(14/41: 2006) JOHN PRESCOTT
The Larry Elmore Bet
In 2004, a man in Macomb, Mississippi, with no prior game design credentials decided to start an RPG company. He had two assets: a fantasy world he’d been building in his head, and the phone number of Larry Elmore.
Elmore—the painter who gave Dragonlance its visual soul, whose Red Dragon cover defined TSR’s golden age—said yes. That single decision gave White Silver Publishing something no micro-press startup should have had: covers that looked like they belonged next to the Player’s Handbook on a game store shelf. When Prescott debuted at Origins 2005, his booth had the visual authority of a mid-tier publisher. The games inside the covers were another matter.
White Silver Publishing, Inc., operated out of Macomb with Wayne Sykes as CEO and Rajiv Patel as CFO. It was a real company with real ambitions. Prescott served as President. The plan was to acquire the Sovereign Stone RPG license from Larry Elmore—a setting originally created with Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman—reprint it for D&D 3.5 compatibility, then launch an original flagship property built from scratch. The Sovereign Stone reprints would fund the original game. The original game would establish the company. The company would survive.
It didn’t.
The Rules Guy
The original game was The Chronicles of Ramlar (2006), and here the attribution story becomes the whole story.
The core rulebook credits ten authors: Alana Abbott, Benji Blailock, John Prescott, Michael Johnston, Pyran Taylor, Rajiv Patil, Shane Wilson, Shane Wood, Tony Lee, and Wayne Sykes. Ten names on one game. In a 2014 interview, Prescott introduced himself as “world creator for The Chronicles of Ramlar” and described Tony Lee this way: “Tony has the gaming press credentials… I just try and make stuff look pretty.”
Tony Lee introduced himself unambiguously: “game designer and Rules Guy for the Chronicles of Ramlar RPG.” Lee had worked on Traveller 4th Edition, Deadlands, SAGA Marvel, WWE: Know Your Role, and the original Sovereign Stone system at Sovereign Press. He had professional game design credentials. Prescott did not.
When the Momentum mechanic came up in conversation—the system’s most innovative feature, where excess combat success converts into spendable tactical currency for the next round—Prescott interjected: “go ahead… another hit designed by Tony.” In 2018, he said: “some of Tony Lee’s game mechanics are really neat and new to the table.”
Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons—the RPG industry’s most authoritative history—describes White Silver as publishing “The Chronicles of Ramlar (2006) by Tony Lee.” Not by Prescott. By Lee.
What Prescott Actually Made
Strip away the mechanics and the attribution becomes clearer. Prescott built the world of Eranon—its cosmology, cultures, races, geography, deities, and narrative history. He served as art director, commissioning and coordinating the work of Larry Elmore, Mark Tedin, Ron Spencer, Ben Wootten, James Ryman, and others. He wrote or directed over 100 pages of setting material. Alana Joli Abbott—who wrote the tie-in Redemption Trilogy novels—worked alongside him on the world-building, but the setting vision was Prescott’s.
He also contributed the philosophical concept behind the Demeanor/Theme system—the idea that player-defined character goals should drive advancement instead of experience points. Five circles on the character sheet, each with ten dots. Players write personal objectives: become a dragon rider, cure a blighted land, earn a prestige path. Fill dots through play. One mandatory “Participation” wheel handles base leveling; the other four are entirely player-created.
Every reviewer who encountered this system praised it. James D. Hargrove wrote: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cooler system of character advancement.” David Stallard on RPGnet called it “ingenious” and said it was “the one aspect of Ramlar I’d like to take with me to other games.”
But the mechanical implementation—the circles, the dots, the emergency-spend mechanic where you can burn progression for a desperate in-game boost—was Tony Lee’s engineering. Prescott conceived the philosophy. Lee built the machine.
The System That Fought Itself
Even setting attribution aside and evaluating the full game as a collaborative product, The Chronicles of Ramlar had structural problems that every reviewer identified.
