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In Which I Remember Greg
Oct. 15th, 2018 03:57 pmGreg Stafford passed away last Thursday. I've written a historical memoir for Designers & Dragons about his importance to the industry, but it's entirely inadequate for someone that I counted a mentor and a friend.
I came to Greg's part of the hobby relatively late, and in large part due to another friend, Eric Rowe. Oh, I owned copies of Stormbringer and Hawkmoon when I was in high school, because I was already a great follower of Michael Moorcock, but those were some of Greg's peripheral masterpieces, which came into existence almost accidentally, thanks to his mere presence in the gaming industry. And, I played RuneQuest a few times in high school.
But I truly came under Greg's influence in college, after Eric began running his RuneQuest game, which he started the week I started at Cal, and which would continue, with a run of a year here and a year there, sporadically over time, until 2004 when he moved out of the States due to the deteriorating political climate (and he was clearly a seer for what was to come).
I loved RuneQuest. Eric's game was the most fun I've ever had while roleplaying. That was one part Steve Perrin's rules, one part Eric's own world of Erzo, and one part a great group of college friends ... but Greg's influence was clearly there too. And then when I learned that there was a whole other world of Glorantha out there, I devoured it. I remember reading the red box (Gods of Glorantha) and the orange box (Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars) and eventually starting to turn up the old Chaosium products at various gaming conventions, about the only way to find old, out-of-print RPGs at the time. King of Sartar with its contradictory stories won me over entirely. I was a fan for life. David G. was able to get me copies of the old Tales of the Reaching Moon, and poof, I was a member of the fandom.
In those college years, I also came to appreciate the breadth of Chaosium's production. I fell in love with Greg's Pendragon and I also began to read H.P. Lovecraft's stories and the mythos that it created, thanks to my introduction from Call of Cthulhu.
In 1993, as I was nearing the end of my time at UC Berkeley, I decided to start an electronic fanzine called The Chaosium Digest. It was in part a reaction to Andrew Bell's RuneQuest Digest, but a chance to highlight the rest of Chaosium's catalog. And, I had an unlikely dream: that I could get the attention of Greg and the rest of the folks at Chaosium, and maybe get a job there after I graduated, because their office was just a few miles away.
Everyone's been writing about their well-remembered first meeting with Greg, and I honestly don't remember my own. It could have been a DunDraCon or Pacificon. But it was mostly likely January 1994, way out in Maryland, when I attended David Cheng's RuneQuest-Con. We probably interacted in the "Home of the Bold" LARP and I certainly listened with rapt attention at his Lore Auction and his panel on HeroQuesting.
I know I began to talk with him on a more personal level over the next year when I helped Eric to prepare RQ-Con 2 to run on this side of the country. We also were preparing a LARP. (Spoiler Alert: never run a con and create a LARP at the same time!) It was set at the Broken Council, and Greg happily brainstormed with us on the people and places there. I vaguely recall being in his office at 950-A 56th Street for the first time with Eric, talking about Glorantha's Dawn Age. Greg was copying out the materials from his files on that time period. Later, when we went beyond his meager sources, he let us create out of whole cloth the details of the history of his world. I've got a "Red Goddess" manuscript that he signed to me and Eric in the middle of 1994, part of his Lunar Book. That tangible memento is my only real link to 1994, because the memories of that busy, crazy year are otherwise faded.
At the con the next January, I remember that we had a secret back room for staff, special guests, and LARP preparation, but the thing I remember best about it is when my friend David S. Asked Sandy Petersen for signatures on some of his books and Sandy happily agreed and added the inscription: "Signatures increase value!" But I don't remember much about interacting with Greg at that con either.
(And yes, I regularly ask people to remember the minutia of their designs from the '70s and '80s; thanks, guys, you're more use than I'd ever be!)
My actual memories of Greg tend to revolve around the two and a half years that I worked with him at Chaosium, from 1996 to 1998. I suppose it's no surprise that the day-to-day life of working with him made those older memories fade away because (happily) these new memories were so much more plentiful. They started on the day I interviewed, when I spent most of the time talking with Lynn Willis, but when I briefly stopped in to talk with Greg afterward. It was obvious that Lynn was making the staffing decisions, but Greg got the final say on everyone who joined his company. (And yes, my work on the Chaosium Digest helped, because everyone knew who I was and that I loved their games, but moreso it was Eric's running RQ-Con 2.)
