The Store

Paul Arden Lidberg learned the game industry from the retail counter. He managed the Waterloo game store in Phoenix, Arizona—the shop founded by Scott Bizar of Fantasy Games Unlimited. Before he designed anything, he watched what sold and what didn’t, what customers asked for and what gathered dust. That retail education shaped every design decision he ever made: accessibility first, speed of play second, tactical depth third.

From the store he moved into the industry proper. Flying Buffalo. Chaosium. ICE and Hero Games. West End Games. R. Talsorian. Avalon Hill. TSR. Origin Systems. He touched nearly every significant tabletop company of the 1980s and 1990s, freelancing and contributing across formats—board games, RPGs, miniatures, card games, and eventually video games. He founded Crunchy Frog Enterprises and later Nightshift Games and Team Frog Studios as his own publishing imprints.

His first published design was Kill the Commie B******* in 1987 through Crunchy Frog. He was twenty-one years old. He would keep designing for the next twenty-six years.

The Frog

Critter Commandos (1989) is the purest expression of what Lidberg wanted games to be.

Miniatures wargaming in the late 1980s was overwhelmingly serious—grimdark space marines, historical accuracy fetishism, Warhammer’s gothic industrial warfare. Lidberg made a game about cartoon animals shooting each other with cream pies and bazookas. Bullets punched literal holes in characters. Characters fell apart and reset between “episodes.” The closest comparison was Steve Jackson Games’ TOON (1984), but TOON was an RPG. Lidberg applied cartoon logic to miniatures combat—a format that had no sense of humor whatsoever.

Rick Swan rated it 3 out of 4, praising the cartoon elements while noting the roleplaying material was underdeveloped. RPG.net gave it Style 4/5, Substance 3/5. Dragon Magazine recommended it despite calling it “a rather strange game.” The miniatures line became the real draw—the F.R.O.G. Commandos achieved cult status among hobbyist painters and narrative wargamers, and people were still painting full platoons decades after the game left commercial production.

Critter Commandos is unambiguously Lidberg’s. Sole designer, sole creator, published through his own company. Every supplement, compendium, and spinoff—Critter-Tek, Critter Commandos 3000—carries his name alone. It’s the game where nobody else’s fingerprints appear, and it tells you exactly who he was: a tactical designer who thought wargaming took itself too seriously.

The Mountain

Dragon Mountain (1993) is the career peak.

An AD&D 2nd Edition deluxe boxed set, co-designed with Colin McComb. Lidberg wrote Book One—the investigative prologue that established the module’s reputation. McComb wrote Books Two and Three. Thomas M. Reid provided editing and additional design. The division is documented: Lidberg built the gauntlet that players had to survive before they ever reached the dungeon proper.

Book One’s signature contribution was the formalization of what the hobby already called “Tucker’s Kobolds”—a concept from a 1987 Dragon Magazine editorial by Roger E. Moore describing weak creatures using sophisticated tactics, traps, and environmental advantage to threaten high-level characters. Lidberg didn’t invent the concept. He built the definitive product around it. Murder holes, greased slides, coordinated ambushes from creatures that individually posed no threat. The challenge lived in the environment, not the monster’s stat block.

Rick Swan in Dragon Magazine praised Lidberg’s Book One for its investigative encounters and “clean, no-frill prose.” RPG.net awarded Style 4/5, Substance 4/5. The module won the 1993 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Adventure. On Dragonsfoot, admirers called it “one of the all-time great TSR adventures” and “truly a test of player skill.” Detractors argued the kobold-heavy design felt unfair to experienced players accustomed to brute-force solutions. That tension was the point.

Dragon Mountain remains his most-owned credited item on BoardGameGeek: 218 owners, 48 ratings, 6.96 average. It was a high-profile retail success for TSR. It is also a collaborative product—Lidberg’s contribution is Book One specifically, not the entire boxed set.

The System Nobody Could Calculate

In 1995, Lidberg published Hidden Invasion through Nightshift Games. It introduced his original mechanical creation: the Cinematic Adventure System.

The core resolution worked like this: roll 2d6 plus 1d6 per Talent rating. If any dice show matching numbers, reroll those matching dice and add the new results. If the reroll produces new matches, keep going. Standard difficulty was 10. Character creation distributed 10 dice among Talents, selected 5 Knacks, and required at least 1 Fault. The entire system ran on d6s.

The matching-dice-explode mechanic was genuinely unusual. Most exploding dice systems of the era—Shadowrun, West End Games’ D6 System—exploded on maximum values. Nobody was exploding on matches. It was a real mechanical invention, the kind of thing a designer does once in a career if they’re lucky.

It was also fatally flawed. Multiple reviewers wrote that they could not calculate the probability of beating any given difficulty number. The math was opaque by design—matching patterns across variable dice pools create probability distributions that resist intuition and resist analysis. In Vampire Hunter$ (1999), where Mark Arsenault authored the game content using Lidberg’s system, professional monster hunters routinely failed basic fright checks, and knowledge of the supernatural paradoxically made characters more frightened. The system produced memorable moments and broken ones in roughly equal measure.

No other designer adopted the matching-dice-explode mechanic. The research record is clear on this point. A novel idea that nobody could build on because nobody could do the math. The Cinematic Adventure System also powered UNSanctioned and several other Team Frog Studios titles, but it never traveled beyond Lidberg’s own publishing imprints.

