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RuneQuest was first developed and published Chaosium who are now mostly known for publishing Call of Cthulhu. The original edition was quickly revised into what became the classic 2nd edition - RQ2. This version was a serious contender for top dog in FRPdom and is believed to have outsold D&D for a while in the UK in the early 80s. So, Avalon Hill made Chaosium an offer they couldn't refuse, bought RuneQuest and published a 3rd edition also designed by Chaosium. Unfortunately, Avalon Hill spectacularly mismanaged RQ3 and despite a brief renaissance in the late 80s, RQ3 slid slowly into that good night. Eventually the rights to the game reverted and an attempt to produce RQ4 (Adventures in Glorantha) floundered while Avalon Hill developed a game called RuneQuest Slayers which had nothing to do with the original game and never saw light of day. So things languished until Mongoose picked up the rights to the name and a part of the default setting (Glorantha) and produced Mongoose RuneQuest, commonly known as MRQ (and now MRQ1) though it occasionally gets referred to as RuneQuest 4. MRQ was not popular with many old-time RQ fans, being accused of d20ification among sundry heinous crimes. There were certainly a lot of changes to long-standing RQ rules while last minute alterations to the text after a rather chaotic playtesting cycle meant that various parts of the published rules simply didn't add up. Mongoose did release various patches but they often caused more problems than they solved.
On the plus side, Mongoose piled a lot of supplements out of the door very quickly. On the negative side, the content was distinctly patchy. Mongoose then hit an production problem which lead to a lot problems with the books's bindings while releasing 96 page books as expensive hardbacks. Unsurprisingly, sales appear to have nose-dived. MRQ was at best a partial success but enough of a one to persuade Mongoose to commit to a new edition that would be written by a team with a good track record with the system and setting and so, RQII was born.
To summarize RQ (Chaosium) - > RQ2 (Chaosium) - RQ3 (Chaosium / Avalon Hill) - RQ4 (never published) - RQ Slayers (never mentioned in polite company) - RQ (Mongoose -MRQ) -> RQII (Mongoose - MRQII).
Now we understand the difference between RQII and RQ2 and which came first we get to the book itself. It's a fine looking and smelling thing. It's covered in leather, decently bound and contains 196 pages of black & white, fully justified 2-column text. The layout is fairly clean and unfussy with plenty of text to the page. On the whole it feels pleasantly old-school with a focus on getting to the point: playing the game. As an item in itself, the book looks suitably august on a gaming shelf; it appears sturdy and devoid of frippery. If it were a teacher it would teach geology during the week but would go riding on its motorbike at weekends.
A word about the present author. I started roleplaying with the Games Workshop publication of RQ2 in 1981 and it's been my standard game ever since. I've been a BRP player all my gaming life with the exception of a love for DC Heroes. I did get asked to contribute to the final round of playtesting and it's fair to say that this review is written by someone who is predisposed to like the system.
Enough about me. The book contains 14 chapters covering the normal range of a complete core book. It assumes the reader will be familiar with role-playing so there's no "what is roleplaying," instead it plunges straight into character generation. The next four chapters cover skills, the game system, equipment and poking people with pointy things. Four chapters, 70 pages and you're good to go.
The next six chapters covers the magic ecology of the game in 56 pages. First there's an introduction to runes - the metaphysical entities underlying the system - alongside an introduction to the four magic systems provided. Each system (common magic, divine, sorcery, spirit magic) is given its own chapter and the section finished off with a description of cults: organisations providing access to one or more types of magic.
The book ends with a grab-bag of 3 chapters: "Heroic Abilities" (high level powers gained through mastery of skills and hero points), a chapter of creature stats and some notes on GamesMastering RQ. The book ends with Mongoose's typical rather cursory index and a 2-page character sheet.
What's in the system? RQ is, as it has always been, a skills-based roll-under percentile system. There are no levels or classes; there are Hit Points but they don't increase over time. Each character has seven characteristics - Strength, Constitution, Size, Intelligence, Power, Dexterity and Charisma - that vary in a range of 3 to 18 for humans. Several attributes are derived from these characteristics. For example, a character's Damage Modifier is based on STR & SIZ and affects how much extra (or less) damage it does in combat, its Hit Points are based on its CON & SIZ and its Magic Points are based on its POW less any POW dedicated to its god. Skills have a base chance equal to the sum of two characteristics (or one characteristic doubled) expressed as a percentage. For example Athletics - the skill of running, jumping, leaping and throwing - has a based chance of STR plus DEX. Someone with a STR of 11 and DEX of 13 would therefore have an Athletics skill of 24%. To make a skill test, pick up 1D100 and roll. If you roll less than or equal to your skill, you succeed: if not, you fail. It's a system that's been in use since the 70s and has underpinned several successful games that are now known as the Basic RolePlaying (BRP) family.
