I was born on 8/8/80, in Toledo, Ohio, with a birthmark on my right thigh that bears an uncanny resemblance to Lake Superior. By the third grade, I already knew that I wanted to become a fiction writer, choosing to stay in during recess to write stories instead of joining the other children on the playground.
My imagination was shaped by the fantasy and adventure stories of the 1980s and 1990s: Willow, The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, the Conan films, The Princess Bride, Legends of Lone Wolf, HeroQuest, and eventually The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. I was equally fascinated by the neon-lit dystopia and dangerous streets of the cyberpunk world of Shadowrun. In my early teens during the 1990s, I began Game Mastering Shadowrun, discovering that tabletop role-playing games offered something even novels and movies could not: worlds in which the audience could step inside the story and help determine what happened next.
That fascination never went away.
Over the decades, Game Mastering became as important to me as writing itself. Running long campaigns taught me to improvise, listen closely to players, build consequences from their choices, and create worlds sturdy enough to survive decisions I never expected. Those lessons eventually shaped my approach to game design: rules should support imagination rather than stand in its way.
I eventually traveled throughout all 48 contiguous states of the United States of America as a truck driver, seeing nearly every major American city and an enormous amount of the country between them. Away from the highway, I have hiked hundreds of miles through the United States and Mexico and remain an enthusiastic camper and outdoorsman. Mountains, deserts, forests, lonely highways, forgotten trails, old towns, and the experience of actually traveling long distances on foot have all influenced the way I think about wilderness and adventure in my games and fiction.
Mexico became particularly important to my life for another reason. In the winter of 2012, in the beautiful old city of San Miguel de Allende, I met the woman who would become my wife, Berenice Mariana Palma River. A lifelong romantic with a particular affection for stories such as The Princess Bride, I returned to my Berenice seven years after meeting her to marry her, just as Westley returned after years of separation to his beloved Princess Buttercup to ride off into the sunset with her. Today, I am an American living in Mexico with my family.
My creative work has taken several forms. As a voice actor, narrator, and producer, I narrated and produced more than 120 audiobooks. As a nonfiction author, I have written books about survival and religion, but my real passion is creating fictional worlds to explore and telling stories of adventure, romance, danger, mystery, heroism, and the extraordinary people who set out into the unknown and discover who they are along the way.
👑Kingsmark carries traces of many of the worlds that first captured my imagination—the dangerous journeys of Willow, the dreamlike wonder of The NeverEnding Story and The Dark Crystal, the savage adventure of Conan, the fellowship and immense landscapes of The Lord of the Rings, the mission-driven intrigue of Shadowrun, the heroic fantasy of HeroQuest, and the choose-your-own-path spirit of Lone Wolf. My objective, however, is not to recreate any one of them. It is to capture something they share: the feeling that somewhere beyond the next forest, mountain, tavern, ruin, or bend in the road, an adventure is waiting.
I continue to write fiction and nonfiction, design tabletop games, Game Master adventures, study Scripture and Biblical languages, explore Mexico, hike, camp, and build imaginary worlds. After a lifetime spent crossing real landscapes and escaping into fictional ones, my ambition is ultimately a simple one: to create the kinds of worlds I have wanted to explore since I was a boy—and invite other people to explore them with me. rollwithjack@gmail.com
If you have reached this page by reading this book cover-to-cover, then I want to thank you for investing so much of your time in reading this rulebook. Your investment of your precious time in reading my words is a magnificent compliment. Thank you.
In your service,
John Alan Martinson
Kingsmark.games
