(18/41: 1990) STEVEN E. SCHEND (1967–)
The Worldsmith’s Dilemma
Steven E. Schend built cities that felt like they could actually sustain their populations. He tracked thousands of characters across decades of novels and sourcebooks. He created the database that held the Forgotten Realms together.
And almost none of it counts as “game design” in the way this methodology measures it.
This is the fundamental tension in Schend’s profile. By any reasonable measure, he’s one of the most accomplished setting designers in tabletop RPG history. His Forgotten Realms supplements — Sea of Fallen Stars, Cormanthyr, Lands of Intrigue, Calimport — are among the richest, most logically consistent fantasy worldbuilding ever published for any game system. His work as continuity monitor ensured that a world-shaking event in an R.A. Salvatore novel didn’t contradict a regional sourcebook written by Eric L. Boyd.
But this ranking privileges systems over settings. And Schend’s own self-description is “Word Wrangler & Worldsmith” — not system designer.
The methodology doesn’t lie. It just reveals what it values.
Madison to Lake Geneva
Born May 17, 1967, in Madison, Wisconsin, Schend grew up in Kenosha, fueled by L. Frank Baum’s Oz and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom rather than Tolkien alone. These influences matter: Baum and Burroughs weren’t just storytellers, they were geographers. They built places with internal logic, distinct cultures, histories that transcended individual plots.
Schend earned an English degree from UW-Madison in 1989. Before entering the game industry, he worked as a teacher, street sweeper, concrete curb builder, and landscaper. These occupations aren’t irrelevant — a designer who has personally built concrete curbs brings something specific to describing how a fantasy city’s infrastructure actually functions.
He joined TSR’s Games Department as an editor in early 1990. His first assignment was coordinating the Marvel Super Heroes RPG line — not designing the FASERIP system (that was Jeff Grubb’s work), but managing the line’s editorial direction, ensuring that thousands of Marvel characters remained consistent with their comic book depictions while functioning within the game’s mechanics.
The pattern established itself immediately: Schend as coordinator, continuity guardian, infrastructure builder. Working within frameworks others created.
Blood Wars: The Mechanical Exception
The single most important credit for scoring Schend on Invention is the Blood Wars Collectible Card Game (TSR, 1994–1995).
He was the sole lead designer: core rules, card interaction mechanics, combat systems, faction and intrigue challenge rules, battle hand mechanics, fate card timing. He designed the core set plus all six planned expansion packs — Rebels & Reinforcements, Factols & Factions, and Powers & Proxies were published; three more were completed but cancelled when TSR curtailed the line. 603 published cards across releases, themed around Planescape’s planar warfare.
Blood Wars was a niche CCG that never rivaled Magic: The Gathering commercially. It didn’t spawn imitators or establish mechanics that later designers adopted. But it represents genuine standalone mechanical design — a complete game system from one person’s mind.
His only other system-level credit is co-designing the Buck Rogers High Adventure Cliffhangers RPG (1993) with Jeff Grubb — a complete RPG using an exploding d6 mechanic, distinct from the earlier Buck Rogers XXVc percentile system.
Two mechanical design credits in 36 years. One solo, one co-design. Neither commercially significant. Neither influential on later designers.
That’s the Invention case. It’s thin.
Custodian of the Realms
In the mid-1990s, Schend became what he was born to be: the Forgotten Realms’ continuity monitor.
Alongside Julia Martin, he served as one of two people responsible for ensuring that the Realms — a sprawling behemoth of lore supported by hundreds of novels and supplements — remained internally consistent. For three years, he also served as assistant manager of the Realms product group, overseeing strategic direction during the TSR-to-Wizards transition.
The challenge was the Realms’ “open” nature. Unlike the structured Dragonlance setting, the Realms allowed many different stories to be told simultaneously. Schend’s team developed an extensive Intellectual Property database between 1997 and 1999, tracking thousands of characters, locations, and historical events across three decades of published material.
This work was invisible to players but essential for the setting’s longevity. It’s organizational architecture — building systems for managing complexity — but it’s not game design in the mechanical sense.
