About the Author

James Van Sickle is a freelance writer working in the Shadowrun universe. His first title, Los Alamos: The Secret City, a location sourcebook for Shadowrun, Sixth World, was published by Catalyst Game Labs in summer 2026.

// How I got here

I started playing tabletop RPGs around 1992, in high school. One afternoon, waiting for my mom to pick me up, I wandered into the school's Gamer's Guild. My first session was either Star Wars or Call of Cthulhu. I genuinely can't remember which came first, but Shadowrun became the group's go-to game almost immediately. The Guild, and those games, ended up defining a big chunk of high school and the friendships that followed it. Writing for Shadowrun now is partly a way of giving back to a game that mattered to me for that long.

// Writing for the Sixth World

My interest in Shadowrun sits in the corners of the map the core books usually drive past. Seattle, Chicago, Berlin: those cities already have shelves of material written about them. I'm more interested in what the Sixth World looks like from the American Southwest: the smaller towns, the corporate gaps, the people whose lives don't run through a megacity skyline. That's the angle I've been bringing to my work for Catalyst.

I still collect Shadowrun books, along with a much wider RPG library, even when I don't get nearly as much table time as I'd like.

// Day job

By day I'm a ServiceNow Architect at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I've been working in ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, and before that BMC Remedy) since 2000, and first landed in the IT industry in 1996 as a customer care rep for CompuServe and Netscape, back when "outsourcing support overseas" wasn't yet a thing anyone was doing.

On the credential side: a degree in Security and Risk Analysis from Penn State with a cybersecurity focus, a certification in Database Application Design and Development from Columbia University, and both the ServiceNow Certified System Administrator and Certified Application Developer credentials. I've also presented my work at a number of industry conferences over the years.

// A previous chapter: political tech in Dallas

For several years I also ran a small political consulting company out of the Dallas area, building technology tools for local campaigns. Two pieces of that work I'm still proud of:

The field canvassing tablet (2013). Campaigns at the time were still running door-knocking operations on printed walk lists, with no way to tell whether paid staff were actually hitting doors or just burning the clock. I built a locked-down tablet app that restricted staff to their assigned voter list and tracked their movements as they worked a turf. It was, in 2013, several years ahead of where the industry sat. Verizon Wireless gave the project an award, and there's a short video about it here: video of the canvassing tablet ↗ (opens in new tab).

Predictive dialing for local phone banks (2010–2012). Predictive dialing, a system that dials numbers automatically and only hands a live voter to a live agent, was standard in commercial call centers but essentially unused at the local-campaign level. I stood up a predictive-dialing call center for the Elba Garcia campaign for Dallas County Commissioner in 2010. With roughly a dozen staff on phones, we worked our target lists so efficiently that by the final days of the race we'd called every voter on them more than three times and actually ran out of numbers to dial.

For full professional history, see the resume on LinkedIn ↗ (opens in new tab). For press, appearances, or reader mail, use the contact page.