(22/41: 1982) CHRISTOPHER CLARK (1962–)
The Kid Who Wouldn’t Play D&D
Christopher Clark designed his first game because his friends thought Dungeons & Dragons was weird sword-and-sorcery nerd stuff. So he made a game about cop shows instead.
That pragmatic, audience-first instinct has governed his entire career. Inner City (1982) was a crime RPG born in a high-school junior’s notebook, designed to lure people who rejected fantasy into sitting down at a table and playing. Forty-three years later, Clark is still doing the same thing—finding barriers to entry and designing around them. Stuffed animals instead of expensive miniatures. Plastic army men instead of pewter figures. Candy as game components. Humor instead of lore. If somebody wouldn’t play, Clark figured out why and removed the obstacle.
He calls himself “a dinosaur of the industry, although I hope never to become extinct.” Inner City Games Designs has operated continuously since 1982. He co-founded publishing ventures with Gary Gygax, Frank Mentzer, Tim Kask, and James M. Ward. He claims over a hundred published titles—roughly fifty are confirmed through databases—across RPGs, miniatures games, board games, micro games, and adventure modules. He has never achieved mainstream commercial breakout. He has never stopped working.
The Invention: Toys as Wargame
Fuzzy Heroes (1992) is the design that justifies Clark’s place in this ranking.
The concept: use actual stuffed animals as miniatures in a tactical wargame. Not miniatures that represent stuffed animals. The actual toys. Pulled from a child’s bedroom, dropped onto a kitchen table, and played. The game derives each toy’s statistics from its physical properties—real-world size determines Energy Points, physical characteristics determine Defensive Classification, predominant color determines movement type. Character creation doesn’t exist. Any toy can enter the game immediately.
Nobody had done this before. Miniatures wargaming in 1992 required expensive lead or pewter figures, careful painting, and elaborate terrain. Clark eliminated all of it. Dragon Magazine #216 noted that Fuzzy Heroes was “the least expensive miniatures game you’ll ever come across.” The concept solved two problems simultaneously: the cost barrier that kept families out of miniatures gaming, and the intimidation barrier that kept non-gamers away from wargames. A five-year-old can understand that her teddy bear is fighting his dinosaur. The tactical depth emerges from the rules layered on top.
The system expanded across four books. Fuzzy Sooper Heroes (1993) added superhero powers and the W.A.S.H. chivalric code—toys that don costume pieces gain powers but must follow strict behavioral rules. Dragon #216’s reviewer noted this effectively turned the miniatures game into a role-playing game suitable for teaching RPG concepts to children. Heroes in Space! (1996) added zero-gravity combat and ship construction from household materials. The system kept growing without betraying the core principle: play with what you have.
The concept opened design space that hadn’t existed. Before Fuzzy Heroes, the idea that a wargame could derive its statistics from the physical properties of non-standardized household objects was not circulating in the hobby. Clark didn’t implement an emerging concept. He invented a framework—measurement as character generation, the physical world as the stat block—that made miniatures gaming possible for anyone with a toy shelf and a living room floor.
The Other Mechanic
Inner City (1982) introduced a crime-recognition escalation system that deserves mention. Every crime a character commits increments their Crimes statistic. Law enforcement NPCs roll against Crimes × 2% to recognize a character—creating a ratcheting risk curve where early crime is nearly consequence-free but experienced criminals become walking targets. The mechanic generates emergent strategy without complex subsystems: players organically develop tactics like shielding one “clean” party member for legitimate transactions. The Crimes stat is jurisdiction-dependent, allowing characters to flee to fresh territory.
No earlier tabletop RPG has been identified using this precise escalating-recognition mechanic, though percentage-based wanted systems existed in some form. It’s a clever piece of design that anticipated the heat systems in video games like Grand Theft Auto by fifteen years. Clark himself draws the comparison, noting he prefers to think “that GTA sounds a lot like this.” No direct connection has been documented.
Inner City Redux (2021), the Kickstarted update, added its own wrinkle: a stat-free skill architecture where what appear to be character statistics are actually quick-reference numbers derived entirely from skills and training. All characters start identical. Gear and skill acquisition are the sole axes of progression. It’s unusual for a level-based game, and it reflects forty years of iteration on a system Clark designed as a teenager.
The Small-Press Life
Clark has operated entirely within the small-press ecosystem for his entire career. Inner City Games Designs products are priced between three and eight dollars for PDFs, six to thirty dollars for print editions. Most have zero ratings on DriveThruRPG. His most commercially successful project—The Starship Warden, a 650-page sandbox co-authored with James M. Ward for Troll Lord Games—raised $92,239 on Kickstarter. His solo projects are more modest: Lance raised $7,433, Inner City Redux raised $3,571.
