The Incursionist

Michael Van Vleet does not build engines. He moves into other people’s engines and furnishes the rooms so beautifully that visitors forget the walls belong to someone else.

His primary medium is the Trophy Dark incursion — a self-contained horror scenario designed to run inside Jesse Ross’s Trophy system. He writes these with a literary quality that his peers recognize as exceptional. Jason Cordova, designer of Brindlewood Bay and one of the most prominent figures in the indie RPG space, called Van Vleet “one of the best wordsmiths in the scene today.” Tony Vasinda of Plus One EXP described his work as arriving “fully formed.”

These are real endorsements from real gatekeepers. They describe a writer, not a system designer. The distinction matters for scoring. It does not diminish the craft.

The Signal Station Catalog

Van Vleet publishes through Signal Station, his personal imprint on itch.io. The catalog is populated with small, intense objects: Trophy Dark incursions (Devil, Aim For Me; A Warm and Pleasant Hum; Die, Grave Robber, Die!), Trophy Gold incursions (The Alluring; Trophy Golf), micro-RPGs (Closed Forever; Sorry I’ve Got to Take This; California 2020: The Game), a solo journaling game (Can’t Get There From Here), and a handful of system-agnostic accessories (Better Than Gold; Withdrawn From Circulation).

The common thread is brevity, intensity, and thematic precision. These are games designed for one session or fewer — pressure cookers that heat a specific emotional register until the lid blows off. Devil, Aim For Me runs Weird West horror through Trophy Dark’s doom spiral. A Warm and Pleasant Hum uses bee-hive imagery to build dread in an apiary that isn’t what it seems. The Alluring tracks a plague town’s crab-infested body horror through Trophy Gold’s treasure-seeking structure.

Quality indicators are strong for the scale. Devil, Aim For Me holds a 5.0/5.0 rating across forty reviews on itch.io, with user comments noting replay value and effective atmospheric writing. A Warm and Pleasant Hum was selected for inclusion in the official Trophy Dark core book — curated by Jesse Ross himself. These are real signals, earned through craft.

But the catalog is composed almost entirely of scenarios built within other designers’ systems. The Trophy system belongs to Jesse Ross. Brindlewood Bay belongs to Jason Cordova. The Between belongs to Cordova. When Van Vleet writes a mystery for Brindlewood Bay or an incursion for Trophy Dark, he is writing content for someone else’s architecture. His prose may elevate the experience. The underlying structure remains borrowed.

The Collaborative Work

Van Vleet’s contributor credits span the Gauntlet RPG ecosystem: additional contributions to the Trophy Dark, Trophy Gold, and Trophy Loom core books; mystery scenarios for Brindlewood Bay; episodes for Public Access; writing for The Silt Verses RPG; additional contributions to Arkham Herald. In each case, the lead designer is someone else — Ross, Cordova, Oli Jeffery. Van Vleet provides scenarios, settings, atmospheric writing. He does not design the core systems.

His most significant collaborative work is The Wassailing of Claus Manor (2023), co-designed with Mike Martens and Brian Sago. This is Van Vleet’s closest approach to original system design. The game uses a playing-card draw pile (six face cards) and colored d6 dice pools to drive a one-shot of Yuletide horror set in a manor house staffed by desperate servants. A “Holiday Spirit” point system tracks characters’ descent into magical thinking, with a threshold mechanic (six points triggers dismissal) and a counter-mechanic (recalling mundane problems to slow the descent).

The Wassailing won the 2024 ENnie Judges’ Spotlight Award. Reviewer Kathy L. Brown praised the game’s clarity and accessibility. It is the strongest entry in Van Vleet’s portfolio — a complete game with original mechanics rather than a scenario within an existing framework.

But attribution within the collaboration is uncertain. Brian Sago’s contribution is identified as woodcut art. The split between Martens and Van Vleet on design versus writing is undocumented. Cordova’s specific praise of Van Vleet as a “wordsmith” suggests his primary role was narrative, not mechanical. Mike Martens is the publisher (Clear Keep) and the public face of the project. Without clearer evidence of who designed which mechanics, the scoring must remain conservative.

The Craft Trajectory

Van Vleet entered tabletop RPG design around 2019–2020. His earliest work was experimental: single-page games, electric zines (Spooky Season, BOO, Specifically Wizards), micro-RPGs that explored what a game could be as a physical and conceptual object. These were prototypes — someone learning a medium by producing rapidly and iterating in public.

The middle phase (2020–2022) brought refinement. Devil, Aim For Me arrived as a fully realized product: commissioned art by Tim Liljefor and RAPIDPUNCHES, professional layout by Natalie Ash, physical publication through the Cold Hearth Collective and Plus One EXP. This was no longer experimentation. It was professional-grade scenario design with a distinctive voice — darkly comic, theologically inflected, genre-specific.

