(21/41: 2014) BRENDAN CONWAY
The Designer Who Made Your Stats Into Feelings
In most RPGs, your stats tell you what your character can do. Strength measures how hard you hit. Dexterity measures how fast you dodge. The numbers are capabilities — fixed, objective, yours.
Brendan Conway looked at that convention and asked: what if your stats measured how you see yourself? What if Danger wasn’t how dangerous you are but how dangerous you think you are? What if someone you respect could tell you that you’re not the hero you believe yourself to be, and your stats would literally shift in response?
The answer was Masks: A New Generation (2017), a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG about teenage superheroes navigating identity, relationships, and the terrible weight of other people’s expectations. The Labels system — five stats that represent self-image and move when others challenge it — became one of the sharpest mechanical translations of adolescent experience ever committed to a game book. Conway built a system where growing up is the mechanic.
He’s a co-owner of Magpie Games, the indie publisher behind some of the most commercially successful PbtA games in history. His design portfolio includes the highest-funded tabletop RPG Kickstarter ever launched. But the thing that distinguishes his work from the field isn’t scale. It’s the insistence that what your character feels matters more than what your character does, and that the game should have rules for both.
Labels and Influence
The Labels system is Masks’ signature contribution. Five stats: Danger, Freak, Mundane, Savior, Superior. Each one is double-edged — Freak means both powerful and strange, Savior means both selfless and self-righteous. Your Labels start at values the playbook assigns, but they don’t stay there. They shift.
The Influence mechanic is what makes them move. Influence is binary — another character either holds Influence over you or they don’t. When someone with Influence tells you something about yourself, your Labels shift. Your mentor says you’re not ready? Your Savior drops, your Danger rises. Your rival says you’re a freak? The numbers move. The mechanical effect is that interpersonal drama isn’t just narratively interesting — it’s mechanically consequential. Other people’s opinions about you change what you can do.
This is not subtle metaphor. It’s direct mechanical implementation of the experience of being young: your sense of self is unstable, shaped by the people around you, and the most powerful thing anyone can do to you isn’t punch you — it’s tell you who you are. Conway took a universal emotional reality and turned it into a dice modifier. The design is elegant because it’s honest.
Magpie Games and the PbtA Expansion
Conway is a co-owner of Magpie Games alongside Mark Diaz Truman and Marissa Kelly. The company has spent over a decade building a catalog of Powered by the Apocalypse games that push the framework into new genres and new audiences. Conway’s role has been both designer and studio leader — shaping individual games while steering the company’s creative direction.
Zombie World (2019), co-designed with Truman, experimented with card-based PbtA mechanics — replacing character sheets with card draws, making the zombie apocalypse feel more immediate and disposable. Root: The Roleplaying Game (2019) adapted Cole Wehrle’s asymmetric board game into a PbtA framework, translating faction politics and woodland warfare into narrative mechanics. The Kickstarter raised over six hundred thousand dollars from sixty-five hundred backers.
Then came Avatar Legends.
Nine and a Half Million Dollars
Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game (2021) adapted the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra into a PbtA system. Conway was lead designer. The Kickstarter funded in sixteen minutes. It raised nine million, five hundred and thirty-five thousand, three hundred and seventeen dollars from eighty-one thousand, five hundred and sixty-seven backers. It became the highest-funded tabletop RPG in Kickstarter history, the tenth highest-funded campaign on the platform overall, and the ninth most-backed.
The numbers are staggering and they require context. Avatar Legends succeeded because of a beloved IP, because of Magpie’s established reputation, and because the Kickstarter economy rewards recognizable brands. Conway didn’t design a $9.5 million game — he designed a game that a $9.5 million audience wanted to exist. The design itself extends the Labels-style approach into bending styles and balance mechanics, adapting the show’s themes of growth, balance, and identity into PbtA procedures. The ENNIE Gold for the Starter Set followed in 2023.
The commercial achievement is real and the design is competent, but the lesson of Avatar Legends is about market positioning as much as mechanical innovation. Conway and Magpie understood that PbtA’s narrative focus was the right match for a property built on character arcs and emotional growth. The game works because the designer understood what the IP needed, not because the IP needed what the designer invented.
Beyond the Apocalypse
Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game (2025) represents a potential turning point. For the first time, Conway is leading a major project that isn’t Powered by the Apocalypse — the game uses an original system called Ædana. Whether Conway can build compelling architecture outside the PbtA framework is the open question of the next phase of his career. The framework has been both platform and ceiling — it provides elegant genre-emulation tools, but it also constrains the kinds of mechanical problems a designer gets to solve.
The trajectory is clear: from Masks’ focused innovation (Labels, Influence) to Avatar Legends’ commercial scale to Fallen London’s architectural ambition. Each step asks more of the designer. The question is whether the craft that built a brilliant identity-tracking system for teenage superheroes can build a complete system from the ground up.
