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BIO of KRIS MCDERMOTT ( aka THE MAPHATTER )

I am a 46 yr old Melbourne-based man with a background in Freelance Graphic Art, Creative Writing and Illustration and the sole artist of GTW.

 

I grew up in a remote part of New Zealand and deeply appreciate Nature while also learning the necessity of being ingenious when it came to playing RPG's such as Heroquest, D&D, Ancestral Trail etc and making do with bits of paper with crudely drawn items, spells and monsters instead of fine but expensive miniatures, props and tokens. I greatly enjoyed adventure and fantasy even as a child brought up on Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Lord of the Rings, Fighting Fantasy, Pick-a-Path, Enid Blyton and the Faraway Tree and the like and was instilled from an early age with a fascination and deep love of detailed worlds and spent many months at a time crafting every aspect of huge worlds full of characters, shops, monsters, beautiful scenery and frightening traps. I have experimented with and been influenced by a large variety of styles of art such as Lovecraft, Geiger, Dali, Tolkien, Escher. This was accompanied by a simultaneous devotion to fantasy table-top RPG's, board games and later on computer (particularly C64) and console RPG's which I dearly love to play: Skyrim, Baldurs Gate, God of War to name a few.  I use electronic mediums to create my works, finding GIMP a powerful and wonderful tool for putting together diverse and detailed creations. I am currently working my way toward creating 'The Meanderverse' - a modular battlemaps system with a minimum of 3000 maps by close of 2025.

 

I began my journey with RPG in 2015 but have spent my life studying the occult, traditional and ritual magic, alchemy, archaeology, psychology, sociology, social engineering, hermeticism, philosophy and theosophy for 34 years now, later pursuing a degree in Counter-Terrorism for 5 years. I have written extensively on this fusion of 'magico-politics' and thousands of aspects of the above. That work is available at Astrum Allorum.

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Early this year (2025) I was mucking around trying to work out the meaning of the cup and ring markings on Cochno Stone in Scotland, only to discover I could read the stones and that they were maps - found etched on rocks across 88% of the world. As an amateur archaeologist, I wrote a book on my findings available here: I Can Read The Stones

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Please feel free to drop me a line and say hi, suggest new themes/products or report any product/site issues through my contact me section. :) And thank you very much for supporting my art.

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Kind Regards, Kris.

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FAV. RPG: D&D5e
FAV. ACTION MOVIE: BATMAN BEGINS
FAV. HORROR: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS
FAV. FOOD: SEAFOOD / THAI / SALAD
FAV. MUSIC: MARILYN MANSON/EMINEM/PARKWAY DRIVE/PLACEBO/ TUPAC
HOBBIES: CARTOGRAPHY, STAR GAZING, CAMPING, BACKYARD FIRES, COOKING, WRITING, PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, THE OCCULT, THEOLOGY, SACRED GEOMETRY, TEXTURE-HUNTING, MOVIES/TV SHOWS, PAINTING, DRAWING, WORLD-BUILDING, ANCIENT CULTURES, ARCHAEOLOGY, MARTIAL ARTS, VIDEO GAMES, EXERCISING and RPG
FAV. WRITER: H. P. LOVECRAFT / CARL G. JUNG

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