(29/41: 1994) SHANE LACY HENSLEY (~1973–)
The Poker Table
In 1996, Shane Lacy Hensley put a poker deck on the table and told his players it was part of the game.
Cards had appeared in RPGs before. Mike Pondsmith’s Castle Falkenstein (1994) used them as the primary resolution mechanic. Greg Gorden’s Torg (1990) dealt a Drama Deck for initiative and dramatic effects. The technology existed.
What Hensley did was make the props diegetic. In Deadlands: The Weird West, Hucksters—the setting’s sorcerers—literally play poker with demons. You deal a hand. The poker combination you draw determines the spell’s power. The cards aren’t a resolution mechanic bolted onto a Western. The characters are playing the same game the players are playing.
Poker chips serve as Fate Chips—meta-currency in white, red, and blue, each tier offering different reroll power, with unspent chips converting to experience at session’s end. The risk-reward tension is physical. You can feel your luck sitting in a stack beside your character sheet.
This was Hensley’s first and most distinctive design instinct: the prop IS the fiction. Not metaphor. Not abstraction. The physical object at the table and the narrative object in the story are the same thing.
The Weird West
Deadlands launched into a market starving for something that wasn’t D&D or Vampire. The mid-1990s RPG landscape was dominated by TSR’s high fantasy and White Wolf’s urban horror. Hensley carved out entirely new territory: Western plus horror plus steampunk, a genre cocktail nobody had served before.
The setting sold it. Alternate history America, 1876. The dead walk. Ghost rock—a supernatural fuel—powers mad science. The Reckoners lurk behind reality, feeding on fear. Hensley wasn’t just designing a game; he was building a world with its own internal logic, its own mythology, its own physics.
The system underneath was ambitious and complex. Dice pools with stepped dice for skills. Poker draws for character creation. Card deals for Huckster magic. Fate Chips. Wound levels. Separate subsystems for each magical tradition. It was, as RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, emphatically a product of the 1990s—rich, flavorful, and dense enough to choke a horse.
Deadlands sold out its first print run at Gen Con 1996. Pinnacle Entertainment Group became a major player in the RPG industry overnight. Nine Origins Awards followed. The game proved that new genre territory was commercially viable—that the market would support something genuinely different if it was built with enough conviction.
But the system had a problem Hensley wouldn’t solve for seven years.
The Simplification Turn
The Great Rail Wars (1997) was a miniatures wargame set in the Deadlands universe. Hensley simplified the RPG’s mechanics for skirmish play—faster resolution, fewer subsystems, less bookkeeping. It worked. The streamlined rules ran clean at conventions where Deadlands Classic bogged down.
Hensley noticed.
By 2003, after years of running Deadlands at conventions and weathering the commercial turbulence of the late 1990s RPG market, Hensley made the most important decision of his career. He took the Great Rail Wars skeleton—already a simplification of Deadlands—and rebuilt it from the ground up into a universal RPG engine.
This was not accidental evolution. Hensley publicly articulated his design goals before release: a game where monsters and NPCs could be built on the fly, where non-gamers could understand the rules at a glance, where a generic spine could support any genre through modular bolt-ons, where large battles resolved fast.
Savage Worlds was the answer. Trait die plus Wild Die versus target number 4. Raises at every +4 above the target. Stepped dice from d4 to d12 for intuitive progression. Bennies replacing the tiered Fate Chips with a simpler single-token economy. Wild Cards for protagonists, Extras for everyone else. The Setting Rules system allowing each campaign to customize the base engine without breaking it.
Fast. Furious. Fun. Three words that became a design philosophy.
The pivot from Deadlands to Savage Worlds is one of the clearest demonstrations of deliberate craft evolution in modern RPG design. Hensley looked at his own maximalist creation, identified what was essential, and threw the rest away. Not every designer can do that. Most can’t kill their darlings at system scale.
The Platform
Savage Worlds became something Deadlands never was: a platform other people built on.
Pinnacle created a three-tier licensing structure. A free fan license for non-commercial work. The Savage Worlds Adventurer’s Guild for creator-owned content on DriveThruRPG. The Ace Program for vetted commercial licensees paying royalty. The ecosystem grew.
Triple Ace Games. Reality Blurs. Gun Metal Games. Modiphius. GRAmel. Savage Mojo. 12 to Midnight. Dozens of publishers designing their own Edges, Hindrances, Setting Rules, and powers on top of Hensley’s architecture. Paul Wade-Williams and Robin Elliot left Pinnacle specifically to found Triple Ace Games and publish Savage Worlds content. Sean Preston built Reality Blurs around Savage Worlds products. These are designers who staked their livelihoods on Hensley’s engine.
Then came the IP conversions. Rifts—Palladium Books licensing their flagship property to Pinnacle, a deal considered industry-shaking given Palladium’s historic reluctance to license anything. Pathfinder’s Golarion. Solomon Kane. Flash Gordon. Lankhmar. The Goon. Fear Agent. Major IP holders choosing Savage Worlds as the system for their properties.
