Over the many years I’ve played role-playing games, there are a few games that I have never really had the chance to sit down and play. Runequest, in the form of its 2^nd edition (1979) was a game I played a couple of games of at school, and I have run a couple of sessions of it later in my life, but never to a great extent.

But RuneQuest still exists. It has gone through many editions – under one count, the current edition, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is its seventh.

The current edition of RuneQuest is tied very heavily to its world, Glorantha. This setting is a bronze-age world with a lot of gods, and many cults following those gods and other powers. Almost all characters belong to a cult and have magical powers, some learnt from the cult, some from other means. Characters also have various beliefs – passions – that are mechanically reinforced and can give bonuses and penalties in play. This is a key defining feature of RuneQuest that makes it different from most other RPGs. The current edition does a great job of integrating all of this.

However, there’s one aspect to RuneQuest that I find out of place. And that’s the combat system. It’s quite detailed – the basic mechanics are more so than that of Dungeons & Dragons. You roll to attack, your opponent can try to dodge or parry with another roll, and then you make further rolls to see what body part you hit and how much damage you do. This can then get absorbed by the parrying weapon and the armour, before finally reducing your hit points – both generally and in the specific location.

So, detailed, right? And it is also very deadly. The advice I’ve been getting from friends who play the game is to generally stay out of combat. Definitely stay out of combat if you’re outnumbered. (Your ability to defend yourself is severely compromised if you need to parry more than one attack a round). You need to be more careful about when you fight as opposed to D&D.

Really detailed combat system. Don’t go into combat. Bit of a gap there.

But I have recently picked up the RuneQuest Starter Set, so I was happy to try this most recent edition of the game with my friends.

It should be said that this is a beautiful production, with lots of high-quality art. It contains four booklets: the Rules, the World, a Solo Adventure, and the Adventures, and also a set of fourteen pregenerated characters. The adventures are designed for three to six players and a GM.

Fourteen pregenerated characters! Are they just offering a choice, or were they expecting replacement characters would be needed?

From this point forward, there will be SPOILERS for the first adventure, A Rough Landing.

The adventure begins with the characters entering the town of Jonstown. (Yes, there was a Jon it was named after). As they made their way toward an inn, they became aware of a group of five dark trolls causing trouble in a marketplace.

In a D&D game, it’s quite likely they’d have to fight the trolls. (Well, it’s more likely they’d be goblins for new characters). But, for RuneQuest, directly fighting these well-armoured trolls was a bad idea. This isn’t to say that the adventure strictly forbids combat. Indeed, it rather expects it at this point, although it tries to ameliorate the effects by having the trolls fight with their fists.

If the characters, instead, attempt to negotiate with the trolls and find out why they’re causing trouble, there’s a language problem. The trolls have only a 15% chance of understanding anything said to them in Tradetalk, the most likely common tongue. This really is pushing the adventurers towards either fighting or being very inventive. But, from the text, it seems pretty obvious that a fight is desirable.

My players were smart and lucky. We’d discussed how deadly RuneQuest was before we started – and many had already had experience of a short RQ2 campaign where I killed a few of their characters – so, they decided to negotiate. And, amazingly, I rolled really well for the troll’s comprehension, allowing them to communicate without much trouble.

I suspect that the adventure writer wanted you to roll again for the trolls every time the characters spoke, but one of the players said exactly the right thing: He asked the trolls why they didn’t sign up as mercenaries.

This was a gift. It tied in entirely into the trolls’ story, and – under some circumstances – might be disclosed later in the adventure. But the players had triggered it now and I wasn’t going to let their good fortune go unrewarded. So, I described how the trolls, in halting Tradetalk, described how they had been hired at mercenaries, but arrived too late for the fighting and their patron was now dead.

With this knowledge, the characters were able to calm the trolls down with no further destruction and no loss of life.

As described in the adventure, the city guard now arrived and escorted the trolls away, and – impressed by the heroes’ actions – offered them a place to stay in a local temple, which the players accepted.