Into the text The first chapter, character generation, is the longest of the book and presents a comprehensive system for creating characters with a wide range of experience. Players are given the option of two different random systems and one points buy system to generate characteristics. Five characteristics (STR, CON, DEX, POW & CHA) can be randomly generated using 3D6 while the other two (INT & SIZ) are generated on 2D6+6. Players can either choose to roll in order and keep the scores or roll seven scores and assign. If using a points buy system, the player can spend 80 points on buying characteristics within certain constraints. These are human norms but any non-human character could be randomly generated using its characteristic scores as given in the creatures chapter. If you want to create a points buy system for non-humans though, you have to figure out the maths yourself.
Once characteristics have been generated, the derived attributes are calculated. Unless you have a chronically indecisive player, the whole thing should take less than 5 minutes. Then it's time to create the background experience that will set the starting character's skills.
Each character gains skill additions from its cultural background, pre-game profession and personal interests. Four cultural backgrounds are given: primitive, nomadic, barbarian and civilised. Each one will provide some standard skill bonuses (e.g. they all add +30% to your knowledge of the local culture) mixed with specific bonuses. So civilised characters primarily gain bonuses to social skills, barbarians get plenty of bonus to weapon skills and primitives plenty to hunting, tracking and surviving in the wilderness.
Once your culture has been chosen, you choose a profession that gains more skill bonuses. The profession has to exist within your culture so there are no primitive alchemists nor civilised shamans. Generally speaking, each profession adds a bonus to up to 5 different skills. Once you have done that, you get to add free skill points to whatever you like to represent the character's personal interests. There is a limit of +30% that can be added to any one skill. A standard starting character splits 250% this way: more advanced starting characters can add more. This is all pretty similar to the well-regarded MRQ1 system but RQII adds an extra, optional level: community background. Basically you have the option of randomly rolling family members and relationships within the home community. You can also roll on a big random events table to determine what memorable thing happened in the past. Interestingly, there is a rationale for doing character generation as a group because if the players can come up with reasons for why their characters were involved in some of each others' background events, they get a connections bonus to an appropriate skill. To my knowledge this is new in BRP systems and was a big hit with my playtest group.
It's now nearly over but RQ has long had a default position that anyone can use common magic and that most people do. Depending on your setting, the character gets up to 6 points of common magic: spells such as Bladesharp (which does what it says on the tin) and Healing. Finally you get to add some starting Hero Points (get out jail free points), buy some equipment and you're ready to adventure.
It's not the quickest character generation system in the world, probably takes 15-20 minutes for experienced players, maybe up to 45 minutes for new players who can't decide on their preferred options. It does generate some depth though and characters are defined by where they grew up, what they worked at and what their interests are rather than by archetype.
Moving on, skills. RQ divides skills up into two sorts: common and advanced. Common skills are those that everybody is assumed to posses (such as Athletics, Perception and Stealth). Consequently all characters have at least a base score in those skills. Advanced skills are those skills that you won't be able to perform without specialist training such as Lore (Alchemy), Engineering and Tracking. Such skills need to be learned either in character generation or later during play. Once learned, you gain a base score in them just like common skills. It's a simple and neat system and various unresolved issues from MRQ1 have been resolved. About half of the chapter is a list of the various skills and their effects with the other half being about how to make skill tests and various rules for unusual types of circumstances.
Compared to previous BRP systems, the skills list has been significantly shortened with each skill having a broader remit. So for example, scan, search & listen have all become a single "Perception" skill. Similarly, kick, punch, grapple and head-butt are all now a single unarmed combat skill. Compared to MRQ1, the skill list has been better rationalised with some key skills (Insight) made common rather than advanced and other skills either broadened and narrowed where appropriate.
