RuneQuest 6e Combat

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

The post below is written by UbiquitousRat, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

Darryn and the Bear: RuneQuest 6e Combat

Darryn stepped into the cave. The darkness was palpable but he couldn’t scent anything dangerous, although the breeze was strong here at the entrance. Allowing his eyes to adjust slowly to the gloom, he took another step, and then another…

The roar was deafening. The bellow emanated from deep inside the cave. Darryn was transfixed in his place, instinct forcing him to freeze. Then he saw it. A bear. As large as he, should it choose to stand up, and more. Darryn watched it lumber forward, jaws wide and teeth bared. In that moment, it seemed to him, there had never been anything so terrifying.

Stepping backwards towards the cave entrance, instinct carrying him aware from the intimidating roar of the bear, Darryn lowered his spear as a ward. The bear, unimpressed it seemed, padded forward from the gloom. In a moment it was raising up its bulk and roaring again. Darryn felt a moment of gratitude for the bear’s delay.

Gathering his courage, Darryn stood. The bear moved quickly forward, towards the tip of his spear, and Darryn decided to strike. The animal raised its massive paw and, although Darryn’s spear struck true, batted the weapon away as though it were a twig. Before he knew it the bear was inside his weapon’s reach and biting down upon his unarmoured neck.

Darryn crumpled to his knees, pain searing through his body as the bear ground teeth into his shoulder and ripped flesh from his neck. Darkness swept up to surround him. He felt himself falling backwards. The cave floor beneath his back. A jolt of cold through his spine. And that was all…

RuneQuest 6e Combat

Animals make for nice simple encounters. They are also a nice way to test a combat system without worrying too much about the roleplaying encounter as an interaction.

In my last article we took a look at the RuneQuest Sixth Edition (RQ6) character creation system. This impressive and immersive design sequence was a positive experience that drew me into the system. Following the creation of Darryn, my hunter, I also went on to design Shanna, an initiate of the Moon Cult – a young girl who is learning the ways of Theistic magic (about which I will write in a future article).

Today’s task is to review the Combat chapter of RQ6. Besides reading the chapter, which is an obvious first step, I have also run through a solo engagement using Darryn; this was the tale which opened this article.

First Impressions

To be honest, on a first reading of the rules in Chapter 7, I was concerned that the game would lead to slow and over-detailed fights. I was, however, slightly heartened by a couple of statements in the opening couple of paragraphs which read as follows:

“Combat need not end in death: Although commonplace in some genres, battles do not have to conclude with the demise of opponents. It is as easy to end a fight with the submission or capture of a foe without necessarily killing them.”

What is here revealed is the intent behind RuneQuest combat: if it is easy to begin to fight, and this will always be a potentially deadly fight, then you must remember that it is also easy to disengage. For me the signal was clear that interaction will always be favoured over skirmishing. As is fitting with a system encouraging genuine roleplaying based upon potential consequences from the choices each player makes, RuneQuest mentions it upfront.

Slow? No!

Combat takes up 33 pages of the rules. That’s a fair chunk: Character Creation takes up 54 pages.

There are several elements of combat that are unfamiliar to the average fantasy RPG player. Combat Styles, in which expertise with a group of weapons is packaged together, is a new idea to most; weapon reach and size taking a prominent role in the rules, making it harder to attack a warrior armed with a long spear when you’re holding a dagger, are also innovative. These elements look, at least initially, to be complicated and slightly daunting – even to a veteran GM like me.

And yet…

As was noted in my first article, the thing to focus on here is that the whole system is written to be played. An initial read through, which took me about an hour with a minimum of reference back to earlier rules, was fair enough. But it wasn’t until I busted out the dice and ran an encounter that I got to experience how cool this combat engine truly is.

Running an Encounter

Rather than a dry exposition of the rules I thought it would be interesting to walk you through each step of the combat account of Darryn’s nightmare encounter with the bear. This way you can see how the game works and try to imagine how it would feel in play.

I chose a really simple animal encounter and simply pulled the stats for the Bear straight out of the Bestiary chapter in RQ6. I’ll review that chapter too in the future. For now, just stay with me.

Let’s enter the cave…

Darryn and the Bear

Darryn is my hunter character, imagined alone and seeking a place to hole up as night falls on the tundra. He spies a cave.

