Remembering Greg Stafford



Greg Stafford passed away on October 11, 2018.

He was a giant in the gaming industry. He created the world of Glorantha. He founded Chaosium and Issaries. He created or co-created countless role-playing, board, and computer games. Among these are RuneQuest, Ghostbusters, Prince Valiant, Pendragon, and HeroQuest. He helped boil down RuneQuest into its essentials, creating the Basic Role-Playing game. As head of Chaosium, he published the first Call of Cthulhu RPG and made the decision to publish Mythos fiction.

That's an amazing resume. So many of his games are noteworthy. Ghostbusters, written by Chaosium for West End Games, was the origin of the D6 System which went on to power Star Wars - and was a superb game in its own right. RuneQuest was a new way of looking at fantasy RPGs, being entirely skill-based, with no character classes or levels. It is most people's introduction to Glorantha, a world infused with myth and magic. Pendragon was unique in being a generational game - in a successful game, your knight would die and you would take over with his heir. And with his grandchild in all probability.

He was also responsible, together with Sandy Petersen, for the Chaosium renaissance of the past several years, returning to take back ownership of it. It was through these efforts that Call of Cthulhu 7th edition was finally released as well as RuneQuest returning to Chaosium after a long journey away from it.

In the 1980s, it was difficult for me to get ahold of RPGs. I always loved games from Chaosium. It was like unearthing a treasure trove. I always enjoyed his personal web page, where he wrote of his history in the gaming industry.

I can't claim to have met with him and I don't believe I ever corresponded with him - unless he participated in a message board thread I was involved in. But he played a huge role in my favorite hobby and through his efforts brought me and so many others countless hours of enjoyment. He took us beyond searching for treasure and into worlds of heroism and myth.

Greg Stafford was a practicing shaman and I'll close with a quote of his from Pagan Paths - "In Shamanic activity the mythic is experienced, and the impossible can be felt.We must be prepared to feel the impossible."

Thanks Greg for all the myths.


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