Our Staff

Big Bad Con would be nothing without it's amazing volunteer team!

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Adrienne Mueller (she/her)

Data Curator

Adrienne has been in love with RPGs since she discovered an abandoned Red Box at the age of 14. She enjoys tabulating spreadsheets almost as much as she enjoys gaming.

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Akemi Maniwa she/they

Facilities Ranger Captain

Akemi (she/they) is an SF Bay Area based indie ttrpg creator, actual play performer, occasional cosplayer, and penguin enthusiast. By day she makes video games, in the off hours plays more analog games (sometimes digitally). They can often be found doing aikido or chilling at home with their dogs. At one point in their life her goal was to be a Power Ranger, Big Bad Con Ranger is a worthy alternative, even though it doesn't come with a cool transformation sequence.

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Andy Munich (he/him)

Volunteer Coordinator

Andy (he/him) is a cis-het-white-male who’s tired of his own demographic dominating gaming spaces. Through his work with GeekGirlCon, The GeekGirlScouts, and Big Bad Con, he’s tried to bring the thrill of RPGs and Story Games to anyone he can reach. He’s very fortunate in having amazing friends and colleagues helping him in this endeavor. Also, he was once transformed into a dwarven puppet for four hours; ask him about it someday.

Andy lives in his own head, which is located in Seattle.

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Annabelle Blackman she/her

Board Game Ranger Captain

Annabelle Blackman is a local youth librarian in the East Bay. In 2014, she discovered modern hobby games alongside her then 3 year old, and she was smitten ever since. She attends board game conventions for professional development as well as for funzies. Professionally, Annabelle has a particular interest in games that appeal to intergenerational groups of varying literacy levels, and English language fluency. Fun Fact: she had no idea indie TTRPGs existed until she volunteered for Big Bad as a Board Game Ranger in 2019. BBC's welcoming community has really defined what story games are for her, and she is always learning.

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Anne Faye (she/her)

Accessibility & Communications Editor

Anne Faye is a pronoun-flexible wheelchair user and poly-nerd. Missions include “helping conventions be more disability-inclusive”, “disaster preparedness”, “gaming”, “science fiction”, and “eating all the cheese”

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Ash Cheshire (fae/they)

Steward

Ash Cheshire (fae/they) has been a Big Bad Con GM since the beginning, and created the Baba Yaga Gift Totes and Zinethology. Ash is committed to helping make every year of BBC even more inclusive and awesome for all. Long live our annual geek sleepover camp!

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Brenden Sparks (he/him)

Facilities Ranger Captain

By day, Brenden is a web designer in higher education, but by night he freelances in game design, layout and editing, digital accessibility, and UX consulting. He likes dice, maps, cards, and games and anything that combines all of them together.

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Brian Vo (he/him)

Little Red Baskets Coordinator

Brian is a gamer, writer, and cook based in Portland, OR. A huge fan of the Powered by the Apocalypse system, he likes to try out other versions but finds comfort in coming back home to Dungeon World at the end of the day. Spends times dreaming and executing on new recipes in his free time, and also finding ways to create food based tributes to the geeky things he loves.

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Colin Fahrion (he/him)

Marketing & Web Front-End Manager

Colin Fahrion is an artist, designer, web developer, shenaniganizer, Doer, and overall dapper individual. His artistic journey has let him to be a key organizer for several collaborative art events both large and small — from dapper bike rides in tweed (SF Tweed) to small 1/16 scale art festivals (Balsa Man) to large immersive performances (All Worlds Fair, Fallen Cosmos, and more). He is an avidly into games as both a player and facilitator. He has also has designed a number of games which can be found on his site Mirth Peddlers.

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Collette Quach (they/she)

Panel Ranger Captain

Collette is an award-winning Chinese-Cambodian narrative designer based in California. They've worked on projects such as the Tian Xia Character Guide Unbreakable Anthology, and the Uncaged Anthology. They are a Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate and a past Big Bad Con PoC Scholar. They create games based on mythology, identity, the weird and what it means to be human.

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Cris Viana she/her

Graphic Designer

Cris Viana is a graphic designer, based in Bahia - Brazil. She is experienced in many areas of Graphic Design, but today dedicates herself to Book Design. She has been in love with TTRPGs since high school, and now she works with it, doing layouts for TTRPG books and board games for publishers in Brazil and abroad!

You can see some of her work in the newest brazilian edition of Castle Falkenstein (RetroPunk/R. Talsorian), Witcher TTRPG - Book of Tales and Tome of Chaos supplements (R. Talsorian), and the second Edition of Improv for Gamers (Evil Hat).

