RuneScape Conclusions
I’ve put a lot of thought into this series, but I never developed it into a coherent vision. There are a few reasons for this, which I’ll lay out here, and then I’ll talk about how I might knit it all together, if I had to.1
Is this really the end?
Surely not. I first drafted this post in mid 2023, and then kept putting it off as I developed more ideas I wanted to articulate about RuneScape. But the process of drafting it was a useful catalyst in my own thinking, and the ideas outlined here still apply. Just beware of the tense in the rest of this post.
Because this is, if not an ending, a chance to look back at the series and consider where it might be going, I’ve given it a page in my header with links and summaries and a rough history of the ideas. Just follow the 
symbol.
The Grand Exchange, Shuffled.
But first, The Grand Exchange!
Sam W. a.k.a. quajzen, whose work I’ve highlighted before, is hosting The Grand Exchange next month (August), a RuneScape-inspired game jam on itch.io. I’m really excited for it!
We now return you to mid 2023…
Why?
Novel structure
When you put all the pieces together you’ve got a game that can start small with a dumb quest and gradually grow itself into a monstrous caravan of logistics, like a freeform Ultraviolet Grasslands. At the same time, this shift should be invisible and optional. New game modes are added, but old ones aren’t removed. In principle, it allows and rewards play styles that traditional D&D does not.
System serving story
While the game is rules-dense, every rule directly serves the story and the world. This is a conscious choice, not a natural consequence, and it cuts both ways. In a sense, the game itself is a tight jewelbox design,2 perhaps a bit like Le Monastere do Saint Gastronomie.
Nostalgia
Although I’ve tried to remove the Gielinor from the RuneScape, I expect that on some level they’re inseparable. For some players, the mere fact of random events and mining will evoke certain memories, and hopefully get a smile at least.
Why not?
Circular Dependencies
The first and most obvious reason the game is not more fully developed is that it’s a radically different architecture than a usual RPG. So much more of the mechanical effort is present in the setting itself than is segregated into “rules” or “system” that it doesn’t make sense to invest in them until details about the world are sure. Similarly, many things traditionally considered “rules” have become setting now, like spell lists and magic items. And a few things traditionally considered “setting” effectively become rules, like whatever overarching conspiracy drives the treasure trails, or whatever NPCs are tied up in our random events. It’s a supersaturated solution of ideas, waiting for a seed to crystallize around.
Extraordinary Effort
The premise of this game is unfortunately maximalist. A skilled GM can maintain a few plots, extrapolate from unexpected occurrences, and grow the world as the players explore it. But to systematize the unknown requires a lot of effort that may not ever be of use. Jagex gets away with this because they are a many-person team, with years of development behind them and an enormous player base. If one developer spends a day on an item that a small fraction of players will ever see, that day is proportionally less of the total dev time spent on the game than if I spend an hour on it (to say nothing of pay). And even though relatively few players will ever see that work, the player base is large enough that many still will.3 It’s common to solicit player input (even for Jagex), but I still fear that wouldn’t be enough.
Commonplace Effect
I love RuneScape and its extended family, but at the end of the day, the world of Geilenor is pretty boring. This fantasy heartbreaker could have the most exquisite rules, but if they just describe one more kitchen sink fantasy world, it might be hard to get player buy-in. And this premise needs player buy-in both for the new rules and weird subsystems and the amount of player knowledge required to drive it.
How to?
System
Practically, we can put a few requirements on the system. It should be largely classless, as I think it’s important that players can define and redefine their characters through play. It should have some kind of skill system, as many of the proposed subsystems are built on top of that assumption. And it should be as light-weight as possible, given the complexity we are adding elsewhere. It’s fashionable to use Mothership for any kind of game these days, but I honestly think it might be a good chassis here. Troika!-style skill mechanics also seem like an easy inclusion (roll-under skill to succeed, roll-over skill to improve).
