Greg Stafford
This is a little bit different from the normal posts, in that it's not about miniatures or wargaming. It's about a man who played an enormous part in my life (this is Ian writing) and probably didn't realize just how much.
My friend Greg Stafford died on October 10, 2018. He was a giant of the roleplaying game industry, and I swear this is not hyperbole or fond memories overriding good sense. After Gary Gygax, Greg was the One, one of the originals who created the roleplaying game hobby.
His design philosophy was different from Gygax’s. Gygax endeavored to bring imagination and drama to the sometimes staid rules of the wargames he started with; Greg worked the opposite direction, bringing rules in to shape the workings of his vivid, nearly hyperactive imagination.
Back in the 60s, Greg created a fantasy world called Glorantha. It was and is a weird world, filled with duck people, buffalo riders, and mountains that reached above the tallest clouds. But what makes it stranger is how recognizable it is. Everything in Glorantha is based on a reading of the mythology of our real world, just not the sort of reading we do of such works today. Rather, Greg seemed to try to read them the way the ancients would’ve read or, more likely, heard them. It wasn’t what they said; it’s what they felt like.
The idea that you feel Glorantha more than you know it in any kind of empirical sense suffuses his writing. Everything is local, and anything which isn’t is terrifying. The hill next to your village has a story: it’s the heaving bosom of the Earth Mother or the burial place of an ancient giant. But there are other Earth Mothers and other giants, and very different people who believe very different things about them. It’s a world of gift giving and hospitality, of warmth when you’re with you and yours and probably death when you get away from them. Most importantly, it’s a world about figuring out how to navigate all of that complicated stuff which our impossibly distant ancestors really did have to work out.
It’s hard to do justice to the very intuitive style of writing and world creation Greg trucked in for 50 years without reading it. His work has this way of dropping the name of a place or a myth and, because it’s never been fleshed out, you go, “Wait, I need to know more about that thing you just wrote”.
Guess what Greg would say? Go write it yourself. Figure it out. What is that river over there? What is that noise you hear on the wind? The man had multiple filing cabinets of notes, maps, and legends for his work on Glorantha--work compiled in the massive two volume Guide to Glorantha, which is one of my prized possessions--and his genius was to put it on you when you asked a question he left begging. You were scared to answer them, but also you just had to do it, because being a hero means being curious and sometimes foolish. So you did it, you answered those questions, in RuneQuest and HeroQuest later. Thousands of people did.
King Arthur Pendragon was his real masterwork, at least in the mechanical sense. He read everything he could get his hands on regarding the Arthurian cycle, then resolved the contradictions and deconstructed what was left, until the world was left with a game which felt like Arthur. You play a knight. Your knight will die, either through violence or old age, since the cycle lasts 80ish years. Once that happens, you play the child of your deceased knight. That’s if you have one, because the game emulates childbirth, tending a manor, mass combat, and unexpected events. It unfurls before you as you read it, possibilities compounding until you realize, oh my god, I’m playing an epic, a real live epic, in the exact definition of that word.
It was here that I met Greg, in an online sense. Stewart Wieck (who sadly passed away last year), one of the founders of White Wolf, had established a good relationship with him when King Arthur Pendragon was briefly published by that company. Once White Wolf disappeared, Wieck founded Nocturnal Media, primarily as a place to keep Pendragon alive. As part of that, he and Greg called for pitches for alternate settings for the game.
Two and a half glasses of wine later, in the summer of 2010, I was ready to hit send on my pitch, a Bronze Age Mycenae game with the same structure as Pendragon. I’d never written anything in my life outside a few blog posts and forum arguments. I felt practically sick to my stomach at the prospect of sending a page-long outline of something I wasn’t sure I’d thought through to one of my game design heroes. Mouseover, click, mail sent, sigh.
He wrote back within a day. He loved it and, with the submission of a chapter outline, he’d make it official with a contract and guidance on putting the game together. I got up and ran around the room three times, got my brother on the phone, and we wrote what was first called Age of Bronze, then Before Iron, and currently Myrmidon; it’s still not in print, but it’s been finished for years and I hope we get to see it soon (I know things, but I can’t say things).
Him taking a chance on me was an inflection point. It gave me confidence I didn’t know I had, and as the chapters rolled in I felt better and better about my capabilities. He was so kind and insightful, knowing when to prod and when to yield. Everything which has happened in my professional life--writing about digital labor, designing my own game, going back to school, my probable enrollment in graduate school next year--follows from that moment of Greg saying yes.
This isn’t about me and my work, though, because I am not special. I’m not special because Greg touched so many people and corners of gaming. There are so many mes out there. It’s tough to count the number of influential designers he worked with directly throughout the years, from Sandy Peterson to Jonathan Tweet to Rob Heinsoo. How many of them had a moment of shared inspiration with Greg? How many drove on because he believed in them?
