(34/41: 1975) GREG STAFFORD (1948–2018)
The Quirky Uncle
Shannon Appelcline, the most thorough historian the RPG hobby has ever produced, wrote this about Greg Stafford: he was the quirky uncle of the roleplaying industry, never willing to go the way of the common man. If Gygax and Arneson were the fathers, Stafford was the relative who showed up with strange gifts from countries nobody had visited.
In 1975, a year after Dungeons & Dragons appeared and while every aspiring designer in America was trying to figure out how to build a better dungeon, Stafford hand-stapled eight hundred copies of a board wargame set in a fictional Bronze Age world he had been building since his freshman year at Beloit College in 1966. The world was called Glorantha. It drew not from Tolkien but from Mesoamerican mythology, shamanic traditions, and comparative religion. The wargame was called White Bear and Red Moon. Three publishers had failed to produce it. Stafford founded Chaosium—named partly after the Oakland Coliseum near his home, partly after chaos itself—and published it himself.
Over the next forty-three years, Stafford would design or co-design games that seeded three of the dominant resolution mechanics in RPG history: percentile skills, dice pools, and narrative storytelling systems. He would create the personality and passion mechanics that taught an entire generation of designers that characters could have souls, not just statistics. He would build one game so perfectly calibrated to its genre that the industry coined a rule in his honor: if you believe you have come up with a clever mechanic, Greg Stafford already did it.
He was a practicing shaman, a student of Joseph Campbell, and a man who treated mythology as seriously as other designers treated physics. He died on October 10, 2018, at age seventy, still working on what he called the Ultimate Edition of his masterpiece. Chaosium now honors his memory every October with the #WeAreAllUs initiative, inviting gamers worldwide to play a tabletop game in his name.
Pendragon — The Masterpiece
King Arthur Pendragon (1985) is the game Greg Stafford considered the summit of his career. The hobby agrees. Rick Swan gave it 4 out of 4, calling it as close to a work of art as a role-playing game can get. Stewart Wieck rated it 10 out of 10. RPGnet ranks it number five all-time. It has been published in six editions across five publishers over thirty-nine years. Stafford’s own words: he wanted Pendragon to be such a device that the feeling was inseparable from the mechanics.
The system’s central innovation was the paired personality traits—thirteen opposing pairs (Valorous/Cowardly, Merciful/Cruel, Chaste/Lustful, Honest/Deceitful) rated on scales that totaled twenty. Raising one side lowered the other. When a trait reached sixteen, it became Famous—mechanically active, capable of forcing rolls that could override the player’s stated intentions. Your knight might intend to show mercy. If his Cruel trait was Famous, the dice could betray that intention. The character’s internal moral landscape became part of the game’s physics.
No prior RPG had done this. D&D’s alignment system was descriptive wallpaper—a label, not a mechanism. Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) had historical detail but nothing comparable to mechanized psychology. One commentator called Pendragon the mothership—the first roleplaying game that defined characters in terms of their struggles instead of just their capabilities. Stafford didn’t just add personality to an RPG. He made personality the core loop.
The Passions system extended the concept. Love, Loyalty, Hate, Honor—high-value stats that could be invoked for massive combat bonuses but carried the risk of Madness or Melancholy if the roll failed. Acting on your deepest commitments could make you superhuman or destroy you. This was one of the earliest examples of a mechanical incentive for roleplaying—a system where behaving in character was not flavor but tactics.
The Winter Phase solved a problem no one else had addressed: how to make time pass in a campaign. Between adventures, years advanced. Knights aged. Estates were managed. Marriages arranged. Children born. When a knight died—and in Pendragon, death came easily—the player continued with an heir. The Great Pendragon Campaign (Diana Jones Award, 2007) spans years 485 to 566 AD, approximately eighty game-years of Arthurian history, designed to take years of real-time play. The Diana Jones committee called it almost a century’s worth of continuous story with gemlike clarity.
RuneQuest — The Commission
RuneQuest (1978) is where attribution demands precision.
Stafford did not design RuneQuest’s mechanical system. Steve Perrin did. The percentile-based skills, strike ranks, hit locations, classless character advancement—Perrin’s work, drawn from his experience in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Perrin’s own account: the decision to have a roleplaying game was Greg’s; he just asked Perrin to supply the actual game.
What Stafford supplied was everything else. Glorantha—the entire fictional world, its mythology, its religions, its creatures, its cultures. The design direction: not D&D. When Dave Hargrave attempted to fit Glorantha into D&D-style rules, Stafford rejected the result as too D&D-ish. He wanted organic systems that felt native to their setting. He found Perrin and made it happen.
