The response to my two-part interview with Rudy Kraft at the start of the month was very well received, generating a lot of comments and emails. A recurring elements of them was a desire for Rudy to expand upon or clarify his answers to my interview questions. Fortunately for readers of Grognardia, Rudy was paying attention to the comments and sent along a collection of responses to some of the questions put to him, along with some further thoughts and reflections on matters of interest.
Because there are a lot of replies and because some of them are lengthy, I'm going to place them behind the jump break below.
A few memories, corrections, and responses
When I responded to the interview questions, I did not know that Jennell Jaquays had died over two years ago. I only found about her death when I went to send her a link to my interview. Obviously, we were not in regular contact. I was shocked and greatly saddened to learn this. I was also glad that all my references to her were favorable—not that I had anything unfavorable to say about her anyway.
Until I was working on this interview, I had not done a lot of recent Internet searching of my gaming past. Since my memories of my work with Jennell were clear enough for the interview, I didn’t research further by clicking on any links that would have mentioned her passing.
It is true that Greg, Jennell, and I created Griffin Mountain without every meeting in person—or by phone—as a group of three. The three of us were only together in person once at a game convention. Someone took a photograph, but I don’t have a copy.
My last contact with her was about five years ago (not sure about the exact year though) when we exchanged emails connected to her publicly answering questions about transitioning. I have not been able to locate these questions to nail down the date. It is possible they were on Facebook which I chose not to access.
I had intensive contact with her in the form of snail mail and long-distance phone calls for brief periods of time—during our work on Duck Tower and, again, Griffin Mountain. However, long-distance phone calls were expensive back then so there was not a lot of chit chat. Once we were done with Griffin Mountain our contacts faded out. In pre-email and pre-texting days with high phone bills maintaining casual contact was not as easy as it is now. (In the 1990s my monthly phone bills exceeded $250 because my law business required numerous long-distance phone calls inside California. Now they are just over $100 for my landline. I don’t have a cell phone.)
Part of me was always hoping that after I retired as an attorney, we could update Griffin Mountain to current RuneQuest and the chronologically more advanced present day of Glorantha—maybe it would be called Return to Balazar or something like that. Give our relative skill sets and the absence of Greg and Jennell, this project which was never likely to happen is now never going to happen. I will miss knowing she is out there and offer my belated condolences to her wife and family.
Correction
In looking at the internet, I realized that the first edition of RuneQuest was published shortly before I first arrived at the Chaosium. In 1978, when Greg invited me to participate in playtesting RuneQuest, it was for the second edition that was published in 1979 and, apparently, for Apple Lane.
Responses
Here are my responses to some of the comments.
I also can’t figure out how I found time to blog regularly ten to twelve years ago—it would be nice to have a link to said blog!
My blog was focused on the Southampton Saints, at the time an English Premier League football club. I still follow the club but no longer watch every match—in part because it is not possible to watch every match of a club that is not in the EPL. I changed the name of the blog and tried to revive it early in the pandemic under a new name, but my plan failed and I moved on. I did some good work there but it is not likely to be of general interest to the RPG community.
That being said, gaming led to my fandom of that football club which started when I played them on Football Manager 2010. So, in a way, games are at the heart of everything I do, including lawyering. Here is the link to my blog.
The Before Time -- The After Time
If you want to go down the rathole of my legal work do a google search for “Rudy Kraft cases California.” If you have access to Westlaw or JuriSeach you can find them more easily there.
Thanks for this. GM is an absolute masterpiece and Rudy's Portals of Torsh and Heart of the Sunken Lands are both critically underappreciated. Glad to hear that he has been doing well!
I didn’t mention Heart of the Sunken Lands because it did not really come up in response to any of the questions, but it is second on my list of what I was most proud of. It has also been the most profitable of my publications in the last 15 years since a French company paid both the publisher and me an advance for the rights to translate and publish it. I think the pandemic killed the project.
Great interview - looking forward to the next installment! I've gotten a lot of use out of his Portals of Torsh supplement over the years! My players still talk about that one.
I am glad to hear that you and your players enjoyed it.
Would love to hear about the Portals series and their development. Were these originally run as a campaign? Were more ever written but not published? Have the rights reverted back to Rudy?
The rights have not reverted. I don’t have a copy of my old contracts so I am not sure what the reversion process would be. I have sent a message via the Judges Guild website asking about whether they could make all their old products available on DrivethruRPG. The website is
As you can see only a small fraction of their library is currently available to purchase. The Portals were never run as a campaign or at all by me. Judges Guild was not big on playtesting. I cannot speak to whether Bob Bledsaw ran a D&D campaign and playtested some of his stuff in that campaign. If he did that campaign was either not ongoing during my four months in Decatur or I was not invited to play in it. He hired me primarily to write as many publishable scenarios as possible. The lack of focus on quality is clear to me now, but at age 22 in my first real job I didn’t have anything to compare it with so I thought it was just normal. In all my RPG writing work I simply created things out of whole cloth and submitted them. I then made whatever changes were requested by the publisher. My actual RPG gaming, which was fairly heavy during the late 70s and early 80s, was completely divorced from anything I wrote for publication.
Great to read about this bit of history, I'm hoping to hear about writing the Crimson Bat cult for Cults of Terror!
I can honestly say that I didn’t think about the Crimson Bat cult at all while drafting my interview responses. I don’t have detailed memories of my work on that cult. I am pretty sure (say 75%) that I decided to write the cult on my own—possibly to submit for publication to Wyrm’s Footnotes. Greg directed some revisions and then published it.