The War PIGs series (Plastic Infantry Guys) applies the same accessibility philosophy as Fuzzy Heroes to plastic army men. Gummi Wars! uses candy as figures. Lemmings In Space! does what the title suggests. The ICGD catalog reads like a toybox inventory: Crouching Hamster Hidden Translation, Who’s Your Daddy?, My First Miniatures Game, Blow Me Out of the Sky! Clark publishes parody games under the pen name “Hugh Betcha,” including My First LARP—described as “not really playable, but fun to read for gaming hobby veterans.”
The Lands of Igpay adventure modules are system-agnostic OSR dungeons with names like These Goblins Won’t Kill Themselves and I Think I Stepped In Something. They cost a few dollars each. They sell to the convention circuit and the old-school community. They are exactly what they promise to be.
The Legends Next Door
Clark’s career takes an unusual turn in 1997 when he approaches Gary Gygax—sidelined from the industry after TSR’s sale to Wizards of the Coast—and proposes they publish adventures together. They co-found Hekaforge Productions in 1998. Gygax provides the Lejendary Adventure system and a 72,000-word Lejendary Earth manuscript. Clark provides the publishing infrastructure, expands the manuscript into five books, contributes interior artwork, edits, and writes adventure modules. He becomes the most prolific scenario author for Gygax’s final published RPG system.
In 2010, Clark co-founds Eldritch Enterprises with Frank Mentzer (author of the BECMI D&D rules), Tim Kask (TSR’s first employee and founding editor of Dragon Magazine), and James M. Ward (creator of Metamorphosis Alpha). Each contributes adventure modules and supplements in the old-school tradition. Clark publishes Forest of Deceit, Dark Visitor, Rain of Terror, and others under his own name within the Eldritch framework.
The Starship Warden (2021), co-authored with Ward for Troll Lord Games, is Clark’s most high-profile credit—a massive expansion of Ward’s generation-ship concept. After Ward’s death, Clark became the contact person for licensing Ward’s Metamorphosis Alpha properties through Para Bellum Consulting.
The pattern is consistent: Clark as the infrastructure builder, the editor who expands manuscripts into publishable books, the co-founder who provides the production setup that lets legendary designers return to retail. His role in these partnerships is genuine and documented. But the methodology measures what you designed, not what you facilitated. The Lejendary Adventure system was Gygax’s creation. The Metamorphosis Alpha universe was Ward’s. Clark expanded, published, and stewarded their work. That’s a different craft.
The Honest Assessment
Two research drafts arrived with radically different framings. Draft 1 was thorough, source-verified, and honest about limitations—marking uncertain claims and flagging missing evidence. Draft 2 inflated nearly every dimension of Clark’s career.
The most significant inflation: Draft 2 invented an elaborate narrative about an “Xpress Engine” dice pool system with an “Attribute Ceiling” philosophy, dating it to 1982 and comparing it to Legend of the Five Rings’ Roll and Keep system. Draft 1 describes Inner City as using a hybrid d20/d100 system and Inner City Redux as having a stat-free skill architecture. These are fundamentally different mechanics. The Xpress Engine narrative appears fabricated.
Draft 2 also claimed BrikWars and other games cite Clark’s Fuzzy Heroes as a foundational text, and that Clark “effectively helped to launch what would become the Old School Renaissance.” Draft 1 found zero documented cases of other designers crediting Clark as an influence. Draft 2 accepted Clark’s self-claimed 117 published titles; Draft 1 confirmed roughly 50 through databases. The methodology follows the evidence.
The Scoring Case
Invention (7):
“People noticed.” The physical-object-derived character statistics in Fuzzy Heroes (1992) represent a meaningful innovation that opened new design space. Before Fuzzy Heroes, no miniatures wargame derived its statistics from the physical properties of non-standardized household objects. Clark didn’t iterate on an existing mechanic—he invented a framework where the real world becomes the character sheet. Dragon Magazine noticed. White Wolf noticed. The concept made miniatures gaming accessible to anyone with a toy shelf. The crime-recognition escalation system in Inner City (1982) adds further evidence of original thinking—a clever emergent-strategy mechanic with no identified precursor. Neither innovation was widely adopted, which caps the score below 8. But the Fuzzy Heroes concept shifted the conversation about what miniatures gaming could be, and it opened a design space—play-with-what-you-have wargaming—that hadn’t existed. The 7 reflects meaningful innovation that people noticed without wholesale adoption.
Architecture (5):
“It works.” Clark’s systems achieve their goals. Fuzzy Heroes is playable, fun at the table, and scales from a five-year-old’s first game to a convention session with experienced gamers. RPG.net gave Fuzzy Sooper Heroes Style 4/5, Substance 4/5—the highest marks any Clark product received. War PIGs was playtested with a nine-year-old with ADHD who “stayed mesmerized with play.” The Fuzzy Heroes system supported four books of modular expansion, each adding meaningful mechanical layers. Inner City Redux generates sandbox gameplay through random encounters without extensive GM preparation. But White Wolf rated Fuzzy Heroes 2/5 for adult gamers, suggesting the system lacks depth for experienced players. Dragon #216 noted “typo problems.” Convention play appears to be the primary use case—no long-campaign reports exist. Production quality is consistent with small-press standards: functional, not polished. Propagation is near zero—no third-party supplements, no fan-created content, no designers building on Clark’s frameworks. The sole exception: Mutazoids, a co-created property that received a third edition from different designers. The 5 reflects systems that work for their intended purpose without hidden depth or structural legacy.
