RuneQuest 6 Cover Story

We are very pleased to see that a new edition of RuneQuest has been published by Moon Design Publications. The game's print & PDF pre-order is now available. Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker (the later of whom headed-up the Mongoose iteration of RQ) are the primary authors. The book is hefty, at 458 pages, and aims to be a complete game in one package (taking the opposite tack from Mongoose). 

Cover art by Pascal Quidalt

The new edition also includes for the first time ever in RQ, magic mechanics for Mysticism. This will be useful for East Asian style games, which brings up the eternal question: is this edition Glorantha-specific. The answer is emphatically NO: the implied setting is Bronze age swords and sandals & magic, which is why I am covering it here. In fact, having just read another 130 pages of David Graeber's Debt: the First Five Thousand Years this week, I have a hankering to run a real-world Bronze age campaign.

Glorantha fans (myself included) will find that:

• Character generation includes culture and community, as well as Careers and membership in Cults
• All of the magic traditions associated with traditional Gloranthan RQ
• A bestiary with a number of Gloranthan creatures with the serial numbers filed off (i.e., different names). 

So, Glorantha-philes will have everything they need to run in Glorantha if they have any previous setting sourcebooks such as Mongoose's 2nd Age books, or Avalon Hill RQ box sets, etc.

Combat looks a bit more complex with more options than in the past (and definitely more complex than  Newt Newport's recent and well-received OpenQuest). I consider this a bit of a bug, as I am not a fan of overly complex simulationist combat systems. At least there is a combat tracker in the appendix.

And so a new era begins. To make this post a bit more Everwayan, and to show off just how classy this book is, I am going to quote the About the Cover text box from the book. You may want to click on the cover art above before you read the story:    

In search of the Eight Treasures of Meeros, Anathaym travelled into the ancient forests of Sykei. She knew the risks: Sykei had ever been the home of the slargr and it was her hope that she would avoid their hunting trails: the map sold to her by that wily merchant seemed reliable, as did the shield and spear
he'd supplied.

Never trust a merchant...

Anathaym didn't hear the slargr - a massive, old male - until it was upon her. She barely had time to whisper her Bladesharp matrix. The slargr's huge, clawed fists seized her shield as she brought it into position, just as she'd been trained, and the old leather straps, older, perhaps, than the slargr, groaned and snapped. She cursed the merchant but then she was calm. All she needed was to use her spear to place some distance between her and the monster...   

The merchant, she decided, would pay later...