You might have heard by now that Stan Lee passed away (which, sadly, is another celebrity death that I care about).

The only time I saw him was at FanExpo Vancouver 2013. Here he is, signing my friend’s Spidey book. “Thank you very much for all the stories” my friend said. “Oh, you’re very welcome” Stan said.

A bit later, all the Marvel cosplayers gathered for Stan, and for a minute he kinda looked like a nerdy version of Hugh Hefner.

Farewell, Stan!

A few weeks ago, Greg Stafford passed away. He was best known as the founder of Chaosium (one of the greatest role-playing game publishers in history), co-designer of RuneQuest (one of the greatest role-playing games in history), and creator of Glorantha (one of the greatest fantasy universes in history).

Since then, there has been a lot of talk about his life and legacy, but I can mostly recommend Ken and Robin’s Special Podcast Episode, which has several anecdotes about Greg, and the Chaosium Forums’ Condolence Thread, which has quite a few nice pictures, stories, and words on the subject.

Now, the folks at Chaosium recently made a call to play a game in honour of Greg next weekend (November 10th). Although you can frankly play any game and be certain that Greg Stafford had at least some kind of indirect influence over its design and/or its author, it’s obviously even better if you play a game that is more directly linked to him. Sadly, our weekly Friday game night is on a hiatus from our Call of Cthulhu campaign – that would have been our best homage to Greg, short of playing RuneQuest or Pendragon. But what we’re doing is still not too bad, as we just started a 7th Sea one-shot adventure, and John Wick, the game’s author, recently posted a nicely worded blog post about how much influence Greg had on his career (which includes L5R in addition to 7th Sea).

So I guess we’ll be plundering ships and fighting sea monsters for the occasion.

Farewell, Mr. Stafford.