The Great Sourcebooks
Schend’s celebrated works cluster in 1996–1999: the Undermountain trilogy (The Lost Level, Maddgoth’s Castle, Stardock), Lands of Intrigue, Cormanthyr: Empire of the Elves, The Fall of Myth Drannor, Empires of the Shining Sea, Calimport, Cloak & Dagger.
And his self-described proudest achievement: Sea of Fallen Stars (1999).
Sea of Fallen Stars detailed the underwater realms of Serôs beneath Faerûn’s central sea. Rather than placing human-like cities on the ocean floor, Schend developed a complex ecosystem and political landscape accounting for the physical realities of aquatic life. Sea elves of Hakhlovar, merfolk of the Alamber Sea, sahuagin hordes. Territorial waters, neutral zones, biological justifications for creatures.
The design credits on Sea of Fallen Stars tell the story clearly: Schend is credited for “Design and Development,” but Bruce Cordell, Keith Strohm, and Skip Williams are separately credited for “Undersea AD&D Rules Designs.”
Even in his signature product, others designed the mechanical subsystems.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s a clarification. Schend built the world. Others built the rules for interacting with it. Both are necessary. Only one scores high in this methodology.
The Urban Sociologist
Schend’s approach to Waterdeep reveals his design philosophy. He analyzed the city’s growth patterns, noting that by law, no permanent structures were allowed outside the city walls for half a day’s patrol distance. This created meadows for caravans and livestock markets, forcing the city to grow vertically.
He detailed the housing market: most buildings south of the line between Castle Waterdeep and the City of the Dead consisted of street-level shops with three or more floors of rental apartments above. He developed Aurora’s Emporium — the Realms’ catalog-based shopping service — with “service-mages” using specific magical field configurations to focus teleportation spells on target warehouses.
This is worldbuilding as infrastructure engineering. Every fantastic element has a physical price, a logical explanation, a place in the economic and social fabric.
It’s brilliant work. It operates entirely within mechanical frameworks created by others.
The Alternity Transition and Freelance Years
When TSR was acquired by Wizards of the Coast, Schend relocated to Renton, Washington. He transitioned to the Alternity science fiction RPG line — System Guide to Aegis, Alien Compendium II, The Externals — before departing WotC around 2000.
His freelance career since has included Green Ronin (Freedom City, Foes of Freedom, Mutants & Masterminds Annual #1), Bastion Press (Oathbound, d20 Guide to Alchemy & Herbalism), Paizo (Pathfinder gazetteers for Westcrown and Iobaria, Gnomes of Golarion), two Forgotten Realms novels (Blackstaff in 2006, Blackstaff Tower in 2008), and nine published short stories.
As of 2025–2026, he remains active: contributing to the RealmsBound project (a Mythmakers LLC collaboration with Ed Greenwood releasing Forgotten Realms content on DM’s Guild), developing the independent Ouroboros RPG, and proofreading the Planet of the Apes RPG: The ANSA Files (2024).
Outside gaming, he works as an assistant branch librarian at Kent District Library in Michigan — a fitting parallel to his decades spent managing the fictional libraries of Faerûn.
The Honest Assessment
If this were a worldbuilding ranking, Steven E. Schend would be top 50. His work on Waterdeep, Cormanthyr, the Sea of Fallen Stars, and the broader Realms continuity represents setting design at its finest — the kind of work that makes a world feel real, that gives GMs confidence their campaigns won’t be contradicted by the next supplement.
In a mechanical innovation ranking, the picture is different.
The gap between those two positions is the gap between what Schend does brilliantly and what this methodology values. He’s the worldsmith, not the system-smith. The continuity guardian, not the rules inventor. The architect of coherence, not the creator of frameworks.
His LinkedIn specialties list “world building, intellectual property management, continuity management, manuscript assessment, proofreading.” Game mechanics design is conspicuously absent. His website tagline is “Word Wrangler & Worldsmith.” He knows exactly what he is. So does this ranking.
The draft article proposed a total of 16 with adjustments of +0. The pillar scores hold, but the methodology corrects the adjustments. Schend’s 36-year career — published game work spanning 1990 to 2024 — clearly triggers the Longevity 20+ years adjustment at +2. The draft acknowledged the longevity and then didn’t score it. The corrected total is 18.
The Scoring Case
Invention (4): “Variation to copy.”
