(15/41: 2020) AMANDA LEE FRANCK
The Barge
Amanda Lee Franck drew a garbage barge. That’s where this starts — not with a rule system or a design theory, but with a sixty-page zine full of beetles, pirate radio stations, and failing infrastructure, all illustrated by the same person who wrote it.
You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge was published in 2020 through Kickstarter’s Zine Quest initiative. It was Franck’s first RPG publication. It was also, by her own account, the first RPG she ever ran.
That fact deserves a pause. Most designers spend years playing, running, homebrewing, and absorbing the grammar of the form before they publish anything. Franck skipped all of it. She drew a world, wrote the people who lived in it, and handed it to strangers. Seven hundred backers funded it at fifteen times its $600 goal. Something about a barge full of trash and the people who called it home resonated immediately.
The method was already visible. Franck doesn’t write a game and then hire someone to illustrate it. She draws the map and writes the adventure as a single act. The cross-section cutaway of the Garbage Barge isn’t a supplement to the text — it IS the text. A reviewer on Prismatic Wasteland would later note of Vampire Cruise that there is so much detail in the cutaway map that you can understand what the adventure entails just by looking at it.
That’s not illustration supporting writing. That’s a designer who thinks in pictures first and words second.
Three Vessels
Franck’s major works share an obsessive architectural choice: every one takes place aboard a vessel.
A garbage barge. A cruise ship. A submarine. Each is a closed environment — a world with walls, a setting that explains its own boundaries. You can’t leave. The question isn’t where to go. It’s what to do with the people trapped alongside you.
This solves an ancient problem in adventure design: the “why don’t we just leave” question. Ravenloft solved it with mist. Tomb of Horrors solved it with greed. Franck solves it with water. The vessel is the dungeon, the social space, and the ticking clock all at once.
Vampire Cruise (2021) tightened the formula. Where Garbage Barge was maximalist — lists of trash, random encounters, and NPCs without clear spatial anchoring — Vampire Cruise introduced an overstuffed two-day itinerary. Ping-pong tournaments, formal dinners, poolside activities. Events happen whether the players attend or not. The cruise doesn’t care about the protagonists. It’s a social clock that keeps ticking while vampires hunt below decks.
Crush Depth Apparition (2023) pushed further still. A haunted submarine in 1902. A standalone system with its own procedures — haunting escalation, submarine systems failure, spatial transformation. The vessel doesn’t just contain the adventure. It becomes the horror, corridors twisting into impossible geometries as psychic pressure mounts.
The progression across these three works tells you what kind of designer Franck is becoming.
The Voice-Quote Method
Franck’s most praised technique is her approach to NPCs.
Traditional module design provides stat blocks, personality traits, motivations, and appearance descriptions — paragraphs of information the GM must process and synthesize before portraying a character. Franck replaces all of it with a single quotation in the NPC’s own voice.
One line. The way the character talks tells you who they are, what they want, and how they feel. The GM doesn’t interpret a description. They perform a voice.
Franck credits Zedeck Siew and Mun Kao’s A Thousand Thousand Islands series as the direct influence — their terse NPC descriptions paired with illustration. The voice-quote method is Franck’s specific refinement: not just brevity, but performance. Every NPC is a line reading waiting to happen.
Reviewers have praised this method extensively. Brad Kerr and Yochai Gal on the Between Two Cairns podcast highlighted it for dramatically lowering GM cognitive load. The technique has been recognized as part of a broader trend toward minimalist NPC design in the indie RPG space. Whether Franck’s specific implementation becomes standard practice remains to be seen — she’s been designing for six years, and influence attribution at this career stage is premature.
The Scaffolding Problem
The Playful Void review of Garbage Barge contains the most useful critique of Franck’s early work. The reviewer praises the setting’s evocative NPCs and creatures, then delivers the structural diagnosis: the reviewer likes the content but wants more support in using it. The conclusion is frank — a GM might struggle to run the adventure despite admiring it.
That’s the central tension in Franck’s development as a designer. She creates extraordinarily vivid worlds. She populates them with characters who feel alive. And then she trusts the GM to figure out how the pieces fit together — which works beautifully for experienced improvisers and leaves less confident GMs stranded.
By Crush Depth Apparition, she was addressing this directly. She playtested the game and discovered players wouldn’t engage with the horror elements without explicit permission from the fiction’s hierarchy — so she rewrote the opening to scaffold that engagement. She built explicit procedures for haunting escalation. She designed a standalone system rather than deferring to external rules.
The evolution is real and documented. Franck is learning to build the bridge between her evocative instincts and the functional structure a GM needs to actually run the game.
