Special Guests

Information for our Special Guests is listed below as they are booked and the information is provided. Please check back periodically for the latest information.

Artist / Game Designer Jeff Dee

Jeff Dee has worked in the gaming industry for over 40 years. His artwork has appeared in numerous games and magazines, including TSR's Deities and Demigods (as well as many AD&D modules and other early TSR products), Villains & Vigilantes, adventures for the Star Wars RPG from West End Games, and others. He co-designed Villains & Vigilantes, TWERPS (The World's Easiest Role-Playing System) from Gamescience, and Cavemaster the Stonepunk RPG from UNIgames. Cavemaster won the 2013 Three Castles Design Award at NTRPGCon. Jeff has also worked in the computer games industry on games such as Ultima VI, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, and Wing Commander. He was the art director on Ultima VII, and the lead game designer on The Sims: Castaway Stories. Jeff currently works as a game design consultant, and operates two paper game publishing companies: Monkey House Games with V&V co-creator Jack Herman, and UNIgames with partner Talzhemir Mrr. UNIgames’ latest products are ‘Bethorm: the Plane of Tekumel’, which reintroduces the first tabletop RPG setting ever published from TSR’s ‘Empire of the Petal Throne’ (1975), and the latest from Monkey House is ‘Mighty Protectors’, the 3rd edition of V&V.

Artist / Game Designer Talzhemir Mrr

Manda (Talzhemir) is an artist, poet, storyteller, inventor, co-creator of POCKET UNIVERSE (the mechanics used in the games Bethorm and Quicksilver Lite) and FURCADIA (listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the world's oldest multiplayer online social game). She's also the co-designer of Cavemaster (the tabletop RPG played with stones instead of dice; UniGames). Both her writing and art careers began on Ultima VI; she is known to Ultima fans as ''Penumbra''. She was one of the first people to be trained to use 3DStudio Max. She worked for Apogee (now known as 3D Realms) and Optigon (later known as TEN, Total Entertainment Network).

Personal interests include 3D printing designs, archery, hand-spinning, swords, pottery, cooking, backyard chickens, the Stone Age, and the Royal Manticoran Army. She doesn't have a first name.

Leonard Balsera

Leonard Balsera is best known for his design and development work on Evil Hat Productions’ various Fate system games, such as the award-winning Dresden Files RPG, but has worked across the breadth of the industry, with credits from Pelgrane Press, Fantasy Flight Games, Green Ronin, Margaret Weis Productions, Onyx Path Publishing, Steve Jackson Games, John Wick Presents, and many others. When he isn’t eating, breathing, and sleeping hobby games, he spoils his cat rotten, reads voraciously, performs on stage occasionally, and plays a lot of video games. He lives at the intersection of memory and dream, but his physical body resides in Austin, Texas.