I started playing RuneQuest with the latest edition, “RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha”, colloquially known as “RQG”. I had fallen in love with the setting via its gigantic¹, critically acclaimed, system-agnostic “Guide to Glorantha”², so using the official game to bring it to the table felt like the next logical move. RQG looked great at first, even though I was immediately skeptical of some of its most idiosyncratic mechanics, like Strike Ranks³. But there was a lot of cool stuff! Divine magic that requires worship at your god’s temples to recharge! Rune affinities that model your personality! Passions that connect to your community!

But after a couple years of play, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Chaos in Glorantha started as the pretty clear-cut mark for the “bad guys”, a tool for gamemasters to scare their players, and for those players to kill some monsters without remorse. But I’m a Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green player at heart, with some early formative years spent on Vampire and Cyberpunk, so I want my grey moral areas, my secret cults, my conspiracies, and my mission-giving patrons that turn out to be corrupt assholes! So let’s look at how to make Chaos in Glorantha a bit more insiduous and nuanced.

I never planned to become a TTRPG collector but, you know, it kinda just happened. I started looking on eBay for the games I used to play as a kid, and then I wanted to have a look at the previous editions of games I’m interested in, and then I’d hear about this or that old supplement or scenario that’s “worth checking out” and then… well frankly, OCD kicked in and I wanted to see all the books nicely lined up on the shelf.

But then I realized what I think most of you already know: books get fatter as new editions get released. How much fatter? Well, I’m glad you asked, because that means it’s spreadsheet time!

Chaosium may have a problem: Glorantha became the very thing that its critics warned us about. It’s mostly just a bunch of lore, now. How did that happen? And what does that mean for my RuneQuest games?

When Brindlewood Bay came out it seemed to become an immediate darling of my TTRPG circles. Being a fan of both the Cthulhu Mythos and TV series like Murder She Wrote, Columbo, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and more, I figured that “old ladies investigating murders that lead into cosmic horror” sounded totally like my jam! Plus, there was some promise of a “novel take” on investigation games! So, as is tradition, I backed some Kickstarter, and waited to receive the books.

That’s how, back in 2024, I ran my Friday group through a handful of cozy mysteries from both the basic Brindlewood Bay book and the Nephews In Peril supplement. Here are some notes about how that went!

The old ElfQuest boxed set got the recent “revival” treatment by Chaosium’s excellent “Nostalgia Department” (aka the ever wonderful Chaosium president Rick Meints). After quite a successful Kickstarter campaign, the box was finally delivered this week to most backers. Since I’ve got nothing better to do this week-end, let’s take a quick look, and compare it to the old one!

These past few years I’ve been catching up on a lot of classic roleplaying games that I’ve never played before, despite having several decades of play behind me. One of those was Traveller, so I was happy to finally run that with my Friday game! We ran about 15 sessions, across four scenarios, plus the usual extra shenanigans in between.

I liked the game and would like to play more of it, but my players didn’t! Oh noes! They sent Traveller all the way down their list of games! I’m a bit sad but as we’ll see, some of the blame was on me as the gamemaster. Hopefully, these “Notes on Traveller” will be useful for someone introducing Traveller to their group!

Mausritter is a TTRPG in which you play little adventuring mice trying to survive in a world of big dangers. If you’re a fan of the excellent comicbook Mouse Guard, you should already be hooked! The system is as minimalist as its protagonists, with low-prep two-hours adventures, so we played this a dozen times as an “interlude game”: the sort of game you play when a key player is missing, or in between campaign arcs. I also played this several times with TTRPG newbies, with up to 8 players! Here are my notes on Mausritter!

Lately I’ve seen a bit of criticism about TTRPG “reviews” that are mostly about flipping through a book and sharing first impressions. I do agree that it’s wrong to call those “reviews” but frankly, most of their authors actually call them “first looks” or “unboxings” anyway, so I’m pretty sure they are aware of that.

What I disagree with is the criticism that they are “useless”. It generally takes this form: “they only read the back cover and flip through the book, and I can do that myself!” And sure, I could do that myself too… if I had the book.

Numenera is a science-fantasy game set in the far, far, far distant future, with some lightweight and somewhat original system, all written by Monte Cook.

On paper, it ticked a lot of boxes for stuff I’m interested in, so I brought it to my Friday group a few years ago. We played a dozen sessions or so and… well, we weren’t much into it and dropped it for something else. Still, there are a few cool things to take away from Numenera! Here are my notes!

Disclaimer: we played Numenera several years ago, using the game’s first edition. Since then Monte Cook published a new edition, called Numenera Discovery and Destiny. I have no idea what changed in that second edition.