The core resolution mechanic was elegant: a percentile roll-under system where the tens digit of your result becomes the “Success Value,” creating inherent dramatic tension. Roll high but under your target, and you succeed better. The A/B (Armor/Body) system tracked damage across twelve body locations with separate armor and hit pools for each zone. Momentum let you carry excess success forward as tactical currency.
The problem was that the game abandoned its own core mechanic three times. Combat used a cross-reference table instead of the skill roll. Rogue abilities used a separate resolution system. Magic used yet another table. Hargrove wrote: “this departure from what is arguably a rich core resolution mechanic leaves me puzzled.” Three subsystems where one should have served.
The bookkeeping was heavy—twelve body locations per character, armor repair loops that created permanent resource depletion, hundreds of skill points to distribute across 34 skills with individual caps. Stallard concluded the system “needs refinement in order to appeal to a wider audience.” Bunce wrote: “Ramlar needs an experienced GM to run.”
Prescott was reportedly aware of the armor problem and had planned to transition to a Damage Reduction model in unreleased revisions. The Revised Edition (2007) did split the monolithic core book into a Player’s Guide and World Guide, added a Resource Level system to reduce bean-counting, and expanded the magic system. These were improvements. But the fundamental architectural inconsistency—three resolution systems pretending to be one—remained.
The Collapse
White Silver Publishing dissolved around 2008–2010. Reports indicate unfulfilled customer orders and unpaid freelancers. Tony Lee confirmed on RPGnet that “WSP for now is kaputz.” Personal circumstances contributed—Prescott fought pneumonia and suffered his brother’s death. The d20 market was contracting. D&D 4th Edition arrived in 2008, rendering the 3.5-compatible Sovereign Stone reprints obsolete overnight.
After the collapse, Prescott resurfaced under a new imprint called Whispering Tree Press. In 2014, Tony Lee ran a Kickstarter for a Pathfinder Edition of Sovereign Stone, which hit its $10,000 goal in seven hours—evidence that the setting still had a devoted audience. In 2018, Prescott described plans for a massive Ramlar expansion: 150 new locales, a new continent, 400 monsters, multi-system stat blocks for Ramlar, D&D 5E, and Pathfinder. Neither project appears to have reached full completion.
No public activity from Prescott has been found after February 2018. He later described himself on Amazon as a full-time independent writer of horror fiction—novels called Pray and the Revelation Chronicles trilogy, published through Dark Continents Publishing. But during the White Silver years, game publishing was the job. He was President of the company, running conventions, managing freelancers, directing art, and shepherding products to market. The pivot to horror came after the collapse, not before it.
The Scoring Case
Invention (4):
“Good twist on existing work.” The Demeanor/Theme concept—player-defined goals driving advancement instead of experience points—represents a meaningful variation on the emerging conversation around player agency. Burning Wheel’s Beliefs (2002) and FATE’s Aspects (2003) were exploring adjacent territory, but Prescott’s specific vision—five circles, player-authored objectives, dots filled through roleplay milestones—was distinctive enough that every reviewer who encountered it praised it as the game’s standout feature. Hargrove called it the coolest advancement system he’d ever seen. The mechanical implementation was Tony Lee’s, but the conceptual direction was Prescott’s. The Momentum mechanic, A/B System, and improvisational magic belong to Lee by Prescott’s own admission. A meaningful variation on known territory with identifiable improvement, driven by a concept someone else had to engineer. That’s a 4.
Architecture (4):
“Functional but rough.” The collaborative product achieves its basic goals—a complete fantasy RPG with a working percentile engine, a genuinely elegant Success Value mechanic, and a Demeanor/Theme advancement system that reviewers wanted to port to other games. The Revised Edition showed awareness of problems and made real improvements: splitting the core book, adding the Resource Level system to reduce bookkeeping, expanding magic. But three separate resolution subsystems where the core mechanic should have governed all of them. Heavy bookkeeping across twelve hit locations. Armor repair loops clashing with heroic fantasy tone. Divine Boon balance problems. Zero third-party products, zero community play content. The system works but needs house rules and an experienced GM. Basic goals achieved with notable balance problems—that’s a 4.
