Meet the Happy Jacks Crew:
Stu
Producer and Engineer
Stu Venable began roleplaying in the late 1970s, with the D&D Basic Set. From there he discovered Traveller and GURPS (his game of choice). After a decade-long hiatus from the hobby, he rediscovered roleplaying with D&D 4th Edition. He has since returned to GURPS, but he enjoys Savage Worlds, Traveller and is currently running a Legend of the Five Rings game.
He published a very controversial artile in Steven Jackson’s Roleplayer #24, in June of 1991, marking him as an asshole in the RPG community. To date, he has maintained his asshole status.
Outside of gaming, Stu sells truck parts, operates a project recording studio and makes music with his folk band, the Poxy Boggards. His first podcast, the Angryfolk Music and Infantile Comedy Show, had a listenership of more than 1500. For the betterment of the entire planet, this show has been discontinued and its archive deleted.
Kimi
Producer and Video Manager
Kimi started her gaming career with video games, mostly MMORPGs. She started tabletop gaming after she grew weary of farming gold and dealing with guild drama. Now she puts her guild organizing skills to work herding the Happy Jacks c- er hosts and keeping the AP tables full. In 2016 she persuaded Stu to try streaming content on Twitch and Youtube, a decision she regrets to varying levels depending on the strength of the internet connection on a particular night. She regularly GMs “sandbox” type games, usually in the Wild Talents system.
In addition to tabletop RPGs, Kimi has many geeky hobbies. She is a veteran cosplayer who makes most of her own costumes, and is especially known for dressing up as her hero Wonder Woman. Kimi has used her geek knowledge and costuming skills to contribute to multiple fan-film projects, including the Rainfall Wonder Woman trailer (2013) and Metroid: the Sky Calls (2015), and in 2015 her original Bombshell Big Barda design was used by DC Comics as the cannon design for the character.
You can read about Kimi’s gaming, cosplay and more at goldenlasso.net or on most social networks as @GoldenLassoGirl.
Bill
Contributor
Bill has been a well-known creative executive in the global video gaming industry for 22 years, building a solid reputation for creating high-quality games and maintaining strong relationships with developers and gamers. He is best known for his work at Blizzard Entertainment launching the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo franchises while, at Flagship Studios launching Hellgate: London, at Cryptic Studios launching Champions Online and Star Trek Online, and most recently at Disney Interactive launching Disney Infinity.
Bill is a life-long gamer, fantasy and sci-fi writer, and an award-winning instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer. Along with hetero life mate and Happy Jack’s host Stu Venable, Bill is a founding member of the world famous folk band, The Poxy Boggards whose music has been featured in a Dockers Super Bowl ad and performed on Hell’s Kitchen. Married to rocker/scientist/gamer Elspeth, they’re raising their son in a respectful mixed faith (Star Trek/Star Wars) household.
Stork
Contributor
Stork is an old man with a big nose. He began playing RPGs in the late 1970s with Dungeons & Dragons. He continued to play many other RPGs during those prehistoric days, and often waxes nostalgic about them. He also LARPed in college, at a time when LARPing was so obscure that even other nerds didn’t know what it was.
Stork is known for his thespian play style and for his terrible luck with dice. His rolls are so bad that the HJ crew coined the term “storked it” for when someone rolls horribly. This term inspired Stu’s geek song of the same name.
JiB
Contributor
CADave
Contributor, B-Team Original
Born and raised in the seat of the Happy Jacks Empire, Dave found roleplaying as a hobby in high school with Palladium and Rifts, moving on to D&D in all it’s various incarnations through college and arriving in the promised land of playing all sorts of stuff as a fairly convincing adult. A fan of all types of games, he plays anything he can find time to around the busy life of keeping three children under six alive and out of prison.
Gina
Contributor, Indie Game Correspondent
Gina began roleplaying in the teens of the 21st century with D&D 4e as her entry-level RPG of choice. As with all memorable firsts, there remain mixed feelings about discovery and awkwardness and exes, but a passion for RPGs was born. With a lot of catching up to do, Gina began devouring as many games as she could – playing all the games, all the time. Her RPG brain was etched early in its formative stage by playing Burning Wheel one late Sunday at her first con, and a zeal for hippie and indie games was ignited. She still loves D&D and Pathfinder but has lots and lots of love for Apocalypse World and its many sister-games, as well as the Mutant Year Zero family of RPGs (and so many others).
Outside of gaming, Gina spent most of her formative working life as a General and District Manager at the now defunct Borders bookstore chain and is now a manager of a retail establishment in Los Angeles. She still loves ‘books, music, movies, and coffee’ most of all. And beer.
Probie Tim
Contributor, OSR Correspondent
Tim – who, for some odd reason, is still called “probie” after several seasons with Happy Jacks – began role-playing in the early 1980s with the Erol Otus decorated Basic and Expert D&D boxed sets. Since then, he’s experimented with almost every major RPG system, largely because his rampant gamer A.D.D. tends to prohibit him from sticking with one game for long. He even spent some time heading up a small-press RPG publishing company. In recent years, he’s eschewed modern games with fancy mechanics like aspects, and GMs that don’t roll dice, in favor of OSR retro-clones and re-releases of the older RPGs with which he grew up.
Outside of gaming, Tim is a programmer-type who likes to ride bikes and recently started playing World of Warcraft. Because after ten years, WoW is finally old-school enough for him to play.
