The One-Way Ticket

Matt Forbeck’s career begins with an act of pure audacity. In 1989, a twenty-one-year-old creative writing graduate from the University of Michigan bought a one-way ticket to England and knocked on the door of Games Workshop’s Nottingham studio. He had no job offer. No industry connections. Just the conviction that this was how you got into the tabletop business.

They let him in. Within a year he was co-designing the Genestealer expansion for Space Hulk alongside Jervis Johnson and Richard Halliwell — two of Games Workshop’s most important designers. He introduced psychic combat mechanics and Genestealer Hybrids that would persist through the game’s lineage for decades.

This tells you nearly everything about Forbeck’s career in miniature. The ambition is real. The talent is real. And the most celebrated work always has someone else’s name on the masthead beside his.

The Deadlands Question

No discussion of Matt Forbeck avoids Deadlands. It shouldn’t. But it has to be honest.

Deadlands: The Weird West (1996) is one of the most enduring RPG settings of the past thirty years. The poker-based initiative system, the playing card draws, the fate chips — these mechanical innovations proved that RPGs could thrive outside medieval fantasy. The game spawned adaptations in d20, GURPS, and Savage Worlds. Pinnacle is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2026 with active Deadlands publications.

Shane Lacy Hensley designed it. All of it. The setting, the mechanics, the innovations that made the game’s reputation.

Forbeck co-founded Pinnacle Entertainment Group with Hensley and served as its president for four years. He edited the core rulebook. He ran the company that published the game. His fingerprints are on every page of the first edition — as editor, as business partner, as the operational engine that turned Hensley’s vision into a product line.

This is important work. It is not design work. The methodology measures what a person created, not what they managed. Forbeck’s own credits page on forbeck.com is unusually transparent about this distinction — he lists himself as editor, not designer, for Deadlands. He deserves the same honesty from this evaluation.

Brave New World

In 1999, Forbeck did something the Deadlands association obscures: he designed his own game.

Brave New World RPG is unambiguously his. Sole designer, sole writer, his vision from concept to shelf. Set in an alternate-history America where superheroes have been outlawed, it combined dystopian politics with superhero action in a d6 dice pool system.

The mechanical signature was the Power Package system. Where Champions and Heroes Unlimited offered freeform power creation, BNW committed fully to pre-built archetype packages — Blaster, Flyer, Speedster, Bouncer. You picked one. That was your character. No mixing, no custom builds. In an era of infinite customization, Forbeck bet on structured restriction.

The Trick mechanic made the restriction sing. Roll five or more above the target number on your dice pool, and the extra successes became currency for character-specific special abilities. The degree-of-success wasn’t new — Ars Magica and Shadowrun got there first — but tying it directly to superhero power expression was genuinely creative.

The reception told a split story. RPGnet’s aggregate across seven reviews: Style 3.86 out of 5. Substance 2.86 out of 5. The setting was widely praised. The mechanics drew fire — only ten power packages in the core book, too many mundane skills for a superhero game, restricted character creation that frustrated players expecting Champions-level flexibility. AEG cancelled the line in 2001 after roughly two years and nine books.

In an extraordinary moment, Forbeck himself told players who didn’t like the archetypes to “junk the system for one you prefer.”

The Fiction Years

After Brave New World, Forbeck’s career shifted. Game design became episodic. Fiction writing became central.

He could produce twenty-five thousand words a week — a productivity that served novels better than the iterative refinement of game system design. Blood Bowl novels for Games Workshop. Halo novels. D&D novels. He wrote for Marvel, for Star Wars, for practically every major franchise in genre entertainment. His Lord of the Rings RPG contribution was as co-writer and developer, not designer — Steven S. Long wrote the core system. His Shotguns and Sorcery RPG used Monte Cook’s Cypher System, with mechanics by Robert Schwalb; Forbeck contributed the setting.

From 2000 to 2021, his significant game design output was High Stakes Drifter (2005) and Marvel Heroes Battle Dice (2005-06) — solid professional work, not the kind of system design that shapes a career’s reputation. Twenty-two years between his two major RPG systems.

This isn’t a criticism. It’s an observation about where he invested his time. The fiction paid. The fiction was prolific. And when the right design opportunity arrived, he was ready for it.

The d616

In 2022, Marvel hired Forbeck to co-design its official tabletop RPG. The game that resulted shows what two decades of thinking about mechanics — even while not designing them — can produce.

The d616 system rolls three six-sided dice, with one designated the “Marvel die.” When the Marvel die shows a 1, it counts as both a 6 and triggers a “Fantastic” result — the game’s critical success. Roll 6-1-6 and you get an “Ultimate Fantastic.” The name brands the mechanic: 616 for Earth-616, the Marvel Universe’s canonical designation.

