The Production Artist

Stephen D. Sullivan arrived at TSR Hobbies in 1980, twenty years old, carrying a fine arts degree from Southeastern Massachusetts University and a willingness to do whatever needed doing. He moved from Massachusetts to Wisconsin for the job. This was the year Dungeons & Dragons was breaking into the mass market, and TSR was swelling from a handful of hobbyists to a company that would peak at 386 employees by fall 1983.

Sullivan’s TSR credits establish his role precisely: editorial work, graphic arts, cartography, interior illustration. On C2: Ghost Tower of Inverness, he served as editor. On the Fiend Folio, he was an uncredited co-editor working under Don Turnbull. For B3: Palace of the Silver Princess—the controversial module whose original orange cover was recalled and pulped—he served on the editorial team and contributed art. On the Slave Lords series, he drew interior illustrations for A4: In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, then served as both editor and cartographer on the A1-4 supermodule compilation. He worked on the D&D Basic and Expert sets, writing cover copy and providing editorial oversight.

None of these were design credits. David Cook designed the Slave Lords. Tom Moldvay wrote Castle Amber. Allen Hammack wrote Ghost Tower. Sullivan’s job was making these products readable, visually coherent, and navigable—the production work that separated TSR’s professional output from the amateur fanzines of the late 1970s. He was learning how games were built by ensuring they shipped correctly.

The Exodus

By late 1983, TSR was hemorrhaging money. Revenue projections had been wildly overoptimistic. The hobby market was contracting. The Blume brothers’ management style had demoralized the creative staff. The company shed 300 employees in five rounds of layoffs between late 1983 and summer 1984.

Sullivan and several colleagues left proactively. On January 23, 1984, they founded Pacesetter Ltd in Delavan, Wisconsin, about fifteen miles from TSR’s Lake Geneva headquarters. The founding team comprised roughly ten former TSR employees: John Ricketts as CEO, Troy Denning as VP of Production, Mark Acres as primary game designer, and Sullivan as Art Director. Gali Sanchez, Garry Spiegle, Andria Hayday, Carl Smith, Michael Williams, and Gaye Goldsberry O’Keefe filled design, writing, and production roles.

This was the first major group of TSR expatriates to successfully launch a competing RPG line—a fact noted by Shannon Appelcline in Designers & Dragons. Pacesetter would produce four RPGs and three board games in roughly two years. For a company of ten people, the output was remarkable. For Sullivan, the move marked a shift from anonymous production work at a large publisher to a named role at a startup where everyone’s contribution was visible.

Every Single Product

Sullivan’s own description of his Pacesetter tenure is precise: “Art Director, design team, graphics—I worked on every single Pacesetter product.” That sentence contains the tension at the center of his career. Art Director and design team. Two roles that at a ten-person startup were not as separable as they would be at a company of four hundred.

The published credits for each Pacesetter product tell a consistent story. Chill: Adventures into the Unknown (1984) credits design concept to Gali Sanchez and Garry Spiegle, development to Mark Acres and Ethan Sharp, writing to Michael Williams. Sullivan is credited under Art Direction. Timemaster (1984) credits design to Acres, Hayday, Sanchez, Carl Smith, and Spiegle. Sullivan: art direction. Star Ace (1984) credits design to Acres and Sanchez. Sullivan: art direction. Black Morn Manor (1985), the tile-laying haunted house board game that would later be recognized as a precursor to Betrayal at House on the Hill, credits design to Troy Denning. Sullivan: art direction and graphics.

In every case, the credit page separates “Design Concept” from “Art Direction.” The mechanical designers are named. Sullivan’s name appears in a different section. This is clear evidence that the company itself distinguished between these roles.

But a ten-person startup that ships four RPGs in two years does not operate with the clean role boundaries of a large publisher. The art director playtests. The art director gives feedback on mechanics. The art director, when the system communicates its resolution logic through a visual table, makes decisions that are simultaneously aesthetic and mechanical. Sullivan was in every design meeting for every product. His influence on the final form of these games exceeded what his credit line captures, even if the precise extent is unprovable.