Blood Wars CCG is a complete game system but commercially marginal and didn’t influence later designs. Buck Rogers High Adventure is a co-design with Grubb. The d20 Alchemy guide offers minor subsystem work. No mechanics he created were widely adopted by other designers or became industry standards. Even his proudest work — Sea of Fallen Stars — credits others for the mechanical subsystems. Two mechanical design credits in 36 years, neither commercially significant, neither influential.
Architecture (6): “Good craftsmanship.”
Over 50 credited products across 36 years, spanning TSR, WotC, Green Ronin, Bastion Press, Paizo. The Forgotten Realms IP database was genuine organizational innovation for franchise management. His continuity monitoring helped maintain coherence across one of gaming’s largest shared settings. But this is editorial and organizational architecture, not game system architecture. Blood Wars is his only complete system, and it didn’t generate an ecosystem.
Mastery (6): “Competent, moments of craft.”
His setting supplements are among the best-regarded in the Forgotten Realms canon. Two novels. 36-year career. But no individual Origins Awards, ENnie Awards, or Hall of Fame inductions. Two products he contributed to received ENnie nominations, both multi-author works. No evidence of other designers citing Schend as a mechanical influence. Mastery in worldbuilding is evident; mastery in mechanical design is not demonstrated.
Adjustments (+2):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 — Published game work spanning 1990–2024, thirty-four years of credited output across TSR, WotC, Green Ronin, Bastion Press, Paizo, and current RealmsBound contributions.
- ■ Full-time career: No. TSR/WotC from 1990–2000 (ten years), but primary profession since 2000 has been library work. Freelance game contributions are secondary.
- ■ Awards: No. No individual Origins, ENnie, or Hall of Fame recognition. Two multi-author products received ENnie nominations, but Schend was not primary designer on either.
- ■ Branded name: No. No Schend title recognizable to non-gamers.
- ■ Cross-genre success: No. Blood Wars (CCG) plus RPG work spans two formats, but Blood Wars was commercially marginal. The “success” threshold is not met.
- ■ Commercial success: No. No single title near $10M lifetime retail.
- ■ Design propagation: No. No documentable copying of Schend’s mechanical approaches by other designers.
The Hidden Pattern
Steven E. Schend treats imaginary places as real places.
Not as backdrops for adventure. Not as aesthetic wallpaper. As functioning social systems with economic needs, legal frameworks, infrastructure constraints, biological consequences.
When he builds a city, he thinks about where the waste goes. When he creates a shapeshifter, he accounts for the digestive byproducts of instantaneous mass change. When he manages an IP, he builds databases to track thousands of interconnected facts across decades of publication.
This is the “bottom-up sociological worldbuilding” his career exemplifies. Start with the street. Ask what the people living there need. Build upward from infrastructure to politics to magic.
The methodology doesn’t reward this directly. Mechanical invention scores higher than setting invention. System architecture scores higher than organizational architecture. Awards and citations matter more than the invisible work of keeping a shared world coherent.
But the Forgotten Realms exists as a coherent, playable, publishable entity in part because Schend spent years ensuring it didn’t collapse under its own contradictions. That’s not nothing. It’s just not what this framework measures.
What Remains
The Forgotten Realms IP database — organizational infrastructure that held a sprawling setting together across three decades and hundreds of products.
Sea of Fallen Stars — underwater worldbuilding that treated the ocean floor as a real place with real civilizations, not just a wet dungeon.
Cormanthyr and The Fall of Myth Drannor — the definitive account of elven civilization’s decline, making “lore” a core component of gameplay experience.
City of Splendors: Waterdeep — urban sociology applied to fantasy, a city that could actually sustain its population.
Blood Wars CCG — one complete game system, commercially marginal but genuinely his.
Two novels. Nine short stories. Fifty-plus products. Thirty-six years.
And the invisible work: ensuring that when you opened a Forgotten Realms book in 1999, it didn’t contradict what you’d read in 1989. That Waterdeep’s laws made sense. That the undersea realms had territorial waters and neutral zones.
Total: 18 points. Year: 1990.
18 points. 1990. The worldsmith. Still building infrastructure that makes other people’s adventures possible.
The methodology sees the difference. It has to.