The skill resolution system is pleasingly simple. If you roll equal to or under your skill, you succeed. This means that if you have Athletics 40% and you have to make an Athletics roll to jump the bottomless pit, it's pretty obvious what your chance of success is. GMs may add modifiers to make tasks easier or harder (e.g. having to jump a pit in the pouring rain while running full tilt from a horde of trollkin might require an Athletics test at -20%). It's probably still the simplest and most obvious system out there. It does have room for more detail. Rolling 1/10th or less of your chance to succeed (rounded up) is a critical success, doing far better than normal. So if your Athletics skill is 43% and you roll a 05 then you have succeeded with a critical. Alternatively, you can fumble if you roll 00 (or 99% if your skill is 50 or less).
The skills system has two awkward issues though. Firstly, what happens if your skill is over 100% or is reduced to 0% or less. RQII sticks with the traditional answer: if you are allowed to a roll then a roll of 01-05 always succeeds no matter what; similarly a roll of 96-00 always fails, with 00 always being a fumble. The other difficulty is what happens when two people oppose each other. E.g. If Fred and Frank are having a dance off and they both succeed at their roll, who did best? Percentile roll-under systems hate that question. In RQ the best type of success wins (e.g. critical beats normal) but if both roll the same kind of success then the highest roll wins. This rule explodes the heads of some old-time RQers, and it is pretty clunky but it works. The authors even managed to resolve the horrible knot that MRQI tied itself in with skills over 100. E.g. if Fred and Frank have Dance skills of 130 and 101 respectively, what do you do. In RQII you subtract the amount over 100 of the highest skill from all participants: so the contest would end up being between 100 and 71. RQ will never handle opposed rolls brilliantly but this is about as good a system as I have seen yet. As with most of the book, the chapter is clear, concise and well organised.
So to chapter three, the Game System. This presents the basics you need to have the character operate in the world. Movement, time, character advancement and so on are covered, the effects on your character of various nasty things (disease, poison, falling, having things fall on you, heat, cold, getting lost in the woods) are detailed. A lot of this has been massively changed both from MRQI and previous versions of BRP. For example, poison now generates various nasty conditions if it is not resisted ranging from Nausea to death rather than doing HP damage, and acid is no longer the nastiest force in the universe. So far I have not uncovered any obvious problems; most things seem roughly to do what you might expect. That said, most of what is here is not particularly memorable. If someone is falling off a branch you do need to look at table to see how much damage is taken. Similarly if someone is struck with Scorpion Man venom, it's a rare GM who will actually know what the onset time is, what the recurrence time is, what the conditions are and how to counteract it. Although RQ has a bit of an old school vibe and you could always just wing it, it isn't really an old school game.
The chapter also covers advancement and Hero Points. As with MRQI, RQII uses Improvement Rolls to handle character advancement. When a particular story reaches a natural break point, the GM hands out IRs to worthy characters who then spend them on increasing skills, learning or developing magic, or increasing characteristics. This is a big change from previous editions of the game where improvement in skills came from succeeding at using them. RQII has built on MRQI and extended IRs into all forms of character advancement in a systematic way.
Hero Points are game's sop to narrative needs. Players can spend HPs to force re-rolls, convert major life-threatening wounds into serious wounds or to ask the GM for a clue. Alternately they can be saved up and used to pay for Heroic Abilities. The latter leads to the odd situation of characters avoiding have to act heroically and spend their HPs in order to qualify for a Heroic Ability.
Naturally, every wanabee hero needs equipment and the next chapter provides it. It has armour and arms and various lists of gear some which seem more useful than others. I' m not entirely sure, for example, that I really needed a paragraph explaining what a skirt is and how much it is likely to cost. RQ has often been described as having a default "Bronze Age" setting, but it doesn't. The arms and armour selection is pretty thoroughly based on European Dark Ages technology. Armour goes up to plate segments not the full gothic plate of the middle ages and weapons include the usual melange. I'm not exactly a gear-head but one of the authors is. This means that you get a note that a round shield can impale (surprised me, it being round and a shield) and slings were the uber-missile weapon of their time. Well, it turns out that Round Shields usually had a spike in the middle and slings were, actually, scary. All in all, the chapter gives you enough to be going on with while leaving plenty of room to develop culturally specific weaponry.
