4. Were you ever formally an employee of Chaosium or were you simply a freelance writer and designer for the company?
I was never an employee of Chaosium. All the work I did for them was as a freelance writer and designer. I was, for four months, an employee of Judges Guild. I was never an employee of any other game company although I was flown to Las Vegas to interview with Coleco for a job as a game designer in Connecticut. I was recommended for this job by Jennell Jaquays, with whom I had worked on several projects. I ended up turning the job down because at that time, Coleco only had a handheld gaming device with which I was not impressed. To be fair, I have never used a handheld gaming device or controller other than for the original Pong. All my electronic gaming has been on computers, so my judgment in this area might have been flawed.
Also, the pay being offered by Coleco was not significantly above what I was making as a combination freelance game designer, book seller, and legal secretary for my mother. And after spending four winters in Ithaca, New York and one winter in Decatur, Illinois, I preferred to live in the Bay Area to avoid snow. Other than my four months with Judges Guild, I was never a formal employee of a game company. Even my work as editor of Gryphon was done as a freelancer where I got paid a certain amount of money for gathering the articles and editing them for each issue of the magazine.
5. You also wrote a number of products published by Judges Guild. How did that come about and what do you recall about it?
My involvement with Judges Guild came about when Greg decided to exclude the Broken Tree content from Snake Pipe Hollow. As best I can tell, he did so for reasons of space not quality. Greg told me that they had signed an agreement with Judges Guild to produce licensed RuneQuest products. He suggested that I expand the material and submit it to them. I did so. I do not have any detailed memories of my work on that project, but it did lead to a job offer. Unlike the job offer from Coleco, which occurred several years later, I accepted this job offer and moved to Decatur, Illinois in January 1980. I remained there for 4 months during which time I designed and worked on several projects for the Judges Guild.
I attended the Origins game conventions in Philadelphia in June of 1979 and again in 1980. I wanted to make contacts and look for work in the gaming industry. The job with Judges Guild partially arose out of the 1979 trip. My work on Frontiers of Alusia with SPI arose out of the 1980 trip.
I remember many things about my involvement with Judges Guild quite clearly and some not at all. While I was Judges Guild, I injured my back moving heavy boxes. Prior to that time, I had no problems with my back. Since that time, I have had intermittent chronic back pain which requires precautions to avoid ongoing pain. I think it’s likely I would have eventually had back problems anyway, but I didn’t need it to trigger at age 22.
I left Judges Guild because the owner, Bob Bledsaw, became concerned because there was a burglary in a building somewhat near the Judges Guild offices. He decided to address the burglary by buying a gun and leaving it in the office so whoever was there could protect themselves. This probably seemed like a perfectly sensible plan from the perspective of someone living in downstate Illinois, but it seemed crazy to me as a 22-year-old from Palo Alto, California. As a result, I left the Judges Guild and went home.
However, this was not a hostile breakup. I continued to produce projects for Judges Guild for several years thereafter. I began to represent Judges Guild at San Francisco Bay area game conventions by running a booth in the dealer hall. I don’t remember the specific financial arrangements, but it was financially profitable, albeit not greatly so, for both Judges Guild and myself.
The RPGGeek website shows that I had been involved in 26 projects as a designer. Some of them are duplicate entries or things where I only contributed a short element. However, 10 of them were separate Judges Guild products.
My contributions to the Book of Treasure Maps II, Book of Treasure Maps III, Legendary Duck Tower, Duck Pond, and Portals of Torsh were done as a Judges Guild employee. Treasure Maps II involved me completing work that someone else had already started. I started Treasure Maps III but Edward Mortimer completed it after I left. Legendary Duck Tower had been started by Jaquays while she was a Judges Guild employee. I finished it while I was working there. Its title was a pun on her Dark Tower D&D adventure. Obviously, Duck Pond took the punning title sequence one step further.
The other five products were items that I designed freelance after I left Judges Guild. Wondrous Relics was inspired by my RuneQuest product, Plunder. I thought it would be fun to make a bunch of new magic items for Dungeons & Dragons. I should pull out a copy and see if there is anything worth using in my current campaign.
