Inspirations: RuneQuest

Back in the very early days, before I had seem much besides D&D and maybe a little bit of Champions and Traveller, one of the things that widened my eyes to the broader hobby was a copy of Ian Livingstone's Dicing With Dragons, which was an interesting book in a lot of ways.

Most obviously, Livingstone is an English writer and presented RPGs from an English perspective. One of the games he described in detail was Chaosium's RuneQuest, then in its iconic 2nd edition. It was, for a few years, my only exposure to RuneQuest, because though Livingstone talked about it as if it were a major RPG, it wasn't until later that I actually got to play it. And it was decades before I personally saw a copy of that fabled 2nd edition... but by then it had lost some of its impact, because I had already discovered the third edition, still crafted by Chaosium but this time published by Avalon Hill, a storied arrangement warranting an epic series of posts in its own right.

RuneQuest 3 rubbed a lot of existing RQ fans the wrong way and bashing it in favor of RQ2 was the hip thing to do for many years. It added a few new rules that some felt cluttered up the system, but more importantly it distanced the rules from Glorantha — one of the finest settings in the history of RPGs — as the default setting. I was unaware of any such drama at the time, of course, having never seen a live RQ2 book in the wild and therefore having no appreciation, except by vague hearsay, of how good some of that early Glorantha-based RQ stuff had been.

Time and a collecting budget gives one new perspective. But to this day I still feel that RQ3 was a better implementation than RQ2. The rules changes were almost all minor, and the big one, Sorcery, was a significant and welcome addition. The separation of RuneQuest from Glorantha, though, was very important and, I would argue, a good move for the game.

I think it can now be seen much more clearly that even in the early days there was a tonal disconnect between historically-colored, gritty RuneQuest and dreamy, mythic Glorantha. RuneQuest just wasn't an ideal match for the kind of game that Glorantha was increasingly being designed for. That had to have been a factor when the time came to design a new game system for Glorantha, when it appeared that RuneQuest was lost forever in the mire of Hasbro's buyout of Avalon Hill. The resulting game, HeroWars, which developed into something pretty terrific in its own right in time, was nothing at all like RuneQuest.

Despite this, Glorantha worked well enough with RuneQuest in the 2nd Edition days that many of those products have acquired legendary status. I think the reasons are twofold. One, those early books, the Griffin Mountain, Cults of Prax, Pavis and Big Rubble and the rest, are just that damned good. Glorantha has always shined brightest when presenting itself from the ground up from the perspective of the myth-tellers. When described from the top down Glorantha is weird and off-putting and yielded some really awkward and even useless products like the Glorantha book from the 3rd edition boxed set. When you try to present a coherent description of Glorantha as a whole it collapses into a haze of contradictions and half-explained but nevertheless vital elements.

The second reason is why I personally prefer 3rd edition over 2nd; RQ is a marvellous and very powerful engine for simulating a wide variety of fantastic and historical settings. I think tying it to a single milieu obscures that. It's one of the only games to treat magic in the same way as it's handled in, say, the Icelandic sagas; not as some arcane art practised by some dusty wizard shuttered up in a tower, but as one of the facts of everyday life in a world seen as mythic by its inhabitants. Anyone might throw a hex or cant his blade to sharpness, or invoke the blessings of a harvest goddess. All while not neglecting the power and subtlety of the dedicated practitioner.

Just when it seemed that RuneQuest might be dead forever, it came back in the guise of a new edition from Mongoose. This was, I would argue, a misfire in some respects, because the Mongoose edition of the rules took a good part of their core flexibility away and shunted it into supplement bloat. The core book felt like crippleware. Although everything that was lost eventually came back, I didn't feel Mongoose did right by RuneQuest until their second edition, now called MRQ2. But it resurrected RuneQuest as a viable brand after years in limbo. And very interestingly Mongoose opened up RuneQuest via the OGL, allowing them to continue publishing the MRQ2 rules as Legend after they lost the rights to call it RuneQuest... and allowing me to pilfer from it for An Age Undreamed Of.


After Mongoose the game went to Design Mechanism, which put together a 6th edition that is absolutely terrific, playing to all of the strengths of every edition of the game. It is a weightier system than RQ2, for certain, but it also does a lot to model almost any setting inspired by history and roughly realistic in tone. More importantly, it places characters firmly in the context of their societies within those settings, one of the game's traditional virtues.


Its five magic systems add a ton of flexibility, lacking only something more strictly along the lines of Stormbringer-style summoning... but you can import stuff from other BRP iterations easily enough, or build it from the tools already in RQ6. For clarity the book is second to none. I find myself in desperate need of this volume in hardcopy.