The Wabbit Question

Wabbit Wampage (1985) is the product where Sullivan’s attribution is most contested. His Wikipedia entry says he “developed” the board game at Pacesetter. The Grand Comics Database calls him “the creator of the Wabbit Wampage boardgame.” He later wrote and drew the 1987 comic book adaptation for Amazing Comics, extending the IP into a new medium. The game won the 1985 Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Fantasy or Science-Fiction Board Game.

Yet BoardGameGeek, Amazon, and AbeBooks all credit Mark Acres as the game’s designer.

The most plausible resolution: Sullivan conceived the theme, characters, and visual identity—cartoon rabbits engaged in slapstick seasonal mayhem, a concept inseparable from visual art and humor—while Acres designed the mechanical system. The game’s seasonal objective cycling, which altered win conditions and optimal strategies as the board moved through Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, was a genuine design innovation. But the mechanical credit for that innovation belongs to Acres. Sullivan gave the game its soul. Acres gave it its skeleton.

This pattern—Sullivan providing the creative vision and visual identity while colleagues built the mechanical architecture—recurs throughout his career. It is not nothing. Concept creation shapes mechanical decisions. A game about cartoon rabbit slapstick demands different mechanics than a game about military simulation. But the methodology measures mechanical design, and the mechanical credit here belongs elsewhere.

The Action Table

The Pacesetter Action Table was the system’s beating heart. A percentile-based resolution chart producing four quality levels of success—from marginal to critical—it gave Game Masters gradated narrative feedback from a single roll. The same core table served across Chill, Timemaster, Star Ace, and Sandman, creating cross-genre compatibility that was revolutionary in 1984 when most systems required extensive conversion math to bridge genres.

The design concept belonged to Gali Sanchez and Garry Spiegle. Mark Acres developed it into its published form. Sullivan never claims credit for the Action Table’s math in any interview or on his website. He does not mention it at all.

What he did was make it readable. The Action Table was a piece of information design as much as a piece of game logic. Its visual organization—the column structure, the color coding, the relationship between the Master Screen layout and the rulebook presentation—determined how quickly a Game Master could resolve an action in play. At a company where the Art Director worked on every product, the visual decisions about how the table communicated were Sullivan’s domain. A badly laid out Action Table would have made the same mathematical system feel clunky. Sullivan’s production work made it feel elegant.

This is the argument for Sullivan as a designer: that at Pacesetter, information architecture was inseparable from systems architecture. The rules existed as printed objects, and the person who determined how those objects presented information shaped the player experience as directly as the person who wrote the probability curves.

The Attribution Map

Sullivan’s career demands the most careful attribution work in this project because his contributions were real but consistently adjacent to mechanical design.

Editorial and production (TSR, 1980–1984): D&D Basic/Expert sets (editorial, writing, graphics), C2: Ghost Tower of Inverness (editor), Fiend Folio (uncredited co-editor), B3: Palace of the Silver Princess (editorial team, artist), X2: Castle Amber (interior art, cartography), A4: In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords (interior art), A1-4: Scourge of the Slave Lords (editor, cartographer). No design credits.

Art direction and design team (Pacesetter, 1984–1986): Chill, Timemaster, Star Ace (art director, design team on all three). Wabbit Wampage and Wabbits Wevenge (concept creator, artist; Acres credited as designer on BGG). Black Morn Manor (art direction, graphics; Denning credited as designer). Sandman: Map of Halis (design team, art director).

Writing and development (post-Pacesetter): Star Wars: Galaxy Guide 4 (1989, co-writer with Denning and Hayday at West End Games—a writing credit, not design). Various “Gamemaster” booklets for D&D and Tolkien RPG (1988, writer). Bosun’s Booty Pathfinder supplement (2013, developer).

Solo design: Dr. Cushing’s Chamber of Horrors (2017, self-published, lead designer). This is Sullivan’s only unambiguous sole-design credit, coming thirty-three years into his career.

