Category: RuneQuest

Supplement Supplemental! (Cults, Forests, Creatures, Screens, and Catalogues)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, BRUGE, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams1 Comment

Time for another article where I give quick breakdowns of supplements I’ve looked at lately. This time, it’s mostly Basic Roleplaying-based, with supplements for RuneQuest, Pendragon, BRUGE, and Age of Vikings, but I also dip into the grim darkness of the far future to see what’s going on with Imperium Maledictum.

The Gods of Fire and Sky (RuneQuest)

This is the latest volume in the Cults of RuneQuest supplement series; this one covers the pantheon ruled over by the sun-emperor Yelm, whose members take in everything from abstract illumination through to humble cooking fires. Some of these deities have been alluded to in other volumes in the series; The Lightbringers, for instance, is defined in part by the constituent gods’ involvement in the Lightbringer’s Quest to bring Yelm back from the underworld after Orlanth, the lead Lightbringer, killed him in the mythic before-time and came to badly regret the consequences.

However, there is a very clear logic to why these deities have been put into this book: the pantheon as a whole represents a particular cultural outlook, rooted in Dara Happa and with outposts elsewhere, which offers a direct contrast to the outlook presented in books like The Lightbringers. Indeed, the Yelmian version of the narrative has a rather different emphasis, in which the divine justice doled out by Yelm is so potent that it reached out beyond the grave and caused his killers to die, recasting the Lightbringer’s Quest less as an epic journey and more as a penitential pilgrimage of Orlanth and his co-conspirators to apologise to Yelm for being bad, and for Orlanth to sacrifice himself to bring Yelm back.

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Sun County: Dawn of the RuneQuest Renaissance

On By ArthurIn Avalon Hill, Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs4 Comments

In the early days of RuneQuest, the old guard at Chaosium made the game a major success, a serious challenger to Dungeons & Dragons, and arguably the most groundbreaking and sophisticated RPG of the 1970s. More recently, the new regime at Chaosium – primarily made up of members of Moon Design Publications, brought in by Glorantha creator and Chaosium founder Greg Stafford to right the ship after a series of major blunders nearly destroyed the company – have proved to be reliable custodians of the game, producing a new edition which enjoys the most lavish production values and extensive support that RuneQuest has ever enjoyed.

In between. however, RuneQuest‘s history has been somewhat patchier. I’ve gone on the record here as not liking Mongoose’s custodianship of the line in the mid-2000s; their first edition seemed a little slapdash, suffering from the lax production values that has been Mongoose’s trademark for most of their existence (though I was recently pleased to note that their latest versions of Paranoia and Traveller have found them cleaning up their game on that front), and their second edition was legendarily botched, with the two lead designers leaving to found the Design Mechanism and given the blessing of Greg Stafford to produce a 6th Edition of the game – a variant later retitled Mythras – which was essentially a “director’s cut” of the second Mongoose edition without the hatchet job it suffered in the edit.

Before the Mongoose era, however, RuneQuest endured another misstep – Chaosium’s decision to get into a business arrangement with Avalon Hill. Let’s rewind to the early-to-mid-1980s: RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer are all big hits, but Chaosium isn’t a huge business (and never really has been) and doesn’t really have the means to do all the production and distribution logistics on all three game lines. Lead figures like Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin want to spend more time doing game design and less time doing business management. As a result, the business decides to indulge an experiment to see if they could pivot to being a design house, so they could do all the fun part of designing game materials and other companies could handle the nitty-gritty of actually printing, distributing, and marketing the stuff.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Lands of RuneQuest, Horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, and Typos of Warhammer)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Scenarios, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP6 Comments

Time for another entry in my occasional series covering RPG supplements I want to comment on but don’t fancy doing a fully-developed article on individually. This time around, I’ve got some Call of Cthulhu scenarios, some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay releases that recently slipped out in hard copy, and the RuneQuest supplement Chaosium has been building towards releasing since they put out their new edition of the game.

Lands of RuneQuest: Dragon Pass (RuneQuest)

As the title implies, this is the first entry in the new Lands of RuneQuest series. Just as the Cults of RuneQuest sequence offers the full-detail breakdown of each of the various pantheons of the setting, these Lands of RuneQuest books are gazetteers offering a deep dive on various regions of Glorantha I’m not sure how many of these we are going to get – by contrast, Cults of RuneQuest has a fairly well-established plan set out for it – but it does make a certain sense of think of the two series as linked, because after all the original groundbreaking Cults of Prax supplement was a travelogue as much as it was an overview of the local sects.

