Permanent Special Guests | ||
| John Kovalic is the creator of the fan-favorite Dork Tower comic book, as well as the "Wild Life" newspaper strip. John has also drawn editorial cartoons for newspapers, as well as providing illustrations for such companies as Steve Jackson Games, Out of the Box, and Jolly Roger Games. John is a huge fan of Beef-a-Roo, a Rockford fast food chain mentioned in Dork Tower strips. You can visit Beef-a-Roo while you're here! |
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| James M. Ward, President of Fast Forward Entertainment. Successful author and game designer since 1974. He created the first science fiction role playing game, Metamorphosis Alpha. He's written for MARVEL, DC COMICS, RANDOM HOUSE, DEL REY, BANTAM, and WESTERN PUBLISHING. Voted into the Game Designer's Hall of Fame, Received the best game of the year for Gamma World. His novels have been on the best selling lists of Waldens, B. Dalton's, and Locus. His game credits include work with: Charlie Brown licenses, Sesame Street licenses, He-Man licenses, Conan licenses, Indiana Jones Licenses, Dragon Ball Z licenses, Marvel licenses, DC comics licenses, Worlds of Wonder licenses, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time licenses, and Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro licenses. He designed the smash hit card game, DRAGON BALL Z. In the '90s he was head of the TSR R&D department and helped guide the company to several 40 million dollar years. He left the company to go back to his first love, designing products and has worked with several game companies to produce best selling product. |  | |
| Tom Wham, game designer to the stars! Tom Wham has been a game designer since age 7 when he got his first monopoly set and immediately began modifying the rules. For a very long time this activity went unrewarded. Then, he got a job at a combination mail order hobby shop and game company, where for the most part, he shipped bottles of paint to Gary Gygax. With Don Lowry at Guidon Games, he co-authored a set of Civil War Naval Miniature rules (Ironclad). Subsequently he was employed by TSR, and this led to the publication of such titles as Snit Smashing, Snit's Revenge, Icebergs, and The Awful Green Things From Outer Space. Since them, Tom went on to work at the Lake Geneva Public Library, a position he retired from in 2003. Now, he's back to game design full-time, meaning when he's not doing other things! |  | |
| Jamie Chambers, A native of the kudzu-covered hills of north Georgia, Jamie Chambers began playing role-playing games at the age of seven--cutting his teeth on the "red box" set of Dungeons & Dragons. A few years later (and an upgrade to "Advanced"), he ran his very first campaign for fellow sixth-graders: the original Dragonlance modules. A few years later he began playing science-fiction, using a homebrew modification of Traveller called the "Space Dungeon." Jamie played a young mechanic on a beat-up old spaceship making cargo and smuggling runs, the crew managing to get into trouble wherever they went. Years later, Jamie is still involved with both fantasy and science-fiction gaming. He now works as the Vice President of both Sovereign Press (overseeing the Dragonlance game line) and Margaret Weis Productions (developing the Serenity Role Playing Game and the upcoming Battlestar Galactica Role Playing Game). He also has authored game products for Wizards of the Coast, Elmore Productions, and Fast Forward Entertainment, and wrote articles for Dragon Magazine, Games Unplugged, and Campaign Magazine. Jamie contributed to Search for Power and Dragons in the Archives, two fiction anthologies published by Wizards of the Coast, and also wrote the appendix to Amber & Ashes, a novel by Margaret Weis. Jamie is currently hard at work overseeing two companies and their respective game lines, developing new projects both in games and fiction, and is working on a Dragonlance novel to be published by Wizards of the Coast. He lives in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (the birthplace of hobby roleplaying games) with his wife, Renae, and three children: Melanie, Elizabeth, and Alexander. |  | |
