Meet The Staff: Gossamer
If you spend much time in Havn County, chances are you’ve encountered something I’ve had my hands in—whether that’s a piece of lore, a strange new ability, a location, a script, an event idea, or one of those things that started with, “I wonder if we could…” I’m Gossamer, and much of what I do for Havn lives somewhere between imagination and implementation. I develop lore neck-and-neck with acquiring and installing scripts, shaping ideas and figuring out how to translate those ideas into things people can actually experience in game.
But my love of creating worlds started long before RedM.
A Long History of Storytelling
I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons—both tabletop and online—for roughly thirty years. I genuinely love everything that comes with it: the dice, the storytelling, the ridiculous plans that somehow work, the critical hits, and perhaps especially the spectacular critical failures.
I also founded a collaborative writing and roleplaying website called Mizahar, which has been operating for more than twenty years. Mizahar was built as an entirely original world, with its own races, religions, cultures, magical systems, history, and ways of doing things. Over the years, we watched plenty of people attempt to duplicate pieces of what we’d created, but what made Mizahar successful was never just the setting. It was the community of people creating stories within it.
That experience taught me a great deal about worldbuilding, but it taught me even more about giving creative people a world large enough to make their own.
A Biologist and an Artist
In real life, my background is in Wildlife Biology. I graduated with honors from the University of Montana and have worked with Coho salmon, Spotted Owls and other raptors, ungulates, riparian habitats, stream health and classification, and other aspects of wildlife and habitat management. I’ve also been a wildland firefighter and a wilderness guide. I currently am retired from Wildlife Biology, though I do volunteer on multiple seasonal projects, and have a more mundane job that keeps me close to home.
Science, however, was only one direction my life could have taken.
I’m also an accomplished traditional artist and something of a Photoshop guru. I work in stained glass, watercolor, colored pencil and other media. At one point, I was offered a full-ride scholarship to the Art Institute of Seattle. I turned it down to pursue Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana instead.
I chose the scientist’s path professionally, but I never stopped being an artist.
Those two parts of me really aren’t as separate as they might sound. Art taught me to pay attention to color, atmosphere, composition and tiny details. Biology taught me to observe the world closely and ask why something is the way it is.
Both inevitably find their way into Havn.
Heritage, Home & the Pacific Northwest
I’m proudly exactly half Native American and a member of the combined Shoshone-Bannock Tribe. My other half is Manx, a tiny island of fierce mixed bloods, out in the middle of the Irish Sea. I have both relatives in the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho and on Isle of Man. My combined Shoshone Manx blood makes me a tall, fierce woman with auburn hair, hazel eyes, and the deep dark burnished gold tan of western natives.
I’m also very much a creature of the Pacific Northwest, where I live and where I feel most at home. Unlike the majority of the people in the PNW, I am not a fan of the rain. And while I like warm sunny skies and the endless daylight of summer, autumn steals my heart with its cool crisp mornings and pleasant comfortable evenings. September, October and November is a backdrop of vivid greens, bold reds, and every shade of orange and yellow in existence. I admire the evergreens here most of all. They stand tall, unchanging, and unapologetic year round. We rarely have a white Solstice, but our Yuletide is always a thousand shades of green.
The volcanoes that surround us are spectacular. I was only 50 miles away from Mt. St. Helens when it erupted. I watched it go from a tall beautiful shining white peak to something dark and brooding, crouched low in the distance that day. It taught me how quickly the world could change. This was a lesson I’ll never forget. I will always love the PNW’s mountains, old forests, rivers, wildlife, and untamed spirit. I love its history. The Pacific Northwest is a landscape that has influenced both my professional life and my creative one, and you’ll probably see pieces of the PNW sneaking into Havn County whenever I can get away with it.
These days I have a hobby farm with horses, goats, many many chickens and an apparently ever-expanding collection of rescued geriatric cats. So if I’m not fighting with a script, writing lore or creating something in Photoshop, there’s a reasonably good chance something outside needs to be fed.
Finding RedM
Strangely enough, I didn’t discover Red Dead Redemption 2 until 2024. I discovered RedM in 2025 and promptly fell in love with it. My first RedM home was a large sandbox server (GGI) where I met some wonderful people. It is an amazing place in many respects, but for me there was still something missing:
Roleplay.
So I went looking for it.
I tried several roleplay servers, and unfortunately some of those experiences left a fairly bad taste in my mouth. I encountered portrayals of Native Americans that I found deeply ignorant and racist, along with communities where gatekeeping seemed to determine who was permitted to participate in particular parts of the game. It was never what you played and how you played them. It was always who you knew or how much ass you kissed. Eventually, I found a genuinely warm and inviting roleplay server. Unfortunately, it ultimately closed for financial reasons.
Then one of my online best friends, whose husband already had experience running multiple Rust servers, decided she wanted to open a RedM server and invited me along for the ride. I am eternally grateful for the invite.
My reaction was essentially: If other people (especially those who didn’t impress me with intelligence, integrity, or ethics) could figure out how to build these things, why couldn’t we? So I jumped in feet first. And together, eventually, we built Havn County. I would love to talk about my fellow collaborators, but I will let them write their own stories. That’s how we do things here.
