Wednesday, November 28, 2012

The 'Ancient World' of Avalon Hill's RuneQuest

Apart from the 'Fantasy Europe' map in the boxed set, Avalon Hill's Deluxe Edition RuneQuest contained two maps of the ancient world, both attributed to the fictional Korybos of Tiana; the 'Ancient Map of the Western World' on page 11 and the 'Ancient Map of the Eastern World' on page 83.  They were obviously two parts of a single map and your humble host wanted to see the combined whole.  Other than defacing the book, the only option was to re-create the map.  Without further ado, you humble host presents the meager fruit of his amateur effort.


'Blue' signifies coastlines, 'Gray' signifies mountains


6 comments:

  1. Nice. I always liked this version of RuneQuest and the setting.

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  2. I didn't know that this version of Runequest was set in the ancient 'real' world. Any comments or reviews of how they did the magic system? I actually hadn't heard good things about AH's version, but now I am very curious.

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    1. Alas, the 'Ancient World' really wasn't a 'setting'-just those two maps.

      AH RQ had five 'books.' Book 4 (Creatures) and Book 5 (Glorantha) contained information about Glorantha. The other three books (Players, Magic, and Gamemaster) were generic (except the introductory scenario had some Gloranthan trappings). 'Fantasy Europe' was a non-proprietary setting AH could use, distinct from Glorantha. However, aside from some low-detail maps and the characters used in the examples, neither 'Fantasy Europe' nor 'the Ancient World' were addressed in the rules.

      The magic system was not much different from what the RuneQuest SRD provides. 'Real world' religions were not written up as cults.

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  3. i played this version from its release to about 2001 - as dark age europe in byzantium, as my own fantasy world, glorantha and bronze age babylon - viking book was great - this is my proffered version i have 3 sets worth and several are disintegrating now from so much handling - i even like monster coliseum - but ive gone back to dnd because i need 2 stats for monsters not a whole character sheet

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  4. Let me just say, this is fantastic. I loved this setting, and was sad that they never had any overview material about it -- while it's true GMs could just browse historical reference works, I always thought it needed a gamable overview book to push people into adopting it.

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  5. Nice. Trying to learn more about this setting. Land of Vikings and Land of Ninja were two other products linked to this, though Land of Ninja seems to fit poorly with the timeframe of the other books?

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