At GenCon 2015 and Chaosium together with Moon Design announced they were bringing the name Runequest back to Chaosium along with a Moon Design partnership. Moon Design has been doing the Glorantha (the default world of Runequest) work for a number of years. The prospect of a Chaosium Gloranthan RuneQuest was received by many (myself included) with great enthusiasm. RuneQuest was then in it's 6th Edition published by The Design Mechanism, which was a very good book, but devoid of actual Glorantha material because of IP holdings.
A few months passed and it became apparent that Chaosium was not sticking with RuneQuest 6. The RQ Classic Kickstarter went way better than they expected and established there is still a big following for RuneQuest 2. As a result two things happened at Chaosium. They now have virtually all the old RuneQuest/Glorantha product available for sale again and they are working on their own update of RuneQuest based on the 2nd Edition so that new RuneQuest will be compatible with the older material.
In the early 80's RuneQuest was perhaps the second most popular fantasy RPG. In all it's editions, it's a percentile based, classless skill system. Percentiles have the advantage of being transparent and a skill system together with percentiles can give a "realistic" feel to a game. A lot of gamers were looking for "realism" in their RPGs at that time and our group was no different. We played a lot of RuneQuest during the early '80s. It was also one of the first games to come with a default world setting, Glorantha.
Decades later game design tastes have moved forward. RuneQuest 6 was well received as a system which combined newer game sensibilities with the traditional percentile, skill based RQ rules system. I was saddened to learn that Chaosium was not going to be working with The Design Mechanism folks to make a RuneQuest 6 that was fully integrated with Glorantha. My hope then was that The Design Mechanism could continue with their system, under a new name, and continue to produce the excellent play-aids like Mythic Britain. Well, my wish is here. I have in my hands a very nice hardcover book called Mythras which is very similar to RuneQuest 6, even down to the same cover illustration. If you are unfamiliar with RuneQuest, one of the biggest differences between RQ and D&D is magic. There are no fireballs, or Harry Potter-style flashy spell casters. Anyone can do a little magic, even warriors. The cover illustration shows a big lizardman called a "Slarg" and a hoplite style warrior who has cast "bladesharp" on her spear, hence the magical glow. (It will probably be needed to defeat the much bigger, stronger lizardman.)
I mentioned The Design Mechanism improved on the older 2nd Edition RQ. One of the bigger improvements is in the area of combat. Older edition RQ combat was often a series of blows and parries and could go on for quite a while until someone missed a parry or scored a critical hit bypassing armor. The Design Mechanism folks use a Differential Roll matrix and Special Effects which allow for combat to end much quicker, often with a surrender/skeedaddle rather than out-right killing.
The implied setting for Mythras remains one of a proto-Greek or bronze age type civilization, although the rules work fine outside this. In many ways I think this has advantages over the traditional quasi-medieval setting of FRPGs. Drawing on myth and the heroic age for inspiration can provide one with a fresh game after years of fairy tale inspired medieval knights and Merlin-esque wizards. Mythras encourages us to take a break from Tolkien and adventure in the manner of Perseus and Herakles.
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