Ray Turney's "Origins of RuneQuest"

Introduction

I was pleased to see Steve’s Perrin’s brief reminiscence on the origins of RQ. (Click and go to page 30.) I’ve been thinking that the documentation of this ought to be done. Thanks to Lev for getting that out, and also for provoking me to take care of my own corner of game history.

As I said, I’d been thinking this ought to be done for quite a while. So I wrote to Ray Turney, the other primary author of RuneQuest, to get some of his thoughts and memories. Below is his response. I’ve changed nothing except to insert some formatting heads.

Thank you Ray.

--Greg Stafford, Oct 1, 2008.

RuneQuest – Context, Development and Impact
by Ray Turney

Context

The role playing game world was very different when RuneQuest was developed. For one thing, role playing games were new. Many people were excited about the possibilities of role playing games. The D&DTM rules were three little booklets, which while offering a lot of interesting possibilities were so ambiguous that when people got together at DunDracon, they often found that they were not playing the same game. Most of the other co-authors of RuneQuest were high ranking fighters in the Society for Creative Anachronism. They were very annoyed by the abstract D&D combat system, which did not allow them to visualize what was actually happening in a fight. Character classes were few and rigid, more derived from the problem of adapting the Chainmail miniatures game to handle fantasy than from an analysis of how to represent characters in fantasy fiction. Last, but certainly not least, Greg wanted to represent the world of Glorantha, which had little Tolkien influence and no dungeons.

Development

With this background in mind, the reader will better understand our development process. Greg initially talked to my brother Art, who was one of his playtesters for Dragon Pass and his friend Hendrik. They brought me in. It rapidly became apparent that designing and developing a set of game rules was much harder than we had at first assumed. A couple of key ideas that were later used in RuneQuest were agreed on. As I recall, the basic skill rather than character class orientation and experience checks were used from this initial work, but this was thirty years ago now and I could be wrong. Progress was much less rapid than Greg had hoped. So Greg brought in Steve Perrin, who brought in Steve Henderson and Warren James. My brother and Hendrik left the team.

Bringing in Steve Perrin proved to be a key move. This was not because he was outstanding at coming up with new rules, but because he was a skilled technical writer. He knew how to organize and present abstract ideas to an audience. He did things like break the project down into chapters, etc. With an organization in mind, we were now in a position to get serious about developing the game. Since both Steves had been kings in the SCA, they basically wrote the combat rules. I ended up responsible for most of the magic section. I forget who wrote up the skills section.

Key points in the combat rules were the adoption of a system involving a fixed number of hit points; separation of active defense such as parrying from passive defense such as armor; the concept of hit locations; the concept of strike ranks and the adoption of the “Perrin Conventions”. The reason for going with a fixed number of hit points was that what “hit points” in D&D represented was very ambiguous. The obvious interpretation of D&D hit points was that they were about how tough a character is. Once this interpretation had been adopted, indefinitely increasing hit points became clearly absurd, so we changed hit points into a basically fixed quantity. Separation of parrying from armor was necessary to allow the fighters in our group to visualize how a fight went. While both armor and parrying protect a character, thus lending a superficial plausibility to D&D’s combination of the two {particularly in the context of Chainmail fantasy battles} , when you move to a lower level of abstraction combining them ceases to make sense. Hit locations were a necessary addition because a blow hits a specific part of a human body, and the effect of a blow depends on the part of the body which is hit. Strike ranks were added because the question of who hits first is very important in SCA fighting, possibly more important than in real fighting. This led to a decision to include a detailed system for determining who struck first. Finally, the “Perrin conventions”, breaking down turns into phases and specifying the order of magic, missile, movement and melee, were something that Steve had found to be necessary while organizing conventions. The ambiguity of the D&D rules on this led to interpretations that differed from one group to another, which resulted in arguments when members of a group that had one reading of the rules played with members of a group that had a different reading of the rules. So RuneQuest made this an explicit part of the rules. The result of these changes, collectively, was to reduce the level of abstraction of the combat rules, at some cost in additional complexity and die rolling.

The magic rules were influenced by the debate about spell point vs. D&D style slots then going on in the role playing community. It was also influenced by a feeling that that very powerful magicians, for example those capable of throwing large fireballs and taking out dozens of people, though useful in modeling fantasy fiction, are more trouble than they are worth in a role playing game context. D&D tried to address the issue by making low level magicians very vulnerable and high level magicians very powerful. In my experience, this merely led to players of low level magicians being frustrated by the inability of their characters to survive, and players of high level fighters complaining that any magicians who survived were much more powerful than their fighter characters. So I created two new systems, “battle magic”, a simple spell point system intended to allow everyone to have the fun of casting a spell while not detracting from the glory of the fighters, and “rune magic” in which characters could call upon the gods. This fitted Glorantha moderately well and had the effect of making RuneQuest distinctive.

There were a few other innovations, such as providing statistics to allow players to play baboons and ducks. The decision to include ducks was definitely debatable, but they were a part of Glorantha and so had to be included. But if you are a member of the “Down with Ducks” faction, I was definitely with you.

One innovation in RuneQuest first and second editions which was not widely copied were slightly comic separate examples. The decision to include separate written examples was originally made by Steve Perrin, but I wrote a fair number of them. These do not seem to been copied elsewhere in the gaming industry, but I think they played a key role in getting people interested in RuneQuest and clarifying the rules by making them less abstract. I can only assume that since space costs money, and there is always too much material to include it all. So I assume that either examples are never written or they are cut for other games. I think this was the most overlooked potentially valuable innovation in RuneQuest.

Impact

The short version is that RuneQuest had a lot of influence on later game design and a lot of players really liked the game. The longer version is that RuneQuest was a major step in some long term trends. These trends include the separation of role playing games from war games and miniatures rules, away from dungeons and toward more fully realized worlds, away from limitation of character development to career tracks as defined by character classes and toward a more literary concept of character. It was also a much needed move toward clarity in the writing of rules. RuneQuest supplements such as Cults of Prax and Griffin Mountain had a lot of impact, in terms of providing an interesting fantasy world to play in and defining what a supplement should be. This impact, and the impact of the world of Glorantha in general, are conceptually distinct from the impact of RuneQuest, but RuneQuest made those supplements possible. These supplements, in turn, did a lot to increase the impact of RuneQuest.

What I Now Think

RuneQuest is still clear and playable, and Glorantha is still one of the best fantasy role play settings out there. You can still find RuneQuest 1st edition and 2nd edition on eBay sometimes. That said, most of the people who created RuneQuest have gone on to do other things. Greg Stafford worked with Robin Laws to produce HeroQuest, Steve Perrin has produced SPQR I have written Fire and Sword, available as an open source free download. Mongoose RuneQuest, while a different game than the old Chaosium RuneQuest, is certainly worth checking out if you liked Chaosium RuneQuest. Chaosium has produced Basic Role Playing, which includes a wide variety of rules for D100 based role playing. So if you like RuneQuest 1st and 2nd editions, I suggest checking out what RuneQuest evolved into.

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