Joe Mandala

 Joe Mandala

Occupation: Project Manager, Criminal Intelligence, Law Enforcement Agencies.

Role Playing Gaming Author and Tolkien essayist.

Event Attended: MerpCon III / TolkienMoot 2007

Joe has been involved in Middle-earth gaming since the early 1990s when ICE revised MERP for its full second edition.  Shortly thereafter, he was selected to pen the mighty tome Races and Cultures of Middle-earth for RMSS, but sadly it was never to be published as ICE lost the license to Middle-earth before project completion.  Pieces of that (incomplete) work can be found here and there on the internet, having found homes where they could.  Joe began gaming in Middle-earth sometime in the mid-1980s, and has been doing so ever since (with a break now and then).

Joe makes his living currently working with law enforcement agencies on criminal intelligence systems in a project management role.  His largest current project involves an inter-jurisdictional statewide Intel system for the state of Kansas that will also interface with national and federal agencies.

Joe was born in 1972.  He studied Classical Antiquity at the University of Kansas and has served in the US Army (albeit briefly).  He was married in 1996, and has four children with his wife Jill.  He lives in northeast Kansas on a small 10-acre farm, and would love nothing better than to be a gentleman farmer, or possibly a Hobbit. 

Joe's contributions to the Middle-earth gaming community are humble, and include:

• Early articles written for Grey Worlds, ICQ (Iron Crown Quarterly), and other  small-circulation magazines

• Secondary editing and vetting for 2nd-edition MERP source material
• The Mysterious Manuscript for R&C:M-e
• A vast body of editing work for The Guild Companion
• Editing and article vetting for Other Hands
• Content vetting for source material on Decipher's LotR RPG
• Maps of Middle-earth: Cities and Strongholds for Decipher's LotR RPG

In addition, Joe has made an attempt to write several literary essays on
Tolkien's work, some of which have accidentally stumbled into print and
happily gone unnoticed enough to avoid critique.

Here is Joe's review of MerpCon III in The Guild Companion: "MerpCon III: Overdose"