I rolled Initiative – a simple d10 added to each combatant’s Strike Rank (SR) value. Darryn’s base SR is 11 reduced by 3, because of his armour, to 8; a 4 rolled gave Darryn an initial Strike Rank of 12. The Bear has a base SR of 13, meaning it would always go first, but added 3 from its roll to total 15.

Each Combat Round is 5 seconds long and allows the characters to act in order of Strike Rank, from highest to lowest. The Bear acts first; Darryn second. Each Turn within the Combat Round allows the acting character to expend one of their Action Points to do something.

First Turn and the Bear, acting on SR 15, bellows a roar using the Intimidation special ability: Darryn must make a Willpower check (he had 20%) or suffer instinctive fear. Guess what I rolled?

Darryn must withdraw as his instincts carry him backwards. Darryn makes a Change Range action, aiming to put some distance between him and the Bear.

I made the Bear take a Dither action, allowing it a chance to assess Darryn as a threat: most animals seek to avoid a fight. I used this as a chance to get Darryn to spend his second Action Point on readying his spear, partly an instinctive response to the threat in front of him.

The Bear, seeing the spear as dangerous, decides to Change Range and move in to paw-bashing range. In game terms, the Bear and Darryn’s spear both have long reach, so the Bear is capable of slapping the man despite the length of that short spear haft.

Round 2 begins with the Bear bellowing intimidation again but Darryn making his Willpower check (I rolled an 11!). This first Action Point spent it was time for Darryn to make a desperate attempt to stab the Bear.

Darryn hit, beating his 68% Combat Style check with a 57, but the Bear spends an Action Point and attempts to Parry with its huge paws. A roll of 05 against the Bear’s Ursine Fury Combat Style of 78% places the defence inside the Critical Success range (7 or less): the Bear gains a Special Effect and selects the “Close Range” option, allowing it to move inside the spear’s long reach and enter short reach.

Before he knew it the bear was inside his weapon’s reach and biting down upon his unarmoured neck.

The Bear’s next action was to Attack using its Bite. Although only able to use the butt of the spear to Parry, Darryn knows he has to try and spends his second (and only remaining) Action Point to do so. Rolling a 91 means he fails… and the Bear’s attack roll of 19 gives it another Special Effect. Taking “Choose Location” means that the Bear can deliberately attack Darryn’s head location, which I imagined as it snagging the neck.

Darryn crumpled to his knees, pain searing through his body as the bear ground teeth into his shoulder and ripped flesh from his neck.

The Bear rolls its 1d8 damage but adds 1d12 from its massive Damage Modifier (Strength 25 and Size 34 make it very scary!), totalling 11 points. No armour on Darryn’s head location means that all of this damage goes into his 6 hit points on that location. Going under zero hit points, but not quite to a negative equal to his hit points, gives Darryn a major wound. He must test his Endurance or fall unconscious… and Darryn failed the roll.

Darkness swept up to surround him. He felt himself falling backwards. The cave floor beneath his back. A jolt of cold through his spine. And that was all…

In the next round I had the Bear bite again in towards Darryn’s head. An automatic hit against an undefended foe gave the creature another Special Effect. Choosing location again, aiming for the head, the Bear delivered another 1d8+1d12 damage… crushing Darryn’s skull.

How did that feel?

For the purposes of my campaign, which hasn’t yet started, this encounter will be nightmare that inspires a deep fear of bears in the hero.

For our purposes, however, I got to run a short encounter which took less than 10 minutes to play, even with many rules checks and page flips.

Combat in RQ6 is deadly. They say so and they mean it. The rules also mention that most fights last 3 rounds or less. This one certainly did. And I have a new respect for bears.

It was really easy to run, despite all of the extra detail. It was bloody, exciting and felt like the kind of outcome you’d see in a Swords and Sorcery-type story. Overall I loved it!

Points of Note

The game has a number of Proactive and Reactive Action choices that you need to remember to use. Each costs 1 Action Point to use. You’ll probably want a list on hand the first few games… and the free download Game Master’s Pack includes just such a listing.

