Hoplites…
Finally, OpenQuest delivers the stuff that Chaosium’s old RuneQuest 2 started out long ago.
First out, the OpenQuest 2 rules set is awesome, and has just about the right amount of rules crunch for me these days. And now there’s even a free basic version.
Second, the supplements for the game are seriously cool:
- Crucible Of Dragons – Ancient Greek style Hoplites against Dragonmen on a weird isolated island.
- Savage North – Barbarian Swords & Sorcery galore.
- Life & Death – Death in the ancient post-apocalyptic desert sands.
This game and the supplements feels like the natural successor to RQ2. Simple and cool, yet intricate enough for intrigue and investigative games.
This is what I wanted and hoped that RQ and Glorantha would become – adventure and action in a well designed setting. They are also a great GM tool to help design your own, less “serious and mature” and more adventurous – well, adventures. I also think that OpenQuest has the right amount of crunch for a beginning d100 GM.
What happened in real life was that during the lean years in the 90’s, Glorantha became a scholar’s world, with layer upon layer of esoteric knowledge added and the focus shifted from cool place to adventure to some mythic quasi ethnologic intellectual training ground for self proclaimed Gloranthan Scholars. Shifting the system from RuneQuest to the more free-form storytelling HeroQuest, did not help the situation either. (There’s a more in-depth post on that here).
The result of this, plus the Mongoose thing kinda burned me out on Glorantha. Thus, I’ve decided to draw up my own World for running OpenQuest and RuneQuest 6 adventures, and I will cram in all these cool mini-settings plus the new non-Gloranthan ones for RQ6. And yeah, I will throw in the old, but modded Gloranthan stuff also!
Started on the World Map today! Freedom!
References:
d101 Games (OpenQuest)
The Design Mechanism (RQ6)
Moon Design Publications (Glorantha)
Nerd-O-Mancer of Dork 