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It’s never a good sign when a roleplaying product spends its first page disparaging other roleplaying products. Trash talking is still in poor form when found on a back cover, or in a press release, but it’s at least understandable. However, once someone has taken the time to look inside a product, better for the product to start being impressive than to keep on bragging. Unfortunately, that’s how Rune Stryders begins. Right after quoting Richard Nixon – yes, that Richard Nixon – the authors of Politically Incorrect Games’ largest free-standing game to date take a moment to bash “[g]eneric brand fantasy, different logos and artificial colors dropped into the same batch of sugar water”, and then proceed to deliver pretty much what they just denigrated.

Rune Stryders isn’t a bad game. It’s a hefty release (242 pages) and complete unto itself, which is definitely a cut above many of its competitors on the market. On the other hand, there’s nothing here that’s going to set the roleplaying world on fire, despite the authors’ strong words in the forward. True, Rune Stryders lacks elves and dwarves, but its world is still a collection of medieval technologies, magic and various humanoids with funny names. On the whole, the game is more inoffensive than anything else.

Unlike most of PIGames’ other releases, Rune Stryders has a fairly complex set of rules that degenerates rapidly into things like measuring feet and all the crunchy, wargaming bits that have been a familiar staple of Dungeons & Dragons for decades. This is due in large part, one suspects, to the presence of magical (rune-powered) mecha. Rune Stryders is D&D meets Battletech. Sort of. Unfortunately, this idea has already been touched on in Privateer Press’ amazing line of Iron Kingdoms products and, frankly, PIGames cannot compete with the sheer polish of Privateer’s work.

As mentioned, Rune Stryders doesn’t even have the polish of some of PIGames’ other products. The psychological horror game Unbidden was only 81 pages, but had a much sharper look and concept, as well as much more compact rules. Rune Stryders does what it sets out to do, but there’s little to distinguish it from anything else on the market. Template-driven character creation with a point buy option? Check. Too much self-indulgent fiction? Got it. Bloated, but shallow world info? That’s there, too. Even from a graphical standpoint, Rune Stryders isn’t that impressive, though there are a couple of nice illustrations to be found.

There are so many generic bits in Rune Stryders that it’s easy to overlook what’s original. The magic system, which revolves around combinations of runes, is an interesting deviation from bog standard lists of spells and such. Players who enjoy magery will find the rune magic in the game to be surprisingly flexible and deep. Meanwhile the more physical types have the fantasy-styled mecha with which to smash around. Everyone’s happy in the end.

The PDF of Rune Stryders sells at a base price of $10.00. Those who take the plunge get a lot of game for their money, but it’s not the next stage in the evolution of roleplaying games, despite what the authors seem to think. Perhaps they’ll open their next product with a bit of wisdom from George W. Bush.

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