An RPG from the Past: RuneQuest

Back when I was in high school, my Geometry teacher ran a club called the Rail Baron Club. Until I actually had him for Geometry my sophomore year, I had absolutely no idea what the hell Rail Baron actually was, much less why a club existed for it. 

As it turns out, Rail Baron was a game produced by The Avalon Hill Game Company*, and since my Geometry teacher was a railroad fan, he'd fallen in love with the game and shared it with the students. A few of us bought our own copies of Rail Baron, and I joined their ranks sometime late in my sophomore year. 

Imagine Monopoly but using rail lines, although
that's a bit of an oversimplification. I'm nerdy enough
that I laminated the destination chart to protect it long term.
"I swear, Bill, if you buy Seaboard Air
Line AGAIN I'm gonna scream!" --Me

Inside the box for Rail Baron was a postcard you could send in to Avalon Hill, requesting a game catalog, and of course I did just that.

I couldn't find any of these old cards, where
the air of superiority was very strong, so
I had to go to the Internet Archive to find this one.
The cards I found from the late-80s onward were...
much more polite toward prospective players.

When the catalog arrived, I would spend hours perusing the various board game titles, imagining what it'd be like to play them. But in the back, there was an ad for this:

Something I did not know was that
SFF author Kate Elliot and her husband
were the models for this artwork by
Jody Lee. From Bill H from RPGGeek.

RuneQuest? I'd never heard of it before. Given that I was a couple of years into the RPG ban in my household, I just didn't draw any sort of attention to the fact that an RPG was right in a board game catalog. Still, the image that Avalon Hill tried to project --they were a "thinking man's company"-- meant that their Mensa-esque "superior" image rubbed off onto RuneQuest. I kind of knew about the game, but never played it, and I figured it was pretty highbrow as far as it went.

Oh, I had no idea just how bonkers the game could be.

***

Okay, let me back up a bit. 

As I have since learned over the decades, RuneQuest was created in 1978 as an RPG for the world of Glorantha, a setting created by the late Greg Stafford back when he was in college in the 60s. Greg co-founded Chaosium to publish his first game based on Glorantha, a board game titled White Bear and Red Moon, and RuneQuest came along a few years later. D&D was experiencing its first huge burst of growth, and people who liked the Glorantha setting in White Bear and Red Moon wanted an RPG for that setting. 

Hence, RuneQuest.

The initial two editions of RuneQuest, published by Chaosium, were integrated with the Glorantha setting, but by the time the third edition was published, publishing had since been picked up by Avalon Hill.*** The biggest change from the previous editions of RuneQuest was that the third edition became divorced from the Glorantha setting; sure, there were plenty of Glorantha supplements published for RQ 3rd edition, but the "official" setting was Fantasy Europe****, which is just as it sounds.

Avalon Hill published RuneQuest up until the company imploded and was sold to Hasbro*****, and when the rights to RuneQuest became available once more, Greg Stafford grabbed it and got Mongoose Publishing to create a version of RuneQuest. 

In typical Mongoose fashion, they ended up with two versions of the RPG. And let's just say that Mongoose's version of RQ had.... issues. Unlike Mongoose Traveller which continues to be well received, there were a ton of issues with RQ, and in the end a RuneQuest 6th Edition was created by The Design Mechanism. 

Fast forward to 2015 and Chaosium was on the verge of collapse, and the founder, Greg Stafford, was brought in to save the company. (Apple fans, tell me if you've heard this scenario before.) When Greg came back, he helped to get Chaosium on good financial footing, and began work on a new version of RuneQuest. The Design Mechanism's version of RuneQuest was no longer needed per se, so that 6th Edition morphed into a setting-agnostic version of the game called Mythras. (Which still exists to this day.)

Greg passed away in 2018, but his vision for the current version of the RPG was realized with the publication of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, in 2018. 

Got all that?

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned Greg Stafford creating HeroQuest, which also uses the Glorantha setting in a rules-lite fashion.

No, not this HeroQuest:

This is the current version of the
Milton Bradley game, published by
Hasbro. Pic is from all over the net.

But THIS HeroQuest:

Yeah, it's complicated, and I'm not done yet!
From Moon Design Publications.

And back in 2020, the trademark for HeroQuest moved back to Hasbro so they could republish that first HQ game, and THIS HeroQuest is now known as QuestWorlds.

Whew!

In a bizarre sort of way, the history of RPGs based on Glorantha is as complex as the Glorantha setting itself is.

***

Remember when I mentioned that RuneQuest was a bit bonkers? The RuneQuest system itself isn't bonkers per se, because it is a skill based RPG with a lot of crunch to it; if you think Pathfinder has crunch, let me introduce you to my little friend here. 

No, it's the Glorantha setting itself that is bonkers.

When you first hear Glorantha and "Bronze Age Setting", your mind immediately leaps to, well, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or maybe Ramses II of Egypt, or Hammurabi. Or maybe even the Hittite city of Watusa, the Nubian city of Meroë, the Elamites of Anshan, or the Indus Valley and Harappa.

Somebody should have told the Hollywood

execs that these should have been bronze weapons.

But The Rock's gonna Rock...

But Glorantha is... Well, it's kind of not what you might be used to.

For starters, the world of Glorantha is known by its inhabitants be a gigantic disk, with an underworld and a sky above:

I should mention that the artwork and the rules
themselves do have an adult approach toward
sexuality. I mean, I'm an adult so it's no big deal,
but be aware of it in case you don't want kids asking
uncomfortable questions of you.
This is from writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com

There are also a veritable ton of gods out there in Glorantha, and none of them really fit into the standard Greco-Roman --or even Egyptian-- Pantheons. The gods aren't good or evil either in the standard Fantasy sense either, despite what the Chaosium rep tried to explain to me at Gen Con back in 2023. There are gods and goddesses of Nature, the Sky, the Underworld, etc., but whether they are good or evil is purely dependent upon the point of view of your cult.

