# RuneQuest tags: #game/rpg/runequest ![[RuneQuest - Roleplaying in Glorantha (cover).jpg|600]] RuneQuest is the game that taught the hobby that skills don't have to live on a class sheet. It's the 1978 Chaosium original by Steve Perrin and friends, set in Greg Stafford's Glorantha — the first RPG to hang a full percentile skill list on characters regardless of class or level. If you've ever played **[[Basic Role-Playing|BRP]]**, you've played its descendant: RuneQuest is the engine BRP was carved out of, the granddaddy of the whole d100 branch of the family tree that eventually produced **[[Call of Cthulhu]]**. This is where the chassis came from. The cynical take: it's a forty-plus-year-old game whose name has been bounced around more publishers than a beach ball at a stadium. The fair take: every time the industry tried to bury it, somebody dug it back up — mostly because underneath all the name shuffling it's genuinely good at what it does. ## Setting Glorantha is the mythic Bronze Age world Greg Stafford started sketching in the 1960s and spent a lifetime building: a fantasy land where gods visibly walked the earth, the sky is literally a dome the Sun rides across, and the rules of physics are arguments among the divine. It's a world of warring cults, heroquests, Bronze Age tech, a blood-red Lunar Empire chewing on its neighbors, and Chaos gnawing at the edges of civilization. There's no generic medieval Europe here — every tribe, city, and soldier wears its mythology openly, and your character's religion is mechanically load-bearing rather than flavor text. It's the rare setting that's *better* the more you know about it. The only problem with that is how badly it tempts you to read forever instead of playing. ## Core Resolution Mechanics RuneQuest is a d100, roll-under BRP game — the version with real teeth around its edges. - **Characteristics and skills.** Characters hang off characteristics (Strength, Constitution, Size, Dexterity, Intelligence, Power, Charisma) that feed an expansive skill list expressed as percentages. You attempt something by rolling d100 and hoping to land at or below your skill. Success is a clean under; a fumble very much is not. - **Runes, Passions, and Reputation.** The modern incarnation (*RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha*) made the setting mechanical: your character's **Runes** — elemental and runic affinities — boost related skills, and **Passions** (Loyalty, Hate, Love, typically aimed at specific gods, people, or causes) shape and gate your behavior, occasionally paying you for going along with them. **Reputation** tracks how much the world already knows your name. - **Deadly combat.** Damage lands on hit locations and armor soaks per spot; wounds can stack, cripple, or kill. It's lethal, it's swingy, and it respects your choices — which means it punishes the stupid ones. ## Editions and the Mess RuneQuest's edition history is the hobby's love of publishing chaos colliding with a genuinely beloved game: - **RuneQuest 1e** (1978) — the Chaosium original by Steve Perrin and Ray Turney; the game that invented the sandbox of percentile skills. The 1979 boxed set also shipped the sixteen-page **Basic Role-Playing** booklet that birthed BRP proper. - **RuneQuest 2e** (1979–80) — the classic, later reissued by Chaosium as *RuneQuest Classic*. - **RuneQuest 3e** (1984–1994) — written by Chaosium but published by **Avalon Hill** (with Games Workshop UK editions); where the name started getting juggled and the setting started drifting toward a generic fantasy engine in some lines. - **Mongoose RuneQuest** (2006) — the less said, the better; mercifully renamed *Legend* when Mongoose's license ran its course. - **Mythras** (2011 as *RuneQuest 6th*, renamed 2016) — The Design Mechanism's superb build, forced to drop the RuneQuest name when Chaosium reclaimed it. It's arguably the best pure RuneQuest ruleset ever written, living on today as its own game. - **RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha** (2018) — Chaosium's fourth edition, 448 pages, by Greg Stafford, Jeff Richard, Jason Durall, Steve Perrin and friends. It welds modern play onto the old bones — family background and recent history in adventurer generation, Passions/Runes/Reputation, deep Glorantha integration — while staying backward-compatible with the classic scenarios. This is the one to run if you're coming in fresh. ## Community Licensing Glorantha and RuneQuest fan content runs through the **Jonstown Compendium**, Chaosium's community-content platform on DriveThruRPG — the Glorantha cousin of the Miskatonic Repository. Fans can sell their own scenarios and supplements set in Glorantha under its terms, which is how the line stays alive between big releases. The name's been through the wringer; the community keeps the candle lit. ## References - [RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha - Chaosium](https://www.chaosium.com/runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-hardcover) - [RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/243427/runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha) - [RuneQuest - RPG Systems & Versions - Well of Daliath (Chaosium)](https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/rpg-systems-versions) - [Jonstown Compendium - community content FAQ (Chaosium)](https://www.chaosium.com/blogjourney-to-jonstown-20-faq-for-community-creators/) - [RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha Quickstart - Chaosium](https://www.chaosium.com/runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-quickstart/)