RuneQuest Companion
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- Bill Johnson
- Sherman Kahn
- Alan LaVergne
- Jim McCormick
- Ron Nance
- Sandy Petersen
- Greg Stafford
| History, Stories and Play-aids | |
|---|---|
 Cover by Rick Becker, 1983, 2019 | |
| Designers |
|
| Publishers | Chaosium |
| Publication | 1983 |
| Genres | Fantasy |
| Systems | Basic Role-Playing |
| ISBN | 978-1-56882-520-5 |
RuneQuest Companion[1] is a tabletop role-playing game supplement for RuneQuest. Originally published by Chaosium in 1983, it consisted of reprints of Wyrm's Footnotes magazine articles as well as new material to expand the game rules and setting. It received positive reviews in game periodicals including Dragon, White Dwarf, Fantasy Gamer, and Different Worlds. It was republished in 2019 in PDF format as part of Chaosium's RuneQuest: Classic Edition Kickstarter.
RuneQuest Companion is a supplement consisting of
- reprints of magazine articles
- an errata sheet with corrections and additions to the second edition of RuneQuest
- new material that had been left out of Trollpak
- a new history and geography of the Holy Country by Greg Stafford
- a solo adventure scenario designed by Alan LaVergne
- a short story, "The Smell of a Rat", also by Lavergne
- details of illusion Rune magic by Stafford
- details of unicorns and trolls by Sandy Petersen
- fragments of fictional correspondence
- excerpts from chronicles of notable and historical figures of Glorantha
- and more.[2]
Publication history
In 1976, the year after Chaosium released their first product, the fantasy board game White Bear and Red Moon, the company published Wyrm's Footnotes, a magazine dedicated to providing supplemental material about the game. When Chaosium released its fantasy role-playing game Runequest in 1978, set in Glorantha, articles about the fictional world began to appear in Wyrm's Footnotes. By 1981, Wyrm's Footnotes was solely dedicated to articles about Glorantha. However, the magazine was discontinued in 1982, and as Ken Rolston noted, "When publication of Wyrm's Footnotes ended, a most important source of detail, both epic and trivial, about Glorantha disappeared."[3]
In 1983, RuneQuest Companion was released as a 72-page book edited by Charlie Krank that contained a collection of previously published Wyrm's Footnotes articles as well as new material.[2]
As several contemporary reviewers noted, RuneQuest Companion was initially publicized as the first in a projected series of Companion books.[4][3] However, no other volumes were ever published.