Chaosium

• 1. Introduction

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  Chaosium was born, in part, from the chaos of an apartment near the Oakland Coliseum. Greg Stafford founded the company in 1975, deliberately blending the word "coliseum" with "chaos" to name it, because his home had become such a creative whirlwind. His original aim was narrow: publish a single fantasy war game called White Bear and Red Moon, set in his invented world of Glorantha. What followed over the next five decades was something far larger. Chaosium grew into one of the most influential tabletop game publishers in the world, shaping the mechanics and mood of role-playing games across generations. How did a small Bay Area startup built around one man's fantasy world end up creating the dice pool mechanic, licensing to one of the oldest wargame publishers in America, and surviving near-collapse to win nine awards at a single convention?

• 2. The Gloranthan Foundation

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  White Bear and Red Moon arrived in 1975 as Chaosium's first release, a board game rooted entirely in Stafford's invented mythology. Glorantha was not a backdrop; it was the engine driving the company's early identity. Three years later, in 1978, Chaosium published RuneQuest, a roleplaying game designed by Steve Perrin and set in the same world. A second edition followed in 1980, supported by a string of supplements across the next six years. Stafford and Lynn Willis then distilled RuneQuest's rules into a 16-page booklet called Basic Role-Playing, which became the backbone of nearly every game Chaosium would release afterward. Those simulationist, skill-based rules, built around percentile dice, gave rise to what the industry calls the "d100" family of RPGs. When Chaosium entered a licensing deal with Avalon Hill in 1983 for a third RuneQuest edition, Avalon Hill handled manufacturing and marketing while Chaosium retained design control, with Ken Rolston managing the line under the title "Rune Czar."

• 3. Call of Cthulhu and Literary Roots

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  Sandy Petersen brought H. P. Lovecraft's horror fiction into the tabletop world in 1981 when Call of Cthulhu first appeared. The game drew directly from Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories, and it proved to be Chaosium's most durable product. Many of the company's lines share this habit of adapting literary sources: Pendragon is rooted in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, while 7th Sea places players in a fantasy version of seventeenth-century Europe with a "swashbuckling and sorcery" premise. The company's fiction imprint, launched in 1993, leaned heavily on the same territory. The first non-game book Chaosium published was Greg Stafford's King of Sartar, a Gloranthan work. A 2015 anthology called Cassilda's Song, based on Robert W. Chambers's King in Yellow and written entirely by women, received two nominations at the 2016 World Fantasy Awards. In May 2017, award-winning author and editor James Lowder was appointed executive editor of fiction, after having previously helped freelancers resolve payment and contract disputes with the company.

• 4. Design Firsts

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  Chaosium's output contains several milestones that shaped the wider games industry. Kerie Campbell-Robson's 1986 game Hawkmoon stands as one of the earliest RPGs to credit a woman as lead designer. That same year, Chaosium collaborated with West End Games on Ghostbusters, a game designed by Sandy Petersen, Lynn Willis, and Greg Stafford. Ghostbusters introduced the dice pool mechanic to roleplaying games, a system where players gather and roll multiple dice based on their character's abilities. West End Games carried that system forward into Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game and eventually codified it as the D6 System. A less successful experiment came in 1979, when Chaosium released board wargames including Reich, Raiders and Traders, followed by Panzer Pranks in 1980. Both titles gathered positive reviews but failed to find a substantial audience, and the company stepped back from that market. Wyrm's Footnotes, Chaosium's earliest magazine, ran for fourteen issues between 1976 and 1982, starting as a support publication for White Bear and Red Moon before becoming the official RuneQuest magazine from issue eleven onward.

• 5. Crisis and Departure

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  The collectible card game Mythos nearly destroyed Chaosium. Its financial failure in the late 1990s prompted Greg Stafford to resign as company president in 1998, and Sandy Petersen left alongside him, though both kept their shareholdings. Stafford took the rights to Glorantha with him, founding a new company called Issaries, Inc. to continue publishing in that setting, later licensing it to Moon Design Publications along with the game HeroQuest. Charlie Krank and Lynn Willis stayed on, running a much-reduced Chaosium with Call of Cthulhu as its primary product. Willis retired in 2008 because of poor health and died in 2013. For years, the company continued at a diminished scale, until a new crisis forced a reckoning. Problems and delays fulfilling the Kickstarter campaign for Call of Cthulhu's seventh edition prompted Stafford and Petersen to return to active roles in June 2015, and Charlie Krank subsequently left. The turnaround came quickly: later in 2015, at Gen Con, Stafford and Petersen announced that Moon Design Publications had joined Chaosium's ownership structure, with its four principals, Rick Meints, Jeff Richard, Michael O'Brien, and Neil Robinson, taking over as the new management team.

• 6. Rebuilding and Expansion

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  One of the new management's first acts was closing the Hayward, California office and warehouse, ending decades of physical ties to the San Francisco Bay Area. The company relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan and shifted to a fulfillment house model for distribution. Delivery of the Call of Cthulhu seventh edition Kickstarter rewards finally began in April 2016, and the edition went on to win nine of the ten awards it was nominated for at the Gen Con 2017 ENnie Awards. Chaosium also won the 2017 Silver Ennie Award for "Fan's Choice for Best Publisher." Stafford remained as chair of the company board and creative consultant until his death in October 2018. Steve Perrin, the original creator of RuneQuest, did freelance work for the company until his own death in 2021. The company then moved into a sustained acquisition phase. King Arthur Pendragon and Prince Valiant returned to Chaosium ownership on the 11th of December 2018. On the 2nd of April 2019, Chaosium acquired the 7th Sea product line from designer John Wick. Rights to produce a game based on Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels were secured on the 30th of November 2019. By August 2021, the company had also acquired Cthulhu Britannica and World War Cthulhu from Cubicle 7, products that had last been produced under license in 2017.