Bio, they asked for a bio. What do I say that would be interesting to you? All the normal stuff like being 53, a married father of 3, and a career Union Carpenter doesn’t mean much to the average gamer. So how about this. In 1978, I was 13. My brother, 10 years my elder, called the house one Thursday and asked me if I wanted to go and play a game. He called to see if his kid brother wanted to play a game with him!! You bet I did. He drove down and picked me up and off we went to some house in the woods of Taunton. There were people dressed as wizards and fighters and we sat around a big table, I was a dwarf with an axe and darn I died three times that night but we killed that dragon! And that was it. I was hooked. Forever. And that really means until I’m done. I played all throughout school, read anything fantasy I could get my hands on (my book collection at one point numbered 10K, awesome but ridiculous to move), joined the SCA, joined NERO, started several community gaming clubs, ran or played in every 2nd edition module published, designed numerous “real physics” systems and greedily consumed everything remotely fantasy-related whole and kicking. By the time college ended with a bang, I was deep running my own game system, I was pretty darn good with a sword, my apartment was teaming with dragons, gargoyles and fantasy ephemera and life was right around the corner to put a screeching halt to it all. During my first and second marriages my gaming life was subdued and more of an addendum rather than a headline. No regrets, it’s just the way it was. But I still believed. Jump forward a bit right to the end of my second marriage. After years of working retail I had begun a new career in construction and one day at work, a thousand miles away from anything remotely fantasy, a strange thing happened which began an entirely new phase in my life. My partner at work (let’s call him Vinnie) went away for a long weekend. When he got back I asked him where he had gone. He said “Gaming Convention”. I was the only guy who ever said “You play D&D?” A month or two later, after finding a piece of paper “ Looking for Gamers” tacked to a bulletin board in a very missed game store in the Providence Arcade, we were standing on a porch in the rain, right back in Taunton. A guy (let’s call him Jay) opened that door and it might as well have been to Narnia, because ever since Gaming has back in my life and those two guys are still my best friends on this rock. At the first convention I went to with the both of these guys (Totalcon), I was playing D&D and looked across the tables in the hall to see a beautiful woman dressed in a burgundy blouse and leather pants. Jump forward to today as I write this and that woman, Petra Jackl, my wife of 17 years, is in the other room working. We’ve raised our kids to be gamers and surrounded ourselves for years now with amazing friends and family that all are gamers. Next story. About half a dozen years ago, Petra and I were sitting around thinking about what the future held. The kids were getting older and less interested in what we were doing and we thought about when they moved on and what were we going to do. We decided that night that we would surround ourselves with the most excellent group of gamers and amazing people we could meet and together we would live in interesting and exciting times of our making as we got older. And we did. Dark Phoenix Events was born of our efforts to meet great folks and for five years now it’s continued to get better and better and we’ve had some incredibly adventurous, side-splittingly humorous, downright just the best experiences of our lives with those folks and we are proud and honored to call each and every one of them our friend and family. Our Tribe. Our newest endeavor, Rising Phoenix GameCon promises to be another great step in the path we have chosen. I hope to instill that sense of gaming that I still have, from that first night a lowly dwarf fought a dragon to stepping foot in our own Convention for the first time and all the amazing possibilities gaming gave me to live the incredible full life I have so far.