The 16.7 percent Fantastic rate creates dramatic moments more frequently than D&D’s 5 percent critical hit rate. The bell curve of 3d6 was a deliberate choice over the d20’s flat distribution. No one had used this exact mechanic before — the specific integration of brand identity into probability curve is genuinely innovative.

More importantly, he learned from BNW’s worst mistake. The playtest version included mandatory archetypes. Feedback told him what BNW’s players had told him twenty-three years earlier: too restrictive. He cut them. The final game lets players build freely.

A designer who repeats his failures shows stubbornness. A designer who corrects them shows craft.

The Cross-Format Professional

Before the RPGs, between the RPGs, alongside the RPGs — Forbeck designed games in formats most RPG designers never touch.

WildStorms: The Expandable Super-Hero CCG (1995) imported miniatures-game concepts into card gaming. Rank-based play tiers and point-based deck construction came directly from his Games Workshop background. Fastbreak CCG (1996) introduced a spatial grid system for a card-based sports simulation — a 5×5 board where a physical basketball token moved between positioned cards. Silent Death: The Next Millennium (1995) was a miniatures game. Marvel Heroes Battle Dice (2005) was a mass-market dice game sold through toy channels.

RPGs, CCGs, miniatures games, board games, dice games. Five distinct formats, each with different design constraints, different audiences, different mathematical foundations. Few designers on this list can claim that range.

The range itself is a design skill that doesn’t appear on the scoring pillars but shows in the work. Moving between formats requires understanding what each format does well — why a CCG needs different balance structures than an RPG, why a mass-market dice game demands faster resolution than a miniatures game. Forbeck navigated these transitions for thirty-five years.

The Honest Assessment

The draft material presents two Matt Forbecks. The factual dossier carefully distinguishes his design credits from his editorial and development work. The academic analysis blurs those lines, inflating his role in Deadlands, claiming propagation without evidence, and attributing commercial metrics that belong to his fiction career rather than his game design.

The corrections matter because Forbeck’s actual design career is interesting enough without inflation.

Deadlands’ mechanical innovations belong to Shane Hensley. The methodology’s Trap 6 — design credit belongs to the inventor, not the polisher — applies cleanly. Forbeck edited and managed; Hensley designed. Both men’s own public statements confirm this.

The academic piece claims the Power Package system “significantly influenced subsequent superhero games” and connects it to City of Heroes and Masks: A New Generation. No designer has cited Forbeck’s mechanics as inspiration. These connections are speculative.

What survives the corrections is a designer with genuine cross-format versatility, a distinctive thematic approach to mechanics, and two major RPG systems that demonstrate both creative ambition and structural problems. The d616 is clever. The Trick system was smart. The archetype restriction was ahead of its genre. The execution has been uneven, and the career spent more time on fiction than on the iterative work of refining game systems.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Matt Forbeck treats mechanics as branding.

Most designers start with a problem — how do I model this combat, this economy, this social dynamic? They build mechanics to solve the problem. The IP wraps around the engine afterward.

Forbeck starts with the IP. What does it feel like to be a Marvel superhero? What’s the emotional signature of this universe? Then he finds the mechanic that expresses that feeling. The d616 doesn’t solve a probability problem. It makes you feel like you’re rolling inside the Marvel Universe. Tricks don’t solve a balance problem. They make you feel like your superpower is responding to how well you performed.

This is why his settings consistently outscore his systems. The thematic integration is strong. The structural engineering underneath sometimes isn’t. He’s designing experiences, not architectures — and the moments where the experience works are genuinely memorable.

The mechanic isn’t the engine. It’s the logo.

What Remains

The one-way ticket to Nottingham. The Genestealer expansion, still influencing Space Hulk editions decades later. Four years running Pinnacle while someone else’s genius became an industry landmark. A superhero RPG that bet on restriction before the industry was ready. Twenty years of novels. Then the d616 — a mechanic that makes three six-sided dice feel like they belong to Marvel.

Forbeck is the tabletop industry’s great generalist. RPGs, CCGs, miniatures, board games, dice games, novels, comics, ARGs. He has designed in more formats, written in more genres, and maintained a presence across more decades than almost anyone on this list. His institutional influence — as Diana Jones Award president, as a connector between game design and fiction, as a convention fixture — is real and significant.

The design catalog is thinner than the career suggests. Two major RPG systems across thirty-five years, both with structural problems, both with moments of genuine creative ambition. The gap between the industry presence and the design output is the story.

24 points. 1990. The mechanic is the logo.

The methodology is honest about the difference between being in the industry and shaping it through design. Forbeck’s presence was vast. His design catalog was selective.

Both things are true.

Total: 24 points. Year: 1990.

24 points. 1990. The mechanic is the logo.

Both things are true.