STEPHEN A. SALAKA

Worldbuilder

Class: Creative  ·  Subclass: Author

“I’ve got a billion elephants running around in my head, chased by mice, bitten by fleas, all infected with the plague.”

A mind that never stops creating. You know that scene in A Beautiful Mind where every wall is covered in newspaper clippings connected by yarn? Replace the yarn with plotlines, the clippings with dream journals, and the paranoia with a GATE program that told an eight-year-old his brain was “gifted” (read: dangerously overclocked).

The elephants have been running ever since -a billion of them, chased by mice, bitten by fleas, all infected with stories demanding to be told. Decades of scribbled notebooks and 3 a.m. voice memos eventually coalesced into the Towers of Elysium series; three books (so far) where cosmic horror meets mythology meets “what if your video game was actually real and also trying to kill you.” The worlds aren’t invented so much as excavated -dug out of the beautiful chaos between his ears, one shovelful at a time. CankleBurry Tales is next; because apparently one universe wasn’t enough.

Technomancer

Class: Engineer  ·  Subclass: Solutioneer

“I’m MacGyver -if duct tape were made out of bytes.”

From a dumpster-dove TRS-80 (yes, literally rescued from a trash can) to enterprise platforms that keep airplanes in the sky -the throughline was never the technology. It was the solutioneering. Give him a problem and a weekend; he’ll hand you back a working prototype and a mild caffeine dependency. Kreeder started as a Chrome extension he built because existing RSS readers offended him personally.

SuperTrooper happened because job hunting felt like screaming into a void, so he built an AI command center to scream more efficiently. GhostBusters exists because he got tired of AI detectors calling his own writing “AI-generated” (the irony was not lost). Every tool follows the same pattern: something’s broken, nobody’s fixing it, fine -I’ll do it myself. Recently he’s been open-sourcing everything instead of letting corporate middlemen take credit. The MacGyver comparison isn’t hyperbole; it’s just that the duct tape is made of bytes, the Swiss Army knife is a Docker container, and the explosions are mostly contained to staging environments.

Sensei

Class: Warrior  ·  Subclass: Martial Artist

“Martial arts was my anchor. Everything else moved -but the dojo was always there.”

Here’s what nobody tells you about being a military brat: everything moves. Bases, schools, friends -all temporary. You learn not to unpack the bottom of the box because you’ll just have to repack it in eighteen months anyway. But then karate rolled into theatres (thank you, The Karate Kid, for the single most consequential piece of 1980s cinema), and suddenly there was one constant. Every new city had a dojo.

Every dojo had a sensei willing to teach. The style names changed -Shotokan, Kenpo, Jiu-Jitsu -but the language was the same: discipline, respect, controlled violence as meditation. Decades later, black belt around a slightly wider waist, the body negotiates with gravity in ways it didn’t used to. But the knowledge? That’s the thing about martial arts -the collection doesn’t depreciate. It compounds. And now it gets passed forward, because the only thing better than knowing is teaching someone else to know.

Seeker

Class: Philosopher  ·  Subclass: Pilgrim

“We don’t know what we don’t know, and can’t know what we can’t know.”

The question isn’t whether God exists -it’s why we keep asking. (The website name is a bit on the nose; he’s aware.) Standing inside the Sistine Chapel, staring up at Michelangelo’s God reaching for Adam, the feeling isn’t religious exactly -it’s recognition. Something in the paint knows something you know. Walking through the vermillion gates of Fushimi Inari at dawn, ten thousand torii stretching into mountain fog, the feeling comes back. Not answers. Never answers.

Just better questions. The Seeker isn’t looking for God in a pew; he’s looking for the signal in the noise -that resonant frequency where philosophy, science, mysticism, and that weird sensation at 3 a.m. when the house is too quiet all converge on the same coordinate. We don’t know what we don’t know, and can’t know what we can’t know. But the search itself? That’s where the meaning lives. The pilgrimage is the point.

Guardian

Class: Protector  ·  Subclass: Father

“I want him to look back and have fond memories -things I never had.”

Building what was never given. That sounds dramatic (it is), but here’s the math: take everything you wished you had as a kid -stability, presence, someone who actually shows up -and reverse-engineer it into a parenting philosophy. Every Colosseum selfie, every Scout campout, every goofy photo with a wax Jackie Chan at Madame Tussauds is a deposit in a memory bank he’s building for his son.

Not a trust fund; a trust fund. The currency is showing up, being honest when it would be easier to lie, admitting when you’re wrong (frequently), and teaching reverence for the world without demanding blind acceptance of it. The goal isn’t to raise a copy; it’s to raise someone who looks back decades from now and has fond memories -things he never had. Servant leadership, not authoritarianism. “Because I said so” doesn’t live here. “Let me show you why” does.

Paladin

Class: Servant  ·  Subclass: Helper

“Mr. Rogers said look for the helpers. I’m a helper.”

Mr. Rogers said look for the helpers. He’s a helper. Not the cape-wearing, spotlight-seeking variety -more the “oh, you need someone to organize the entire Scout troop’s annual campout, handle the volunteer paramedic shift nobody wants, and build a community Discord server from scratch? Sure, I wasn’t using that weekend anyway” variety. It’s not duty, exactly; duty implies obligation. This is closer to compulsion -the same instinct that makes you pick up litter in a parking lot even though nobody asked.

Eagle Scout values baked so deep they’re structural. He’d genuinely rather give than receive (gift-giving is an ordeal; just donate to something). When injustice shows up -in a workplace, a community, a system -bystanders step aside. Paladins step forward. Sometimes that means confrontation. Sometimes it means quietly building something better. Always, it means not looking away.

Arcanist

Class: Mystic  ·  Subclass: Occultist

“Hidden in the darkness is beauty and truth. Stare into it hard enough, and something will answer.”

Some people only seek the light. Sensible people. The Arcanist goes the other direction -past the comfortable silence, below the substrate of consensus reality, beyond what the Towers of Elysium call the “prison of etheris.” As above, so below; as within, so without. The hermetic principles aren’t metaphor here -they’re operating instructions. Tarot isn’t fortune-telling; it’s pattern recognition with prettier cards.

The occult isn’t about summoning demons (though the reading list would alarm your average book club); it’s about understanding the architecture of consciousness that mainstream thought conveniently ignores. The cosmic entities -Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, the Gnostic archons, whatever you want to call the things that live in the spaces between spaces -probably don’t care about ants. But some entities are close enough to the frequency to engage. And for those stubborn enough to stare into the darkness long enough? Something stares back. Whether that’s terrifying or beautiful depends entirely on the question you brought with you.

Strategist

Class: Gamer  ·  Subclass: Tactician

“Getting lost elsewhere just means I have to find myself again.”

Games gave him something he never really had -an actual life. That sounds backwards (it’s not). The military brat with no roots, the overclocked brain with nowhere to discharge -games were the grounding wire. Not escape; focus. A place to pour 200% brainpower into something with clear rules, measurable progress, and the blessed, blessed silence of elephants finally sleeping.

Age of Empires taught resource management before any MBA could. Final Fantasy taught storytelling before any writing class. Dark Souls taught that failure isn’t the opposite of progress -it’s the mechanism of it. And then one day, staring at his own book series and thinking “this would make a killer RPG,” the Strategist did what the Technomancer always does: built it himself. The Elysium Rising RPG isn’t just a game -it’s every facet on this page converging into one playable question. The same question the whole page answers, actually. Who am I? Pick a class and find out.