Mastery (6):
“Competent professional, moments of real craft.” Clark has logged four decades of focused design time across fifty-plus confirmed titles spanning RPGs, miniatures games, board games, micro games, and adventure modules. His design voice is immediately recognizable: humor, accessibility, genre satire, toys as game components. The craft evolution is documented—from the simple crime RPG of 1982 through the genuinely creative Fuzzy Heroes concept in 1992 through collaborative editorial work through a late-career return to original IP with Inner City Redux and the hard-science Lance RPG. Fuzzy Heroes is a genuine moment of real craft—a creative concept executed with purpose and expanded across four books. His collaborative work with Gygax and Ward shows professional-level editorial and developmental skill. But the catalog as a whole shows competence rather than consistent mastery. His highest review is 4/5, 4/5 for a supplement. No awards or nominations. His systems are accessible and fun but not deep. The 6 reflects sustained career output with flashes of genuine craft amid solid, unpretentious work.
Adjustments (+4):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 (1982 through 2022+. Inner City to Lance. Forty-plus years with published designs across the span. ICGD has operated continuously since 1982.)
- ■ Full-time career: +1 (Game design and publishing have been Clark’s primary professional identity. ICGD has operated continuously for over four decades. He took a partial hiatus to manage a bakery from 1999–2010 but maintained publishing output throughout.)
- ■ Awards: No. No Origins Awards, ENnie nominations, or other industry honors found for any ICGD product. Guest of Honor at Gamicon 2000, but that’s recognition, not an award.
- ■ Branded name: No. Inner City, Fuzzy Heroes, and Lance are unknown outside niche hobby circles. No game recognized by non-gamers.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1 (RPGs—Inner City, Lance—and miniatures wargames—Fuzzy Heroes, War PIGs. Two distinct tabletop formats with published designs in each.)
- ■ Commercial success: No. Most ICGD products priced $3–$8. Highest Kickstarter was $92K for The Starship Warden (co-authored). No single title approaching $10M lifetime revenue.
- ■ Design propagation: No. No instances found of other game designers publicly crediting Clark as an influence. No game systems cite his designs as inspiration. Draft 2’s claims about BrikWars and other games citing Clark are unsubstantiated by database research.
The Hidden Pattern
Clark’s career reveals the two-body problem of small-press tabletop design: invention without distribution.
He created a genuinely novel concept in Fuzzy Heroes—a framework where the physical world becomes the game system, where any child’s toy is a ready-made miniature. Dragon Magazine reviewed it. White Wolf reviewed it. Convention GMs have run it for decades. But it never reached the distribution channels that turn a clever idea into an adopted mechanic. The concept stayed inside ICGD’s catalog, priced at a few dollars, sold through convention tables and DriveThruRPG, unknown to the broader design community that might have built on it.
Meanwhile, Clark spent two decades as the publishing infrastructure behind legendary designers. He gave Gygax a second act. He gave Ward a production partner. He gave Mentzer and Kask a co-founded publishing house. The methodology doesn’t score facilitation, but the hobby is richer because someone kept the production line open for the old guard while they still had games to make.
What Remains
The toybox. Fuzzy Heroes is still played at conventions—stuffed animals deployed across kitchen tables, children learning that their teddy bear has six Energy Points because it’s twelve inches tall and blue. The concept is self-evident once you see it: of course a toy can be a miniature. Of course its size determines its stats. The elegance is in the obvious-in-retrospect quality of the idea.
The catalog. Over fifty confirmed titles across four decades, from crime RPGs to hard science fiction to parody LARPs published under the name Hugh Betcha. A body of work that nobody would confuse with anyone else’s. Every game in the ICGD catalog says the same thing: sit down, stop worrying about the rules, and play.
And the collaborations. Gygax’s last published system, shepherded into print by a small-press lifer from rural Illinois. Ward’s Starship Warden, expanded into 650 pages by the same hands. A career spent building bridges between the hobby’s past and its future, one three-dollar PDF at a time.
The methodology measures what you built and whether others built on it. Clark built a catalog that never stopped growing and an invention that never needed expensive components. Nobody built on it—not because the idea was bad, but because nobody outside the convention circuit ever saw it.
That’s the small-press paradox. The game was always there. The audience never found it.
Total: 22 points. Year: 1982.
Total: 22 points. Year: 1982.
That’s the small-press paradox. The game was always there. The audience never found it.