Editorial: Glorantha: Another Magical World

December 2018 was the fifty-first anniversary of the ancestor of the modern role-playing game, Dave Wesley’s Braunstein, a Napoleonic miniatures scenario which offered character-based roles for multiple players. First played in 1967, it expanded over the next three years to include scenarios set in Central America and the Wild West written by his friend Dave Arneson. Arneson then adapted the basic Braunstein idea into Black Moor, a fantasy game heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings and based on the medieval miniatures game Chainmail by Gary Gygax. In 1974, Gygax’s new company, Tactical Studies Rules, published the first edition of Gygax and Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons.

Although TSR was based in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the first copy of D&D ever sold ended up in the hands of Greg Stafford in Oakland, California. Stafford had begun writing stories about the fantasy world of Glorantha while in college in the mid–1960s, inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and Joseph Campbell. In 1975, he launched a small company, The Chaosium, to publish board wargames based on Glorantha. He published two titles—White Bear and Red Moon and Nomad Gods—while he worked with Steve Perrin and a team of other designers to create a role-playing game set in Glorantha: RuneQuest was published in 1978.

Glorantha is one of the richest and most vivid created worlds in fantasy, a world where everything from the dirt to the stars is literally made of mythology. The mythological backbone of Glorantha revolves around the deeds of Orlanth, the god of storm, who struck the Emperor Sun with his brother’s sword, which was Death, plunging all the world into darkness and war. The escalating violence lead to the eruption of Chaos, a danger greater than Death. Finally Chaos was defeated when all the living beings participated in a transcendent union known afterward as “I Fought, We Won.”

Glorantha is a wonderland of invention: the Uz, trolls made of mankind and night, who can eat anything, even air; broos, the goat-headed children of the goddess of rape; the city of Pavis, built along the River of Cradles at the ruins of a city of giants, with its hundred-foot-high walls falling forever into rubble, haunted by jack-o-bears and scorpion men and creatures that are enormous mouths on six crablike legs.

Glorantha’s Bronze Age aesthetic was informed by a modern sense of justice and a sociological/anthropological understanding of cultures. RuneQuest was designed to highlight entire societies. In most early RPGs, the characters are untethered, freebooters one step above brigands; in RuneQuest, characters are strongly encouraged to belong to cults, local or global, and work with and for the cult and the civil authorities. One of the first RuneQuest campaigns, Borderlands, guides a group of adventures through a series of missions for a minor duke on the edge of the Lunar Empire, at the end of which they have become a vital part of the Duke’s power base.

Stafford went on to design several more major RPGs. He and Lynn Willis turned the RQ rules into a “generic” backbone called Basic Role-Playing (BRP), which was used in most of Chaosium’s games in the 1980s, including Stormbringer, Elfquest, Super World (the game behind George R.R. Martin’s original Wild Cards campaign), and most famously Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Peterson. Of Stafford’s own games, the most important is certainly Pendragon, the game of the knights of the Round Table. Pendragon’s rules are even simpler than BRP but introduce a personality system by which players follow the dictates of their characters rather than the other way around. This revolutionary system was a cornerstone of the modern story-driven RPG. (As was Ghostbusters, which Stafford codesigned with Peterson in the late 1980s. The Ghostbusters conflict resolution system is simpler and faster in play than any of the direct descendants of D&D, and its core elements are in dozens of games today.)

When Stafford died last October, I attempted to summarize him as the first person to look at role-playing games and see in them the potential for actual art. That’s somewhat unfair—M.A.R Barker self-published Empire of the Petal Throne, showcasing his world of Tékumel, less than a year after Gygax sold his first copies of D&D from the tailgate of his station wagon. But Stafford did more to advance the art form of role-playing games, and in more roles—as publisher, designer, editor, world-crafter, and inspiration—than anyone else after Gygax and Arneson.

I’ll end by quoting from Stafford’s official obituary:

To honor Greg’s memory the family requests, in lieu of flowers, that you strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know, go somewhere you haven’t been, face a personal challenge head on, read about something new, and enjoy life.

We are all us.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors

Comments

[Erik Brickman]

A wonderful summary and background on Stafford and his general impact on the hobby of table-top RPG. Yes, he was an extraordinary man, and also was not beneath thanking for the slightest help from the most foreign and outskirt players (such as myself, based in Sweden) who among many things tried to send not-so-good maps to him personally as part of a Pendragon adventure write-up. He operated on so many levels, both personally and strategically when it came to orchestrating the wonderful worlds and fantasies that he created and contributed to. They continue to fascinate and make new young players a part of his legacy. A legacy that was always asking questions; who am I? what am I doing here? why am I playing this character? Someting that transcends gaming itself.