As promised last time I teased it, the first volume of the Canadian Chronicles is now available on DriveThruRPG. These are three scenarios for Call of Cthulhu, made and set in Canada, written by Francis Acquarone, Patrick Chandler, and myself. More details below!

I’ve been teasing it for a little bit but it’s getting closer and closer! The first three scenarios in the “Canadian Chronicles” series will be released next week on Chaosium’s Miskatonic Repository on DriveThruRPG. Here are some teasers and general information for each!

In the last article of the “Reading Classic RuneQuest” series, I looked at the Introduction chapter of the RuneQuest 2nd edition rulebook and noted that I would have things to say about the map of Glorantha we see here… as many of you know, I love maps, and this is one of the three classic and famous maps in this book! It deserves its own article!

I’m coming back to my “Reading Classic RuneQuest” series after a hiatus caused by, you know, having to deal with my twelve other hobby projects 😄 Last time I read through the “Basic Role-Playing” booklet and now I’m finally getting into the actual RuneQuest book proper! Yay! But don’t get too excited, we’ll only do the Introduction chapter! Booo!

I recently wrote an article about how the “RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha” product line is getting bogged down with too much lore and not enough playable content. A comment I saw a few times in response to it is that Chaosium “has to” release more lore supplements to establish a “baseline” for Glorantha. Let’s address this… with random tables!

I got into TTRPGs around the turn of the 1990s and, after my first few games, fell into a long tunnel of Call of Cthulhu gaming. I pretty much exclusively GM’ed Call of Cthulhu from the mid-90s to the late 2000s, including a lot of Delta Green, which back then was a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook.

I wasn’t online much at the time, so all the GMing techniques I picked up during that time were through adventure books, friends, or by myself. I suspect that investigative horror games like Call of Cthulhu are uniquely positioned to force the GM to develop good technique, and that’s sort of what I want to explore here through the lens of my own formative GMing years… and let’s start with “automatic clues!”

I’m back to reading the classic RuneQuest 2nd edition boxed set! See the first and second articles in the series if you missed them. Today we are reading the “Basic Role-Playing” booklet, written by Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis, with a couple illustrations by William Church.

This “introductory guide” to fantasy role-playing (FRP) and the Basic Role-Playing system (BRP) is a 16 pages-long booklet that, we are told, presents a “whole game system”. So in theory, you could completely ignore the rules in the bigger RuneQuest book and just play BRP directly from this. The BRP rules differ quite a lot from the RuneQuest rules, in that they’re much simpler, but you can tell they share the same chassis. I wonder how many early 1980s players decided to simplify aspects of RuneQuest by “downgrading” select rules to their BRP equivalent?

Anyway, let’s dive in!

If there’s a sure way to get my attention, it’s including some good looking maps in a game. But a sure way to get an instant buy is to include a big-ass cloth map in a game. That’s what Dragonbane did with their original crowdfunding campaign, and so of course I backed it at the “Deluxe Bundle” level. But wait! Instead of forgetting about it by the time it shipped, and then collecting dust on a shelf after receiving it, we actually played it! Shocking, I know. So here, let’s talk about Dragonbane!

Welcome to Open Box, the part of the blog where we look backwards to look forw… wait, no that’s not correct¹. It’s the part where we open the 2nd edition RuneQuest boxed set, like I said we would in the preamble! Let’s be careful with those corners, lift the lid, and take in the wonderful smell of old paper!

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.