Griffin Island (1987) is the lone adventure for the Avalon Hill RuneQuest that Games Workshop decided to import. Again, except for new art and some minor changes to the text, it is identical to the Avalon Hill box set, preserving both its pros and cons.

Griffin Island is a significant reworking on Griffin Mountain, a well regarded Glorantha campaign book by Jennell Jaquays and Rudy Kraft. Griffin Island strips all the Glorantha out of it, which sucks, then pours in lizardfolk and orcs, which sucks more. It keeps most of the settlements and adventuring sites, though, so the core of the overland exploration is the same. Turning mountain into island is pretty smart, too, allowing you to drop it in any ocean in your campaign world. It also comes with a map that is mostly blank (aside of some obvious locations and annotations from previous owners) that is very good and probably more intriguing than the actual execution of the revamped campaign. The GW one is in color, even.

All the art is new. Angus Fieldhouse’s cover is probably the most RQ in feeling of the line. The interiors mostly fail to capture that feeling even though I love Russ Nicholson and will never complain about getting more of his art. His pieces here are gorgeously packed battle scenes and I adore them. But they don’t feel at all like RuneQuest.

One interesting thing. Some of the maps got re-worked in the style of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, with tavern signs and such. I really love that. But I also love that they reproduced the map of Soldier Point unchanged – Griffin Island has got lots of warts, but that map is one of my all time favorite RPG maps. It struck a chord for GW, evidently (and Chaosium, too, which essentially disavows the Avalon Hill days and uses nearly none of the art from the period, but does use the Soldier Port for a completely different location in the massive, canonical tome The Guide to Glorantha).