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My preference is RQ1, but RQ2 is a solid game and totally playable. And it has a nice set of adventures.

There is also cult and guild borrowing that gets you 100 L * POW (and other attributes) loans for training. That helped a little bit. I use the previous experience in my RQ1 campaign PLUS the cult loan (which can be used for cult skills as well as cult spells). But yea, back in the day, characters started off pretty weak. Yet we still had loads of fun... I ran a campaign in the 90s and used RQ3 style previous experience and that worked pretty well also.

Does purchase of the PDFs give a coupon towards the hard cover like usual?

Oh, hi Mike!

Do I know you by a different name?

For what it's worth, I have openings in my 1st edition (1978) RuneQuest campaign. We play from 8:00 PM Pacific Time to 10:00 PM every other Wednesday on Roll20 with Google Meet for audio. The next session will be July 19th. The campaign is definitely more old school and more "adventure and treasure seeking" and not clan oriented as the current rules tend to encourage, and it's definitely my Glorantha. Frank

Thanks, though sadly it doesn't seem like that came up with a definitive timeline... Ah well, back to not really being sure what the date is in my campaign, and not sure how much I actually care... Also, time passes really fast when the PCs get loads of treasure and take a couple seasons off to train... My campaign is now in year 5.

Well, I meant all the RQ1, RQ2, and RQ3 adventures also 🙂

Is there anything that places all the official adventures on the timeline? Well, and the JC adventures also...

RQ1 Only has Rune Lords and Rune Priests. RQ2 adds Initiates (becoming an Initiate is on p.54) and Orlanth Initiates get some 1/2 price skills and spells just as in Cults of Prax. So Lay members weren't described with obligations and benefits until Cults of Prax, though the Orlanth description does mention Lay members in a paragraph, just no obligations or benefits. Kygor Litor describes Lay members a bit more, mentioning some spells they have access to (but no discounts) and more requirements to join as a Lay member. I personally pretty much ignore the cult descriptions in the rule book other than Black Fang Brotherhood since Orlanth and Kyger Litor are given full descriptions in Cults of Prax.

Hmm, is part of the problem here the increased power level of starting RQG characters such that they need more advanced opponents? When I started playing RQ1, I cut my teeth on trolls and trollkin with a few battle magic spells each. By the time I was dealing with more advanced NPCs, I had the combat system down well, and got to see what PCs did with their growing array of battle magic spells. Playing at that level, rune spells rarely saw action. And as I have mentioned before, balancing encounters was never much of an issue. Sure, some encounters were probably over powered versus the PCs, but TPKs never happened, so the PCs found a way to win, or disengage before losing too many PCs.

Well, the OP in this thread said: Nothing about power levels... Though I get that was a question in the other thread. But to run higher powered NPCs with lots of options, I start from the tracking I do, and then I just layer on picking from the larger set of options. Now with RQ1/2 the rune magic is sort of easier to manage because once the NPC has used his Shield spell, unless he had several, he doesn't have that anymore. The big Thanatar battle I ran, the floating skull Thanatar Priest couldn't summon another Shade because the PCs had destroyed the one he first summoned back in the Rubble, and he hadn't had time to gain POW to sacrifice for a new one. I don't know how RQG would handle that, but it sounds like the rune pool would just let him summon a new shade.

OK, how do I do it... Note that I run 1st edition RQ, but I couldn't imagine doing things any differently with any other edition... Sometimes I will use resources like FOES or Trolls & Trollkin to provide quick sheets for the opposition. Note that I prefer the earlier form of each NPC is an individual as opposed to the later form (Borderlands for example) where all the opposition of the same type is identical. Sometimes I'll note damage and stuff right in the module (blasphemy...) Sometimes I'll take notes on scrap paper. I track POW used and spells cast individually. If I'm running RQ, I'm running it because I like this level of detail. If I want to track less detail about opposition, I'll run something different. Oh, and I have house rules for hit points, often I will recalculate though sometimes I'll just use the NPCs are written in a module. It depends on my mood. But as I use average of CON and SIZ, you can bet that I'll be refiguring the hit points for anything that has SIZ much larger than CON. And conversely I'd probably do the same if SIZ was much less than CON. What I really need to do is make a Google Sheet combat tracker where I can just input the NPCs CON, SIZ, and POW at the top and everything automatically calculates and then I also have a space to input damage to each location (and then total HP loss is automatically tallied also). On the other hand that would be annoying... Maybe I could make something work that was easy to print... As to balance, in the other thread I noted that as an old school gamer, I'm not that concerned. Sure, if I'm setting up an adventure for my PCs, I'll make some effort to match power level. But I'm not going to worry about perfection there. The PCs can surrender or run away or not even engage in the first place. And if a TPK happens, it happens, and we move on. On the other hand I can't recall EVER having a TPK in RuneQuest... Or having to invoke deus ex machina to save the PCs (I've done that in the past in other games). I've had plenty of PCs die. And the PCs have retreated after watching one of their companions explode.

