I have a checkered past with the Runequest game. I won't bore you with the details, but I bought this game fully aware of the history of the game line.
Runequest was the game that started the entire BRP lineup more or less. This new game is more or less an evolution of that design. The fundamental basics of character design and play remain the same. You roll dice for attributes that scale nicely with D&D (only, you know, there's more of them), you have a list of skills that are measured in percentiles. Your characters have a culture of origin, and a job/career that tells you what you know. None of this has changed appreciably.
Now for the book itself. Starting off, the price seems pretty decent given the cost of other books. It's a hardcover with a pretty glowing 'rune', in this case the infinity symbol surrounded by smaller, less glowy runes. It is attractive and simple, sure. However, even at the price it feels light. This thing is slim, almost like there is nothing too it BUT cover. I'd rather they sold me a softcover that had more content, really.
As an addendum: all the books in the line share the same format for the cover. The setting book looks more attractive and unique, possibly representing another 'format' for the covers.
The first two pages are typical 'what is this' space filler. It may be that there is more setting information in these two pages than the rest of the book combined.
Following that is the character creation chapter. Seven familiar looking attributes (characteristics), all rolled on 4d6 drop the lowest... except for intelligence and size, which are 3d6+6 for some reason. It seems its perfectly acceptable to be inhumanly clumsy or weak, but not so much to be a midget or a moron. That's good to know.
Derivied attributes are called, conviently enough, attributes. There are five, including hit points and magic points. A note for the grognards: strike ranks, RQ initiative, is here, and is simply the average of INT and DEX.
I'll gloss over the basic skills portion, this is just your character's ability to do anything skill related. It's in 'previous expirence' that I had my first frowny face. Also, here on pages seven and eight we have half the overall artwork in the book in the four 'iconic' cultures presented.
Only, they aren't really cultures so much. In the bad old days you had all sorts of choices about where your character came from, then you got your social class. Now you have two... and one is divided into social classes for you. Essentially you are a barbarian or you are not. If you are not you are rich, poor, or somewhere inbetween. Not much choice, eh? Never mind that for a game supposedly in a bronze age setting the nobles look right at home in the renissance.
Other than ripping you horribly in background choices, this isn't actually that bad. You do get several choices in your skills for each background that can have an effect on how you view your character's origins. It's not perfect, but it helps.
After your background you pick a profession. Cleverly, they've removed these from the backgrounds where they used to hang out. Sure, not every profession is available to every 'culture', but it does work better than in the past. There are actually three pages of professions, in a tight 'chart' format, so that adds up to a lot...31 in fact. There is a little redundancy, such as blacksmiths being seperated from craftsmen, seperate entries for mercenaries and soldiers, courtiers and lords... that sort of thing. Still, I like options, so I'm not going to complain too loud. There is one weakness to the professions that I will address in detail later.
One thing that does erk me a little is the 'advanced skills'. Previously you had a few skills that were harder to develop at character creation, skills like Martial arts and Dodge, they started out at 0% as I recall. Now they, well not dodge which seems to have become much easier, have become advanced. Now, the idea alone doesn't send me screaming for the hills, its nothing so much as insisting that you be trained in order to do something cool. Only... only Advance skills don't quite progress like normal skills, requiring an exception to normal skill progression rules. Exceptions are, in my expirence, a crappy way to run a ruleset. Likewise, a couple of the 'advanced' skills don't seem all that different than the 'basic' skills. Things like Survival or streetwise don't seem all that difficult compared to Acrobatics or Sleight of Hand. Looks arbitrary to me.
I sort of blended in character creation with skills, which is the next chapter. All skills (and combat is skill based mind you) are rolled the same way, under your percentile skill. Easier tasks add you your skill, harder ones take away. You have critical success and fumbles, automatic successes and failures, none of which will rock any boats. You also have rules for opposed tests, which gives us a somewhat unique position in RPG rules: If both sides fail in an opposed check the side that failed the least wins. That's right, you can succeed on a failed roll if you opponent fails too. The actual rule is easier to memorize: he who rolls lowest wins.
There are quite a few rules in this chapter. You have group tests, sorting tests (used for finding out the order of runners, say), a whole page on dealing with very high skills (350%, for example) and assistance. Personally, I found the example of the assistance rule a bit wonky. If one man is doing something like holding up a portcullis, someone helping him only adds +3% to his chance of success? Seems kinda... low.
Rather than follow the skills chapter with, say, combat (where many skills are being used and more rules come up...) it instead takes us to equipment. This is fair enough, really, as we are still theoretically dealing with character creation. I can see the layout person torn between keeping character stuff together, and trying to get rules stuff together and failing miserably at one or the other. Ideally, rather than preface the skills chapter with all the ways you roll skill checks, that stuff could have been stuffed in with the other rules stuff later on.
