Chaosium facts for kids
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| Founded | 1975 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Greg Stafford |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Ann Arbor, Michigan |
| Key people |
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| Publication types | Games, Books |
| Fiction genres | Role-playing games, Board games, Fantasy fiction, Horror fiction, Weird fiction |
| No. of employees | 16 |
Chaosium Inc. is a company that creates and publishes exciting tabletop role-playing games. It was started by Greg Stafford in 1975.
Chaosium is well-known for popular games like Call of Cthulhu. This game is based on the spooky stories by H. P. Lovecraft. Other famous games include RuneQuest Glorantha, Pendragon (inspired by King Arthur legends), and 7th Sea, which is about swashbuckling adventures in a fantasy 17th-century Europe.
Many of Chaosium's games get their ideas from books and myths. Greg Stafford himself was a very famous game designer. Many other talented designers have also created games for Chaosium. These include Sandy Petersen, Robin Laws, and John Wick, among others.
Contents
History of Chaosium
Starting Out: 1975–1980
Greg Stafford founded "The Chaosium" in 1975. He named it by mixing "coliseum" (because his home was near the Oakland Coliseum) with "chaos." His first goal was to publish his board game White Bear and Red Moon. This game was set in his own fantasy world called Glorantha.
In 1978, Chaosium released RuneQuest, a role-playing game also set in Glorantha. They updated it in 1980 and added more content over the next six years.
Growing Bigger: The 1980s
In 1980, the company officially became Chaosium Inc. That year, Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis made a simpler version of the RuneQuest rules. This new, shorter rulebook was called Basic Role-Playing (BRP). These rules became the foundation for many of Chaosium's future games. They were especially used for games that use "d100" (percentile) dice, like Call of Cthulhu, which first came out in 1982.
In 1983, Chaosium teamed up with Avalon Hill to create a third edition of RuneQuest. Avalon Hill handled making and selling the game. Chaosium was in charge of designing and developing it.
Chaosium also published one of the first role-playing games designed by a woman, Kerie Campbell-Robson's Hawkmoon in 1986. That same year, they released Ghostbusters with West End Games. This game was special because it was the first to use a "dice pool" system. This system was later used for the Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game.
Tough Times: Late 1990s–Early 2010s
In 1998, after a card game called Mythos didn't do well financially, Greg Stafford left Chaosium. Sandy Petersen also left, though they both still owned parts of the company. Chaosium then split into different smaller companies. Each focused on a few of the original products. Greg Stafford took the rights to his Glorantha game world and started a new company called Issaries, Inc..
Long-time employees Charlie Krank and Lynn Willis stayed at Chaosium. They focused on Call of Cthulhu as the main game. Lynn Willis retired in 2008 due to health issues and passed away in 2013.
Stafford and Petersen Return: Mid-2010s
In 2015, there were problems and delays with the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition project on Kickstarter. Because of this, Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen returned to help Chaosium. Charlie Krank then left the company.
Later in 2015, at a big game convention called Gen Con, Stafford and Petersen announced that Moon Design Publications was now part of Chaosium. The main people from Moon Design became the new management team for Chaosium. This meant that RuneQuest and other Glorantha-related games came back to Chaosium. The company also continued to publish Call of Cthulhu. Greg Stafford was the head of the company's board until he passed away in 2018.
As part of these changes, Chaosium moved its main office from California to Ann Arbor, Michigan. They now use special companies to help distribute their games. The delayed Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition finally shipped in 2016. It won many awards at the Gen Con 2017 ENnie Awards.
Growing More: Late 2010s to Present
After getting reorganized, Chaosium started to grow again. They added more games by buying rights to them or making new deals.
In 2018, Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon and Prince Valiant role-playing games returned to Chaosium. In 2019, Chaosium also bought the rights to the 7th Sea game series.
Later in 2019, Chaosium got the rights to make a role-playing game based on Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London fantasy novels. They also started distributing English versions of other popular games like Aquelarre and Würm. In 2021, Chaosium also acquired the rights to Cthulhu Britannica and World War Cthulhu.
In 2021, Moon Design Publishing announced a partnership with Black Monk Games from Poland. A new company called The Chaosium Group was formed to manage both.
Chaosium's Fiction Books
Chaosium started publishing books that weren't games in 1993. Many of these books were fiction stories. A lot of them were about the Cthulhu Mythos from H.P. Lovecraft. However, the first book they published was Greg Stafford's fantasy story King of Sartar, set in his Glorantha world.
In 2015, an anthology (a collection of stories) called Cassilda's Song was nominated for two awards. This book was based on Robert W. Chambers's King in Yellow and was written entirely by women.
In 2017, the famous author and editor James Lowder became the executive editor for Chaosium's fiction. He helped the company with its past book projects.
Interestingly, the Wild Cards series of superhero science fiction books started as a long-running game campaign. This game was run by Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin and his friends who were also writers.
Magazines by Chaosium
Chaosium has published three magazines to share news and extra content for its games:
- Wyrm's Footnotes was published from 1976 to 1982. It provided material for White Bear and Red Moon and later became the official RuneQuest magazine. It was brought back in 2012 after a long break.
- Different Worlds was a magazine published every two months. Chaosium published the first 38 issues from 1979 to 1985.
- Starry Wisdom was a magazine about H. P. Lovecraft's stories. Chaosium published three issues of it in 1997.
See also
In Spanish: Chaosium para niños