There are a few niggles. The weapons table might be missing a column (or there may be a legacy reference to a column that was deliberately removed) splitting weapons into categories, there is an occasional entry where it's not completely clear whether a given weapon is used 1-handed or 2-handed. The only serious issue is the armour table where the encumbrance column has been accidentally left out. Also, the authors could probably have done with explaining that the equipment list makes a stab at historical accuracy over game balance. So some things are strictly better than others. Linen armour is cheaper, lighter and more protective than heavy leather. This is probably true in real life but linen is useless in some environments, and requires certain kinds of technology. Bolting all that into a game system would be over-detailed but it would reduce reader head-scratching if this was explained in a small box somewhere.
A matter of life and death. Combat. It wouldn't be RQ without legs being cleaved, blood being shed and people slipping in the mud before impaling their best friend in the head with a long spear. RQII has all this but it has been toned down. I once saw a description of RQ3 as having the only combat system more deadly than real life. RQII is significantly less extreme but a single blow with a dagger can still kill.
The fundamentals are still the same: you attack with an attack skill and your opponent parries with a parry skill. If the attack is parried, some or all of the damage may be blocked. Any damage that isn't parried may be reduced by armour. Whatever is left is removed from the hit points of the location it strikes. If the location is reduced to zero or fewer HPs then you have suffered a serious wound and must roll to remain conscious and/or upright. If it is reduced to negative its normal amount you have suffered a major wound. A major wound to limb will probably lead to you bleeding to death if you don't get treatment. A major wound to a vital location is either instantly fatal or leads to bleeding to death within a minute or two at most.
Something to realise is that there is no central pool of Hit Points. Life and death is a matter of damage to locations. It means that characters can take multiple wounds and keep going while other times a single wound can put you straight down. Unlike previous versions of RQ3, you can't be nibbled to death and die without a single bad injury. This is not universally popular but I personally like it; it's one of the innovations from MRQI that has had its flaws shaved off and now works remarkably well: every attack is potentially lethal but the system as a whole is far more survivable than pretty much any previous BRP system.
Speaking of which, how does combat work? Well, each character has a number of Combat Actions (CAs) that it can perform each round based on the average of its INT & DEX. A normal human has 2. A fast or smart character has 3, a very fast and smart character 4. There is no upper limit. Dual wielding can give a bonus CA and there are other avenues to gaining them as well. CAs are used each time you want to act or react in a round. Someone swings an axe at you; spend a CA to parry it. Want to run across the bridge, cast a spell, reload your crossbow? Spend 1 or more CAs. Want to evade that fire breathing dragon but have run out of CAs? You're toast. And that's the big scary thing about combat in RQ: if you get outnumbered and you run out of CAs, you get pounded upon with no comeback. What's worse, if you run out of CAs and can't defend yourself, not only will you take damage if you get hit, you'll give the attacker a free choice of Combat Manoeuvres.
For players of previous editions, RQII has a huge innovation: combat manoeuvres (CMs). CMs move RQ combat from swing and block to one which allows a range of options, some more 'cinematic' than others. Basically, if you perform better than your opponent then you get to choose a CM and apply it. This goes for parrying as well as attacking. If you critical and they only get a normal success, then you have gained a CM. Similarly if you succeed and they fail, you get a CM. A critical success while they fumble would give you 3 CMs. Having no CAs left meaning you can't parry even if you wanted to means that any success is exactly the same as succeeding versus a failure. If someone is firing a crossbow at you and catches you by surprise then you don't get to defend. This means, providing they hit they can choose a CM such as choose location ("I'll take a head please, Bob.").
As I said, you can gain CMs by doing better in a parry than an attack which means with a good enough parry you might be able to disarm the attacker, break their weapon, entangle them, trip them up or, if you are a ninja, you can grab their weapon and use it yourself. If you are an awesome critical-rolling ninja you might be able to take their weapon with one CM and use your second CM to immediately riposte with it. Nothing like killing people with their own sharp, pointy sticks to impress your friends. In total there are over 20 CMs. Some are attack only, some parry only, some are weapon specific (such as impale for pointy things) and some can only be chosen if you critical (bypass armour).
This tallk of ninjas notwithstanding, the basics of RQ combat are simple. You spend a CA to attack and roll percentages. If you succeed you have hit *something*. Your opponent spends a CA to parry and if they succeed they have got their parrying weapon in the way. If an attack is parried then the amount of damage done depends on the weapon. A Medium weapon (like a shortsword) can completely parry a small or medium weapon and can block half the damage of a Large weapon (such as a greatsword) but is useless against huge or enormous weapons. So you really can't parry a T-Rex bite with a dagger. If some damage does break past the parry then any armour you're wearing reduces the damage by its armour points. Anything that goes through that is applied to a randomly chosen location.
