(16/41: 1996) BRENNAN TAYLOR
The Publisher Who Built the Indie Road
Brennan Taylor’s most important contribution to tabletop gaming isn’t a game. It’s a shipping label.
In 2004, Taylor co-founded Indie Press Revolution with Ed Cha — a centralized distribution hub that gave dozens of small-press RPG publishers the one thing they couldn’t build themselves: retail shelf space. Before IPR, an indie designer with a brilliant game and a box of books had no way to reach stores. After IPR, they had a pipeline. Taylor served as the company’s first CEO and helped establish the logistics infrastructure that the indie RPG movement ran on for half a decade, until the company was sold to Hero Games in 2010.
But Taylor is also a designer, and his thirty-year catalog tells a quieter story — one of narrativist conviction, cultural seriousness, and a willingness to build on borrowed frameworks rather than invent new ones from scratch.
The Forge Road
Taylor came up through the Forge, the online community that in the early 2000s functioned as both seminary and proving ground for indie RPG theory. Ron Edwards’s GNS model — Gamism, Narrativism, Simulationism — gave designers a vocabulary for what they were trying to do, and Taylor planted himself firmly in the narrativist camp. His interest wasn’t abstract. He wanted practical mechanics that made stories happen at the table without a game master forcing them into shape.
Mortal Coil (2005, revised 2008) was his answer. The game uses a token economy — Action, Power, Magic, and Passion tokens that players spend and trade to shape the narrative. The setting is collaboratively created at the table. The magic system is defined by the group, not the designer. It’s a game about the supernatural that refuses to tell you what the supernatural is, handing that authority to the players and then giving them the currency to negotiate it.
The system works. It doesn’t revolutionize. Mortal Coil is a solid narrativist engine that delivers what it promises — collaborative storytelling with meaningful mechanical weight. But no other designer picked up the token framework and ran with it. The innovation stayed inside Taylor’s ecosystem.
The Cultural Turn
How We Came to Live Here (2010) is Taylor’s most distinctive design. Set in a fantasy world inspired by the Puebloan cultures of the American Southwest, the game uses Fudge dice and a community-focused structure that treats the players’ home village as a character in its own right. It earned an ENnie nomination for Best Writing — deserved recognition for a game that took its cultural source material seriously enough to build mechanical infrastructure around it rather than painting it onto a standard fantasy chassis.
The game represents something Taylor does consistently and well: treating cultural specificity as a design commitment. Where other designers might reskin a generic system with non-Western flavor text, Taylor builds the culture into the mechanics. The village isn’t set dressing. It’s a subsystem.
This commitment shows up again in Thousand Arrows (2018), a Powered by the Apocalypse samurai drama co-designed with James Mendez Hodes. The game takes the PbtA framework — an established architecture — and adapts it for Japanese Warring States period action with deliberate cultural consultation. It was Taylor’s best-funded Kickstarter at roughly $24,500. Not blockbuster numbers, but respectable for indie TTRPG work.
The Borrowed Chassis
The honest assessment of Taylor’s catalog is that he builds better on other people’s frameworks than he does on his own. Bulldogs!, his sci-fi adventure RPG about freebooting space rogues, debuted in d20, migrated to Fate 3e, then upgraded again to Fate Core. Three editions, three borrowed systems. The setting — diverse alien species, rough-and-tumble galactic frontier — is fun and well-realized. But the architecture underneath is always someone else’s.
Blood Red Sands (2012) tries something more original: a GM-less competitive sword-and-sorcery game where heroes vie against Witch Kings. The competitive structure is interesting. But it raised only $7,000 on Kickstarter and didn’t generate the kind of ongoing play community that would signal architectural depth.
Taylor knows how to design. He knows how to publish. He knows how to build roads. What he hasn’t done is build a vehicle that other people want to drive.
