RuneQuest

• 1. Introduction

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  RuneQuest arrived in 1978 as a direct challenge to the reigning assumptions of fantasy role-playing. Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James designed a game where characters did not gain more hit points as they grew in power, where every fighter could cast a spell, and where a lucky blow from a weaker opponent could kill a stronger one outright. Published by The Chaosium, the game was set in the mythical world of Glorantha, a world its creator Greg Stafford had first imagined for a board game three years earlier.

  What made RuneQuest genuinely unusual was its foundation: percentile dice, direct skill improvement, and a combat system that tracked exactly which limb you had just injured. These were not merely stylistic preferences. They produced a fundamentally different kind of play than the dominant alternative, Dungeons and Dragons. Within a year of release, critics were already calling RuneQuest the second most popular fantasy role-playing game in the world.

  The game's journey across four decades carried it through a tangle of publishing deals, trademark disputes, a near-cancellation at the hands of a toy company, and a grassroots Kickstarter revival. How a game designed by four people for a world invented for a board game became the foundation of an entire family of games is a story worth hearing.

• 2. Glorantha and Its Origins

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  In 1975, Greg Stafford released White Bear and Red Moon, a fantasy board game built around a world he had invented. The Chaosium, a publishing company Stafford had set up specifically to release that game, brought it to market. The world of Glorantha underpinned everything. It was, as one writer later put it, a vibrant living world with established geography, history, and religion, at a time when many other role-playing settings were, in the critic's words, cobbled together.

  The Dragon Pass region became the default setting for RuneQuest adventures. Set on the northern continent of Glorantha, it comprises five homelands: Sartar, Prax, Old Tarsh, Lunar Tarsh, and the Grazelands. Each has its own distinctive culture. The geography itself shapes the politics. Several mountain passes connect the region to surrounding areas, and the resulting traffic of peoples has created what the source material describes as a melting pot, with an unusually high variety and concentration of non-human species.

  Religion in Glorantha operates through cults, each with three tiers of membership. Lay members have no insight into the true nature of the cult. Initiates are directly connected to a god or greater power and receive magic in return. Rune levels are the priestly and martial leaders, working toward the god's ideals. The basic rules describe twenty-one such cults. An adventurer's access to them depends on their rune affinities, homeland, and occupation. This interweaving of geography, faith, and character identity was, in 1978, something no other game was offering.

• 3. The Mechanics That Mattered

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  Steve Perrin designed the combat system with mock medieval combat in mind. He was familiar with it through the Society for Creative Anachronism. Combat in RuneQuest is divided into Strike Ranks, an initiative system driven by dexterity, size, and weapon. Attackers roll their skill; if they succeed, the defender may parry or dodge.

  The hit location subsystem set the game apart from every competitor. A successful attack lands not on a generic pool of hit points but on a specific part of the body, determined randomly or by deliberate aim. A hit to the leg, the weapon arm, or the head each carries its own mechanical and narrative consequences. RPG historian Stu Horvath, writing in his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, noted that characters did not gain more hit points as they progressed, making deadly combat a constant threat. Players who wanted to keep their limbs learned to solve problems without drawing swords.

  Task resolution outside combat runs on the same percentile logic. A character with a climbing skill of 35% needs to roll 35 or lower on a hundred-sided die to succeed. A roll of 1 out of every twenty of the target number produces a critical success; 1 in 5 gives a special success; a roll of 96-100 is always a failure; and a roll of exactly 100 is a fumble. Skill improvement uses the same die in reverse. To advance that 35% climbing skill, a player must roll higher than 35. The better you already are, the harder it is to improve.

• 4. Magic for Everyone

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  At the time of RuneQuest's release in 1978, dividing adventurers into those who use magic and those who do not was standard practice. RuneQuest discarded that division entirely. Every adventurer had access to magic. An adventurer's magical strength was proportional to their connection to the divine or their natural skill at sorcery.

  In the current edition, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, every character also has connections to the various runes of Glorantha, and those connections govern spellcasting. To cast an Ignite spell and create a fire, a player rolls under their fire rune affinity. The three main schools of magic in the current rules are spirit magic, rune magic, and sorcery, though other forms such as dragon magic exist outside normal adventurer access.

  This design choice had a strategic consequence Horvath identified in his retrospective analysis. When combat is genuinely dangerous and all characters carry some magical capability, the setting's details become load-bearing in a different way. Players need to know the world well enough to talk their way through problems, find clever alternatives, and draw on the specifics of cult membership and rune affinity. The twenty-one cults described in the basic rules are not optional flavor. They are the infrastructure through which magic and motivation are both delivered.

• 5. A Troubled Publishing Journey

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  By 1984, Chaosium had published over twenty supplements for the second edition, but distribution was a bottleneck. To reach a wider market, Chaosium struck a deal with Avalon Hill, which published a third edition that year. The agreement split ownership awkwardly. Avalon Hill held the RuneQuest trademark. Chaosium retained copyright over the rules text and required approval of all Glorantha-related content. The result was that the third edition's default setting became the Dark Ages of fantasy Europe. A separate booklet allowed Gloranthan play, but the core identity of the game had been diluted.

