Gillan, Geoff

PERSONAL:

Married; children: one daughter.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia.

CAREER:

Freelance writer, c. 1991—.

WRITINGS:

(With Richard Watts, Mark Morrison, Nick Hagger, and Charlie Krank) Sorcerers of Pan Tang (role-playing game), Chaosium, 1991.

(With Richard Watts, Penelope Love, and Mark Morrison) Melnibone: Dragon Isle and Dreaming City ("Elric" role-playing game), Chaosium, 1993.

(With Shannon Appel, William G. Filios, Heidi Kaye, and Eric Rowe) Tales of Chivalry and Romance: Adventures in the World of King Arthur Pendragon (role-playing game), Green Knight Publishing, 1999.

(With Mark Angeli and others) Corum: Heroic Adventures across the World of the Five Planes: A World Supplement for Stormbringer, Darcsyde (Balwyn, Victoria, Australia), 2001.

(With Kevin A. Ross, Scott Aniolowski, Richard Watts, and K. Herber) Tales of the Miskatonic Valley ("Call of Cthulhu" horror role-playing game), Chaosium, 2001.

Envious Gods, Five Star (Waterville, ME), 2006.

Also author of Blood Brothers, Chaosium, 1990; Horror on the Orient Express ("Call of Cthulhu" role-playing game), 1991; Blood Brothers 2, Chaosium, 1992; and Perilous Forest, Chaosium, 1992. Contributing author, Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep, 3rd edition, Chaosium, 1996.

SIDELIGHTS:

Australian freelance writer Geoff Gillan has been noted for the creation of role-playing games based on works and characters created by fantasy and horror authors Michael Moorcock and H.P. Lovecraft. His Corum: Heroic Adventures across the World of the Five Planes: A World Supplement for Stormbringer takes as its basis the stories of Moorcock's hero and lays out their basic assumptions and rules so that gamers can create their own role-playing adventures within that world. "The book," concluded a contributor to the publisher Darcsyde Production's Web site, "has been a labor of love, written over the course of five years."

Gillan's first fantasy novel, Envious Gods, tells the story of a ne'er-do-well named Nicholas Rakehell. While serving as agent (and playwright and sometime actor) for a wandering theater troupe, Rakehell is targeted by a magician who is searching for some stolen artifacts and has mistaken Rakehell for the thief. When Rakehell and his companions recover the artifacts, still more complications ensue and, stated Regina Schroeder in Booklist, "the only way out is to impersonate a god." Rakehell, Harriet Klausner said in her Alternative Worlds review, "gets into and out of more trouble than any hundred people." "Geoff Gillan," she concluded, "has written an entertaining fantasy filled with intrigue and action." Declared Library Journal contributor Jackie Cassada, Gillan's work redefines the differences "between good and evil."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 1, 2006, Regina Schroeder, review of Envious Gods, p. 32.

Library Journal, December 1, 2006, Jackie Cassada, review of Envious Gods, p. 114.

ONLINE

Alternative Worlds,http://www.alternative-worlds.com/ (October 10, 2006), Harriet Klausner, review of Envious Gods.

Darcsyde Productions,http://www.darcsyde.org/ (September 1, 2007), review of Corum: Heroic Adventures across the World of the Five Planes: A World Supplement for Stormbringer.