Runequest: I seem to be liking it.
Aug. 27th, 2008 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebitterguySo I'm digging through my new acquisitions. The Runequest boxed set is... Man, I think I kind of missed out on something back in the day, eh? Perhaps I would have liked this a lot back in high school, but it's quite the thing to see. It's a deep box (Battlesystem or DC Heroes second ed deep) and it's got five rulebooks and a couple reference books, a map of "Fantasy Europe" that's pretty dull (it’s just like regular Europe, but Fantastic! And by Fantastic, we mean pretty not fantastic), and a few dice.
It also has a product registration card that lets you Do A Friend a Favour and send them a copy of AH's colour catalogue (Only one dollar! But an 1983 dollar, so that would be about $7.98 today). The catalogue that comes in the set is, sadly, only in B&W.
But, seriously, there’s a lot of game in here. The Guide to Glorantha is pretty thin (32 pages?) but has a nice amount of info. There was a Guide to Ernalda (?) for sale as well, but by then I was totally tapped out. I had managed to get half of the members of Power Pack (just need Lightspeed now) and the Isaiah Bradley Captain America Herocilx, though. And Pete Wisdom for the wife.
But, yes, it’s very neat looking, and I like the cosmology of Glorantha so far (but a lozenge floating in the sea? Okay, then). It’s a shame I’m only 22 years late coming to this party. Ah, well.
Of course, like everything I read I the first thing I wonder about it is “could I use it to play Al-Qadim?” I think that it seems a solid enough system that it would work quite well. I don’t know what level of lethality it imposes on PCs (it IS BRP, though) since I like my sand fantasy to be swashbuckling, but I do like how the magic system works on a general level. All pipe dreams, in any case.
What’s kind of impressive is that this boxed set (once again, an impressive boxed set) retailed for $38 in 1986. That’s a fair amount. I don’t remember what my red box cost (since I didn’t actually buy it for myself) but I think I know one reason why I never picked it up. I wasn’t going to be making a decent wage for a couple years yet, anyway.
The catalogue indicates you can get a Player’s Box for $20 and a GM’s box for $25, which each have about half the contents of the deluxe box.
I loved one particular bit from the catalogue:
You ask me, that isn’t exactly a great way to sell your organization. I mean, sure, it means nothing; if printing wasn’t crazy expensive back then, it’s entirely possible that development costs were the most significant part of the company’s expenses (especially if they rolled salaries into it) and it might be more than profit, depending on if they mean net or gross, yadda yadda.
But it just gives a weird impression. Plus, I’d assume that the licensing fees for James Bond might show up somewhere in there, too.
It also has a product registration card that lets you Do A Friend a Favour and send them a copy of AH's colour catalogue (Only one dollar! But an 1983 dollar, so that would be about $7.98 today). The catalogue that comes in the set is, sadly, only in B&W.
But, seriously, there’s a lot of game in here. The Guide to Glorantha is pretty thin (32 pages?) but has a nice amount of info. There was a Guide to Ernalda (?) for sale as well, but by then I was totally tapped out. I had managed to get half of the members of Power Pack (just need Lightspeed now) and the Isaiah Bradley Captain America Herocilx, though. And Pete Wisdom for the wife.
But, yes, it’s very neat looking, and I like the cosmology of Glorantha so far (but a lozenge floating in the sea? Okay, then). It’s a shame I’m only 22 years late coming to this party. Ah, well.
Of course, like everything I read I the first thing I wonder about it is “could I use it to play Al-Qadim?” I think that it seems a solid enough system that it would work quite well. I don’t know what level of lethality it imposes on PCs (it IS BRP, though) since I like my sand fantasy to be swashbuckling, but I do like how the magic system works on a general level. All pipe dreams, in any case.
What’s kind of impressive is that this boxed set (once again, an impressive boxed set) retailed for $38 in 1986. That’s a fair amount. I don’t remember what my red box cost (since I didn’t actually buy it for myself) but I think I know one reason why I never picked it up. I wasn’t going to be making a decent wage for a couple years yet, anyway.
The catalogue indicates you can get a Player’s Box for $20 and a GM’s box for $25, which each have about half the contents of the deluxe box.
I loved one particular bit from the catalogue:
"We spend more on product development than we make in profit"
You ask me, that isn’t exactly a great way to sell your organization. I mean, sure, it means nothing; if printing wasn’t crazy expensive back then, it’s entirely possible that development costs were the most significant part of the company’s expenses (especially if they rolled salaries into it) and it might be more than profit, depending on if they mean net or gross, yadda yadda.
But it just gives a weird impression. Plus, I’d assume that the licensing fees for James Bond might show up somewhere in there, too.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:32 pm (UTC)1: But not nearly as bad as picking a fight in Harn, home of "you die two weeks later after the minor wound you picked up gets infected."
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 03:12 am (UTC)I seem to recall the encumbrance rules were broken.
Basically, AH took RQ, tried to remove everything that appealed about it, esp Glorantha, and then made it more complicated, badly.
