The House He Didn’t Build

The distinction matters because the methodology is specific: design propagation credit belongs to the inventor, not the polisher. Nesmith and Hayday created the Demiplane of Dread, the Darklord concept, the domain structure, the original fear and horror checks. Shannon Appelcline documented that these psychological saving throws themselves descended from Call of Cthulhu’s Sanity mechanic. Connors inherited a foundation with clear prior art.

What he did with that foundation was substantial. Through Forbidden Lore (1992, co-designed with Nesmith), the 1994 Revised Campaign Setting, and his capstone Domains of Dread (1997), Connors expanded the fear and horror checks into a three-tiered system—fear (fight-or-flight), horror (revulsion at the deeply disturbing), and madness (long-term psychological breakdown)—each producing different mechanical consequences. He gave the powers check mechanic its definitive thirteen-stage escalation from innocence to absolute corruption, culminating in the character becoming a Darklord and permanently exiting play.

He introduced domain types (Pockets, Islands of Terror, Clusters, Core Domains), Cultural Levels ranging from Stone Age to Renaissance, the custom Tarokka deck as both in-game divination and DM-facing plot randomization, and detailed domain evolution mechanics tied to each Darklord’s specific curse. Domains of Dread consolidated a decade of contradictory adventure modules into a single coherent political and geographical map. An RPG.net reviewer noted it transformed Ravenloft from a sideshow attraction into a main event.

This is excellent stewardship. It is not invention. The methodology draws a hard line between the two.

The Moral Horror Machine

Where Connors made his most distinctive contribution was in the powers check system’s underlying philosophy. Call of Cthulhu’s Sanity mechanic punishes passive exposure to horror—see something terrible, lose Sanity points. The universe is indifferent, and breakdown is inevitable. Connors’ powers checks punish deliberate moral transgression. Lying triggers a 1% chance of Dark Powers attention. Minor betrayal, 2%. Brutal murder, 8–10%. Acts of ultimate darkness, up to 100% at DM discretion.

A failed check produces a simultaneous blessing and curse—supernatural power alongside disfigurement or behavioral compulsion. The character gains something terrible by becoming something terrible. This is Faustian horror mechanized: the system doesn’t punish bad luck, it punishes bad choices. Where Lovecraftian horror says the universe doesn’t care, Connors’ moral horror says the universe is watching, judging, and tailoring its punishment to fit the sin.

The distinction is genuinely original within the horror RPG landscape. But it’s a refinement of an existing mechanic (Nesmith and Hayday’s original powers check), applied within an existing conceptual framework (corruption-as-consequence), inside someone else’s setting. The methodology scores the difference between refining a tool and forging one.

The Card Table Revolution

The SAGA system is where Connors stepped fully outside Ravenloft’s shadow and designed something from the ground up. For Dragonlance: Fifth Age (1996), he replaced dice entirely with an 82-card Fate Deck, creating a complete RPG engine built on fundamentally different assumptions.

The hand-as-health mechanic was the boldest stroke. A character’s vitality was represented by the number of cards in their hand. Taking damage meant discarding cards equal to the damage value. This created constant tactical tension—every card spent on a brilliant action was a card no longer available to absorb punishment. Resources and survival shared the same pool. The system made vulnerability feel visceral in a way that abstract hit points never could.

The GM never rolled or played cards—NPC success was determined entirely by players’ reactive draws, prefiguring the player-facing resolution later popularized by Apocalypse World (2010) by fourteen years. Trump suits rewarded thematic specialization. Extempore magic allowed freeform spell creation. A Wealth score replaced currency tracking. These were ideas the indie design scene would work on throughout the first decade of the next century.

But SAGA arrived in a mid-1990s zeitgeist. Mike Pondsmith’s Castle Falkenstein (1994) had already brought cards to RPGs. The initial release had notable balance problems—warriors dominated, and card counting could undermine dramatic tension. Connors addressed most issues in A Saga Companion (1998), but the system was commercially short-lived, swept aside by the d20 System avalanche following Wizards of the Coast’s acquisition of TSR. The SAGA engine was adapted by other designers for the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game (1998), but Connors did not design that adaptation—only the underlying system.

A Goodreads retrospective called it “my tenth favourite RPG ever” and noted that many of its design ideas read as early iterations of concepts the indie scene would later develop independently. The causal link between SAGA and later narrative-first design remains unproven—parallel invention, not documented adoption.

Gothic Earth

Masque of the Red Death (1994) was Connors’ personal favorite, and it shows. He adapted AD&D to an 1890s Gothic Earth setting with new class structures (Soldier, Merchant, Adept, Mystic), required Victorian professions (Chemistry, Photography, Criminology), heavily restricted magic requiring proficiency checks with penalties per spell level, firearms rules, a salary system, and secret societies called Qabals.

The design occupied a unique niche between D&D’s Ravenloft and Call of Cthulhu—historical Gothic horror with D&D’s engine subverted rather than abandoned. Mark Sumner wrote in Realms of Fantasy that it was “what Ravenloft should have been in the first place.” Rick Swan gave it his highest rating in Dragon magazine.

