It’s funny, when I started Vintage RPG, and you can go back and look at this, but I was deep into devouring RuneQuest, posted about it all the time. I still love RuneQuest! But…I’m running out of RuneQuest. This week marks the end or very close to it, I think, of the Chaosium second edition material I have. There’s still a bunch of Avalon Hill stuff and modern books to get through, but it makes me a little sad that the OG books have dwindled.

You’ll recall that Chaosium experimented with a more generic, non-Glorantha RQ experience during the 2E era, with the not very good Questworld box set. The Gateway Bestiary (1980) prefigures that with a collection of monsters that might be handy for other sorts of games (but don’t really fit the vibe of Glorantha). It’s spaciously laid out and reminds me a bit of Chaosium’s All the Worlds’ Monsters books (wait, have I not posted about those before?!), but with better illustrations by Rick Becker (though, not nearly enough of them).

Couple things worth pointing out about the monster selection. For one, author Sandy Petersen included a number of Lovecraftian monsters for some reason, directly anticipating Call of Cthulhu, which would come out the following year. This is also ground zero for the inclusion in RQ of the Chonchon, a sorcerer’s head with enlarged ears that is uses to fly, from Chilean folklore. There’s also the anthropophage which sure sounds like a xenomorph to me (spoiler: it is clearly a xenomorph with the serial numbers filed off — I love that!).