After that, there are many wonderful fragments of memory.
I remember talking many more times in Greg's cramped office, book shelves off to the right, clippings covering the walls. He leaned back in his chair, wearing a flannel shirt, wrist braces on his arms. We usually talked about Glorantha, which at the time was mostly lost to Chaosium, not about the Call of Cthulhu books that I was laying out and editing.
I played around with the Dawn Age for a while after the Broken Council LARP, but I soon moved on to become the resident Gloranthan elf expert, and I remember Greg eagerly expanding upon the ideas that I had about the Aldryami, sketching out a series of "plantings" that took my mundane musings and turned them into something mythic. (I just went hunting, and no longer seem to have that piece of paper; alas!)
I remember sitting up in the loft at Chaosium, after work, as Greg gamemastered the early versions of Hero Wars, years before its publication. It was like there was a spotlight on him, in that dim, tight space. That was a spotlight on him wherever he was, in whatever room, always.
I remember how the smell of pot would start wafting down the hall from his office, past my desk, in the early evening. He'd always wait until 5 o'clock, or thereabouts. And I'd start feeling hungry, and know it was time to head home.
I remember going over his timelines for Pendragon which I later translated into some nice diagrams for the reprint of The Boy King, the one creative project for Chaosium that we worked on together.
I remember his solid handshake, I remember him clapping me on the back, I remember him laughing, such laughter. He was jolly, he was kind, he was erudite, he was creative, he was generous. It's almost impossible to conceive of a world without him.
I left Chaosium in 1998 because the decaying financial status of the company was literally giving me nightmares. It was not long after a private meeting between Greg, Lynn, Charlie, and Anne over in the kitchen that was full of raised voices which I tried to ignore until I was finally able to flee the building at 5pm. It was like hearing your parents fighting. Maybe that was the day that everyone acknowledged the problem of unpaid personnel taxes, maybe it was the day that Greg announced he was leaving, but it was certainly the day that Chaosium split apart.
Lynn was angry at me for leaving. He told me I was killing the company and afterward was politely cold to me whenever I called Chaosium to discuss some bit of business. But Greg, his attitude toward me never changed. He asked me to edit Hero Wars for release as Issaries' first product, a huge honor that I don't think I even realized at the time. Unfortunately, it was also beyond me. I didn't yet have the editorial chops to manage a manuscript of that size, and I also didn't have the self confidence to mold the work of master designers like Greg Stafford and Robin Laws into a publishable form. I did some editing on the manuscript over the next months and eventually handed it back to Greg and told him I couldn't take it to completion. He was entirely kind about that too. He didn't complain; he made sure my name was on the published book as a developer.
Around 2000 I shyly asked Greg if I could put together a book on elves, expanding on the material we'd been discussing for a few years now. Greg agreed and I was soon working on a roleplaying supplement to be published by Greg's new company, Issaries, as part of the Hero Wars (later HeroQuest) line. Greg continued to offer great support for my creativity, to offer ideas and new thoughts — most of which complemented what I was doing, but some of which made me rethink something from the start. (That was Greg.)
Unfortunately, a number of events came together that ended that collaboration and my work with Greg. The d20 industry collapsed, then Eric's Wizard's Attic died, and suddenly Issaries was without a home. Greg decided he couldn't stay in the overly expensive Bay Area and moved down to Mexico. He fell out of communication. Steve Martin took over running Issaries for him. Conflicts among the various members of fandom were escalating, but Steve did keep the torch burning for a little longer. I finished my elf book around 2004 and handed it off to Steve ... but Issaries never published another book. It's still sitting on my hard drive almost 15 years later. I've tried to find a home for it from time to time, but I've since moved on to my own creative niche, Designers & Dragons.
I've sometimes said that my experience with that elf-book was the reason that I stopped working with other peoples' properties. And, that's true. I'd completed a 100k word manuscript, my biggest work to that date, and it ended up wasted. I didn't want to ever end up in that position again. But, that had nothing to do with Greg. It was just an unfortunate coincidence of timing, a business and financial obstacle that none of us could overcome, and I did manage the next best thing, at the time: a book on elves for Mongoose's RuneQuest that made public many of the ideas that Greg and I had come up with over the previous decade.