The setting material Stafford authored alongside the rules was revolutionary in its own right. Cults of Prax (1979) treated fictional religions as anthropological systems with internal logic, social structure, and narrative consequence. No one had done this before. These supplements transformed worldbuilding from set dressing into lived experience.
RuneQuest became, for a time, the second most popular RPG in the world behind D&D. The skill-based advancement-through-use concept influenced an entire branch of RPG design, from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to Eclipse Phase to The Elder Scrolls video game series. But the mechanical credit belongs primarily to Perrin. Stafford’s contribution was vision, world, and the courage to reject the dominant paradigm.
The System That Kept Growing
What happened after RuneQuest is where the architectural case fundamentally changes.
In 1980, Stafford and Lynn Willis distilled the RuneQuest rules into a sixteen-page booklet with the working title Basic RuneQuest. The name became Basic Role-Playing—BRP. As Stafford explained, fans kept telling him they were using the RuneQuest rules for their own homebrew settings. RPGs took half the time to make, cost half as much to print, and sold twice as well as wargames. He saw the architecture’s potential as a universal engine.
BRP became exactly that. Call of Cthulhu (Sandy Petersen, 1981). Stormbringer (Ken St. Andre, 1981). Superworld (Steve Perrin, 1983). Elfquest (1984). Ringworld (1984). Nephilim (1992). Mythras. Rivers of London. The Swedish national RPG Drakar och Demoner. Each game ran on BRP’s percentile-skill core, adapted to its specific genre. Chaosium’s own assessment: BRP is likely the bestselling house system in the history of role-playing games.
The 2023 release of Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine under the ORC License opened the architecture to unlimited third-party development. The system Stafford and Willis distilled from Perrin’s RuneQuest engine in 1980 is still being built on over four decades later, by designers who never met any of them.
This is not elements borrowed. This is a complete system architecture adopted wholesale by dozens of published games across multiple decades, genres, and languages. Perrin built the original engine. Stafford recognized its architectural potential, distilled it into a universal form, and made it the foundation of an entire publishing ecosystem.
The Seeds — Ghostbusters and Prince Valiant
Two smaller games planted seeds that grew into forests.
Ghostbusters: A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game (1986), co-designed with Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis for West End Games, introduced what Pyramid magazine’s editor called the first-ever RPG to use the dice pool mechanic. Characters rolled a number of d6 equal to their trait score, with a special Ghost Die that could cause complications even on success. The game won the 1987 Origins H.G. Wells Award for Best Roleplaying Rules.
West End Games purchased the system and expanded it into the D6 System, which powered the Star Wars RPG—over 140 products across a decade. The family tree branched further: Ghostbusters to Star Wars to the D6 System to OpenD6, then into derivatives like Mini Six, Mythic D6, Cinema 6, and beyond. Jonathan Tweet cited the dice pool as inspiration for Over the Edge. Mark Rein-Hagen cited it as inspiration for Vampire: The Masquerade. Tom Dowd refined the concept for the entire World of Darkness line. The Shadowrun system adopted a success-counting variant. Three Chaosium designers built a mechanic for a licensed comedy game, and an entire resolution paradigm descended from it.
Prince Valiant: The Story-Telling Game (1989) went further in a different direction. One-page core rules. Coin-flip resolution instead of dice. Players took turns as Storyteller. Storyteller Certificates gave players limited narrative authority over the fiction—probably the first time a player was allowed to make use of GM Fiat in a published RPG. Stafford called it the first storytelling game, and the term predates White Wolf’s Storytelling System by two years.
It was a commercial failure. Shannon Appelcline noted its innovations: a strong storytelling basis, a one-page game system, matched player and character reward systems, and an early troupe-style system. Multiple reviewers concluded it was about ten years ahead of its time. Vincent Baker, designer of Apocalypse World—the game that spawned the Powered by the Apocalypse movement—called Prince Valiant a treasure trove. The conceptual lineage of the narrative RPG movement runs through this game like a river. The game that failed commercially became a conceptual ancestor of the most important design movement of the 2010s.
Glorantha — The Cathedral He Never Finished
Glorantha deserves separate consideration because it represents something unique in gaming history: a fictional mythology so deeply realized it arguably has no peer.
Stafford began building it in 1966, drawing on comparative mythology, shamanic traditions, and non-European Bronze Age cultures. Where other fantasy world-builders worked from Tolkien, Stafford worked from anthropology. The Heroquesting concept—characters literally walking in the footsteps of gods, re-enacting myths to gain power and transform reality—was his most ambitious design idea. John Wick wrote that in 1978, while Gygax was making sure his falling rules comported to reality in his little tactical simulation game, Stafford created the perfect metaphor for what roleplaying games could be: a mythological and transformative experience.
