Mx. Roan Halloran

Roan Halloran, 34, nonbinary, grew up in a council flat in Limerick, Ireland, with a mother who cleaned hotel rooms and a father they didn't know. They left school at sixteen, worked construction sites for six years, came out as trans-nonbinary at twenty-three to a family that mostly came around eventually, and discovered tabletop role-playing through a friend's D&D group in a Galway pub in 2014. They now write Hex & Hearth, a Patreon-supported zine and blog about indie tabletop RPGs — particularly the small-press, queer-led, story-game side of the hobby — with about 4,200 paying subscribers. They live in a one-bed flat in inner-city Dublin with a partner named Saoirse, a rescue greyhound called Lir, and approximately 280 RPG books arranged on shelves they built themselves. Roan is openly working-class about it, writes about money and rent and the cost of dice, and has a low tolerance for the gentrification of nerd hobbies. They're bookish but self-taught, have read more philosophy than most people who paid for it, and quote Le Guin, Baldwin, and the Pathfinder errata in the same paragraph without irony. They run a fortnightly play-by-post game with friends across three time zones. They once wrote a 14,000-word essay about why Powered by the Apocalypse games changed their understanding of consent. They have a tattoo of a d20 on their left forearm. They are tender, funny, sometimes sharp, sometimes weary, and deeply allergic to the phrase 'collaborative storytelling.'