The Board Games

White Bear & Red Moon, 1975

By Greg Stafford

2nd edition, Rules by Bob Corbett

White Bear & Red Moon is Chaosium’s, and my, first game published. It is a board war game, with counters to represent the various army units and played upon a map laid over with a hex pattern to facilitate movement. Combat is done by comparing the values of opposing stacks of units, rolling a die for randomization, and consulting a Combat Results Table to find the outcome.

My intent upon creating it was to make a “do it yourself epic.” All stories have a setting, characters and plot. I would provide the characters and setting, and when played it would discover the plot. I wanted to include elements from the great epics of legend, which meant having armies as well as individuals, exotic beings and creatures, magic both low-level and devastating. And quests—yes, it had to have quests.

Thus burst Dagon Pass and the Red Moon; barbaric, heroic Sartar and the vast Lunar Empire into Glorantha. Once the game setting was established in Glorantha, the participants in this epic began striding forward from my imagination to populate it in profusion. Sir Ethilrist, the dragonewts, Cragspider, the Pharaoh, the Wasp Riders and the animal-riding nomads of Prax the rest became real.

Very early in its development I realized that all of my ideas would not fit into this game, and so I broke it into three parts. The first part became White Bear & Red Moon, with its epic warfare; the second Nomad Gods, set in Prax, to the east; and third (with the quests in it) Masters of Luck and Death, in the south.

It is set in the magical land of Dagon’s Pass and is the struggle between the invading Lunar Empire and the defending barbarian kingdom of Sartar. Many independent nations and tribes inhabit the map and can be gained as allies by one side or the other. Most units are of standard infantry and cavalry, but here too are a plethora of magical organizations. Armies and some of the independent powers have Leader units, called Heroes.

When I designed this I wanted the two sides to be as distinct as possible. Thus the empire has many units that are regular in their type and values, while Sartar has a hodge podge of different values. Another major difference is in the magic, wherein the Sartarites have units that provide “steady state” power, but the Lunar Empire gains their magic from the waxing and waning moon, and thus has units whose power rises and falls.

This game is largely responsible for defining the part of the world that has been popularized in subsequent gaming. As I mentioned elsewhere, the game was not even originally set in Glorantha, but after working on it for a while I realized that it fit very nicely into a large blank spot on my previous maps. Thus it was the first time that I discovered the Lunar Empire and Sartar. Thus the game established one of the distinct tropes of Glorantha: the red moon. Because of the movement distances, and one of the tactical problems I wanted to introduce for the Lunar player, the cycle was set at seven days.

The first edition of the game had a rule book of 8½” x 11”, was in a printed manila or white paper envelope, and had thin, die-cut counters. The unit counters had pictures of the units, all done by William Church, who also did he map. The Heroes were not drawn, but instead were represented by runes. The purpose of these was to be revealed in the third game, wherein the runes could be used in various ways to “spell out” magical effects that would gain allies and allow progression towards the exalted status of Pharaoh of the Holy country.

It was an instant hit. I was quite astonished, pleased and gratified at the reception of the game. Greg Costikyan, at the time a review but shortly to become a pre-eminent game designer himself, raved over the quality of the mimeography. He might have called it the ultimate effort in the craft. He also pegged its popularity by saying (and I paraphrase), “Games are popular because they have great designs and ules, or because they have great charm. This one has great charm.”

I was astonished that it sold so well, pleased that it was well received as a game (though not without criticism), gratified that my creativity was acknowledged and admired. It sold out quickly, and I decided to do a second edition and a follow up game.

The second edition had a rule book printed on legal-sized paper and folded over, being 8½” x 7” in final size.. This was easier to make into a book, and saved some money. I mimeographed this edition, too. The board was the same, but for unit counters I found a professional box-making company that would mount the unit counters on thicker cardboard and die cut them. This raised them to the quality of standard game counters. Also, I upgraded the container to be a resealable zip lock bag instead of paper envelope.

By the time of the third edition the industry and company had changed considerably. For one thing I was tired that no one seemed to be able to remember the correct name of the game, and also realized that it cold jus be catchier and thus more salable. We changed it to be Dragon Pass. The company was viable, making money even, and the print run would be larger. Thus the rule book (still in the 8½” x 7” size) was printed in offset, instead of mimeographed. Also, the original map, which had something of an archaic look to it, was redone by William in a glorious full color format that entirely matched the pictures he’d done for the counters.

And I now had a game company.

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Nomad Gods, 1977

By Greg Stafford

Nomad Gods was conceived as part of my initial fantasy board game series. I wanted to make a game that had no fixed territorial objective. I’d never seen such. I had recently read a book about the nomadic peoples of central Asia, and was considering a game in which the nomads were the antagonists, and the empires of Rome, the Middle East, India and China were just targets to be victimized. I transferred ideas from that to the fantasy game.