The Guide to Glorantha (Diana Jones Award 2015, co-authored with Jeff Richard and Sandy Petersen) and dozens of supplements expanded the mythology to unprecedented depth. The methodology scores game design, not worldbuilding. But Glorantha shaped every game Stafford touched. It was the reason RuneQuest couldn’t be D&D. It was the soil from which forty-three years of design grew.
The Publisher’s Shadow
One distinction must be drawn carefully. Greg Stafford the publisher enabled some of the most important games in RPG history. Call of Cthulhu (Sandy Petersen, 1981). Stormbringer (Ken St. Andre, 1981). Superworld (Steve Perrin, 1983). His founding mission for Chaosium was to be never content to imitate. He built a company where originality was the standard—and then gave designers the freedom to be original within it.
But Stafford did not design Call of Cthulhu. That game’s investigation mechanics, sanity system, and Lovecraftian framework belong to Sandy Petersen. The enabling was enormous. The methodology scores personal design contribution, not publishing vision. The distinction matters.
The Honest Assessment
Stafford is one of the foundational figures of tabletop game design. Appelcline places him in the top three most important people in the RPG industry, alongside Gygax and Arneson. Pyramid magazine named him one of the Millennium’s Most Influential Persons in adventure gaming. His innovations seeded three dominant resolution mechanics, his Pendragon is universally ranked among the greatest RPGs ever designed, and the Stafford Rule is the industry’s acknowledgment that he got there first, repeatedly.
The nuance is in the attribution. His most widely propagated systems were collaborative: RuneQuest with Perrin, BRP with Willis, Ghostbusters with Petersen and Willis. His most perfectly authored work—Pendragon—propagated elements (traits, passions, generational play) rather than the whole system. His greatest creative achievement—Glorantha—is worldbuilding, not game mechanics.
But the architectural argument demands reconsideration. The original assessment scored Architecture 8 on the grounds that other designers borrowed elements, not whole systems. That framing was too narrow. BRP is a whole system—dozens of published games across four decades ran on its architecture as a complete engine. The D6 System is a whole lineage—from Ghostbusters through Star Wars through OpenD6, an unbroken architectural chain spanning forty years and hundreds of products. Pendragon’s trait/passion architecture became the conceptual template for mechanized psychology across multiple design families: Burning Wheel’s Beliefs and Instincts, Fate’s Aspects and compels, 7th Sea’s backgrounds, Legend of the Five Rings’ elements.
Stafford did not merely contribute elements that others borrowed. He co-built or directed the construction of system architectures that became templates—complete frameworks adopted and extended by other designers for their own purposes. That is the definition of Architecture 9.
The Scoring Case
Invention (9):
“Nobody had seen this before.” Multiple innovations, each widely adopted. Pendragon’s Personality Traits and Passions (1985)—the first RPG to mechanize character psychology as a core game loop. Adopted by World of Darkness, Burning Wheel, Fate, Legend of the Five Rings. The first dice pool (Ghostbusters, 1986, co-designed)—became the D6 System, cited by Tweet and Rein-Hagen as inspiration for their own dice-pool games. The first storytelling game (Prince Valiant, 1989)—influenced the entire narrative RPG movement. Generational play (Pendragon, 1985)—multi-generational campaigns as a core design pillar. Each individually qualifies for score 8. The cumulative body—multiple 8-level innovations, the Stafford Rule, top-three placement by the hobby’s most thorough historian—pushes to 9. The frame of reference existed (RPGs already existed as a form), so not 10.
Architecture (9):
“Industry-defining engineering.” Three system architectures that became templates. BRP (co-designed with Willis from Perrin’s RuneQuest engine): likely the bestselling house system in RPG history, powering Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Elfquest, Ringworld, Nephilim, Mythras, Rivers of London, Drakar och Demoner, and dozens more across four decades. Released under the ORC License in 2023, still generating new products. The Ghostbusters dice pool (co-designed with Petersen and Willis): became the D6 System, powered Star Wars (140+ products), spawned OpenD6 and its descendants, and inspired the dice-pool paradigm adopted by Vampire, Shadowrun, and their lineages. Pendragon’s trait/passion architecture: became the conceptual template for mechanized internal character states across Burning Wheel, Fate, 7th Sea, and L5R. These are not borrowed elements. They are complete system architectures adopted wholesale. The 9 vs 8 inflection asks whether the system became a template. Three of them did.
