I was introduced to RuneQuest with the Avalon Hill release of RuneQuest 3rd edition. I liked what I saw enough to track down a copy of RuneQuest 2nd edition. The Avalon Hill release was made to fall apart under heavy use.
The ads for the Games Workshop release of RQ3 that I recall from White Dwarf were amazing. The art spoke to me.
Now, years later I've finally tracked down the GW releases at a fair price on eBay.
So many good systems, so little time.
I'm exceedingly jealous. AH RQ3 is my favorite RQ, and I've long wanted the GW hardbacks but have been unable to find them.
ReplyDeleteIs there a brief introduction to variations among the RuneQuest editions somewhere? All this OSR stuff has me wanting to learn my way around rule systems I never played, RuneQuest & Traveller among them.
DeleteI don't know if such a thing exists, however, originally there was RuneQuest by Chaosium. Then there was RuneQuest 2 by Chaosium, and then Chaosium ran into some problems and licensed it to Avalon Hill who created RuneQuest 3. When WotC bought out Avalon Hill, RuneQuest was all but dead.
DeleteThen, somehow Greg Stafford (one of the original creators) managed to get the RuneQuest name back and licensed it to Mongoose Publishing who released RuneQuest (often called MRQ for Mongoose RuneQuest). They released it under the OGL which led to "clones" like GORE (from Goblinoid Games) and OpenQuest (d101 Games).
MRQ had some rules problems and so they later released RuneQuest 2 (often called MRQ2), which was a very solid ruleset. However, the MRQ2 designer somehow got the rights from Mongoose, started The Design Mechanism, and released RuneQuest 6... basically a cleaned up MRQ2. Mongoose then re-released their MRQ2 ruleset as Legend.
So, basically, it's:
* Chaosium RQ
* Chaosium RQ2
* Avalon Hill RQ3
* Mongoose MRQ
* Mongoose MRQ2
* Design Mechanism RQ6
...whew.
(I should mention that the GW RuneQuest is Avalon Hill RuneQuest 3... basically GW had a publishing license for Avalon Hill's RQ3 overseas.)
DeleteThanks! I had read about the history, but it didn't give me much to go on re: relationships, but you filled in enough for me to pick a place to get started. I was a little sad to fail to find a print RuneQuest 6 (even on Lulu!), but I'll read through the PDF for now, I think.
DeleteYeah, wow, it's not anywhere, is it? Noble Knight, Amazon, eBay (well, I found 1 copy on eBay), heck, not even Moon Design has any. That's crazy.
DeletePossible explanation: they think they'll be updating it soon? I can hope they aren't pointlessly turning away business.
DeleteYou can get the cut down version RuneQuest Essientials and an adventure on Lulu
Deletehttp://www.lulu.com/spotlight/RuneQuest
Yeah, for some reason I wasn't interested in the essentials. I wanted to deeply grok the ideas for a game system that's influential and I didn't know.
DeleteIn any event, it turns out it's in print and on sale on the mercurial design site (under products) in a javascript plug-in store that doesn't work for me. If the PDF doesn't turn out to be enough I'll probably ask someone else to buy it and hand it to me.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThat golden sliver of time during which GW was known for amazing editions of licensed RPGs with beautiful full color art prints, and White Dwarf was a D&D/RPG magazine....I miss that era.
ReplyDeleteSeems GW had a much stronger sense of RPG design sensibilities than Avalon Hill that seemed to be shoehorning the drsign into a board game arsthetic as much as they could.
ReplyDeleteYou still need the Monsters and maybe the Land of Ninja books.
ReplyDelete