For a book with no setting having an exchange rate is a bit odd. Most prices are listed in Silver, making it a good default coinage. There is a bunch of stuff detailing lifestyles, trading, wergild and ransom, then POOF weapons galore. There is the big full page chart of melee weapons, pages of descriptions of what they are, followed by the ranged weapons in the same fashion, followed by armor... again chart then descriptions. All totalling to six pages. Nice. Also not particularly bronze aged, mind you. There is very little here which would be unfamiliar to the player of D&D, other than the 'stats' of the weapons themselves.
There of course does follow a bit of generic 'stuff', and to cap it all off a single page of 'magic item's, though so trivial and slim you have to wonder what they were trying to say. Three potions that could have come from a nintendo game?
And on page 44 we start the chapter on combat. The book does go by quickly, eh? What can I say; what should I say? Roll initiative, take your actions, end round. Strike Ranks, sorry grognards, I'll remember next time. Each character gets from one to four actions, determined solely by his DEX. A round is 'five seconds' which seems long until you recall that you actually get upwards of eight actions (four actions, four reactions (defenses)) in that round if you are dexterous enough. Reactions are mostly defensive, but it also includes the RQ version of AoO's. I found nothing that suggested that you need (or want) a gridmap to pull this off, which eliminates a LOT of confusion. I find a lot less 'exception' rules than you would in D&D, and the bulk of the rather slim chapter is explaining your options.
Perhaps it overexplains, really. You get an entire 'entree' for each possible action or reaction, explaining when it can be used (dodge: use when attacked) and a paragraph or three of text about whatever (dodging, say), followed by examples of possible results (dodge fails you get hit, dodge succeeds you get out of the way...)... which I have vastly oversimplified here. There are actually a wide variety of possible results and they are explained exhaustively, particularly the defensive acts. Parrying, for example, can result in failing to parry, fully parrying (esp if the attacker failed), a partial parry where the weapon acts like armor, to making the other guy overextend himself for a riposte (AoO time!!!) I imagine the learning curve can be a tad steep but it looks worth it if you like tactical options.
Armor and damage take up little space. Armor absorbs points of damage, damage is applied by location. Typically one or two hits will end a fight. Of note, determining hit locations uses a D20 roll. I'm not liking that, it lacks elegance. It's functional, but when you consider that this will be the third dice swap at this point, it just feels rough. (hit, damage, location... all using different dice).
One last note: here is where the book talks about Hero Points. You actually get two at the start of the game, but nothing else is said until the end of combat. You can use them, obviously enough, to avoid getting badly mangled by a harsh combat system. You may also spend them on 'plot stuff', though only in minor ways, and only with GM approval. Lastly they can be used to 'buy' legendary abilities, something that has yet to reach the pages of this review.
One note that irked me: the vast majority of the artwork in the game is pictures of the various runes. This wasn't so bad in and of itself, but here, at the end of the combat chapter they have the rune of Death, a fine, even funny commentary on combat. But why, by all that is holy, is the rune of Death a Cross? I could argue the stupidity of this all day, from any number of angles, but let's leave it for another place, another time.
There is a two page example of combat/play that was actually quite illustrative of how the game can go down. I found a minor glitch in the text, a typo. I'm sure there are more, but really, commenting about editing in game books is so passe, don't you think?
What is interesting about the example is that, in two pages it covers ONE round of combat. Before you think that is necessarily bad, realize that in that one round the fight was essentially done, one PC down, two badguys dead the rest fleeing.
Which leads us to Magic. Of all the chapters in the book, this one actually pissed me off. You see, while the first page lists SIX different types of magic, the book itself only actually describes ONE. Rune magic at that, very nearly the least generic of them. This puts the game at odds with itself, btw. Shamans and wizards are both listed in character creation as using Rune Magic (with different lists of starting runes), while the book tells you that Runes are more or less scattered at random throughout the world. Adding in at least Sorcery and Shamanic magics would have added roughly a dozen pages to this already slim book... so where are they? Not here.
Then there is the oddity that is 'intigrating runes'. Now runes are found objects, and you have to meditate upon them to use their power. All well and good, but integrating them seems to consist of 'drawing them into' yourself, and runes, once integrated, can't been taken away or shared. A cooler rereading suggests that you can't unintegrate the rune, but you still need the physical object. Clearer writing might have saved me some hair tearing... or less drugs.
Okay then... is the rune a seperate object or not? And why, oh why, does an RPG, which presumably is a party based game, have something this 'powerful' that can't be shared? Bah. Either every time the players find a rune they find enough for everyone, or you have people fighting over the only real magic items in the game... either way it's rough. Who gets the rune?