The current phase (2023–present) shows increasing ambition. The Wassailing is a co-designed complete game, not an incursion. Die, Grave Robber, Die! continued the Trophy Dark line at a high level. Step Right Up, currently in playtest as of December 2024, is a traveling-carnival game set in 1930s Dust Bowl Oklahoma, built within Cordova’s Between framework. It is his most ambitious solo project — and it is still built inside someone else’s system.

The trajectory is clear and upward. The question is whether it crosses the threshold from scenario design into system design. As of this evaluation, it has not.

The Community Position

Van Vleet is a member of the Cold Hearth Collective, a group of Trophy designers including Mike Martens, Madeleine Ember, Natalie Ash, and Gabriel Robinson. He is a frequent contributor to Gauntlet Publishing projects. His games appear in actual-play streams and community discussions. He is, by all available evidence, a well-integrated and well-respected member of the indie narrative RPG community.

What he is not, based on available evidence, is a figure whose work has propagated beyond that community. No designer outside the Gauntlet/Trophy ecosystem has been documented citing Van Vleet as a specific influence. No mechanics of his have been adopted by designers working in other systems. No third-party supplements exist specifically for his standalone designs. His incursions are treated as exemplary within Trophy — but when other designers write Trophy incursions, they are building on Jesse Ross’s architecture, not Van Vleet’s.

The comparison that clarifies: a brilliant module writer for Call of Cthulhu enriches the Chaosium ecosystem but does not score on Architecture unless their module creates infrastructure others build on. Ravenloft became a campaign setting line. Van Vleet’s incursions have not crossed that threshold.

The Report Conflict

Two research reports were provided for this evaluation. They tell significantly different stories.

Report 1 describes Van Vleet as a “pivotal figure” who “significantly pioneered” the adaptation of the Trophy Dark Ring structure to the Weird West genre and characterizes him as a “Pioneer of the Third-Wave Narrative zine movement.” It attributes the Ring structure’s innovations to Van Vleet and frames his contributor credits as lead designer roles.

Report 2 states plainly: “Van Vleet is not primarily a mechanical innovator. He is a scenario writer and world-builder working within established systems.” It correctly identifies the Ring structure as Jesse Ross’s creation, delineates Van Vleet’s contributor roles from his sole-designer credits, and notes the absence of downstream mechanical adoption.

Report 1 exhibits narrative momentum — building a case for significance by inflating attribution. Report 2 does the harder, more honest work of separating what Van Vleet created from what he contributed to. All scores in this evaluation are derived from Report 2’s evidence base unless Report 1 provides independently verifiable facts.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Van Vleet is a writer who found game design, not a game designer who learned to write.

His Goodreads profile lists three published novels: Microwave Coven, The Spirit Left Me, Me and What Army. His personal website, signalstation.com, has existed since 2001 as a platform for fiction and creative writing. His Bluesky bio describes him as a “Writing type person” — not a game designer. The TTRPG work is one creative output among several, and the literary sensibility comes first.

This explains both his strengths and his limitations. His incursions read like short fiction with mechanical scaffolding. The atmospheric writing, the thematic unity between mechanics and mood, the darkly comic voice — these are literary skills applied to game design. They produce beautiful scenarios. They do not produce systems.

The methodology measures system design. Van Vleet practices scenario design. These are adjacent crafts with different scoring profiles. A gifted novelist writing for television may produce exceptional episodes without ever creating a show. Van Vleet writes exceptional incursions without ever creating a system.

The question for the future is whether Step Right Up — his 1930s Dust Bowl carnival game, currently in playtest — marks a transition from episode writer to showrunner. If it publishes as a standalone system with original mechanics, the Invention and Architecture scores could both move. Until then, the evidence supports what it supports.

What Remains

Devil, Aim For Me — a Weird West incursion with perfect user ratings and physical publication, the work that established his reputation in the Trophy community.

A Warm and Pleasant Hum — strong enough to be selected for the official Trophy Dark core book, described as “award-winning” by the Cold Hearth Collective.

The Wassailing of Claus Manor — an ENnie Judges’ Spotlight winner, his most ambitious collaborative work, a complete game rather than a scenario within someone else’s framework.

The praise of Jason Cordova — peer validation from one of the indie RPG space’s most prominent designers.

A catalog of small, intense, beautifully written objects that make other designers’ engines sing.

Van Vleet is not yet a system architect. He is a scenario writer of genuine quality working at the literary edge of the indie RPG movement. The score of 9 reflects this honestly. It measures what he has built, not what he might build. The methodology leaves room for the future.

9 points. 2019.

Total: 9 points. Year: 2019.

9 points. 2019.