Looking for an old D&D Runequest article

[Chaot]

Hi everyone.

Long ago someone (who probably posts here) wrote this amazing piece taking D&D monsters and giving their culture the RuneQuest treatment. It talked a bit about D&D's objectively evil status and reframed it as cultural relativism.

It was a beautiful piece. For the life of me I can't track it down. Ring any bells?

[Ian Absentia]

I'm getting a strong whiff of White Dwarf magazine circa the late '80s.  My existing collection is pretty sparse, though.  Anyone with a searchable PDF collection?

!i!

[Rick Meints]

Here's a list of RQ/Gloranthan related articles that were in Dragon magazine:

Dragon #40, August 1980.
Artifacts of Dragon Pass, Jon Mattson, page 26. RuneQuest artifacts. 

Dragon #51, July 1981.
The  Worshippers of Ratar, Eric Robinson, pgs 28-29. A Lhankor Mhy subcult with the rune spell Magic Resistance. 

Dragon #129, December 1987.
A Sorceror’s Supplement, Michael DeWolfe, pgs 46-47.  Twelve new sorcery spells for RQ3.

Dragon #132, March 1988.
Resourceful Sorcery, Michael DeWolfe. Power-gaming tips on how to use spells more effectively.

Dragon #144,  April 1989.
When Gods Walk the Earth, Paul Jaquays, pgs 46-50, 55. A good article on the summoning of greater spirits and avatars. It is gateway in nature, although the tables for avatar powers, statistics, and weaknesses are good.

Dragon #172,  August 1991.
Into the Spirit of Things, Michael DeWolfe, pgs 66-68. A collection of spirit spells and Divine magics.

Dragon #206, June 1994.
The Dragon Project, Sandy Petersen, pgs 16-18, 20. The background and history on a unique NPC dragon.

 

[Rick Meints]

4 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

I'm getting a strong whiff of White Dwarf magazine circa the late '80s.  My existing collection is pretty sparse, though.  Anyone with a searchable PDF collection?

There are no legally available searchable PDFs for White Dwarf magazine. There probably never will be. Alas, clear ownership of most of material is uncertain, and probably lies with the authors and artists of much of the material, and not with Games Workshop. That said, GW did try to produce an omnibus collection of the first 10 years of WD (1977-1987) and intended to make it available on CD-ROM. They pulled the product for legal reasons. It is similar to what happened with the Dragon Magazine #1-#250 set which was sold for a while and also pulled for legal reasons. Many years ago I was lucky enough to get a hold of the White Dwarf CD-ROM collection which had a limited release in Australia before being pulled from the shelves. It may be a pre-release promo. 

 

[Chaot]

Sorry, I should have been more specific. It was on someone's RuneQuest webpage. It was distinctly a fan article taking 'D&D monsters are Evil' and reframing it as religious/cultural conflict.

[Psullie]

That's a shockingly small list of articles, 7 in 14 years!

[soltakss]

15 minutes ago, Psullie said:

That's a shockingly small list of articles, 7 in 14 years!

But not bad for RQ articles in a D&D magazine.

[Ian Absentia]

23 minutes ago, soltakss said:

But not bad for RQ articles in a D&D magazine.

Too true.  White Dwarf had a much more vigorous crossover curatorship of both AD&D and RQ, particularly when Games Workshop was the UK publisher for Chaosium games and prior to diving deep into Warhammer and 40K.

However, as Chaot pointed out, neither magazine was the source of the article in question.

!i!

[MJ Sadique]

2 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

I'm getting a strong whiff of White Dwarf magazine circa the late '80s.  My existing collection is pretty sparse, though.  Anyone with a searchable PDF collection?

!i!

A searchable collection not but some index, maybe : https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?articleid=4599

This article from White Dwarf #39 seems pretty close in terme of title : "RuneRites: Monster Mash" , type of article "Stats: Monsters", system RuneQuest 2 by  Dave Morris, Graham Northing

A least, you can have all others articles for RQ2/3 from white dwarf with the link !

GOOD LUCK 😉

[Chaot]

I'm now positive that it was written by someone on this board, but on their own website. Maybe about running Forgotten Realms with Runequest? I don't think it was Pete Maranci and I don't see it on Simon Hibbs page.

I seem to remember it taking a race that D&D labels as objectively evil and building a legitimate cult around it to explain the cultural reasons why the race was considered hostile.

 

[Chaot]

3 minutes ago, MJ Sadique said:

A least, you can have all others articles for RQ2/3 from white dwarf with the link !

GOOD LUCK 😉

I appreciate the links to official articles but Ian Absentia is correct, this is a fan made thing.