Gamemastering
Despite everything I said about maximalism above, I think the best thing to do is keep the GM info minimal with a few hooks and plots that can grow naturally. Of course the details of the conspiracies and sub-systems are also GM info, but ideally not ones that need to be present immediately. Finally, I think it would be best to include “prompts” for the players alongside some of the earliest hooks and plots. If players are at a loss as to how to reach an ominous floating structure, it shouldn’t feel out of place for an NPC to suggest “some kind of magic potion” or for the PCs to already know who might have that recipe.
The Player Gazetteer
RuneScape relies on player knowledge to a degree that can even rob the game of its own fun. Sometimes it relies on metagaming so much that attempting something without help is miserable. Even though “player knowledge” is an interesting and fun part of many games, I don’t want that extreme here. I think players should have a gazetteer of some kind, which maybe starts with broad outlines of the setting (these are the big cities, these are a few notable people) and a few rumors (locations of rare items, a few speculative recipes). I don’t want the players to have to read a book to play the game (nor remove that suspension of disbelief, nor force “system mastery” in that way), so the bulk of the actual game content may need to be hidden either in the GM materials or a third “book,” or developed in play.
Technology
Concerns like the gazetteer may lend themselves well to a wiki. Everything that can be automated should, but that shouldn’t excuse complexity creep. If there’s a VTT involved, it would be worthwhile to take the time integrating the more finnicky parts.
There’s some level of detail that’s lost in in the distillation of a world into a few paragraphs and dice rolls. By describing something as the GM, I necessarily make it relevant. Perhaps there is a solution here similar to Dwiz’s Picture Book Gameplay, but to make that a regular feature would require a workflow that I don’t have.
Structural Concerns
This is a game that requires an inordinate amount of buy-in from everyone and also provides a lot of solitary activity. While players should be encouraged to do some thinking between sessions, it would also be important to ensure that at the table everything keeps moving, instead of silent minutes staring at screens and flipping through pages.
It may be worth drastically restructuring the game after some cooperative or GM-less model, to share the burden of world-building.
Scale-down
This vision of the final product rests on an immense amount of theorizing and daydreaming, and hasn’t been empirically proven. Perhaps the way forward is to start with a dense mini-campaign. Run The Black Hack with only 6 random events, detail 2-3 potion recipes and legendary items, and so on. Then see if it does in fact sing like I hope it does.
Hook
A couple times now, I’ve alluded to the hook. It really needs something: an elevator pitch, a few clear images and aesthetics, an idea. But then again, maybe that would become obvious through play.
Illustrations
For what’s really the actually-final-probably post in this series, I wanted to play around with a few other techniques for glitching images that I hadn’t had the chance to yet.
- Cerberus by u/ID3APrinting.
- Compressed to 20% quality in the FIASCO fractal image compression format.
- Garden by u/Kadence_KG.
- Reconstructed using only the real component of a Fast Fourier Transform.
- Miniature Kraken by PocketxGalaxy.
- Reconstructed using only the phase component of a Fast Fourier Transform.
- WOM Tattoo by u/DatAdamBoi.
- Compressed to 1% quality in the FIASCO fractal image compression format.
- OSRS Frog Tattoo Ft. u/dtattoo by PM_ME_SONG_MASHUPS.
- Read in as the Adobe98 colorspace.
- Converted to the LMS colorspace.
- 3D Printed Phantom Muspah by MasterFelix6.
- Read in as the LUV colorspace.
- Converted to the RGB colorspace.
This is a rhetorical trick that I play on myself. “Obviously I’m not going to, it’s a terrible idea” can be temporarily suspended by “sure, but if someone else were to do it, how, specifically would they start?” Hopefully I’ll have too much momentum by the time the first voice says “hey, wait a minute…”↩︎
“Jewelbox” specifically in the sense of dense, interactive, and self-reinforcing, but perhaps without the more specific connotations of “location-based” or even necessarily “usability-focused,” although that would be nice.↩︎
This is not hypothetical. The stale baguette has a drop rate of 1/256 from an already rare random event. The champion scrolls have a drop rate of 1/5000 from ten different monsters, and you need one of each to be able to fight for the right to the champion’s cape. I never expect to see either of these things myelf, but the game still feels richer for them.↩︎