Write up a new monster, and when it kills all the PCs, say "oops" and have the players roll up new PCs. Now they know there's a creature out there they can strive to get what it takes to be able to fight it... 🙂 No, I get the need to understand balance, but for that, in RuneQuest, you need more than a bestiary. You need sample scenarios that give some idea where on the PC power curve they are. Note that that wasn't done back in the day, well, maybe Borderlands was a bit tailored towards beginning characters, and Apple Lane was also reasonably suitable for beginning characters. RQ players should also remember that surrender is meaningful in the setting. Ransoms can get paid. Oh and ask Dave about Resurrection... Poor Dave, his PC died of fright enveloped by a Shade in his first session. His PC died I think twice more... Fortunately they were in the Big Rubble and Chalana Arroy healers were handy (and I was generous). Eventually his PC was the one whose butterfly net "invention" (wielded by another PC) bagged the floating skull Thanatar priest that had summoned the shade, his axe smashed the now trapped skull... After more than a year of play... We play mostly every other week for 2 hours. The skull had fled the Rubble for Dyskund caverns, connecting with the Thanatar temple there). Oh, and yea, I probably didn't run two Rune Priests and numerous Initiates to their full potential as pointed out, a GM will never gain the familiarity with his NPCs that players have with their PCs. Oh, and the skull was another made up "monster" created from a Roll20 freebie token... Cults of Terror doesn't mention anything like it, but it seemed like a fun thing that maybe a Thanatar Priest could achieve... As to GM advice, yea, it would be cool if we could collect some GMs ways of running things. I'm sure my way is different from others, and I don't know that I could manage to get my way of running down on paper, but over nearly 45 years of running RuneQuest (RQ is the ONLY RPG I have run EVERY decade since I first bought it sometime in 1978, even counting all editions of D&D, I didn't run any D&D in the 1990s), I have definitely developed my own techniques.

Here is what I have to say about monsters grabbed from a thread about why I like RuneQuest from another forum (note that I use RQ1 from 1978): I like that a pretty modest bestiary (64 entries) supplemented with the Gateway Bestiary (99 entries) is more than enough monsters, maybe make up an occasional monster. Optionally, get some of those Gateway Bestiary entries with a few extras from Trollpak and other supplements. Mostly you need the sources outside the rule book for more breadth of natural animals and things like giant spiders. A workable set of bestiary entries could probably be collated into something like 100 entries, reaching beyond that only for the occasional special case. Actually, a good working set is probably some 20-30 entries that are used most of the time, most of those taken from the rule book. More or less depending on how important natural animal encounters are to you. I would say that at least 90% of the encounters I run use monsters from that list of 64 from the core book. Sometimes I drop a Mistress Race Troll or a Giant Spider. If I am using the encounter tables from Borderlands, a few things not in the core book might show up. Sometimes a scenario has a special monster in it. I used the Vough from the Gateway Bestiary for one encounter. I made up a monster when I dropped a Roll20 freebie token onto a Dyson Logos map I was using for a scenario. I have the RQG Bestiary and have perused it, but I don't know if I've actually used anything from it yet. I also have all the RQ3 supplements except Land of Ninja but haven't used anything from there in my current campaign. Really, as has already been mentioned in this thread, the fact that ANY monster, particularly the more humanoid and fully intelligent species, can be used as the basis for a fully detailed NPC means you need a lot fewer monsters. I have run fantasy campaigns with even fewer monsters. The history of lots of monsters arises primarily from early D&D. First off, you needed the "humanoid of the week" because Orcs were 1 HD. Second, in the early days, there was a lot of angst about players knowing the monster stats, so GMs were constantly on the prowl for new monsters. I think that a different early mindset would have resulted in supplemental bestiaries being less popular. But now we have that culture, and game systems that don't provide get a ding from some folks. There's also a stronger desire for "universal" systems, so folks are looking for variety so they can match some particular setting. And as is mentioned, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating additional bestiaries so long as they don't copy something they don't have permission for...