The Scoring Case
Invention (4): “Competent within existing frameworks”
Mortal Coil’s token-based resolution is solid narrativist design. How We Came to Live Here integrates cultural material into mechanical infrastructure. Blood Red Sands experiments with GM-less competitive RPG structure. But the majority of Taylor’s catalog builds on borrowed frameworks — Fate, PbtA, Fudge, d20 — and no single mechanic has been adopted outside his own games. Not 5 because the innovations remain within Taylor’s ecosystem. Not 3 because the cultural-specificity commitment and the token economy show genuine design thinking that goes beyond reskinning existing systems.
Architecture (4): “Functional, not distinctive”
Bulldogs! migrated across three system editions — which means the architecture was always the borrowed framework, not Taylor’s. Mortal Coil received a revised edition but didn’t sustain massive ongoing play. The games work, they deliver what they promise, but none became self-sustaining systems supporting thousands of hours of independent play. Not 5 because no game demonstrates deep architectural longevity beyond its initial run. Not 3 because the games are well-constructed and complete — they do what they set out to do.
Mastery (4): “Working designer, developing voice”
Thirty years active. Roughly ten to thirteen original designs. Clear design interests: narrativism, cultural specificity, collaborative worldbuilding. ENnie nomination but no wins. Many games built on other designers’ frameworks. The voice is identifiable but not one other designers emulate. Not 5 because the designs are small-scale indie throughout — the volume is there but the weight isn’t. Not 3 because thirty years, a publisher co-founding, and consistent design interests show more than amateur or early-career output.
Adjustments — +4
- ■ Longevity 20+ years (+2): The Legend of Yore (1996) through Thousand Arrows (2018) and ongoing. Thirty years of continuous involvement in tabletop design and publishing.
- ■ Full-time career (+1): Founded Galileo Games (1996). Co-founded Indie Press Revolution (2004). Game design and publishing as primary profession for three decades.
- ■ Awards (+0): One ENnie nomination for How We Came to Live Here (Best Writing, 2010). No wins.
- ■ Branded name (+0): Not recognized outside the TTRPG community.
- ■ Cross-genre (+0): All RPGs. No distinct second game format.
- ■ Commercial success (+0): Approximately $55K total across Kickstarter campaigns. No title approaching $10M lifetime revenue.
- ■ Design propagation (+0): No mechanics widely adopted by other designers.
- ■ Field stewardship (+1): Co-founded Indie Press Revolution (2004), the centralized distribution infrastructure that gave dozens of small-press RPG publishers their first path to retail. Institutional contribution to the field beyond personal design work.
The Hidden Pattern
Taylor builds roads, not destinations.
IPR was a road — a distribution pipeline for designers who had games but no way to sell them. Galileo Games is a road — a publishing house that puts indie work into the world. Even Taylor’s design philosophy is infrastructural: narrativist theory implemented as practical mechanics, cultural material built into system architecture rather than bolted onto surfaces, collaborative worldbuilding as design principle.
The games themselves are well-paved roads that lead to interesting places. Mortal Coil delivers negotiated supernatural drama. Bulldogs! delivers pulp sci-fi action. How We Came to Live Here delivers culturally grounded fantasy. But no one builds a house at the end of these roads. No communities of sustained play have grown up around Taylor’s systems. No other designer has taken his framework and expanded it.
The road-builder’s paradox: the infrastructure outlasts the traffic. IPR’s model — centralized indie distribution — influenced how the entire indie RPG market organized itself. That contribution is real, durable, and largely invisible in a ranking that measures design. Taylor built something the field needed. It just wasn’t a game.
What Remains
Indie Press Revolution (2004) — the distribution infrastructure that gave the indie RPG movement its retail footprint. Co-founded with Ed Cha. Sold to Hero Games in 2010.
Mortal Coil (2005) — narrativist token economy, collaborative supernatural worldbuilding. The Forge theory translated into playable mechanics.
How We Came to Live Here (2010) — Puebloan-inspired fantasy RPG. ENnie-nominated. Cultural specificity as mechanical infrastructure.
Thousand Arrows (2018) — PbtA samurai drama. Taylor’s best-funded Kickstarter. Cultural consultation as design methodology.
Thirty years of building roads for an industry that needed them.
Total: 16 points. Year: 1996.
16 points. 1996. The publisher who built the indie road.
Thirty years of building roads for an industry that needed them.