The AU Chancellory: Our Esteemed and Learned Leadership
Between us, we have over a century of experience with tabletop gaming. While each of us brings individual knowledge and skills to the table, we have all loved this hobby for as long as we can remember, and we’re all committed to helping others discover and enjoy the games we love.
Leadership Biographies
Laura “Chick in the Hat” Croston
Bailiff of Grammarye, Dean of Logomancy
Laura began her gaming journey at the tender age of 7 when her father handed her a set of polyhedrals from the Blue Box. Her first character was a Magic User named Sparkle Starret who, with her illustrious familiar Abracatabra, delved into many dungeons and dealt with a few dragons.
Both of Laura’s degrees are in English literature, composition, criticism, and rhetoric, with the MA focused on Writing Popular Fiction (emphasis on Speculative Fiction), and she is a founding member of Kansas City’s premiere spec fic writing group, The Dead Horse Society. Unless you’re prepared for a very looooong conversation, do not ask Laura about JRR Tolkien or Terry Pratchett.
After decades as a player (in a wide variety of systems), Laura discovered GM-ing. She’d been under the weird impression that becoming a GM involved either a death match with another GM, a musty ceremony with dribbly candles, secret handshakes, and chanting, or a “The Last Starfighter” sorta selection process, and was shocked to discover she could just declare herself a god and claim dominion over a world and its denizens. Who knew? Once she started GM-ing, she was hooked.
Laura combines her hobbies, education, and work skills (more than 35 years in professional geeksplaining – corporate communications, tech writing, instructional design / curriculum development) to do something she truly loves: Helping players, GMs, and writers hone their crafts and create great experiences. She also sits on the board of the Role-Players Guild of Kansas City and manages events for their yearly con, Midwest GameFest. At home, she takes care of her parents and two dogs (both husky mixes, because she occasionally makes bad life choices), and enjoys good bourbon, good friends, occasional good cigars, and Monte Cristo sandwiches.
She has not gotten better at making up character names.
M.L. “Mister” Howard
Illuminatus, Dean of Worldbuilding
Mister Howard began his illustrious role-playing career in the Spring of 1981, playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as a means of avoiding the high-pressure world of Middle School dating. In the four decades since, he has played in and run a broad variety of role-playing games in the Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror genres. He has run RPG demo games, introductory games for new players and run games he has written himself at various local conventions, and at GenCon.
He views RPGs as a welcome escape from the hum-drum of everyday life; a chance to get around a table with good friends, put down the smartphone, flip the switch on the old imagination and tell a story together.
From his early days in role-playing, Mr. Howard felt the pull of adventure design, penning hand-drawn maps and designing NPCs and dramatic challenges for players to overcome. Recent buzz around the topic of a dearth of Game Masters in the RPG community inspired Mr. Howard to raise concerns about the future of the hobby… so he has set a goal of inspiring and encouraging the next generation of game masters through Adventure U!
Hailey’s Bio
Josh Koops
Non-magical Kineticist, Dean of Raconteuric Studies
Josh Koops was born in Colorado and he has been trying to move back there ever since. He was raised in Maryland and Missouri and sojourned in Kentucky, Texas, and Utah. He prefers anything that takes him to the mountains and nature, the more backwoods the better. Josh has been telling stories since he was four years old and has been writing them down since he was twelve. He is a cigar and pipe man and prefers hard cider to beer, and he believes all the best stories come out of Japan. Josh loves to read westerns, noir detective stories, and fantasy. Josh is currently in the Army National Guard and attending school for Criminal Justice.
Academic Titles: Dean of Stories, Worldbuilding Associate, Lifter of Heavy Things, and Cat Dad.