[Ian Absentia]

42 minutes ago, Chaot said:

Maybe about running Forgotten Realms with Runequest? I don't think it was Pete Maranci and I don't see it on Simon Hibbs page.

I seem to remember it taking a race that D&D labels as objectively evil and building a legitimate cult around it to explain the cultural reasons why the race was considered hostile.

Hrmm...any chance this was a 13th Age: Glorantha essay, and not a RQG article as such?  The notion of running a D&D setting with a Glorantha-intersecting rules set, and punting the Enneagrammatic alignment system for cults sounds right up 13G's alley.

!i!

Edited July 3, 2020 by Ian Absentia
Getting my contemporary political terminology right.

[Chaot]

I think I read it while I was living in Manhattan. That would put the piece somewhere between 1998 and 2001. I'm pretty sure it was on one of those old websites. I don't think it was on the old RuneQuest mailing list digest though.

Edit: The reason it is so prominent in my mind right now is that WOTC is talking about revisiting the implications that their game worlds have in regards to racial and cultural stereotypes. That simple article did so much in taking a somewhat offensive 'race' and creating real cultural depth simply by viewing the monster through the RuneQuest lens rather than the D&D lens.

Edited July 3, 2020 by Chaot

[Ian Absentia]

6 minutes ago, Chaot said:

Edit: The reason it is so prominent in my mind right now is that WOTC is talking about revisiting the implications that their game worlds have in regards to racial and cultural stereotypes.

Well, it's about time (and hopefully they'll handle it a lot better than Netflix and Hulu have handled the AD&D episode of Community).  Maybe they'll finally catch up to where we were in 1980 when our adventuring party found a baby orc and we fell to arguing over whether or not a band of murder-hobos could raise it to be of a Good alignment.  I'd be interested in reading the article you mention, particularly with an eye toward how it would dovetail with what emerged in 13th Age, which was strongly influenced by RuneQuest.

!i!

[Chaot]

3 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

Well, it's about time

Yeah. Sadly there are a bunch of neckbeards crying that it's some sort of political correctness gone wild.

 I'd be interested in reading the article you mention, particularly with an eye toward how it would dovetail with what emerged in 13th Age, which was strongly influenced by RuneQuest.

This rusted old brain started moving again. It was a Dragonlance website!

https://web.archive.org/web/20060823145157/http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~sl2/dl/misc/changed.html

It's not as succinct as I remember but if you read his notes and then look at what he did with Ogres and evil mages you can plot a course on how to make D&D less offensive.

I want to thank everyone in this thread for all your help. I really needed your help to think through this!

[Ian Absentia]

1 hour ago, Chaot said:

Yeah. Sadly there are a bunch of neckbeards crying that it's some sort of political correctness gone wild.

Say it ain't so.  The path out of the 1970s is going to be a bumpy ride.

1 hour ago, Chaot said:

Yeah. Sadly there are a bunch of neckbeards crying that it's some sort of political correctness gone wild.

This rusted old brain started moving again. It was a Dragonlance website!

https://web.archive.org/web/20060823145157/http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~sl2/dl/misc/changed.html

Coolsies.  I'm interested in seeing how far back people proposed ideas before they eventually made publication (present company excepted).

!i!

[Chaot]

7 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

 I'm interested in seeing how far back people proposed ideas before they eventually made publication (present company excepted).

It's been around for a while. I think it was Terhali who had a respectable port of Dark Sun to RuneQuest. I forget exactly when I found the Elric! rules but I think it was around '97 or '98. I didn't have any extensive conversion and I wasn't playing a ton back then  but I did use Elric! them to run a few D&D and MERPS games.

The main thing that jumped out in feel was the number of opponents one could reasonably throw at players without slaughtering them. When Charles Green published his minion rules in Gods of Law and refined them later in Dragon Lines that really solved that problem. Now it's easy to have PCs wading through a battlefield like some 6th or 7th level D&D characters.

Rod Leary was working on Classic Fantasy for a long time before it was published.

Back in '09 I was converting and running BRP Ravenloft (and I might have a fully self-contained document for it when I'm on my deathbed.)

[g33k]

On 7/3/2020 at 6:43 PM, Chaot said:

Yeah. Sadly there are a bunch of neckbeards crying that it's some sort of political correctness gone wild.

...

Well THIS neckbeard is cheering, but planning to hold their feet to the fire if they don't follow through, or pull a "right hand giveth / left hand taketh away" stunt...

And looking for the weeping neckbeards muttering over the "political correctness gone wild" so I can hobble up & kick 'em in the shins...