When I wrote about Bestiaries recently, I said that the reason that I was reading some was because I was prepping for a new Swords & Wizardry campaign. After that faltered with a near TPK in the first session, the group dusted off and regathered themselves and talked about what to do next. Since we were going to have some real life interruptions that would through our schedule off…I suggested that we give a different game a try. Since the PDFs from the Runquest Classic Kickstarter were circulating, we ended up deciding to give another old school fantasy RPG a try.
Just like in my column about OD&D still being relevant, in this column I'm going to talk about the last relevence of Runequest 2. With the recent success of the Kickstarter to reprint Runequest 2 as Runequest Classic it seems like I am not the only one who thinks that this game still has legs to it. It has definitely shown some challenges to our group, which is used to playing D&D games, but they are slowly coming over to the other side.
We’re still in the early stages of the game, but things have already been fierce. We have an interesting selection of characters to explore this new world. I started things out with the classic Judges Guild module for Runequest, The Broken Tree Inn. While not set exactly in Glorantha, it isn’t enough of a departure from the baselines of the world’s concepts to make it discordant with official material. The module digs around in ideas that don’t often get addressed in fantasy games: Just how do the various “races” see one another’s actions? Where the default in fantasy games is often looting and murdering, this module looks at the ramifications of the actions of adventurers, and humans in general, and how these actions are seen in the eyes of the non-humans in a fantasy world.
This is a lot of what drew me to this module. I think that our group may have needed something a little more complex than the typical dungeon crawl. We’ve been playing for a few years now, through different games, and some other forms of exploration will be a welcome break.
The next stop in the campaign will be the long journey across Glorantha to the city of Pavis, to see what sorts of troubles the characters can get into there. City-based adventures haven’t always gone as planned in the past, so it will be interesting to see how the players, and their characters, interact with the world.
This might be a good place for an aside about setting. One thing that Greg Stafford, the creator of Glorantha and one of the developers of Runequest, always said was that “Your Glorantha Will Vary.” I like that philosophy, as a game master, but it may need a little unpacking. The idea of “Your Glorantha Will Vary” is that canon, a game’s setting, is a starting point for the individual campaign, rather than a destination. The assumption is that the Glorantha of an individual campaign will take its cues from the ur-Glorantha of the published material, but that it will take on a life of its own as the players explore the world and find the things that are important to them.
That is often implied in a game’s setting, but it is nice to have the idea brought out front and center. I am a GM who doesn’t interact with published settings often, I have enough settings already swirling around in my head that I don’t need more of them, so if I am going to use a published setting (particularly one that has such a wealth of material like Glorantha does) it is nice to know that a default assumption is that, as a GM, I will likely fork the setting.
It is fortuitous that I got the two “grails” of gaming material during the time that I have been setting up this campaign, because I know that I will want to integrate them into our Runequest game. What are these books? The Realm of Chaos books for Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing first eidtion (or Warhammer Fantasy Battle third edition for those of you who are more into miniatures). I’ve long held the opinion that the early Warhammer took the inspirations of Runequest and D&D and turned them into something that only the British could have created. Now, I get to see how these things will look coming back into Runequest.
As the players in our group know, I like Chaos. I like an influence of Michael Moorcock in the fantasy campaigns that I run. Both Runequest and Warhammer also like these things, so a marriage of them won’t be strange. Both games are rough and brutal, and that is where a lot of the appeal for them comes for me.
After so many years of playing games based on the early editions of D&D, I thought that it was a rough and dangerous game. Runequest cranks up a lot of that brutality. In their very first encounter in the game, the characters fought a pack of wolves, with one character being seriously injured in the battle. How will the repercussions of this play out going forward? That is part of the fun of an ongoing campaign.
It is a simple addition that makes Runequest more deadly, hit locations. The first game to decide that not only can you specify what part of the body your attack is hitting, but the ramifications from damage to those locations. The character didn’t lose a limb, although they took a lot of damage to a leg, and they should live. There is also not quite the abundance of healing magic that you would find in a D&D world. The concept of the Cleric, a fighting priest who patches people up, and then casts healing magic on everyone so that they can go down to the next level, isn’t a part of this game.