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Dana Leaman they/them

Games on Demand Ranger Captain

Dana (they/them) may be spotted wherever story gamers gather, from Guatemala to Finland. After a long day of writing, running and organizing ttrpgs and larps, Dana likes to relax by writing, running or organizing a late night ttrpg or larp. After attending BBC in 2019 Dana decided this was their new favorite convention, and is hecking chuffed to be part of the team now. Dana lives near Toronto, Canada with at least two cats.

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E.T. (they/them)

Games on Demand Coordinator

E.T. (they/them) is the Pacific Northwest’s current Indie Games on Demand specialist. Based in Seattle, they act as the 2019 Volunteer Coordinator for Go Play NW and coordinate local Indie Games on Demand events. They’re passionate about increasing accessibility in convention spaces and iterating on the Indie Games on Demand model to meet the needs of different events and audiences. In their remaining time, they bake bread professionally and practice kung fu and tai chi.

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Ethan Yen (he/him)

Industry Coordinator

Ethan (He/Him) is a Midwest-based tabletop game designer, environmental engineer, and past recipient of the Big Bad Con PoC Scholarship. He likes urban design, homonyms, and thinking far too much about core resolution mechanics.

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F. Helen Keeney she/her

Community Coordinator

Helen is a nerd from the South Bay. She loves learning new instruments, reading books, and making friends along the way.

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Gina Ricker (she/her)

Panel Coordinator, Big Bad Online Steward

Gina (she/her) is a writer/planner/project/manager and ttrpg enthusiast who streams, hosts, plays, runs, play tests, and makes games on the sly to someday release into the geeky wild. She’s an avid consumer of media and eater of books with a background in mathematics, English, creative writing, and education. She is committed to equity for excluded and marginalized people and to cultivating safe spaces in gaming and beyond. Gina’s north coast roots often show, though she followed the sun and transplanted to the west coast in the last century. She is an irrevocable hopeful optimist and wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Jeremy Tidwell (he/him)

Application Developer

Jeremy Tidwell is a game player, game designer, software developer, photographer, and general nerd-about-town. He has written Companions, a social fiction about the feelings of time travellers, and has collaborated on several Mage 2nd Edition products for White Wolf. He is quite affable, and occasionally smells of lychee fruit!

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Jerry Ozbun he/him

Facilities Coordinator

I grew up a feral child in rural Oregon. In 7th grade I traded my beloved Transformers collection for a set of AD&D books. It's the best trade I ever made. Since then, I’ve played TTRPGs of every flavor. Recently my favorite TTRPGs have been Indie titles like The Watch, The Very Good Dogs of Chernobyl, and MASKS.

I first attended BigBadCon 2017 and over that week fell in love with the con and the people there. In 2019 I joined the Rangers, and generally got underfoot until someone asked me to do something helpful, probably to get me out from underfoot.

I am temporarily relocated from Eugene to Hillsboro Oregon. I get together with my friends in Eugene for online games weekly. I also occasionally drive down for a meatspace session of something light every few weeks. I'm very excited to be a part of the BBC team and look forward to seeing all of you.

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Ken Gribble (he/him)

Greeter Captain

Ken — he/him is a Linux senior systems administrator. He's also a writer, photographer, and amateur mycologist.

He's definitely not a coffee snob.

His favorite role playing games are usually narrative in nature, but he's always willing to explore new things.

Ken loves learning very old skills, like how to make cordage from stuff you find in your neighbors yard waste piles.

Kilted Ken is a faithful sidekick to Princess Izzy The Wonder-Dog.

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Kristine Hassell (she/her)

Social Media & Community Coordinator

Kristine acknowledges that she lives and works on the unceded, traditional land of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish People past and present. She is a cultural consultant, community manager, and all-around geek. She received her first published RPG credit in 2015 and was nominated in 2020 for an ENNIE Award. She works in social media, cultural consulting, and community coordinating. She is a first-generation Filipino-American who can be mercurial but she loves indie TTRPGs, popcorn, snail mail, stickers, K-pop, Schoko-Bons, dark wave, and dim sum.

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Lyla McBeath Fujiwara (she/her)

Crowdfunding Coordinator

Lyla McBeath Fujiwara (she/her) is a Massachusetts-based TTRPG writer, game designer, and the project lead for the Stormlight Archive TTRPG. She's had many past lives, from teaching high schoolers in East Africa to eight years in tech, where she worked as a developer for Google News and created mobile programming online courses that taught hundreds of thousands of students. Her TTRPG work includes freelancing for Gamehole Con, Bob World Builder, and Jeff Stevens Games and designing Jukebox: The Karaoke Musical TTRPG. She was a Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate, Big Bad Con PoC Scholar, and the author of Project Management for TTRPGs, a Substack series about project management and leadership for newcomers in the TTRPG space. In her off hours she can be found throwing lopsided ceramics.

