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.

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 working on Genestealer for Space Hulk alongside Jervis Johnson and Richard Halliwell, two of Games Workshop’s most important designers. The expansion added psychic combat and Genestealer Hybrids, both of which became part of the broader Space Hulk and Warhammer 40,000 lineage.

This tells you nearly everything about Forbeck’s career in miniature.

The ambition is real. The talent is real.

And the most celebrated work often has someone else’s name on the masthead beside his.

The Deadlands Question

No discussion of Matt Forbeck avoids Deadlands.

It should not.

But it has to be honest.

Deadlands: The Weird West is one of the most enduring RPG settings of the past thirty years. Poker-based initiative, playing card draws, fate chips, supernatural Western horror, and the strange confidence to turn cowboys and monsters into a durable game line.

Shane Lacy Hensley designed it.

That is the center of the attribution.

Forbeck co-founded Pinnacle Entertainment Group with Hensley and served as its president for four years. He edited and helped publish the early material. He was part of the operational engine that turned Hensley’s vision into a product line.

This is important work.

It is not the same thing as originating the design.

Forbeck’s own public credits have often been unusually clear about distinctions between writing, editing, developing, and designing. He deserves the same clarity from this evaluation.

Deadlands helps explain his career.

It does not carry his design credit.

Brave New World

In 1999, Forbeck did something the Deadlands association can obscure: he designed his own RPG.

Brave New World is unambiguously his vision. 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 other superhero games leaned toward freeform creation, Brave New World committed to pre-built archetype packages. Blaster. Flyer. Speedster. Bouncer. You picked a package. That was your superhero lane.

In an era of infinite customization, Forbeck bet on structured restriction.

The Trick mechanic made that restriction more expressive. Beat the target by enough, and the extra success could become currency for special power expression. Degree-of-success was not new. Ars Magica and Shadowrun were already there. But tying it directly to superhero feel was a smart move.

The reception told a split story.

The setting had energy. The core premise was strong. The rules drew more criticism. Players who expected the flexibility of Champions found the archetypes too narrow. The core book’s limited package selection made the restriction feel tighter than some players wanted.

Brave New World did not become the superhero system standard.

But it showed Forbeck’s design instinct clearly.

He was interested in how rules express the brand of the experience.

The Fiction Years

After Brave New World, Forbeck’s career shifted.

Game design became episodic. Fiction writing became central.

That was not a retreat from games. It was a move into another part of the same entertainment ecosystem. Forbeck wrote Blood Bowl novels, Halo novels, D&D novels, Marvel material, Star Wars work, game tie-ins, original fiction, and more.

He became one of the tabletop industry’s great cross-media professionals: part novelist, part designer, part developer, part editor, part convention fixture, part connector.

Some projects in this era were game-adjacent rather than design-led. His Lord of the Rings RPG contribution was writing and development work inside a system designed by others. Shotguns and Sorcery used Monte Cook’s Cypher System, with additional mechanics by Robert Schwalb. These are meaningful credits, but they are not the same as inventing a system.

From the early 2000s to the Marvel Multiverse RPG, Forbeck’s major game-design output was selective rather than continuous.

The fiction was prolific.

The design waited for the right doorway.

The D616

Marvel gave him that doorway.

The Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is built around the d616 system: three six-sided dice, one of them designated as the Marvel die. The name is not accidental. Earth-616 is the main Marvel Universe designation, so the resolution mechanic carries the IP inside the dice expression itself.

That is very Forbeck.

The d616 does not merely solve probability. It brands probability.

The Marvel die can trigger Fantastic results. The system uses the familiar 3d6 curve but wraps it in Marvel identity. Instead of rolling a generic check, players roll something that feels named by the universe they are playing in.

That is the strongest design idea in Forbeck’s recent work.

More importantly, the full game shows evidence of learning. The playtest era leaned harder on archetypes and rank structures. Feedback pushed the final version toward more flexible creation than Brave New World had allowed.

A designer who repeats a mistake shows stubbornness.

A designer who corrects it shows craft.

The Cross-Format Professional

Before the RPGs, between the RPGs, and alongside the RPGs, Forbeck worked in formats many RPG designers never touch.

Miniatures games. Collectible card games. RPGs. Dice games. Board game and mass-market formats. Fiction. ARG and transmedia work.

WildStorms imported superhero and card-game logic into a collectible format. Marvel Heroes Battle Dice moved superhero play into toy-channel dice combat. Genestealer came from miniatures design culture. Marvel Multiverse returned him to RPGs with a major corporate IP.

Moving across formats is a skill.

A CCG needs a different balance structure than an RPG. A mass-market dice game demands faster comprehension than a miniatures expansion. A licensed RPG has to serve brand, accessibility, and system durability at once.

Forbeck has navigated those transitions for more than three decades.

That range matters.

The Honest Assessment

The temptation with Forbeck is to confuse the career with the design catalog.

The career is huge.

The design catalog is more selective.

Deadlands belongs primarily to Shane Hensley as design. Forbeck’s role was editorial, publishing, and operational. Important, but not the same kind of credit.

The Power Package system in Brave New World was distinctive, but not widely adopted. The d616 mechanic is clever, branded, and memorable, but it is too recent to show long-term propagation. His cross-format range is real, but many credits are collaborative.

What survives the correction is still interesting:

A designer with genuine versatility, a distinctive instinct for tying mechanics to IP identity, and two major RPG systems separated by decades that show both ambition and structural risk.

The mechanic is often the logo.

Sometimes that works beautifully.

Sometimes the architecture underneath struggles to carry the promise.

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? Then they build mechanics to solve that problem.

Forbeck often starts with the IP.

What does it feel like to be a Marvel superhero? What does this world want the player to touch? What is the emotional signature of this brand?

Then he looks for the mechanic that expresses that feeling.

The d616 does not simply solve a dice problem. It makes the player feel like they are rolling inside the Marvel Universe.

Tricks do not simply solve a balance problem. They make your superpower feel like it responds when you perform well.

This is why his settings and concepts often outshine the raw system engineering. The thematic integration is strong. The structure underneath sometimes strains.

He is designing experiences as much as architectures.

The mechanic is the logo.

What Remains

The one-way ticket to Nottingham.

The Genestealer expansion, still part of Space Hulk’s design lineage.

Four years helping run Pinnacle while someone else’s genius became an industry landmark.

A superhero RPG that bet on restriction before most superhero players wanted restriction.

Twenty-plus years of novels and licensed fiction.

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, and licensed worlds.

He has worked in more formats than many designers ever touch.

The design catalog is thinner than the career suggests. Two major RPG systems across more than thirty 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.

The history has to distinguish being in the industry from shaping it through design.

Forbeck’s presence was vast.

His design catalog was selective.

Both things are true.