It was still better than Powers and Perils, which was like Draqonquest as translated from English to Japanese to Sanskrit and then back to English by someone who spoke only Turkish.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:57 pm (UTC)Doug.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:58 pm (UTC)May DOUG make a Walktapus?
Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:05 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:07 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:11 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:12 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-28 02:40 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-28 02:40 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-28 03:31 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:21 pm (UTC)There's just no "likable middle ground" with Broo.
Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:25 pm (UTC)Yeah, but what if the Duck is the father?
This game group sucks! I'm gonna play FATAL.
Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:28 pm (UTC)First stop! The Circumference tables! Circumference of what? I'm not telling!
Doug.
Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:30 pm (UTC)Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 09:30 pm (UTC)Or was that Red Dwarf?
Re: Yes he may
Date: 2008-08-27 08:23 pm (UTC)Doug.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 07:57 pm (UTC)Runequest was the original "% roll-under, skill based, level-less RPG" whose engine Chaosium used again and again, most notably in Call of Cthulhu.
HeroQuest, set in the same world, is a "narrative tag" driven game. The stat "Sturdy Oak Clan" is resolved in the same way as "Strong" and "Six Demon Bag" although what you chose to use the traits for may be very different.
From what I've HeroQuest 2.o, due out soon, is even more different, leaving dice resolution until the end of the scene.
either way, Justin is in a unique position to discuss HeroQuest, since he knows the writer.
Doug.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:02 pm (UTC)In other news, I think we did play HeroQuest once as the engine for American Empire's supersoldier section.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:14 pm (UTC)The engine is good ... they're still making Call of Cthulhu today, after all. But it's still an old engine.
Yes, considering who your GM is, there is little surprise that he took it for a test run and did something fairly far from the enclosed concepts with it.
I used it for Tianguo (http://waiwode.livejournal.com/tag/tianguo), my Ancient China game, and had a great time.
Doug.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-29 05:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-29 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 11:51 am (UTC)No, your Runequest (version 3) is an Edsel.
::B::
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:03 pm (UTC)I'm gonna hafta go with "Yes."
Glorantha is rad. Also some of the best gaming I've ever played has been RQ, albiet a custom world (and as usual, that was mostly the brilliance of the GM more than anything).
Good times.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:08 pm (UTC)It is lethal. Fact. And although healing magic was readily available, magic to let you get better from a "maim" result was not so easy to find. And dead was pretty much dead.
It's current incarnation, Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying (http://catalog.chaosium.com/product_info.php?cPath=37&products_id=1256) is a system that still strongly reflects its origins, although some things have been polished up.
Could you run Al-Qadim with RuneQuest? Absolutely. If I were to try such a thing, I would leave Sorcery (although the rules are a bit mind-bending) so you can have sorcerous Viziers (and what is a game of Al-Qadim without one?) and take Spirit Magic and make it the magic of the desert Sahir. Divine magic? I would probably have to do some serious revision.
Doug.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:19 pm (UTC)Not to heap lauds of glory upon your GM, but the entire idea of "mook rules" really show up after he used them when writing Feng Shui. And that was '96.
Have you taken a look at "Legend of the Burning Sands" yet?
And next time you're at a big convention hit up the "old game" section ... there are a number of the "Middle East" setting modules for D&D Bloodright. With it's usual cabal of evil monsters or sorcerors ruling some settings, and enlightened princes ruling others, I always thought the Bloodright stuff had in inherently 1,001 Nights style to it.
Doug.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:36 pm (UTC)I have not yet seen a copy of LBS, but I'm rather... reticent to take a look. If it puts Arabesque fantasy through the meat grinder the same way L5R did Asian fantasy, I may find the sausage...
Oh, man, that metaphor just got the hell away from me.
I haven't seen it yet, though. And I'm wondering why they are turning a failed CCG setting into an RPG a decade later.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 08:43 pm (UTC)Yes, it does. Putting the Egyptian/Senpet in there pretty much guarantees that. However, if one were to ask if it were a useful starting place? If you liked the d10 roll and keep system, you could do worse.
Two reasons: The "story" has never really torn itself away. It has proven difficult to re-cork the djinn bottle once they allowed super-insular Rokugan's story to escape its borders.
They are (for good or ill) listening to the fans (or at least that section of fans) who never stopped clamouring for an LBS game.
It's in the middle of my very large reading pile, so I haven't done more than flip through it yet. But from what I've seen, if you wanted a game set around the "Assassin's Creed" Crusade era you could certainly do a lot worse.
Doug.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 03:30 pm (UTC)If you wanted to run a modern day RQ, then I would recommend this (http://www.chaosium.com/article.php?story_id=246) in combination with Moon Design's RQ2 reprint collection of sourcebooks (plus a used copy of the RQ2 rules if you can find one cheap; the "collectability" of same seems to go in waves).
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 03:32 pm (UTC)This RQ 3 is a darn spiffy box, though.