Announcing the winners of the 2024 Greg Stafford Memorial Award for Gloranthan Fandom

The Greg Stafford Memorial Award for Gloranthan Fandom was established in November 2018 in memory of Chaosium's revered founder and original creative visionary Greg Stafford. With the blessing of Greg's family Chaosium presents the award to recognise a significant and exceptional contribution to Gloranthan Fandom in a current year.

This month marks the sixth anniversary of Greg Stafford's passing, and we are pleased to present the 2024 award to David Hall, Kevin Jacklin, Dan Barker, and David Cheng. They receive the award for running the freeform game Home of the Bold at Chaosium Con in Ann Arbor in April. Notably, it had been 24 years since this epic 50+ player, eight hour Gloranthan live action game had last been staged, so its revival has opened the experience to a brand new audience of gamers. 

-- Home of the Bold's triumphant return after 24 years - the assembled players at Chaosium Con, Ann Arbor April 2024 --

Chaosium vice president Michael O'Brien said, "The Greg Stafford Memorial award recognises a significant and exceptional contribution to Gloranthan Fandom in the current year, and David Hall, Kevin Jacklin, Dan Barker, and David Cheng all thoroughly deserve that in 2024. But if this award was retrospective, each of them of course could have earned it in many years past: Dan for his amazingly evocative Gloranthan art; David Cheng for pioneering the first-ever RQ Con; Kevin for co-writing Home of the Bold (with David Hall) and the Gloranthan freeforms that followed it; and David Hall for his absolutely seminal role in helping keep Glorantha fandom alive with his magazine Tales of the Reaching Moon (which RPG historian Shannon Applecline describes as 'the most important publication for RuneQuest and Glorantha across its more than a decade of existence'). Glorantha fans everywhere owe them all a debt of gratitude, and this award is a fitting way to help recognise that."

-- A Rough Guide to Boldhome features Dan Barker's evocative cover art. --

In 2022, on the thirtieth anniversary of Home of the Bold's debut at Convulsion in Leicester UK, Chaosium community ambassador Nick Brooke recounted his experiences playing in the freeform. He said Home of the Bold "set the course of the convention and fan publishing scene for a decade or more, and helped set things in place for the resurgence of RuneQuest today."

Home of the Bold was first staged at Convulsion in Leicester UK in July 1992. It was subsequently run at the first RuneQuest Con in Baltimore (January 1994), RQCon Down Under in Melbourne, Australia (January 1996), and twice again at Convulsion in Leicester (July 1996 and July 2000). 

The revived game has been run at Chaosium Con in Ann Arbor MI (April 2024) and then at Continuum, Bedford UK (July 2024). A special new edition of 'A Rough Guide to Boldhome', the official sourcebook for Home of the Bold, was produced for the revival of the freeform. It is available in PDF and POD formats at DriveThruRPG.

Previous recipients of the Greg Stafford Memorial Award for Gloranthan Fandom are:

• Lev Lafayette (2018), the driving force behind successfully bringing back RQ Con Down Under after a hiatus of twenty years.
• Martin Helsdon (2019), author of the monumental fan work The Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass, based on Greg's writings.
• Nick Brooke (2020), for his passionate advocacy of the Jonstown Compendium, Chaosium's community content platform for Glorantha on DriveThruRPG.
• Katrin Dirim (2021), for her vibrant Gloranthan art, inspired by art styles from antiquity and the middle ages and capturing the essence of mythology.
• Andrew Logan Montgomery (2022), creator of the critically acclaimed and bestselling Six Seasons in Sartar trilogy in the Jonstown Compendium.
• Mark Smylie (2023), artist whose beautifully-detailed artwork has brought Jonstown Compendium authors’ imagined Gloranthan scenes vividly to life.