Honoring My Editor

Awen I. Rowan-Nelson has been my editor at Evil Genius Games for the last two years or so. I’m very sorry to say that she passed away due to complications from pneumonia in late December of 2024. Awen was a unique person who a came to very much enjoy working with and I will miss her both as her friend and as a writer who won’t be quite as good without her.

Awen was new to the world of role playing games when she was first brought in to work with us. She came to us with a lifetime of experience as an academic writer and editor. In addition to her prodigious writing talents, Awen was a philosopher and historian, someone with an ever curious mind that never stopped wanting to learn new things and to share what they’d learned with others. Our little world or roleplaying, action movies, and fandom was a new world for her to both learn and teach.

Awen and I hit it off going into the minutia of everything as we went back and forth over my manuscripts. While most editors I’ve had the pleasure of working with tend to stick to correcting errors, Awen dug into every nook and cranny of a manuscript looking for historical, zoological, philosophical, and cultural inaccuracies that she could speak to. We had some good times discussing Angolan insurgencies, summaries of existentialism, wolf behavior, and of course, good grammar. I could be as long winded as I liked and be sure she’d read every word, and I’d happily return the favor.

Before long, she became interested in the game mechanics and I taught her how the character stat blocks are put together so she could check them for accuracy. Its not something we’d ask an editor to do, but like me, she really cared that things were correct and if there was a way she could improve the quality of the books through editing, she was right there wanting to do it. It was great working with someone who clearly cared about the books as much as I did and was willing to throw their all into whatever was set in front of them.

I very much doubt I’ll ever work with another editor quite like Awen. She was, as we all are, a very unique person with a unique mind. Soon, I’m going to dive into the rather enormous project we’d both been working on this year, The Armory. It was far and away the hardest project I’ve yet worked on, and I’d warned her it would be pretty monumental as an editing task if she wanted to dig into the historical varsity of the contents. I had to research nearly every word I wrote for that book, and I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied just to make sure my grammar was on point. She didn’t get to finish her work on The Armory. I’d been waiting until she was done to read the voluminous notes she’d left for me.

I’m sorry won’t have the pleasure of discussing the finer points with her or answering her questions. I will have to simply read and appreciate her contributions, while imagining what she might say. I always try to focus on the joy of what I’ve had rather than the loss of what I no longer can enjoy, but there will be sadness in going over her final words to me. Usually editing notes are read and discarded, but I will be making a copy of these, and as much as Awen hated after-edit additions, there will be something new added to the forward to honor her and her work.