The Fanzine Kid

In 1994, a teenager self-published a fanzine called The Dark Library for Warhammer 40K and miniatures gaming. By twenty-one he was editing Forge: The Magazine of Miniature Gaming for Heartbreaker Hobbies & Games. By twenty-six he had a company.

Goodman Games launched in 2001 with a product that told you everything about its founder’s design instincts: Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex. A d20 setting where Union and Confederate soldiers ride dinosaurs in space. Ninety-six pages. Solo author. Conceptually gonzo, mechanically rough, aesthetically fearless. It was the company’s best-seller for years.

The d20 OGL gold rush was in full swing. Hundreds of small publishers were flooding game store shelves with D&D-compatible supplements, most of them interchangeable. Goodman entered this market with the opposite instinct—Civil War dinosaurs in space, later steampunk mechs driven by apocalyptic necessity, eventually a module series with the most deliberately unfashionable name in the industry: Dungeon Crawl Classics. He knew what game he wanted to play. He spent the next two decades building the tools to play it.

The d20 Survivor

The vast majority of d20-era publishers went bankrupt between 2005 and 2008. The market contracted. D&D 4th Edition arrived and invalidated 3.5-compatible product lines overnight. Goodman Games survived through strategic agility—publishing for 4E even while personally preferring older editions. He later said: “I will always publish old-school products because that’s the most fun for me, but it’s 4E that pays the bills.”

During the d20 era, Goodman built something subtler than product. He built brand equity with a specific audience—older gamers who wanted intelligent dungeon-crawl adventures with the feel of 1970s D&D. He identified and served that market segment before the OSR movement had a name. By the time the Old-School Renaissance coalesced around 2008–2012, Goodman had a decade of customer relationships in that space. He wasn’t joining the movement. The movement was catching up to where he’d been standing since 2003.

DragonMech (2004) showed real growth during this period. Published through Sword & Sorcery Studios (White Wolf’s d20 imprint), it was a 240-page hardcover setting where steampunk mechs existed not because they were cool but because the surface world was being destroyed by a permanent meteor rain. Goodman explicitly rejected anime mech aesthetics in favor of European-flavored, desperate machines built from necessity. Shannon Appelcline called it “widely acclaimed.” The design philosophy was maturing: genre conventions examined before being subverted, worldbuilding that justified its mechanics rather than just housing them.

The Game He Always Wanted to Play

The Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game arrived in 2012. Five hundred and four pages. Single volume. Solo designer. No splatbook treadmill planned or needed. It was not a retro-clone. It was a reimagining—what D&D might have been if designed in the 2010s by someone steeped in 1970s source material.

Goodman built it on a stripped-down d20/3e SRD chassis, then cut away everything that felt like a concession to modern game design: feats gone, skill lists gone, prestige classes gone, grid-based combat gone, attacks of opportunity gone. What remained was six ability scores (with Luck replacing the usual lineup), unified d20 resolution, three saves, race-as-class, and a level range of 0–10. Onto that skeleton he grafted systems designed to make play feel like reading Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard.

The design diary from 2011 reveals a man who had spent years studying D&D’s literary roots—Appendix N—and the OSR movement, and who had arrived at a specific conviction: that the feeling of sword-and-sorcery fiction could be mechanized without being domesticated. Magic should be dangerous and unpredictable. Combat should be cinematic and player-driven. Characters should be earned, not built. Every subsystem in DCC serves that conviction.

The Funnel, the Deed, and the Spell

Three innovations define the DCC RPG.

The Character Funnel. Players each create three to four randomly generated Level 0 peasants—gong farmer, grave digger, turnip farmer—with 1d4 hit points and improvised weapons. They play through a lethal introductory adventure. Survivors become Level 1 characters with classes. No prior RPG had formalized this as a default campaign-start mechanic. The concept had precursors in wargaming culture and tournament-style D&D, but the structured funnel as a designed play mode is Goodman’s. Kelsey Dionne’s Shadowdark RPG (2023, multiple Gold ENnies) adopted “Gauntlet” adventures explicitly modeled on DCC funnels. The funnel has entered the standard OSR design lexicon.

Mighty Deeds of Arms. Warriors and Dwarves roll a Deed Die alongside their attack roll. If it shows 3+ and the attack hits, the player’s declared narrative stunt—tripping, disarming, blinding, shield-bashing, whatever they describe—succeeds with mechanical effect scaled to the die result. This replaces feats entirely. It solved the “boring fighter” problem that had plagued D&D since 1974: warriors now have creative agency every round without needing a pre-built menu of options. An EN World commenter wrote: “Mighty Deeds of Arms is so good, it’s a headscratcher that every game hasn’t stolen it.” Widely ported as homebrew into D&D 5e and other systems.