The next day, the adventurers were summoned to the local law courts. There, some officials made inquiries into what was going on. The players, once again, acquitted themselves one. I allowed several of them to speak, and though some failed Orate rolls, the good successes that other characters achieved allowed them to succeed. The officials thought highly of them and let the trolls off with a warning. The adventurers had made some friends in the trolls.

The story continued with the officials asking the adventurers to investigate some nearby farms who hadn’t sent anyone to the city for a few days. The political situation was quite fraught at the moment – in fact, the area was still in a war against the Lunar Empire – and their free guards were now at a nearby fort in case of a new attack. So, the only ones available to look into the situation were the adventurers.

They didn’t offer to pay them, though. I found that odd. But the adventurers didn’t ask for money either. That’s even more odd!

So, with a renewed set of altruism, the adventurers set off. I showed them a few maps and pictures from the adventure book to help them picture the area in their minds. While I’m not in love with all of the art styles in RuneQuest, a lot of it is very good.

Now we got to the part of the adventure that I had problems running: The investigation.

The basic shape of it is that the four farms are deserted. There are a few clues as to what is going on, and, honestly, it feels like I should run it as a Call of Cthulhu scenario. But I’m also getting towards the end of the session and I feel I should include a fight. I’m not entirely happy with how the investigation is constructed in the adventure, but let’s leave that for now.

So, with my players acing their Scan checks (that’s like Perception or Investigate in D&D), they found bloodstains in the first place they investigated, and then discovered some tunnels. In the tunnels? A couple of scorpionmen!

Into combat they go! They begin at range, and so most of the characters use missile weapons as the scorpion men charge in.

The adventure leaves a lot of the numbers of scorpion men present up to the GM. This is a mistake for a starter set; you can not assume the GM knows the game already and how it is balanced. I already knew of RuneQuest’s reputation for lethality, so I started the combat against few foes.

It doesn’t take long for us to run up against stuff in combat that annoys us. Some of it is definitely a legacy of all our D&D play – but we don’t only play D&D. Some of it is just stuff that feels bad.

Stuff like strike ranks. RuneQuest uses the old-school method of everyone predeclaring actions, then calculating in what order events occur, and then resolving the actions. This is, quite simply, a pain. I’ve tried going back to the old system of doing things a few times in D&D, but cyclical initiative has just turned out to be a lot better for everyone. But I’m trying to play RuneQuest by-the-book, so strike ranks it is. They make combat feel a lot more awkward.

One player has drawn a melee weapon and is waiting for the enemy. The rest fire missile weapons. Miss, miss, hit, hit.

On the hits, we roll the body part the arrow hits, then see how much damage the arrow does. That is reduced by the armour, then hit points are reduced on the body part. A leg gets hit: 10 damage goes down to 7 damage after armour. The leg has 3 hit points, so I reduce the leg’s hit points to -3, which tears off the leg, with one additional point of damage ignored due to special rules about hitting the legs of a scorpion man. This also reduces the scorpion man’s total hit points from 13 to 7.

Melee commences, and the one character ready to melee is trying to fend off two scorpion men. RuneQuest does not favour the defender in such a situation. Each additional parry after the first is at a -20% cumulative penalty. And the scorpion men have two attacks each round.

Somehow, the lone defender manages to survive the initial burst of melee. I’m left wondering what strike rank the scorpion man should be using when it attacks with two different weapons, but I can’t find a rule to cover it.

Now it’s time for the rest of the characters to enter melee. Firing into melee is possible, but the target is determined randomly (also in the same style of old AD&D combat). But changing weapons will take time, 5 strike ranks to draw a new weapon, after dropping the old. 10 strike ranks if you’re putting away a weapon and drawing a new one. This last version means that they’ll basically skip the turn, as there are only 12 strike ranks in a round and there’s an additional cost for attacking.

The third round of combat is the last, with both scorpion men falling. Incredibly, the lone melee warrior has survived, due to some horrible rolling on the scorpion men’s part and the arrival of reinforcements.

As the session ends, I’m feeling optimistic about the game. While I can’t say the combat system thrills me, there’s a lot of things about it I do like, and the early part of the session with the role-playing and investigations went very well.