The Scoring Case
Invention (6): “Smart combination”
The Labels system in Masks is a fresh synthesis within PbtA — five stats representing self-image rather than capability, shifting when other characters with Influence challenge your identity. This is a clever mechanical translation of teenage identity formation: your numbers are how you see yourself, and they’re unstable by design. The Influence mechanic makes interpersonal drama mechanically rewarding rather than purely narrative. Zombie World’s card-based PbtA is genuinely experimental. Not 7 because the Labels system hasn’t been widely adopted outside Conway’s own games as a design template others build on. Not 5 because the specific insight — stats as identity rather than capability — was ahead of the PbtA field and represented a genuinely fresh synthesis of genre emulation and mechanical design.
Architecture (6): “Good craftsmanship”
Masks is well-built — the Labels system creates natural dramatic arcs, playbooks are tightly designed, and the game generates satisfying teen superhero stories with clear structure. Avatar Legends adapted the approach to a massive licensed IP. Root adapted PbtA to a board game setting. The systems support moderate campaign play and the genre emulation is consistently tight. But these are PbtA variations — they inherit Apocalypse World’s framework and modify it rather than building from scratch. Not 7 because the systems are variations on PbtA rather than self-contained architectures sustaining thousands of hours independently. Not 5 because the adaptation work is consistently well-crafted and the Labels system is genuinely elegant engineering that achieves its genre-emulation goals.
Mastery (5): “Working designer, steady hand”
Multiple professional-quality RPG designs over approximately fifteen years: Masks, Avatar Legends, Root RPG, Zombie World, Fallen London. Co-owner of Magpie Games. Clear design voice — genre emulation through narrative mechanics, PbtA adaptation to licensed IP. Visible evolution from early work through increasingly ambitious projects. ENNIE awards across multiple titles. But much of the work is collaborative, and the design approach stays consistently within the PbtA framework. Not 6 because the reliance on PbtA as a base and heavy collaborative credits make it harder to evaluate independent mastery across varied design challenges. Not 4 because the sustained career, multiple award-winning titles, and identifiable design voice demonstrate professional craft beyond developing talent.
Adjustments — +4
- ■ Longevity 10+ years (+1): Published design work from approximately 2010 (Sojourn, Game Chef entry) through 2025 (Fallen London). Fifteen years of active design output.
- ■ Full-time career (+1): Co-owner of Magpie Games. Game design is primary profession.
- ■ Awards (+1): ENNIE Gold (Avatar Legends Starter Set, 2023). ENNIE Silver (Masks: Best Family Game, 2017; Root, 2022). IGDN Best Rules (Masks, 2017).
- ■ Branded name (+0): Avatar Legends is based on a well-known IP, but the RPG itself is not recognized by non-gamers.
- ■ Cross-genre success (+0): All designs are RPGs within the PbtA or PbtA-adjacent framework. No distinct second game format.
- ■ Commercial success (+1): Avatar Legends raised $9.53M on Kickstarter — the highest-funded tabletop RPG in Kickstarter history. 81,567 backers. $10M+ lifetime revenue certain.
- ■ Design propagation (+0): The Labels system has not been widely adopted by other designers in their published games.
- ■ Field stewardship (+0): Magpie Games advocates for diverse voices in the industry, but no evidence of formal mentorship programs or institutional contributions beyond published games.
The Hidden Pattern
Conway designs games about the gap between who you are and who people tell you to be.
In Masks, you’re a teenage superhero whose identity is literally unstable — other people’s opinions change your stats, and growing up means learning which Labels to lock in place and which to let move. In Avatar Legends, you’re a bender or warrior navigating the tension between your training and your principles, between the balance the world demands and the imbalance your feelings create. In Root, you’re a vagabond caught between factions, defined less by what you can do than by who you’ve chosen to help.
The through-line is identity under pressure. Every Conway game puts a character in a situation where external forces are trying to define them, and the mechanics reward the moment when the character pushes back — or doesn’t. The Labels shift. The balance tips. The vagabond picks a side. The system doesn’t model what happens to the world. It models what happens to the person inside the world, and it makes that interior experience the thing that generates dice rolls.
This is a specific and valuable contribution to RPG design: the argument that the most interesting mechanical space isn’t physical conflict but identity conflict, and that a game system can track who you think you are with the same precision that other systems track how many hit points you have. Whether Conway can extend that insight beyond the PbtA framework — whether Fallen London’s Ædana system can carry the same emotional weight on original architecture — is the question that will determine whether twenty-one points is where this story ends or where it begins.
What Remains
Masks: A New Generation (2017) — the Labels system, the Influence mechanic, the game that made your stats into feelings. ENNIE Silver. The sharpest mechanical translation of adolescence in tabletop history.
Root: The Roleplaying Game (2019) — a board game world rendered in PbtA. Six hundred thousand dollars. Faction politics as narrative mechanics.
Avatar Legends (2021) — $9.53 million. Eighty-one thousand backers. The highest-funded TTRPG Kickstarter ever. ENNIE Gold. The proof that PbtA can scale to blockbuster IP.
Zombie World (2019) — cards instead of character sheets. The apocalypse you can set up in five minutes.
Fallen London (2025) — the Ædana system. The first step beyond PbtA. The open question.
A co-owned studio. A design voice built on the conviction that identity is the most interesting thing a game can track. A career still climbing.
Total: 21 points. Year: 2014.
21 points. 2014. The designer who made your stats into feelings.
A co-owned studio. A design voice built on the conviction that identity is the most interesting thing a game can track. A career still climbing.