When RQ first came out, the combat system was several orders of magnitude more complex than anything else around. RQII has refined and streamlined the process and in play it seems that most combats are over in a relatively brief flurry of dice rolling. It's still a more fine grained system than most and requires a fair amount of book-keeping. The pay-off is a pretty gory, quite detailed and often very dramatic system. RQII has sorted out the horrible tangle that MRQI combat managed to get itself into and provides a good balance between lethality and survivability. In particular, the balance between skill and numbers is much more 'herioc' than old RQ systems. Previously, being outnumbered was invariably fatal. Now, with enough skill, a Conan-like figure can hack their way through quite a crowd before numbers finally tell. Some fans of old RQ who like the lethality of previous editions will not like this.
There are quirks with the system. Movement feels a bit bodged. The authors describe it as an abstract system yet it is measured in metres and is probably the element in the system which is hardest to track. I'm not convinced that, as written, you could play with miniatures on a grid without fudging. The much derided "Armour Penalty" from MRQI has been revised so that it now affects initiative and movement speed which is an improvement but makes you wonder why if you take all your armour off and sling it on a bag around your shoulders it suddenly no longer slows you down. There are a few spot rules that don't seem all that clean (firing into combat is a bit puzzling for example) and the odd omission (it doesn't seem to be possible to poke someone who goes running past you) but these issues are in the nature of fine tuning and tend to be the province of system junkies (like me).
Perhaps the most major changes have been made to the magic systems. RQ was probably the first RPG in which magic was both ubiquitous and weak. Most PCs would know a few 'common' magic spells to make a sword sharper, provide healing or offer protection. On the other hand there were no mega kill spell and no real concept of the mage as an artillery piece. For some this was a selling point. On the other hand, though you could play RQ in a swords and sorcery style where magic was very limited, the lethality of the system meant that you ended up fudging quite a bit. RQII has kept magic ubiquitous with everyone still having access to common magic but the advanced magical systems (theism, sorcery and animism) having been given a lot of red meat.
To get back to basics, RQII magic is generally based on a character's POW. Common Magic and Sorcery both use magic points derived from POW to power spells. Theism requires characters to dedicate POW to their deity for magic (basically you mortgage part of your soul). Animists are the one exception in that spirits are more prone to respecting high Charisma.
One major innovation from the first Mongoose edition of RQ has gone. Rune Magic. No longer do you need physical runes to cast magic. In fact physical runes turn out to have been a figment of the imagination. Although physical runes might have a place in some worlds, the implementation of the system in MRQI was so bad that it was probably far and away the worst idea for a BRP system yet. Even the daft addition of Battle Magic to Chaosium's version of Elric! was better. There is still a brief description of a runic system from the default game setting of Glorantha with comments about becoming rune touched but it's now symbolic rather than physical.
Common Magic (known as Battle Magic or Spirit Magic in previous editions) consists of spells that are limited in effect, short in duration and usually only personal. Spells either cost a fixed number of Magic Points or can be cast at any "Magnitude" up to the maximum that the caster knows. Unlike previous editions of RQ, techniques for gaining extra Magic Points are not assumed to be easily available so the main problem with Common Magic Spells is that you quickly run out of MPs to power them with. To cast a common magic spell takes half its Magnitude in Combat Actions and requires a successful use of the common magic skill. If you're trying to cast something malignant on a target, the target can try to resist the effects of the spell with a skill roll or possibly intercept the spell with a countermagic spell. It's fundamentally the same system that RQ has been using since 1978 and it has stood the test of time.
Divine Magic is a whole new beast. Although first introduced in 1978 as well, the version here has taken the MRQ1 idea of dedicating your POW to a deity and pumped it full of steroids. To learn divine spells you must join a cult worshipping a god that provides the spell you want. Belonging to a cult is, however, a major commitment of time and money and once you have joined you can't leave without reprisals. As you progress through the cult's ranks, you can start to dedicate POW to the deity, and each point of POW dedicated allows you to store one casting of a Divine Spell. The drawback to dedicating POW is that the Magic Points it would normally provide for you now get funnelled off to your god instead. So, the more divine magic you know, the fewer MPs you have available to cast common magic spells. Although it's a trade off, it's one that's worth it as spell for spell, Divine Magic is now probably the most powerful magic in the game.
