A thing about RuneQuest… in both RQ2 and this latest edition, Robert E. Howard and Hyboria are name-checked.

People get all caught up in the shininess of references to the The Histories and The Shahnameh and all (certainly I do!) But the game assumes at some point a company of badasses is going to wander into some ruins and battle some fucked up shit.

I think the HeroQuest run was more anthropologically focused than the game needs to be. This conversation has actually helped me see where I am going with what I want to do with RQG — and that’s seeing the conflicts of Glorantha as if through the eyes of Le Guin. The cultures, conflicts, and physics of Glorantha are all intertwined and built off the backs of these powerful forces/gods/magic that might as well be “high tech as magic” if someone were writing one of those cynical “religions is really tech” stories. (But that is in fact not the case in Glorantha.)

Gregor Vuga As for the length of RQG… yeah. There is an economy of words in early RPGs that is hard to beat.

That said, if you were playing RQ2, you’d still want to pick up Cults of Prax and maybe Cults of Terror. From those you’d have enough to build out anything you wanted. (Either from those Cults, or building out you own world with those as examples.) So the page count was already going up.

RQG adds in a LOT of stuff that simply has not been part of RQ — family background charts for PCs, using Runes, Passions, and Skills for Augments, Rune magic that fully integrates Runes in the setting and the mechanics (which didn’t exits in RQ2). And a lot more art.

The fact is the text is wordier and clunkier than it needs to be, leading to some fuzziness in clarity. But if you can get past that, as Brand Robins says, it’s RQ2 with a lot of ideas ported from Pendragon and sort of awesome for that.

I’ve never played RQ (only HQ) and I’m really looking forward to giving this a spin.