Products!
RuneQuest 2
The Moon Design high-quality RQ2 reprints of Pavis & Big Rubble (contains everything from the boxed sets and more besides), Griffin Mountain, Cult Compendium (Cults of Prax & Cults of Terror & much, much more), and the imminently forthcoming Borderlands*. These books are gorgeous, professionally laid out, much new art, old typos cleaned up, new material added... well worth a look. You can buy from Rick Meints directly (he's the publisher), or from Steve Jackson Games (the distributor). They're also available as hardbacks (search Warehouse 23 for these).
RuneQuest 3
If you want professional scenarios for RQ3, here's my old explanation of What to Get? (thanks to David Dunham for preserving this):
If you want to play RuneQuest in Glorantha, I'd recommend buying the books Sun County and/or River of Cradles as a first purchase. Sun County is good because the Sun Dome Templars in Prax have an isolated, xenophobic culture which is fairly easy to get the hang of, but is full of flavour for your characters and adventures (we once characterised them as "uptight Spartans in the Wild West"). River of Cradles includes lots of information about the other peoples of the river valley the Sun Domers live in. Both campaign packs include some ready-to-run adventures, and Shadows on the Borderlands has more still, all set in the same area. After that, it's "Ho for the High Plaines!" with Tales of the Reaching Moon #14 and #15 telling you everything you needed to know about Prax (but were afraid to ask) and including yet more scenarios. If you like monster-killing, Dorastor: Land of Doom and Lords of Terror make a good set about the indisputable Evil Bad Guys of Glorantha (the creatures of Chaos), with The Book of Drastic Resolutions: Volume Chaos a neat supplementary source. Dorastor has a good campaign setting for new players (the dangerous frontier settlement of the Risklands), but there's a danger that games here could centre around "getting tough enough to fight the bad guys" without careful referee intervention. If you want to learn about Glorantha as a world, I'd recommend the boxed sets Glorantha: Genertela (orange box) and Gods of Glorantha (red box) as a starting point. Apart from lots of "factual" material presented from a neutral standpoint, these also have the excellent "What My Father Told Me" and "What The Priest Said" sections: a page or two presenting a culture's worldview (temporal and spiritual) in its own terms. By their nature, these are approachable and player-friendly. I'll also plug our book Wyrms Footprints here: although it includes no RQ stats or rules, it does reprint some of the best Gloranthan articles ever written, Greg Stafford's 50+ page series on the Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha, along with another 60 pages of articles (old and new) illuminating various corners of the world. My advice would be to avoid the recent, non-RuneQuest publications King of Sartar, The Glorious ReAscent of Yelm and The Entekosiad first time out: these books contain a fair amount of obscure mythical stuff which would be hard to fit into a game, given the lack of supporting material (cult writeups, character generation rules, overview information, etc.). That said, if you can get the Dragon Pass boardgame, Glorantha and King of Sartar, you'll have a useful set of background information on one of the key Gloranthan settings: we old hands have been resenting the lack of immediately-playable material in Sartar since way back when. Glorantha is a broad setting (one of the few fantasy worlds where you can play just about anyone, in any kind of story), so there will be a lot of material circulating that may not be immediately useful to your gaming. (Like, I've not even mentioned the Troll books and boxes, etc...). |
(NB: this article was written in 1996 and has not updated since). I'll put
in a strong plug here for the "red box" (Gods of Glorantha*) and "orange box" (Glorantha: Genertela - Crucible of the Hero Wars*), my most worn-out RQ3 boxed sets. Rick Meints can help you find out-of-print
RuneQuest books: check his website.
If you want top-quality fan-produced material for RQ3, I'd recommend Tales
of the Reaching Moon magazine (bias alert: I helped make it). For RQ2 types, the Lunar, Praxian and
Sartar/Upland Marsh special issues (there were a couple of each) are
well worth a look, and came late in the zine's life
(#14&15 are Prax, #16&17 are Lunar, #18&19 are Sartar/Upland Marsh; #20, the final issue, is also superb). Several back
issues available at Warehouse 23.
HeroQuest
For HeroQuest (and its very compatible
predecessor Hero
Wars): get yourself the HeroQuest rules and download the free 76-page rules-free book of player handouts in HeroQuest Voices (disclaimer: I made this; contains lots of revised background from from the
red and orange boxes, plus 50% all-new material), and then,
whatever you think you're into, get Imperial Lunar Handbook, Volume 1 - The Lunar Empire (player background and character generation for campaigns in the Lunar Empire):
it might just rock your world...
After that, if you're into Orlanthi Culture
and Religion, check out Thunder Rebels ("OrlanthiPak") and Storm Tribe ("Cults of Sartar").
If you're into Dragon Pass History and Scenarios,
check out Dragon Pass: Land of Thunder (a gazetteer), Barbarian Adventures*, Orlanth is Dead, and now Gathering Thunder: the books (to date) in the Sartar Rising! campaign arc.
If you're into the World of Glorantha,
check out the old Glorantha: Introduction to the Hero Wars* paperback (out of print, may be tricky to find, a rewritten version is meant to come out later this year) and Anaxial's Rooster (a "Monster Manual" for Glorantha).
The books and maps from the Unspoken
Word are very super, too. In Wintertop's Shadow (Tarsh Exiles) and Tarsh in Flames (Lunar Tarsh) flesh out the lands of north-western Dragon Pass beautifully; Sons of Kargzant does a top-notch job on the Char-un cossacks; the stuff I didn't mention is
great, too.
And Tradetalk have
done some good stuff. Perhaps most interesting to an RQ "old hand" is the first published Gloranthan novel, Penny Love's book The Widow's Tale. The eponymous Tradetalk magazine is still going strong, and the Ye Booke of Tentacles (background and scenarios) / Tentacles Tome (Pavis-based campaigns) series have lots going for them.
Hope this helps. I'm probably missing something (well, it has been
a while!). More advice and explanations on request (private messages
or emails welcome).
Cheers, Nick
* not a link - these products are hard to find: try eBay or ask Rick
for help.
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