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Ideas from RuneScape for the Tabletop

In the pandemic, I spent a lot of time with RuneScape,1 and I got to thinking about what might be interesting to take from it for other games. I started by considering random events, but eventually I moved on to other subsystems and the ways in which these systems are knitted together. Now I’ve got half an impossible game between my notes and my head and it’s not quite coherent but I’d like to share it anyway, and maybe I’ll learn something in the process.

A screenshot from RuneScape of a kitten playing with a ball of wool. The caption reads “We interrupt this harrowing scene with a soothing picture of a kitten. Please do not think about what happened to Ulina - she found peace. Click here to continue.”A cutscene from the 2016 Christmas event.

This is distinct from my ideas about the Uncanny Hinterlands. The Hinterlands want to explore the limitations of video games as a medium and center that dissonance in a physical game,2 and they happened to use RuneScape as a jumping-off point. But these ideas take RuneScape at face value, focusing on the particularities of the setting, the culture of play, and the design of the game.

So in the next few weeks I’ll be porting digital subsystems into a tabletop paradigm and musing about the emergent game-play that these systems encourage. I can’t promise to finish in a timely manner, but I can say that I’ve got a few lined up already.

A black-and-white image with a dominant grid pattern and a repeating motif of kittens legs in the air like a frieze.A glitched version of the same cutscene.

I’m illustrating these posts with some glitched images. I had a lot of fun making them, so I’m including notes on methodology too. This image was glitched by opening it in WordPad on Windows. The method is rather destructive, so this was my only attempt that looked interesting. You just open up the image (as a bitmap) and then save it again.

  1. Mostly, I play Old-School RuneScape or “OSRS.” This is a community-driven officially-maintained fork of RuneScape as it existed c. 2007. For this project though, I also draw on ideas from RuneScape 3, RuneScape Classic, and from the idealized RuneScape of my memories.↩︎

  2. Now it sounds like they were meant to be some kind of important project or theoretical work. I’m just trying to distinguish between the two trains of thought here, and I can assure you that the Uncanny Hinterlands are very silly.↩︎

Tags
RPG RuneScape
Date
January 29, 2023
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