I grew up Christian. I started playing wargames back in 1973 when I ordered a game catalog out of the back of Boys Life magazine as a third grader. My previous independent purchase had been the "Total Team Control" electric football Superbowl set pitting the Miami Dolphins against the Dallas Cowboys. The Total Team Control bases didn't live up to their PR and I had a lot more fun controlling WWI biplanes in the Fight in the Skies wargame that later became TSR's Dawn Patrol.
When I was a seventh grader, Niall Shapero's article about WHITE BEAR AND RED MOON in The Space Gamer #10 introduced me to Frasier's Golden Bough and the other cool mythic sources Greg had tapped into. I held off spending my allowance money on WB&RM, but when I saw the pre-release ads in Dragon magazine for Runequest (odd text involving fighting rubble runners, hunting for slaves near Whitewall (?), and other evocative images) I knew I had to pick it up as soon as it came out.
My dad glanced at the back cover of RQI in the car on the way home and worried that I was getting into occult stuff. So did I, given what I was reading from RQ's bibliography, though I didn't admit it at the time. I remember rewriting Rune Priests into Wizards and Runelords into Heroes in order to avoid pushing my own Christian-wanna-be buttons. But when Cults of Prax came out I fell thoroughly in love with Glorantha and stopped apologising for its non-Christianity. Tho I did always make a point of hiding CoP's cover at home!
Eventually I left the family church, went to college and studied anthropology and religion, partly as a process of trying to figure out my own history, partly because those are the subjects that interest me most. In a sense, Glorantha introduced me to myth streams and the path I chose after leaving home.
I'm 30, I've worked a series of odd jobs including most of the possible positions at an herbal medicine company and a foreign language translation agency. Now I've bagged the employment scene for freelance writing. Mostly I'm working for roleplaying game companies -- nothing to do with Glorantha. I live in the Pacific Northwest.
I've never cared much for the RQ system, it seldom does enough to evoke the myth and cosmology that are my favorite elements of Glorantha. But I love following the Daily, Codex ,and ToRM.
My thanks to all who contribute.
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