(17/41: 1990) LOU PROSPERI
The Conductor’s Chair
There is a role in tabletop publishing that gets misidentified more than any other. The line developer. Not the person who writes the symphony—that’s the lead designer. Not the person who plays an instrument—that’s the freelancer. The line developer is the conductor: the one who ensures twenty supplements, a dozen writers, and a five-year metaplot all resolve into a coherent piece of music.
Louis J. Prosperi was the conductor of Earthdawn from 1993 to 1998. He did not compose the Step System. He did not originate thread magic. He did not invent the Discipline/Circle advancement structure. Greg Gorden did those things. But Prosperi sat in the chair where consistency lived or died, and across more than twenty supplements and a half-decade of continuous publication, the world of Barsaive never contradicted itself.
That is not a small thing. It is also not the same thing as designing a game.
The Apprenticeship
Prosperi entered the industry at Mayfair Games around 1988–1989, working as staff on properties like DC Heroes and Chill. His first confirmed published credit is Chill, 2nd Edition (1990), a team revision of Pacesetter’s original horror RPG, co-developed with Troy Denning, David Ladyman, and Jeff Leason. Chill 2E revised the FEAR/SAVE resolution system, but the individual contributions of each team member are undocumented. This is Prosperi’s closest claim to core system design work, and even here, the attribution is shared four ways.
He freelanced widely in the early 1990s. Treasures of Greyhawk and the Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium for TSR. Cylent Scream and Storm Knights’ Guide for West End Games’ Torg. Wanted by Cracken for the Star Wars d6 line. A Killing Glare for Shadowrun. The portfolio of a journeyman building contacts and credits across every publisher who would answer the phone.
Then FASA called with something bigger.
The Cathedral
Earthdawn launched in 1993. Greg Gorden—the same architect who had designed Torg and the DC Heroes MEGS system at Mayfair—built its mechanical core: the Step System, where character proficiency mapped to escalating die types and combinations. Step 4 rolled a d6. Step 8 rolled 2d6. Step 12 rolled 2d10. The math was rigorous, designed to produce a roughly 50% success rate against average difficulty at every point on the curve. Thread magic required characters to learn an item’s history before unlocking its powers, transforming treasure from stat-boost commodity into narrative hook. Disciplines gave character classes an in-world metaphysical justification—a Swordmaster didn’t just fight well, they followed a magical philosophy of artistic combat.
Prosperi was credited under “Game Concept” and “Development” on the original corebook. He then became Line Developer—the person who approved every mechanic, maintained the world bible, managed the freelance stable, and ensured that when Robin D. Laws wrote Denizens of Earthdawn or Steve Kenson wrote Secret Societies of Barsaive, the pieces fit together.
Twenty-plus supplements over five years. The Barsaive Campaign Set. Parlainth: The Forgotten City. Horrors. The Serpent River. The Blood Wood. The Theran Empire. Crystal Raiders of Barsaive. The Ork Nation of Cara Fahd. Every one of them had to honor the Step System’s mathematics, the thread magic’s logic, and the metaplot’s trajectory toward the Barsaive-Thera War. Every one of them did.
What He Built Himself
Separating Prosperi’s personal design contributions from his line stewardship requires careful excavation.
The Earthdawn Companion (1994), co-authored with Gorden, extended the Discipline system to 15th Circle and added subsystems for questor devotion, Lightbearer organizations, and riverboat combat. This was architectural extension—demonstrating that Gorden’s framework could scale without breaking. The questor system became a permanent part of Earthdawn’s identity across all subsequent editions. Real work, but the question is whether extending someone else’s architecture counts as architecture of your own.
Arcane Mysteries of Barsaive (1998) is his most substantial solo-credited rules supplement. Over two hundred new spells, seventy-plus talent knacks, sixty-plus magic items. The talent knacks—specialized applications of existing talents—were a modular design approach that added granularity without system bloat. They were carried forward into every subsequent Earthdawn edition. A genuine contribution, though skill specializations existed in other systems (GURPS advantages, AD&D proficiency specializations), so the concept was not wholly novel.
Shattered Pattern (1994) and Barsaive at War (c. 1999–2001) represent his strongest narrative design work. Barsaive at War, eventually published by Living Room Games after FASA closed its doors, was an epic campaign framework that married metaplot events to mechanical consequences—the line developer’s art applied to its most ambitious canvas.
The Attribution Trap
Here is where the methodology earns its keep.
When a line developer stewards a product for five years, casual retrospection collapses the distinction between steward and architect. Research reports written about Prosperi frequently attribute the Step System, thread magic, and exploding dice to him. They don’t belong to him. They belong to Greg Gorden.
This is not a diminishment. It is a clarification. The television showrunner who maintains The Wire for five seasons is doing vital creative work. They are not David Simon. The conductor who leads the Berlin Philharmonic through Beethoven’s Ninth is indispensable. They did not write it.
Prosperi’s own later work confirms this reading. His post-industry books—The Imagineering Pyramid (2016) and The Imagineering Process (2018)—are about structural frameworks for creative projects, applying Disney Imagineering principles to design methodology. He understood systems thinking better than he understood system origination. His natural talent was coherence maintenance across complex creative ecosystems. That is the Imagineering discipline exactly.
What Survived
Earthdawn has endured across four editions and multiple publishers for over thirty years. Living Room Games published a 2nd Edition. RedBrick produced Classic and 3rd Editions. FASA Games, Inc. Kickstarted a 4th Edition in 2014. Vagrant Workshop released The Age of Legend, a rules-lite adaptation. Translations appeared in German, French, Japanese, and Polish.