Fiction career: Legend of the Five Rings novels (The Lion won the Origins Award for game-related fiction). Dragonlance novels. Hardy Boys installments. Movie novelizations (Iron Man, Fantastic Four). Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comics. Manos: The Hands of Fate novelization (2016 Scribe Award winner). This is the career path that defined Sullivan after Pacesetter—writer, not designer.

The Honest Assessment

Sullivan’s career presents a specific evaluation challenge: how do you score a creative professional whose contributions to game design were genuine but consistently interstitial? He did not write the probability curves. He shaped the objects through which players encountered them. He did not design the fear mechanics in Chill. He designed the visual language that made Chill’s horror atmosphere cohere on the page and at the table.

The methodology measures mechanical design. Sullivan’s mechanical design output is thin: one self-published indie RPG (Dr. Cushing) and contested concept-creation credit on Wabbit Wampage. His Pacesetter “design team” participation is real but unquantifiable. His TSR credits are editorial and artistic throughout.

But the methodology also recognizes that game design at small studios in the early 1980s was not the role-separated profession it became later. Sullivan co-founded a game company, worked on every product it released, and participated in the design process at a level that exceeded his credit line. The seasonal cycling mechanic in Wabbit Wampage may have been his concept even if Acres formalized it. The cross-genre compatibility of the Pacesetter system may have been influenced by his visual thinking even if Sanchez and Spiegle wrote the math.

The score reflects the interstitial position. Not the score of a non-designer. Not the score of a systems architect. The score of a creative professional whose design contributions were real, diffuse, and largely invisible in the credit lines that survive.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

The distinction between “art direction” and “game design” is a modern convenience. It describes role boundaries that did not exist in the same form at a ten-person startup in Delavan, Wisconsin, in 1984.

Sullivan’s career reveals something the credit system obscures: that the physical form of a game IS part of its design. The Pacesetter Action Table was a piece of math and a piece of visual communication. Whoever determined how that table was organized on the page—which columns went where, how the color coding mapped to success levels, how the Master Screen arranged the information a Game Master needed mid-session—was making design decisions. The math without the layout is an equation. The layout without the math is a chart. Together they become a game system.

Sullivan was the layout. His colleagues were the math. The game was both.

This is why his career reads differently depending on which lens you use. Through the lens of mechanical design credit, Sullivan contributed almost nothing—one self-published RPG after thirty-three years. Through the lens of how players actually experienced these games at the table, Sullivan’s fingerprints are on everything Pacesetter made. His art direction for Chill defined the visual grammar of investigative horror RPGs. His production work at TSR helped bring D&D from hobbyist manuscript to mass-market product.

The game industry has never had a clean vocabulary for this kind of contribution. “Art director” undersells it. “Game designer” oversells it. Sullivan occupied the space between these categories his entire career. That the space doesn’t have a name is a failure of the industry’s language, not a failure of his work.

What Remains

The Pacesetter products, still alive through Goblinoid Games clones and the Chill third edition. The visual identity of early 1980s TSR—the interior illustrations, the cartography, the editorial polish that made D&D professional enough for mass-market distribution. A comic book adaptation of a board game about cartoon rabbits. Two Origins Awards for fiction. A Scribe Award. A career that touched some of the most important tabletop games of its era without ever quite designing one from scratch.

And Dr. Cushing’s Chamber of Horrors, published thirty-three years after Pacesetter folded. The only product where Sullivan’s name appears alone on the design credit. A horror game, naturally. Some instincts outlast the institutions that formed them.

The methodology measures what you built. Sullivan’s name appears on the credit pages of products that shaped the hobby’s golden age, but it appears under Art Direction, not Design. His one solo design credit came decades after the work that defined him. The score reflects a genuine but diffuse design presence—contributions that exceeded what the credits captured, fell short of what inflation could claim, and inhabited a space between roles that the industry never learned to name. Some designers build the math. Some designers build the table the math sits on. Sullivan built the table.

Total: 15 points. Year: 1984.

Total: 15 points. Year: 1984.