A long-standing and popular feature of this blog has been its interviews with designers, artists, and other luminaries of the hobby. From the beginning, I’ve believed it’s important to preserve and share their memories, insights, and experiences. They deserve to be heard not only by those of us who remember those now-ancient days firsthand, but also by later generations of roleplayers who might otherwise never encounter the stories behind the games they love.
That’s why I’m always especially pleased to speak with someone whose contributions were largely unknown to me in my own youth. Such conversations are reminders of just how many hands shaped this hobby in its formative years.
Rudy Kraft, who was involved in the early days of Chaosium – or The Chaosium, as it was then styled – very kindly agreed to answer a series of questions I put to him. As you’ll soon discover, he did so with remarkable generosity and detail. What follows is the first part of our conversation; the second will appear tomorrow.
1. How did you first become involved in the hobby of role playing?
I first got involved in gaming as a hobby because of my father. I was the oldest of five children—although we started gaming before the fifth child was born. We had family games of Clue and Monopoly—mostly Clue. At some point, my father bought me a Christmas present of the old Avalon Hill game Afrika Korps. He and I played that a lot often leaving it set up on the desk in my parents' bedroom. Because I liked this game, he bought additional Avalon Hill Games at least once a year until I went away to college in 1974.
Starting in elementary school, I became an enthusiastic reader of both science fiction and fantasy. During this time, I read and reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and Asimov’s Foundation series on multiple occasions.
During high school, some friends and I created a space exploration war game where one person acted as the moderator and the other people explored a star map from different locations until they ran into each other and presumably fought a war.
When I was at Cornell University, I read a lot of science fiction and touched the periphery of SF fandom. In one fanzine I read about this new game, Dungeons & Dragons. This almost certainly occurred in August 1975. The game sounded interesting to me, so I ordered a copy of it which I received in September. Once I looked at it, it became obvious to me that I did not know how to get started in the game and I set it aside.
In October, I overheard two people talking about playing Dungeons & Dragons. It turned out that there was a small group of people playing the game regularly in the same dormitory where I ate my meals. They played every Saturday, so I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons on the second Saturday in October 1975. In fact, I had a 50th anniversary celebratory session in October this year where, for the first time in years, I played rather than DMed a game of Dungeon & Dragons.
Following that first session, I became very addicted to playing Dungeon & Dragons to the point where it significantly adversely affected my grades. During those years, I bought Empire of the Petal Throne and Metamorphosis Alpha, but I never persuaded anyone to play them instead of D&D.
2. You're listed as a playtester in the 1978 RuneQuest rulebook. How did you come to be involved in that?
When I graduated from college in 1978, my mother agreed to let me live at her place for at least a year, during which time I would try and become a writer. It did not take long for me to realize that I wanted to be a game designer rather than a writer. We lived in Palo Alto California. The Chaosium was in Berkeley, California.
I knew about the Chaosium because I had bought their board game, White Bear and Red Moon. Alas, I was unable to persuade my father to play it with me because he only liked wargames based on the real world.
Since the Chaosium was nearest game company of which I knew, I contacted them. I do not remember whether I wrote them a letter and Greg Stafford called me or whether I called them directly. In any case, Greg and I spoke on the phone. Based on the conversation, Greg Stafford invited me to join them for a play testing session for their upcoming roleplaying game, Runequest. Since I did not have a driver’s license, I persuaded my mother to drive me to Berkeley. She then hung out somewhere and drove me home about four hours later.
The Chaosium was in a house in a nice residential neighborhood. Greg Stafford’s house was next door. I do not remember the exact address, but it was at least two miles from the BART (“Bay Area Rapid Transit”) station.
I started to attend playtest sessions almost every week. On rare occasions, my mother would drive me to Berkeley, but most of the time I had to get myself there so I took the Amtrak train—I think it was already Amtrak then but maybe it was called something else—to San Francisco, walked from the train station to BART, took BART to Berkeley, and then walked from the Berkeley BART station to the Chaosium. After playtesting, I spent the night at Greg Stafford’s house. It was very generous of Greg (and his wife, Cam, and their two children) to let me stay with them so often. The next day, I went home by taking the reverse trip although sometimes someone would drive me to the BART station. Once, I rode to BART on the back of another playtester’s motorcycle. He gave me his helmet and, of course, I survived but now I would never consider riding on a motorcycle. Even now, I regret my poor decision to ride on a motorcycle to save me half an hour of walking.
The playtesting sessions were held on the same day every week, but I do not remember which day although it must have been Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. I attended them regularly for around a year and intermittently thereafter for a few more years.