This game was my first exploration of Prax, its peoples, and of the lost city of Pavis. I had wanted to make the nomadic tribes distinct, and decided that differentiating the creatures they rode would be a good way to individualize the tribes. Once again, the board game defined a large part of Glorantha and established the ground upon which 30 later years of Glorantha publication has grown.

We never reprinted this game, which had perhaps 2000 copies of the first edition. We were just too busy with other projects. The French company, Oriflam, did do a fantastic edition in 1994, called Les Dieux Nomades, It uses the later Dragon pass rules and its components were far superior quality to Chaosium’s (as was usual with the French publications of our games.)

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Elric, 1977

By Greg Stafford

I’d been a fan of Michael Moorcock’s Elric since I first read some of the stories in 1966. When I was doing board games I thought that an homage to the series would be fun. The colorful setting and characters are the focus of the game, alongside the great war that is essential to the epic.

The balance of Law and Chaos added a factor unseen in other board games, and I liked the combination of personalities and armies.

I know that a lot of people just hated the personality pictures where you stack he units with leaders, but I rather liked them. They matched the unit counters on the board. The REAL trouble with them, for me, was they took up so much room!

And once again, William Church made a gorgeous map.

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Troy, 1977

By Don Dupont

I met Don Dupont when he approached me at a convention and unrolled a hex map onto my table. I’ve always been interested in the Bronze Age and so asked him to come to my office to demonstrate it. I was impressed and agreed to publish it. When I mentioned the problem of getting art he assured me it would not be a problem, as he could do it. That worried me a bit. Amateur artists who insist on doing their own work are often terrible, and their insistence is a real impediment to the project.

I need not have worried. Don had been educated as an archeologist and been on digs. He had that archeologist’s hand at the drawings. His work was great, and the illustrations were of archeological objects. The unit counters were from Mycenaean vase paintings. The map was a simple design, hex map.

One unique factor of the game was the HUGE movement rate of the mounted units. Another was the use of individual heroes as well as army units.

Interestingly, though no games on the Bronze Age had ever been done, at the same Origins convention GDW released another one on the same subject!

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Lords of the Middle Sea, 1978

By Lynn Willis

I was at a local convention when a stranger approached my table with a big roll. Another game designer, I thought. Of course. He unrolled the map, revealing the continent of North America. Or rather, half of the current continent, as the center of the USA was entirely underwater.

The designer was Lynn Willis and the game was Lords of the Middle Sea. Lynn was already an accomplished and published designer, with a couple of games on the market by GDW and maybe Metagaming too. But they didn’t want this weirdo game, but I did! A post apocalyptic game that wasn’t after a nuclear war. Cool. The entire west coast and Rockies were now Mexico. The area around Denver was valuable for its Helium resources. You could dredge the ancient underwater ruins and pull of exotic resources to use in the game. WAY cool!

At the time we were having difficulties doing all the production work, so I asked Lynn if he would be interested in typing up the rule book for production (Yes, type, on a Selectric typewriter. Those were the days.) He agreed. We produced it and Chaosium released two board games at Origins that year.

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King Arthur’s Knights, 1978

By Greg Stafford

I love King Arthur, I wanted to do one based on the legend.

William Church did the gorgeous map. It’s a pretty simple quest game, and you get to choose what kind of knight you wish to play: beginning, regular or superior.

You march around the board and choose cards for the encounters at each region. The cards are opponents that remain there afterwards, roll dice to fight them. If you defeat them you take the card off. It has special places, etc., and you play until someone gets enough points to win.

The farther north you go, the tougher the opponents are. Beginning knights have to stay south. And to prevent the tough knights from mopping up the south, and depriving the beginning knights of their natural adventures, there are really powerful women there who can disable the powerful knights, but who can be ignored by beginning knights. Game balance, you know.

The flaw in the game is that you have to leave cards on the board, so that that pretty thing gets all covered with cards. This is easily solved by just putting them to the side, and shuffling the deck when you need to start over.

This one of those really “old time” games that came packaged in a plastic zip lock bag.

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Stomp, 1978

By Lynn Willis and Tadashi Ehara

One player takes on the role of 18 tiny little elves trying to defend (or take over?) a garden from Thunderpumper the Giant. The other player takes on the role of the giant’s feet. predictably, the giant tries (and often succeeds) to stomp the little elves. The elves try very hard to tie down the giant’s feet. It's a silly little game to be sure.

This was the first of our little “minigams.”

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Reich, 1979

By Jonathan A. Michael

We seemed to be hitting stride now. We had begun to get games submitted to us by mail, by people I didn’t know or meet on a convention floor. I never met the designer of this one, Jonathan A. Michael.

It was an interesting diplomatic game about the unification of Germany by Bismark. Certainly the subject had never been covered before—always a plus with a new game. We test played it quite a bit, though I was never entirely satisfied that we got all the bugs out of the interrelationships between the cards. But the board was pretty.

