Iona is an up-and-coming game designer from Austin, Texas. She formerly studied Physicals in Austin College in Sherman, Texas before transferring to Evergreen State College outside of Olympia, Washington. She has since begun working on two tabletop roleplaying games, influenced by her lifelong interest in the medium and her experience studying STEM subjects. 

Her first game–The House Always Wins–is a one-shot system based on the idea of player characters as characters in a heist movie, and tries to have a more flexible inventory mechanic than other similar systems. It also attempts to vary the randomization from shifting from traditional dice-based system to a system where each check’s success is determined by a hand of blackjack, with the ability to bet the character’s own luck on these checks, leading to a system that feels thematically best when attempting to rob a casino, as they are one of the traditional targets in heist movies. 

The second system, Blackskies, acts more as an attempt to innovate on the traditional movement systems of two-dimensional tabletop battles by preserving velocity between turns, and allowing players to change the acceleration of their vehicle. As such, it is set in a relatively hard sci-fi future within the Solar System, where players act as pilots in space fighters, fighting for whatever faction they like (or none at all, if they so wish.) The setting itself is inspired by Firefly, along with the coal wars and various anti-colonial revolutions. It also attempts to simulate for the players the “survivability onion” in a way that is not too intrusive but remains true to the concept.