Oh yes, the cults of Glorantha.

No, not this Cult...

but these types of Cults. Have I mentioned
the adult themes? From Chaosium.

A Cult in Glorantha isn't what it means in our own terminology, but is closer to an extended tribe that embraces a god or goddess. If you roll with that, you're about 90% of the way to understanding cults. Your cult gives you identity and camaraderie, and a ready made community to fall back on for support throughout the game. You betray your cult at your own risk.

The player characters in Glorantha embrace their position as heroes by going on what is in-game referred to as Hero Quests# --if you think of the Hero's Journey as a template, you've got the right idea-- for the glory of your cult and your chosen deity. If you complete your Hero Quest successfully, you may take your place in the upcoming Hero Wars, where the great heroes across Glorantha gather to fight for the future of the world.

The traditional starting location for a RuneQuest game is Dragon Pass, where there's a ton of action and activity, and there's clearly defined "Good Guys" (Kingdom of Sartar) and "Bad Guys" (The Lunar Empire). Like I mentioned above, they're not "good" and "evil" in the traditional sense, but the Lunar Empire is definitely the aggressors as an occupying empire that the Kingdom of Satar has recently ejected from the area; like the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, the Lunar Empire is plotting to return to power in Dragon Pass, so they're not going away any time soon.

***

Okay, one thing I do have to address about Glorantha is that while humans are the current dominant race, there are lesser races that had their time in the sun. Such as the Elder Races. 

Elves are not like what you typically find in RPG fare, but are akin to that found in Guild Wars 2: they are sapient plants.##

There are also spirits that reside within everything, which is very much an ancient way of looking at the world:

From RuneQuest: The Coloring Book,
available for Print and PDF from Chaosium, page 15.
If you buy the POD version, the PDF is free.
Again, yes, adult themes, but the art is really fantastic.

And I suppose I need to mention the Ducks.

Again, Glorantha is a bit bonkers.
From Runeblog's Creating a Duck
Character for RuneQuest Glorantha.

They're formally known as the Durulz, and kinda-sorta fill the spot in a Fantasy RPG normally populated by Halflings or Gnomes. As for their creation, the most common explanation is that they were created by a curse, but I've also seen goofier creation stories. Still, they're a part of what makes Glorantha a bit nutty.

***

Okay, nuttiness aside, why am I so fascinated with Glorantha and RuneQuest?

Because it's a classless, skill based system that acknowledges that combat is dangerous.

Unlike MERP or D&D 3e or other skill based hybrid systems, RuneQuest has abandoned the level concept and gone full tilt into skills. If you want to 'get gud' at something, you have to actually do it. You know, like real life. 

But RuneQuest has also abandoned the class structure as well, basically allowing you to do whatever you want as long as you actually work at it. It's like an Elder Scrolls game without even the pretense of a class structure.

There is magic, performed through the use of Runes that grant you access to spells. Runes are also intrinsic to Glorantha, and their in-game use is that they also allow you to augment your skill checks and your resistance rolls.

Combat is, well, not something you enter into lightly. You can quite easily be maimed or die. It's not quite the "you die on character creation" that Traveller has, but it's not the handwaving of the danger that you find in a lot of other RPGs. There are real consequences to combat, and even the best battle plan and warriors can be laid low if the gods do not favor you. True to the ancient world, you want to attack when the gods favor your success. 

Yes, RuneQuest is crunchy; there's no denying that. But it also provides you with extraordinary freedom within all that crunch. 

And yet...

RuneQuest can be dense. The reason why it never took off the same way D&D did is due to the denseness of the rules and the zaniness of the game world. You kind of need a RuneQuest evangelist to help you embrace the game and overcome it's quirks. For some, that's the video game The King of Dragon Pass that is set in Glorantha. For others, YouTube can come in handy, although I've found the official Chaosium videos on Glorantha to be somewhat lacking. If you've lived through a class at a university given by a boring professor who obviously knew his stuff but couldn't communicate effectively, you'll understand what I mean. 

However, Chaosium has put out a truly high quality starter set for RuneQuest that is worth checking out. The Starter Set has premade characters --and the set doesn't teach you how to create characters, strangely enough-- but they stuffed just so much material into the box that it's frankly amazing how they were able to pull it off.

From Chaosium. You can find it at their
website or at your local game store (which
is where I bought my copy).

I've often wondered how RuneQuest would work in a rules-lite system. I've never played HeroQuest so I couldn't comment there, but adapting RuneQuest and the Glorantha setting to the FATE or, say, Burning Wheel systems would definitely pique my interest.  

Still, if you're up for something definitely different, RuneQuest is a rabbit hole worth going down. I mean, where else can you create a character who is a Bison Rider?

This is Vasana, Farnan's Daughter,
one of the iconic characters of Glorantha.
From Book 3 of the RuneQuest Starter Set.

*3M --yes, that 3M that created sticky notes and various forms of adhesive tape-- was publisher of Rail Baron before Avalon Hill bought all of their board game assets, including Acquire and Facts in Five. The original Facts in Five (which is what we have) is kind of dated these days as far as trivia goes, although there was a reworking of the trivia part back in 2007 or so when University Games put out a version. As is usual, my wife tended to win those games we played in the 90s and 00s.

**Now most well known for the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

***Hence its presence in the 1985 Avalon Hill catalog.

****Not to be confused with the Mythic Europe setting for Ars Magica.

*****Now THAT is quite a tale by itself.

#Hence the name of the rules-lite RPG HeroQuest.

##From the Glorantha Tumblr on the subject of Elves.