RuneQuest

RuneQuest is a fantasy role-playing game first published in 1978 by Chaosium, created by Steve Perrin and set in Greg Stafford's mythical world of Glorantha. RuneQuest was notable for its original gaming system (designed around a percentile die and with an early implementation of skill rules). There have been several incarnations of the game. The most recent is the 6th edition that was released in July 2012 by The Design Mechanism under the title RuneQuest.^[1]

In Britain in the 1980s, RuneQuest was recognised by the gaming world as one of the 'Big Three' games with the largest market share, the others being Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller.^[2]

Setting

With the exception of the third and sixth editions, which still offered it as an option, the default setting for RuneQuest has been the world of Glorantha. The well-developed background of the game offered a breadth of material for players and gamemasters to draw from. At a time when many RPG settings were cobbled together, RuneQuest offered players a vibrant living world, giving them a much more developed fictional world with established geography, history, and religion.

The Dragon Pass area

The original rules contained a map of an area called Dragon Pass, a region offered as the default setting for adventures. The original RuneQuest game was set during a period of invasion, offering opportunities for game scenarios. A supplement titled Cults of Prax added more detail to many of the setting's locations.

Cults and religion

A key element of RuneQuest flavor is a character's affiliation with a cult. Characters begin as lay members and progress through a series of membership levels, such as initiate or Rune Lord. This system offers narrative and mechanical benefits to players who chose to have their characters join a cult.

The basic rules described a handful of original and mythological gods. These were greatly expanded upon in the supplements Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror.

Magic in RuneQuest

Characters in RuneQuest are not divided into magic using and non-magic using characters. At the time of the game's release, this was an unorthodox mechanic. Although all characters have access to magic, for practical gameplay purposes a character's magical strength is proportional to his or her connection to the divine or natural skill at sorcery.

The exact divisions of magic vary from edition to edition, but most contain divisions such as Battle Magic, Sorcery, Petty Magicks, Divine Magic, Spirit Magic, and Enchantments.

System

Character Creation

As with most RPGs, players begin by making a Player Character. Player characters are devised through a number of dice rolls to represent physical, mental and spiritual characteristics.

Characters in RuneQuest gain power as they are used in play, but not to the degree that characters do in other fantasy RPGs. It is still possible for a weak character to slay a strong one through luck, tactics, or careful planning.

Task resolution

Both combat and non-combat actions use a percentile roll-under system to determine success of actions. The game features mechanics for critical hits and fumbling. For example, if a character has climbing at 35% and her player rolls 25 on a D100, the character has succeeded. However, a nuanced range of results existed in every die roll. If a die roll was 1/5 of the necessary percentile roll or less, it was a special success, and if it was 1/20 of the necessary roll or less it was a critical success. Very high rolls (in the range 96-00) on the other hand, could be "fumbles" or spectacular failures if they were in the top 1/20 of possible failed rolls.

Combat

The game's combat system was designed in an attempt to recreate designer Steve Perrin's experience with live-action combat. Perrin experienced mock medieval combat through the Society for Creative Anachronism. The player rolls against the character's combat skill. If the number rolled is equal to or less than the character's skill level, they have hit their target. The defender has the chance to roll to avoid the blow or parry it.

The RuneQuest combat system has a subsystem for hit location. Successful attacks are allocated randomly (or by decision) to a part of the target's body. In RuneQuest, a lucky hit against a character's leg, weapon arm, or head could have specific effects on the game's mechanics and narrative. This was a unique part of the game's combat system and helped to separate it from the more abstracted, hit-point-based combat of competitors such as Dungeons & Dragons.

Character advancement

Rules for skill advancement also use percentile dice. In a departure from the level based advancement of Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest allowed characters to improve their abilities directly; the player needs to roll higher than the character's skill rating. For the climber example used earlier, the player would need to roll greater than 35 on a D100 in order to advance the character's skill. Thus, the better the character is at a skill the more difficult it is to improve.

Other rules

The RuneQuest rule book contained a large selection of fantasy monsters and their physical stats. As well as traditional fantasy staples (Dwarves, Trolls, Undead, Lycanthropes, etc.), the book featured original creatures such as the goat-headed creatures called Broo. Some of its traditional fantasy creatures differed notably from the versions from other games (or fantasy or traditional sources), for example, Elves are humanoid plant life. Unlike other fantasy RPGs of the time, RuneQuest encouraged the use of monsters as player characters.

History

In 1975, games designer Greg Stafford released the fantasy board game White Bear and Red Moon (later renamed Dragon Pass), produced and marketed by Chaosium, a game publishing company set up by Stafford specifically for the release of the game. The board game introduced the region of Dragon Pass and many of the creatures and personalities that would appear in the world of the RuneQuest games. In 1978 Chaosium published the first edition of RuneQuest, a role playing game set in the world of Glorantha from White Bear and Red Moon. RuneQuest quickly established itself as the second most popular fantasy role-playing game, after Dungeons & Dragons.^[3] RuneQuest is the original percentile die-based and skill-based rule set. A second edition, with various minor revisions, was released in 1980.