The Spell Check system. Every spell has its own unique results table. Casters roll d20 plus modifiers against the table; results range from catastrophic failure (corruption, misfire, permanent spell loss) to extraordinary success. Each spell behaves differently at every power level. Spellburn allows casters to sacrifice ability score points for bonuses—your wizard’s body literally deteriorates as he channels power. Warhammer Fantasy had chaotic miscast tables. Call of Cthulhu had sanity costs. DCC’s contribution was the per-spell unique table creating genuinely unpredictable, dramatic magic every time someone casts anything. Shadowdark adopted roll-to-cast magic with failure consequences. Multiple reviewers name the magic system as DCC’s greatest strength.

The Ecosystem

Goodman made a decision that separates DCC from most indie RPGs: he built infrastructure for other people to create within.

The formal Third-Party Publishing License allows independent publishers to produce “Compatible with DCC RPG” products. As of 2024, over 200 fan-created products are on the market. Goodman Games sells third-party products through its own store and annually publishes ranked lists of best-selling third-party supplements. Hubris (weird fantasy setting), Star Crawl (sci-fi rules), Dark Trails (Weird West standalone), Crawling Under a Broken Moon (post-apocalyptic zine), and the Gongfarmer’s Almanac (annual community compilation) all exist because Goodman opened the gate.

Beyond the license, the DCC engine itself became a platform. Jim Wampler designed Mutant Crawl Classics (2018) entirely on DCC’s mechanical foundation. Brendan LaSalle migrated Xcrawl to the DCC system as Xcrawl Classics. Michael Curtis designed DCC Lankhmar (Fritz Leiber’s setting) using the DCC rules. Each of these is a full game built on Goodman’s architecture.

He also co-created Free RPG Day with Aldo Ghiozzi of Impressions Marketing—an annual industry-wide event that has become a fixture of the hobby’s retail calendar. Not a game product. An institutional contribution to the ecosystem that sustains game products.

The Craft Arc

The refinement arc across Goodman’s three core designs is visible and instructive.

Broncosaurus Rex (2001) was conceptually fearless and mechanically rough—a genre mashup that proved Goodman had creative ambition but not yet the system-design chops to match it. DragonMech (2004) showed real sophistication: genre conventions examined before subversion, worldbuilding that justified mechanics, a 240-page hardcover that earned critical praise. DCC RPG (2012) synthesized everything—a designer who had spent eleven years publishing other people’s adventures, learning what worked at the table, studying the literary roots of the hobby, and arriving at a system where every mechanic served a specific aesthetic conviction.

The design voice is unmistakable across all three: genre fidelity over system elegance, controlled chaos as a feature, anti-optimization as a principle, the physical book as a complete artifact. Goodman’s philosophy—articulated in the 2011 design diary and expressed in every DCC table—is that mechanics should make play feel like the source literature, even if that means embracing randomness over balance.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Goodman and Hutchings score identically—28 points—but from opposite directions. Hutchings arrived from Yale sculpture studios and Chelsea galleries, bringing installation art’s conviction that the container is part of the content. Goodman arrived from miniatures fanzines and the d20 gold rush, bringing a publisher’s conviction that serving an underserved audience is its own form of design. Both ended up in the same place: mechanics that encode feeling rather than simulate physics.

The methodology rewards Goodman for exactly the right things. He didn’t invent the most novel mechanic on this list—the funnel and spell checks are elegant implementations of circulating ideas rather than lightning from nowhere. He didn’t build the most architecturally ambitious system—DCC’s d20 foundation is borrowed, and its level cap constrains long-term play. He didn’t produce the most voluminous body of personal design work—three core products in 24 years is selective. What he did was all three at once, at a consistently high level, for twenty-five years, while building an ecosystem that amplified his innovations beyond what any solo designer could achieve.

The OSR has many retro-clone designers who faithfully reproduced old rules. It has many indie designers who reimagined them in personal ways. Goodman is rare because he did something harder: he asked what D&D’s source material wanted the mechanics to feel like, and then he built a system that delivered that feeling. The funnel makes you feel the mortality of pulp heroes. Mighty Deeds make you feel the improvisation of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Spell checks make you feel the danger of Dying Earth magic. The dice chain makes you feel the strangeness of a world where nothing is standardized. Every mechanic is a translation from literature to experience.

What Remains

A teenager who published fanzines in 1994 built a game company that survived the d20 bust, the 4th Edition transition, and the OGL crisis. He wrote three RPGs himself. The third one was a 504-page love letter to the books Gary Gygax listed in the back of the Dungeon Masters Guide—and it worked.

Two hundred fan-created products carry its name. Other designers built whole games on its engine. Kelsey Dionne won Gold ENnies for a game that borrowed its best ideas. The company he founded has operated continuously for twenty-five years from San Rafael, California.

He solved the boring-fighter problem with a single scaling die. He made magic dangerous again by giving every spell its own results table. He made death matter by making you start as a turnip farmer with 1d4 hit points and a pitchfork.

The game he always wanted to play is still in print. Eighth printing. Five hundred and four pages. Everything you need is in one book.

Total: 28 points. Year: 2001.

Total: 28 points. Year: 2001.