The power of Divine Magic depends on your relationship with your god: the higher your pact skill the greater the power of your magic. In previous editions of RQ you had to permanently sacrifice POW and then rebuild it in order to generate powerful spell. Now a lowly initiate with a low Pact skill might only be able to cast a spell such as Shield at Magnitude 3 but a priest with a high Pact skill might be able to cast it at Magnitude 10. Unlike previous editions of RQ where the magnitude was inherent in the spell, now it is inherent in the strength of your pact. Added to that, the authors have decided to make divine spells suitably awe inspiring. Spells such as Call Winds no longer struggle to put out a candle: a rune priest can now reliably create a hurricane over an area of more than 70km2.
Sorcery has also had a thorough makeover. It has long been a problematic part of RQ so the authors have both simplified the process of casting spells and completely overhauled the spells' effects so that they work with the new system. Now, the power of the spell and the sorcerer's ability to cast it are based on the sorcerer's skill with the "grimoire" in which the spell is found. A second skill - Manipulation - lets the sorcerer change the parameters of the spell or even combine several spells together into one single spell. So for example, a sorcerer with 70% in Manipulation could add 2 levels of range, 2 levels of duration and add three extra targets to a particular spell. As with common magic, sorcery spells cost Magic Points to cast. However each spell only costs 1 MP to cast plus 1 MP for each level of manipulation added. Given that the power of the spell's effect depends on the caster's Grimoire skill, then the more learned the sorcerer, the more power they get out of their initial 1 Magic Point. A magus is fully capably of striking 3 targets 100km away with a spell for a cost of just 3 Magic Points. That said, RQ sorcerer's are still not artillery pieces in general; there is not much in the way of mass destruction so there is plenty of room for subtlety.
Finally we come to spirit magic, animism, the ability to perceive, bargain with and control spirits. The original RQ first introduced shamans and the spirit world but over time there was never really a coherent development of animism. An attempt to do so in the last edition of RQ went horribly wrong so, at last, a fully fledged system has been presented. As with the other advanced magic users, animists can see, and with training, learn how to communicate the spirits that inhabit the world around them. They can also travel to the spirit plane to bargain with or maybe even capture spirits. Depending on the bargains they make or spirits they bind, they can let ancestors take possession of their body, manifest the traits of nature and animal spirits (want to jump like a kangeroo, bind a kangeroo spirit into a fetish and then, when you need to leap, manifest the spirit), embody elementals, send curses, eat other peoples' spirits or protect themselves from magic. The uses are pretty much as varied as the player's imaginations.
The beauty of RQ magic system as a whole is that it is modular making it easy to adapt to a setting. If your world is one where magic is rare then common magic either doesn't exist or is secretly guarded. If the gods are dead, leave Divine Magic back in the box. If sorcery is evil and corrupting then require sorcerers to perform evil and corrupting acts to learn and cast sorcery. You could even play in a completely magic-free setting. Or you can go hog-wild and play with the whole lot, in which case there looks to be enough meat on the bones of just the core book to keep you going for a long, long time.
The book itself ends with a bit of a miscellany of chapters. Heroic Abilities are a revision of Legendary Abilities from the last edition of RQ. To qualify for a heroic ability you generally need one high characteristic, 90% in a skill and to spend some hero points. You also are supposed to undertake an in-game quest. Unlike Legendary Abilities, Heroic Abilities generally need to be invoked by spending a magic point and last, generally, for just a short period. In this respect they are more like semi-mystical powers than anything else. It looks as though the authors have no great love for the whole concept as its given pretty short shrift and the powers are uninspired.
Sadly, the creatures chapter is also somewhat cursory. There are just 22 entries in total, 5 of which are elementals. It's probably the only disappointing part of the book. As is traditional with RQ, there are notes on using some of the old standbys (dwarves, elves and so on) as player characters but the bestiary lacks any spark. To an extent this is a case where RQ has such a good and well-tested inventory of creatures already that the authors didn't need to do much other than copy and paste. It doesn't help that the art is average at best and the layout is extremely inefficient, meaning that those 22 creatures take up a lot of space.