The three portal products were designed to create an interconnected series of worlds where each product would provide a background for a world which Dungeon Masters could add to their campaign, if they wanted to have multi-planet campaign.
I don’t remember much about design process of each of these items except that in September of 1980, I bought an Apple 2+ computer. From that point on I was typing my work, and my mother’s legal work, on that computer. At the time, there wasn’t any standardized word processing program, so I still submitted everything on paper, and it had to be retyped by the game publisher. I don’t remember the specific word processing program I used, but it was nowhere near as user friendly as the current ones. So, for example, if I accidentally deleted something, there was no control Z to bring it right back. I had to retype it. Thus, there were number of occasions where work was lost because of accidental deletions or a failure to save combined with a computer crash, which also occurred much more often than it does now. In addition, there was no internal hard drive, so everything had to be saved onto a separate floppy disk.
I stopped representing Judges Guild at Bay area conventions in 1983 or 1984 after I got a part-time job at a local bookstore which became a full-time job that lasted until 1985 when I left to go to law school.
6. Is there a particular project you worked on that you're especially proud of and still look back on fondly?
Clearly, Griffin Mountain is the product that I remember most fondly, and I am most proud of. After I left Judges Guild, I began working on a large open world wilderness adventure for RuneQuest. As I was working on the project I ran into my personal limitations on what I was good at. I was very good at generating RuneQuest characters with weird sounding names that even today I recognize as something I would have made up in my 20s. (Remember this was before you could easily generate characters on computer.) I was okay at selecting brief backgrounds/jobs for the characters. I was good at creating the stats for characters and pretty good at making sure they were balanced for the right level of player character strength—keeping in mind that RuneQuest was not game that involved character levels. I was also good at making up ideas for locations and magic items. I was less good at writing coherent biographies for NPC characters and constructing coherent scenarios.
At some point, I realized that I needed help and since Jennell Jaquays had told me that I had done a good job of finishing her Legendary Duck Tower, I thought maybe she would be willing to help me finish my open world project. I was right. She was willing.
So, I immediately mailed everything I had done to her. This was not really fair although I certainly don’t regret it.
When she got the project, she, being a skilled artist, created a number of illustrations and location maps. I honestly don’t remember whether I had provided useless low quality location maps and she transformed them into something useful or whether she created the location maps herself without any guidance from me. She also transformed my writing into something that was much better written, more detailed, and more coherent than what I had sent her.
I do not remember how much back and forth there was after she did her first round of design work. Frankly, I can’t even be sure that there was any back and forth. There certainly hadn’t been on Legendary Duck Tower since she was no longer a Judges Guild employee at the time.
Our intent was that the product would be published by Judges Guild, but because Greg Stafford had the right of approval over any Judges Guild RuneQuest projects we sent it to him first.
He responded promptly that he liked it very much and wanted to publish it at the Chaosium as a Glorantha product. Obviously, I was very happy about that outcome. We were confident that the Chaosium would do a better job at producing the product and we reasonably believed that the Chaosium would, ultimately, pay us more based upon a higher level of sales than the Judges Guild would get on its RuneQuest projects. Both these judgements turned out to be correct both in the short and the long run. Interestingly, Greg took a royalty interest in the product, but it did not come out of our share. The Chaosium just paid a higher royalty rate than normal.
Because the product original design was set in a generic RuneQuest world, the product had to be redesigned to set it in the Balazar region of Glorantha. Greg controlled that process, but I believe that both I and Jennell did a fair chunk of the adaptation work as required.
For example, Greg added the entire concept of Gonn Orta’s Castle although the name Gonn Orta (and the names of two of the other three giants) are perfect examples of names created by Rudy Kraft in his 20s. I distinctly remember expanding on his directions for the Castle but I have no memory of those directions now.
The title for the product, Griffin Mountain, was undoubtedly chosen by Greg. However, the Griffin Mountain at the center of the wilderness was named by me because I thought it would be cool to have a mountain with Griffins living on top of it who would basically have free range over the surrounding plains and grasslands. Further, based upon the RuneQuest combat system, they would be relatively safe from adventurers or any other enemies. I often wonder how many groups of player characters around the world made their way to the top of the mountain and killed the Griffins. I hope not very many.
