[Rq-rules] re: after the end

[Nick.Middleton at invensys.com]

>Re the topic of that discussion, while I always liked Glorantha I found it
rather too contrived for my own tastes,
>and Peter's comments about the 80's-90's Gregging (into the current day)
by Gloranthaphile scholars essentially
> turned me off it despite my own meagre contributions to the published
work.

I have a huge nostalgic fondness for early RQII Glorantha - not from
playing or running it directly, but from reading about it in early White
Dwarf and ransacking the supplements (Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror,
Pavis, Griffin Mountain) for inspiration for my own games in worlds of my
own invention.

Whilst I liked some of the RQII material, the AH boxed sets did seem a
rather obvious repackaging to maximise profit approach and I rather stopped
following what was going on in the latter part of the eighties, and didn't
pay proper attention until the late nineties... So I missed the whole
scholars thing, but was increasingly uncomfortable with Hero Wars and the
Glorantha it was describing (or rather, trying to describe in the case of
Hero Wars itself...)  I fairly rapidly realised that, like Hero wars/Quest,
Glorantha in its current form is a setting I have little sympathy for or
interest in, so I've been quietly completing my RQ collection via eBay and
buying up the Gloranthan Classics and largely ignoring where "modern"
Glorantha (and Hero Quest)  are going.

>I prefer my fantasy slightly familiar to the totally fantastic - Tolkien
instead of Jorune, if that doesn't date me too much.

:D I happen to love both, the former to read, the later to game in. And
funnily enough, I love reading about Tekumel as well, but like
Middle-Earth, the idea of running a game there has never really appealed.
But then both are settings ultimately built around their creators passion
for languages... Where as I adore gaming in Jorune (a setting built from
the ground up for gaming in), and Michael Moorcock's multivers , which (at
least in it's 60's/70's incarnation) seems ideally suited to RPG's to me.

> Glorantha just got to be too rococo for my tastes.

And (IMO) at the same time seems to have come over all po-faced and
humourless: as happened a quarter of a century ago, I think I'll stick with
my homebrew setting... ;-) But then, I think Glorantha gets over-hyped as
an achievement in the history of roleplaying (and Pendragon under-hyped, to
be fair to Greg Stafford).

>But that's why I continue to lurk here, since I think the mechanics of RQ
(props to Perrin)
>were and still are one of the best systems ever, despite its being hitched
to Glorantha.

As I did on the BRP Yahoo group, allow me to quote from my copy of Call of
Cthulhu hardback Edition 5.6, the
Acknowledgement section of the Clear Credit sidebar on the copyright page:

"Thanks are also due to the original authors (especially Steve Perrin)
and play group connected with the 1978 roleplaying game RuneQuest, now
owned by Hasbro#, from which the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu were
adapted via the intermediary and out-of-print Basic Roleplaying. Mark
Morrison has remarked that when he wishes to see how some problem of
physical action is handled in a game, he turns first to RuneQuest. He
is not the only one."

#This was of course written before Hasbro relinquished the rights to the
text of RQIII back to Chaosium and didn't dispute Issaries Inc's
registering of the "RuneQuest" trademark.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton