RuneQuest Memories
I knew only D&D when I was 19. had just bought Redbox, so when a friend brought over Runequest, I thought, “Eh, what is this? Meh, some ripoff I guess.”
It immediately struck me as more… “strict” I guess, a bit more realism, you don’t just throw a gold piece to the barkeep, that’s like a year’s wages.Character creation was long and initially confusing, there are a LOT of details in the system (probably not any more than the current D&D now) and questionable issues and “features”, including layering armor and it being divided into seems like almost a dozen different configurations or body parts.
The Strike Ranks were highly confusing, and even when I got used to them, I definitely didn’t like them (still don’t, though they make some sense), but I eventually got into the percentile system, which is how I was able to fairly easily make the transition to Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying system horror flagship, Call of Cthulhu.
Overall, I had a lot of issues with the fiddliness of RQ, a bit too much detail and required maintenance, there were maps and calendars and High Holy Days and times when the moon influenced different things – I definitely credit it with being extremely immersive and served as a terrific example of just how much color and depth you can give to a fictional world, even in an RPG, everything had its own character and “feel”, and it helped me also go on to appreciate the simpler Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
Overall, though I wasn’t fond of the system taken together in a working machine, the general idea of it and how it was connected was just brilliant and I wondered how D&D could have ever competed. So even though now I still would prefer not to game with RQ unless it were modified to be a bit more intuitive, it was the very first non-D&D system I had ever seen and was a full-on example of “Hey, look what else is out there!” – it was a bit overwhelming, but I definitely remember it.
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