From Lake Geneva to the Bazaar

Wolfgang Baur walked into TSR in 1991 with a Cornell biochemistry background, a stack of Dungeon magazine submissions dating back to age fourteen, and the quiet conviction that adventure design was architecture, not improvisation.

He left corporate publishing seven years later with something more valuable than a résumé: an education in how the sausage gets made. He’d watched TSR’s financial collapse from the inside. He’d seen brilliant settings—Planescape, Al-Qadim, Dark Sun—flourish precisely because management wasn’t paying attention. He understood that the gap between a designer’s creative ambition and a corporation’s publishing priorities was not a bug. It was the fundamental constraint of the hobby.

So he built a workaround. Then he built a company. Then he built an ecosystem.

The Patronage Model

In 2006, Baur launched Open Design with a proposition nobody in professional RPG publishing had tried: let the audience fund the work before it exists, participate in the design process, and share in the creative decisions. His first project, Steam & Brass, attracted roughly eighty patrons. The model drew explicitly on Renaissance patron-artist relationships—a framework from outside gaming applied to a problem inside it.

Three years later, Kickstarter launched and made the concept mainstream. By then, Baur had already proven the economics, refined the workflow, and demonstrated that collaborative funding could sustain professional-quality RPG content. The Diana Jones Award recognized him in 2008 specifically for this contribution.

The patronage model is Baur’s most original act. It’s also the source of the deepest tension in his scoring: it’s a publishing innovation, not a game mechanic. The methodology measures what you build at the table, not what you build around it.

Inside Other People’s Houses

Baur’s game design career exists almost entirely within frameworks other people created.

His TSR adventures—Assassin Mountain, Planes of Chaos, Doom of Daggerdale—are excellent work inside AD&D 2nd Edition. His freelance contributions—Frostburn, Expedition to the Demonweb Pits—are excellent work inside D&D 3.5. His Midgard campaign setting is excellent work designed to run inside D&D 5E, Pathfinder, 13th Age, and AGE. Even Tales of the Valiant, Kobold Press’s own system, is a refinement of the 5E chassis rather than a new engine.

This isn’t a criticism. It’s a structural observation. Some designers invent engines. Some designers build beautiful vehicles that run on other people’s engines. Baur is the second kind—and he may be the best of that kind who ever lived.

The distinction matters because the methodology asks separate questions. Architecture asks whether you built something others built on. Invention asks whether you created something genuinely new. When your life’s work involves building inside D&D’s architecture and refining D&D’s mechanics, the credit for the foundation belongs, in significant part, elsewhere.

The Voice Beneath the Publishing Empire

Strip away the business model innovation and the corporate infrastructure, and you find a designer with a genuine voice.

Kingdom of the Ghouls (Dungeon #70, 1998) is considered one of the greatest D&D adventures ever published—a solo-authored descent into the Underdark that Baur conceived, structured, and wrote himself. Assassin Mountain brought Arabian mythology into AD&D with a scholar’s care. Planes of Chaos translated philosophical abstractions into playable environments. Courts of the Shadow Fey delivered fairy-tale horror with mechanical teeth.

These are the credits where Baur’s personal craft is unambiguous. Short paragraphs, deliberate pacing, settings that draw from Slavic and Germanic mythology rather than the standard British Isles template. Dark fairy tales where the monsters have politics and the politics have consequences.

The voice is real. It shows up in his earliest Dragon magazine contributions and his most recent worldbuilding seminars, unchanged in philosophy, refined in execution. Story first, stats later. Provide enough for play, leave room for imagination. That principle holds across thirty-seven years of published work.

Midgard: The Setting That Survived Everything

Midgard is Baur’s most personal creation—a dark fantasy setting built on ley lines and shadow roads, populated by gearforged automatons and ravenfolk, governed by masked gods whose identities shift from culture to culture.

Its most distinctive features are mechanical: a ley line system that transforms magic from resource management into spatial tactics, a status system that gives feudal hierarchy real rules weight, and a masked pantheon that allows the same deity to function differently across cultures. These are smart, integrated subsystems. None of them were adopted by other designers.

What Midgard has done, remarkably, is survive six system editions. From D&D 3.5 through 4E, 5E, Pathfinder, 13th Age, AGE System, and now Tales of the Valiant. That’s not mechanical architecture. That’s setting durability—proof that the world itself is robust enough to transcend any single rules engine.

The methodology distinguishes between these things. A setting that works across multiple systems proves the setting is well-designed. It does not prove the designer built mechanical architecture that others built upon.

