| Jonathan S. Coolidge, D.O. is me; I am an osteopathic family physician living with my wife Cathey in Pasadena, Texas and working as an ER doctor at several small community hospitals. I am also an artist and a writer, with two online vanity press novels and numerous short stories, as well as numerous drawings and photomanipulations on sites such as DeviantArt. Interests include philosophy, computers and the Internet, spiritual therianthropy, Anime, and science. I have been given full license to write and publish the Genetic Wars by its other co-authors, and have been involved in its production from earliest concepts to its present day incarnation. During the original run of the Genetic Wars, I played a fictional version of myself that eventually became the character Scott Gardener in subsequent revisions of the storyline, and I am the primary creative force behind the L.G.F.F., the Wolven Empire, Xau Zolan and astral phase theory, and Four One and the Cozaliens. Other creative works include the Moonstone role-playing game, through which I game-mastered two campaigns. I also played the character Katar "Arooh" Dargrivian in Thomas Weigel's original Ell'jaret: The New Pantheon campaign and participated in numerous other role-playing gaming projects around the same time, in the first half of the 1990s. Most art projects since then have been relatively solitary, including my two novels Lycanthrope and Lycanthrope II: Revelations, both set in the time period before the Genetic Wars. |
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| Thomas R. Weigel is the best role-player I have ever met, having run thousands of game sessions, worked for Steve Jackson Games, and designed several complete game systems as well as countless custom revisions and modifications to existing ones. He has run whole campaigns for solitary players and has run gaming parties with up to fourteen players at one time. He currently resides in Austin, where he runs several weekly campaigns while working a tech industry job. Thomas is as much the author of the Genetic Wars as I am. He portrayed and developed Thomas Shann and C.A.T., as well as David Alistaire, Omnicorp, and Burnout. Thomas also contributed a substantial portion of the science of the storyline, researching cosmic strings and grand unified theory. He has contributed again in the contemporary writing of Lycanthrope II: Revelations and the short stories through his Timeline reference, offering a template of twenty-first century chronology. http://seasong.idempot.net |
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| Heather Varley was known to me as Heather Rigby throughout the 1990s. In terms of raw creative energy, she is perhaps without rival, having a complex cast of characters and storylines that could easily bury my own works. I am unsure of her current whereabouts, though I do know she is married and at last check was attending college at S.F.A. in Nacogdoches. That was several years ago, and I would not mind learning an update. As indicated by her web site, she was actively involved in fanfic surrounding the role-playing game Changeling: the Dreaming for awhile. Heather Varley became involved in the Millennium Universal Timeline after the original run of the Genetic Wars reached its end, but was heavily involved in its sequel storyline in the two Moonstone gaming campaigns. She also monitored and offered advice on the revisions of Lycanthrope throughout the early 1990s. She and I independently in parallel developed the idea of crossover as a means of using imagination to travel to alternate realms; from my end, it was the ultimate ambition of Gardener's highly evolved incarnation Vlkos Rinan, and the explanation for the creation of the Moonstone setting. For Heather, it was a means by which an order of priestesses rescued new members from abusive situations inside various realms. The decision that our two sets of characters should cross paths laid groundwork for a complex web of realms and story arcs that make the post-Genetic Wars Millennium Universal Timeline, though less well organized due to its nonlinear nature, at least as complex as the first part. Lycanthrope's Selena Hawthorne was a donated character, given to me with the intent of representing a being from the distant future, having chosen to go back into time to experience the Millennium Universal Timeline from start to finish as a visiting ultraterrestrial. Heather's Blue Cloaks were also the influence for Melody Dreamsail, a character that appears in New Moonstone; Heather in turn created an entire family legacy and at least one whole world around my Dreamsail name. http://geocities.datacellar.net/Area51/Corridor/5847 |
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| Michael Derr was involved in a portion of the original run of the Genetic Wars for awhile, role-playing a spin-off group seeking independence from C.A.T. around the time of the Earth Incident and the Wolven Empire. He was also involved in playtesting Moonstone in several of the major gaming parties of the Haven campaign run during Thomas Weigel's Ell'Jaret: New Pantheon games of the early 1990s. He, Thomas, and I frequently dueled during high school in front of an Apple IIe, playing the old computer game Galactic Empires, and both Derr and I would play in Thomas' play-by-mail game inspired by it. His current whereabouts are unknown. Derr's organization during the Genetic Wars storyline was known as "Damage, Incorporated." As Shawn Fanning and the original incarnation of Napster found out, the band members of Metallica are sticklers about song rights, and this heavily used name will no doubt have to be changed when I get to that part of the story. Because of the difficulties locating Michael Derr today, many of his other creative ideas may also have to be omitted out of respect for his own artistic property. |
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| Additional contributors: Matthew Weigel (pictured) witnessed the creation of the timeline and followed his older brother's work from a distance in the original run. He was more directly involved in Moonstone as well as Thomas' concurrent projects, including a PBEM game of galactic civilizations based on the Galactic Empires computer game. Sheila Svenson interacted with Thomas, role-playing Yvonne Psyche as a matriarchal leader, splintering off from C.A.T. I know little about her actual work, since I did not meet her until after the storyline ended, though she also created the Thraeti in Thomas' Galactic Empires game. Though I do not know her present whereabouts, appearantly Thomas does, since he tells me that she has authorized my use of the Thraeti in chronicling Galactic Empire Lykosa, a planned (at some future date) storyline based on my civilization's perspective of the play-by-mail game. Whether or not I'm also allowed to portray Yvonne Psyche remains unknown at this time. An unknown contributor created "Wyvern," an organization that appeared on the scene late in the LGFF League days to threaten C.A.T. even as the League settled its war with Shann and was negotiating peace. A second unknown created another organization, "Jaguar." Neither organizations are essential to the story outline framework, though I would not mind knowing who these anonymous contributors were. |
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| Additional creative forces: Joel Rigby (pictured) was involved heavily in playtesting Moonstone, and was involved in the Moonstone / Crossover / DarKheist storyline meshwork that emerged from the shared collaboration of worlds. Hillary Rigby, Joel's sister, poked her head in from time to time, and her enthusiastic interest in the very first playtest of Moonstone is still stamped in my memory. Eric Stepp was also involved in Moonstone, as well as Ell'jaret: the New Pantheon and the play-by-mail Galactic Empires campaign. Billy Bossier played the Avery in the play-by-mail game, and participated in a one-shot experiment at adapting the Moonstone game to the Genetic Wars storyline, portraying a character who helped the LGFF steal a copy of the gheidei genome after the Iota One fiasco, making Essence Domin possible. |