But TSR discontinued the Gothic Earth line in the face of slow sales. Critical acclaim and commercial performance told different stories. Connors built his best room in a house that was collapsing around him—TSR’s aggressive setting proliferation was hemorrhaging money by 1996, and even innovative products couldn’t escape the financial gravity.

The Departure

Connors left Wizards of the Coast in 1999, the year after TSR’s absorption. He never designed another tabletop game. He wrote manuals for id Software’s Quake III (self-deprecatingly calling himself “the Worst Quake Player in the World”), freelanced for FASA Corporation and the Pleasant Company, returned to school for a graphic design degree, briefly served as Art Director at Fast Forward Entertainment, and eventually became a graphic designer and media director. The transition was permanent.

His legacy transmission, however, was extraordinary. The Kargatane—a Ravenloft fan group founded in 1997—produced over 1,450 pages of material building directly on Connors’ canon. In 1999, Wizards of the Coast appointed them the first-ever Official Website for a D&D setting. When White Wolf licensed Ravenloft for 3rd Edition, Kargatane core members Andrew Cermak, John W. Mangrum, and Andrew Wyatt became the professional designers of the entire 3rd Edition Ravenloft line. Few RPG designers can claim such a direct fan-to-professional pipeline.

Both Curse of Strahd (2016) and Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft (2021) cite Connors’ work in their bibliographies. But Chris Perkins’ deliberate framing of Curse of Strahd as “a bloodstained love letter to the Hickmans” repositioned the 1983 module—not Connors’ decade of setting development—as the canonical touchstone. The steward’s work endures in the architecture. The credit flows elsewhere.

The Honest Assessment

Connors occupies an unusual position in RPG history: the person most responsible for building a beloved campaign setting who receives less recognition than either the setting’s original creators or its modern revivalists. The Hickmans created the spark with module I6. Perkins reignited it with Curse of Strahd. Connors spent nearly a decade building the infrastructure between.

The methodology is designed to handle exactly this kind of case. Invention scores the originator, not the expander. Architecture requires both quality and propagation—and while Connors’ quality in the horror subsystems is strong, the known continuity problems, balance issues, and structural tensions pull the overall score down, and the propagation is mostly within-ecosystem rather than across independent designers. Mastery reflects a career that was focused, skilled, and relatively short—ten to fifteen years of active design, exclusively in RPGs, mostly within one setting.

The SAGA system is the strongest argument for a higher score. A complete original RPG engine designed from scratch, with mechanics that anticipated indie design by a decade, demonstrates ambition and range beyond Ravenloft stewardship. But its commercial failure, initial balance problems, and the absence of documented adoption by later designers limit what the methodology can credit.

The SAGA system is a fresh synthesis—cards replacing dice, hand-as-health, player-facing resolution, freeform magic—with genuine creative vision. The powers check corruption spiral in its definitive 13-stage form is distinctive. But the major Ravenloft innovations refined Nesmith/Hayday’s work (itself descended from Call of Cthulhu), and Castle Falkenstein brought cards to RPGs first. Smart combination of existing elements, not origination.

The fear/horror/madness system is widely praised as elegant and portable. The domain structure proved durable across 30+ years. But documented continuity errors, balance distortions (casters disproportionately punished), the unresolved tension between horror and sustained campaign play, and SAGA’s initial balance problems pull overall quality below “excellent.” Propagation is mostly intra-ecosystem—licensed continuations, same publisher, not independent designers building on the approach.

Clear three-phase evolution: utility player (Monstrous Compendium editing) to atmospheric refinement (Masque of the Red Death) to mechanical radicalism (SAGA system). Identifiable design signature. Moments of genuine craft. But active career approximately 10–15 years, exclusively RPGs, mostly within one setting, with common team credits. The body of work is focused but narrow.

The Scoring Case

The Architecture of Dread

The hidden pattern in Connors’ career is the gap between atmosphere and ownership. He understood something about horror that his contemporaries at TSR did not: that D&D’s power-fantasy architecture was fundamentally antithetical to vulnerability and dread, and that making horror work within it required systematic subversion—restricting magic, penalizing power, mechanizing moral consequence. No other TSR designer of the era attempted this kind of systematic genre subversion.

His Ravenloft Rule—that player characters must know they cannot rely on their abilities to save them—is a design philosophy disguised as a campaign guideline. It inverts D&D’s fundamental promise. That’s a radical act inside the hobby’s most commercially dominant system.

But radical acts inside someone else’s system score differently than building your own. The SAGA system proved Connors could design from scratch. The market didn’t care. He built his best work during TSR’s financial collapse, and when the rubble settled, he walked away.

The Kargatane became professionals. Curse of Strahd sells millions. Van Richten’s Guide cites Domains of Dread in its bibliography. The architecture of dread that Connors built still supports the weight of everything placed on top of it. He just isn’t the name on the building.

20 points. 1990. The steward’s paradox: build the world, lose the credit.

Total: 20 points. Year: 1990.

20 points. 1990. The steward’s paradox: build the world, lose the credit.