Q. Tell us something about you: age, education, hobbies (besides gaming I guess):
A. I am 64 years old, have a BA in English, and my hobbies besides gaming include ballroom dancing, history, science fiction and fantasy, comic books, and alternate history.
Q. When and how did you discover role playing games?
A. My friend Steve Henderson (a later collaborator on RuneQuest) and I were in a small game store in Berkeley, California, where we found a little box with the title Dungeons and Dragons. This was the very first edition. Steve H. bought the box and copied the rules for myself and many friends (don't do this at home, kids) and we started playing Dungeons and Dragons almost from the first.
Q. Who did you game in this time? Who were the players in your own campaign and what campaigns did you run/join/play in that influenced your work?
A. My friends and I did not run formal campaigns. We had dungeons, which we assumed were more or less in the same area and our various characters wandered between them, depending on who was running. Notable players, mostly because they were my co-authors/co-conspirators on various projects over the years, included Clint Bigglestone, Steve Henderson, Gordon Monson, Bill Keyes, and Anders Swenson. After a year or so, Greg Stafford also joined the group for a few games.
Q. We read that in March 1976 you wrote The Perrin Conventions for Original Dungeons & Dragons. How and why did you develop them? Where they successful?
A. The Perrin Conventions were called that because I actually wrote them down. There were many contributors, including most of those people named above. We developed them because the original D&D rules were full of holes and assumptions. They were published (as much as you could call it publishing) for the use of players at the first DunDraCon. They were definitely successful, as many people used and adopted them. They were never sold, so there was never any monetary reward.
Q. How did you enter in contact with Chaosium?
A. Most of my friends purchased and/or played Greg Stafford's White Bear and Red Moon. Greg knew some mutual friends and attended a couple of our regular games. Jeff Pimper and I had the idea of doing All the Worlds' Monsters, a compendium of D&D monsters that actually came out before the first Monster Manual. Greg published it. He then asked me to work on the role playing game some people were working on for him and the rest is covered by the next question.
Q. How was RuneQuest born?
A. Greg Stafford got the idea that D&D did not cover his White Bear & Red Moon world and wanted a unique game. Some of his fans were working on something but he wanted me to look at it and see if I could help out. I got involved and started coming up with ideas like throwing out experience points and not having character classes and slowly took over the process. One of the original group, Ray Turney, continued to the end. I brought in my friends Steve Henderson and Warren James, old friends from the Society for Creative Anachronism.
Q. You career at Chaosium, judging from your web site, lasted from 1981 to 1985. There you worked on various
RPGs besides RuneQuest: Stormbringer, Elfquest, Worlds of Wonder... how was the creative environment at Chaosium at the time?
A. The Chaosium was a very friendly environment full of people trying various ideas. Greg Stafford was definitely the director, but everyone had input. Lynn Willis, a very creative designer in his own right, tried to keep everyone producing and was moderately successful, but most of us were learning work habits as we went along and it could get quite anarchic at times.
Q. Thieves World was a very ambitious product, especially for the time. Were there any difficulties involved in developing it considering the number of authors and game developers involved in the project?
A. Everyone we contacted was enthusiastic except for TSR, from whom we needed rights to have AD&D and D&D stats published. However, TSR had published Deities & Demigods (DD) and included stats for Chthuloid and Stormbringer gods. Chaosium had official rights to those universes. So Greg and Gary Gygax arranged that we could use D&D and AD&D in Thieves World and they could use our licensed properties in DD. So the second edition (a collector's item) of DD came out with the licensed stats and an acknowledgement to Chaosium. Then apparently someone in power at TSR (not Gary) decided that they could not acknowledge the existence of another game company and they removed the stats in future editions...
Q. Why did you leave Chaosium?
A. The Chaosium was undergoing some major financial problems and letting people go. The whole game business was undergoing a shrinnkage. At the Chaosium we were making jokes about the "Former TSR Employee Club" and suddenly we were discussing the "Former Chaosium Employee Club." The Chaosium went from 10 employees to four in about six months. My interests were expanding to other games and Greg decided to let me go.
Q. After leaving Chaosium, you were a freelancer. What are the biggest projects were you involved with? I'd guess the TSR ones...
A. I did a game for Hero Games (Robot Warriors) and several Forgotten Realms supplements for TSR. A lot of my stuff for TSR/Wizards still shows up in Forgotten Realms revamps for new editions.
Q. Tell us something about the aborted Ghostbusters II adventure, Haunted House... It's not the most popular
RPG ever, but it has a loyal following of collectors. What kind of adventure was it? What was the plot?
A. The name pretty much tells it all. Generally, a Geraldo Rivera like TV reporter was doing a Haunted House story and disappeared, and the Ghostbusters had to go in and save him. It was a basic dungeon run with ghosts and lots of New England flavor.
Q. From 1989 you were employed full time by a videogame company, Spectrum Holobyte, following many other game designers that switched from adventure games to computer games. What was the biggest difference you noticed between adventure game companies and computer game companies?
A. Computer game companies are much more of a collaborative process and a distributed labour process. Unless you are the main creative force of the company (which I wasn't), you only work on a small part of a project, and the work depends on a lot of people. There is also a lot more money involved. It is actually more like a movie company than a tabletop game company.
Q. Are you still involved in the adventure games and computer games industries? What are your opinions about recent trends and the future of adventure and computer game design?
A. I am not really involved with the games industry of either type right now. I am mostly a technical writer, writing procedures and manuals for mundane companies. I do have a successor to RuneQuest (SPQR) that I sell on my website and did a cyberpunkish game called Black 9 Ops in 2003 that I give away on request.
Q. Are there any games you consider classic...or at least your favorites? What are your favourite modules/scenarios? Do you mean besides Basic Roleplaying/RuneQuest?
A. I have always been fond of the Hero System. The basic White Wolf game system is also a classic. There have been so many modules and scenarios over the years I am hard-pressed to pick a favorite. The one I used the most, I would say, was the Golden Age of Champions book from Hero Games. I think I used every page of that book except for one supervillain during a multi-year Golden Age superhero campaign I ran. For that same campaign, I also made use of Ray Winninger's The World at War sourcebook for Mayfair's DC Heroes game.
Q. You were and perhaps are one of the owners of DunDraCon? How did you came to create and organize it? And what are your thoughts about convention and their evolution in the last 30 years?
A. I am still helping to run DunDraCon. The original creators were Clint Bigglestone, Adrienne Martine, and Jerry Jacks. They had run sci fi conventions before and this seemed like a natural extension, back in 1975. Adrienne and Jerry dropped out relatively soon, and a lot of the current group joined in over the first five years or so. Clint eventually left about ten years after the start and died about 16 years ago. Many conventions have gotten immense over the last 20 years because the popular interest in genre fiction and activities has accelerated, largely I think because there are just that many more people in the world. DunDraCon has stayed what we generally think of as mid-sized mostly because it is a part time occupation for all of us, something we do once a year as a break from our usual lives.
Q. Did you enjoy the Lucca Comics & Games convention? Whet were your favourite moments? Any funny anecdotes?
A. I had a wonderful time at Lucca. Any event I attend where everyone tells me I'm a genius is great to me. While I laughed many times, no particular moments leap into my memory. The staff of the convention and of Asterion Games, who sponsored me, were top notch and I look forward to seeing everyone again sometime.
Q. Thanks for your time!
A. My pleasure. Thank you.