Last year, Dave Butler approached the AML about interviewing legendary tabletop and computer game designer Sandy Petersen, who he felt is one of the more accomplished and influential LDS artists who isn’t talked about much in Mormon arts circles.
Petersen joined Chaosium Inc. in the late 1970s and contributed to the development of the table-top role-playing game RuneQuest. He went on to be the lead creator of Call of Cthulhu. First published in 1981 and based on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, Call of Cthulhu is one of the most influential role-playing games in history, especially when it comes to horror games. Later in his career, Petersen joined ID Software where he worked on the groundbreaking first person shooter games in the Doom franchise as well as Quake. His 2013 Kickstarter for the strategy/horror board game Cthulhu Wars raised $1.4 million and gathered more than 4,000 backers.
Although his work is often scary and violent, like other Mormons involved in the horror genre, Petersen doesn’t see a conflict between his religion and his work.
We’re delighted to bring you this conversation between Butler and Petersen as part of our special genre edition of Irreantum:
D. J. (Dave) Butler has been a lawyer, a consultant, an editor, a corporate trainer, and a registered investment banking representative, and he is now a Consulting Editor for Baen Books. His novels published by Baen Books include the Witchy War series (Witchy Eye, Witchy Winter, Witchy Kingdom, and Serpent Daughter), In the Palace of Shadow and Joy, Between Princesses and Other Jobs, and Abbott in Darkness, as well as (with Aaron Michael Ritchey) The Cunning Man and The Jupiter Knife. His novels have won the Whitney Award, the Association for Mormon Letters Award for Novel, and the Dragon Award. He tells many stories as a gamemaster with a gaming group some of whom he’s been playing with since sixth grade. He plays guitar and banjo whenever he can, and likes to hang out in Utah with his wife, their children, and the family dog.
