The Invisible Hand

Kim Mohan walked into TSR’s Lake Geneva offices in the summer of 1979, a thirty-year-old newspaper reporter looking for something different. He’d spent nine years at the Beloit Daily News — sports writer, editorial writer, state editor, wire editor — and he was tired of the news business.

He wasn’t a game designer. He once admitted, with characteristic dry humor: “I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I’m not much of a D&D game player.”

What he was, unmistakably, was an editor. And for the next forty-three years, he would become the most important one the tabletop RPG industry has ever known.

His name confused people. Convention attendees assumed “Kim” was a woman. Writers who’d only corresponded by mail would do double-takes meeting the tall, soft-spoken, silver-haired man behind the red pen. But the work spoke for itself. By May 1981, at age thirty-two, he was editor-in-chief of Dragon Magazine. He would hold that position through the magazine’s greatest era.

Dragon’s Golden Age

Under Mohan, Dragon Magazine went from a hobbyist journal to the most important periodical in tabletop gaming. Circulation climbed from roughly 45,000 in early 1981 to its all-time peak of 118,021 in 1984. The magazine won Origins Awards in 1984 and 1986, with a Special Award for Outstanding Achievement in 1987.

What drove it wasn’t flash. It was discipline. Dragon never missed a deadline under Mohan’s watch. That sounds minor until you understand what RPG publishing looked like in 1981: amateur layouts, inconsistent editing, books that contradicted themselves from one chapter to the next. Mohan brought newspaper rigor to a hobby industry that had never experienced it.

He introduced centerfold pull-out game modules, the Ares science fiction gaming section, and expanded coverage beyond TSR’s own products. He established columns that would define the magazine’s identity for decades — “Sage Advice,” “Bazaar of the Bizarre,” “Ecology of…,” “Dragon’s Bestiary.” Each one a structural innovation in how a gaming magazine organizes and delivers content.

More consequentially, Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms articles appeared during Mohan’s tenure, seeding what would become one of D&D’s most iconic campaign settings. Mohan gave artist Larry Elmore his first TSR art assignment, leading to Elmore joining staff — one of the most impactful talent decisions in D&D’s visual history. Roger Moore, who would succeed Mohan as editor-in-chief, was recruited by Mohan in 1983 and openly credited him with teaching him how to edit.

The demanding editor earned the nickname “Orcface” after publicly annotating a contributor’s manuscript to show how editorial review actually works. But the rigor earned respect. Freelancer Steven Schend later noted he was “never anything but a gentleman.” The quality of the magazine under his stewardship — that was the evidence that mattered.

The Wilderness Survival Guide

In 1986, Mohan did something he rarely did: he designed a game product.

The Wilderness Survival Guide was a 128-page AD&D 1st Edition hardcover that attempted to bring the same systematizing instinct he applied to Dragon Magazine into the game itself. It covered terrain, weather, proficiencies, hazards, and outdoor magic — everything a DM needed to run wilderness adventures with mechanical support rather than improvisation.

His most significant mechanical contribution was the formalization and expansion of Non-Weapon Proficiencies for the core fantasy game. Oriental Adventures (1985) had introduced the concept, but Mohan standardized the resolution mechanic — ability score versus d20 roll — and expanded the list into a comprehensive system. Fire-building. Navigation. Swimming. Tracking. Skills that made characters feel like people who existed in a world, not just combat statistics.

This system was adopted as a core optional rule in AD&D 2nd Edition and became the foundational logic for skill systems in every subsequent edition of D&D.

He also introduced granular environmental mechanics: damage tables for heat and cold exposure, wind-speed modifiers for ranged weapons, fatigue tracking for characters and animals. White Dwarf called it “the best written rulebook I’ve ever read.”

The criticism came later, and it was fair: the environmental detail was too granular for most tables. Weather tables that required multiple rolls per game-day could stall the narrative momentum they were meant to enhance. The specific tables didn’t propagate. But the concept of “Survival” as a distinct mechanical concern — terrain as adversary, environment as system — became a staple of adventure design from 2nd Edition onward.

The WSG is Mohan’s design philosophy in concentrated form: systematize the chaos, make the implicit explicit, give the DM tools instead of intuition. It’s a journalist’s instinct applied to game design. Cover every angle. Leave nothing to assumption.

The Gygax Gamble

In 1986, Mohan made the most consequential decision of his career: he left TSR.

Gary Gygax had lost a boardroom struggle for control of the company he’d co-founded. He formed New Infinities Productions, and Mohan and Frank Mentzer — both secure at TSR — followed him. It was a loyalty play, pure and simple. Luke Gygax would later write: “He left TSR and went to work with my Dad because he believed in him and his capabilities. He did that at great risk to his family and it was a gamble that didn’t pay off.”

New Infinities produced the Cyborg Commando RPG (1987), co-designed by Mohan and Mentzer from a Gygax outline. The game struggled commercially. The venture failed by 1989, unable to secure outside investment.

Cyborg Commando is Mohan’s weakest design credit. The system lacked the clarity he brought to other people’s work. Without the D&D framework to refine, his instinct for systematization didn’t find solid ground. The game is a footnote — evidence that editorial mastery and design mastery are related but distinct skills.

