Our Members: Who We Are - The Company of Strangers

The Members of The Company of Strangers:

Rob Cheung

Rob has always had an interest in war. In public school in his free time, he would be in the library reading about the First and Second World Wars. Well not actually reading. He would look at all the pictures and read the odd item of interest here and there.

He has always been fascinated with how things worked and would look for the cutaway pictures of a gun, rifle, tank, fighter plane, and ships … The lists go on. Maps of battle fields, medieval, modern, American civil war.. He remembers a book of battlefields of the American Civil War from a bird's eye view. The artist had drawn all the individual soldiers from both sides, standing in a firing line, shielded behind fences, trees, crouching and lying on the ground.

He used to collect comic books: Spiderman, Thor, Fantastic Four, Batman, Superman (drawn by Kurt Swan), Iron Man (drawn by Bob Layton, also my favorite). He would also read The Archie’s, Richie Rich - just for fun, not collecting. He amassed around 2000 comic books before he grew tired of them and gave them away to his nephew.

He didn’t really start reading until he was in his early 20’s, needed something to read on those long bus rides to and from work. His favorite authors include: Bernard Cornwell (Sharpe Series), Alexander Kent (Richard Bolitho series), all the original “Battletech” series starting with “Decision at Thunder Rift”, William R. Forstchen (The Lost Regiment Series), Dan Abnett (Gaunt’s Ghost series), David Sherman and Dan Cragg (Starfist series), William C. Dietz, R.A. Salvatore, David Weber, John Ringo and Harold Coyle. He liked Tom Clancy until he had too many ghost writers writing for him.

His first experience playing Dungeons and Dragons was in college. He'd never played or heard of D & D before, so he was given a 5th level Paladin (at the time, he didn't have any idea what his character could do). There was one other player and the GM. The first monster they fought was a Rakshasa. Needless to say, he did in that first encounter and didn't like the game very much.

It wasn’t until much later in life that he found a flyer for Pandemonium #9 at Ryerson and decided to go and see what that was all about. That's where he met Dave Graham and played his first game of 40K. From there, Dave told him about Toronto Trek and his conventioning days began. He's now gone to the Orion conventions and attended his first GenCon last year.

He's a member of the RPGA and tries to attend all the gaming sessions held by the Daggerthorn Consortium in Toronto.

He has been happily married for twelve years, working on thirteen and works for the same security company he's been working at for the last twenty-three years. Talk about loyalty!