In my mind, Greg was in Mexico for years, for a decade, but it was really just more than a year, from some time in 2004 to 2005. But it was the end of my creative relationship with him. More sadly, it was also the beginning of the end of my creative relationship with Glorantha, which sputtered out over the next several years. My interest in the books faded out during the time of Mongoose's uninspiring MRQ1 publication and Gloranthan fandom was dying away due to Issaries' fan policies and fandom's disagreements over HeroQuest and the new directions that it was taking the world.
Tradetalk and Hearts in Glorantha were the last fanzines standing, and I contributed to the scant issues of both during the rest of the decade, but the end came in 2009 and 2010 when I wrote some expansive articles meant to complement my work in the elf-book, which I then still hoped would see publication: "The Posionthorn Forest" in Hearts in Glorantha #3 (2009), "The Vale of Flowers" in Tradetalk #17, and "The Hellwood" for Hearts in Glorantha #4 (2010) I also wrote some articles for Mongoose's Signs & Portents including a pair of articles on the red elves which complemented the Mongoose book that actually did see print.
And that was the end of my creative input to Greg's mythic world.
I still miss it.
I'm happy that I stayed in touch with Greg in the years that followed. He helped me with histories on both Issaries and Chaosium that eventually went into Designers & Dragons. He contributed a bit to RPGnet, and sometimes he just told me about something fun. I remember once he wrote to me to verify that there had been no second edition Pendragon game, something that I'd worked out with him and the rest of the Chaosium staff some years before. He was my first choice to write an foreword for Designers & Dragons, and he was kind enough to introduce the '70s book.
By the end, I might hear from Greg once a year or so. Honestly, I was somewhat jealous of the folks who were now engaging in creative partnerships with him, but I'd had my chance, and I'd moved on.
The last thing I spoke with Greg about was the passing of Stewart Wieck. I wrote up the story of Stewart's life in the industry, and since Greg had been working with him on Pendragon in recent years, he was one of the people that I asked for comments. Greg suggested I humanize the piece, ending it with: "We are all impoverished by the loss. We extend condolences to his wife, children, and other family." And, I did add those condolences; Greg was always very human.
The last letter I had from Greg came after I posted Stewart's eulogy and simply said, "Thank you for [the] post".
I never would have imagined that my next historic eulogy would be for him.
I came to Greg's part of the hobby relatively late, and in large part due to another friend, Eric Rowe. Oh, I owned copies of Stormbringer and Hawkmoon when I was in high school, because I was already a great follower of Michael Moorcock, but those were some of Greg's peripheral masterpieces, which came into existence almost accidentally, thanks to his mere presence in the gaming industry. And, I played RuneQuest a few times in high school.
But I truly came under Greg's influence in college, after Eric began running his RuneQuest game, which he started the week I started at Cal, and which would continue, with a run of a year here and a year there, sporadically over time, until 2004 when he moved out of the States due to the deteriorating political climate (and he was clearly a seer for what was to come).
I loved RuneQuest. Eric's game was the most fun I've ever had while roleplaying. That was one part Steve Perrin's rules, one part Eric's own world of Erzo, and one part a great group of college friends ... but Greg's influence was clearly there too. And then when I learned that there was a whole other world of Glorantha out there, I devoured it. I remember reading the red box (Gods of Glorantha) and the orange box (Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars) and eventually starting to turn up the old Chaosium products at various gaming conventions, about the only way to find old, out-of-print RPGs at the time. King of Sartar with its contradictory stories won me over entirely. I was a fan for life. David G. was able to get me copies of the old Tales of the Reaching Moon, and poof, I was a member of the fandom.
In those college years, I also came to appreciate the breadth of Chaosium's production. I fell in love with Greg's Pendragon and I also began to read H.P. Lovecraft's stories and the mythos that it created, thanks to my introduction from Call of Cthulhu.
In 1993, as I was nearing the end of my time at UC Berkeley, I decided to start an electronic fanzine called The Chaosium Digest. It was in part a reaction to Andrew Bell's RuneQuest Digest, but a chance to highlight the rest of Chaosium's catalog. And, I had an unlikely dream: that I could get the attention of Greg and the rest of the folks at Chaosium, and maybe get a job there after I graduated, because their office was just a few miles away.
