Bio

Todd Downing is the primary author and designer of over fifty roleplaying titles, including Arrowflight, Grimmworld, Airship Daedalus, and the official Red Dwarf RPG for Deep7 Press. He has written for stage, screen, comics, audiodrama, short-form and long-form, interactive and narrative, in a career spanning more than three decades.

Once active in the Seattle indie film community, Downing was the co-creator of the superhero-comedy webseries The Collectibles, and the screenwriter behind The Parish and Ordinary Angels (the latter of which he also directed).

His first feature film, a supernatural thriller entitled Project, was included in a PBS young directors series in 1986. While recording alternative music for Epithet Records as a founding member of And Tears Fell, he amassed somewhere between a bachelor’s and master’s degree worth of college credits (including a two-year advanced animation program) without graduating—instead moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle in a beat-up Isuzu pickup with his late wife and two cats as part of the artist migration of the early ’90s. He immediately began writing in earnest, cranking out both short stories and novels, selling the former to various literary magazines and having one of the latter (Sakuru) optioned by Warner Books.

In a twelve-year relationship with a West Seattle arts charity, Downing mentored young performers and provided graphic and production design expertise, as well as directing several shows during his tenure. He also provided production design for the low-budget horror film Hunting Grounds and the fantasy-comedy webseries JourneyQuest season 3.

The father of two adult children, Downing spent a decade as a concept artist and art director in the videogame industry, working on games such as Spider – The Videogame for the Playstation, and Allegiance and Casino Empire for the PC, among others.

Downing currently creates book covers and marketing art for fellow authors, filmmakers and corporate clients, and has done voiceover work for videogames, animation, Microsoft industrial videos and the Seattle Seahawks Pro Shop. Most recently he has dipped his toe in the audiobook arena, narrating his own scifi-horror anthology Primordial Soup Kitchen and his retro ’80s scifi mystery Calico Kids.

He is not the New York filmmaker, the NFL coach, or the historical mystery author of the same name. He is one half of Bitter Tasting Omelette (with brother Gavin), who recorded the Star Wars themed parody of Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (as “Livin’ La Vida Yoda”) in 1999. The track is often incorrectly attributed to Weird Al Yankovic.

Widowed to cancer in 2005, Downing remarried in 2009 and currently lives in Port Orchard, Washington, with his wife, her mother, and three rescue cats. Thankfully, he has an office with a door that closes.

IMDb
Airship Daedalus
Deep7 Press