The Mechanic Behind the Curtain

Every creative partnership has a visible face and an invisible engine. At Rowan, Rook & Decard, Grant Howitt writes the words — the sharp prose, the strange settings, the one-page RPGs that spread across the internet like wildfire. Christopher Taylor makes the numbers work. He is the systems designer, the balance architect, the person who ensures that the machinery under the hood actually runs when someone turns the key.

This is not a glamorous role. It is, however, an essential one. When Spire: The City Must Fall launched in 2018, what players encountered was a game about revolutionary dark elves fighting oppression in a mile-high alien city. What they felt, mechanically, was something different: a stress-based resolution system where damage accrued across multiple tracks — physical, mental, social, financial — and the question was never “can I win?” but “what am I willing to lose?” That tension was Taylor’s contribution. Howitt painted the city. Taylor wired the bombs.

The Resistance System

Heart: The City Beneath followed in 2019, taking the Resistance system deeper — literally. Where Spire was vertical and political, Heart was subterranean and body-horror, a dungeon crawl where the dungeon was alive and hungry and the characters were defined by the resources they could afford to burn. The mechanical chassis proved flexible enough to hold both registers without breaking.

Taylor and Howitt formalized the engine as the Resistance Toolkit, an open framework for other designers to build upon. The toolkit represented something increasingly common in indie RPG design: the recognition that a good system should be a platform, not a locked box. Other designers adopted the framework, extending it into genres and tonal spaces the original creators hadn’t imagined.

The partnership’s earlier work, Unbound (2016–2017), had been a collaborative worldbuilding RPG that showed Taylor’s systems instincts in a looser context. The broader RR&D catalog — Honey Heist, Goblin Quest, Crash Pandas, Eat The Reich — represents Howitt’s prolific one-page game output more than Taylor’s mechanical architecture, though Taylor’s design safety net runs beneath all of it.

The Attribution Problem

Scoring a co-designer is always an exercise in incomplete information. Taylor’s role is well-documented — he builds the mechanical foundations, tests the balance, ensures systems function under play pressure — but the creative vision, the settings, and the writing belong to Howitt. The inventive spark is genuinely shared. When Heart won seven ENNIEs in 2021, including Gold for Best Setting, Best Writing, and Best Layout, it was a partnership achievement.

What can be attributed to Taylor specifically is the Resistance system’s mechanical identity: stress tracks that force narrative consequences, resource scarcity as gameplay driver, low-prep frameworks that reward improvisation over preparation. These are real design contributions. They’re also the kind of contributions that disappear into the background when the game is working well — which is exactly how good systems design is supposed to feel.

The Scoring Case

Total: 17 points. Year: 2016.

17 points. 2016. The Systems Half of a Partnership That Made Indie RPGs Feel Like Punk Rock.