Inspirations: Hârn

Many of us who were around back in the day recall the memorable ads for Columbia Games' Hârn that ran in Dragon magazine throughout the early to mid 80s. I took note of them at the time, and one of the local hobby stores near me carried some of the product line, which I'm certain I at least leafed through. For whatever reason, though, it didn't take — I just didn't get it. My guess is that the detailed campaign material just ran well over my early teenaged head.

Cut to many years later. In the early 90s I had just left college for the first time and was looking for a campaign. There was an ad for a Rolemaster game on the board at a local hobby shop in Lakewood, Ohio. At that point I has owned the books for Rolemaster for some time but hadn't yet played, so I made the call and set up a meeting with Dave, the GM, to talk it over. Rolemaster I didn't need to be sold on... but Dave began to show me some really amazing-looking setting material for Hârn, that campaign world that I remembered from all those years before, but had more or less ignored at the time. He kept most of the written material close to the vest, of course. But he showed me the full-color heraldry, the calendar of religious holidays, the writeups of the deities and the glorious, glorious maps.

The full-color "regional" Hârn are done in a cartographic style by the setting's creator, the late N. Robin Crossby. Both beautiful and absolutely packed with information, they are the gold standard for RPG maps, and have in my judgement never been equaled for their combination of utility and aesthetic appeal. The local and kingdom-level maps are almost as stunning and just as useful, and the written background material is both rich and engaging, at least if you like Hârn's very medieval and somewhat low-fantasy approach.

It wasn't long before I started to collect Hârn stuff of my own. Some of that product had become quite hard to find by the mid 90s. Inevitably, I wanted to run campaigns set there myself... but it would be quite a while for that to really come to fruition. The product line evolved interestingly after that original core set; over the course of a number of Kingdom Modules covering the human and nonhuman nations of Hârn in immense detail, as well as a series of Encyclopedia Hârnica volumes that expanded on various other topics, the island of Hârn became increasingly thoroughly filled-in. At this point, although Hârn proper has seen relatively little development in recent years (but see below) almost every site or topic of interest on the island has a multi-page article about it. It's a perfect example, according to the tastes of some, of too much setting material filling in every imaginable gap until the GM has little room to maneuver.

I say that's misleading. Obviously, some GMs, happy to riff off of published material, thrive in settings that are very detailed out of the box. Also, in order for this to be true you have find all the material, which in the case of Hârn could be fairly difficult to do. And you have to make the decision to care about all that supplemental stuff. I say that the HarnWorld core set  has everything you need for a splendid and very loose sandbox campaign, including Hârn-specific encounter tables, travel and weather rules. If the relatively low implied amount of magic isn't enough for your tastes, you can always add more. If you do need or want more material, It's out there in spades. And the Hârn setting materials are system-free; you can use them with any rules set you like, although there is a set of dedicated HârnMaster rules that does some interesting things.


Aside, then, from my admiration of Hârn as a setting, I think it along with the HârnMaster have some very interesting general design principles built in. From the setting side there is the idea of a "framework" setting that provides rich high-level detail but maximum creative freedom for the group and GM, done elsewhere but, I think, never so well as here. The integration of travel and weather rules adds a great deal to those wanting to run an exploration-driven sandbox. And of course many details of the setting itself, including the abundant wilderness through which stretches long and perilous trade routes, the rationale for a near-infinite array of weird monsters, the precursor race which left an array of ruins and magical (or perhaps technological) artifacts laying about, and the interplanar gates found here and there, allowing for a number of interesting things to happen.

From the HârnMaster rules, there is a very interesting and elegant cosmology underlying an equally interesting magic system that's very reliant on player-created spells and magic items... without an Ars Magica-style array of rigid rules for designing them. Instead, GM are given latitude in determining what works for their table along with instructions to use the provided examples as guidelines... and a couple of different ways to approach informing players of whether their designs will work or not, a couple of which will satisfy the most Gygaxian tastes. There are also some really cool and clever rules for psionics, and a combat system that, like Rolemaster, deals out specific injuries rather than just marking off hit points.

Which brings me to one final oddity. In its creator's final years there was a dispute over creative control and ownership of Hârn and its world, with neither party having the financial wherewithal to settle the matter in the courts. The result is that two companies are publishing HârnWorld material. Columbia Games, the original publisher, is mostly doing revisions (some of them substantial) of older material set on the island of Hârn itself, made available as individual articles. The other, Kelestia Productions, is doing mostly all-new material set outside of Hârn proper, in the wider world of Kethira upon which Hârn is set. I have no idea how much angst there is between the two companies, but from a fan's perspective there is little to complain about, especially since Columbia had largely let Hârn fall fallow before the current status quo arose.

The Inspirations series highlights RPGs having special influence on or inspiration for the design of An Age Undreamed Of, the Sundered Reach or the World of Ytherra.