Old School Adventures

[Eddy]

Hi

Does anybody know of any NEW, decent old school type Runequest adventures in the vein of say Borderlands or maybe White Dwarf adventures. Preferably set in  Prax, With minimal page count and not 50 NPCs to manage. I know there's the Jonstown Compendium thingy but the Drive Thru search only brings up the more popular stuff involving clans etc. Basically I want a an exploratory type scenario involving some classic Runequest monsters.

[Godlearner]

So various Holiday Dorastor supplements have dungeons and scenrious for this type of play. Not it Prax, but you could adapt. If you want something more specific, I can direct you better.

[Brian Duguid]

Is Jorthan's Rescue old school enough? It's not a dungeon bash, but it did originally appear in White Dwarf!

Of the Beer With Teeth material, Rocks Fall can be set pretty much anywhere and is short, straightforward and likely to be combat-oriented. Stone and Bone is also probably fairly easy to run (and can lead into some of their other scenarios). Both have classic RQ monsters.

All the Sandheart books have a Praxian connection, with several similarities to things like Borderlands (sandbox setting with a range of scenarios that can be run independently or in sequence).

At even bigger scale there are Ian Thomson's updated versions of his Pavis & Big Rubble Companion material, starting with City on the Edge of Forever. Plenty of scope to start a pretty epic Pavis-based campaign there.

I'm sure there are plenty more: there's a whole load of more recent scenarios from "new" writers that I've not dug through properly yet.

My strong recommendation would be to get the Jonstown Compendium Catalogue 2022, and the Jonstown Compendium Index 2023, as these give a great overview of the JC content, colour-coding it by the area they are located in, and with a helpful map of scenario locations.

[jajagappa]

As @Brian Duguid noted both the Beer with Teeth supplements and the Sandheart books noted above would be good choices based on what you requested.

[Nick Brooke]

Jonstown scenarios set in Prax: there isn't anything that's exactly what you're after. Stone and Bone comes closest (a skirmish vs. scorpion men), but that has some social bits at the start where you'll probably want to press fast-forward ("Don't tell me the plot, just give me something to hit!"), and the page-count isn't "minimal." The same team (Beer With Teeth) brought out The Gifts of Prax, The Lifethief and The Temple of Twins, which all have appendices of random Praxian encounters. You could ignore all the main plots ("Ugh! Social encounters and mythology, again! What's wrong with these people?") and just try to beat those up.

The Sandheart series is set in Sun County, Prax, and has an entirely non-clan context (you're Sun County cops); if you wanted to pick up one book with some wacky Praxian randomness, volume four has some encounters: that's The God Skin & Mad Prax. The second scenario in volume two is a fairly old-school wilderness trek and (small) dungeon job (Fortunate Sun), but it's got some plot, and you'll hate the first scenario, which is all about talking to farmers and working out what's going on.

The Rubble Redux books (Insula of the Waning Moon and Rising Sun) have combat encounters in the Big Rubble. Lots of statblocks and floorplans, not many social bits.

Korolstead is a old-school megadungeon complex with loads of floorplans. The Ruins of Bonn Kanach is an old-school lost city to explore. Some of the Holiday Dorastor books are dungeons (or deadly settlements) for Rune level parties to explore: start with The Temple of Heads, maybe? These ones aren't set in Prax, but they don't have lots of clan stuff and social NPC interactions (which I get the impression you're trying to avoid). Jamie Revell's stuff set in Prax has lots of NPCs (inc. some you can fight), but I'm not sure they're what you're after: they're more setting books than old-school dungeon-bashes.

If you want dungeons with a truly minimal page count, Davide Quatrini's short scenario outlines (two or three pages each) might be what you're looking for. He doesn't really use iconic RuneQuest monsters, most of the time, and you'll be doing a lot of work yourself to flesh them out. (They aren't my cup of tea, to be honest).

Edited May 18, 2023 by Nick Brooke

[Eddy]

Thanks guys, some good suggestions here.