Typo Lists

Fiona Maeve Geist entered the tabletop RPG industry by sending unsolicited typo lists to indie creators on Google+. She figured out she should maybe not do that for free. That instinct—the compulsion to make someone else’s book better—became her career.

Before the games, there was philosophy. Geist earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture from Binghamton University in 2017. The academic training shows in her design work: procedural thinking, information architecture treated as functional argument, a preference for systems that reveal their logic through use rather than explanation. She brought theoretical rigor to a community that mostly ran on instinct and playtesting.

She is an openly transgender woman who has been a visible advocate for inclusion in the tabletop gaming space. Her identity informs her creative voice—the body horror in her writing draws from lived experience—but her reputation rests on the quality of her editorial and design work, not representation alone.

By 2018, her name appeared across dozens of the most acclaimed indie RPG products of the era. But the credits tell a specific story: editor, developer, co-writer, proofreader. On Mothership’s Player’s Survival Guide: developer. On Dead Planet: co-writer, one of three. On Ultraviolet Grasslands: editor. On Silent Titans: editor. On Troika! Numinous Edition: editor. The pattern is consistent. She makes other people’s work better.

Dead Planet — The Best Work

Dead Planet (2018) is where Geist’s creative voice is clearest. Co-designed with Donn Stroud and Sean McCoy in six weeks for Gen Con, it became the adventure that gave Mothership its identity. It won the Silver ENnie for Best Adventure in 2019.

Within the three-person collaboration, Geist wrote the Red Tower dungeon complex and contributed to the derelict ship generator and Necropolis random generator. Her most distinctive contribution is the d100 nightmare table—a procedural horror generator incorporating personal childhood nightmares. The body horror is deliberate and personal.

Dead Planet proved that Mothership’s adventures could be as compelling as its character sheet. The terse prose, the usability-first layout, the random generators that create emergent horror—these became templates for the broader Mothership community. Over 300 third-party Mothership products followed in the years after. The trifold pamphlet format became a hallmark of the ecosystem.

But Dead Planet is a co-design. Three names share the credit. The derelict ship generator—the module’s most mechanically innovative element—is collaborative work, and the system it plugs into is Sean McCoy’s. The methodology measures what you built, and co-design dilutes attribution.

The MoonRat Conspiracy

The real weight of Geist’s influence lies in editorial infrastructure. The MoonRat Conspiracy—the editing collective she co-founded with Jarrett Crader and Christian Kessler—became the go-to editorial team for the indie/OSR scene’s golden age.

The client list reads like a hall of fame: Ultraviolet Grasslands for Luka Rejec. Silent Titans for Patrick Stuart. Troika! Numinous Edition for Daniel Sell. ARC for momatoes. Hull Breach Vol. 1 for Ian Yusem—a 26-module anthology. Land of Eem for Exalted Funeral. The Warden’s Operations Manual for Tuesday Knight Games. These products collectively won multiple ENnies, raised millions on Kickstarter, and defined the aesthetic of a generation of indie RPGs.

The editorial philosophy drew from unexpected sources. Modern cookbooks, Geist argued, understand information delivery better than most RPG books. An RPG module should be a functional tool for a GM running a session—not a novel for a reader on a couch. Everything you need to run a room on the two pages in front of you. Terse prose. Spread-based architecture. The philosophy influenced products from Mothership to Land of Eem.

The question the methodology must answer is whether this constitutes game design. It is unquestionably creative labor. It is demonstrably influential. But editing and development, no matter how brilliant, is not the same as designing a game system.

What McCoy Built

Attribution on Mothership is unambiguous. Sean McCoy is the sole creator and designer. He designed the rules, wrote the core text, illustrated the artwork, and did all layout and graphic design. The control-panel character sheet—McCoy’s. The Stress/Panic system—McCoy’s. The flowchart skill tree—McCoy’s.

Geist’s contributions to the Player’s Survival Guide were the d100 Trinket table and the Patch table. On the 1e line, she served as developer—one of four to six credited developers on each book. In RPG publishing, “developer” means refining, playtesting, providing structural feedback. Not designing the core system.

The Mothership 1e boxed set Kickstarter raised over $1.4 million in 2022. Geist was part of the development team. But the system that generated that commercial success is McCoy’s invention. The “downward spiral” Stress architecture, the campaign frames linking one-shots through corporate debt, the TOMBS cycle of horror adventure structure in the Warden’s Operations Manual—these are system-level innovations from the Mothership core team, and Geist contributed to refining them. She did not originate them.

