RUNEQUEST 6TH EDITION

[Trifletraxor]

RuneQuest – Sixth Edition of the Iconic Roleplaying Game. Created in 1978 by Steve Perrin, Ray Turney and friends, RuneQuest is the classic roleplaying game of fantastic adventure with heroes and magic. Now in a brand new edition, RuneQuest is updated and expanded by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker. Everything you need for fabulous roleplaying adventure is contained in a single volume that has been designed to support any genre of fantasy. The game retains all the key concepts and hallmarks of its earlier versions, but requires no familiarity with the previous editions.

In RuneQuest your characters are defined by their culture, career, community, background, comrades, skills, magic and cults. Progression is through skill advancement – not levels or similarly abstract concepts. As your characters adventure and quest, their capabilities improve and their relationships deepen and strengthen. Players and Games Masters have complete flexibility over what can be achieved, and the way characters develop is entirely dependent on choices players make, depending on their characters’ aspirations and motivations. Games Masters receive a huge amount of support through the RuneQuest rules. All the concepts and game mechanics are explained clearly with options and considerations explored and presented for ease of use. You need only this rulebook for many years of exciting and imaginative play.

RuneQuest contains everything needed for play:

• Character Creation – building your character through the familiar characteristics, through developing culture and community relationships, choosing a career, and gaining basic equipment according to social class.

• Skills – What they do, how they work, and how to handle many different circumstances (degrees of difficulty, critical and fumbled rolls, opposed skills, group skills, and so on).

• Economics and Equipment – Arms and armour, tools, clothing, accommodation... everything your character needs as he or she begins on their life of adventure.

• Combat – RuneQuest’s combat system is unique, dynamic and geared towards adventurous realism. Gaining success over an opponent generates Special Effects that can rapidly turn the course of a fight. Copious advice is presented on balancing combat skills and styles, through to handling rabble and underlings.

• Magic – No less than five very different forms of magic are presented and explored, with complete lists of spells and effects. How magic is defined and used in different fantasy settings and campaign worlds is examined in detail. The Runes, what the represent and how they work, is clearly presented.

• Cults and Brotherhoods – Religious, magical and secular organisations, as well as other kinds of societies are detailed the Cults and Brotherhoods rules. Cults have been an important and traditional part of RuneQuest, and they are covered in significant detail along with templates for many different kinds of cult, order, school and so on for Games Masters and Players to build upon for their own campaigns.

• Creatures - Over 50 creatures are fully detailed, including several non-human player character races. This chapter also offers complete guidance on how to use creatures effectively in RuneQuest games, and notes on how to design your own.

• Games Mastery – Copious notes, thoughts and guidance on how to Games Master RuneQuest games. Areas for consideration are summarised, options explored, and different ways of using the rules offered. An invaluable chapter for new and old RuneQuest Games Masters alike…

• Anathaym’s Saga – Numerous examples of play and how the rules are used are provided through Anathaym’s Saga. Follow Anathaym, her sister Kara, Mju the Mystic and Kratos the Sorcerer as the RuneQuest rules are illustrated and explained.

By Lawrence Whitaker and Pete Nash. 456 pages. Published by The Design Mechanism July 2012.

Edited September 28, 2012 by Trifletraxor

[Nightshade]

I just wanted to mention I had a chance to read Steve Perrin's copy of this a couple weeks ago, and wanted to mention that it sold me on it enough that when my finances recover a bit I'm going to buy the PDF of it (I don't buy physical books any more unless and until I actually get around to running the game, and that isn't liable to be for quite a while).

Good work gentlemen.

[seneschal]

There's currently a nice review at rpg.net.

[url=http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15749.phtml]

I tried to post the link, but am getting an error message, generated either here or by rpg.net.

Edited December 2, 2012 by seneschal

[Pindar]

I finished reading my copy at the weekend.

On the whole I could see nothing to recomend RQ6 over BRP.

I like the new sorcery rules and pretty much didn't care for the rest, I don't like the new combat rules at all.

[Mankcam]

Perhaps neither could be recommended over the other, but rather, instead of the other. BRP BGB is great for covering many different settings, whereas RQ6 has a strong focus on fantasy settings. The two rule sets would play a little differently. I do like some of the RQ6 melee mechanics and they have certainly done a better job with magic than in Chaosium's RQ3.

However my group pretty much knows RQ3 and Call of Cthulhu, so I won't change things too much with them considering they have a good grasp of BRP. It I had a new group to play with I might consider RQ6 however, just to see how it all plays out. Either way I think they both have pretty good system mechanics as I read them, enough to share between the systems which I suspect many GMs are doing.

I'm certainly interested in checking out some upcoming RQ6 titles, I think I could easily use them with BRP mechanics if I keep gaming with my current group of friends.

Edited January 8, 2013 by Mankcam

[silent_bob]

I finished reading my copy at the weekend.

