The Gaming Den

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From Chaosium official forums:

It is not an exact reprint of RQ2. If we did that it would not have the errata incorporated into the text, nor would we have corrected some typos.
and there wouldn't be a barcode on the back cover.

The layout has been updated a bit, and we have added additional items into the appendices, plus some Q&A from Steve Perrin's "Rambling Runequestions". We also updated the Orlanth and Kyger Litor Cults so they are the Cults of Prax versions as opposed to the abbreviated versions the rulebook used. As a result, the book is now 144 pages instead of the original 120. The GM Handouts in the middle of the book will now be separately available. Of course the PDF of the book is bookmarked well

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It seems Chaosium will release it again as part of a "classic runequest" line. I wonder if Cults of Prax is coming back too.

Fake edit: Oh, and..

"Glorantha is my north star of fantasy narratives... a sacred and unattainable goal".
- Ken Rolston, author, Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Oblivion.

YEAAAHHHH!!!

Runequest 2 was an excellent game thirty years ago. I'd still happily mine it for pieces of setting info now (ignoring ducks), but the mechanics are slow & tend to result in horrible first level-itis, weird imbalances and random deaths. There are better games.

"Glorantha is my north star of fantasy narratives... a sacred and unattainable goal".
- Ken Rolston, author, Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Oblivion.

That really does sound much better than "Ken Rolston, editor of RuneQuest".

The idea of Glorantha as a "sacred (...) goal" makes me glad I'm a Satanist.

Playing RQ2 was a lot more fun than AD&D, at least it was for me in ~1980. But it's certainly not perfect.

Glorantha is totally insane in a lot of ways, but it can also be a lot of fun if you ignore whatever parts you find too crazy to handle.

The only reason Glorantha is a setting is because it's illegal to sell people boxes of LSD, Mushrooms and Spanish Fly.

The system of Runequest and the setting of Glorantha were written by a self-proclaimed shaman, Greg Stafford, who is a white guy from Connecticut. He was genuinely interested in gaming, I'm sure, but Glorantha was really more about his obsession with reconstructionist religion.

My big problem with Glorantha is that what we recognize as science, or, more precisely, real world physics, has no place in it. The flight of an arrow has precisely dick to to do with aerodynamics or energy transfer, and everything to do with runic correspondences and an actual law of the game world metaphysics which says that arrows fly. And while this has the fun implication that you can fire anything from a bow so long as you can give it the runic correspondences that an arrow has and the name "arrow," it does mean that you are basically roleplaying in a video game engine, and a very basic one at that.

Sure, the scientific method functions, but that's just a method of observation-based learning. If you combine saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal--in literally any ratios--you will never get gunpowder unless you steal dwarven magic. If you get hit with acid, you cannot run to the scullery for lye to neutralize it, you use water, because acid does not burn because of pH, but rather because it is liquid-fire, rune-wise.

Sure, if you know this shit, you can deal, but you basically wind up having to interview the GM for hours to figure out what he will allow you to do, and you can never use any amount of real world science knowledge to solve a problem in game. It's worse than being a lupus in Werewolf, because the problem isn't just a lack of character knowledge, but also the game world literally lacking the physical laws of our world. Where the laws still exist, its because of magic, wizards and gods, making it less than reliable.

My problem with Runequest is that it's just a bad system. It's a d% roll under system which allows your skill to exceed 100%. There are people walking around in the setting that literally have 1000% Sorcery skills, and you sort of wonder why you're bothering to do anything when there are clearly sorcerers who could fix any problem at all. More than that, there are literally four entirely distinct magic systems which all exist at the same time and have different rules. Divine magic requires you to pray for spells at temples. You give over power to a god, get spells if your gm is nice, and then you just hold them in your head until you cast them, at which point you have to find a temple to your god again and start over. Spirit magic requires you to catch spirits like they were pokemon and then evoke them in combat for their specific charms in a way that's a lot more like Binding in D&D than spellcasting. Rune magic requires you connecting to specific runes, learning their associated spells at specific power levels, and relearning them if you ever want a different power level. Sorcery involves learning either discrete spells, or groups of spells called grimoires, depending on edition, and then either five skills for manipulating various aspects of spells, or just the Sorcery skill and allocating points for manipulation, again, depending on edition.

Deciding to not fuck with magic doesn't really help. My group played for four or five years, at least a couple of those were with RQ6, and even after two years, the combat system of maneuvers caused debates that lengthend fights unnecessarily.

Glorantha is a deprotaganizing setting that basically requires you to interview your GM as to how his magic world works. Runequest is a cruft-full system that has only the ability for anyone to learn magic at any time regardless of their profession to recommend it.