Since 2020, I’ve been writing on-and-off about the early-2000s MMO RuneScape and how and why different aspects of its gameplay could be imported into a tabletop RPG setting. The journey has been long, and my thinking on the topic has evolved over time. There’s a lot of posts in this series now, so I’m collecting them on this page.
Old-School RuneScape Character Creation, glitched in WordPad.
Ideas from RuneScape for the Tabletop
A brief introduction to the idea and its parameters.
Character Builds in RuneScape
How emergent character optimization resembles foregrounded character growth, and how that might be encouraged.
Recovered: Random Events
An examination of the idea of the random event, similar ideas in the history of D&D, and how it might be implemented in modern RPGs.
Questing in RuneScape
How “questing” in RuneScape is similar an dissimilar to more usual ideas of “adventuring.”
Treasure Trails, Part 1
Possible implementation of a subsystem similar to RuneScape’s treasure trails (which I consider crucial to its texture).
Treasure Trails, Part 2
Modeling the proposed system as an absorbing Markov process to answer questions about it and suggest possible improvements.
Complexity in RuneScape
Short discussion of “complexity,” when it’s desirable, and how to manage it when it’s not.
Crafting & Items
A loose set of ideas about crafting, how different kinds of crafting are called for by different stories, and maybe like a third of a useful system.
Defining Terms
A freewheeling glossary of game design ideas, some original but mostly from elsewhere. There is no thesis here, except that I really needed to organize some of these thoughts before I was able to keep going.
Models of High-Level Play
How the core loops of RuneScape change as you advance through the game, and how other TTRPGs have had similarly-changing loops (or not). How the specific ways the RuneScape handles it might be encouraged.
Skills1
A close examination of the idea of a character “skill,” how skills operate in RuneScape as first-class objects (unlike D&D where they have always been secondary).
Tracking Through Spaces
A complete system for tracking a quarry through an endless procedural catacomb. It’s not directly part of the RuneScape series, except that I was having a hard time formulating how I wanted to handle minigames and writing and playing in an example helped sharpen my thinking.
Deeper Catacombs
After playtesting, I made some expansions and improvements to the system. This post outlines both the process of iteration, and completely restates the procedure.
Death in the Catacombs
A short addendum to Deeper Catacombs, Cairn-specific rules for playing as a ghost.
Minigames
After all of that, I didn’t think the catacombs were really getting at what I wanted from RuneScape for a minigame, so I elaborated on what minigames add to a larger game, try to define them a little more exactly, and attempt to rework the catacombs into something more focused.
RuneScape Addenda
Having worked through all the above ideas by now, I’d accumulated a pile of little footnotes, references, comments, elaborations, and corrections. I thought I was approaching the end!
Geilinor
What makes the world of Geilinor work well for the game of RuneScape? What can we learn from it for our own use?
Other RuneScapes
Reviews of two existing RuneScape TTRPGs: an unofficial one from ~2018 and an official one that finally released in 2024.
RuneScape Remixes
A pointer to the work of Sam W a.k.a. quajzen about importing quests directly from RuneScape and fuller analysis of The Waterfall Quest. I didn’t add much but a collage.
Leagues
Reflections on the unique experience of “leagues” in Old-School RuneScape, and how the general idea of the time-limited alternate game-mode might be deployed.
RuneScape Conclusions
Looking back at all of these posts, how might one start to form them into a coherent game? Why bother, and what unique challenges does it pose? Despite the title, this is not the final post.
Future Drafts
Where my thoughts may or may not tend.
- RuneScape Cosmology
- Skill Lists (distinguished from skills)
Old-School RuneScape Tutorial Island, glitched in WordPad.
I immediately regretted (and still regret) giving the post a jokey-but-meaningless title. At the time I didn’t feel I could make a post called “Skills” and still usefully refer to it. Oh well.↩︎