His fingers are everywhere. Ken Rolston, lead designer on Elder Scrolls III and IV, came through Chaosium’s doors and adores Glorantha; he wrote the foreward to the second volume of The Guide, enthusing that the Elder Scrolls design team “held Glorantha in great awe and admiration, and were eager to steal from it at every opportunity”. To truly understand Elder Scrolls, from the writing style in the in-game books to the way the gods just hang out waiting for people to say hello, you have to understand Glorantha. It’s all there, in its hugeness and uncanny sense that you’ve been somewhere you never could’ve been to.
Greg’s insistence that you can emulate genre via mechanics and put a little less emphasis on emulating physics was a forerunner to any number of indie roleplaying games. Burning Wheel has its Beliefs, a counterpart to Pendragon’s creeds and Virtues. Apocalypse World owes much to the simple idea that you can model story beats in your mechanics. The debt story-facing game design, in video games and analog games, owes Greg Stafford is immense.
Maybe open world video games become massive without Greg’s philosophies underpinning The Elder Scrolls games which made them mega-popular. Maybe RPGs experience their current renaissance without designers who cut their teeth with him all over the development processes of 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition D&D. Maybe games which aim to model emotions and belief become popular anyway. But we don’t live in that world and we don’t know. We have this one, the one where Greg’s influence is felt in games I imagine he was barely aware existed.
After Myrmidon wrapped up, I heard from Greg less often. We were outside the crucible of game design, and a 100k word marathon dissipated into nothing. Mostly we’d chat about when it was due to come out, how my brother and I felt about editing, and all the other bookkeeping notes which are the dreadfully unsexy part of game design.
But he’d still send me puckish emails about how the weather was in northern California or a myth he found interesting. The strangest, most delightful one I got was an invitation to come visit him and sleep on what he described as a big couch in his backyard. All the wanderers and hippies came through on their way to the redwoods to crash there, or so he claimed, and he wanted to hang out in the cool breeze with me.
I demurred, but I wish I hadn’t. I didn’t have the cash, and my genes are just WASPy enough that I always feel a little uncomfortable when confronted with guileless affection. What a trip it would’ve been to sleep on a big couch under the stars while chatting with my hero and surprise mentor, however brief and separated by distance our relationship was. I’m going to miss you, Greg, hell, just the idea of you, and I know I’m not alone, but you’re everywhere, man.
And what more could you have ever wanted?
My friend Greg Stafford died on October 10, 2018. He was a giant of the roleplaying game industry, and I swear this is not hyperbole or fond memories overriding good sense. After Gary Gygax, Greg was the One, one of the originals who created the roleplaying game hobby.
His design philosophy was different from Gygax’s. Gygax endeavored to bring imagination and drama to the sometimes staid rules of the wargames he started with; Greg worked the opposite direction, bringing rules in to shape the workings of his vivid, nearly hyperactive imagination.
Back in the 60s, Greg created a fantasy world called Glorantha. It was and is a weird world, filled with duck people, buffalo riders, and mountains that reached above the tallest clouds. But what makes it stranger is how recognizable it is. Everything in Glorantha is based on a reading of the mythology of our real world, just not the sort of reading we do of such works today. Rather, Greg seemed to try to read them the way the ancients would’ve read or, more likely, heard them. It wasn’t what they said; it’s what they felt like.
The idea that you feel Glorantha more than you know it in any kind of empirical sense suffuses his writing. Everything is local, and anything which isn’t is terrifying. The hill next to your village has a story: it’s the heaving bosom of the Earth Mother or the burial place of an ancient giant. But there are other Earth Mothers and other giants, and very different people who believe very different things about them. It’s a world of gift giving and hospitality, of warmth when you’re with you and yours and probably death when you get away from them. Most importantly, it’s a world about figuring out how to navigate all of that complicated stuff which our impossibly distant ancestors really did have to work out.
It’s hard to do justice to the very intuitive style of writing and world creation Greg trucked in for 50 years without reading it. His work has this way of dropping the name of a place or a myth and, because it’s never been fleshed out, you go, “Wait, I need to know more about that thing you just wrote”.
Guess what Greg would say? Go write it yourself. Figure it out. What is that river over there? What is that noise you hear on the wind? The man had multiple filing cabinets of notes, maps, and legends for his work on Glorantha--work compiled in the massive two volume Guide to Glorantha, which is one of my prized possessions--and his genius was to put it on you when you asked a question he left begging. You were scared to answer them, but also you just had to do it, because being a hero means being curious and sometimes foolish. So you did it, you answered those questions, in RuneQuest and HeroQuest later. Thousands of people did.