The Range

A Line in the Sand (1991), co-designed with Douglas Niles for TSR, was a board wargame about the Gulf War published while the conflict was still in the news. It earned TSR approximately $500,000—a remarkable figure for a topical wargame. SSI produced a computer adaptation the following year. The game used hidden “War Aim” chit draws for each player, creating diplomatic uncertainty within a hex-based framework. Attribution between Lidberg and Niles cannot be separated from available sources.

Duel (1992), co-designed with Ray Greer and Bruce Harlick of Hero Games, was a compact RPG using d5 and d10 dice with an aspect-based magic system that let players invent spell effects on the fly rather than selecting from a list. Reviewers praised it as “balanced, creative, and easy to absorb” within its 36 pages. The open-ended ability scores could break the math at high levels—a structural limitation Lidberg never resolved.

He wrote adventures for West End Games’ Star Wars RPG, contributed to Castle Falkenstein for R. Talsorian, worked on Wing Commander titles at Origin Systems. He published The Familiar, Team Frog’s own magazine. He designed board games, card games, miniatures rules, RPGs, and dice games. The range was real. The depth in any single format was limited.

The Honest Assessment

Lidberg was a lifer. Twenty-six years of active design output across every major format in tabletop gaming and several video game credits besides. He worked at or freelanced for virtually every significant company of the 1980s and 1990s. He won an Origins Award. He maintained game design as his primary professional identity for a quarter century.

His best work was collaborative and early. Dragon Mountain and A Line in the Sand were produced inside TSR’s professional infrastructure with established co-designers. His most personal work—Critter Commandos, the Cinematic Adventure System—was produced independently and achieved cult status rather than mainstream influence. The trajectory from TSR professional to independent publisher is a common story in this industry, and Lidberg’s version follows the pattern: quality and reach peaked when institutional support was strongest.

No published designer has been found citing Lidberg’s mechanics as a direct inspiration for their own work. The matching-dice-explode mechanic left no traceable legacy. The Tucker’s Kobolds formalization in Dragon Mountain influenced how the hobby thought about encounter design, but the concept predated his product by six years. His games do not appear in academic game studies literature. Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons mentions him on three pages, primarily as context for the TSR West story and the Renegade Legion license narrative.

He was known and respected within the professional game design community. His memorial in Amazing Stories’ 2022 “In Memoriam” and the detailed remembrance thread on RPG.net confirm that people who worked alongside him valued both the man and the work. The work itself sits at the journeyman tier—prolific, dedicated, occasionally excellent, peripheral to the hobby’s main currents of influence.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Lidberg was a satirist trapped inside a tactician.

Every phase of his career shows the same tension. He builds games with tactical bones—hex grids, probability distributions, action economies, layered encounters. Then he wraps them in parody. Critter Commandos takes miniatures wargaming and makes it absurd. Critter-Tek mocks BattleTech’s Technical Read-Outs by recreating them for cartoon animals in mecha suits. Vampire Hunter$ (the dollar sign is the title) turns monster hunting into B-movie slapstick. Even Dragon Mountain’s kobold gauntlet has a dark humor to it—the most dangerous dungeon in AD&D guarded by the weakest creatures in the Monster Manual.

The dual impulse explains both his strengths and his limitations. The tactical foundation gave his games structural integrity. The satirical voice gave them personality. But satire is niche by nature—it appeals to players who are already fluent in the conventions being parodied. You need to know BattleTech to laugh at Critter-Tek. You need to have survived a kobold ambush to appreciate what Dragon Mountain does with them. The audience for “smart parody of tactical games” is smaller than the audience for either smart parody or tactical games alone.

The retail education never left him. He designed games that were fast, accessible, and fun to handle physically—miniatures you wanted to paint, cards you wanted to collect, maps you wanted to unfold. The Waterloo game store taught him that a game has to sell itself from the shelf. Everything he built, even the broken things, had that quality: you could see what it was trying to be from across the room.

What Remains

Dragon Mountain—an Origins Award–winning adventure module that formalized the tactical kobold and proved that encounter design could matter more than monster statistics. Critter Commandos—cartoon animals in miniatures combat, still being painted by hobbyists thirty years after the game left print. A Line in the Sand—a topical wargame that earned half a million dollars for TSR while the conflict it simulated was still on television. The Cinematic Adventure System—a genuinely novel resolution mechanic that nobody could calculate and nobody else adopted, which is its own kind of legacy.

And twenty-six years of showing up. Every format, every era, every tier of the industry from the retail counter to TSR’s deluxe boxed sets to his own garage-press imprints. Not every project landed. The ones that did were built by a man who believed tactical games should make you laugh.

Paul Arden Lidberg died on June 13, 2022, at fifty-five, of a stroke following heart disease. He left behind a catalog that spans the full breadth of tabletop gaming and a design voice that nobody else in the hobby quite shared—the tactician who kept telling jokes. The score measures the reach. The work remembers the man.

Total: 17 points. Year: 1987.

Total: 17 points. Year: 1987.

Paul Arden Lidberg died on June 13, 2022, at fifty-five, of a stroke following heart disease. He left behind a catalog that spans the full breadth of tabletop gaming and a design voice that nobody else in the hobby quite shared—the tactician who kept telling jokes. The score measures the reach. The work remembers the man.