Dragon Pass being the first region to get the Lands of RuneQuest is something of a no-brainer; you get beginner-friendly descriptions of it in the current core rules and the Starter Set, the adventures bundled with the referee screen and in The Smoking Ruin and The Pegasus Plateau are all set there, and with the release of the Lightbringers, Earth Goddesses, and Lunar Way volumes of Cults of RuneQuest the major sects of the region have been covered, so it’s by far the best-supported locale when it comes to officially released material by Chaosium themselves. (The Jonstown Compendium scheme for putting out fan-developed supplements has done a fine job of widening the scope of this edition, but only people quite deep into it can really be expected to dip into there that much.)

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Supplement Supplemental! (Lunar Pantheons, Cult Zines, and PDFs In Print)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Free League, Games Workshop, Mörk Borg, Mongoose Publishing, Ockult Örtmästare Games, Paranoia, Periodicals, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Scenarios, Stockholm Kartell, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP3 Comments

It’s time for another entry in my occasional series where I compile a clutch of brief supplement reviews. This time around, we’re going to continue our journey through the Cults of RuneQuest series and look at a series of different ways publishers have also compiled shorter texts into larger wholes.

Cults of RuneQuest: The Lunar Way (RuneQuest)

The Lunar Empire is one of the major cultures of RuneQuest – and, in many campaigns, will tend to be the lead antagonists. This is in part because the major cultural conflict in Dragon Pass – one of the first areas of Glorantha to be detailed, going back even before the original release of RuneQuest to the old White Bear and Red Moon boardgame, which was the product that Greg Stafford originally founded Chaosium to publish and was the first glimpse of Glorantha the public ever saw.

That boardgame, in fact, was all about the conflict in the Hero Wars between the forces of the Lunar Empire and their Sartarite foes under Argrath. and in effect that basic story has resonated throughout RuneQuest ever since. The latest edition has followed the lead of the first two in presenting Dragon Pass as the first area of Glorantha it introduces you to, both in its core materials and the Starter Set, and the fact that there’s this easily-understood conflict there between tribal barbarian groups resisting an encroaching empire probably contributes to this.

The Lunar Empire is so called because it ultimately serves the Red Goddess, who dwells on the Red Moon that hovers stationary in the sky above the centre of the Empire; the Red Emperor himself is part of the pantheon led by the Red Goddess. Back in the mythic era, before the Great Compromise of Time was made, there used to be a Lunar deity, but she did not survive the wars of the gods and so for its first few ages of conventional time Glorantha had no Moon to speak of. Then the Seven Mothers – Heroquesters who have now achieved apotheosis – enabled the ascent of the Red Goddess, returning the Lunar concept to creation. Yet by doing so, they necessarily dabbled in Chaos, the medium through which thing which missed out on inclusion in Creation can creep their way in…

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Stray Gems From Horvath’s Hoard

On By ArthurIn AD&D 1E, AD&D 2E, Aftermath!, Basic D&D, Basic Roleplaying, Dungeons & Dragons, Exalted Funeral, Paranoia, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

A while back I reviewed Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground, Stu Horvath’s engaging run-through of RPG history told via product overviews. Stu’s actually been nice enough to send me a little supplementary product – the zine-sized Experience Points, a selection of material cut from the book. The zine is available via Exalted Funeral, a well-regarded distributor who still, after years of promising they are Definitely Working On It, Pinky-Swear, don’t have an adequate UK/Europe shipping solution – a ridiculous situation that’s persisted for years and has left Necrotic Gnome without a local storefront shipping to their own country, because they closed their own store in the expectation that Exalterd Funeral would get their shit together on this front in an orderly manner – so I’m extremely grateful to Stu for making it easier for me to get hold of it.

Experience Points is, essentially, more of the same, but a touch more niche; I can’t put hand on heart and say that any of these entries absolutely should have been in the book at the cost of one of those that did make it in, but it is still nice to see these. There’s more D&D stuff, of course, primarily third-party releases this time; the collection starts with a discussion of the Judges’ Guild supplement The Unknown Gods and ends with a look at Petty Gods, which was conceived as an updated riff on the Unknown Gods concept; there’s also a look at the Stonehell megadungeon, but it’s the deities books which offer the most interesting narrative, if only for illustrating how a community-led project can fill a gap which the commercialised industry wasn’t touching and no one individual self-publishing creator would have spawned by themselves.

On the first-party side of the coin there’s a deep dive into the novels and modules which TSR put out to cover the Time of Troubles metaplot event. This was a bid to try and provide an IC explanation for the shift from 1E to 2E, a concept I always thought was pretty muddle-headed in its undertaking to begin with. Why even bother explicitly stating that all the assassins have spontaneously died when you can just stop mentioning their existence? Why publish the original Forgotten Realms box to begin with if you’re going to render it out of date almost immediately? Why run big cosmic events to tidy up continuity issues when you can just quietly decanonise contradictory perspectives that don’t pan out? Horvath unpacks why such metaplot events can rake in money for publishers even though they arguably provide no net benefit to players or referees on balance.

