnie Gold, but it refined an existing tradition rather than creating a new one. The two-page-spread adventure format was elevated from contest curiosity to sustained publishing model—elevation, not invention. Prescott’s contributions are format and framework innovations within a niche, not mechanical inventions with broad adoption.
Architecture (5):
“Competent within deliberate constraints.” The Trilemma Adventures are widely praised for information density, dynamic situations, and structural elegance. Two hundred hours of play from one book. ENnie Gold for Cartography, Silver for Best Adventure. The fractal campaign structure—each spread complete, all linking into a shared world—is well-designed. But the primary works are system-neutral adventure locations, not game systems. There is no resolution mechanic, no character creation framework, no mechanical engine to evaluate for balance or extensibility. MOSAIC Strict is a meta-specification, not a playable system. The original RPG designs remain in development. The quality is real within its scope. The scope is deliberately minimal, and propagation—three Gildor Games adaptations, four bestiaries by other stat-writers—is limited.
Mastery (6):
“Skilled specialist.” Eleven years of adventure design output (2014–present). Forty-eight adventures with consistent quality and a monthly production cadence sustained for five years. Clear four-phase craft evolution from contest entries to world-building to design theory to experimental systems. Three consecutive One Page Dungeon Contest wins. Identifiable design signature: compression, isometric maps, system-neutral usability, situations “on the edge.” Triple-threat creator (writer, illustrator, cartographer). The narrowness is the limiting factor: one format within one genre, game design as a side pursuit alongside a software career, no published core game system. Recognizable voice and documented growth within a contained specialization.
The Adjustment Triggers
Adjustments (+2):
■ Longevity 10+ years: +1 (2014–present. Eleven years of continuous adventure publication, with blog and Patreon active through 2025.)
■ Longevity 20+ years: No (Eleven years of design output. The blog began in 2009, but adventure publication started in 2014.)
■ Full-time career: No (Game design is a side pursuit alongside a career in software and technology. Prescott’s own economic analysis concluded his RPG sales were “not even remotely close” to supporting full-time work.)
■ Awards: +1 (ENnie Gold for Best Cartography 2020. ENnie Silver for Best Adventure 2020. ENnie nominations for Best Layout and Design and Product of the Year. Three consecutive One Page Dungeon Contest wins 2015–2017. Ramanan Sivaranjan Award 2020.)
■ Branded name: No (“Trilemma Adventures” is recognized within the OSR and indie RPG communities but is not known outside that niche. Prescott’s name does not register beyond the hobby.)
■ Cross-genre success: No (Exclusively tabletop RPG adventure modules. No board games, wargames, miniatures, card games, or digital originals.)
■ Commercial success $10M+: No (Combined Kickstarter revenue approximately CA$128,000. DriveThruRPG sales modest. The work is critically acclaimed but commercially niche.)
■ Design propagation: No (MOSAIC Strict generated 139 itch.io items and a 120-entry game jam—documented adoption by named designers including Paul Czege and discussion by Chris McDowall. This is real propagation within a micro-niche. But the scale is contained: 139 micro-fragments within an indie RPG subcommunity, not a design approach adopted across the broader hobby. The two-page adventure format was elevated, not invented. The isometric technique’s adoption is diffuse. The influence is genuine; the scale does not reach the threshold.)
The Hidden Pattern
Prescott is a designer who builds containers, not contents.
The two-page spread is a container for adventures. MOSAIC Strict is a container for game rules. The isometric map is a container for spatial information. In each case, the innovation is not what goes inside but how the inside is organized, compressed, and made navigable. He does not invent new ways to fight dragons or track hit points. He invents new ways to present the dragon’s lair so that a Game Master can run it in five minutes without preparation.
The software-engineering background is everywhere, but not in the way you might expect. There are no complex mathematical models, no procedural generation systems, no algorithmic resolution mechanics. The engineering shows up as interface design. A Trilemma spread is a user interface for a GM. MOSAIC Strict is an API specification for game modules. Q*Bert Topology is a rendering optimization for three-dimensional information. The discipline is always the same: reduce the distance between opening the document and using it.
This is why the score is what it is. Prescott is exceptionally good at something the methodology does not fully measure. Adventure format design, information architecture, cartographic technique—these are real skills that produce real value for real players. But they are not game system design. They are the infrastructure that game systems inhabit. The score reflects the pillars as written, not the quality of the work as experienced.
What Remains
Forty-eight adventures that fit in your hand and play in an evening. A cartographic technique that won the field’s highest award. A design specification that generated a community from a single blog post. A Compendium that one reviewer played for two hundred hours and counting.
No published game system. No core rules. No resolution mechanic that bears his name.
Michael Prescott built the most elegant containers the OSR has ever seen. What other people fill them with—B/X, 5e, Dungeon World, Into the Odd, or nothing at all—is, by his own design philosophy, entirely up to them.
He designed the box. The hobby keeps finding new things to put inside it.
Total: 19 points. Year: 2014.
Total: 19 points. Year: 2014.
He designed the box. The hobby keeps finding new things to put inside it.