The social unit is an important part of Runequest, which is a reflection of the bronze age influences upon the world. Characters are part of a warband. They are in a clan. They are from a place. They are part of a Cult, a religious group. All of these things help to define the characters, and give them a place in the world. Magic, in the worlds of Runequest, comes from the Runes, which describe the universe, and the Gods, which either define the Runes or are defined by the Runes. While magic is more present in Runequest than in a game like D&D, it is also more controlled. Nearly anyone with the potential can be taught to use some form or another of magic, or congress with the Spirits or Elementals, but knowledge of the spells and the ability to train others to use them, rests in the hands of the various Cults around the world of Glorantha. This makes magic both more available, and limits it at the same time.
This approach probably isn’t for everyone, but it assures that the characters will be a part of their world, rather than apart from it. Magic is a part of the nature of the world, defining it like the Runes. Each Cult will have magic that they specialize in, according to the type of god that they worship which means that not every spell will be available to everyone. It also means that the “wizard” that most other fantasy games use as a trope is not available in Runequest. I think that this makes spell-casting characters more like the Merlin from the movie Excalibur, and less like Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. Magic is weird, magic is woven into the very fiber of the world, but it isn’t the magic of fireballs and lightning strikes.
What are Runes in Runequest? The easiest way to explain them is that they are the fundamental principles of the universe, the things that those creatures, people, gods and magic draw power from. Each principle has governance over some area, and by identifying with that principle, through the Rune, people can draw upon that governance in the form of magic, or special abilities. It is a more complicated concept, but for an essay like this I am just going to go over the highlights.
Non-humans in Runequest are weird too. Elves, as befits their standard role as protectors of the forests, are actually semi-sort of plants themselves, and draw upon the Plant Rune for their power. It is a concept that takes a little work to get your head around. They are tied to the forests that they protect, and rarely journey far from them. Some elves, like the Dryads, are bound to a particular tree and live or die according to the fate of that tree. Dwarves are creatures of the Earth, and rarely journey from their underground homes, but when they do it is typically to battle their sworn enemy, the Trolls. Trolls are some of the earliest of creatures, being of the Darkness that rose from the primordial Chaos. They identify with the Darkness and Chaos Runes, and some of the more degenerate Troll kind get abilities, like that of regeneration from Chaos. About the only thing that Elves and Dwarves will cooperate on is the slaying of Trolls.
Runequest treated nonhuman creatures in the same way as characters, which would later be used conceptually in the third edition of D&D. Characters and creatures were built in the same ways, using the same rules. This also meant that you could dig through the bestiary section of a Runequest game, or supplement, and use the write-ups as the basis for a Troll character, or a centaur, or anything else in the rules.
Skills are an important innovation in Runequest for me. One thing that I have learned from playing old school D&D stuff is that I like skills in role-playing games. I like how they can help to differentiate one character from another, and I like the granularity that they can add to a character. Skills aren't easy, the character in the group who is the archer still has problems hitting her targets, but one lucky hit will help out with that a lot. I am a fan of the intuitiveness of a percentage-based skill system. It is easy for a lot of people to conceptualize "you have a 20% chance to hit that." Skills in RPGs can be a sticking point for some, but I like them and I have always liked the Chaosium handling of them.
One of the interesting things about Runequest is how it ended up in the middle of a great cycle of influences in gaming. Originally developed from a set of D&D houserules by Steve Perrin, called the Perrin Conventions and widely used in West coast D&D games and conventions, Runequest took a life of its own and became its own game. According to Jonathan Tweet, the Runequest rules were an important influence on his designs for the third edition of D&D. Third edition skills, and the idea of critical successes and failures that they used, were influenced by how skills worked in Runequest. The concept of Prestige Classes came from the idea of Rune Lords and Rune Priests in Runequest Cults, and how advancement within an organization could unlock further abilities for your character down the road.
Overall, I like this game. It suits my sensibilities in ways that our D&D-based games did not. I like that the characters are encouraged to be a part of the world, rather than loners who are apart from things. I like that the world is complex, and requires a group to think about the repercussions of their actions instead of just blindly killing their way through the world. The thing is, playing Runequest as if it were D&D does a disservice to both games, and it can end up in frustration for everyone. This can be a tough hurdle to overcome, but rewarding for the right groups if they work it out. If you are looking for something old school, but that plays differently than D&D I suggest looking for the Runequest Classic rules when they come out this summer.
