Table Tales: Breaking the Curse of the Empty Table
By Mark Morrison
It’s been far too long between tales!
Partly because I’ve had my head down working on the RuneQuest Revised Rulebook for next year (so exciting), but mostly because my group has had a winter of gaming discontent. With one life reason after another we have cancelled far more sessions than we have convened. You know how it goes.
But, everything finally worked last Thursday when Rhiannon, Scott and Mark were free to join me for an absolutely cracking playtest of “The Mouth of Chaos”, the brand new short adventure by Brian Holland which will be included in the new RuneQuest rulebook. No spoilers from me, but it’s designed to introduce new players to both the thrill of Glorantha and the core mechanics of RuneQuest.
It was a particular thrill to throw down the new adventurers that Brian has designed, with wonderful art from Ossi Hiekkala, and see who caught their imagination. The players selected Titus the Minotaur, Marmar the Duck, and Attia the Healer. Their mix of completely different cults, cultures, skills and magic turned out to be perfect for the adventure at hand.
It was a fantastic playtest; a validation of how much fun the adventure is, how easy the new streamlined rules text is to access in play, how simple the pre-generated adventurers are to pick up, and most of all, how wonderful it is to finally beat the spirits of scheduling and get everyone to the table. All in all a great night in, and I made a few notes to fine tune the final edit after the player’s feedback.
There have been some quiet nights before this though, which raises the question: what do you do when you don’t got game? In my case the answer is, of course, plan for the next one.
Later this year I’ll be at both Chaosium Con Europe in October and Chaosium Con New Zealand in November, and I always like to have a new scenario on board. Most of my convention scenarios aren’t intended for print, but exist in a liminal space between my imagination, a small pocketbook, and what happens at the table when I run them. So, I needed something else for 2026, to go with my RuneQuest unicorn rider scenario “Star in Darkness”.
Read more at Table Tales: Breaking the Curse of the Empty Table