Sean K. Reynolds Reflects on a Career Spanning D&D, Fallout, and the Art of Tabletop Storytelling

Sean K. Reynolds is a veteran of the tabletop RPG industry with a storied career that spans multiple iconic franchises and groundbreaking designs. He began his professional journey at TSR and Wizards of the Coast, contributing to Dungeons & Dragons during the transition into 3rd Edition. He later worked with Interplay on the original Baldur’s Gate III and Van Buren—the infamous, canceled version of Fallout 3 developed before Bethesda took over the franchise.

Over the years, Sean has become a trusted voice in RPG design, known for his ability to balance complex systems with narrative richness. As part of Monte Cook Games, he’s played a critical role in shaping the Cypher System, Numenera, and the surreal and deeply personal RPG Invisible Sun. His work continues to push the envelope in both storytelling and community-driven game design.

Q1: Why do you still use crowdfunding at this stage in Monte Cook’s development, when it’s usually used by small, indie teams that need funding to get projects off the ground?

Sean: Crowdfunding is actually a core part of our strategy because it allows us to work directly with our consumers to gauge interest and provide them with the kind of product that they’re interested in. To smaller companies, we may look like a large TTRPG juggernaut, but to companies like Paizo or Wizards of the Coast, we’re a small company. And it’s interesting because the support we get from crowdfunding allows us to keep our staff of about 14 people employed full-time. Which is rare while working in TTRPGs, because a friend of mine that’s also an RPG designer likes to joke that there are more full-time astronauts than there are full-time TTRPG designers—and he’s right.

Q2: How has your crowdfunding strategy evolved over time?

Sean: We’ve learned how to properly introduce content and stagger content releases. You see some campaigns that will put everything out there initially in terms of content and stretch goals, and then their funding peters out quickly because there’s nothing to get and keep the community engaged after that initial interaction with the campaign. By having additional content that can be unlocked after a period of time, and when more funding goals have been reached, it keeps people excited by your project, which leads to more word of mouth and more money.

Q3: What role does community engagement and feedback play in your campaigns?

Sean: Community engagement and feedback play a large role in our campaigns because you have to listen to your community and meet their needs. So that might mean we tweak things because the community isn’t as interested as we thought, or we add more of something, like extra pages to a book or physical items to give people something to chase. At the end of the day, we’re making the type of games that we want to play, but we’re doing it with the support of our community.

Q4: Looking ahead, do you foresee a time when you’ll move away from Kickstarter—or is it now an essential part of your long-term model?

Sean: Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t think we’ll be moving away from crowdfunding anytime soon because it gives us a direct line to our community and allows us to gauge interest in our products. So we know what to make and how much to make of it, which cuts down on wasting money that could have been better spent elsewhere. But you never know—things can change, and if they do, we’ll change as well.

Q5: When I look at Invisible Sun, the first thing that comes to mind is it's weird. And I mean that in a good way. It's magic, and mysticism, and personal, deep, emotional journeys all rolled into one. It's very cyberpunk, in a way. The only real point of comparison I can find for it is Planescape: Torment. So did Planescape influence the development of the game?

Sean: So, it's interesting that you note Planescape: Torment as being very like Invisible Sun, because Monte—the man that created Invisible Sun—was working at Wizards of the Coast on Dungeons & Dragons supplements, like the original Torment guidebooks and sourcebooks that were the inspiration for Planescape: Torment. So, there is a lot of overlap and DNA from Planescape and other things that he worked on over at Wizards of the Coast that did come into Invisible Sun. And you're absolutely right that it is very cyberpunk-like in the sense that you have self-determination, and you are able to decide who and what exactly you are going to be, and shape yourself in this very strange world that you find yourself in.

Q6: How did you balance abstract narrative elements like mystery and symbolism with structured gameplay?

Sean: Balancing out mystery and narrative with the gameplay wasn't exactly as hard as you might think, because while it's a game that's played in a group setting, Invisible Sun is also really about your individual journey. And Invisible Sun is something that you can't really understand until you play it, because it's when you're sitting around a table and everybody is kind of on their own unique journey of discovery through the world of themselves and whatever it is that they are trying to do—whoever it is that they are, or whoever it is that they're trying to become.

You have to really sit and get immersed in it and really experience it before you can kind of figure out who you are and what your place in that world is. But when it clicks, it clicks. And people tend to try to play Invisible Sun like it's any other game until they sit down and realize there's nothing else really like it. You know, you have orcs and dwarves and things like that in other games, like fantasy or what have you, but in Invisible Sun, you don't have to abide by any standard rules and archetypes. If you decide that you want to have, say, a TV speaker as a head, you can absolutely do that and make it make sense in-world and with your character. And that's the beautiful thing about it—just blending all of those things together by allowing everybody the freedom to have their own individual journeys while also supporting the group moving towards a shared objective. The key was giving GMs and players tools that encouraged mystery, without ever demanding a “right” answer. You engage with the mystery, but you don’t always resolve it. That’s intentional.

Q7: What was the creative process behind the Sooth Deck?