Same anon - forgot to mention... Wow, playtested Apple Lane. I'm not sure I could keep that from being the first line of my C.V. About 95% of the normies looking at it would have no clue, but the remaining 5% would be in awe. Just wow.
At the time it just felt like a regular RuneQuest gaming session. In fact, I don’t think I knew that I had participated in playtesting Apple Lane until it was published, and I recognized the adventure.
I like this interview because Rudy sounds so human. No AI could have communicated like that.
I can assure you that I am a 68-year-old human and not AI. Of course, that is what a sneaky AI would say. I suspect it will quickly become harder and harder to tell the difference. I do report fake AI channels on YouTube whenever I spot them.
Wow. Just wow. I wrote the revision of Snake Pipe Hollow for Chaosium, which will be published Real Soon Now.© I wish I had expended some more effort to find him, for any input or insight he would have been willing to offer. I can only add two things: Redbird is sort of infamous because he was a magic-user stuck in Glorantha, who was probably more powerful than most beginning characters. He appears in various write-ups of Greg's campaign. When I read that Rudy was Redbird, I nearly jumped out of my seat. I can add a little about the geology of the Cave of Chaos (which predates the Caves of Chaos BTW) that he speaks of. In a nutshell, each strata of rock corresponds to a different mythic era of Glorantha. (Spoiler!) At the bottom of the Caves is a God's War-era Earth temple, and the rock strata for the temple (jade, IIRC) can act as a sort of guide to the cooler stuff going on there. At least, that's what I think he's referring to.
There is a lot of new information there. I was not aware that Chaosium was going to publish a new revision of Snake Pipe Hollow. I am slightly disappointed not to be given the opportunity to turn down working on it. They know how to contact me. Now that I think about it, they might have asked me if I wanted to be involved in the project and I said that I was too busy and then forgot all about it. If so, I am slightly disappointed in myself for not remembering.
I did not know that anyone still knew about Redbird. The naming of Nochet occurred while playing Redbird. Redbird had split off from the main Sartar centered campaign and had headed off into the Holy Country. This was caused by the real world. I was not attending the weekly gaming sessions often enough to stay with the main campaign, so when I was there Greg GMed Redbird doing things on his own. I was trying to decide where to go and that is when I asked him if this city had a name. I do not remember whether I wrote down “Not Yet” and it was later changed to “Nochet” or whether I wrote “Nochet” that very moment.
Redbird was a weird character in Gloranthan terms. To match his incoming spell set, he was allowed to be a member of multiple allied Lightbringer Cults (Lhankor Mhy and Issaries and maybe one other). As I remember it, the other player’s characters were all members of just one cult.
Your description of the significance of the rock strata in the Caves of Chaos sounds vaguely familiar. I cannot say for certain that was what Greg had in mind back then, but it seems likely.
I would suspect that the word processor Rudy used for a 1980 Apple II+ would have been AppleWriter 1.1. I think that one used the Esc key to toggle upper and lowercase letters, wrapped text, and was basically fairly solid. There was another one available at the time that attracted a lot of attention for its superficial features, but it was really terrible. EasyWriter. I'm pretty sure EasyWriter ran off a boot disk, and AppleWriter did not.
If Rudy was working off of EasyWriter, that would have been agonizing. Neither of them had an "undelete" feature. Nobody did back then.
Once I read the name it came back to me. I think my word processing software was called Professional EasyWriter. It was sold to me by the store where I bought the computer. Toggling capital letters with the escape key would have been a deal breaker for me so given the choices maybe I had the best software. On the other hand, I continued using my Apple 2+ as my primary computer until 1990 so I probably could have upgraded my software. Incidentally, the entire computer system cost me more in 1980 dollars than my most second most expensive computer cost me last year in 2025 dollars.
It is hilarious to me that the office gun at Judges Guild was grounds for the departure. As a midwestern kid at around the same time whose high school lockers were occupied by rifles and shotguns during hunting season (and whose lockers were big enough to hold them!) and would have paid no more attention to a gun placed in a convenient corner in the open at place of business, I would have been a) a little bit in awe of a cool adult from California and b) completely baffled by his reaction to his boss' desk ornament!
What a great quitting story.
I suspected that would be the normal response of a midwestern person at that time, but I was not comfortable with everyone at Judges Guild having easy access to a gun. Of course, unbeknownst to me at the time, most of them probably had easy access to a gun even before Bob bought the office gun.
Leaving when I did was probably for the best for other reasons. Financially, the job was not the greatest. Everyone else doing the work I was doing was making minimum wage. I was earning a little bit more because I was previously published but Bob got his money’s worth by constantly checking to ensure I was writing something if I hadn’t been assigned another task.
I met Rudy Kraft in the 1980s when we both worked at a Waldenbooks chain bookstore on College Avenue in Palo Alto. His professional gaming career was already behind him, mine not yet started. I enjoyed our acquaintance greatly, and I'm glad he's still finding time to game.
It’s good to hear from you after all these years. I remember you asking me questions about the gaming industry. I would like to think my answers were helpful.
I also remember the heavy marijuana smell in the Chaosium HQ, a couple of years later ~1980. And a lot of The Cure on the radio. Tolerated the pot, love The Cure. I enjoyed being one of the lead play testers for Griffin Mountain, along with Bill Keyes, Steve Perrin, and many others. Great job by Rudy, Paul, Greg and others to create something truly special.
As you know I wasn’t present for any of the playtesting. If you want to contact me and tell me about it, I would love to have my curiosity satisfied even at this late date.
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