  RPG historian Stu Horvath later called it an ill-fated edition that never made the kind of money either company had expected. Avalon Hill began work on a fourth edition, RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha, intended to restore the tight RuneQuest-Glorantha relationship. But in 1994 Stafford refused permission, unhappy with Avalon Hill's stewardship. Avalon Hill then started a mechanically unrelated game under the RuneQuest name, originally called RuneQuest: Slayers. When Hasbro acquired Avalon Hill in 1998, that project was canceled despite being near completion. The copyrights reverted to the original authors, who released it for free under the name RuneSlayers.

  Also in 1998, following the financial failure of the collectible card game Mythos, Stafford and fellow shareholder Sandy Petersen left management of Chaosium. Stafford took a subsidiary company, Issaries, Inc., with him, and through it controlled the Glorantha property. He partnered with Robin D. Laws to publish Hero Wars in 2000, a new game system set in Glorantha. In 2003 it was renamed HeroQuest after Issaries acquired the HeroQuest trademark and the RuneQuest trademark from Hasbro.

• 6. Revival and the Mongoose Years

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  Mongoose Publishing entered the picture in August 2006 with a new edition of RuneQuest, built under a license from Issaries. Because Chaosium still held copyright over the prior rules text, Mongoose's team, led by co-founder Matthew Sprange, had to recreate the function of earlier editions without reusing a word of the original. They released the result under the Open Game License. The official setting shifted to Glorantha's Second Age, whereas all previous editions had covered the Third Age.

  In January 2010, Mongoose published a heavily revised edition written by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker, known among fans as MRQ2. In May 2011, Mongoose and Issaries parted ways. MRQ2 was rebranded as Legend and released in late 2011 under the Open Gaming License. Nash and Whitaker then formed The Design Mechanism and in July 2011 announced a licensing agreement with Issaries for a sixth edition, which arrived in July 2012. It drew heavily on MRQ2 and aimed at rules adaptable to many settings, though it still used the Gloranthan runes even without Gloranthan content.

  In 2013, Stafford sold Issaries outright, including the Glorantha setting and both the RuneQuest and HeroQuest trademarks, to Moon Design Publications. Moon Design had published the second edition of HeroQuest under license in 2009 and maintained the Design Mechanism's RuneQuest license after the acquisition. In June 2015, Stafford and Petersen retook control of a financially troubled Chaosium and arranged a merger with Moon Design, which placed Moon Design's management team in charge of Chaosium.

• 7. Return to Glorantha

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  In 2015, the newly reconstituted Chaosium ran a Kickstarter campaign to produce a hardcover reprint of the second edition and PDFs of its supplements, under the title RuneQuest Classic. The campaign succeeded. In 2016 it was announced that The Design Mechanism and Moon Design had parted ways, and the sixth edition would continue as Mythras. Shortly after, a new official edition was announced: RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

  The new edition was previewed on Free RPG Day 2017 with the release of a quickstart module. The PDF of the full rules followed in May 2018, with the printed book arriving later that year. Officially abbreviated RQG, the new edition draws heavily on the Chaosium second edition while incorporating ideas from later editions. A steady stream of products has followed: a Bestiary, adventure books, and reference material.

  In 1996, a reader poll in Arcane magazine ranked RuneQuest fifth among the fifty most popular roleplaying games of all time. Editor Paul Pettengale attributed this to the game's intricate and highly original campaign setting, praising a world that combined high-fantasy heroism with the gritty realities of cross-humanoid racism and the problems of daily life. The cults, he wrote, gave the game a level of depth which other fantasy systems could only envy. Writing for the 2007 book Hobby Games: The 100 Best, Jennell Jaquays put the game's historical influence plainly: after RuneQuest and Glorantha, she wrote, detailed fantasy worlds would become the norm, not the exception.

• 8. The BRP Legacy

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  In 1980, Chaosium distilled the RuneQuest system into a simplified and generic form, edited by Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis, and published it as Basic Role-Playing, or BRP. Derived from the first two RuneQuest editions, BRP became the engine for a significant portion of Chaosium's subsequent catalog. Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu both arrived in 1981. Worlds of Wonder followed in 1982, Superworld and ElfQuest in 1983-1984, Pendragon and Hawkmoon in 1985, and Nephilim in 1992. Outside Chaosium, the science-fiction game Other Suns, published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1983, also used BRP.

  Each game adapted the core rules to its genre. Pendragon, for instance, replaced the percentile scale with a 1-20 scale and a single twenty-sided die. The sole Chaosium role-playing game published without any variant of BRP was Prince Valiant: The Story-Telling Game in 1989, which substituted coin tosses for dice.

  In 2004, Chaosium released a print-on-demand version of the third edition rules with all trademarks removed, under three separate titles. Four years later, in 2008, they released a comprehensive single-volume edition of Basic Roleplaying, running to four hundred pages and incorporating material from across the BRP game family. That book carries optional rules for fantasy, horror, and science fiction, but contains no setting-specific material, a deliberate choice that left the engine available for anyone to apply. Dan Joyce, reviewing RuneQuest retrospectively for Arcane magazine, put the original game's contribution in stark terms: RuneQuest broke the FRP mould.