What is New with RuneQuest? (THE KRAKEN 2021)

OK, so unexpected shit happened and, as a result, I was unable to travel to THE KRAKEN this year. But as they say: ‘if you can’t travel to THE KRAKEN, THE KRAKEN will travel to you’, which it did electronically by posting a video of Jason and Neil’s What is New with RuneQuest? panel at THE KRAKEN.

Here it is for your enjoyment.

For people of the tl;dr persuasion, or who have trouble listening to people speaking English, I have written a small summary below.

As everyone is aware of now, the RuneQuest Starter Set is coming next. It is an epic, ridiculously heavy labour of love, and it’s been the core aim of the RQ team for two years.
Unless most starter sets, this starter set is designed to be useful AFTER it’s been used as a ‘starter set’:
 - the Sartarite city of Jonstown is fully detailed
 - the scenarios can be used as non-starter scenarios in a GM’s campaign

(my 2 cents: except for the character generation part, which is missing as the Starter Set only contains pre-generated characters, it can be safely used as your reference RQ rules set— the rules are sometimes even better explained and presented than in the core book!)

These products are supposed to follow:
 - the Weapons & Equipment Guide
 - the Sartar boxed set (the first in a series of locale sets)
 - the Cults book, which is actually going to be two very large books plus a slimmer prosopædia, book, all of them with mind-boggling art.

Further down:
 - maybe some small PDF-only publications (stand-alone adventures, using the elder races as PCs, this kind of stuff)
 - Big Rubble and Pavis by Robin Laws is being edited right now
 - a collection of adventures by Jason
 - a book about key Gloranthan locations by Jonathan Tweet

Even further down:
 - the GM book is ongoing — it’s been slowed down by the battle system
 - Spell decks are also in the works (personal note: do we really need these??)

On the digital side, there will be an official RQ wiki with:
 - an overview of the world of Glorantha
 - the very basic rules + a chargen module

Q&A session

Q: Any news about the heroquesting book?
A: It will probably end up as a boxed set because of all the cool ‘props’ that can be used on top of the character sheets.

Q: What is the status of the new Dragon Pass boardgame?
A: We’re going back to the original design and making it more modern (rather than the reboot that had been demoed at an earlier convention)

Q: Is there a RQ video game in the works?
A: Black Shamrock, a video game development studio, is working on one.