TSR took him back. That alone tells you something about his professional value. He resumed editorial work almost immediately, editing Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space in 1989. The prodigal editor returned, and the institution welcomed him because the institution needed him.

The Company Man

From 1989 until his retirement in 2013 — and as a freelancer until his death in 2022 — Mohan was the constant behind D&D’s evolution. Managing editor on the 3rd Edition core rulebooks. Managing editor on the 3.5 revision. Managing editor on 4th Edition. Editing team on 5th Edition. Freelance editor on Curse of Strahd, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, and Spelljammer: Adventures in Space.

This is where the methodology has to be honest about what it’s measuring.

The d20 unified mechanic that made 3rd Edition revolutionary? That was designed by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams. The mathematical engine that replaced THAC0 and descending armor class with a single upward-scaling system? Their architecture. Mohan was managing editor. He ensured consistency of implementation across every subsystem — combat, skills, psionics, magic. He made the language clear, the cross-references accurate, the rules internally coherent. That’s not nothing. That’s essential. But it’s editorial work, not mechanical invention.

The distinction matters because this methodology scores design. Mohan didn’t design the d20 system. He made it readable. He made it consistent. He made it professional. And the people who did design it — every single one of them — will tell you they couldn’t have done it without him.

Jeremy Crawford called him a “colossus in the publishing industry.” Chris Perkins called him “a pioneer, a mentor.” Ray Winninger said he made “a greater contribution to our beloved game than almost anyone who remains on the planet.” These aren’t polite obituary quotes. They’re professionals describing the person who made their work better for decades.

Behind every celebrated game book stands an editor who made it coherent. For forty years, that editor was very often Kim Mohan.

The Honest Assessment

The draft material positions Mohan as an institutional architect whose editorial oversight shaped the d20 system and standardized RPG publishing. The narrative is compelling and largely accurate. But the methodology requires separating what he designed from what he edited — and the corrections tell a story about the limits of editorial credit in a design-scoring system.

Invention holds at 5. The NWP formalization in the Wilderness Survival Guide was a solid implementation of an emerging concept — Oriental Adventures introduced proficiencies the year before, and Mohan expanded and standardized them for the core game. The environmental systems were novel in their granularity but were later criticized as over-detailed and weren’t adopted in their specific form. The draft’s claim about the unified d20 mechanic falls to Trap 6: design credit belongs to the inventor, not the editor. Tweet, Cook, and Williams designed the engine. Mohan ensured it ran clean.

Architecture holds at 5. The WSG is functional and well-written for its purpose, but it’s a subsystem supplement, not a complete game architecture. Nobody else built on its specific mechanical structures. The weather tables weren’t propagated. Cyborg Commando’s architecture was weak enough to contribute to its commercial failure. The 3E architecture belongs to its designers.

Mastery rises to 6 with an important caveat. Mohan’s authored design catalog is thin — one strong supplement, one failed RPG, a handful of minor credits. But the methodology says editors are designers, and Mohan’s editorial craft was exercised at the highest level for over forty years. The staff at TSR and Wizards of the Coast knew something the public didn’t: he was the person everyone went to. His greatest value wasn’t what he created — it was who he helped in the creative process. The methodology can see this, but it measures output over influence. Sustained career, moments of real craft, team credits common. That’s a 6.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Kim Mohan treated game books as journalism.

Most designers think in terms of systems — what mechanics produce what experiences, how rules interact, what the math enables. Mohan thought in terms of communication: is this clear? Is this consistent? Does the reader know where to find what they need? Can a new player sit down with this book and understand the game?

This is why Dragon Magazine thrived under his editorship. This is why White Dwarf called the WSG “the best written rulebook I’ve ever read.” This is why D&D 3E reads like a technical manual rather than a hobbyist notebook. Mohan imported newspaper discipline — deadlines, house style, index quality, cross-referencing — into an industry that had never applied those standards.

He didn’t design the cathedral. He built the walls so the architects’ vision could stand.

What Remains

Dragon Magazine’s Golden Age, still cited as the standard for RPG periodicals. The professionalization of RPG editing as a discipline. The NWP formalization that seeded every skill system in D&D’s future. The Wilderness Survival Guide, still praised for its writing quality forty years later. A mentorship legacy — Roger Moore, Steven Schend, Larry Elmore, and generations of writers and editors who learned their craft from a quiet man with a red pen and a dry sense of humor.

Mohan professionalized an industry. He didn’t do it by designing a system everyone copied. He did it by editing every system until it worked.

The SFFHOF induction came posthumously, in 2025, driven by a grassroots campaign. Even the recognition required someone else to do the work. That’s the Kim Mohan pattern: the excellence is real, the visibility is zero, and somebody eventually notices.

The methodology is honest about the gap between influence and design output. Mohan’s influence was vast. His design output was modest. Both things are true.

Both things are true.

Total: 21 points. Year: 1980.

21 points. 1980. The invisible hand that built the industry’s clarity.

Both things are true.