Not a cat but... When she was little, Santa got used to sleeping on my lap while I made maps, now that she is almost an adult and weighs around 35 kilos, she continues with the same habit... I thought that when she was an adult she would go to her corner. She is a Dogo Argentino.

The numbers on the scale are a little small. Maybe a little bigger.

I have Karen's atlases of both Middle Earth (I bought them as an adult) and, since I was young, the Forgotten Realms, where her drawings inspired me more than her writings. I remember using her drawings to inspire me to write my own stories in my Forgotten Realms - parallel reality. 😍

Tolkien also arrived later in my life, when I was young, around 15 years old... But then my heart already had an owner, Robert E Howard and Conan.

Maps have always fascinated me — long before RPGs crossed my path.

I remember well when the world was not yet made of screens. We lived surrounded by paper, pencils and imagination, and even without knowing exactly why, I was already attracted to those mysterious lines that indicated paths, places and possibilities.

There was, for example, a map of acupuncture points that my aunt kept very carefully. It fascinated me. It was this first contact that led me to study acupuncture for more than twenty years. It was as if each point on that drawn body was a crossroads between science and mystery. I also fondly remember geography classes. With silent maps we had to fill in roads, railways, capitals, rivers... That, far from being just a school task, was almost a sacred activity for me. I lost myself in that process with a joy that few would understand.

And then came RPGs. My first adventure was as a master — due to a lack of volunteers, it's true, but perhaps destiny was already giving me a push. I didn't follow the game's official script. I created my own story inspired by the short stories of the masters Roy Thomas and John Buscema and drew, as best I could, a small, crude map. It was 1987. And from there, it was all uphill.

Also, there was a time when maps were not only used to dream of distant worlds, but to emerge unharmed from a real world. In those days a well-placed line could be the difference between returning... or not.

Years later, around 2010 or 2011, the internet finally became accessible in the small town where I was living at the time. That's when I thought, half-laughing to myself: "It's already 2011... where are the flying cars?" If they hadn't arrived, at least, I imagined, maybe there was a computer program to make it easier to create maps — since those made by hand required time that I no longer had. It was in this search that I found Campaign Cartographer. I installed it, started fiddling around, and soon after my life turned upside down. I moved to Argentina, in an unexpected turn of events, and only really resumed this passion in 2021.