This is the 1981 reprint of Snake Pipe Hollow for Chaosium’s RuneQuest RPG. With the exception of the cover, it is identical to the 1979 version.

I’d like to talk about the creature on the cover for a minute. It is called a walktapus. Not kidding at all. Within the context of RuneQuest’s lore, the creature makes a certain amount of sense – Chaos creates all sorts of abominations. In the meta sense, my goodness, it is hard to take the monster, let alone its name, seriously. It is also, at least as far as I am concerned, hard to not be delighted but such a creature. This is the sort of thing that makes early RPGs so wonderful – designers threw in whatever they wanted. The conventions of fantasy games weren’t so set in stone back then – if you tried to come up with something so doofy as the walktapus now, you’d probably be accused of trying too hard and it would get edited out anyway.

Whether or not you take the walktapus seriously, it can mess you up. Bad. And that is maybe the most beautiful thing about it – your players are bound to underestimate a monster like this.

Another thing worth thinking about – Snake Pipe Hollow is one of few early Chaosium products to get several reprints, so in the covers you can see the company’s increasingly refined professionalism and design sense evolve.