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Horvath’s Hoard

On By ArthurIn AD&D 1E, AD&D 2E, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Ars Magica, Basic D&D, Basic Roleplaying, Blades In the Dark, Blue Rose, Bunnies & Burrows, Bushido, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Chivalry & Sorcery, Classified, Cyberpunk 2020/RED, D&D 3.XE/D20, D&D 5E, D6 System, De Profundis, Deadlands, Delta Green, Dragonlance, Dungeons & Dragons, Everway, Fiasco, Fighting Fantasy, Fighting Fantasy, Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine (FUDGE), Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment (FATE), Gamebooks, Gamma World, Ghostbusters, GUMSHOE, GURPS, GW 1E, GW 2E, Hawkmoon, HERO System, In Nomine, Interlock System, Kult, Mage: the Ascension, MERP, Metamorphosis Alpha, Microscope, MIT Press, OD&D, Old-School Essentials, Over the Edge, Palladium System, Pathfinder, Pendragon, Phoenix System, Planescape, Powered By the Apocalypse, Prince Valiant, QuestWorlds, Ravenloft, Referee's Bookshelf, Rifts, Rolemaster, RuneQuest, Shadowrun, Skyrealms of Jorune, Spire, Star Wars, Stars Without Number, Stormbringer, Storyteller/Storytelling System, Tabletop RPGs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fantasy Trip, Toon, Trail of Cthulhu, Traveller, Troika!, True20, Tunnels & Trolls, Unknown Armies, Vampire: the Masquerade, Violence, Warhams, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, WFRP, World of Darkness, Wraith: the Oblivion, Year Zero Engine9 Comments

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Static Solo Scares, Old-School Architecture, and Freshened-Up Cats)

On By ArthurIn Alone Against..., Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, D101 Games, Gamebooks, Openquest, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Scenarios, Sixtystone Press, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGsLeave a comment

Time for another entry in my occasional series offering brief mini-reviews on RPG supplements interesting enough to pass comment on but not quite spurring enough thoughts for a full article. This time around, it’s various items from the Basic Roleplaying family of systems.

Alone Against the Static (Call of Cthulhu)

South Dakota, the 1990s: Alex and Charlie are a couple whose relationship is not doing great. Charlie’s brother, Mark, has offered them the use of his cabin in the woods, which should give them a chance to have a nice getaway to have some fun, talk things over, and patch things up. As Alex and Charlie settle in for their first night, they decide to watch a movie – but the broadcast reception out here is lousy and the vast majority of Mark’s videos are horror movies, which they’re not in the mood for.

Eventually, they hit on a tape which they hope contains something different, and it certainly does – because it proves to be camcorder footage of the cabin from the last time Mark and his wife visited, filmed by an unseen figure a la Lost Highway, cutting off partway through and playing this hideous white noise static. Then the power to the cabin cuts off. The next day, one of the couple wakes up to find that the other has taken the car to town to try and get help fixing the power. A day alone in the cabin – or walking in the surrounding woods – can’t be that bad, right? (Oh yes it could…)

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Supplement Supplemental! (Gloranthan Mythology, the Romano-British Mythos Horror, a Far Future Bestiary, and an Old World Miscellanea)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Golden Goblin Press, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP, Wrath & Glory1 Comment

Time to do some housekeeping again with my regular series of articles in which I pass brief comments on RPG supplements I have something to say about, but not enough to say to fill an entire article.

Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology (RuneQuest)

Last time I did one of these articles I covered the first clutch of volumes issued Cults of RuneQuest, the massive multi-volume collection of RuneQuest cult information for the current version of the game. Most of the volumes in this series concentrate on providing deep dives on the deities and cults of a specific pantheon, but there’s two exceptions. In the previous article I wrote about one of these – the Prosopaedia, a sort of system-free master index of gods and heroes.

This is the other “general” volume – a deep dive into the overarching mythologies of Glorantha, the monomyth which keeps cropping up in the different pantheons, and the deep history and ancient cosmology of the word. It opens with a Foreword by the late Greg Stafford himself (whose work underpins much of the Cults of RuneQuest series), and simply by reading those few pages I felt I understood Greg’s take on mythology and how it fits into Glorantha and how you can make an interesting RuneQuest story out of it much better than I did previously.

The rest of the book does not disappoint. Whilst some readers may prefer a “bottom up” approach – tackling the mass of Cults of RuneQuest by beginning with one pantheon or another and concentrating on the specifics of the cults – this offers a complementary “top down” look at the legends of the setting, and in doing so can both help you get the best out of the pantheon-specific volumes and get a better handle on the underlying ethos of Greg Stafford’s creation.

Some of the features here may seem idiosyncratic – in particular the set of mythic maps, showing the world of Glorantha at different stages of the God Time that preceded conventional time. However, part of the whole schtick of Heroquesting in the setting is embodying, re-enacting, and to a certain extent enacting mythic tales that took place in that time – and so knowing what the lie of the land was like at a particular phase of the God Time can be massively helpful when it comes to cooking up Heroquest-themed scenarios for high-level play.

