Glorantha and Gaming
Stafford is perhaps most famous as the creator of the fantasy world of Glorantha, but is also a prolific games designer - he was designer of Pendragon, he was co-designer of the RuneQuest, Ghostbusters, Prince Valiant and HeroQuest role-playing systems, founder of the role-playing game companies Chaosium and Issaries, designer of the White Bear and Red Moon, Nomad Gods, King Arthur’s Knights and Elric! board games, and co-designer of the King of Dragon Pass computer game.
Greg Stafford's interest in roleplaying and gaming originated in his adolescent fascination with mythology. During his adolescent years he read anything he could find on the subject, and when he exhausted the libraries, he started to write his own stories in his freshman year at Beloit College, in 1966. This was the start of the world of Glorantha.
Around 1974, Stafford created White Bear and Red Moon, a board game about the violent struggle between several cultures in the Dragon Pass region of Glorantha. In essence the game centered around the conflict between the barbarian Kingdom of Sartar and the invading Lunar Empire, which has remained a central theme for Gloranthan publications since then.
Not able to find a publisher, Stafford founded a company of his own, Chaosium, in November 1975. At the same time the game of Dungeons & Dragons (and the concept of tabletop role-playing games) was becoming extremely popular — role-players wanted to use the setting of White Bear and Red Moon in their own games, so Chaosium published RuneQuest, which was written by "Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, and Friends".
Despite Glorantha being the focus of his life's work, Greg considers his masterpiece to be the Arthurian chivalric role-playing game Pendragon, which was published in 1985 by Chaosium, and republished in 2005 by White Wolf. Stafford won the Diana Jones Award, 2007, for his work on Pendragon.
In 1999 Pyramid magazine named Greg Stafford as one of The Millennium's Most Influential Persons "at least in the realm of adventure gaming."
Read more about this topic: Greg Stafford
Famous quotes containing the word gaming:
“Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)