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Morgan Nuncio (they/she)

Volunteer Coordinator

Morgan Nuncio (they/she) is a TTRPG Content Creator, writer, safety consultant, voice actor, and BIPOC Hype Human. Hailing from deep in the heart of Texas, Morgan (or Mo for short!), loves to dive into creative worlds and share stories with others. They are a Caretaker for Huetopia, a streaming platform and community for BIPOC folks in the TTRPG sphere, by BIPOC folks. She also loves hiking, playing with her pup, and food adventures!

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Nathan Black (he/him)

Community Coordinator

I’m helping with the Community Standards. I’m super happy to be here helping out. I’m a factotum, bouncing from job to job. I’ve done everything from working in tech as a project manager to working the door at bars to working the floor at Wizard World Comic Cons.

I play a lot of games and I’m heavily involved in the indie video game scene here in Austin, TX with the Juegos Rancheroscrew. But my first true gaming love is tabletop RPGs. I also spent 7 years in boffer larps.

In my spare time I’m a photographer and a stunt man. The best stunt bit I’ve done was a gritty Super Smash Bros Mario vs Luigi battle

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Pam Punzalan (she/they)

Special Events Coordinator

Pam Punzalan is a queer, Filipino Nebula-nominated, award-winning writer, designer, editor, and consultant based in Canada. Some of her credits include D&D: Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, Hunter: The Reckoning V5, Spire: Shadow Operations, Starfinder: Galactic Magic & Tech Revolution, Candela Obscura, and Thirsty Sword Lesbians: Advanced Swords & Lesbians. She also publishes under her Pammu/The Dovetailor. She believes in making games that engage with the intersections of violence, joy, intimacy, and rebellion, and is also a loud and proud voice from RPGSEA.

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Poorna M. (she/her)

Project Manager

Poorna (she/her) went to the TTRPG milliner's and emerged with many, many hats. At the moment, she's wearing a fascinator that screams : writer. On occasion, she has been known to don an editorial top hat, a process management trilby, even a jaunty AP beret. She has a soft spot for bookish folx and bedlam. She hails from southern and western India and has never met a bookshelf she didn't covet. In the rare moments she isn't distracted by fantasy fiction and the brilliant world of board games, she rambles about mental health in her slice-of-life webcomic, Meta Cheez. There is only so much time she can go without caffeination before language processing becomes insurmountable.

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Red Strange they/them

Greeter Ranger Captain

Hello! I am totally definitely an Agender human & not just 4 racoons in a trenchcoat. By day, I plays games of the tabletop & video varieties with my two cats Remy & Izabelle. By night I work in Hospitals, Ambulances, & Bars all over Seattle making sure people are taken care of in any facet they might require! I'm an avid cinephile & labor organizer in my downtime. I strive to make any space I inhabit a safe, inclusive, & welcoming environment for folx of all walks of life. I am honored to be able to assist BBC in any facet I can.

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Sophie Lagacé (she/her)

Events Coordinator

Sophie Lagacé has been gaming for so long that she thinks of THAC0 as “that new-fangled acronym.” She likes playing, game-mastering, organizing, reviewing, tinkering with, and writing about tabletop games, especially role-playing games.

She has written for Atlas Games, Evil Hat Productions, Generic Games, Vigilance Press, and ZombieSmith, and is currently working on game supplements for Vigilance Press and Atlas Games.

She also is the Fate line developer and project manager for Evil Hat Productions.

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Taylor Navarro (she/her)

Special Events Coordinator

Taylor Navarro (she/her) is a Puerto Rican-British TTRPG project manager, game designer, editor, and two-time Big Bad Con POC Scholarship recipient (2022 & 2023). Her great loves are her children, dice, kobolds, her husband, and knitting/crochet (probably in that order!) Born a support character, Taylor’s goals are to pay it forward and help others find joy and success in tabletop games.

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Tomer (Tomes) Gurantz he/him

Community Coordinator

Just an amorphous blob inhabiting the interstitial; gaming, community, education. I run Games on Demand at Strategicon in Los Angeles , and co-run Story Games LA. I like to occasionally hack games and make cheat sheets and some of those may appear at https://tgurantz.itch.io/.

