Coming [Chaosium] RuneQuest Starter Set: beyond the Starter Set

[Michael O'Brien]

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By Jason Durall, RuneQuest creative director

The Starter Set for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is coming! Between now and its release later this year, RuneQuest creative director Jason Durall's Design Diary will share insights about the development of this exciting new boxed set which will introduce the RuneQuest RPG and Greg Stafford's mythic world of Glorantha to all-new audiences.

• Diary #1: What to expect in the RQ Starter Set
• Diary #2: Cover Art reveal, and what's inside the box
• Diary #3: The new adventurers
• Diary #4: More about the new adventurers
• Diary #5: Welcome to Jonstown, setting for the Starter Set (guest post by Jeff Richard)
• Diary #6: Creating the Jonstown City Maps (guest post by Jeff Richard)
• Diary #7: Printer's proofs are back!
• Diary #8: A Gateway to Adventure

In our last Design Diary, we previewed the three scenarios that feature in Book 3: The Adventures. Today, Jason discusses how the RuneQuest Starter Set can be used as the basis of further adventures beyond those in the Adventures booklet itself.

Further Adventures​

Adventures book concludes with a section called Further Adventures. It features:

• adventure seeds
• a Jonstown-specific rumors and gossip table
• a table for random encounters drawing from the sample non-player characters in Book 2: The World of Glorantha.
• a one-page version of the Gloranthan calendar for those who want to keep track of the passage of time.

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Finally, the last five pages of Book 2: The World of Glorantha features a close-up two-page map of the immediate area surrounding Jonstown and three pages of brief entries covering various points of interest, geographic features, and other communities. All inspiration for a Gamemaster to further develop these in later games set after the pre-written adventures in the RuneQuest Starter Set are played through.

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Beyond the Starter Set​

A small sidebar in Book 4: Adventures discusses how to utilize additional resources, such as drawing from the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack's writeup of the city of Clearwine and the smaller village of Apple Lane, as well as the adventures set on each. Apple Lane is less than a day’s walk from Jonstown so this ‘coziness’ helps keep the players familiar with the area they already know, yet expands the world ever slightly more.

From here, the Gamemaster could go to The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories or The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories to continue with adventures in the region. Soon after the release of the Starter Set, we will be releasing a new adventures set in Jonstown and the surrounding area and requiring nothing else other than the materials in the Starter Set to play.

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With the RuneQuest Starter Set, gamemasters and players have the most direct and accessible entry to Glorantha ever published! The Starter Set is a core product that offers many hours of entertainment, easily expanded into more adventures in the grander world of Glorantha.