King Arthur Pendragon was his real masterwork, at least in the mechanical sense. He read everything he could get his hands on regarding the Arthurian cycle, then resolved the contradictions and deconstructed what was left, until the world was left with a game which felt like Arthur. You play a knight. Your knight will die, either through violence or old age, since the cycle lasts 80ish years. Once that happens, you play the child of your deceased knight. That’s if you have one, because the game emulates childbirth, tending a manor, mass combat, and unexpected events. It unfurls before you as you read it, possibilities compounding until you realize, oh my god, I’m playing an epic, a real live epic, in the exact definition of that word.
It was here that I met Greg, in an online sense. Stewart Wieck (who sadly passed away last year), one of the founders of White Wolf, had established a good relationship with him when King Arthur Pendragon was briefly published by that company. Once White Wolf disappeared, Wieck founded Nocturnal Media, primarily as a place to keep Pendragon alive. As part of that, he and Greg called for pitches for alternate settings for the game.
Two and a half glasses of wine later, in the summer of 2010, I was ready to hit send on my pitch, a Bronze Age Mycenae game with the same structure as Pendragon. I’d never written anything in my life outside a few blog posts and forum arguments. I felt practically sick to my stomach at the prospect of sending a page-long outline of something I wasn’t sure I’d thought through to one of my game design heroes. Mouseover, click, mail sent, sigh.
He wrote back within a day. He loved it and, with the submission of a chapter outline, he’d make it official with a contract and guidance on putting the game together. I got up and ran around the room three times, got my brother on the phone, and we wrote what was first called Age of Bronze, then Before Iron, and currently Myrmidon; it’s still not in print, but it’s been finished for years and I hope we get to see it soon (I know things, but I can’t say things).
Him taking a chance on me was an inflection point. It gave me confidence I didn’t know I had, and as the chapters rolled in I felt better and better about my capabilities. He was so kind and insightful, knowing when to prod and when to yield. Everything which has happened in my professional life--writing about digital labor, designing my own game, going back to school, my probable enrollment in graduate school next year--follows from that moment of Greg saying yes.
This isn’t about me and my work, though, because I am not special. I’m not special because Greg touched so many people and corners of gaming. There are so many mes out there. It’s tough to count the number of influential designers he worked with directly throughout the years, from Sandy Peterson to Jonathan Tweet to Rob Heinsoo. How many of them had a moment of shared inspiration with Greg? How many drove on because he believed in them?
His fingers are everywhere. Ken Rolston, lead designer on Elder Scrolls III and IV, came through Chaosium’s doors and adores Glorantha; he wrote the foreward to the second volume of The Guide, enthusing that the Elder Scrolls design team “held Glorantha in great awe and admiration, and were eager to steal from it at every opportunity”. To truly understand Elder Scrolls, from the writing style in the in-game books to the way the gods just hang out waiting for people to say hello, you have to understand Glorantha. It’s all there, in its hugeness and uncanny sense that you’ve been somewhere you never could’ve been to.
Greg’s insistence that you can emulate genre via mechanics and put a little less emphasis on emulating physics was a forerunner to any number of indie roleplaying games. Burning Wheel has its Beliefs, a counterpart to Pendragon’s creeds and Virtues. Apocalypse World owes much to the simple idea that you can model story beats in your mechanics. The debt story-facing game design, in video games and analog games, owes Greg Stafford is immense.
Maybe open world video games become massive without Greg’s philosophies underpinning The Elder Scrolls games which made them mega-popular. Maybe RPGs experience their current renaissance without designers who cut their teeth with him all over the development processes of 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition D&D. Maybe games which aim to model emotions and belief become popular anyway. But we don’t live in that world and we don’t know. We have this one, the one where Greg’s influence is felt in games I imagine he was barely aware existed.
After Myrmidon wrapped up, I heard from Greg less often. We were outside the crucible of game design, and a 100k word marathon dissipated into nothing. Mostly we’d chat about when it was due to come out, how my brother and I felt about editing, and all the other bookkeeping notes which are the dreadfully unsexy part of game design.
But he’d still send me puckish emails about how the weather was in northern California or a myth he found interesting. The strangest, most delightful one I got was an invitation to come visit him and sleep on what he described as a big couch in his backyard. All the wanderers and hippies came through on their way to the redwoods to crash there, or so he claimed, and he wanted to hang out in the cool breeze with me.
I demurred, but I wish I hadn’t. I didn’t have the cash, and my genes are just WASPy enough that I always feel a little uncomfortable when confronted with guileless affection. What a trip it would’ve been to sleep on a big couch under the stars while chatting with my hero and surprise mentor, however brief and separated by distance our relationship was. I’m going to miss you, Greg, hell, just the idea of you, and I know I’m not alone, but you’re everywhere, man.
And what more could you have ever wanted?
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