Similar reference material from the GM’s Pack will help you remember the options for Special Effects. Basically, when you earn one, you can just look up the choices until you get used to the system. They are easy to apply once you start playing.

Overall, RQ6 Combat is really tactical and detailed. It’s also quite quick… which was a surprise!

Frankly I’m starting to think that this game is really nice. It’s one to try and I’m glad I did just that.

It’s just a good job that Darryn was dreaming, eh?

Game on!

Bio

UbiquitousRat is a long-time roleplayer and gamesmaster who has a history with gaming going back to 1979. In 1994 he joined Games Workshop, spending 12 years in the gaming industry at the coal-face of tabletop wargaming. In 1998 he founded the Friday Night Roleplay group at his home in suburban Nottinghamshire, UK, and ever since has been the primary GM. Oh, and he’s also a high school teacher during the daytime.

RuneQuest Sixth Edition: Characters

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

The post below is written by UbiquitousRat, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

Following the near-collapse of my home roleplaying group, saved only by the decision to drop our most recent campaign, I’ve begun to tinker with two convergent ideas:

Trying to build a solo-game using Mythic Roleplaying
Testing out two promising candidates for fantasy RPG systems in my home-brew setting.

This morning, in a bid to get things rolling and take advantage of a day off work, I decided to try out character creation using RuneQuest Sixth Edition. This article is a review of those efforts and my thoughts on the experience.

RuneQuest

A long time ago, in a city far far away, a young boy and his father bought a boxed game called “RuneQuest”. This was the first RPG we had bought and, frankly, Dad wasn’t impressed once he opened it and found out what it was. For my part, however, I was hooked.

I remember rolling up my first character and reading through the rules with avid pleasure. We had some resources from Glorantha too, such as Apple Lane, and I still recall being slightly amused by the idea of sentient Ducks.

RuneQuest, however, won a space in my heart. I only played it a couple of times with friends, who much preferred to play D&D and Traveller, but I was a convert to the style. It was a game for heroes – proper heroes – and not just a game. And RuneQuest gave birth to my first campaign world: Mykovnia.

Return to Mykovnia

Some years ago I had a recurrent dream. It was a dream of the same world that I used to dream about when I was a teenager: Mykovnia. I shared the dream with a friend (now since lost to the aether) and used the dream to write some very short pieces of fiction.

Wanting to return to Mykovnia as a gamer I ran a very poor, over-rushed game using the Rolemaster FRP games system. I realised that, for my home group, the world was forever tainted as a failed game. Yet… for me, the world lives on. I learned today that I should have used RuneQuest.

Today, then, as I sat down to begin a solo-game using Mythic it occurred to me to also pick up the book that has been gathering dust for too many months: RuneQuest Sixth Edition.

RuneQuest 6e

This is a beautiful soft-backed book. I would pay serious cash for a hardcover.

The book covers all that is needed to play a fantasy RPG: Character Creation; Skills; Equipment; Game Mechanics; Combat; Magic (5 systems); Cults; Creatures; GMing. It is wonderfully written and presented, with some very nice black-and-white artwork throughout. At 450+ pages it’s a weighty tome.

I began to read the book months ago. The problem was that, although excellently written, it is done in a style which was designed to support a “read along as you play” approach. To be frank, I found this hard to get in to and realised that it’d be best to wait until I wanted to try it out. That day took far too long to come.

RuneQuest is a d100 game descended from the Basic Roleplaying system. It is skill-based and flexible, being written so that it can fit any setting of the GM’s design. Gone are the days of Glorantha, although the HeroQuest 2^nd Edition supplements would be very easily adapted to the game. By the author’s own admission, “RuneQuest has always excelled at supporting Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Sandal, and mythic Ancient World sub-genres.” It’s this that makes it perfect for Mykovnia.

Character Design

Here’s where I picked up, working through the three-chapter process as written. RuneQuest emphasises background development and deeper roleplaying… so I started with an extract from my own writing:

“Out on the plains, away from the cover of the forest that would protect his tribe, the hunter was watching the lone wolf as it padded along the ancient trackway. Clutching his spear in his cold hands, chest and stomach pressed close to the snow-covered grass, he scented the air and squinted his eyes against the weak morning sunshine.”

This character is called Darryn. Later I described him as, “tall and powerfully built, with lithe form and pale skin.”

