James Nicoll Reviews

Greg Stafford, Steven Perrin, Jeff Richard, Jason Durall, and friends¹’ 2018 RuneQuest – Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG) is the latest²edition of the venerable roleplaying game, RuneQuest (RQ). My review of the 2^nd edition can be found here.

And how does this version of the pioneering game stand up, forty years after the first edition saw print?

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Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford’s 1979 booklet Cults of Prax is a source book for the venerable RuneQuest roleplaying game. It was, I believe, the second publication in the RuneQuest line. Cults of Prax outlines the religions found in Prax, a wasteland adjacent to the Dragon Pass region featured in the original rule set. This booklet fleshed out the backstory to the world of Glorantha, the setting used for most (but not all) editions of RuneQuest. 

The somewhat dry material was spiced up with comments from a wandering trader with long experience of the peoples of the Prax region. 

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Steve Perrin and Gordon Monson’s FutureWorld was included in Chaosium’s 1982 Worlds of Wonder box set. The set also included the 1980 Basic Roleplaying Game rules, SuperWorld (an early superhero RPG), and MagicWorld (rules for fantasy roleplaying, not tied to any specific setting). Here I am reviewing only FutureWorld. The other parts of the box set fall outside the purview of the BRP review series. 

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My first year at university, I encountered my first roleplaying games; two of those games I still remember fondly. Well, perhaps three, butI’ll explain that in a footnote¹. The first game was Traveller, which I reviewed here. The second was Chaosium’s RuneQuest, 2^nd Edition. Which is now in print again, thank Ghu. 

LikeTraveller, RuneQuest is a skill-based system. Like Traveller, the skills that count are somewhat mundane. However, unlike Traveller, whose basic rule set was quite unspecific about the setting, RuneQuest was explicitly set in Greg Stafford’s Glorantha.

I should perhaps add that both games, unlike a lot of role-playing games then and now, are designed to put wandering murder hobos at a considerable disadvantage. Just in case you wondered. 

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