The Most Important Person in RPGs Whose Job Title Isn’t “Designer”

Every book has a spine. Someone has to build it.

For over twenty-five years, Hal Mangold has been the person who turns manuscripts into objects — who takes the raw output of some of the most celebrated game designers in the industry and transforms it into something you can hold, read at the table, and find the rule you need in the middle of combat without losing the thread of the story. As Production and Art Director for Green Ronin Publishing, he has been the sole person responsible for the layout, graphic design, art direction, and print production of one of the hobby’s most respected catalogs. Mutants & Masterminds, Dragon Age, Blue Rose, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, DC Adventures, Fantasy AGE, The Expanse, Critical Role: Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting — every one of these books passed through Mangold’s hands. Every one bears his visual fingerprints.

And he appears on this list not because he designed game mechanics — his mechanical design credits are modest — but because the methodology that governs this ranking says, explicitly, that “editors, graphic designers, and system maintainers are designers. Their contributions — often invisible — enable other designers’ visible work.”

Mangold is the test case for that principle. If production professionals belong on this list at all, he belongs on it. If they don’t, he doesn’t. His placement here is an argument that they do — and an honest accounting of the limits of that argument.

The Deadlands Aesthetic

When Mangold joined Pinnacle Entertainment Group, he walked into the most visually ambitious RPG project of the 1990s: Deadlands: The Weird West.

Shane Lacy Hensley had designed the mechanics — the poker chips for fate, the playing cards for initiative, the exploding dice that would later become the foundation of Savage Worlds. But Deadlands needed more than a good system. It needed to feel like a world. The weathered parchment backgrounds. The distressed typography. The thematic borders that made every page look like a document from the Weird West itself. That was Mangold.

His title at Pinnacle was brand manager, graphic designer, and art director. He was, in the parlance of small game companies, “the production department.” But he also contributed content. The Deadlands core rulebook (1996) credits him as co-writer alongside Hensley, John R. Hopler, and Matt Forbeck. He authored Canyon o’ Doom (1998), a 128-page sourcebook and adventure. He wrote Heart o’ Darkness, Rascals, Varmints & Critters, Half-Damned: Dhampyr, and Tigres del Diablo. He edited supplements and shaped the line’s narrative direction as brand manager.

These are real design credits. They’re also secondary to what Mangold actually did at Pinnacle, which was prove a thesis: that graphic design could function as worldbuilding.

Before Deadlands, most RPG books looked like textbooks with fantasy art dropped in. The layout served the text. Mangold’s work at Pinnacle reversed that relationship — the layout became the world. Open a Deadlands book and the visual design tells you where you are before you read a word. That distressed, lived-in aesthetic wasn’t decoration. It was lore expressed through production choices.

The Green Ronin Era

Green Ronin Publishing was founded in February 2000 by Chris Pramas, with Nicole Lindroos as co-founder. Their first major release, Death in Freeport, debuted the same day as the D&D Third Edition Player’s Handbook — a piece of timing that launched the company into the d20 boom.

Mangold began freelancing for Green Ronin almost immediately, providing graphic design and layout. When the company incorporated as an LLC in 2003, he became a full partner alongside Pramas and Lindroos.

The division of labor among the three partners was clean and permanent. Pramas was the game designer — he created the AGE System, developed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition, and directed product lines. Lindroos was the general manager and COO, handling business operations, contracts, and logistics. Mangold was everything else that turned words into books.

Steve Kenson, designer of Mutants & Masterminds and one of Green Ronin’s core developers, described it plainly in 2015: “Only one guy on-staff is responsible for the artwork and the look of our books. That’s Hal Mangold… which means he’s layout designer, art director, and print buyer all in one.”

Consider the scale. Green Ronin at its peak ran four simultaneous game lines — Mutants & Masterminds, Dragon Age, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, and d20 supplements — each with its own visual identity, its own art teams, its own production schedule. One person managed the entire visual pipeline. One person art-directed every illustrator, laid out every page, negotiated every print run, ensured every PDF was bookmarked and screen-optimized.

That person was Mangold.

What Remains

The Deadlands aesthetic — the proof that graphic design could be worldbuilding, that the look of a book could be lore.

The Green Ronin catalog — twenty-plus years of production quality that set the industry standard for how RPG books should look, read, and function at the table.

Three consecutive Best Publisher ENnies — a streak built on production standards that one person maintained across four simultaneous game lines.

The Tal’Dorei bridge — the template for translating streaming-media worlds into professional print products.

Atomic Overmind Press — a model for how veteran industry professionals can maintain creative autonomy through boutique publishing.

Sixty-plus products. Thirty years. The silent hand behind the books that defined an era of tabletop gaming.

You’ve held his work in your hands. You’ve never noticed his name on the credits page.

That’s exactly how he designed it.

Total: 18 points. Year: 1996.