I like Minecraft. I put a picture of my current Minecraft build as a header for this post. Why? Because Minecraft is a "block placing game". The main thing you do in the game is collect and place blocks so that over time you build greater and greater things. Of course, there is a lot more to the game, but at its heart, you place blocks.
I have a lot of things that I want to do with this blog. I have a multitude of complex ideas and realizations that are rattling around inside my head, and I think many of them will be either of interest or of value for other people to know about. Some of them might be of interest to certain communities, like I have a conjecture on how to establish gravity on the inside of a Dyson sphere and I've thought a lot about what the future holds given current trends in scientific research. I have other thoughts about careers in science, academia, and particularly bioinformatics, which may be useful to some other people. And then there is a lifetime of being deeply engaged with the table-top roleplaying community.
"I was there man, I played D&D in the 1970s. I was the old school!" (But, I'm better now.)
But I have to start somewhere. I have to have a first real blog post. The first real things I am stating publicly for all the world to potentially know, but generally ignore. I've had a complete mental block on where to start. What should be my first post. In Minecraft when you hit a mental block and don't know what to do, the common piece of advice is to just start placing blocks. Don't over think it. What I'm going to do here is just place my first block. I want to tell you the story of how I never meet Greg Stafford.
Greg Stafford did many things, but the one that affected my life was developing Glorantha, the fictional bronze-age world at the heart of my favorite roleplaying game, Runequest. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in a small university town in rural California. By the late 1970s I was hard into D&D when a small company down in the Bay Area came up with a cool, new game, Runequest. I suspect I had my copy within months of the original release. I loved that game. Me and my friends quickly added it to our rotation of on-going campaigns.
We played both kinds of roleplaying, D&D and Runequest. (We counted Arduin as D&D.)
I have vivid flash memories of sitting in my room on the second floor of our old, Victorian family home reading that game. Learning about Animism and world religions and even math and computer programing. And as a kid, never knowing that Mr. Stafford lived just six hours south of my home.
Flash forward to the mid-20-teens, something like 2015. I was writing some minor pieces for Chaosium and following them on social media when I learned that Greg Stafford was retiring, and moving out of the big city. In fact, he was moving to my home town. Naturally, I followed this on social media. And then he posted a picture of moving into his new home.
And I recognized that home.
No, it wasn't mine. Instead, it was a house that was visible out my old bedroom window! In the intervening decades, I had moved two time zones away and didn't really know anyone back in my old home town. Except, I was Facebook friends with one of my late mother's old friends. And she still lived in the house next door.
I reached out to her. "Hey, do you have a new neighbor?"
"Greg? Yes, he's out walking our dog right now."
"Really! He's very famous with my friends. He's written a lot of great things."
Later, she said that she had talk to Greg and that he would like to meet me the next time I was in town.
Unfortunately, Greg Stafford passed suddenly in 2018, before I was able to get back there. One of the most influential people in my life retired to a house I could see from my bedroom window, but only decades after I moved on.
I don't know what to say about that, except if you are into TTRPGs, do yourself a favor and read Runequest, and I will end this inaugural post by quoting my late brother Martin who would say, "It is a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it."
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