Philip Hibbs wrote:
> According to the story as I once heard it told (which may
> be apocryphal), Greg was writing up Glorantha as a D&D
> module when he met Steve Perrin, who had a great idea for a
> game system. Oh, the horror that could have been! We could
> this very day be aruging over whether Hero Wars can
> simulate Glorantha without experience levels!
I asked Steve, and here was his reply.
> Feel free to pass this back along the HW list...
>
> As far as I know, Greg developed Glorantha and White Bear
> and Red Moon more or less independently of D&D. He then
> discovered D&D players like Clint Bigglestone at a party,
> thought it was a neat idea, and wanted to do a role-playing
> version for his world.
>
> He initially talked to Dave Hargrave, who was developing
> Arduin at the time, and Dave wrote up a bunch of the WB&RM
> characters as Arduin types. However, Dave was never one of
> the easiest people to get along with and the limitations of
> D&D (which Arduin was never far from emulating) were more
> than Greg wanted for his world. I think Dave may have
> wanted to turn Glorantha into Arduin, and this was not
> going to happen.
>
> So he got some enthusiasts like Art and Ray Turney and
> Henrik Pfeifer to work on a role-playing version, and they
> were essentially doing D&D, too. They had some ideas like
> you could buy experience points with gold, and anyone could
> train in thief skills for a higher price than thieves, etc.
> I think they may have had the idea of making everything a
> percentile roll, but I'm not sure.
>
> But progress was slow and Greg still wasn't satisfied with
> how things were going. Since I had done All the Worlds
> Monsters for him (or more correctly he had published it for
> Jeff Pimper and me), he asked me to check in on the others
> and see if I could help out. I ended up taking over the
> project and inadvertently driving Henrik and Art away,
> though Ray stuck with me and did most of the magic rules.
> Strike Ranks I had invented for use with D&D before I got
> involved with RuneQuest (which I named), but most
> everything else, like dropping EPs and character classes
> entirely, I came up with after looking at their rules and
> taking them to their logical extreme.
>
> Any other questions?
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