Invention No. 1

The Steampunk RPG — Space: 1889 (1988)

In 1988, Frank Chadwick published a roleplaying game set in an alternate Victorian era where luminiferous aether was real, Thomas Edison had invented an ether-propelled spacecraft, and the Great Powers of Europe had colonized Mars and Venus by gaslight. The word “steampunk” had barely been coined. K.W. Jeter had used it in a letter to Locus magazine the year before, mostly as a joke. Chadwick wasn’t labeling himself. He was building a world.

Space: 1889 was a commercial failure at GDW—cancelled after one year. The mechanics were, by most accounts, a mess: three incompatible resolution systems stitched together. Rick Swan, reviewing it for The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games, nevertheless called it “one of the most imaginative RPGs of the last decade.” The setting was the innovation. Victorian science fiction as playable space. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a game engine, not a reading list.

Castle Falkenstein arrived five years later. Gear Antique appeared in Japan in 1991. For Faerie, Queen & Country followed in 1993. Strange Owl Games rebooted the line in 2023. Every steampunk RPG traces through this one. Classification: INVENTED. No predecessor RPG in the steampunk genre exists. “Father of Steampunk RPGs” holds as a recognized subcategory—one layer below the RPG Fathers (Arneson and Gygax), which means a ceiling of 9. He clears it.

Invention No. 2

The Monster Wargame — Drang Nach Osten! (1973)

Five map sheets. 1,792 counters. An estimated two hundred hours to play. Drang Nach Osten! simulated Operation Barbarossa at division level, and nothing like it had ever been commercially published. SPI and Avalon Hill had been pushing wargame scale upward through the late 1960s and early ’70s, but nobody had gone here—theater-wide, division-by-division, turn after turn after turn.

The game launched GDW’s Europa series, an ongoing project to cover the entire European Theater of World War II at this granular scale. SPI followed with their own monster games: War Between the States in 1977, War in Europe in 1979. Nicholas Palmer coined the term “monster game” in 1977 to describe what Chadwick had started four years earlier. Classification: INVENTED. He created the format. The industry adopted it.

Invention No. 3

Coolness Under Fire — Twilight: 2000 (1984)

In Twilight: 2000, Chadwick introduced a personal hesitation rating for combat. Veterans act immediately. Novices freeze. Your character’s Coolness Under Fire stat determines how many combat phases you lose to shock and indecision before you can act. Wargames had unit-level morale and suppression for decades, but no RPG had modeled personal combat hesitation as an individual rated attribute.

It’s a narrow innovation—limited adoption beyond the T:2000 line itself—but it’s genuinely novel. Nobody had done this in an RPG before Chadwick did it. Classification: INVENTED. The mechanic is his. The adoption is thin.

Invention No. 4

Post-Apocalyptic Military Survival RPG — Twilight: 2000 (1984)

Post-apocalyptic RPGs existed before T:2000. Aftermath! (1981) and The Morrow Project (1980) were already on shelves. But Chadwick combined military simulation with a Cold War post-nuclear setting and sandbox survival into something that felt different from anything else on the market. Your characters were soldiers, cut off behind enemy lines after a limited nuclear exchange. There was no cavalry coming.

T:2000 won Best RPG Rules at the 1984 Origins Awards. Forty-plus supplements followed. Free League’s 2021 reboot proved the concept still has teeth nearly four decades later. Classification: COMBINED. The individual components existed. The specific combination was unprecedented.

Invention No. 5

Social Status Simulation & Tactical Fencing — En Garde! (1975)

GDW’s first RPG, co-designed with Darryl Hany, Paul Evans, John Harshman, and Loren Wiseman. En Garde! did two things no RPG had done before. First: a social simulation where characters accumulate status points through weekly activities—carousing, gambling, social climbing—with social level determining access to military rank, exclusive clubs, and career advancement. In 1975, when D&D meant dungeon corridors and hit points, this was radical.

Second: a tactical fencing system using secret simultaneous action plotting. Players record twelve turns of movement in advance. The cross-reference of attack versus defense, multiplied by strength and weapon type, creates what Rick Swan later called “perhaps the best fencing simulation ever to grace an RPG.” Both innovations are genuinely novel. Both had almost zero industry adoption. The social simulation was a forerunner to Traveller’s lifepath system—Chadwick worked on both games, carrying the idea forward from real-time social gameplay to pre-game character generation.

Invention No. 6

Elegant Strategic Wargame with Point-to-Point Movement — A House Divided (1981)

Most wargames in 1981 ran on hex grids. A House Divided replaced the hexes with cities and towns connected by transportation lines—roads, rivers, railroads. The result was a Civil War game of unusual elegance. Chadwick’s stated philosophy: “My intent from the start was to make a game which was mechanically simple, so players could concentrate on strategy.”

It won the Charles S. Roberts Award in 1982 and was selected for the book Hobby Games: The 100 Best in 2007. S. Craig Taylor Jr. called it “elegant.” GMT Games later released a Designer Edition. The point-to-point approach wasn’t entirely new—Diplomacy used area movement in 1954, and Courtney Allen’s Storm Over Arnhem pioneered P2P the same year—but Chadwick’s execution set a template for strategic simplicity that still resonates.