Everyone's been writing about their well-remembered first meeting with Greg, and I honestly don't remember my own. It could have been a DunDraCon or Pacificon. But it was mostly likely January 1994, way out in Maryland, when I attended David Cheng's RuneQuest-Con. We probably interacted in the "Home of the Bold" LARP and I certainly listened with rapt attention at his Lore Auction and his panel on HeroQuesting.
I know I began to talk with him on a more personal level over the next year when I helped Eric to prepare RQ-Con 2 to run on this side of the country. We also were preparing a LARP. (Spoiler Alert: never run a con and create a LARP at the same time!) It was set at the Broken Council, and Greg happily brainstormed with us on the people and places there. I vaguely recall being in his office at 950-A 56th Street for the first time with Eric, talking about Glorantha's Dawn Age. Greg was copying out the materials from his files on that time period. Later, when we went beyond his meager sources, he let us create out of whole cloth the details of the history of his world. I've got a "Red Goddess" manuscript that he signed to me and Eric in the middle of 1994, part of his Lunar Book. That tangible memento is my only real link to 1994, because the memories of that busy, crazy year are otherwise faded.
At the con the next January, I remember that we had a secret back room for staff, special guests, and LARP preparation, but the thing I remember best about it is when my friend David S. Asked Sandy Petersen for signatures on some of his books and Sandy happily agreed and added the inscription: "Signatures increase value!" But I don't remember much about interacting with Greg at that con either.
(And yes, I regularly ask people to remember the minutia of their designs from the '70s and '80s; thanks, guys, you're more use than I'd ever be!)
My actual memories of Greg tend to revolve around the two and a half years that I worked with him at Chaosium, from 1996 to 1998. I suppose it's no surprise that the day-to-day life of working with him made those older memories fade away because (happily) these new memories were so much more plentiful. They started on the day I interviewed, when I spent most of the time talking with Lynn Willis, but when I briefly stopped in to talk with Greg afterward. It was obvious that Lynn was making the staffing decisions, but Greg got the final say on everyone who joined his company. (And yes, my work on the Chaosium Digest helped, because everyone knew who I was and that I loved their games, but moreso it was Eric's running RQ-Con 2.)
After that, there are many wonderful fragments of memory.
I remember talking many more times in Greg's cramped office, book shelves off to the right, clippings covering the walls. He leaned back in his chair, wearing a flannel shirt, wrist braces on his arms. We usually talked about Glorantha, which at the time was mostly lost to Chaosium, not about the Call of Cthulhu books that I was laying out and editing.
I played around with the Dawn Age for a while after the Broken Council LARP, but I soon moved on to become the resident Gloranthan elf expert, and I remember Greg eagerly expanding upon the ideas that I had about the Aldryami, sketching out a series of "plantings" that took my mundane musings and turned them into something mythic. (I just went hunting, and no longer seem to have that piece of paper; alas!)
I remember sitting up in the loft at Chaosium, after work, as Greg gamemastered the early versions of Hero Wars, years before its publication. It was like there was a spotlight on him, in that dim, tight space. That was a spotlight on him wherever he was, in whatever room, always.
I remember how the smell of pot would start wafting down the hall from his office, past my desk, in the early evening. He'd always wait until 5 o'clock, or thereabouts. And I'd start feeling hungry, and know it was time to head home.
I remember going over his timelines for Pendragon which I later translated into some nice diagrams for the reprint of The Boy King, the one creative project for Chaosium that we worked on together.
I remember his solid handshake, I remember him clapping me on the back, I remember him laughing, such laughter. He was jolly, he was kind, he was erudite, he was creative, he was generous. It's almost impossible to conceive of a world without him.
I left Chaosium in 1998 because the decaying financial status of the company was literally giving me nightmares. It was not long after a private meeting between Greg, Lynn, Charlie, and Anne over in the kitchen that was full of raised voices which I tried to ignore until I was finally able to flee the building at 5pm. It was like hearing your parents fighting. Maybe that was the day that everyone acknowledged the problem of unpaid personnel taxes, maybe it was the day that Greg announced he was leaving, but it was certainly the day that Chaosium split apart.
