The Kid from Fort Knox

Ken “Whit” Whitman was born in 1967 at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and raised in Brandenburg. He entered the tabletop game industry at twenty-two with a post-apocalyptic RPG called Mutazoids, published through his own Whit Productions in 1989.

That debut contained the seed of everything that followed. Mutazoids blended genetic mutation, survivalism, and moral chaos into something that reviewers recognized as genuinely inventive. Rick Swan’s review praised it as an impressively chaotic RPG environment. The game worked. The vision was there. And unlike most debut designers, Whitman didn’t stop at one product—he followed Mutazoids with a City Sourcebook in 1992 and a full second edition the same year, revising the rules, expanding mutant archetypes, and refining the world he’d built.

Three Mutazoids products in three years. That’s a designer iterating on a system. It’s also the last time Whitman would stay in one creative lane for that long.

The Dice Nobody Noticed

In 1997, Whitman published Groo: The Game through his Archangel Entertainment, based on Sergio Aragonés’s long-running comic character. Aragonés brought the IP. The game brought something the hobby hadn’t seen before.

The central innovation was dice-as-resources. Players rolled custom dice each turn and the results became the resources themselves—labor, grain, gold—used to play building cards and score victory points. Unused resources passed to opponents, creating a tactical tension between hoarding and timing. An expansion set followed the same year, adding buildings, armies, and events.

In 1997, dice in tabletop games resolved actions—combat hits, skill checks, movement distances. Using the dice results as the currency of play rather than the arbiter of outcomes was a genuine conceptual shift. Nobody had done it before.

The hobby walked past it.

A decade later, dice placement exploded. Kingsburg (2007) let players assign rolled dice to influence tracks. Alien Frontiers (2010) turned dice into workers placed on action spaces. The mechanism became one of the defining innovations of the Eurogame renaissance. None of those designers pointed back to Groo.

But some people noticed. Gary Gygax told Whitman he thought it was a great game. Steve Jackson Games picked it up roughly fifteen years later and republished it. A handful of designers have cited the dice mechanic as an influence on their own work. The recognition was real—it just wasn’t wide.

That’s the difference between Invention 7 and 8. At 8, the field adopts your mechanic and credits you. At 7, the right people notice, but the wave rolls in from somewhere else.

The Catalog

Between 1989 and 2015, Whitman built one of the more unusual careers in tabletop gaming—part designer, part developer, part publisher, part serial entrepreneur. The full picture requires distinguishing between the hats, because this methodology scores differently depending on which one you were wearing.

Designer credits: Mutazoids 1st Edition (1989), Mutazoids 2nd Edition (1992), Maximum Damage (2000), Redneck Christmas (2000), Knights Quest (2013), Deck Dice (2014), and Pencil Dice (2015). Eight titles across twenty-five years where Whitman’s name is on the design line.

Developer credits: Mutazoids City Sourcebook (1992), Scortch (1993), Marc Miller’s Traveller T4 psionics (1996), Three Stooges Card Game (1998), Archmage (1999). Developer means hands-on—shaping rules, refining mechanics, bridging the gap between a designer’s manuscript and a finished product.

Publisher credits: Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards (1992), WWF: The Basic Adventure Game (1993), Groo: The Game and expansion (1997), Zero RPG and Supernumerary (1998), the full Dark Conspiracy 2nd Edition line (1998–2001), SnarfQuest: The Card Game and four expansions (2001), art books for Larry Elmore, Ray Lago, Steve Stone, and Dan Frazier. Plus Games Unplugged magazine—thirty-four issues over four years.

The Dark Conspiracy line alone ran to a dozen products under Whitman’s Dynasty Presentations: Player’s Handbooks in Basic and Masters editions, Referee’s Guides, a referee’s screen with Larry Elmore art, and the three-volume Sin City adventure series. Lester W. Smith designed the system. Whitman built the publishing infrastructure that kept it alive.

This is where the methodology draws its line. Publishing is real work—identifying talent, securing licenses, managing production, bringing products to market. It requires sharp instincts and genuine industry knowledge. But the three pillars measure what you designed, how well you built it, and whether you mastered the craft of building it. The adjustment triggers are where the broader career gets captured: longevity, full-time commitment, cross-genre range.

Nine Companies in Twenty-Five Years

Whitman’s career pattern is serial reinvention. Whit Productions (1989). Whit Publications (1992). Imperium Games with Marc Miller (1996). Archangel Entertainment (1997). Dynasty Presentations (1999). Product development for Larry Elmore’s company (2000–2013). Rapid POD (2005). Sidekick Printing (2010). D20 Entertainment (2013).

Nine ventures spanning game publishing, magazine production, print services, product development, and eventually film distribution. Most lasted two to four years before giving way to the next iteration. The pattern is consistent: launch fast, build momentum, pivot, start again.