Finally, we come to the GMing chapter. The chapter mostly consists of common sense. The authors are assuming that anyone who has got this far has role-played before and probably GM'd as well so the suggestions they give ("some preparation is always necessary") manages to be true but possibly not that enlightening. They do make some suggestions about creating worthy adversaries and how to pick and choose magic systems to match your setting. I personally think they could have delved a little deeper into how to customise the system and how to world build. Speaking of which, the chapter ends with some traditional random encounter tables and sundry other game aids such as wind strength table.
If you're still here there are probably various questions that you want answering now. If you're brand new to RQ, a lot of this next bit isn't going to make much sense.
Glorantha The default setting for RQII is Glorantha, the world first created by Greg Stafford. That said, there is no setting information in the book. The example texts draw upon characters from a Gloranthan campaign, two of the three example cults are drawn from Gloranthan sources and the chapter on runes explains the Gloranthan runes but there is no background information given. It's fair to say that everything in the core rules has been designed with Glorantha in mind but the system is modular enough that it can probably be used to run most fantasy settings well. Mongoose have already re-published a swords and sorcery setting for RQII (Lankhmar) and have announced a Dark Fantasy Alternate Earth one (Deus Vult) as well as promising to revisit Moorcock's Eternal Champion line and some pseudo-historical settings starting with the Vikings. Although Glorantha will presumably remain the main setting, indeed a Living Glorantha campaign is meant to start in the summer of 2010, it seems likely that RQII will be used as their house system for a variety of settings so there's no chance of being locked in to Glorantha.
It might also be useful to consider the system in relationship to other editions of RQ, the BRP family and other FRPGs generally. The first thing to say is that MRQII is a massive revision of MRQI but with the exception of physical runes nothing from MRQI has been rolled back. On the whole it takes the ideas behind MRQI and develops them properly. Some might say that this is what MRQI should have been. Fans looking for a fine tuning of the original Chaosium editions of RQ will be disappointed by MRQII. Although it is still very obviously a system in the Basic Roleplaying family it is ploughing its own path.
Compared to other contemporary FRPGs, RQ is hard to place. It's not a high concept game, it's more meat and potatoes. It's not exactly old school, but neither is it new school. Perhaps it would be best to call it "classic". It provides a pretty comprehensive system that is still relatively light touch. It doesn't really aim for any sense of balance, instead it attempts to envision some notion of versimilitude. A player character is a set of skills and some basic characteristics and that's it: at that point you as a player decide how much to bring the character to life. There's probably nothing unique about RQ as a rpg but that's because pretty much every game since has taken ideas first developed by RQ. What it has though is a unique "mouth feel." The components fit together in such a way as to provide a system that mechanically is easy to master yet provides plenty of room for expansion.
If you've got this far, I might as well provide some numbers. I would give the book 5 out of 5 for content. Despite a few caveats around the perfunctory bestiary and heroic abilities, the system is deep, interesting and comprehensive which is pretty impressive in under 200 pages. There are a few wobbles in the final version and the inevitable errata has been published. The errata however addresses issues with what appear to be editing issues (a missing column in the armour table for example, a portion of a skill description left out) rather than flaws in the system. It's not quite enough to justify losing half a mark.
Production wise I'm less impressed. The binding and covering is high quality and looks like it will last. The paper quality is just about adequate but the bibliophile in me isn't that impressed. The layout is vast improvement over previous Mongoose products but, frankly, that means that it is distinctly average. One other improvement is the quality of the proof editing; it looks like Mongoose are no longer relying on computer spell checkers so typos are few and far between. The big weakness is the art. There is a skill to good line drawing but even the best examples in the book are less than impressive. On the other hand, there is some quite qood but utterly pointless cheesecake art that adds nothing to the book except female flesh; it jars with the tone of the rest of the book. So as a physical product, I reckon 3.5 out of 5. Great covers, functional layout, poor art.
So would I recommend this book? Darn tooting. To my eyes it's the best version of RQ yet and it's probably my favourite BRP-based game. Should you wish, you could take it and use it to power a more 'pulp' version of Call of Cthulhu for example. RQ has long been my favourite fantasy role-playing game and this version is simple and light enough to run pretty much any fantasy genre I might be interested in while being detailed enough to do a lot of the heavy lifting. It isn't particularly balanced and characters don't generally come with powers straight out of the box so if that's what you're looking for, you're best off looking elsewhere. If on the other hand you're looking to play a game where being stabbed hurts no matter how good you are and where your character has no limits to how they develop, then RQII is definitely worth a try.
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