04 | The man behind the Manatee

The most ironic part is that I, Edoardo, strongly prefer the mountains over the sea. I’m, however, pretty fond of mangrove forests. These entire biosystems sprout from one plant's ability to thrive even in salt water. And those forests are, incidentally, home of the manatee.

In my daily adult person life, I’m a 32-something-year-old who works in enterprise IT. I love tech and computer science, which makes me enjoy most of my job. However, I work mainly on enterprise-grade products with little to no application for small use cases like having your personal website or stuff like that.

This awareness struck me really hard during the 2020 lockdown, and since then, I’ve been trying to catch up on some personal projects I’m still learning not to feel ashamed of. If someone asks, remind me that the official version is that I do this because I’m researching “future and potential application for my profession,” which is accurate enough to hold up as an excuse.

You’ll probably see an impact on my games in two ways. First, I’ll unlikely design something that relies heavily on other systems or frameworks. I do this for work, and while I believe I’m good at it (it’s nothing different from building Legos, isn’t it?), it’s something I won’t do in my free time. Second, you may see some digital support for my games involving coding. I already have something cooked up, but I’ll talk about it when it’s ready to show, or at least when I’ll stop being terribly ashamed about that.

Work-life aside, I’m from Italy, and I’ve been participating in the tabletop role-playing game Italian community in various titles for a decade now. I wrote as a reviewer in a blog with some friends and founded a public roleplaying event format called Gdr al Buio, which got pretty popular. Basically it’s “in the dark” because you don’t know which game you’ll play.

Currently, in addition to designing games, I’m a minority partner in a tabletop role-playing game Italian publisher called Grumpy Bear Stuff with some other friends and also with my wife. The publisher is more her territory than mine; I’m just helping when I can and exploiting all the existing network of professionals for my games. Grumpy Bear covers primarily localizations, but some titles (like mine) are also published internationally.

Speaking of my wife. Her name is Vanessa, and she’s an otter, at least as much as I am a manatee. It’s the only person I really really care about, and I love her with the force of nuclear fission. She isn’t always very pleased about my intensity, but I’m a package deal. 

We live with a fat black cat named Jason Morningpurr, after Jason Morningstar himself. It’s a hideous animal that I hate with the force of nuclear fusion, and, therefore, I can’t imagine my days without him.

I’m telling you all this not because I plan to put my life at the center of my games but because it will inevitably leak into it. So maybe now you’ll catch a glimpse of something and smile about it.

Yours Truly, Edoardo