[Tori Bergquist]

Very nice review, Lev, and as an advocate for the current MRQ (as well as someone who previously ran RQ2 and 3) I appreciate your very fair review.

I recently put my MRQ campaign on hiatus while that group tries out D&D 4E, but having run a campaign with this system over the last year I've noticed some interesting elements that surfaced in play....and was both surprised at "what actually worked, but wasn't supposed to" vs. "what I thought would be cool, but turned out to be a pain." I'll go ahead and group them in a sec.

I liked your suggestion that the current edition of Runequest lacks some of the more anthropological and mythic recognition or identification in the text of earlier editions, as I think you are essentially right; the earlier editions of Runequest read very well, in terms of conveying the ancient world and its mythic parables. It hadn't really occured to me until you mentioned it, but that is a hard-to-define trait that the older editions have and which this one, in its straight forward conciseness, lacks. Actually, a lot of RPGs are lacking that these days, I am afraid; I think that's a n unfortunate side effect of the hobby's age and the influence of fantays fiction, film and video games moving so far away from the root sources of fantasy and myth.

I'm still of the opinion that Runequest can and should be a stand-alone game, on to which Glorantha can be added. I've never run Glorantha, and never will, although it's a nice setting....I just prefer to do my own thing. So MRQ being more open to multiple settings remains a good thing for me.

The Cultural Packages deal is an interesting point of debate: I'd love to see some elucidation on how this could be fixed, for those who are concerned with it. While the fact that MRQ is not modeling any particular anthropological classifaction of what cultures are is certainly true, speaking as one who got his degree in anthropology, I can't say that it would have necessarily been any better or different. Given that they were going for a simpler model on character building (or so it seems) I haven't really been bothered by the way it is done in MRQ, although perpaps they could have done a cultural package deal added to a Social Status package deal, and that would have fixed the issue (and I would have approved of such a model, too.)

Now, for my In-Play Observations:

Unexpected Pros:
I thought the magic systems would prove to be both unwieldly and game-breaking. I was expecting the runes to be fun, but (as you suggested) turn in to basic magic items with a collection motif. Didn't work out that way at all; players loved finding them and integrating them when possible, but the simple fact was that the GM could easily control the rate of acquisition, and impose restrictions on why a given character would or wouldn't arbitrarily integrate every rune he found. In actual play (with my group at least) this proved to be a non-issue and became a big portion of the role-playing plot elements. Also, the use of runes as physical qualities proved to be a novel and interesting take on magic in my (non-Glorantha) campaign that seemed to really appeal to my jaded gaming group.

The Sorcery system also gave me a measure of heartbreak, but in actual play turned out not to be such a big deal, either. I imagine given enough time, a very powerful, highly skilled sorcerer will be a real beast.....but the game hasn't progressed that far yet.

Skills in Runequest actually worked pretty well. I remember the old days (and even some CoC games) where it seemed like I had to hand out arbitrary numbers of extra skill points to make starting characters basically functional. The system, as presented, created some essentially competent characters, although it helped that everyone in the group coordinated to make sure they had their important skills covered.

The modifications to the skill improvement rolls worked rather well. On the one hand, players familiar with BRP games missed the idea that they could get a skill roll for every stat they successfully employed in play, but on the other hand they loved a smaller number of rolls, but with at least 1 guaranteed improvement point.

I never thought the legendary abilities were a bad idea; in fact I loved that idea. In actual play they take a looong time to acquire. In some ways, MRQ feels like two games: a variant of the old RQ we are all familiar with, and then a Legendary edition in which a group can start with bad-ass characters from the get-go. But getting from standard RQ to "we're all bad asses" is actually a very, very long process. Kind of like how getting to play a 21st-30th level character in D&D is a rarely seen event in most campaigns (in my experience, anyway). But players loved the concept that they might, someday, be able to perform some of those legendary abilities.

Unexpected Cons:
I was surprised to discover that I really, really disliked the absence of a core HP score. However, the players liked this feature a lot; in play, the players tended to survive better (as intended in the design, I suppose) but the monsters often held out far longer, as well. I pretty much ended up house ruling that most non-boss monsters would just fail their resillience checks and keep over when they hit -HP in a critical location, to save myself some book-keeping nightmare work. Also, I noticed that the likelihood of death seemed to go waaaay down. Again, I was miffed, but players liked it. Heck, I would dare say death is easier in D&D 4th edition than in MRQ!

The armor point rules are damned annoying. Stacking rules (or absence thereof) are kind of arbitrary, a hand-waived effort to avoid the case of something with natural armor of 5 APs wearing plate on top of that, I suppose. Although the calculated system for skill point penalties for wearing armor was cool, it does not properly reflect armor that's really effective while simultaneously being light weight and maneuverable, so some armors which really should be less restrictive (imo) while still having a lot of stopping power don't make as much sense as they should under this system. I forget how it worked in older RQ editions, but the BRP system is better, imo.

I hated Strike Ranks in 3rd and 2nd edition, let me get that out of the way: it was damned annoying. But despite preferring the streamlined system of MRQ, I found the real issue turned out to be Combat Actions. CAs are defined entirely by one's attributes, so the CA value is going to be high for quick, nimble types like elves and low for slow lumbering types. But in actual play, this is where player started dumping skill checks to try and improve attributes, to get that golden number that grants 1 extra CA. I think that, given a chance to do it my own way, I'd simply make CAs a flat number, say 2 or 3 for everyone, and then just let quickness for Dex and such be reflected in the initiative. This will also help avoid the "guy with slow tank sits back for 2 CAs while all the quick little people run around." In actual practice, the quick guys tended to be low damage dealers anyway, and the big guy with one good hit tended to demolish things when he got his chance, but the net effect of a set number of CAs would (to me) seem to do nothing more than insure all players were equally involved over the course of play.

Because MRQ (and all previous editions) are stat-based for race creation, in actual play I can safely say that letting someone run a...oh, say...minotaur can guarantee you have one player who can cause serious damage while everyone else hides behind him. This has always been an issue with RQ and BRP, though, not sure how to "fix" it beyond restricting options for players (and thus the campaign) which I'd rather not do. On the other hand, because the group had a minotaur in it, I often let loose with some pretty formidable opponents, and the minotaur came close to dying....many times.

I quickly ran in to stat block problems with the monsters: monsters who wore (non-natural) armor should have skill penalties, for example (which apply to attack skills as well) but it was impossible to tell from the stat blocks if those were prefigured in or not. I decided to assume they were, as some creatures (like the slaarge) would be borderline incompetent in battle if I applied the skill penalties. Except for this, and occasional monster stats seeming incomplete (like skeletons and ghouls...why are undead making resillience checks? What exactly is going on here?) I didn't encounter many other issues.

Other minor quibbles I had: I wish the book had key charts assembled in an appendix in the rear. I wish Mongoose had not used their in-house printer for a while there, because my UK-published book fell apart in the middle of the first session. The new ones are sturdy, yes, but the post office managed to lose my replacement copy and I am unsure if I will ever see another replacement. But all that aside, it's a nice book.