Revised and expanded from the first Mongoose Edition of 2006, RuneQuest II keeps the core of things but tries to streamline, or at least explain things more clearly, in order to make it user-friendly to new players. As someone who played 2nd and 3rd Chaosium/Avalon Hill editions back in the day, I’ll admit it was a crunchy and somewhat daunting system to learn. It’s still pretty crunchy, but this edition is far less intimidating. It start off explaining character creation step by step, breaking it into easily digestible bites. The option is given to randomly roll attributes, or to point-build. You pick your background, you sort through skills, you get magic… all pretty much like the original.
There’s no setting included, although the implied setting is Glorantha (the creature section in back includes Broo). It can be used for any sort of fantasy game, obviously, as Mongoose and others have released them. The notes for converting from Mongoose RQ to RQII are downloadable for free from the Mongoose website and are not included here.
If you like RuneQuest, this isn’t a drastic change. If you’ve wanted to try RuneQuest, now’s a good time to jump in and start fresh with a new edition.
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