The designers who passed through Prosperi’s editorial hands went on to shape the industry. Shane Lacy Hensley contributed to Denizens of Earthdawn before creating Deadlands and Savage Worlds. Robin D. Laws wrote multiple Earthdawn supplements before designing Feng Shui, HeroQuest, and GUMSHOE. Nicole Lindroos wrote Earthdawn adventures before co-founding Green Ronin Publishing. Carsten Damm succeeded Prosperi as line developer and carried the torch through two more editions.
How much of their later success traces to Prosperi’s editorial influence? Impossible to quantify. But a line developer who consistently attracted and retained talent of that caliber was doing something right in the chair.
The Scoring Case
Invention (3):
“Competent variation.” Prosperi did not originate the Step System, thread magic, the Discipline/Circle structure, or any other core Earthdawn mechanic. Those belong to Greg Gorden. His talent knacks were modular specializations within an existing framework—useful, carried forward, but not a new direction. His Companion extensions demonstrated that Gorden’s architecture could scale, which is skilled variation, not invention. His Chill 2E contributions are team-credited and individually unverifiable. The inflection point between 4 (“Good twist”) and 3 (“Competent variation”) turns on whether the work pushed the form forward or kept it fresh. Prosperi kept it fresh. That’s a 3.
Architecture (5):
“It works.” His authored subsystems—the Companion expansions, Arcane Mysteries’ spell and knack libraries—were functional and well-integrated within Gorden’s architecture. His editorial consistency across twenty-plus supplements is genuinely impressive craft, but the methodology scores architectural construction, not editorial maintenance. Nobody studied Prosperi’s talent knack system as a model for their own games. The system he maintained has supported thirty years of play, but that infrastructure belongs to its originator. Brilliant editorial work nobody builds on architecturally caps at 5.
Mastery (5):
“Working designer, steady hand.” A decade of full-time professional work across multiple systems and publishers. Consistent quality throughout—no bad products under his watch. But limited solo-authored output, and his personal design voice is difficult to separate from the team context at FASA. He didn’t show the refinement arc from rough-to-polished that marks the 6+ range; he was consistently competent from the start. The 10,000-hours question: he logged the hours, but primarily as a line developer, not as an originating designer. He sits at the mastery line.
Adjustments (+4):
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: +1. First published credit approximately 1990 (Chill 2E). Last tabletop RPG credit approximately 2007 (Nations of Barsaive, RedBrick). Seventeen years of published work. Qualifies for 10+ but not 20+ of active published designs across the span.
- ■ Full-time career: +1. Game design was his primary profession from approximately 1988 to 1998. Roughly ten years before transitioning to technical writing at Oracle.
- ■ Awards: +1. Earthdawn received the 1993 Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Rules. Prosperi was a credited member of the design team. Pyramid magazine named Earthdawn one of the Millennium’s Most Underrated Games in 1999, during his tenure as line developer.
- ■ Branded name: No. Earthdawn is well-known within the RPG hobby but invisible outside it. Fails the grandmother test.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1. Published designs in fantasy (Earthdawn, AD&D), horror (Chill), science fiction (Star Wars d6, Shadowrun), and multi-genre (Torg). Four distinct formats.
- ■ Commercial success: No. Earthdawn was a successful mid-tier RPG line at FASA, but no public sales figures confirm $10M+ lifetime retail for any single title. FASA was a significant publisher, not a mass-market one. Score conservatively on absent data.
- ■ Design propagation: No. The Earthdawn system’s propagation into later editions and influence on designers like Hensley is attributable to the Gorden-designed core, not to Prosperi’s specific mechanical contributions. Talent knacks were not widely adopted as a design model outside the Earthdawn line.
The Hidden Pattern
Prosperi’s profile illuminates a structural tension in how the hobby remembers its makers. The line developer is the most important uncelebrated role in tabletop publishing. They don’t get the designer’s credit or the writer’s byline glory. They get the phone calls at midnight when a freelancer’s manuscript contradicts established canon. They get the spreadsheets ensuring Step 12 still works at Circle 15. They get the metaplot timeline pinned to the wall, tracking which war happens in which supplement.
The methodology was built to measure design craft—invention, architecture, mastery of the form. It was not built to measure editorial stewardship, however excellent. Prosperi’s score reflects this gap honestly. A different instrument, measuring line development as its own discipline, would rank him considerably higher. He was one of the best showrunners the 1990s RPG industry produced. The cathedral stood on his watch. He just didn’t lay the foundation stones.
His later Imagineering books suggest he understood this distinction himself. He moved from creating specific rules to studying how creation works—from the “what” to the “how.” The conductor who retires and writes about conducting. The skill was always in the orchestration.
What Remains
A journeyman freelancer walked into FASA Corporation and sat down in the line developer’s chair for one of the most architecturally ambitious fantasy RPGs ever published. He held that chair for five years. Twenty-plus supplements. A metaplot that never broke. A world that never contradicted itself. A stable of freelancers who went on to build the next decade of the industry.
Then the company closed. He went to Oracle. He wrote books about how Disney builds things.
Earthdawn is still in print. Four editions. Five publishers. Thirty years. The foundation was Greg Gorden’s. The fact that it’s still standing is partly Lou Prosperi’s.
Total: 17 points. Year: 1990.
Total: 17 points. Year: 1990.