Interview With Sandy Petersen - The Man, The Mythos, The Living Legend!

 I love Sandy Petersen.

The man has made a game (Call of Cthulhu) that is arguably responsible for the ubiquity of Lovecraft we now seen in popular culture.

His game has also given me many great gaming memories with friends.

Ditto the video game DOOM he helped create.

A few years back, he started his YouTube channel, and I was impressed anew by his warmth, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his astute insights. He even liked and responded to some of my comments,  attesting to his love of the fans. 

Not thinking I would get an answer considering how busy Sandy is being the patriarch of a large, happy family as well as the head of a gaming company, I decided to contact Sandy and ask him a few questions about his involvement in the development of Stormbringer.

And Sandy delivered. There are some juicy insider tidbits here, and it'll take me a few days to respond to them.

For now, please enjoy these memories of Stormbringer's production and insights on its popularity. There are also some dark revelations in here about the business, especially the sad fate of Hawkmoon's creator. Sandy's comments remind us that the games we love are all too often made by real, frail humans who do not always get the happy end they deserve.

I am happy that Sandy seems fit and happy. Please give him some love via the links below:

Sandy's YouTube HERE

Peterson Games HERE

1 I think your work for Call of Cthulhu is amazing and well known by now, but can you tell us a little about the other Chaosium products you worked on?

Answer – After being hired in 1981, I had a tendril in almost everything Chaosium produced. As far as game design credits go, I was assistant designer on Elfquest, co-designer on Runequest 3^rd edition, and main designer on the Ghostbusters RPG which Chaosium created for West End Games.

 

2 Back in the day, Chaosium was known for doing quality interpretations of Intellectual Properties - Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, Niven’s Ringworld, and Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. What was the thinking behind that, and what do you think ended this trend?

Answer – I was not privy to the early reasoning; Chaosium got the Lovecraft & Moorcock licenses before I worked there. Plus they did the Sanctuary multi-system expansion. Chaosium also got the license for Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon series but this was literally extorted away by evil men. I was there when they got Niven’s Ringworld and I think by that time they were no longer giving reasons for it – they were just in the habit of doing games based on literary licenses.

 

When Chaosium fell on hard times, this really bit them in the hindquarters, because Moorcock got pretty mad about not getting his royalties or really, any communication. This was after I’d left of course.

 

I also recall, as a side note, that Moorcock didn’t care a lick about what we did with his characters & world. We had carte blanche. He just wanted to give us the license, sit back, and let the checks come in. Of course that suited us dandy, but we did keep our creations within the spirit of his worlds.

 

3 The cosmic horror of Lovecraft has a huge resonance & appeal for roleplaying fans and has really seeped into the cultural zeitgeist. The Moorcock mythos also has a roleplaying appeal & influence, but in terms of literature has been copied or homaged but generally remained niche. Why do you think this is so?

Answer – I think there are two reasons behind this. First, Lovecraft’s work was far more seminal and influential than Moorcock’s. When talking about “great horror writers” it’s Poe and Lovecraft, with everyone else panting far behind. When talking about “great fantasy writers” while Moorcock gets a mention, so does Tolkien, LeGuin, Howard, Zelazny, Rowling and so many others. Moorcock can get lost in the flock.

 

The other reasons is that, for me, Lovecraft’s work is more adult. It appeals to the empty, terrifying universe, and he put forth concepts not seen before in horror or science fiction. A cosmic entity which acts as Earth’s suicide pill? Creatures that travel in time instead of space? All Earth life is a joke or mistake? It’s heady stuff.

 

Moorcock is designed to appeal to an angsty teenager. I realize that sounds like I’m making fun of Moorcock, and that’s not the case. I think Moorcock’s writing appeals to the angsty teen that lurks inside ALL of us. Look at his sad tortured yet murderous heroes who practically must be prodded into action and spend so much time navel gazing. In addition almost none of his heroes belong in their world –many are the Last Remaining of their race, so the eternal outsider. I will say that every “tortured outsider” written by other authors are really depressing and boring, while Moorcock managed to make HIS heroes likeable, interesting, and also he did a fabulous job of world creation. That’s quite a feat. I love everything of Moorcock’s I’ve read (which is most of his stuff).

