The emphasis on communal obligations and day-to-day life is one strength of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG). This is built into the game’s religious expectations like tithing adventuring loot to one’s temple, and in how the game’s cults describe reciprocal relationships and social hierarchies. Despite these strengths actual RQG adventures tend to focus more on the “weird, strange thing going on” and less on “everyday drama.” This makes sense to me. I’m not really interested in roleplaying about who the baker’s son is going to marry—the core rules have a 34-page combat chapter and by Humakt, I’m gonna use it.
As a gamemaster, though, I do like to take a brief look at more mundane aspects of the adventurers’ lives. These vignettes between adventures typically explore how an adventurer spends their time performing their occupation, helping their cult, doing something for their clan or tribe, and fulfilling other social obligations of that basic nature. I often highlight the vignette as the “most exciting thing” that happened in day-to-day life, but the scale usually isn’t “big event.” Getting pickpocketed in Boldhome, rather than fighting off raiding Praxians.
These aren’t rules; they’re more like “guidelines.” I might codify them into rules at some point for the Jonstown Compendium, but it’s not all that high on my radar. In large part, I think the basic concept makes sense enough to use, and I just don’t have that much interest right now in the formalizing process I’d want to do if I was putting vignette rules into an actual product.
Playing Vignettes
My four basic principles for playing vignettes are:
- Each player gets one vignette, and can’t participate in other vignettes
- The player can only make a certain number of dice rolls (usually three)
- Adventurers won’t get seriously harmed
- Adventurers can’t get significant benefits
Always tell the players this upfront—I forgot once, and it led to confusion when a player thought their adventurer might get drowned.
The fundamental goal is to show a “moment” in the adventurer’s life, rather than telling a “complete story.” Ideally, each vignette takes about 15 minutes to play. That’s the main goal of limiting the dice rolls. If a player wants to try something which has a chance of failure, well, that’s a dice roll. Want to see how much damage their attack dealt? That’s a second roll (rather than letting the gamemaster broadly narrate the event). Want to augment your ability roll? That’ll cost one of your dice rolls (but hey, your ability’s more likely to succeed!).
Once the player runs out of dice rolls, the vignette’s basically over. If I need to wrap something up I will, but in general that’s just a dash of narration. For example, one time the adventurer got their coinpurse back, but was out of dice rolls so the thief escaped. This means most vignettes won’t have a “full” conclusion, and that’s OK.
These restrictions are also why there’s neither serious danger nor benefits from a vignette. The player has restricted agency in the scene, so logically they shouldn’t be at substantial risk. I tend to frame danger in a vignette as “you might get wounded, but if you do you’ve recovered by the start of the next adventure.”
In a similar vein, most benefits from a vignette are just those which the adventurer is already receiving from their occupation and cult. If the circumstances warrant, I might give a small benefit, up to 1–3 Lunars in value. Frankly, it’s fun to get stuff, and knowing they can get something tends to keep players interested.
A more nebulous benefit is typically in the form of roleplay and plot or character development. Vignettes give me an easy excuse to introduce a new character, a new plot seed, or to give the player a chance to bump into a non-player character I haven’t been able to use lately during an adventure. For example, during my Esrolian campaign set in the small city of Sylthi one adventurer’s vignette was encountering a mad prophet. This was a plot hook for a future story arc I had in mind, where a cult of the Sun Dragon would trigger a populist uprising in the area against the oppressive mafiosa Grandmothers.
I’m more inclined to give players a roleplay benefit—like advancing a story they’re interested in, but which doesn’t really involve the other adventurers—than a mechanical benefit. This does reflect my players; we, as a whole group, tend to be very incentivized by mechanical gains and concrete “character sheet stuff” type of rewards. Roleplay and story is fun, but it isn’t our focal goal as a “win condition” of each adventure.
A final benefit of playing vignettes this way is that they give the adventurers a chance to use skills with a lower rating in a low-consequence environment. I encourage players to use skills outside their main toolkit, and I do reward experience checks for abilities used successfully during a vignette. This helps players overcome their reluctance to use skills at 20% or less, and ultimately in my opinion encourages more well-rounded adventurers. And—as mentioned before—experience checks very much are a “character sheet” reward. Indeed, the skill-experience-improve gameplay loop is the core of my RuneQuest experience. It’s a satisfying cycle which encourages players to take risks in order to improve their abilities. It also provides the foundation for very long campaigns, since there’s no real upper “limit” to how high a skill’s rating can go.
Constructing Vignettes
When I first started using vignettes in RQG I had the helpful support of an old RuneQuest 3 book, RuneQuest Cities. This book is basically 50 pages of encounter tables, especially for urban environments, focusing on what area of a city an adventurer is in then describing who they might bump into based on the time of day. I managed to pick this up cheaply online back before COVID; like most collector’s items I imagine the price is now… prohibitive.
Edit: It is not prohibitive! A version of this is still available from the original publisher, Midkemia Press, as Cities 4th Edition, in PDF on DriveThruRPG for $4.99. Thanks to Joerg and Alexei for pointing this out to me!
A similar set of tables are included in the RuneQuest Starter Set for the city of Jonstown, in the adventures book. While not in anywhere near the level of detail in RuneQuest Cities (it’s just a starter set, after all), these tables are quite a bit more accessible! They provide enough structure for most gamemasters to get a scene started and a few ideas brewing. In particular, the “reactions” table is rather handy.
I’m not a great improviser, however, so I’m usually looking for more ways to trigger ideas in the moment. I find using dice to randomly generate a Rune helps me greatly. I imagine a tarot deck or some other method of semantic randomization would work well, too. For example, we played a vignette where the adventurer was at a feast. I rolled to see who they’d encounter, and rolled the Spirit Rune and the Earth Rune. So, I decided that it was probably a shaman of the Earth Witch. To make it more interesting, I decided that she was a family friend or relative also. Next, I asked the player what the shaman’s relationship was to his family. Putting some of the improv burden on the player helps me out a lot when gamemastering. It also helps the player feel included in what’s going on, which increases investment in the scene.
These randomized characters often stick around (well, if I remember to write them down…). They become useful characters for future vignettes. Further, my experience is that players will remember side characters more vividly than myself. They’ll reach out to them for aid, advice, guidance—or to stab them, if the non-player character was a real jerk.
Overall, I’d pretty heartily encourage giving something like this a try in your RQG games. As a gamemaster I’ve found vignettes to be a useful way of generating sandbox plots and characters. Since it happens slowly, over time, it reduces my feelings of being overwhelmed by trying to build the sandbox. There’s nothing to build—better yet, half the time the players do it for me!
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