Characteristics

RuneQuest provides three systems for the core seven attributes, called Characteristics. I chose the third, a points-buy option, so that I could fully model the hero as I wanted. In truth, this was a quick process and the derived characteristics were really easy to calculate too.

What I really liked was that there is no obvious “dump stat” and that all the core Characteristics derive further stats that are essential. There are Hit Points but they are spread over seven hit locations, instead of being a simple total.

Adding Luck Points and Action Points to my sheet promised systems for creating the kinds of cool deeds Darryn might get up to in the future. I buffed up his Size and Constitution, gave a reasonable Strength and Dexterity, dropped below average with Charisma, and left Intelligence and Power roughly average.

The last step was to add two Characteristics together for each of a range of Standard Skills (which any character can use), giving Darryn some basic percentages from which to develop.

Culture

Here is where I started to think, “This is cool!”

RuneQuest provides a choice of four major Cultures: Barbarian (which I chose), Civilised, Nomadic or Primitive.

These cultures each give you some focused training in a selection of Standard Skills; they also add a choice of three Professional Skills (which cannot be used untrained) based on the given culture.

I chose Navigation, Survival and Tracking. I also gained a Combat Style – a culture-specific but highly flexible concept for choosing how your hero fights and defends – which is called “Wolf Hunter”.

What I really like about Culture, however, is the gentle flexibility of the system. Gamemastery is promoted as the player and GM work out how their characters fit into a system of cultural ideas. It’s really very simple but also very powerful in yielding character detail.

The section winds up with generating some background details. A random roll gave Darryn a mark of the gods on his body, which I interpreted as a symbol on his left shoulder blade which was associated with the Moon Queen (his patron deity).

On top of that, rolling on a couple of extra tables, we discovered he has a father but no mother; two grandparents and a cousin rounded out his family. We also found out that he has a friendly contact in the form of the tribal Shaman. This gave me the idea for a second character who is the Shaman’s apprentice. All good stuff, eh?

Career

RuneQuest offers twenty-four classic Careers – which are professional training packages, really – and for Darryn I chose “Hunter”. This gives the hero some more training in appropriate Standard Skills and a chance to add three more Professional Skills and/or a Combat Style. I chose to simply replicate Darryn’s cultural training, boosting those core skills even higher.

Careers are impressive. There are enough basic choices to provide for most campaigns. If this isn’t enough there are rules for creating new ones. Once again, the GM is given the tools to fit things to their own world very effectively.

What I really liked, however, was the way in which the Culture and Career choices potentially meld to create a unique character. Choice is maximised and, given the array of options, I would expect to see some very different heroes created from even the same combinations. This is a powerful and yet simple system.

Finishing Up

Final steps included spreading around some bonus skill points, including being allowed to choose either another Combat Style or an additional Professional Skill as a hobby. I added Lore (Beastmen) to Darryn’s skills and smiled as I boosted up his core training.

Characters get some basic equipment based on their place in the social order of their culture. They also get some Silver Coins to buy stuff with. Darryn started with a shortspear, knife and some quilted leather armour. I bought him a short bow, Hoplite shield and various basic gubbins. This too was very simple to choose and record.

Filling out the Character Sheet, usually a chore, was facilitated by a very simple yet comprehensive design. I didn’t need the Magical sections… but these aren’t really a distraction either.

All in all, given a total of around two hours spent in design, reading the book from scratch, this was a pleasant and easy-to-follow system.

Verdict?

Honestly, I expected the game to feel very Old School. In reality, it doesn’t… even though it is a worthy successor to a very Old School system. I am impressed. I want to create another character.

What I like is the easy-to-follow steps. It’s a book written to be used, not read and shelved. In retrospect, I like this.

RuneQuest isn’t, however, a quick pick-up RPG system. This is a game for the serious roleplayer who wants to take the time to “get to know” their character. RuneQuest facilitates this style. It’d probably drive traditional D&D types nuts with the background details, however.

Overall, I want to dig deeper now. Next steps include wanting to create a magical character. From there I plan to run a test combat… and then dive into some play.

RuneQuest has me convinced. Hopefully this review will help you decide if it’s worth a look too.

Game on!

Bio