Mastery (4):
“Developing craft.” Prescott ran White Silver Publishing as his primary professional endeavor from 2004 through the company’s collapse around 2008, then continued pursuing the property through Whispering Tree Press into 2018. Within that span, there is a visible development arc: from republishing Sovereign Stone as a licensed d20 product, to co-creating a fully original property with a bespoke system, to the Revised Edition that addressed known weaknesses, to the planned multi-system expansion. His worldbuilding craft clearly matured—the setting was deep enough to support tie-in novels and sustained a loyal audience through two Kickstarter campaigns. His personal design voice—immersive setting, player-driven narrative goals, premium visual presentation—is identifiable and consistent. No solo-authored mechanical design work and no awards keep this below the mastery line, but there is professional quality and improving trajectory. That’s a 4.
Adjustments (+2):
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: +1. First publication 2005 (Sovereign Stone 3.5). Last publication 2016 (Something Wicked Stirs, a free 34-page PDF). Eleven years between first and last published work, though active output was concentrated in 2005–2007.
- ■ Full-time career: +1. Prescott served as President of White Silver Publishing from 2004 through the company’s collapse around 2008, running it as a full-time professional endeavor. He continued pursuing the property through Whispering Tree Press afterward. His later pivot to horror fiction does not erase the years where game publishing was his primary occupation.
- ■ Awards: No. Zero nominations, zero wins, zero hall of fame inductions for any Prescott-credited work.
- ■ Branded name: No. The Chronicles of Ramlar is unknown outside a small segment of the RPG community.
- ■ Cross-genre success: No. Exclusively fantasy tabletop RPGs—core rulebooks, supplements, adventure modules. One format.
- ■ Commercial success: No. Micro-press scale. The company collapsed financially with unfulfilled orders. No public sales figures suggest meaningful revenue.
- ■ Design propagation: No. Zero documented adoption of any Prescott-originated concept by another designer. The Demeanor/Theme mechanic was praised by every reviewer who saw it, but praise did not translate into adoption. The game’s proprietary system and small audience prevented ecosystem development.
The Hidden Pattern
Prescott is the inverse of Turnbull and Prosperi. Those two scored low on Invention and Mastery because their genius was curatorial—editing, developing, and managing other people’s designs into permanence. Prescott scores low for the opposite reason: his genius was commissioning. He found Larry Elmore. He found Tony Lee. He found Alana Abbott. He assembled a team that could have built something that lasted, and for a brief window in Macomb, Mississippi, they did build something—a game with a genuinely innovative advancement system, stunning artwork, and a setting deep enough to support novels.
The methodology doesn’t have a pillar for the skill of assembling the right people. It measures what you designed, not what you enabled. And the honest answer is that Prescott enabled more than he designed.
There’s a version of this story where White Silver Publishing survives. Where the Revised Edition gets a proper print run. Where the Pathfinder conversion ships on time. Where the Demeanor/Theme system gets the audience it deserved and somebody writes about it in a design textbook. But that version needed either more money or more time, and the d20 bust provided neither.
What Remains
A man with no game design credentials called Larry Elmore and asked him to paint covers for a fantasy RPG. Elmore said yes. He hired Tony Lee, who built a combat system with a Momentum mechanic that anticipated mechanics the industry wouldn’t standardize for another decade. He hired Alana Abbott, who wrote novels set in the world he’d imagined. He put ten names on the credits page of a 349-page rulebook.
The company lasted four years. The game has zero ratings on RPGGeek. The Kickstarter revivals didn’t finish. He went back to writing horror novels.
Twenty-one products sit on DriveThruRPG. Fifteen physical copies rest on shelves at Noble Knight Games. The Demeanor/Theme system—five circles, ten dots each, your character’s personal goals inked onto the sheet in your own handwriting—is the thing every reviewer wanted to steal and nobody did.
Total: 14 points. Year: 2006.
Total: 14 points. Year: 2006.