The primary Game Master of the Urkana Campaign is Mark 'Geo' Gelinas, Sr. Geo, as his friends and players know him, has been playing and running role-playing games since 1978.
The first RPG that Geo ran as a Game Master was Traveller Classic. He received the black box with its three books as a gift in 1978. Since there was a lack of players in the area, he began to run a play by mail game with his brother. This was a time when there were few RPG's around.
Since that time, Geo has acquired and ran many other RPG's including The Morrow project, Champions, Justice Incorporated, Twilight:2000, 2300AD, and Star Wars. Nevertheless, Traveller has long been his favorite game. With the release of MegaTraveller, Geo started publishing a newsletter for the game: The Terra Traveller Times. This eventually led to writing articles for Traveller related magazines including: The Travellers' Digest and Challenge. Geo was a play tester for the next addition of Traveller, Traveller: The New Era, and was a major contributor to several of the supplements for that game.
In recent years, Geo has become interested in the power of myths and legends. A natural extension of this was a desire to run and play fantasy based RPG's. His first foray into that area combined his interests in Japanese culture with his love for RPG's with The Legend of the Five Rings RPG game.
When Wizards of the Coast released the new addition of Star Wars, Geo saw that the D20 system was worth looking into. About the same time, always interested in learning more about the art of DMing, he started reading the Dungeon craft series of articles available on-line at the WOTC web site. Then he purchased the DnD 3rd Edition Players' Handbook to learn more about the D20 system. It was the culmination of these and other factors that led him to develop and run the world of Urkana for 3rd Edition DnD.
The Urkana campaign was first played around a tabletop at a friend's house. Then, in early 2002, Geo was asked to run an on-line campaign. Rather than create a new world, Geo chose to use the Urkana background, feeling each campaign would benefit from materials developed for the other campaign. Now that Geo has retired from the US Navy and moved to Georgia, the tabletop game has had to come to an end, but Urkana continues strong in the on-line game. Geo is considering returning to his first RPG and start a Traveller game on-line as well.
There have been times when Geo could not sit in the GM's seat, and has asked Carl Celizic to fill in that role. |
