Musings on RuneQuest Skills

For various reasons, my thoughts have been turning to RuneQuest a lot lately, particularly RQ II, which is the edition with which I have the most familiarity. RQ is a game that attracts a lot of attention from gamers dismissive of the concept of "old school gaming." I presume it's because RuneQuest has both a skill system and a highly detailed game world associated with it, which they mistakenly assume to be contrary to old school design principles -- but that's a topic for another post.

Anyway, while looking at my RQ II rulebook today and I paid careful attention to the skills it includes. If one leaves out combat-related skills, here is the standard complement of adventuring skills:

• Camouflage
  
• Climbing
  
• Evaluate Treasure
• Hide in Cover
  
• Hide Item
• Jumping
• Listen
  
• Lock Picking
• Map Making
• Move Silently
• Oratory
  
• Pick Pockets
• Read/Write Foreign Language
  
• Read/Write Own Language
• Riding
• Speak Foreign Language
• Speak Own Language
  
• Spot Hidden Item
• Spot Trap
  
• Swimming
• Tracking
  
• Trap Set/Disarm

There are also a handful of very specialized skills, mostly pertaining to crafting. Now, when I looked at the list above, what I immediately noticed is that, with very few exceptions, the skills are those I'd associate with D&D's Thief class (even Oratory, which is primary about swaying the emotions of others for one's own benefit), that is, physical/athletic skills and larcenous/"adventuresome" skills. That's not what I was expecting to find.

On the one hand, I suppose I shouldn't have been at all surprised. Despite its subsequent development, RuneQuest in its early days shared a lot with Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, and other fantasy games, where characters were assumed to be ne'er-do-wells in search of fame, fortune, and power by delving into ancient ruins and contending with foul monsters. In that context, the skills make perfect sense. On the other hand, it's still striking to see how different one's perceptions of a game don't always match up to the reality of how the game is actually presented. When I think of RQ nowadays, I am almost always thinking not so much of the game itself but of the game world with which it is associated, Glorantha, and the full-bore Glorantha that only came to pass after many years and many supplements describing it -- the serious mythopoeic Glorantha that seems to have pushed aside the wild and woolly gaming Glorantha of yore.

I'm not sure there are any deep insights to be gleaned here, but I thought I'd share my thoughts nonetheless. I'll have more to say about RuneQuest and the role it plays in the old school renaissance in the days to come.