RuneQuest. The game famously associated with Greg Stafford’s Glorantha. We’re currently four supplement releases in and the first meaty campaign box is…Vikings.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great. If you want to run a Viking campaign, this is all you need. The art is good, it has excellent cultural notes, a great take on Viking mythology, everything you’d expect from a Chaosium product. The problem, at the risk of beating a dead horse, is that you got it at an Avalon Hill price. Vikings originally retailed at $21. To compare, the Call of Cthulhu core box set at the time was a buck cheaper.

There’s a whole lot more that went wrong with the Avalon Hill/Chaosium partnership, but hopefully over the course of these posts you’ve gotten an good idea of how it all started. And the sin of it is that mismanaging RuneQuest robbed the RPG world of a unique system and setting. RuneQuest, through a long journey, is now entirely back in Chaosium’s hands, but it still hasn’t fully recovered – hopefully, the release of RuneQuest 7 later this year will correct that crime of history.

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