The Publisher’s Paradox

Here is the tension Baur’s career makes visible: his most impactful contribution to the hobby is not something the methodology fully captures.

Wizards of the Coast selected Kobold Press to design the first D&D 5E adventures—an extraordinary institutional endorsement. The Tome of Beasts series became quasi-official, landing on D&D Beyond alongside only three other third-party products. The Kobold Guide series assembled essays from Monte Cook, Ed Greenwood, and Keith Baker into reference works that aspiring designers treat as textbooks. The patronage model prefigured an industry revolution. Several Open Design patrons transitioned into professional designers, including contributors who went on to write for Paizo and WotC.

These are real, consequential achievements. They reshaped how RPGs get published, funded, and taught. But the methodology asks about game design—mechanics, systems, architectural propagation—and by that measure, Baur’s greatest innovations live in a category the scoring system isn’t built to fully reward.

That’s not a flaw in Baur. It’s a limitation of any methodology that tries to separate the act of designing games from the act of making game design possible.

The Honest Assessment

Invention scores a 6. Baur’s game mechanics—ley lines, status, the masked pantheon, clockwork magic—are smart combinations of existing elements with genuine creative vision. The patronage model is genuinely innovative, but it’s a publishing format, not a game mechanism. At the table, Baur’s designs synthesize existing RPG elements with unusual cultural sources and strong narrative instincts. Nobody adopted his specific mechanics. Nobody built a new design school around his inventions. The innovations are appreciated and self-contained. “Smart combination” fits precisely.

Architecture scores a 6. This is where the “systems over settings” principle hits hardest. Midgard is excellent worldbuilding with clever subsystems, but it runs inside other people’s mechanical frameworks. Tales of the Valiant has third-party adoption—140+ titles on DriveThruRPG—but the chassis is WotC’s 5E, refined rather than originated. The propagation credit for the d20 foundation belongs to the people who built it. Baur’s original architectural elements haven’t propagated beyond his own products. Tome of Beasts and Deep Magic are well-regarded content, but both have documented balance inconsistencies that limit the quality score. Good craftsmanship. Some subsystems underdeveloped. Solid professional work.

Mastery scores a 7. This is Baur’s strongest pillar. Thirty-seven years of active design with a clear three-phase evolution: modular adventure specialist inside TSR, environmental mechanics alchemist during the 3E freelance era, mythic worldbuilder at Kobold Press. An identifiable design voice that hasn’t wavered since his earliest published work. Multiple quality games with personal authorship—Kingdom of the Ghouls, Assassin Mountain, Planes of Chaos, Courts of the Shadow Fey, Midgard. The counterweight: his role shifted progressively from solo designer to publisher-CEO. His most famous products increasingly list other people as lead designers. Tales of the Valiant’s Player’s Guide doesn’t credit him as a designer at all. Solo work weighs more than team work, and the team credit proportion keeps this at 7 rather than 8.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Baur’s career reveals what happens when you build brilliantly inside someone else’s cathedral.

Every pillar of his score reflects the same underlying dynamic. His inventions are smart combinations within existing frameworks. His architecture serves settings that run on other people’s engines. His mastery evolves toward directing others rather than designing solo. His adjustments capture the career facts but miss the publishing revolution because it sits outside the methodology’s scope.

The pattern isn’t limitation. It’s a conscious choice—made once at TSR, reinforced at WotC, and elevated to a business philosophy at Kobold Press. Baur decided early that the game’s mechanical foundation belonged to someone else and that his gift was making the best possible content within that foundation. Then he built an empire proving it.

What Remains

Kingdom of the Ghouls, still appearing on greatest-adventure lists three decades later. Midgard, the dark fairy-tale setting that outlived six game systems. The Kobold Guides, still on shelves as the closest thing the hobby has to a design curriculum. The patronage model that showed an entire industry how to fund creative work without a corporate parent.

And Kobold Press itself—the company WotC trusted to launch 5E’s adventure line, the publisher whose monster books sit on D&D Beyond beside official content, the studio that answered the OGL crisis by building its own system rather than waiting for permission.

Baur didn’t redesign the cathedral. He proved that professional-grade work could happen outside its walls. Then he proved you could make a living at it. Then he proved you could build something the cathedral itself would come to rely on.

The score measures the design. The legacy is the infrastructure.

Total: 23 points. Year: 1989.

Total: 23 points. Year: 1989.