A Year of RuneQuest Fun

My Thursday group has been playing RuneQuest weekly for a bit more than a year now and hopefully my players have had as much fun as me! I figured I would share and celebrate our game achievements here.

(this article was originally posted on Facebook, and is reposted here with minor edits and extra pictures)

Kids on Bisons

We started in 1611 with 10-year old characters being in-over-their-heads at Gamla’s Leap. The world comes crashing down around them and they join or return to the Bachad Tribe, in flames. Using some half-assed rules for playing a “kids on bisons” campaign, we went through some year-by-year adventuring, with quite a few vignettes and short scenes in between to punctuate daily Orlanthi life in the Far Place.

While the kids navigated the social web of teenager cliques in the Alone confederation, they got involved in increasingly dangerous and outlandish shenanigans. They formed a wildly illegal spirit society and got hold of equally illegal underage magic. They threw some rocks at Tusk Riders and kicked them repeatedly while they were down. They stumbled into an old Mostali settlement, talked to a rusty robot, escaped in mine carts, and destroyed a Chaos shrine. They got discorporated by mistake and ran away from Broo shamans. They accepted a dare to stay by the Woods of the Dead by night. They participated in various games and challenges during tribal festivals. They went up against a scary local rural legend, narrowly avoided becoming mushroom fertilizer, became friends with the elves their parents told them to stay away from, shocked the entire confederation by going heroquesting, saved hundreds of children, greatly upset the trolls by making the Deadwood start regrowing, and indirectly caused the dissolution and exile of one of the Bachad clans… and then they became adults.

Needless to say, they are absolutely infamous around the Far Place for having done all this as teenagers, although they’re not the only ones (I have a couple of NPCs who also did some crazy stuff… with the implication that the PCs inspired stupid heroics from many kids in the confederation!)

We had, of course, some other half-assed heroquesting rules for adulthood initiation, with one character coming back with a glimpse of Illumination!

Apprenticeship and Initiation

Next was the apprenticeship years. The kids, now young adults, said goodbye to each other as they all went to different universities and community colleges, so to speak, but they found each other for big tribal festivals.

During Sacred Time they helped smuggle a Sartarite rebel from under the Lunars’ noses, and stole an important magical item from a bunch of Yelmalion bounty hunters.

In their second year they went cattle raiding, drank Amad blood beer, and otherwise made some questionable choice of party friends. Shortly before their cult initiations they found puberty going sideways and realized they got a Chaotic taint somewhere along the line. That’s what you get when you don’t use protection… Nothing that a bit of dangerous heroquesting can’t fix, mind you, but in doing so they found some ugly tribal secret that has maybe put a target on their back. Woopsies.

We recently finished the cult initiations, and you won’t be surprised to know that yes we did have some half-assed rules for that. They all pushed beyond the normal ritual paths and into experimental heroquesting, because they are all reckless would-be heroes. Sure, some of them came back with banes, including curses that will soon befall their community and will have to be dealt with. But hey, they also learned ancient languages, came back with magical God Time objects, and discovered ancient cult entities that will now act as patron spirits.

One character however died during Orlanthi initiation. Our trickster player opened his big mouth (yes we have a trickster player… and he plays a trickster, so that works out well) and lo and behold the character was stopped by Humakt just before entering the Underworld. “You work for me now.” He came back as a Humakt initiate (once again, shocking the community!) with a big black mark on his left arm, where the Death God grabbed him and turned him around. He can’t put any armour on that arm.

Adulthood

Now the players are off to troll lands around the Indigo Mountains to find some missing family member, and after that they’ll go travelling in a caravan led by the Issaries character (mostly because, based on the aforementioned tribal secret, it’s a good idea for them to leave the tula for a while) And yes, before you ask, I’m currently working on some trading rules. They’re totally half-assed.

Thanks for reading! I hope this will either give you ideas for your game, or give you ideas for our game you can share back to me