Episode 27: The Cults of RuneQuest

We finally worked up the courage to get Jeff Richard on our show!

Jeff is the Creative Director and Chair of Chaosium, the lead writer on most of the RuneQuest books, the lead art director on RuneQuest, and the editor for Pendragon. Jeff is also generally responsible for the look and feel of the Chaosium books.

Jeff’s Gaming History

Jeff’s roleplaying career started in the late seventies with not being able to make much sense of the original D&D rules but getting the system from playing Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha. It was in Middle or High School when one of his friends brought a copy of RuneQuest and advertised it as a game where you could play anything in the setting, even a were-pig. Even better, they realized it was in the same setting as that board game White Bear and Red Moon which they had played before.

Jeff had been gaming for quite some time before he and Greg Stafford started writing together in the late 1990s. In the 2000s Jeff and Rick Meints ended up pretty much taking over the leaderless Issaries Inc. with its Hero Wars/HeroQuest line, putting out the second (generic) edition of the HeroQuest rules and campaign books for Sartar and Pavis. A few years later Greg Stafford regained control over Chaosium and brought the Moon Design crew (expanded to include Michael O’Brian aka MOB and Neil Robinson) in to take over the company.

Ludo mentions that Jörg told him just before the recording about the werepig. Jeff confirms that Pinky Petunia was his first character (who didn’t last very long), a kamikaze werepig which was the coolest experience to a 14 or 15 year old who had been playing just AD&D and related games with their very limited set of character classes and races.

Jeff also was part of the Seattle Farmers Collective, a group of Seattle roleplayers including Jeff, David Dunham, Neil Robinson, Pam Carlson, Dana Shack (?), Dave Pearton and others which engaged in a number of ways of exploratory gaming in the nineties.

David Dunham had managed to marry the Pendragon rules with RuneQuest, which on retrospect is pretty easy, and the Collective played a couple of generational games in various places in Glorantha. What was interesting was that the characters were the local community, and they were involved in these Bronze Age feuds, and the more the characters succeeded the worse the things would turn out.

At the time, Jeff was reading a lot of Icelandic Sagas and researching theories of feuds, of how feud systems would end up to create an equilibrium.

A lot of those experiences worked their way into David Dunham’s computer game King of Dragon Pass, and then, twenty years later, a lot of that worked its way into the current edition of RuneQuest.

Ludo mentions that a lot of people who play RuneQuest might recognize its setting as that of the King of Dragon Pass or Six Ages games, much like Jeff had the experience with the White Bear and Red Moon boardgame.

Jeff talks about the demography of the players of RuneQuest and the fans of Glorantha. It is very clear that a lot of old-time fans are getting back into it, but sales numbers indicate that it is largely a new audience. There are people coming in from David Dunham’s computer games, others come in from the Morrowind/Skyrim connections (mentioned in this interview with the designers).

Jeff often jokes that old RuneQuest is The Velvet Underground of gaming, selling 20,000 copies but everybody who ended up owning a copy leaving a big impression. Ludo inserts the saying “You might not know RuneQuest, but RuneQuest is your favourite game designer’s favourite game.”

Jeff argues that this changed in the last decade or so as RuneQuest had largely been dead as a rules system since the early nineties. Now it has a new edition, it has a very active fan-base, it is showing up at conventions, its audience is growing – Jeff will probably have to retire that Velvet Underground joke. What would have happened if that band had ever actually caught on?

Ludo points o