About Us

How did we get here?

Talking Skull represents the professional union of Nimrod and Linda Jones to create fun games and other products that other people can enjoy.

Nimrod has been playing games, telling tales and otherwise tinkering with ideas for longer than he can remember. He has held a variety of jobs including working in a second hand and antiquarian bookshop, a games shop, within the film industry, within theatre and as a web designer. A long time attendee at various gaming conventions, he has been co-organising OddConUK with Steve Pennington (a.k.a. Sad) since 2007. He’s worked professionally within the gaming industry from 2003, writing for Cursed Empire, Qin: The Warring States and Victoriana. He’s worked on numerous editing and proofreading jobs with Cubicle 7 for various games including Victoriana, Qin: The Warring States, The Laundry, Doctor Who and much more. In 2008, a drink and a joke in the company of Angus Abranson, co-founder and then co-director of Cubicle 7, lead to Nimrod’s defining ‘talking skull’ moment when he was challenged to make a card game. This lead to other work opportunities within Cubicle 7 while the card game evolved to become Faustus. With Angus launching his new company, Chronicle City, Faustus is to become Talking Skull‘s flagship game and the first game released in partnership with Chronicle City.

Linda has been doing art for equally longer than she can remember, but she has been working professionally since 2007. She has a particular love of dragons, fantasy characters, vampires, the supernatural and anything Gothic; she has long been identified under the moniker of SheBlackDragon. Her work features within the Cubicle 7 product lines Cthulhu Britannica, Victoriana and The Laundry; Mongoose Publishing product lines Wraith Recon, RuneQuest, Conan, Traveller and Babylon 5; and also Triple Ace Games, Middle Earth Games and Dreamscarred Press, as well as commissioned covers from private clients. She has also illustrated the book Urban Faerie: Pocket Edition by Postmortem Studios.

As well as the gaming industry, she has experience in complex and innovative T-shirt design for companies such as Darkside, ImageCrazy, The Mountain and Spiral.

Nimrod and Linda were married in 2011 and have a beautiful baby girl possessing strange superpowers that make everyone around her either broody or pregnant. They claim ignorance as to the reasons or consequences of such powers.

We would like to thank everyone that supported us when we were raising start up capital. Here are the names of those supporters that were happy to have their names made public:

(Listed alphabetically)
Mark Beveridge, Aidan Bowes, Nick Brooke, James “Grim” Desborough, Nick Eglinton, Sally Haynes-Preece, Miriam Hunt, Steve Huxton, Benjamin Jones, Tim Partridge, Godfrey Pitman & Jean Collins-Pitman, Andrew Peregrine, Emma Pratt, Ben Prior, Gwenifer Raymond, Rules of Play, Maartje Swart, Sandrine Thirache, Jennifer Waddington, Jan Van Zon