Other features are just plain useful. There’s a generic breakdown of the template that all of the individual cult entries in Cults of RuneQuest use which is mighty useful, but at the same time too long to be sensibly reprinted in all the volumes. If I’m remembering correctly, at one point the plan was for Cults of RuneQuest to be a pair of two big, fat, super-chunky books – much like the Guide to Glorantha – but that was shelved in favour of the larger number of smaller volumes that the collection is now intended to span. My hunch is that had the “two big books” plan been gone with, this volume would have been the introductory material put front and centre, and I certainly think the rest of the Cults of RuneQuest volumes are significantly enhanced if you have this to hand.

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Supplement Supplemental! (A WFRP Grimoire, a Cthulhu Railroad On Ice, and a RuneQuest Encyclopedia)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Scenarios, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, WFRP9 Comments

It’s time for another Supplement Supplemental article – part of my ongoing series where I put reviews of supplements where my thoughts aren’t sufficient for a standalone article, but where I do have something to say about the books in question. This time around I have a significant rules update and magic resource for WFRP, a chunky Call of Cthulhu campaign, and the first volumes in a major new series of RuneQuest resources.

Winds of Magic (WFRP)

Winds of Magic is Cubicle 7’s magic-themed supplement for WFRP 4th Edition. There’s a tweaked magic system in here, adjusted to address longstanding complaints like the issues with Channelling in the baseline rules, much as the combat-focused Up In Arms supplement provided a revised combat system; one suspects that if Cubicle 7 get around to doing a WFRP 5th Edition/4.5 Edition/whatever, we will eventually see those tweaked systems folded into the core rules.

However, just as Up In Arms offered a host of additional material based on combat and combat-adjacent matters, Winds of Magic also offers a wealth of additional stuff under the broad umbrella of magic. Unlike Up In Arms, it has some significant previous supplements to model itself on – because a good chunk of this is dedicated to providing detailed breakdowns of the eight Winds of Magic, and their associated Colleges within the Empire that study them, much as was provided in 1st and 2nd Edition with the Realms of Sorcery supplements.

An approach, this cleaves somewhat closer to the 2nd edition Realms of Sorcery than 1st Edition, in terms of focusing on how magic is practiced in the Empire, rather than trying to cover a large range of non-Imperial magics above and beyond that. The arrangement of material differs somewhat – after providing general overviews of the history of magic and the colleges, the writeups of the individual colleges are provided along with the broader discussion of the Wind they are associated with (including the additional spells offered here), so each Wind-specific section covers everything specific to that Wind.

Between this and a wealth of NPCs, details on item creation, additional spells, magical locales, and other fun details, this is likely to be useful to most referees. As a result of excloring well-trod territory, there’s a fair amount here you’ll have seen in some variant before, but having versions system-adjusted to the new edition is handy, and the thought given to how the information is arranged means that this may be the best-organised version of “tentpole WFRP magic supplement” yet.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Material Cultures, Filled-In Blanks, and Arthurian Encyclopedia)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Free League, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, The One Ring4 Comments

Time for another instalment in my occasional series talking about RPG supplements which by themselves don’t inspire me to write an article, but which I still find worthy of comment.

Weapons and Equipment (RuneQuest)

From the title, you might expect this to be a fairly dry piece – perhaps along the lines of …and a 10 Foot Pole for Rolemaster, with lots of expanded equipment lists and the like. There’s an extent to which it is utilitarian in nature – it deliberately includes a chunk of the information from the equipment rules in the RuneQuest core rulebook, for instance, specifically so the book can be of maximal use in actual play. (If you know the information is definitely in there, there’s no need to juggle between this and the core book to find the equipment details you want.)

However, as someone on one of the RuneQuest discussion groups on Facebook pointed out, this supplement’s title undersells it – you could almost call this Material Culture of Dragon Pass, for it doesn’t merely provide you with a price list, but goes into a little detail about what the equipment is, what it tells us from a cultural perspective, and so on. Old World Armoury for 2nd Edition WFRP did something along similar lines to this, though I would say Weapons and Equipment takes the approach even further. Details on availability are here as well as pricing, and there’s also information on the obtaining and maintenance of livestock, mounts, dwellings, and so on. Services as well as goods are covered to an extent, with information on hiring mercenaries and other skilled personnel, or obtaining skill training.

In short, whilst the book gives you the fine item-by-item details it can also, with a quick skim, give you a quick grounding in what the material possessions of RuneQuest characters are like, what that says about them, and how all these things fit into the world – thereby helping evoke the distinctive cultures of Glorantha. This means it’s both extremely useful and extremely flavourful, which is a rare and welcome combination.

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