Foes (1980) is a good contrast to the modern direction of RuneQuest. This is a decidedly old school sort of book.

The cover boasts that the book contains 1200 monsters, which is true. They just aren’t unique monsters. What’s inside is 1200 sets of stats for a pool of about 30 types of monsters. There are a lot of early RQ books like this, just full of stat block after stat block. This one at least has art.

Which I like. Rick Becker definitely has some of those oh-so-sweet old school vibes. I love the cover art with the hand-drawn typography. And the interiors are well rendered. It doesn’t feel terribly distinct, though. The dwarves look like dwarves, the elves look like elves. Everything is cut from the same late 70s, early 80s cloth.

This isn’t entirely Becker’s fault. RuneQuest was still evolving and, as was common at the time, the rules were doing so at a greater pace than the aesthetics. You can see this particularly well with the trolls. Becker’s look pretty much like trolls from the folklore of northern Europe, with a little bit of orc thrown in. But as soon as two years later, with 1982’s Trollpak, Gloranthan trolls are distinct and unlike any other fantasy troll. It took a while for everything else to catch up to the trolls, but in modern RuneQuest, dwarves and elves are downright alien. As they should be! But it definitely makes looking back a curious experience.