Olias of Bunhillow

I love it. I can use that as jumping off point for a bit of intrigue (maybe give one side the appearance of higher social status) and highlight the idea of family and clan loyalty. All while reinforcing the ideas of negotiation = survival and bloodshed will lead to bloodshed.

This is what I was worried about. It's easier to fudge things I roll if it gets out of hand, but I don't want challenges to just be miss miss miss. Even with a 60/40 it still feels like they would be missing a lot. I've played other BRP games and other non BRP percentile based systems and they feel like they swing wildly. That was my initial thought upon reading through the lore. It works with the guild and cults as well, getting some basic jobs guarding this or that to get some lunars to pay off part of their starting debt. Also a good way to introduce them to the society. They are more used to a D&D medieval fantasy world and it will probably take a while to adjust to the more bronze age/early iron age cultural feel which attracted me to this game in the first place. Ha! Definitely newbs all around then. The feel of this game is very different to anything we've played. The closest it comes to is Unknown Armies and that's only the potential deadliness and percentile rolls.

Thanks for all the advice so far. It all seems like really good advice. I saw the ransom rules in the book and your vocal support of it actually has me excited to implement it in my game. This has been so helpful just to read through myself. I thought I had a decent grasp on character creation after reading the rules through a couple time but having them all in one place as opposed to sprinkled through multiple chapters really helps. As a follow up question. How recommended is starting the characters out at the really low power level that the book defaults to or should I pull in the previous experience rules from the appendix? It seems like they will be failing a lot by default. Do you find it teaches the players to be more cautious especially given they don't get much more robust HP wise?

So I'm getting ready to run my first game of RuneQuest using the 2nd edition rules. What tweaks or changes have y'all found useful in improving your game experience without changing the core of the game? Also what pitfalls have you learned to avoid in your experience playing the game? Really looking forward to introducing RuneQuest to my group. Thanks!