I do have fond memories of those play testing sessions. While we were playtesting the rules—although there was not a lot of detailed rule playtesting because the game was close to being published by the time I joined up—we were playing in Greg’s original Gloranthan Sartar. So, we were playtesting scenarios that might get published and helping Greg expand his world. I am pretty sure I playtested Apple Lane, for example.
My least fond memory of the playtesting session was the heavy marijuana usage. I have always hated smoke of any kind; I never used marijuana or even touched one of the joints when they were being passed around. It became a kind of running joke to remember to pass the joint past me, not to me. It also gave me the opportunity to claim to be the opposite of President Clinton who claimed to have used marijuana but never inhaled. I, on the other hand, never used marijuana but undoubtedly inhaled some of it.
For reasons that don’t really make sense to me now but seemed to make sense to me then and were approved by Greg, I played a version of my favorite Dungeons & Dragons character who had somehow gotten lost in the multiverse and ended up in Glorantha. The character, Redbird, started a bit overpowered. This somehow created a weird dynamic, which has sometimes followed me in real life, where I was nominally the leader, but I was surrounded by chaos and people running off to do things their own way.
3. Your earliest published credit is Snakepipe Hollow, which is widely regarded as one of the classics of the early days of RuneQuest. What do you remember about working on it?
My clearest memory of working on Snakepipe Hollow is sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with my electric typewriter writing the detailed description of the various rooms in the Caves of Chaos, while hoping I did make any typos because that would require me to stop typing and use liquid paper. I was a pretty good typist then—not so much now. The very idea of using an electric typewriter is now horrifying. I would probably go through a container of Liquid Paper every week. I also remember being hot and sweating while writing Snakepipe Hollow although I do not know whether that was due to warm weather or nerves.
The project originated from my curiosity about various interesting things on Greg’s big map of Dragon Pass. When I asked Greg about Snakepipe Hollow, he told me that a place called the Caves of Chaos existed there and in a mutual discussion, we decided that it might make an interesting scenario for RuneQuest. When I started working on Snakepipe Hollow, my attendance at the playtesting sessions dropped off significantly.
My work started with the creation of the Caves and the occupants of the Cave. The rest of the contents of Snakepipe Hollow were added later to provide the background information for the area and provide potential scenario hooks to get people to the Caves of Chaos.
Based on Greg’s suggestions, I drew a rough diagram of the Caves of Chaos and began making up the occupants of the caves and describing what was in each part of the caves. While Greg provided feedback and suggestions, I don’t think he specifically told me that any particular entity lived in the caves. I think we mutually believed in a chaos hot spot where residents did not last all that long before moving on, being pushed out, or being eaten.
To assist my memory, I just googled Snakepipe Hollow. I discovered that there was a Wikipedia Snakepipe Hollow page. The Wikipedia entry triggered a memory. Greg and I discussed, at some length, whether we should include opponents in the dungeon whose level of difficulty meant that the typical characters entering the dungeon would be unable to defeat them. Greg generally approved of the idea of encouraging players to run away rather than pointlessly fight to the death. He was also willing to kill or cripple player characters who didn’t run away. This was inevitable in the RuneQuest system.
Snakepipe Hollow was not intended as an introductory adventure for beginning characters. That adventure was Apple Lane. It was intended to be a challenge for moderately experienced players with moderately experienced characters. Those players could come back to the caves later in the campaign if and when their characters had become sufficiently powerful.
As for the caves themselves, after discussing some of Greg’s Gloranthan thoughts, I decided it would be interesting to incorporate descriptions of the rock structures in each of the rooms in the caves. I distinctly remember that there were clues hidden in the geological information that would be potentially helpful to players—at least in Greg’s campaign. However, I have no clue right now what those clues were.
I also distinctly remember coming up with the idea of found items so that it would be unpredictable exactly what loot was in any given room. I remember thinking at the time that this was a clever idea. I believe I came up with the idea without seeing it being used in any other products, but I cannot be sure about that nearly 50 years later. I have not reviewed contemporaneous Dungeon & Dragons scenarios published by TSR or Judge’s Guild to see whether anyone else was using that idea. I know I later used the idea in two of my Judge’s Guild RuneQuest scenarios.
In terms of the work on Snakepipe Hollow, I estimate that I was probably responsible for writing 80% of the first draft. Greg wrote the more Glorantha stuff while I generated the first draft of the caves and the scenario hooks. Greg did a moderate amount of rewriting. Of course, the whole thing was based on Greg’s original vision for Glorantha and that part of Dragon Pass.
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