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Yoshi Creelman (he/him)

Games on Demand Ranger Captain

Yoshi (he/him) is an RPG enthusiast, reading, playing, or facilitating some indie story game. While mostly as a player or facilitator, he's recently started to dabble into RPG design and creation.

Staff Emeritus

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Aven McConnaughey (e/em/eir)

Advocate Ranger Captain

Aven is a game designer that currently resides in the Midwest with eir two cats and one husband. E piloted the Advocate Program in 2018, hoping to create a resource that supports attendees whenever they have to engage with the safety processes available at Big Bad Con. Eir other pursuits include amateur carpentry, improv, and seeing how many game systems e can use to run a single campaign. You can find Aven’s work in Behind the Masc, The Imposters, and the Tragedies of Middle School.

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Brian Kwa (he/him)

Big Bad Con Photographer

Brian Kwa (he/him) is a UX designer by day and a dabbling content creator by night. When he’s not distracted by his young kids or gaming, he’ll be live streaming art and making things. Hang out with him online!

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Carmen Wong they/them

Greeter Captain

Carmen (they/them) is based in Seattle, a marketer by day and an all around nerd all the time. They got first introduced to Big Bad Con in 2019 and has been in love ever since. They're passionate about promoting a safe, inclusive and supportive environment for everyone to play and fun in.

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Darby Pak (she/they)

Board Game Ranger Captain

Darby (She/They) is Los Angeles based actual play performer, game designer, possum, and community manager. They are the Community Manager for Critical Misses, and a member of Apochromatic Unlimited. She also works at a brick and mortar tabletop store in Burbank, sharing their love of games with her community.

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Devon Apple (he/him)

Volunteer Coordinator

Devon (he/him) is a gamer, web developer, and former literature scholar. A member of Dreams of Deirdre, a Bay Area LARP troupe, Devon has written or contributed to LARPs set in the Forgotten Realms, Dresden Files, Star Wars, and many other established or new settings. He also enjoys malachite, comedy, tacos, and music parodies.

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Elsa Sjunneson Henry (she/her)

Accessibility Consultant

Elsa S. Henry (she/her) is a one eyed Scandinavian horror writer & game designer living in New Jersey with two cats, a husband and a hound dog. She is the creator of Feminist Sonar & Feminist Sonar Live, where she has become a well known disability advocate. Her work in the game design world includes Dead Scare, Wraith 20th Anniversary edition, Dracula Dossier, and Fate Accessible. She was an Industry Insider at Gen Con 2015, is the Community Manager for Storium.com, and does disability access coordination for all the Double Exposure Cons.

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Ezra Denney (he/him)

Board Games Coordinator & Exhibitor Coordinator

Ezra Denney (He/Him) is a lifelong gamer (in just about any form) but especially loves boardgames. He is thrilled to see the boardgame offerings at Big Bad Con explode over the past few years, and wants to keep the momentum going. He especially loves playing game sommelier, so if you are looking for a game to play, come ask and he will definitely have recommendations for you. You can watch him play boardgames with his pals at Quests & Chaos on twitch or Youtube.

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Heather Rose (she/her)

Games on Demand Ranger Captain

Heather “DandySprat” Rose (she/her) pretends to be an adult during the day by administratively assisting a research group at UCSF. She got a Switch Lite for Christmas and no one has seen her since. Legend has it she is sometimes social if cheese is involved. Un-official planner of Too Many Things, she adores the rangers of Big Bad Con, planning gamer camp outs, crochet, her cat, and quilting.

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Indrani Ganguly she/they

Logistics Coordinator

Indrani is a community builder, marketer, dicemaker, and games writer from Mumbai, India. She co-founded Desis & Dragons, India’s largest TTRPG community. She is also the founder of Nonagon Dice, India’s first handmade TTRPG accessories business. She is incredibly passionate about bringing the fledgling Indian TTRPG space into the larger industry through equitable opportunities, and is one of the committee members of the Big Bad Con PoC Leadership Team. Indrani has been working as a digital marketing generalist in various industries for over 4 years. Their goal is to work full-time within the games industry, and continue uplifting PoC voices through actionable advocacy.

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James Mendez Hodes (he/him)

Cultural Consultant

Mendez (he/him) is a martial artist, cultural consultant, professional game master, writer, editor, and poet whom you might know from role-playing games such as 7th Sea, Scion, and Thousand Arrows; or from essays like “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth” and “May I play a character from another race?” He has an academic background in West African religion, Eastern classics, dance, and English literature. His interests include hip hop, weird invertebrates, and collecting stuffed animals. He lives in the greater New York metropolitan area on traditional Lenape land.