On the whole I could see nothing to recomend RQ6 over BRP.

I like the new sorcery rules and pretty much didn't care for the rest, I don't like the new combat rules at all.

I agree. I think the enhanced combat rules from Classic Fantasy are a much better fit for BRP since they were designed as a BRP supplement.

I am running an RQ one shot this weekend at my local game shop and the conversion was a snap.

[rust]

In my view the main advantage RQ6 has compared to BRP is the presentation.

While BRP can be quite confusing for someone new to the game, RQ6 is orga-

nized and written in a very clear way, and therefore rather easy to compre-

hend and "get into". Otherwise I would agree that the two systems are just

different, without one being "better" than the other in any way.

[skarl]

I love, love, love RQ6 and I come from a strong old school D&D background (I have been responsible for this AV&ES for nearly four years now (although I played a bunch of RQ in the 90's. I love the lack of Glorantha material so I can use my blog's world with heavy Dunsany/CAS/Middle Earth imprinting. I would give it two thumbs up any day.

[Mankcam]

While I've got some time off work I'm really starting to sink my teeth into a few titles in my collection that I've only perused up until now, with RQ6 amongst them. I kinda like most of the rules in it so far, esp combat manoeuvres, I think they could play out quite well. I was initially put off by the lack of total HP when I read MQ2 and still am to some extent. I know during actual game play it is less book keeping, but sometimes HP is a quick way to size up a critter when reading creature descriptions. No big issue really, more just personal taste after playing AHRQ3 for many, many years.

I think one of the strengths that really strikes me with RQ6 is the char gen, its quite simple but yet has alot of that old school crunch in regards to life-path etc, including family history, connections, contacts, background events etc. Also the book has a decent ammount of equipment lists, something which is also old school and quite useful. All in all it is a great product for fantasy, a great buy in my opinion

Edited January 10, 2013 by Mankcam

[jp42]

RQ6 is a quandary for me. Call-backs to my memories of RQ2, back in the early 80's, cheek against jowl with modern concepts of combat resolution like special effects and combat styles. Fantastic adaptations of the magic systems that go back to RQ3, plus the addition of mysticism, but skill sets that are less finely grained than even RQ2. It's also the game that keeps drawing my attention back, away from the even more realistic games that I love, like GURPS, Hero, even BRP. I don't know if it'll happen or not, but the next fantasy game I run will likely be in RQ6.

[TrippyHippy]

It depends what you want in a game system. For me, the magic and combat systems of BRP are functional rather than evocative, while the RQ6 ones are more deliberately flavoursome. I prefer character generation in RQ6 too.

[smjn]

Finished my first read-through a couple of days ago (so no actual play experience yet) and my general impression is that RuneQuest 6 is a very good system for what it sets out to be. The general vibe is that RQ6 is a fantasy roleplaying toolkit, since it doesn't contain a default setting, but is otherwise a complete game as advertised.

I come from a RQ3 backrground with a little Stormbringer thrown in and when I started reading the 6th edition at first I was not impressed. But when I got further and started to see the big picture it began to grow on me. When I got to the chapters about magic I was very much sold.

The reason I didn't like it at first was that I felt it was a bit dry read and the examples were not very interesting and evocative. Also there was—and I still think this is true—not enough of them. Somehow RQ3 always seemed to feed my imagination much more, but this may be because I got it in my preteens more than twenty years ago and things were very different back then.

The sample setting of Meeros also seemed a bit uninspiring and the lack of a real setting with existing and/or promised support a bit annoying. But then it hit me that the RQ6 core rules alone are really intended for GMs interested in setting building and the Meeros examples are actually very good in showing how to do that. Also the lack of a deeper setting integration was the right decision in this context.

Many people on this forum and elsewhere seem to really highlight the magic rules as something brilliant and I wholeheartedly agree. They are very well written and the best part is that every kind of magic is very different both mechanically and storywise. So its not just page after page of supposedly different types of magic that essentially do the same thing but instead the rules really set a person's imagination to motion with a lot of great ideas.

Some minor points are that I wasn't much impressed by the art. Most of it was pretty 'meh', but a few bits were very good. The cover of course is beautiful and the obvious reference to RQ2 a very nice touch. One point, almost (but not quite :-)) not worth mentioning is that I didn't much care for the "funny" (for lack of a better word) names of monsters' combat styles such as "Ferocious Fracas" instead of something dull and undescriptive like "Giant Baboon". But that is just the kind of person I am.

The relative lack of examples still bothers me somewhat. It would be very good if The Design Mechanism would produce a short (free) electronic document containing for example the usual detailed one or two page example of combat to help bring the combat system alive and make us understand it better. Longer examples of other kind of situations would also be highly appreciated, especially if based on real life actual play.

All in all I would choose RQ6 for fantasy over the BGB any day and when more stuff comes out for it, probably even over RQ3. But I'm not the kind of guy who enjoys creating his own original worlds, so I'm absolutely anxious about having to wait for the upcoming Adventures in Glorantha. But I also want to see the Kickstarter campaing start so I can get my vanity hardcover version of the core rules.

