I have been playing RuneQuest since the second edition made it to Australia in 1980. I played a lot of RuneQuest 2 and then RuneQuest 3. A long hiatus then ensued...
RuneQuest 6th Edition came out last year and I purchased a copy. It's been good reading. The game feels like it is the legitimate heir to the RuneQuest legacy. I missed out on the Mongoose editions
of RuneQuest, after reading previews of them I somehow felt they did not really seem like RuneQuest as I knew it. The 6th Edition is well organised and has all you need to get a game up and running.
Style wise it reminds me more of RQ2 than later versions. It has some line art images, not too much to be distracting to the main text. The text itself is well written, concise and clear. The game is generic enough, not tied to Glorantha, and feasible to set in anything from the stone age to late mediaeval but not so generic as to be GURPS all over again.
Character creation is points based, which is a change from earlier versions. In a nutshell, after rolling characteristics and calculating various scores from that a character gets 350 points to spend on skills, 100 from their culture, 100 from their career and 150 to spend at will. This allows for the flexibility in character creation that has always been a hallmark of RuneQuest.
The combat system is very different from the earlier systems. A character now has a number of action
points to spend based on INT and DEX. (I can see these becoming very important stats to power gaming types) There are still strike ranks to determine order of attack, but you get a number of actions equal to your action points. Generally characters have 2 or 3 action points to use per round. Apart from this instead of the old critical/impale/fumble rules there is a system of special effects that an attack or
defense may get when they beat an opponent. This includes the impale but also trips, closing range,
bleed, rapid reload and others. The special effects seem to really capture some of the tricks and
odd things that happen in real combat, making it much less of a 'damage per round' slug fest and much more tactical in nature. I am yet to try the combat system with players so this should be interesting to find out about. The special effects seem to me to be a good replacement for the old
fumble rules.
Other changes are to the Magic Systems. There are now five! Folk Magic, Theistic, Sorcery, Animism and Mysticism. I will be interested to see how these pan out. Apparently Mysticism is pretty powerful wheras Folk Magic is minor and weak, the writers did not intend to make all the systems balanced. I intend to start with a very low magic campaign, and introduce it slowly as I get a feel for how the magic system works out. I felt that in previous campaigns magic was a bit too common, and became too ordinary, losing all it's mystery.
There is still a focus on Cults, but also on other organisations, loosely grouped as 'Brotherhoods' (the feminist gamers may have a problem with this). I'm working to add a few of these to my campaign background. They seem to be good ideas to create jumping off points for adventures.
All in all I like RuneQuest 6 from what I have read and from working on a rewriting my old campaign material for it. I have created one adventure so far and have an over arching story to start with. Balancing this will be the key, it looks like RuneQuest 6, like the previous versions is very harsh on player characters that make bad mistakes, combat is brutal and fast. I like that, it makes it more 'realistic'. It pushes players to find non-combat options to problem solving and to really think strategically.
Its worth taking a look at
RuneQuest if you liked the previous versions or are sick of D20. Drop into the
DesignMechanism forum and see what the fuss is all about.