The game was sold to Avalon Hill, who published a third edition in 1983 under a complex agreement that required all Glorantha-related content to first be approved by Chaosium. In an attempt to also have a setting they could release freely, Avalon Hill also supported a new "default" setting, Fantasy Earth, based on fantasy interpretations of several eras of earth's pre-modern history. Later Avalon Hill published generic fantasy material (Lost City of Eldarad, Daughters of Darkness). Critics consider these later "Gateway" publications inferior to the earlier RuneQuest publications.^[4]

A proposed fourth edition titled RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha was intended to return the tight RuneQuest/Glorantha relationship, but it was shelved mid-project in 1994.

Following the financial failure of the collectible card game Mythos, Stafford, along with fellow shareholder Sandy Petersen, left the management of Chaosium in 1998, taking the rights to the Glorantha setting with him (he remained a shareholder in the company). Stafford formed a company, Issaries, Inc., to manage the Glorantha property. He partnered with Moon Design Publications to produce the all-new game system Hero Wars, later renamed HeroQuest. In 2003 the rights to the name "RuneQuest" were acquired from Avalon Hill by Issaries.

Mongoose Publishing released a new edition of RuneQuest, in August 2006 under a license from Issaries. This required that Mongoose recreate much of the function of prior editions without reusing the prior texts (the copyrights of which were retained by Chaosium). The new rules were developed by a team led by Mongoose co-founder Matthew Sprange, and were released under a variant of the Open Game License. The official setting takes place during the Second Age of Glorantha (previous editions covered the Third Age). In 2010, Mongoose published a much-revised edition written by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker called RuneQuest II, known as "MRQ2" by fans.

In May 2011, Mongoose Publishing announced that they had parted company with Issaries.^[5] In July, 2011, The Design Mechanism, a company formed by Nash and Whitaker, announced that they had entered a licensing agreement with Issaries,^[6] and would be producing a 6th edition of RuneQuest. RuneQuest 6th edition, released in July 2012, is largely an expansion of the Mongoose RuneQuest II rules aimed at providing rules that can be adapted to many fantasy or historical settings, and do not contain any specifically Gloranthan content (though they do use the Gloranthan runes).

In 2013, Stafford outright sold the Glorantha setting and RuneQuest and HeroQuest trademarks to Moon Design, which continued to publish HeroQuest and maintained Design Mechanism's RuneQuest license. In June 2015, following a series of financial issues at Chaosium, Stafford and Petersen retook control of the company. They in turn arranged a merger with Moon Design, which saw the Moon Design management team take over Chaosium. Shortly thereafter a new edition of RuneQuest was announced for a 2016 release. It is planned to be based on the 2nd edition, drawing upon ideas from later editions.^[7] They also successfully raised funds through Kickstarter to produce a hardcover reprint of the 2nd edition as RuneQuest Classic.^[8]

Reception

Jennell Jaquays comments: "After RuneQuest and Glorantha, detailed fantasy worlds would become the norm, not the exception. Dragon Pass paved the way for TSR's Faerûn, better known as the Forgotten Realms, and Krynn, setting for the Dragonlance saga. But few would ever achieve the elegant but approachable rules complexity of the original RuneQuest or instill a fervent loyalty in fans that would span decades."^[9]

Legacy

Chaosium reused the rules system developed in RuneQuest to form the basis of several other games: in 1980 the RuneQuest system of rules was simplified and published by Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis under the name of Basic Role-Playing (BRP). BRP was a generic role-playing game system, derived from the two first RuneQuest editions. It was used for many Chaosium role-playing games that followed RuneQuest, including:

• Stormbringer (1981)
• Call of Cthulhu (1981)
• Worlds of Wonder (1982)
• Superworld (1983)
• ElfQuest (1984)
• Ringworld (1984)
• Pendragon (1985)
• Hawkmoon (1985)
• Nephilim (1992)

The science-fiction roleplaying game Other Suns by Fantasy Games Unlimited, 1983, licensed the Basic Role Playing system as well.

Minor modifications of the BRP rules were introduced in every one of those games, to suit the flavor of each game's universe. Pendragon used a 1-20 scale and 1d20 roll instead of a percentile scale and 1d100.^[10] In combat, it used a single STR-based damage value where weapons only gave bonuses or penalties to the number of d6s. Prince Valiant: The Story-Telling Game (1989), which used coin tosses instead of dice rolls, was the only Chaosium role-playing game that didn't use any variant of the BRP system.

In 2004, Chaosium released a print-on-demand version of the 3rd edition RuneQuest rules under the titles Basic Roleplaying Players Book, Basic Roleplaying Magic Book, and Basic Roleplaying Creatures Book. The same year, Chaosium began preparing the most complete version yet of Basic Role-Playing. This new BRP edition was provisionally named Deluxe Basic Role-Playing (DBRP) but was finally released on June 24, 2008 as a single comprehensive book with the title Basic Role-Playing.^[11] The book offers many optional rules, as well as genre-specific advice for fantasy, horror, and science-fiction. Currently Chaosium is selling both a printed^[12] and pdf^[13] version of the game. No current version of BRP includes any Gloranthan content.

After losing the license to use the RuneQuest name and Glorantha setting, Mongoose Publishing announced the release of a new series of books under the title of Legend, which are designed to be 100% compatible with the RuneQuest II ruleset. Legend was released in late 2011 under an open license. Mongoose titles for RuneQuest II were re-released as Legend-compatible books.^[14] Similarly, after the announcement of the Chaosium/Moon Design merger, The Design Mechanism announced that RuneQuest 6th edition would continue to be published under the name Mythras.^[15]

References

External links

• Official website