Guest of Honor: David Blazek

"Your reality is boring. Here, try a bottle of mine."

Caught in the maelstrom of creativity that was 1977 when he was six, David spent that summer alternating between seeing a certain space opera way too many times (according to his parents, that is) and playing a brand new game called basic D&D. Ever the control freak, he quickly started running the games, then designing his own worlds and finally tweaking the rules of existing games so they made more sense… a very relative term as you will understand should you ever meet him.

This all came to stop when he hit high school and came down with a severe case of trying to be one of the cool kids, which threatened to derail everything. Fortunately, his best friend Mike was there to show him what a jackass he was becoming and brought him back into the gaming fold.

He graduated from Eastern Illinois University with a BA in English and minors in Creative and Technical writing. This was accomplished even though he spent most of his collegiate career hopped up on Mountain Dew and Marshmallow Fluff while running and playing every genre of table top game available, in addition to getting his ass squarely kicked every time he tried to branch into a war gaming.

After college he put his degree in a drawer, became an interior designer and discovered the wonderful world of LARPing. When the housing market crashed he got into hydraulics, earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering and is currently on the path to getting his Six Sigma Black Belt. Through all of this, he continued designing and writing games for his friends, which, over time, morphed into doing freelance work for other gaming companies and, finally, starting his own company.

He prefers spending time in his study (or the cave as his lovely wife Karrin calls it) coming up with new ideas for games, writing various novels that may, one day, see print, tormenting Hobbits or other assorted short folk, and napping. He is an old man, after all, and needs his naps lest he get cranky.