Eleven international translations. Five major editions across twenty years. A SWADE Kickstarter that raised over $524,000 from more than 5,000 backers and funded in under five minutes.
The platform worked because the Setting Rules architecture worked. Hensley built an engine where each campaign could toggle specific rules without fracturing the core—horror settings add Fear mechanics, supers settings add Power Points, gritty settings toggle wound penalties. The base stays stable. The surface adapts. That’s why third-party publishers could build confidently: they knew the foundation wouldn’t shift under them.
The Plot Point
50 Fathoms (2003) introduced what became Hensley’s structural signature: the Plot Point Campaign.
The concept is modular storytelling. A main plot presented as a sequence of Plot Points—key narrative beats the players encounter in order—alongside optional Savage Tales that function as side quests. The players can pursue the main story or wander. The GM has both rails and sandbox in the same book.
This parallels open-world video game design—main quest plus side content—but Hensley formalized it for tabletop before the structure became ubiquitous in digital gaming. Whether the influence ran from tabletop to digital, digital to tabletop, or both converged independently is unclear. What’s clear is that Hensley branded it, codified it, and made it the standard structure for every Pinnacle campaign setting that followed.
The Plot Point Campaign solved a real problem in RPG publishing: how to give GMs a complete campaign without forcing linear play. The old model—Dragonlance, published adventures with prescribed outcomes—felt like a novel on rails. The pure sandbox—here’s a setting, figure it out—left many GMs without enough structure to run confidently. Hensley’s hybrid gave both. Authored narrative as a spine. Designed optional content as flesh. Player agency as the circulation system.
The Detour
From 2004 to roughly 2013, Hensley worked primarily in the video game industry.
Cryptic Studios hired him for City of Villains. He moved to Superstition Studios to lead a Deadlands MMO—promoted to Studio Head in 2008—before the parent company went bankrupt and killed the project. He returned to Cryptic as Executive Producer on Neverwinter, then moved to Petroglyph Games.
During this period, Pinnacle continued at reduced capacity under Simon Lucas. Savage Worlds settings kept publishing. The engine didn’t stop. But Hensley’s direct design involvement diminished. The detour matters for the Mastery assessment—nearly a decade where tabletop design was not his primary focus.
He came back. Around 2013, Hensley returned to Pinnacle full-time, launching the Kickstarter era that would produce Savage Rifts, Pathfinder for Savage Worlds, and SWADE. The return to tabletop was decisive, and the Kickstarter campaigns proved the audience had waited.
The Honest Assessment
Hensley built a successful, well-engineered universal RPG engine with a thriving third-party ecosystem. That’s a real achievement. Most designers never build anything that survives five years, let alone twenty.
But the methodology asks harder questions than “did it succeed?”
Savage Worlds is a streamlined version of existing RPG architecture. Attributes, skills, dice resolution, combat rounds—the structural grammar is familiar. Hensley made it faster, lighter, and more accessible. He did not reinvent it. The system occupies the same architectural space as D&D, GURPS, and every other traditional RPG. It executes the formula better than most. It doesn’t transcend the formula.
The innovations are real but bounded. Playing card initiative is distinctive but remained largely a Savage Worlds signature—other systems didn’t adopt it. Bennies popularized the physical token meta-currency, but Hero Points and Drama Points existed before, and direct lineage to Fate Core’s fate points is debated rather than documented. The Plot Point Campaign formalized a structure that was emerging independently across the hobby.
The third-party ecosystem is impressive for a mid-tier RPG. It is not D&D. Savage Worlds is a niche system with a devoted following—a significant, commercially sustainable niche, but a niche nonetheless. When it succeeds, it succeeds as a better-streamlined version of something the hobby already had.
None of this diminishes the craft. Streamlining is a skill. Building a platform that sustains dozens of publishers for twenty years is a skill. Knowing when to subtract is the hardest skill of all. Hensley earned his score. But the score measures what’s new and what propagated, and the honesty of this methodology requires acknowledging the ceiling.
The Scoring Case
Invention (7):
“People noticed.” The diegetic prop integration—poker mechanics as narrative fiction in Deadlands—was genuinely new. Cards existed in RPGs before (Castle Falkenstein, Torg’s Drama Deck), but nobody had made the mechanic the fiction simultaneously. Fate Chips introduced tiered physical meta-currency with advancement conversion. The Plot Point Campaign formalized modular campaign architecture. These innovations opened new design space and shifted conversation. But none became industry standards adopted wholesale by other designers. Card initiative stayed within the Savage Worlds ecosystem. Bennies’ lineage to later meta-currency systems is debated. Innovation noticed, not adopted. That’s a 7.
