[Runequest] Latest on RQ rights

[Sven Lugar]

I believe Greg came up with the title Runequest during the days before 
the game development was turned over to Steve Perrin. I suspect the 
choice of Runequest over other names in part had to do with the then 
current popularity of Runes as a method of divination & thus had market 
appeal. During play-test there was some joking regarding names such as 
"Cleaverquest" & "Golfbag Quest" (the former was due to limbs constantly 
being lopped off & the latter due to weapons frequently breaking).  But 
despite the lack in the published version in the first playtests we 
quested for Runes or Rune-charged objects quite a bit. Thus "Rockquest" 
was a name I coined for a while during the playtest. There was lots of 
quests to find chips of God/Rune rock & the like. My copy of the 
original playtest over stuffs a 2 inch brown binder. Needless to say 
that was way to large to print for a reasonable cost so things were 
stream-lined. Among the things lost were the copious references to Runes 
& Rune touched objects. As other people started adding to the Gloranthan 
Canon the Runes never got added back in. During the original write-up of 
Magic for the MRQ version, Steve attempted to add back in some of the 
original ideas that were very Rune oriented but Mongoose chose to reject 
that approach. So I beg to differ - Questing for Runes was once a 
primary focus of the system though admittedly it was prior to 
publication or for those who were involved with the original playtest. I 
am still using it as a plot line in my current campaigns.
Sköl,
Sven Lugar

On 6/10/2011 5:53 AM, Peter Maranci wrote:
> ...snip...
>
> One point that never occurred to me before: Who came up with the NAME 
> "RuneQuest"? What was their intention? Runes were never the primary 
> focus of the system, nor (arguably) of Glorantha. So why that name?
...snip...