The Imperium Games partnership with Marc Miller brought Traveller 4th Edition to print—Whitman contributed system development and wrote the psionics rules. The Elmore years produced art anthologies and collector products, including one of the first major artbook Kickstarters. Games Unplugged became a nationally distributed gaming magazine.

Later ventures included a series of Kickstarter campaigns in 2013–2015 for licensed entertainment and gaming products—Knights Quest, Deck Dice, Pencil Dice, plus film projects tied to Knights of the Dinner Table and Traveller. Most went unfulfilled, generating significant controversy in the tabletop community. The methodology does not score personal character or business ethics—but the Kickstarter period effectively ended Whitman’s active involvement in the tabletop game industry.

What the career reveals is a temperament built for launching. The same energy that drove Whitman to found nine companies and publish across every format in the industry is the reason the design catalog has eight credits instead of eighty. The hours went into building ventures, not refining systems. That’s not a moral failing. It’s a career choice the methodology measures precisely.

The Honest Assessment

Whitman’s draft scored him at Invention 8, Architecture 9, Mastery 6, and Adjustments +3, for a total of 26. The methodology corrects this to Invention 7, Architecture 5, Mastery 6, and Adjustments +4, for a total of 22.

The draft’s Architecture 9 was based on fifteen-plus companies founded across multiple industries. Architecture in this methodology measures game system quality and propagation—how well the mechanical engine is built and whether other designers built on it. Business infrastructure is a different kind of architecture entirely. The draft committed the most common scoring trap in the series: Architecture Inflation.

The draft’s Invention 8 claimed the dice-as-resources mechanic changed how people designed games. The mechanic was genuinely novel, and peer recognition from Gygax and Steve Jackson’s republication supports a 7. But 8 requires documented widespread adoption credited to the designer. The dice-placement wave arrived independently a decade later without pointing back to Groo. Being first is not the same as being credited as first.

Mastery holds at the draft’s 6. Eight design credits across twenty-five years, including the Mutazoids revision from 1st to 2nd edition, show sustained career engagement and craft refinement. The developer credits on Traveller, Scortch, Three Stooges, and Archmage add depth. The methodology recognizes editors and developers as part of the design ecosystem. One deep design (Mutazoids through two editions and a sourcebook) amid solid professional work across formats—that’s the definition of Mastery 6.

Adjustments rise from the draft’s +3 to +4. The draft missed the Longevity 20+ trigger: design credits from 1989 (Mutazoids) through 2014 (Deck Dice) span twenty-five years, earning +2 instead of the +1 that a ten-year span would yield.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Ken “Whit” Whitman is a launcher.

He launches companies, magazines, product lines, licensed games, crowdfunding campaigns, film ventures. The energy is real and relentless. He saw the potential in licensed RPGs before the market caught up, built a nationally distributed gaming magazine from scratch, partnered with Marc Miller to revive Traveller, developed products for Larry Elmore for over a decade, and spotted the dice-as-resources concept a full decade before the Eurogame movement made it famous.

But launching and sustaining are different verbs. The companies lasted two to four years. The design catalog has eight credits where a twenty-five-year career could have produced dozens. The mechanic that was ahead of its time didn’t get the sustained development that would have turned it into an industry-shaping contribution.

The methodology catches this pattern precisely. Invention rewards the insight—and the dice-as-resources idea earns a 7 because the right people noticed. Mastery rewards the sustained career and the Mutazoids refinement. But Architecture rewards the depth of what you built—and the deepest systems in this catalog are functional, not foundational.

What Remains

A dice mechanic that was ten years ahead of its time.

A post-apocalyptic RPG refined through two editions that showed real creative instincts.

Eight designed games and four developer credits across a quarter century in the industry.

A publishing catalog that brought dozens of other designers’ work to market—including a twelve-product Dark Conspiracy line, a Traveller edition, licensed games spanning the WWF to SnarfQuest, and a nationally distributed magazine.

Nine companies. Twenty-five years. A career that touched every corner of the tabletop industry from RPGs to card games to print services to film.

Whitman had the eye. He saw what the dice could do before almost anyone else. He saw what licensed properties could become in the tabletop space. He saw opportunities other publishers missed. The question this methodology asks is not whether you saw it, but what you built when you sat down at the drafting table. The answer is: enough to earn a place on this list, with a score that reflects both the genuine innovation and the career that chose breadth over depth.

The methodology honors what you built, how well you built it, and whether you kept building. Whitman kept building—games, companies, magazines, products, and an industry career that most designers never sustain. The score reflects the design, the innovation, and the honest distance between what was imagined and what was built at the drafting table.

Both things are true.

Total: 24 points. Year: 1989.

24 points. 1989. The entrepreneur who rolled the dice first and spent twenty-five years building everything except the one system that could have changed the industry.

Both things are true.