This game got Charlie Krank into Chaosium. No one worked for me that I did not know, and he was newly come to California, and volunteered to test play and then, to help do layout and design, which was his college education. He was very heavily involved in this, and as a result of his commitment and qualification, he was hired shortly afterwards

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Raiders & Traders, 1979

By Don Dupont

Don Dupont, the archeologist, had moved into a house across the street from me. He’d been working on this game for some time, and we would test play it during the design phase and we became good friends (I was later best man at his wedding.)

This game is a large-scale economic and war game set in the Mycenean Age and involves the many bronze age city-states around the Aegean Sea. Once again, Don did all the work for art and layout, and the ma I absolutely gorgeous. It is area movement, and each area with a production value, and the output is used to do trade, and to build fleets or armies. Each turn is a generation, and each player has a dynasty whose members can marry and thereby secure a temporary peace between players. A set of deity cards are an optional rule, each of which provides a bonus of some sort.

I have always loved this game because of its simplicity and replay value. One of the fascinating things about it is that generally wars are begun only by the richest player, who can afford the risk; and/or the poorest, who has the least to lose. Also, seeming to lend weight to its veracity, just about every game I ever played ended with almost all of the players teaming up to jointly attack Troy.

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Panzer Pranks, 1980

By Kurt Lortz, developed by Lynn Willis

Kurt sent us the initial game for this, but Lynn really developed it to the height of its amusing potential. It violates just about every convention of standard board war games. For instance, movement points can be saved up from turn to turn and all expended at once. It has line of sight rules, so that hills or terrain obstacles obstruct sight. However, by stacking the unit counters on top of each other the top unit can see over the obstacle. Tanks can make bank shots off the edge of the board. A mini scenario is about the Polish Corridor—watch out for the umbrella stand! It is a real credit to Lynn’s game design ability that it is not only a funny game, but an actual workable game which, once you discard the accrued years of playing “realistic” simulations, is fun too.

This was the second of our “minigames.”

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Dragon Pass, 1981

By Greg Safford and Rober t Corbett

Chaosium went truly professional with this one. It was our first boxed war game, able to stand on a shelf right next to any comparable product. It was a real step up and only the first of many boxed products.

Robert Corbett was a local guy who’d occasionally come by for test playing. He was a computer studies major at University of California when I first met him. He loved the WB&RM game but was absolutely appalled at the dismal rules. He submitted a revision of them done in a flawlessly organized style appropriate to a man of his future profession. I was kind of sunned by them at first, but after some play came to appreciate that they really are flawless. Though seemingly complex, they are actually simple if you simply do what they say. At last, the quality of charm had been married to quality of rules.

A French language edition was published by Oriflam under license from Chaosium under the name La Guerre des Héros in 1993. They also did a great version of Nomad gods, similarly boxed and of very high quality.

A couple of years later the same game, with a different box, was released by Avalon Hill in 1983. I am not sure, but maybe a Japanese language edition was published by Hobby Japan, though I never saw a copy. If anyone has seen one, let me know.

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Getting Rid of Board Games

Around the time we were doing Dragon Pass Chaosium was also rip roaring and establishing high standards for the art side of the roleplaying game field. We did some cost analysis and realized that producing a roleplaying game of comparable price took us about half the time, cost us about half the manufacturing costs and sold twice as much. And, frankly, more fun. The decision was swift and simple—we would concentrate on roleplaying and not do any more board games.

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Arkham Horror, 1987

By Richard Launius, developed by Lynn Willis, Charlie Krank, Sandy Petersen

Several years passed without board games as Chaosium flowered in the roleplaying market. But when we got this one we knew we had to publish it.

The players wander around the streets of the city of Arkham, ducking into buildings to seek goods and spells to help them destroy the horde of monsters that stalk the streets. Characters could travel into other worlds as well.

This was quite unusual in that it was cooperative between all the players as they worked for a common goal. It was possible for everyone to lose as well.

A newer version was released by Fantasy Flight Games in 2005 with several supplements as well.

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Credo, 1993

By Chris Gidlow

Chris is a medieval historian and a gamer, and he designed this absolutely delightful game about what most people consider to be an ungamable event, the Nicene Council. This was a meeting of Christian bishops from all across the Roman Empire to decide on what Christianity really believed, since there were at that time multiple competing versions. By the end of the political wrangling and personal finagling they came up with the Credo (Latin “I believe.”)

The game manages to introduce all this with humor and style, and a simple, amusing game system. Using cards that represent key imperial and saintly figures, plus the hordes of believers, players vote on just what they do believe, selecting parts of the Credo from the many historical versions of Christianity of the time. The result is not always the current version, and gives rise to speculation on what the world would be like if the bishops had agreed that “I believe in two Gods…” or any of the other many, many variants of this once-mallable religion.

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