Fantasy Realism!

I love looking at old advertisements of all kinds, but especially for roleplaying games. Here's a great one for RuneQuest, which appeared in issue #40 of Dragon (August 1980). 

I want to take a look at each paragraph of the ad, because I think each one includes some fascinating boasts about RQ. Before doing that, though, I simply want to draw attention to the ad's title, which plays off a very common concern in the hobby during the early to mid-1980s – realism. This is a topic that gets a lot of coverage in the RPG magazines of the era, including Dragon, and one about which I have opinions of my own. Those aside, what interests me most about this particular case is the way that Chaosium frames the question of "realism" beyond simply having a high degree of verisimilitude in its combat system (though that is part of their pitch).  

This is genuinely remarkable. I can't say with any certainty that this is the first time that a RPG company has claimed that one of its games allows players to "legitimately simulat[e] the great dramas of fantasy," but it's not a boast I recall being made often. I don't believe any TSR edition of Dungeons & Dragons ever made such a claim, even AD&D 2e, which is frequently derided as the "Ren Faire" edition of D&D by grognards more cantankerous than I. It's also worth noting that the ad goes on to state that RuneQuest's "technically-accurate role-playing mechanics" are "not merely collected encounter and resolution systems." That suggests, at the very least, Chaosium believed that RQ had achieved something genuinely new and indeed different from its predecessors and competitors. Does this make RuneQuest the first storytelling game, at least in its own self-conception? 

That having been said, Chaosium is nevertheless quick to point out how realistic its combat system is. The fact that its combat system was "created by a charter member of the Society for Creative Anachronism" – this is a reference to Steve Perrin, who joined the SCA at its inception in 1966 – is highlighted. Even in my youth, it was commonplace to knock D&D for its "unrealistic" combat system with those of other RPGs being held up as examples of better design in this regard. Because of my own prejudices, I wasn't very familiar with RQ at the time, so I can't recall its being cited as one of these putatively realistic games, but, based on this advertisement, Chaosium apparently thought it was.

"Practitioners of real magic?" Even given that, at the time, Chaosium was a California-based company, this is a bizarre statement. Were I to suspend my natural skepticism, the larger point remains that I can't detect much in the way of "real magic" in the magic systems of RuneQuest. They strike me as artifacts of game design – good design, to be fair – but they don't seem to have much in common with any historical systems of magic with which I am familiar. Perhaps my education is simply lacking. On the other hand, I do think RQ deserves credit for making religion and religious beliefs much more significant in play than, say, D&D does. Whether this is the result of RQ's having been "patiently assembled by scholars and practitioners of … the Old Religion" I leave to others to determine. 

What I find most notable here is that Chaosium wishes to draw attention to the fact that RuneQuest takes inspiration from "all the faces of fantasy," not merely those drawing on medieval European history and legend. As a fan of Tékumel, I very much appreciate fantasy settings that draw on other sources of inspiration than the European Middle Ages. Glorantha does borrow from European history and legend, though that's mostly of a pre-medieval kind, such as the Heroic and Classical Ages of the Mediterranean. It also takes a lot from the Near and Middle East, so this isn't a boast that's wholly without merit. I mostly find it fascinating that Chaosium chose to boast about this in the ad. I think it speaks to what was going on in the wider RPG scene at the time.

In any case, I thought this advertisement was well worth sharing. It's a compelling historical document of the hobby from just six years after the publication of OD&D. In just a few short paragraphs, the ad reveals a lot about the state of RPG design at the time, as well as the larger concerns within the hobby about what constituted "good" rules and setting design.