Sean: The Sooth deck is interesting because it serves as a physical gateway to more gameplay opportunities. And it's really interesting because, as designers and developers, we don't get to see or really play with these things until the product is pretty much already in the hands of consumers. When we're developing these things, we're basically just using little paper slips that we've created at the office that we're shifting back and forth.

We don't have actual art or cardstock or anything like that. You guys are getting the product because we're still in development, and things can be changing all the time—from art to writing to world design and what have you. But it's really interesting because Sooth cards are in a lot of ways kind of like tarot cards in the sense that they all have different meanings and different representations, and they're going to be unique to each individual character and the journey that character is going on. So having a physical Sooth card in your hand is just another tool for immersion—to really give you something to look at and look forward to experiencing in that world.

Q8: A unique feature of the game is its emphasis on secrets and personal arcs. How did you ensure that character interiority stayed central and meaningful in a group play setting?

Sean: Invisible Sun was designed in a way to make individual journeys just as, if not more, meaningful than the group journey—because you're attached either way. But when it's your personal journey of your personal character, yeah, you're going to be a little bit more invested in it than you would be if you were talking about the journey of somebody else—say your tablemate or your GM or what have you.

So the game was designed to be open-ended enough to allow for group play in the shared overall objective, but also a smaller-scale and scope individual objective where, you know, you can focus on your own quest. Like I had a character that was very angry at his parentage because he'd basically been abandoned, and his whole quest was trying to figure out who his family was, why they abandoned him, why his parents just basically got rid of him. And when he found his parents and discovered who they were and why they abandoned him, he was angry and he was ready to kill them. And the whole narrative arc of that surrounded him figuring out what was best for him and what was going to make him happy—and really trying to understand: would his parents' deaths even make him happy, or would they make that pit inside him even emptier? We encourage gameplay where you're off to yourself, doing your own thing and making discoveries.

Q9: Invisible Sun has a very deliberate aesthetic—box design, components, even the Black Cube. How important is physical design in communicating your games’ themes?

Sean: It’s absolutely crucial. The Black Cube isn’t just a box—it’s part of the world-building. The physical design signals to the player: this is something different, something immersive. From the moment you open it, you’re stepping into a liminal space. That tactile and visual experience primes you for the kind of narrative the game is trying to deliver.

Q10: The idea of “hidden truths” runs deep in the setting. Did you design Invisible Sun to be replayable or reinterpreted over time, almost like a puzzle box?

Sean: Yes, very much so. Invisible Sun is designed to reward repeated play and layered interpretation. There are truths behind truths, and depending on your character’s perspective—or even your own as a player—you’ll uncover different things. It’s not about solving a single mystery, but about realizing there are always more questions just under the surface. Invisible Sun was actually designed with various secrets in mind.

There's an entire language for the world that you inhabit that we created and populated through various parts of the game—whether it be the box and the internal components, the various books and cards and knick-knacks on the inside of it. People have literally torn their boxes apart looking for secrets and translating things to try and get a little bit more lore, a little bit more story, and a little bit more of the world as a whole—because they love it so much. But it also adds so much to the journey. So yeah, the packaging and the overall design of the Black Cube and its various accessories were an essential part of the game.

Q11: Tech is playing an increasing role in TTRPGs. What’s your take on integrating apps into the experience—do you feel anything is lost or gained in doing so?

Sean: It's interesting that you mention that, because we don't look at technology as necessarily a limiting factor. Yes, having phones and screens at the table can be a distraction—people might be on TikTok, YouTube, or texting instead of being present in the moment—and that isn’t what we want. But we don’t use technology in that way. We use technology as a supplement to help make the experience more intense and immersive.

So maybe you get some background music. Maybe you get some voice-acted text and dialogue. Maybe you just have things like the Sooth cards coming up on screen if you don't have a physical copy of it—or if you left it at home. The digital component adds to the gameplay instead of taking away from it, which is really what our design was about. We wanted to make this a very immersive experience that was also extremely inclusive.

And we realized that to do that, we’d have to meet people where they are. A lot of people are digital. Some have friends and family who live across the country, and they still want to play games with them. So maybe they use Roll20 or Discord or some other platform where they can still connect and play. That little bit of digital aid just makes that process easier—and we’re in full support of that.

Q12: Given your long, storied history of working on games, what would you say is the most impactful game you’ve worked on?

Sean: Invisible Sun is absolutely the most memorable and important game that I've worked on—because of what it is, what it represents, and what it means not just to me, not just to Monte, but to gamers around the world who have fallen in love with the universe and how unique and diverse it is.

After everything that I've done—working in so many different universes from Dungeons & Dragons to Fallout—working on something this personal, deep, and immersive is special. It really, really is. And being able to take what Monte created and then go from there, adding my own spin on it—there's nothing like it. To me, this is the most personal and important project I’ve ever worked on.

\ I had a fantastic interview with Sean, and I strongly recommend anyone that’s interested to check out Monte Cook Games and their selection of TTRPGs like The Magnus Archives, Old Gods of Apalacchia, Numenera, and of course, Invisible Sun.