One of the main reasons I remain proud of our work on Griffin Mountain was that the product was relatively unique for its time. As far as I can remember, nothing like Griffin Mountain had previously been published for Dungeons & Dragons or any other RPG game.
I should mention that neither Jennell nor I was directly involved in the playtesting of Griffin Mountain. As with Snack Pipe Hollow, Greg provided feedback and suggestions for changes which I assume were partially based on play testing. However, I do not know how much actual playtesting Griffin Mountain received.
This was not adventure designed for a specific level of characters to complete in a set order. The purpose of the product was to give game masters a large world for their players’ characters to adventure in. The game masters had to adjust and tinker the world to make it suitable for their campaign. For that reason, detailed playtesting would have never really been possible in any useful fashion. Certainly, whatever playtesting was done would have been done as part of Greg’s weekly RuneQuest game.
I was not involved with the subsequent editions of the project. At some point it became Griffin Island, a non-Gloranthian setting for Avalon Hill. I later learned the product was rebranded because Greg correctly interpreted my complaint about Griffin Mountain being out of print as triggering an obligation to get it back into print or else the rights would revert. (Since the rights would revert to all three authors, I would not have been able to do anything with it without Greg’s consent.) At that time, Greg and I had relatively little contact, so he did not tell me that he was planning to redo Griffin Mountain as an Avalon Hill Gloranthian product in a few years. Had he told me that I probably would have agreed to be patient, but he had no way of knowing that. In any case, I liked some of the changes and additions to Griffin Island but would have preferred the product to be a Gloranthan product.
I also had no participation in the subsequent hardbound version of Griffin Mountain although I think I was given the chance to write a short retrospective, but I elected not to do so. I was given my two contractually obligated copies of each edition and received royalties on the sales of every version of the product. In fact, as far as I know I have received my proper share of the royalties on every product for which I was entitled to receive royalties. I still receive royalties on my Chaosium products which are being sold in digital form. I take my royalties in the form of credit with Chaosium.
I also remember getting a phone call out of the blue about year after Griffin Mountain was first published by a group of role players that happened to live in Palo Alto asking me if I would like to run a session of Griffin Mountain for them. I agreed and enjoyed the process. It was never intended to turn into a full fledge campaign where I would be their game master, but it was fun.
7. Do you still get the chance to play roleplaying games?
Yes. After I graduated from college, I introduced Dungeons & Dragons to several of my friends who lived in Palo Alto, and we played weird variant versions of Dungeons & Dragons off and on for more than 5 years.
However, there was one major change in my gaming practices that occurred when I got my Apple computer. I started buying the occasional computer RPG game. I think the first thing I bought was Wizardry which, oddly enough, was partially designed by someone from our 30 to 50-person, multi-dungeon master, Cornell University Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
When I went to law school in 1985, I stopped playing tabletop roleplaying games but continued to play the occasional computer games including, especially Ultima games. Throughout this time, I played the occasional board game with my father who frequently organized multiplayer games of Advanced Civilization, Age of Renaissance, and, much later Game of Thrones.
After graduating from law school in 1988, I did not play roleplaying games very much until I moved to Eureka in 1991. I started running a RuneQuest game at a local game store there as well as participating in other people’s games including, for example, GURPS. After that RuneQuest campaign ended, I pretty much stopped playing tabletop roleplaying games, but continued to computer games and board games. I particularly enjoyed Ultima Underworld (1 and 2).
In the early 2000s I played Dungeons & Dragons third edition, 3 or 4 times. After that, I stopped playing roleplaying games until 2018 when I started my weekly 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign which ended in the summer of 2020. Due to the pandemic we had to play online and that was less fun than doing it in person. After we were fully vaccinated, we played a one-shot in-person session in June of 2021. We also played several related Dungeons & Dragons sessions that fall.
I started a monthly 5th edition campaign in October 2022. That campaign ended in December 2025—primarily because combat with 12th level characters was not that much fun and took too long. I started my new monthly campaign in March of 2026.
At this point in my life, I cannot even figure out how I had the time to run weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign for 2 years just 6 years ago. (I also can’t figure out how I found time to blog regularly ten to twelve years ago.) My attorney workload has not really changed in the past 20 years.
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