James Nicoll Reviews

Let’s call the history of Runequest from the Avalon Hill deal to the early 21^st century ​“troubled”. Its history after 2003ish was…convoluted seems diplomatic enough, but at least there were versions of Runequest available, albeit not from Chaosium itself. I think there have been seven, maybe eight, editions of the game over the decades. Annoyingly the companies don’t seem to have used a consistent numbering system.

As for Chaosium itself, it underwent what was likely an excessively interesting process in which it essentially broke into component companies, and then re-accreted back into a unified body¹. In 2018, Chaosium finally produced a new, in-house edition of their venerable RPG. Huzzah!

I’ve owned a copy since 2018 and at some point I really need to read it.

1: I would draw a parallel with a gas giant moon thought to have been disrupted by an impact, then reformed, but I can’t recall which moon that was.