Architecture (7):
“Built to last, built for itself.” Savage Worlds is a well-engineered universal engine—clean core resolution, intuitive stepped dice, elegant Wild Card/Extra distinction, extensible Setting Rules system. RPGnet aggregates at 4.25/5 across 24 reviews. Amazon SWADE carries 4.8/5 across 757 ratings. The system supports campaigns of 100+ sessions. Third-party publishers have built on it for twenty years. But the fundamental architecture—attributes, skills, dice resolution, combat rounds—is the same structural grammar as D&D and every traditional RPG. Savage Worlds executes it faster and lighter. It doesn’t redefine it. Excellent within scope. The dual test produces a 7.
Mastery (8):
“Proven master.” Thirty-two years of published design from Fields of Honor (1994) through Holler (2023). Four distinct career phases showing genuine craft evolution: freelance writer learning within existing systems, maximalist designer building Deadlands, radical simplifier creating Savage Worlds, iterative refiner polishing across five editions. The Deadlands-to-Savage-Worlds pivot is one of the clearest demonstrations of deliberate design maturation in modern RPG history. Solo-authored core systems. Identifiable design voice. The video game detour (2004–2013) and increasing delegation to team prevent the 9, but the arc from maximalism to minimalism is unmistakable.
Adjustments (+7):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 (1994–present, 32 years of published game designs across the span)
- ■ Full-time career: +1 (Primary profession as game designer and publisher. Video game detour 2004–2013 was still game industry work; Pinnacle continued under Simon Lucas throughout.)
- ■ Awards: +1 (Nine Origins Awards for Deadlands products. Origins Gamers’ Choice for Savage Worlds. Multiple ENnie Awards including Judges’ Spotlight.)
- ■ Branded name: No. Deadlands and Savage Worlds are well-known within the RPG hobby but unknown to the general public. Fails the grandmother test.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1 (RPGs: Deadlands, Savage Worlds. Miniatures wargames: The Great Rail Wars, Origins Award winner. Two distinct game formats with documented success in both.)
- ■ Commercial success: No. Twenty years of continuous publication and a $524K Kickstarter suggest substantial lifetime revenue, but no documented evidence of $10M+ for any single title. Binary trigger requires documentation.
- ■ Design propagation: +2 (Dozens of third-party publishers built published game products extending the Savage Worlds framework—Triple Ace Games, Reality Blurs, Gun Metal Games, Modiphius, GRAmel, Savage Mojo. Major IP holders licensed properties to the system: Rifts, Pathfinder’s Golarion, Solomon Kane, Flash Gordon. Documentable.)
The Hidden Pattern
Shane Lacy Hensley designs settings first and mechanics second.
Most RPG designers begin with a mechanical concept—a dice mechanic, a resource system, a combat framework—and wrap a setting around it afterward. Hensley works in reverse. Deadlands started as a world: alternate history, weird Western, ghost rock and Reckoners. The poker deck and Fate Chips emerged because they fit the fiction, not because they solved a mechanical problem.
This explains both his greatest strength and his structural limitation. The strength: when Hensley’s mechanics serve his setting, the integration is seamless—the prop is the fiction, the system is the world. The limitation: when the setting is stripped away, as in generic Savage Worlds, what remains is a competent engine without the thematic resonance that made Deadlands special.
Savage Worlds succeeded not because its mechanics are revelatory but because its architecture is hospitable. The Setting Rules system is essentially an invitation: bring your own fiction, and we’ll provide the structural support. Hensley built a house that other people could furnish. The house is well-built. But the furniture is what gives each room its character.
The deeper pattern is subtraction as design maturity. Deadlands had too many moving parts because Hensley was a young designer who loved all of them. Savage Worlds has fewer parts because Hensley became an older designer who understood which ones mattered. That trajectory—from maximalist infatuation to minimalist discipline—is the arc of a craftsman learning his trade.
What Remains
The poker deck as narrative device. Fate Chips and Bennies as physical economy. The Plot Point Campaign as modular storytelling architecture. A universal engine that dozens of publishers chose to build on for twenty years.
A genre-mashing instinct that proved Western-horror-steampunk was commercially viable in 1996 and opened the door for every genre hybrid that followed. A licensing ecosystem that turned a single designer’s engine into a shared platform. Five editions that refined rather than reinvented—each one tighter than the last.
Hensley’s career is the story of a designer who built something complex and beautiful, realized it was too heavy to carry, and rebuilt it lighter without losing the load-bearing walls. The Deadlands-to-Savage-Worlds pipeline is a masterclass in knowing what to keep.
If Greg Porter built the best engine nobody drives, Hensley built a good-enough engine that everyone borrows. The three-point gap between them in this methodology is almost entirely Adjustments—the accumulated weight of decades, awards, cross-format success, and the propagation that comes from building something other people want to use.
The methodology measures what you built, not how many people drive it. But the adjustments notice when the garage is full. Both are part of the score.
Total: 29 points. Year: 1994.
Total: 29 points. Year: 1994.
The methodology measures what you built, not how many people drive it. But the adjustments notice when the garage is full. Both are part of the score.