Mastery (9):
“Master craftsman.” Forty-three-year career (1975–2018). Game design as primary profession. Clear five-phase craft evolution: wargames (White Bear and Red Moon, Nomad Gods), collaborative RPGs (RuneQuest), solo-authored masterwork (Pendragon), experimental narrative design (Prince Valiant), and late-career mythological synthesis (HeroQuest, Guide to Glorantha). Substantial sole-authored work: Pendragon, Prince Valiant, White Bear and Red Moon, Nomad Gods, The Great Pendragon Campaign. Others study his methods—the Stafford Rule. Origins Hall of Fame (1987), two Diana Jones Awards, E. Gary Gygax Lifetime Achievement Award. The 10 inflection requires overwhelmingly solo-authored—Stafford was more collaborative than that threshold demands.
The Adjustment Triggers
Adjustments (+7):
■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 (Published designs 1975–2018. Forty-three years of continuous design. Both the 10+ and 20+ thresholds are met.)
■ Full-time career: +1 (Game design and publishing was his primary profession. Chaosium 1975–1998, Issaries 1998–2004, Chaosium again 2015–2018. Worked in the game industry across his entire adult life.)
■ Awards: +1 (Origins Hall of Fame 1987. Multiple Origins Awards. Diana Jones Award 2007 for The Great Pendragon Campaign. Diana Jones Award 2015 for Guide to Glorantha. E. Gary Gygax Lifetime Achievement Award. Pyramid magazine Millennium’s Most Influential Persons in adventure gaming, 1999.)
■ Branded name: No (Non-gamers do not recognize Pendragon, RuneQuest, or Glorantha. Call of Cthulhu has broader recognition, but Stafford did not design it. The grandmother test is not met.)
■ Cross-genre success: +1 (Board wargames: White Bear and Red Moon, Nomad Gods. Tabletop RPGs: Pendragon, Prince Valiant. Computer games: King of Dragon Pass. Two or more distinct game formats with published designs in each.)
■ Commercial success: +1 (RuneQuest was second only to D&D at its peak, published continuously for 45+ years across five publishers. BRP-powered games including Call of Cthulhu have generated hundreds of millions in lifetime retail across all editions and languages. Well above the $10M threshold.)
■ Design propagation: +2 (Three distinct propagation chains, all publicly documented. Pendragon’s traits and passions: adopted by Burning Wheel, Fate, 7th Sea, Legend of the Five Rings, and the broader mechanized-psychology movement. John Wick, Luke Crane, Fred Hicks all credit Stafford. Dice pool from Ghostbusters: became the D6 System and the Star Wars RPG, cited by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein-Hagen as direct inspiration for Over the Edge and Vampire: The Masquerade. Narrative storytelling from Prince Valiant: cited by Vincent Baker as a treasure trove, influenced the narrative RPG movement. The Stafford Rule itself is the industry’s standing acknowledgment of design propagation.)
The Hidden Pattern
Stafford built the loom.
Gygax built a cathedral and said come worship here. Garfield built a marketplace and said come trade here. Stafford built a set of tools—paired traits that gave designers a way to mechanize the soul, dice pools that scaled probability with narrative weight, storytelling frameworks that gave players permission to stop simulating physics and start simulating story, a universal percentile engine flexible enough to power horror and fantasy and science fiction and myth—and said build your own tapestry.
The hidden pattern is generosity. He commissioned Perrin and got RuneQuest. He commissioned Laws and got HeroQuest. He co-designed Ghostbusters and seeded the D6 System. He published Petersen’s Call of Cthulhu. He distilled BRP with Willis and gave dozens of designers a universal engine. His most important contributions were the ones he gave away—or the ones he built so other designers could find them, decades later, and recognize them as seeds.
John Wick named a character after him. David Hargrave put a Stafford’s Star Bridge spell in Arduin. Ron Edwards used his games as the archetypal examples of narrativist design. Vincent Baker studied Prince Valiant before building Apocalypse World. Luke Crane studied Pendragon before building Burning Wheel. The industry made a rule from his name.
He was a practicing shaman who believed games could be mythological and transformative experiences. He spent forty-three years building tools for that belief. When he died, the tools were still working.
What Remains
Three system architectures that became templates. A masterpiece published in six editions across five publishers over thirty-nine years. A fictional mythology with no peer. A founding mission—never content to imitate—that produced the most consistently innovative publishing house in RPG history.
A rule that bears his name, because the industry kept discovering he had already been where they thought they were going.
Every October, gamers around the world play a tabletop game in his memory. Not because someone organized a marketing campaign. Because he built tools that made other people’s games possible, and they know it.
He didn’t design the greatest RPG ever made. He designed the tools that made the greatest RPGs possible.
Total: 34 points. Year: 1975.
Total: 34 points. Year: 1975.
He didn’t design the greatest RPG ever made. He designed the tools that made the greatest RPGs possible.