I hate writing bios, but I do like stories, so let me tell you one. 

It's about a kid discovering magic.

One of his earliest memories are of his Nana, a now very old woman from Dublin, telling him bedtime stories. Now much like most Irish myth, much of the exact contents of these stories are misremembered but they were both absurd and engrossing. So, it's fair to say the boy had been fascinated with the fantastical for as long as he could remember.

 

Sometime later in life, this still very young kid was sitting around bored out of his skull when a stranger appeared and would introduce him to a concept that would blow his tiny mind. The idea that one could play and have fun through simply talking. The boy asked how such a thing could be possible and he was introduced to the idea of cooperative storytelling. Like he had discovered some sacred secret, he ran home and had a friend come over. The kid would describe a setting and his friend would describe what he would do.

 

Much like the tales of his Nan, the contents of this story are lost to time, save for the fact goblins were involved.

A few years would pass until a mythical being, commonly known as Santa Clause, would deliver to this kid his first Dungeons & Dragons books. Since then he has been running various games, telling stories and consuming them in whatever media he could.

 

A story that would become a favorite of his is that of the time Odin decides to hang himself from a tree and stab himself. Odin begins to see shapes form and is pleased that putting them together can create words and shape reality. Odin discovered magic. Many myths, legends and tales have magic in them.

 

But what the boy found was a simpler thing. These words could form stories that could then form worlds that lived on long past the writer. If something entirely fictional can make a person feel something very real, then perhaps Odin was right. There is something magical to that.

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- Kieran Lawless