 

4 Can you tell us how you came to work on Stormbringer (and Hawkmoon) rpgs, and what products of the Eternal Champion line you contributed to?

(I know only of the Stormbringer Companion and Hawkmoon Shattered Isle)

Answer – basically I did almost all of the typesetting and a good part of the editing for every single Chaosium product. We all worked in a single large room so were firing ideas off each other like machineguns. I was brought onto Stormbringer late – the game already existed, so we were looking to do expansions for it. We felt that Stormbringer was the “good neglected child”. We spent almost no effort publicizing nor supporting it, yet it kept selling well year after year. Every couple of years we’d feel guilty about this, and put something out.

 

Hawkmoon was another attempt to support Stormbringer. I read (and liked) all the Hawkmoon books, and we had a young woman, Kerie Campbell-Robson, who was a big fan, and could write really well. So she designed the Hawkmoon game, and I worked pretty closely with her in the process. She gets the majority credit though. 

NOTE - I have redacted the part about Campbell-Robson being deceased. This was a case of mistaken identity. My apologies to Mr Petersen for jumping the gun on publication, and Mrs Campbell-Robson for not checking the fact before posting.

 (she also did our CoC Dreamlands book)

 

5 Did you find it easier or harder to write for epic fantasy than cosmic horror? Were there any similarities between the two genres, specifically Lovecraft & Moorcock?

Answer – In 2017, I published Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos for Pathfinder. And a couple of years later I republished it, but for D&D. I also published a number of high-quality campaigns for D&D – all set in their epic fantasy world but filled with horrific Lovecraft stuff.

 

While I don’t think that Lovecraftian horror and heroic fantasy are particularly similar, I do think that Lovecraftian horror can be added to a lot of genres, fantasy included. I think Moorcock is particularly friendly to Lovecraft, given the terrifying creatures that Moorcock placed within his tales – such as Sreng of the Seven Swords, the Castle of Blood, or other such awful ideas.

 

6 Whereas the original Stormbringer enjoyed 4 editions and several reprints, Hawkmoon did not fare as well. Do you think this was due to production issues, or else a different reception among gamers?

Answer – I think we at Chaosium didn’t manage to push it very well. By 1986 Chaosium was starting to retract itself. The two main creative forces at Chaosium were me and Greg Stafford. I was of course focussed primarily on Call of Cthulhu (the big money maker) and Greg was focused on Pendragon (his baby). I suppose overall it was a failure from the top down, in that Chaosium never had a real chain of command.

 

7 You are also a designer and lover of board games, and Petersen Games is known for huge tactical games like Cthulhu Wars. Did you ever play the old Stormbringer boardgame? What was your opinion of it as a designer and game lover?

Answer – I played the Elric game several times. Victory was kind of random, because the summonings and events could be so earth-shattering. I mean, you can carefully build up your army, pack it into a fleet and send your mighty military out to conquer Pan Tang (or whatever) and then your enemy summons Slortar the Old or a pack of Oonai or something and wipes your force out. But on the other hand, it certainly hews to the spirit of the stories, where that sort of thing happens a LOT. (“Ha! I’ve summoned the Elenoin to kill you, Elric.” “Well, I’ve summoned a bunch of Grahluk, who live only to kill Elenoin, to save me.”) The bottom line is that while your strategic reasoning and plotting may not always carry you to a win, but the game is always fun to play and full of surprises which is more important.

 

8 Petersen Games is known for the award winning Cthulhu Wars, but has also published fantasy games such as Glorantha: God War and Orcs Must Die. If you did have a crack at Moorcock’s IP, would you produce a game? If so, what would it be like?

Answer – I guess I’d first have to decide if I was doing a game on a single realm or the whole multiverse. If it was the multiverse, I’d have all the players be the different Eternal Champions, competing against each other (yes I know they’re all the same person) to  become the most memorable, or find peace, or something.

 

If it was just Elric’s world, I would have each player be a powerful nation from the world – one player would be Pan Tang, another Melnibone, etc. Elric would be a spoiler.