Well, let's look at what we DO have then. You integrate the rune, whatever the fuck that means, and presto, you gain the Runecasting skill for that rune. You also gain a neat power (half all falling damage, say.). If by chance the rune you have is one of the lucky ones that actually has spells listed for it, you can then learn those, then cast them by use of your newfangled Runecasting skill.
Spells are not skills, they are more like weapons or some other gear you have. You cast using your power points (which are the same as your POW stat, btw). They all have requirements for certain runes, some are more useful than others. They also have things like 'casting times, durations, magnitudes and a few others, most of which are followed by single digit numbers that mean little to the casual read. What exactly does magnatude 10 mean anyway? Don't worry, it's all explained easily enough. I just think the way it's listed is a bit more arcane than strictly necessary. There are no earthshatteringly awesome spells, just so you know. No Wish or even a decent fireball. That's not to say that magic isn't powerful... it is. Just that it is scaled to the rest of the game. That is to say its powerful on the level of characters, not on armies.
The next chapter is Cults. Starting with the Magic chapter the book suddenly seems to take on elements of a setting without actually developing the setting itself. This chapter is more of the same. Characters are meant to join a cult, obviously, and progress through the cult. There are only five actual cults listed (at least one is a 'bad guy' cult), and more pagespace is devoted to generic 'cultiness' than the cults themselves. I can see that Cults are the new prestige class...
One issue that cropped up for me was the time scale of the Cults. In order to reach the higher levels of the cult it takes years, a fair assessement. Only... many RPG characters rarely play for years without huge amounts of downtime between adventures. I can see a conflict between versimilitude and playability here, and no guidance is given on how to handle it.
After the Cults we take a sharp right turn back into generic rules... you know the sort. Falling, healing and poisons. Nothing to see here but a strange, but common, layout decision. Moving along...
Then the chapter on improvement. That's right, an entire chapter. Okay, it's three pages long... There is no real obvious list of what sort of rewards players should get, you actually have to read the text to figure it out (oh, the horror!), it works out to three 'advancement rolls' and two hero points per adventure. There is a change here from older editions in that advancements (to skills) are not so tied to what you did, but what you want to improve. This removes the 'wheelbarrow full of weapons' that has been often scorned. There are also rules for practice, research and mentors, as well as how to learn new advanced skills (two improvements..). Lastly you can improve your attributes (a first, as I recall) by spending three improvement rolls... or rather gambling them.
Technically still in the improvement chapter are the 'legendary abilities' that you can learn. These have been likened to feats, and there is some justification. They are a mixed lot, and a little dull. Born to the Saddle, for example, sounds like something that you should start with. Decapitating swing seems like something anyone should be able to do. They do add a bit to the game, but not as much as they should have.
Finally we have 'levels' of adventurers. This seems more like it should be in character creation, as it mostly discusses playing at a higher level of power 'out the gate'. There is a bit of 'ageism' here, as we could point out that Achillies was too young to be a hero by the game's standards. Might offend younger players to link power/skill to age, though there is some versmilitude here...
Then BACK to generic setting stuff... you know, critters. Some are generic (bears), others are pure Gloranta (Ducks). Actually, the Ducks aren't pure gloranthan to me. I've seen the old artwork, where you had an actual DUCK complete with weapons and armor. This new duck is more 'ugly duckman'. Bah. This is one of the bigger chapters, and holds the majority of the artwork in the book by a country mile. It's functional, like the rest of the book, but nothing outstanding, like the rest of the book.
There is, for the record, an Index. It's good. There is also a character sheet, which is not. I have never seen a more lifeless character sheet in all my years of gaming. I can do better with a pencil and a pad of lined paper. Bottom of the barrel functionality. It actually took me too looks to even realize it WAS a character sheet, and not some chart explaining something or other.
In the end, all I can say about this book is that it works. You can run a game with it. I don't think it's the best ever iteration of the game, I doubt it's much more detailed than the SRD. In car terms its a Kia sedan. Cheap and functional, but no one is begging for a ride. If it means to be generic, it doesn't quite go far enough, if it means to be Glorantha/Runequest it is too stripped down.
I'm glad you wrote this review. I skimmed through the book at the game store, and well - felt like it wasn't much to write home about.
Plus, it's so thin! The core book is like the "Little Golden Book" of gaming texts.
I wish that they would just offer the thing as a free download and then just sell supplements, or maybe just publish it as a softcover $9.95 book.
It occured to me after writing it that I could have said a lot more about what could have or should have been. Making it even cheaper with a softcover was one of my ideas... you durn durty idear theif! :D
On the other hand, my review seemed like it was going longer than the book!
Hi there , the 2nd version is much much better....
I am well aware of that, Taxboy. Of course, when I wrote this review there wasn't even a hint that there was to be a second edition.