Tom O'Vander

Creative Director and Narrative Designer

United Kingdom

Tom is a strategic and creative leader with a strong track record of conceiving, delivering, and scaling experience-led programmes within the games and entertainment sectors.
Currently Director and Co-Founder of Secret Solstice Games Ltd. Their award-winning immersive games (Case Closed) are recognised internationally for innovation, storytelling, and design excellence.

Portfolio

Shipped Games - Case Closed Immersive Experiences

Case Closed
Case Closed Edinburgh - Voted Scotland's Best Escape Room 2025

Winner of Best in Scotland 2025. A fully immersive detective experience, 90 minute murder mystery. Analyse the crime scene, assemble your suspects, and crack the case! The most unique escape rooms in Edinburgh! Edinburgh's detective escape room.

Game Content Examples

Tantamount RPG adventure (WIP)
Horror Game Aduio Logs

Taken from an adaptation of an adventure I created for the TTRPG Dread. Tantamount is a deep sea/ cosmic horror game set in a submarine, where players take on the role of experts in their field chosen to uncover the secrets of the Tantamount Rift. This is a mock-up of some audio files a player might find in a video game adaptation.

Outline of Quest for Larian Studios
07/03/2019
Quest Outline - DOS:2

The accompanying outline for the quest dialogue submitted to Larian Studios as part of the secondary stage of applying to join their writing staff.

Quest Dialogue written for Larian Studios. **Note that downloading the file and opening in your browser is necessary to view as intended**
07/03/2019
Quest Dialogue - Twine

This, along with the outline for the quest and some further material, was submitted to Larian as part of the application process to join their writing staff.

Comic Samples

Google Slides
Abyss Comic 1

Illustration - By Needle and Blade || Writing - Tom O'Vander

Prose

Opening of novel
How Disappointing

The opening chapter of my dark fantasy novel. Here I hope to illustrate my narrative voice and the form i have developed of allowing the narrator to inherit idosyncrasies and behaviours of the lead subject. In this way, I can lead the reader to surmise what may transpire a they come to know the characters, and I can subvert those expectations.

Chapter of novel
Cardinal Visit

One of several chapters included here of my first dark fantasy novel. Here, I hope to showcase my unique command of characterisation in dialogue to deliver exposition whhile keeping the reader engaged and guessing what comes next.

Chapter of novel
Pissing In The Wind

One of several chapters included here of my first dark fantasy novel. In this chapter, I tackle plot and worldbuilding more directly and establish one of several inciting incidents. i hope this example will serve to demonstrate how I approach action and spacial blocking in a scene.

Worldbuilding

Notes on worldbuilding
Giltgreen

This is an example of my process when building a believable and dynamic setting for my players in our campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. It includes notes for myself to effectively communicate the scale and potential of a place that only exists in our collective imagination. Creating a city was a daunting task but after some research and a few attempts at different levels of detail I settled into a system that works for me and gives me a solid foundation for the story I want to tell as...

Personal Work
Character piece

This is a less traditional piece of character-focused writing, which I enjoy as a place to experiment with different styles and bend some of the rules. When I run table-top games for my friends, I go through a process where we build a character together. I treat this process much like a briefing with a client and I then produce a short story form their characters perceptive as you can see in this example. The end result is something like this, which gives the players a solid foundation to...