I used to play a bit of Runequest II in the early 80s but never upgraded to the 3^rd edition that was pretty expensive those days. TAHGC recently sold off a pack of Runequest III expansions at a healthy discount so I ordered a set from the states only to see the same product at a lower price in the UK. Oddly the pack contains some handy adventures but only the basic rules although most of the adventures included require the deluxe rules. Obviously the standard rules never sold so well and there are plenty still to shift in Baltimore. With Runequest Slayers out soon these 3^rd edition expansions are not going to get any more common on the shelves. 2^nd Edition Chaosium stuff is very expensive over here, I have seen 60 pounds on a Borderlands box unfortunately the remains of my 2^nd edition stash is well trashed and unlikely to be worth much. Incidentally the Games Workshop editions of Runequest II and III are still pretty cheap although out of print. I recently bought Griffin Island minus about 3 handouts for 3 pounds.

I had planned to play the newly bought material with my kids (13, 10 and 8) and indeed got a couple of sessions completed without any problems. I cannot however get all 3 of them to agree to play it again so am resting the system and hope to sneak it back in before they all leave home. There is not a lot of difference between the 2 editions except for the sorcery rules that can safely be left alone. Runequest is famous for the heaps of stats that may be modified as a character progresses. Some adventures seem designed to test the maximum number of stats in a session. I remember part of Borderlands being heavy on the testing; there is a similar session in Sun Country. Role-play really depends on the people playing it and the quality of the adventure rather than the rules. You could have a good game with Tunnels and Trolls although I remember some pretty poor ones (mostly my designs at that). Shadows on the Borderland (part of TAHGC's discount pack) has some fine thinking scenarios and there are some other cerebral jobs on the net).

One aspect of Runequest III that is improved and deserves mention is the use of fatigue. Fatigue points equal hit points and are lost during strenuous activity, including melee rounds. When twice the fatigue level has been lost the excess starts to come off hit points and that hurts. An average character in heavy armour or carrying the legendary adventurer's gear (rope, lantern, kitchen sink) is going to start off a battle with negative fatigue points. Thus we get a reasonable trade off between what a character wants and what can be carried. Gear is best divided into the left at home, on the horse or ready for use. Another bonus is the loss of fatigue points shortens melee; Runequest II between rough equals could see a lot of thrashing with little result and wrist cramp from the die rolling. Still a couple of hits can mean death, which is never too popular with the players.

Real players probably like to generate their own characters but my kids do not have the patience to go through this so I set up sheets in Excel '97. We were using Praxian herders (Pol Joni) and Yelmalio militia so I adapted the basic sheet to give experienced characters. Naturally they will all do for NPCs, up the age to increase the stats. The sheets will not open from Geocites; you will have to right click and "save as" on your hard drive. All the sheets generate random numbers for statistics based on 2D6, changing anything will also change all the variables and these sheets have some variables. I suggest that you overtype the attributes for NPCs in the relevant cells and then save them under new files. If you like a character it will also need attributes re-entering and saving under a new name; this will remove the random number generator. The real bonus of these sheets is they print out on A4 in more or less the right places compared to character sheets and the original sheets can be updated on disc and printed again as abilities change. The calculations can be checked by highlighting options from the menu and choosing view formulae.

I am working on C versions of these programs as a bit of a laugh while learning to program C. So far I can generate basic stats and save them to disk but have yet to perfect reading the stats back from disk in a tidy format. Test code has proved that the data is written correctly. More fun can be had from getting C to print out the data when required.