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Jeeyon Shim (she/her)

Outreach Coordinator

Jeeyon Shim (she/her) is a nonwhite, queer roleplaying game designer from both coasts of the continental United States. She’s lived in Oakland, California for about a decade and the greater Bay area for even longer, where she teaches wilderness survival skills and land connection through larping. Her work focuses on bridging the alienation modern urban people often feel from the land and their roots, examining the overlap of race dynamics in land access and larp access, and immersion in the sacred aspects of (re)connecting with the land.

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Jory Bowers (she/her)

Games on Demand Coordinator

Jory (she/her) does a lot of things, including technical theater, roller derby, and blues dancing.

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Mickey Schulz (she/her)

Panel Coordinator

Mickey Schulz (she/her) is a Geek Blogger with (lots) more than 10 years experience running SF/F conventions and games. She blogs at GeekGirlsRule.net about gaming, comics, movies, TV and books, from a feminist perspective. She has also taught Safer Sex classes for people re-entering the dating scene. She lives in the Seattle area with several fish, three cats, two housemates, one dog, and one husband. She is a firm believer in the Oxford Comma.

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Orion (they/them)

Babble on Equity Project Director

Orion (they/them) is a queer Black non-binary game designer from the SF Bay Area. Their goal is to uplift marginalized voices in the ttrpg community and beyond. Currently, they are working to expand and enhance the scholarship program.

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Sandra Aranda (she/her)

Greeter Captain

Sandra entered the realm of Gaming later in life when she turned 40, and she has never looked back! At that time she also embraced all the geeky things she had always loved like Star Wars, Minions, Hello Kitty, Marvel, Wonder Woman, and more. Sandra passionately loves board games, truly enjoys RPGs, and pre-COVID enjoyed LARPs as well. From August to June she is a Speech-Language Pathologist at an Elementary School in the South Bay Area. She works with General Education students as well as Severely Handicapped students. Sandra loves sharing her geekiness with her students through her sense of style and classroom decorations, and enjoys bringing her love of games to her therapy sessions. She is lucky to love her job, and the wonder of helping students learn to 'speak' verbally or with technology.

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Sean Nittner (he/him)

Steward Emeritus

Sean is a system administrator, event coordinator, twitch streamer, podcaster, project manager, and fundraiser. He started gaming at age 12 and he’s never stopped.

Sean’s passion is bringing people together to play games, explore identity, build rapport, and learn. He loves Big Bad Con.

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Shantih Moriarty (she/her)

Board Game Ranger Captain

Shantih Moriarty (she/her) has been attending BBC for seven years. An avid rpg fan from her early years (D&D in a box, anyone?), she was introduced to board games by rpg geeks who were also addicted to cubes. And what better place to try and share cube addiction then her favorite gaming convention! Born in San Jose but lived pretty much everywhere, Shantih is a Real Estate agent in Silicon Valley and before that was involved in the book industry.

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Val Taylor (she/they)

Panel Ranger Captain

Val (she/they) is a screenwriter, project manager, gamer of all varieties, and knower of whale facts. When not working in her full-time role as a communications manager, Val is either furiously rewriting a screenplay, designing her next TTRPG character, or volunteering as CFO for Sunbloom Media Arts Center, a non-profit dedicated to growing the games industry into a safer and more equitable space for people of color. Val was a 2018-19 fellow of LMU and Film Independent’s Incubator Lab, and her writing has advanced in the Austin Film Festival, Outfest Screenwriting Lab, MACRO Episodic Lab, and the HUMANITAS fellowship. As a long-time writer and short-time game designer, her latest obsession is exploring the differences and similarities of storytelling across mediums and how format affects experience.

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Jenn Martin (she/her)

Larp Coordinator

Jenn is a maker, editor, writer, game designer, project manager and geek parent. She has a metaphorical hat collection and wouldn’t have it any other way. She keeps her feet on the ground as the Larp Coordinator for Big Bad Con– where safety and care are central values. She keeps her head in the stars making games about space, curiosity and exploration. You might know her from her time as a host on the Jank Cast or as a member of the leadership team of Indie+.

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Sam Gustas he/him

Board Game Ranger Captain

Sam (he/him) is an information technology servant leader for a county public health plan and a lapsed gamer from the THAC0 days. Having reignited his passion for table top gaming after buying a copy of Talisman on a whim with the love of his life, he now extols the virtues of how every shuffle is valid and that each move is business, not malice during a game.

Illustration of Little Red

Little Red Event Manager is down! Booking and forms are not available.