Edited March 6, 2013 by smjn
Typo in title

[Pete Nash]

The relative lack of examples still bothers me somewhat. It would be very good if The Design Mechanism would produce a short (free) electronic document containing for example the usual detailed one or two page example of combat to help bring the combat system alive and make us understand it better. Longer examples of other kind of situations would also be highly appreciated, especially if based on real life actual play.

Loz is currently working on something to help with this. The main trouble with example combats, detailed combat examples I mean, is that they can become very tedious to read - and more often than not, actually lead to more questions and confusion. A large element of any combat is GM rulings on position and tactical situation, which cannot easily be explained in the context of an example of real life play.

So Loz is coming up with a new approach, and one I hope will make combat examples both more interesting and easier to absorb. It will still take time to produce however, he's snowed under with work at the moment.

[seneschal]

Plus, all those examples can easily lead to rulebook bloat. It's why Hero System quadrupelled in size between 4th and 5th editions and exploded into two volumes in 6th edition. (It didn't help that the author was an attorney. )

[SDLeary]

Plus, all those examples can easily lead to rulebook bloat. It's why Hero System quadrupelled in size between 4th and 5th editions and exploded into two volumes in 6th edition. (It didn't help that the author was an attorney. )

I guess you could call him a rules lawyer!

SDLeary

[seneschal]

I guess you could call him a rules lawyer!

SDLeary

I should have seen that coming. But in this case, quite literally true. To give credit where credit is due, Steve Long did save Hero System from obscurity and put out a line of fine products. And his examples were helpful. But by the time 6th came out it had become too much of a good thing.

Now, since RuneQuest 6 already rivals the Big Gold Book and Hero System 5th edition in size, and that in softback, I'm not sure how much of an expansion we can handle. On the other hand, it'd give the volume's possessor +30% to all Block and Parry rolls.

[SDLeary]

I should have seen that coming. But in this case, quite literally true. To give credit where credit is due, Steve Long did save Hero System from obscurity and put out a line of fine products. And his examples were helpful. But by the time 6th came out it had become too much of a good thing.

Now, since RuneQuest 6 already rivals the Big Gold Book and Hero System 5th edition in size, and that in softback, I'm not sure how much of an expansion we can handle. On the other hand, it'd give the volume's possessor +30% to all Block and Parry rolls.

Considering the core books size, I think the only "expansions" we need at this point would be setting specific; I think that we are in the same place with the BGB by the way. The pulled Star Wars document and the Firearms document are fine examples. I strongly advise against the Wizards, and sadly Paizo model of ad-infinitum rules books.

SDLeary

SDLeary

[seneschal]

But those ad-inifinitim rules books are what make them $$$$$. We want Pete and Loz to make $$$$$ so they will keep on writing RQ goodness.

[SDLeary]

But those ad-inifinitim rules books are what make them $$$$$. We want Pete and Loz to make $$$$$ so they will keep on writing RQ goodness.

Setting books! I am eagerly awaiting Mythic Briton! Loz... make sure you use an extra dose of Warlord in this, OK!

SDLeary

[smjn]

Setting books!

Indeed. And you know, setting books are rule books too: E.g. hasn't Loz said that the magic systems need to be modified to fit Glorantha?

[smjn]

Plus, all those examples can easily lead to rulebook bloat

It's only bloat if it is unnecessary. I think that RQ6 needs more examples. In its current form it is not as friendly and easy to approach for newcomers as it could and should be.

[smjn]

One important thing that I meant but forgot to mention in my review was that I really liked the way resisting stuff like poison and magic works. The fact that Brawn, Endurance and Willpower are skills and the original combat, magic or whatever roll is used as the resisting factor is a simple, elegant, beautiful even and brilliant idea. This is the way it should always have worked, never was too fond of the resistance table.

[Nightshade]

One important thing that I meant but forgot to mention in my review was that I really liked the way resisting stuff like poison and magic works. The fact that Brawn, Endurance and Willpower are skills and the original combat, magic or whatever roll is used as the resisting factor is a simple, elegant, beautiful even and brilliant idea. This is the way it should always have worked, never was too fond of the resistance table.

Just to show you how different people are, there were people who thought the whole system should have been based more on something like the resistance table than the skill rolls.

[GianniVacca]

Just to show you how different people are, there were people who thought the whole system should have been based more on something like the resistance table than the skill rolls.

I also prefer the Resistance Table but I guess its removal was a design decision for Mongoose RQ which got carried over to RQ6.

[Chorpa]

I am also pro resistance table. Not that I dislike the RQ system at all, it is simple and very fast way of resolving similar situations. The resistance table mechanics are so simple you don't really need a table for it in my opinion but some simple math is required while the RQ way don't require math at all.