Why Havn Is Different
From the beginning, I wanted Havn to be welcoming, accessible and—above all—a platform for originality. I don’t particularly like building wonderful systems and then telling most of the community they aren’t allowed to use them. If something is reasonable for players to experience, my preference is to create a pathway that lets them experience it.
Want to breed horses? There’s a pathway.
Want property? There’s a pathway.
Want to operate a business, participate in events, create something unusual, or explore one of the stranger possibilities Havn offers?
There should be a pathway.
That doesn’t mean everything is handed out freely or that every idea will work. Some things require time, participation, responsibility or approval. Technical limitations exist. Balance matters. Other players matter.
But I would much rather begin with: “How can we make this work?” than: “How can we keep people from doing this?” That’s an important distinction to me.
I hope the people who enjoy Havn will support it in the same spirit—not only financially when they’re willing and able, but through participation, development, volunteering, events, ideas, creativity and simply helping make this a good place for other people to spend their time.
Light, Darkness & Everything Between
My own spirituality influences how I think about storytelling as well. I’m Pagan in real life, with a great deal of Native American medicine philosophy influencing my worldview. They are distinct traditions, but both are important parts of who I am.
Within Havn, however, I welcome religions and spiritual roleplay of all kinds.
I’d love to see characters step into our churches and actually give those buildings life. Priests, preachers and other figures of faith can create tremendous roleplay.
And then there are those who walk considerably darker roads. I don’t always root for the good guys. I love a genuinely good villain.
But darkness, to me, should be more interesting than ordinary, everyday cruelty. Give me the character whose darkness has history behind it. Give them convictions. Give them a philosophy. Give them reasons for believing what they believe and becoming what they’ve become. The best villain may not even believe they’re the villain. Darkness shouldn’t exist simply because there is an empty space waiting to be filled.
Darkness should have a purpose.
Sometimes the brightest stories need something dark to push against. Havn has room for both.
A Few Things That Are Very Gossamer
I’m a horse person, a farm person, an artist, a wildlife nerd, a D&D nerd and someone who can apparently look at six unfinished projects and conclude that adding a seventh is perfectly reasonable.
I’m also very much a Gen Xer, and I suspect that explains more about me than I sometimes realize. There’s a certain “figure it out” mentality that comes with the territory. Gen Xers grew up experimenting, improvising, taking things apart to see how they worked, and occasionally discovering exactly why someone had told us not to do that. We absolutely ran feral and had zero to minimal parenting. That was doubly so with me and Res Life.
Tell me something can’t be done and my first instinct is usually to ask, “Why not?”
Tell me it shouldn’t be done and there’s a reasonably good chance you’re about to get a “Here, hold my tea.”
That attitude has followed me straight into Havn County. I’m not particularly intimidated by “We’ve never done that before.” I’d rather poke at the problem, break a few things in testing, learn something, and see if we can make the impossible idea work. Sometimes we discover there was a very good reason nobody did it. Sometimes we get a new Havn feature. Either way, we learned something.
I’m also an unapologetic Bigfoot believer.
Maybe that’s an unusual admission for someone trained as a wildlife biologist, but I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of science, natural history, folklore and the things we don’t completely understand. I was a great admirer of the late Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum of Idaho State University and his willingness to examine the Sasquatch question seriously through anatomy, footprints and primate locomotion rather than simply dismissing the subject out of hand. And besides, being Native, we have stories going back generations and generations. Why would we have stories if there wasn’t a source code, right?
I believe there’s value in remaining curious.
Give me an old-growth forest, wildlife, horses, dice, folklore, a good mystery, a paintbrush, a Photoshop project, something supernatural, a cup of black tea and probably a geriatric cat demanding my attention, and you’ve got a reasonably accurate picture of me.
Among the Community
Perhaps the most important thing I can say about how I see my role here is that I don’t want to be a figure standing above Havn’s players.
I want to be a figure among them.
I want people to feel comfortable talking to me. Bring me your ideas. Tell me what isn’t working. Tell me what you’d love to do with your character. Tell me what Havn is missing. I can’t promise the answer will always be yes. Sometimes something simply won’t be possible. Sometimes an idea won’t be right for Havn. Sometimes I’m going to have to think about it. And occasionally the answer may be:
“That’s completely insane. Give me a minute to figure out how we could do it.”
Because ultimately, I’m not interested in dictating every story people tell here . I’m interested in helping build a world that gives people something worth telling stories about.
My Hope for Havn
Havn County will always be a work in progress. That’s not a flaw. I think it’s one of its strengths.
My hope is that the people who call Havn home will help shape what it becomes—not only through their characters, but through participation, ideas, development, events, volunteering, helping one another, and supporting the community that makes all of this possible. A server isn’t really its scripts, buildings, horses, supernatural powers, businesses, properties, or the hundreds of hours spent staring suspiciously at configuration files.
Those things build the playground.
The people who show up and create something together are what build the world.
That’s what I’m here to help create. And if I had to sum myself up in one line, the portrait hanging somewhere around here probably already did it best:
Science in the day. Magic at night. Kindness always.
— Gossamer