This matters because the methodology’s Trap 6—Propagation Without Invention—is explicit: design propagation credit belongs to the inventor, not the polisher. The Mothership ecosystem propagated. McCoy invented the engine. Geist helped tune it.

The Solo Record

Geist’s sole-authored game designs total two small products: Disk Horse #1.1 (2021), a PbtA-derivative zine about the Satanic Panic exploring meta-mechanical “public perception” as a design concept, and a Jellicle Cat skin for Monsterhearts. She also has contributing designer credit on Mothership: Unconfirmed Contact Reports (2024).

Disk Horse is her most conceptually ambitious personal work—a game where the “system” is meta-commentary on the hobby itself. It’s clever. It has no documented adoption by other designers. No third-party supplements. No propagation. A small, personal expression in a career built primarily on improving other people’s expressions.

The gap between her editorial footprint and her design footprint is the central fact of her career. She touched nearly every landmark indie RPG of the late 2010s and early 2020s. She designed almost none of them.

The Craft Arc

The evolution is real and worth documenting. Fan-volunteer sending typo lists on Google+ (pre-2018). Professionalization through the MoonRat Conspiracy, moving from catching errors to structural editorial work (2018–2020). Co-design on Dead Planet proving she could contribute at the creative level, not just the polish level. Development on the Mothership 1e line at commercial scale. Solo design experiments with Disk Horse.

There is a clear upward trajectory: from proofreader to editor to developer to co-designer to (limited) solo designer. The question is where that trajectory has reached by 2025. Seven years of professional credits, concentrated in editorial and development work, with thin solo design output. The craft is developing. The body of personally-authored design work hasn’t caught up to the editorial reputation.

Her contemporaries are telling. Amanda Lee Franck (#281, Score 17, 2018) and Sean McCoy (#283, Score 17, 2018) bracket her in the database. All three emerged from the 2018 Mothership wave. Their careers are intertwined. But Franck and McCoy have larger personal design catalogs. The clustering reflects a real creative ecosystem; the score differences reflect what each person built versus what they refined.

The Honest Assessment

Both AI research reports—Gemini’s web-sourced deep research and Claude’s training-data analysis—converge on the same portrait with different levels of inflation. Gemini presents Geist as an architectural innovator who originated procedural frameworks. Claude positions Gradient Descent as her flagship design. Both reports overstate her personal design contributions when measured against the methodology’s attribution requirements.

The factual record is more precise. Gradient Descent (2020) was designed and written by Luke Gearing, not Geist—it was developed within the Mothership ecosystem that Geist helped shape editorially, but the design credit belongs to Gearing. The nested derelict ship generators in Dead Planet were collaborative work among three designers. The TOMBS cycle and campaign frames are Mothership system innovations, not Geist’s personal inventions.

What remains after the attribution is corrected is still meaningful: a career that touched nearly every important indie RPG of a generation, editorial philosophy that genuinely improved how RPG books deliver information, co-design on one of the decade’s most influential adventure modules, and a developing solo design voice that hasn’t yet produced a major personal work.

The methodology measures what you designed. Not what you edited. Not what you refined. Not what you touched. What you built.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Every creative scene needs connective tissue—people who make the joints work, who carry ideas between projects, who ensure that brilliant but messy visions actually function when they reach the table.

Geist entered the indie RPG scene at its most fertile moment—the Google+ migration, the ZineQuest explosion, the birth of Mothership and Troika! and Ultraviolet Grasslands and a dozen other games that redefined what independent RPGs could be. She touched nearly all of them. Not as designer. As the person who made the books work.

The MoonRat Conspiracy’s editorial fingerprints are on more acclaimed indie RPGs from this era than any single designer’s mechanical innovations. That is genuine influence. The methodology doesn’t have a pillar for it, and maybe it should. But the scoring system measures what you built, and by that measure her record is honest: developing mastery in a role that is primarily editorial, with a solo design voice still finding its scale.

She’s thirty-something with a doctorate and seven years of increasingly prominent professional credits. The craft arc points upward. The solo design catalog hasn’t caught up to the editorial reputation yet. If it does—if there’s a major personal design in the pipeline that brings the procedural horror and information architecture philosophy into a complete system of her own—the score changes. Meaningfully.

Total: 13 points. Year: 2018.

13 points. 2018. She built no cathedrals. She made sure the ones other people built didn’t leak.

Influence and score are different things. The methodology measures one. The industry remembers both.