I’ve kicked off my Gaming New Year with the thunder of hooves: over the break I plotted my first RuneQuest convention scenario in (cough) 35 years and, to make up for lost time, promptly ran it five times in seven days!
The playtest with my home group went well, and then each session at CanCon* made it better yet, because every game gets better with testing.
I’m pleased with myself: going by the reactions I think I have a solid start, a good reveal, and a thrilling end. Between those story beats it’s the kind of scenario where I can just jam on ideas with the players and mess around—it never ran the same way twice.
The scenario is called Star in Darkness, with the working title of Unicorns, Heck Yeah!**
Yelorna is worshipped by the women of the Unicorn Tribe, and that immediately made me think of the most over-the-top RuneQuest session possible: you get a unicorn, and you get a unicorn, everyone gets a unicorn! Who doesn’t love riding a horse with a spear on its head that can heal you completely with a touch of its horn? See above: heck yeah.**
It’s an honour and a privilege to welcome players to Glorantha for the first time. I always start with who the adventurers are and what their immediate problem is, and then when we know what’s at stake, we finally get to the numbers, working through the character sheet from the top down.
That means the first thing I always talk about is the Runes. The thing I love – love! – most about RuneQuest Adventures in Glorantha is the way the Runes have been elevated from a word in the game’s title and a few odd symbols next to your cult to being a core part of the fabric that weaves every single session together.
Not only do the Runes guide your chosen cult, every player character is defined by their own personal Elemental Runes and Power Runes. It’s one part astrology and one part personality traits from Pendragon: if your adventurer has a higher score in their Stasis Rune than their Movement Rune, you know that they’ll consider things carefully before acting. If the Earth Rune is their dominant Elemental Rune, they're probably dependable, pragmatic, both feet on the ground. You immediately get a sense of who they are.
The best part is that players can draw on a Rune to boost any skill roll. It’s not spirit magic, it’s not Rune magic, it’s an innate form of magic, kinda. In the RuneQuest Adventures in Glorantha core rulebook there’s a nice piece of game design on pages 48-49 which equates each Elemental Rune to a different characteristic, sense, skill category, weapon, and so on. It’s well balanced and gives each adventurer different strengths.
Me? I’ve streamlined that. (Sorry Jason, sorry Jeff. I guess my Disorder Rune value is high.)
My rule of cool at the table is that any Rune can be used to augment any Skill, as long as you can talk me, the GM, into it***.
Here are some recent examples, verbatim:
"I want to use my Earth rune on this STR roll."
"How?"
"I brace my legs, feeling the ground firm beneath me, and push hard."
"I want to use my Air rune on this Jump."
"How?"
"I sprint to the edge and then fling myself across, and as I leap I soar."
"I want to use my Harmony rune on this Orate roll."
"How?"
"I show open hands and lower my voice and speak words of peace."
"I want to use my Death rune on my Firearrow shot to save my sister from the monster that is about to bite her head off."
"Sure, but if you invoke Death in combat, somebody has to die. If you miss the enemy, you will hit her."
"Oh. Hmmm. Can I use my Fire rune instead?"
“Of course.”
It is so much fun to let the player come up with their own reasons why they can use a Rune. It shares narration, delivers epic moments, and you can freestyle any scene without opening the rulebook. Brand new players get this instantly, and in a way, it’s even more immediate than learning what all the skills are, as the basic Runes are such universal concepts. It’s been a real breakthrough in the way I run the game.****
What I love even more is that it makes the Runes potent magical symbols which are alive in the world. If Stella Brightstar calls on her Movement Rune to power up that cliff on her unicorn and her player makes the roll, his hooves kick up whirling spirals of dust, each mote a twirling Movement Rune in motion.
For further inspiration, Jason Durall and Pedro Ziviani have done something equally brilliant in Age of Vikings, where each player character is devoted to three gods: instead of rolling percentile to augment, you have a pool of Devotion Points that you use to buff skills during the big moments. That was the other game I ran intensively at CanCon and players really got into that system, too.
These are the moments I live for. I love it when the players are absolute heroes, and Runes and Devotion Points really deliver those big moments. Not all heroes ride unicorns, but dammit, they should. Heck yeah!
** Or another expression which is verrrrrry similar. This a family website after all.
*** The exact phrase I use is pretty much what comes out the back end of a Praxian Bison, two words, first word is “bull”. As I said, family website.
****Game design never exists in a vacuum, and it wasn’t until this exact moment that I realise that my guiding star for this is the wonderful 13th Age Glorantha rulebook by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet. In that game, again, every character has three Runes, but players can narrate the Runes of their character and change some aspect of the story. (13th Age from Pelgrane Press is an exceptional D20 game and well worth a look; but if you only want to play RuneQuest, 13G is still brimfull of Gloranthan ideas and a wonderful read.) We are all the sum of our inspirations, and Heinsoo & Tweet write inspiring stuff.
- Top - "Yelorna" by Loïc Muzy, from Cults of RuneQuest: Gods of Fire and Sky.
- Middle - photo: Playtesting Mark's new RuneQuest Scenario - the Chaosium team the night before Can Con, January 2026.
- Bottom - "Unicorn" by Katrin Dirim, from the RuneQuest Adventure Tokens.
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