The Honest Assessment
Franck is an early-career designer working at the intersection of illustration and game design in the indie RPG space. Her attribution is clean — solo credit on all major works, clear separation between her design work and her illustration commissions for other designers. She is a living person based in Chicago, and all assessments here are drawn from published reviews, Kickstarter data, retail listings, interviews, and gallery documentation.
Her innovations are in presentation and adventure architecture, not in game mechanics. The voice-quote NPC method, the vessel-as-setting approach, and the map-as-primary-text philosophy are fresh syntheses of existing elements — each with identifiable prior art, each assembled with genuine creative vision. She didn’t invent new design space. She furnished an existing room in a way nobody else had.
Her system architecture is deliberately minimal. Most of her work is system-agnostic, relying on external rules for mechanical resolution. Crush Depth Apparition is her most self-contained work and demonstrates real procedural thinking, but it’s designed for one or two sessions and has documented structural limitations. There is no “Franck system” for other designers to adopt or build upon.
Her craft is developing rapidly. The arc from Garbage Barge to Crush Depth shows genuine refinement — tighter scope, explicit playtesting, functional GM tools. But six years of design work alongside a primary career as an illustrator hasn’t yet crossed the 10,000-hours threshold the methodology uses to identify mastery.
None of the adjustment triggers activate. This is what a score of 15 looks like for an early-career designer. It’s not a ceiling. It’s a snapshot.
The Scoring Case
Invention (6):
“Smart combination.” Franck synthesizes existing elements — system-agnostic OSR adventures, zine format, minimalist NPC design, cartographic storytelling — into something recognizably her own. The art-text unity where the map IS the adventure, the vessel-as-closed-environment concept, and the voice-quote NPC method are creative assemblages with genuine vision. But each has clear prior art: Siew and Kao for NPC brevity, the broader OSR tradition for site-based adventures, Dyson Logos and others for map-centric design. Fresh synthesis, genuine vision, modest new space. That’s a 6.
Architecture (5):
“It works.” The dual test is quality AND propagation. Propagation is zero — there is no system to copy. On quality: Crush Depth Apparition functions as a standalone game with its own escalation procedures, but it’s designed for one to two sessions and has documented structural limitations. Garbage Barge is evocative but structurally loose. Vampire Cruise is tighter but system-dependent. Functional short-form adventures, not deep systems. That’s a 5.
Mastery (4):
“Developing craft.” Six years active (2020–present). Four major solo designs plus smaller projects and ongoing Patreon content. Clear craft evolution from maximalist looseness to focused, playtested work. Identifiable design voice: vessels, art-text unity, tonal specificity, NPC-driven play. But game design is co-primary with illustration — she maintains a substantial body of illustration work for other designers’ games. The 10,000-hours threshold for focused game design hasn’t been crossed. A designer on the rise. That’s a 4.
Adjustments (+0):
- ■ Longevity 10+: No. 2020–2026 = approximately six years.
- ■ Full-time career: No. Primary profession is illustration and art, with game design as co-primary creative work.
- ■ Awards: No. No nominations for games she designed. (His Majesty the Worm won Silver ENNIEs, but Franck was the illustrator, not the designer.)
- ■ Branded name: No. None of her titles pass the grandmother test.
- ■ Cross-genre success: No. All work is in tabletop RPGs.
- ■ Commercial success: No. Combined Kickstarter revenue under $15,000.
- ■ Design propagation: No. No documented cases of other designers adopting her specific techniques.
The Hidden Pattern
Franck doesn’t separate art from design. That’s the thing.
Most tabletop designers write rules and settings, then hand the manuscript to an artist. The words come first. The pictures come second. The two might never meet.
Franck draws the submarine first. The adventure lives inside the drawing. The rules — to the extent she uses rules at all — exist to give players a reason to move through the space she’s already made visible.
This inverts the standard workflow. It’s closer to how a film director works than how a game designer works. The visual comes first. The structure serves the image.
The Weird Hope Engines exhibition at Bonington Gallery in 2025 wasn’t an anomaly. It was recognition that Franck’s maps aren’t game accessories. They’re the primary design document. When they hung as lightboxes in a gallery, they didn’t lose information. They gained context.
She’s designing games the way an artist designs installations — from the image outward.
What Remains
Four zines about people trapped on vessels. A voice-quote method that may or may not become standard practice. Maps that work as art objects independent of the games they serve. A clear improvement arc that suggests the best work hasn’t been made yet.
Franck entered the hobby in 2020, drew a garbage barge, and discovered she was a game designer. Six years later, she’s designing haunted submarines with standalone systems and getting her maps hung in galleries.
The score captures where she is. The trajectory hints at where she’s going.
Total: 15 points. Year: 2020.
Total: 15 points. Year: 2020.