Lynn was angry at me for leaving. He told me I was killing the company and afterward was politely cold to me whenever I called Chaosium to discuss some bit of business. But Greg, his attitude toward me never changed. He asked me to edit Hero Wars for release as Issaries' first product, a huge honor that I don't think I even realized at the time. Unfortunately, it was also beyond me. I didn't yet have the editorial chops to manage a manuscript of that size, and I also didn't have the self confidence to mold the work of master designers like Greg Stafford and Robin Laws into a publishable form. I did some editing on the manuscript over the next months and eventually handed it back to Greg and told him I couldn't take it to completion. He was entirely kind about that too. He didn't complain; he made sure my name was on the published book as a developer.
Around 2000 I shyly asked Greg if I could put together a book on elves, expanding on the material we'd been discussing for a few years now. Greg agreed and I was soon working on a roleplaying supplement to be published by Greg's new company, Issaries, as part of the Hero Wars (later HeroQuest) line. Greg continued to offer great support for my creativity, to offer ideas and new thoughts — most of which complemented what I was doing, but some of which made me rethink something from the start. (That was Greg.)
Unfortunately, a number of events came together that ended that collaboration and my work with Greg. The d20 industry collapsed, then Eric's Wizard's Attic died, and suddenly Issaries was without a home. Greg decided he couldn't stay in the overly expensive Bay Area and moved down to Mexico. He fell out of communication. Steve Martin took over running Issaries for him. Conflicts among the various members of fandom were escalating, but Steve did keep the torch burning for a little longer. I finished my elf book around 2004 and handed it off to Steve ... but Issaries never published another book. It's still sitting on my hard drive almost 15 years later. I've tried to find a home for it from time to time, but I've since moved on to my own creative niche, Designers & Dragons.
I've sometimes said that my experience with that elf-book was the reason that I stopped working with other peoples' properties. And, that's true. I'd completed a 100k word manuscript, my biggest work to that date, and it ended up wasted. I didn't want to ever end up in that position again. But, that had nothing to do with Greg. It was just an unfortunate coincidence of timing, a business and financial obstacle that none of us could overcome, and I did manage the next best thing, at the time: a book on elves for Mongoose's RuneQuest that made public many of the ideas that Greg and I had come up with over the previous decade.
In my mind, Greg was in Mexico for years, for a decade, but it was really just more than a year, from some time in 2004 to 2005. But it was the end of my creative relationship with him. More sadly, it was also the beginning of the end of my creative relationship with Glorantha, which sputtered out over the next several years. My interest in the books faded out during the time of Mongoose's uninspiring MRQ1 publication and Gloranthan fandom was dying away due to Issaries' fan policies and fandom's disagreements over HeroQuest and the new directions that it was taking the world.
Tradetalk and Hearts in Glorantha were the last fanzines standing, and I contributed to the scant issues of both during the rest of the decade, but the end came in 2009 and 2010 when I wrote some expansive articles meant to complement my work in the elf-book, which I then still hoped would see publication: "The Posionthorn Forest" in Hearts in Glorantha #3 (2009), "The Vale of Flowers" in Tradetalk #17, and "The Hellwood" for Hearts in Glorantha #4 (2010) I also wrote some articles for Mongoose's Signs & Portents including a pair of articles on the red elves which complemented the Mongoose book that actually did see print.
And that was the end of my creative input to Greg's mythic world.
I still miss it.
I'm happy that I stayed in touch with Greg in the years that followed. He helped me with histories on both Issaries and Chaosium that eventually went into Designers & Dragons. He contributed a bit to RPGnet, and sometimes he just told me about something fun. I remember once he wrote to me to verify that there had been no second edition Pendragon game, something that I'd worked out with him and the rest of the Chaosium staff some years before. He was my first choice to write an foreword for Designers & Dragons, and he was kind enough to introduce the '70s book.
By the end, I might hear from Greg once a year or so. Honestly, I was somewhat jealous of the folks who were now engaging in creative partnerships with him, but I'd had my chance, and I'd moved on.
The last thing I spoke with Greg about was the passing of Stewart Wieck. I wrote up the story of Stewart's life in the industry, and since Greg had been working with him on Pendragon in recent years, he was one of the people that I asked for comments. Greg suggested I humanize the piece, ending it with: "We are all impoverished by the loss. We extend condolences to his wife, children, and other family." And, I did add those condolences; Greg was always very human.
The last letter I had from Greg came after I posted Stewart's eulogy and simply said, "Thank you for [the] post".
I never would have imagined that my next historic eulogy would be for him.
