Kathleen Mercury

An award-winning teacher and designer, Kathleen Mercury, M.A.T., M.E.T., has been pushing the boundaries of using design thinking to merge game design and instruction from elementary to collegiate levels for over 20 years. She has taught everything from the core subjects to Design and Gifted Intervention in schools from the midwest to California to overseas in Bucharest, Romania. Currently, she is a Lecturer in the School of Education at California Polytechnic Humboldt teaching and supervising student teachers.

Kathleen is a published tabletop game designer with Greece Lightning (2021) and upcoming titles Tulip Season (2024), with others in the works. Kathleen thinks happiness comes from being able to create the life you want, and she feels very fortunate that she’s been able to do that. www.KathleenMercury.com

Joseph Z Chen [He/Him]

Joseph Z Chen is a local board game designer most known for co-designing and self-publishing Fantastic Factories. He also did game development for Verdant, Knitting Circle and is active in the game design community helping playtest up and coming games. He was also a past LUCI Award game design judge and has been attending OrcaCon since 2018.

Amanda Panda [She/Her]

I am an omni-gamer who loves to showcase a variety of board games and their creators with a diverse group of people. I am a part of Our Family Plays Games Voices, TLN, and TTAD. I believe that diversity and inclusivity only makes everything better.

AnnaMaria Phelps [She/Her]

AnnaMaria is a TTRPG writer and the CEO of Violet Daisy Games, a Washington based publisher of storytelling games. When she’s not weaving magical tales of adventure and hilarity, you can find her curled up with a mystery novel or cozy video game and her two dogs, Juniper and Primrose.

Joseph Carriker [He/Him]

A writer, editor, developer, and designer in the TTRPG industry since 2001, Joseph has done work for Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, Onyx Path, Green Ronin, and a number of other companies. He is an outspoken advocate for queerness in gaming, an absolute worldbuilding nerd, and very happily partnered to his favorite gamer in Portland OR.

Fertessa Allyse

Fertessa is a Seattle designer who worked on Wicked & Wise, Mansplaining, Star Trek Cryptic, and the Goofy Movie Game. She loves long walks in her house and the never-ending sound of her dog cleaning her paws (just kidding no one loves that). If you see her, invite her to a game!

Banana Chan

Banana Chan is a Cantonese Canadian game designer, writer and publisher living in the US. Her most notable work has been on Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft and Betrayal at House on the Hill: 3rd Edition. In 2022, she won Dicebreaker Awards’ Game Designer of the Year and 2 Silver ENnie Awards.

Rob Carlos

Rob Carlos started his art career working as a digital graphic designer for a printing company in Florida, illustrating the D&D games he ran with friends and drawing and painting whenever possible. At the printing company he learned to expand his traditional oil and acrylic painting techniques into the digital realm, using a very early version of Photoshop, and was able to get his digital personal work printed in color for the first time. He started selling those prints on his website (the worldwide web was a brand new thing at that point) and was asked to do some paintings for the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time TCG, starting his official professional work as a fantasy artist.

In 2007, Rob started showing his work at Norwescon, and other sci-fi/ fantasy conventions, taking him from the Pacific Northwest across the country, and to Worldcons in Helsinki and Dublin. For years, Rob concentrated on illustrating for independent and small-press writers and musicians, particularly fan-favorites SJ Tucker and Alexander James Adams. Over the years, he has been invited to be the Artist Guest of Honor at Radcon, Dragonflight, Miscon, GFGR, Orycon, and Norwescon.

Rob stays busy doing both self-directed and commercial painting projects, drawing people’s personal dragons (ask him to tell you about that when you see him), and occasionally creating enormous murals for locations around Washington and Oregon. Recently he has delved into the world of 3d modeling, doing a number of digital sculptures for the Zombie Orpheus Entertainment “Strowlers” property, as well as the characters of the Twitch stream “Legacy of Fools”, a live actual-play D&D game that streams every Tuesday.

Last, and most importantly, Rob’s very recent work can be seen in the new Beach House RPGs release: Start Here – the Introductory Roleplaying Game, which debuted in 2024. Rob is currently the Art Director for Beach House RPGs, and was the primary illustrator for the three books in their initial boxed set.

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Stefan Pokorny

Stefan is the founder and CEO of Dwarven Forge. His modular gaming terrain, introduced in 1996 started a whole industry of similar 3-D offerings for gaming. He is also a painter and sculptor and professional Game Master. He has been the subject of various documentary’s including “The Dwarvenaut” directed by Josh Bishop. He is currently working to bring his world of Mythras to publication and to realize his dream of a TV travel series related to gaming

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Connor Alexander

Connor is the owner of Coyote & Crow Games, the designer of the Coyote & Crow RPG, Naasii, Wolves, and more. He’s a proud citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a resident of Seattle.

Jacob Mundell

Jacob is an actor, playwright and stand up comedian. He is also a member of the LGBTQ community and an artist of disability, he was born with one hand. Jacob’s most notable role was Erich on Season 5 of The Expanse on Amazon. Most recently, he produced his own one-man play entitled, Into That Darkness in Chicago in 2023. Jacob loves Catan and plays several games on his Nintendo switch with his husband, including Animal Farm, Hogwarts Legacy, Pokemon Violet and Dynasty Warriors.

John “OnlyPlayWizards” Bultena

John Bultena, aka OnlyPlayWizards, is a continuing lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program at the University of California, Merced where he teaches a class titled, “Dungeons & Dragons Skills IRL?” that examines tabletop roleplaying games from interdisciplinary approaches with first year students. In addition, he is the GameMaster and producer of Abraxas’ Precipice, an actual play of The Expanse Roleplaying Game that has been ongoing since 2021. In addition, he owns and operates Cauldron & Tower, RPG minded apparel.