And why should it be?
Here are links I've found and enjoyed over the years. Some are for RuneQuest, but if you're looking for definitive lists of RQ links you're in the wrong place—I'm only listing my personal favorites. And not just my game favorites; these links cover everything I'm interested in. Or almost everything. :-)
By the way, since I've always found lists without explanations a bit annoying, I'm including at least a few lines of description or review for each link. As time goes by, I'll add more links and more descriptions. If you have a link you think I'd like, let me know!
Links will open in a new window. After all, I
wouldn't want you to get lost out there!
TONY AND GARYTH'S RUNE QUEST PAGE (aka Runequest.za.org). RQ material by Tony Den, who has written some great stuff for the Chaos Project, and Garyth, who I haven't met yet. It's nice to see a new RQ page starting, and I'll admit that it takes me back! I'm looking forward to seeing how the page evolves. Note: This is Tony's new URL, and the site is looking good!
Adam Manning's RuneQuest Page (aka
RuneQuest and Gloranthan Adventures!). Adam's page is huge and unique—among other things it has a ton of
pictures from a RuneQuest party where the participants were in
Gloranthan costumes! I could very easily be jealous. 
Also on
the site is a lot of unusually well-written campaign writeups,
characters, and far too much else to detail here. One interesting
experiment is a cut-out, fold, & staple guide to Snakepipe
Hollow. Oh, and there are no ads—bravo, Adam!
Runequest.net—DEFUNCT. Alas, it
looks like Dyson Empire Productions have gone the way of all
flesh; I'd pick up the URL, but the current speculator-owners
want several hundred dollars for it. Yeah, right! Out of
sentiment, my original assessment of the site follows:
I have to give the guys at Dyon Empire Productions credit. I'd
been talking about picking up the Runequest.net domain, but while
I was dithering they beat me to it. For some reason this is the
only page they've linked to—it's very kind of them—and
although they don't seem to have updated anything for a while now,
they have some useful tables and maps on their site. I was
actually in the process of creating an opposed resolution table
for this site when I found out they'd already posted one. Here's
hoping they fill out more of their sections soon! 10/16/02:
They've added a bit more stuff, including an online random
character generator.
Realm of the Ultimate RuneQuest Gamemasters—Okay, the title of the site could be considered
hubris (), but the people behind this RuneQuest site have
certainly put a lot of effort into it. This site is run by
four—or actually now it looks like three—or possibly
now two— separate RuneQuest GMs, each of whom has
their own "realm"; these contain campaign notes and
information. There are also general areas that seem to be shared,
with sections such as spell and magic weapon archives, as well as
a lot of NPCs. Some of the realms and sections are still empty,
but more material is added frequently. It features some extremely
large graphics, so if you're on dial-up be prepared to wait while
it loads. Note: after being hosted for a while at one or two free
sites, they've picked up their own domain and (I'm guessing) a
non-free host. Which was a good move, in my opinion. 10/16/02:
This site has gone dormant, but will apparently be replaced by a
more ambitious RQ site sometime in the next year.
Pete's RQ Chat/Forum—I recently created
a forum and chatroom for the site; the chat is java-based and
doesn't require installing anything (and you can do a temporary
guest login). There's a popup or two on the login screen, but it's
not too obnoxious so far. If these work out I'll eventually link
to them on the main page. I expect I'll be hanging out in the
chatroom when I'm bored. WARNING: The forum has a
lot of pop-ups. I'll probably delete it before too much longer,
since no one is using it anyway.
Basic Role Playing isn't quite RuneQuest, properly speaking, but it's not NOT RuneQuest, either; it was derived from RQ in the early days. Chaosium re-released it in 2002, making it the closest thing to a commercially-available form of the system there is, and probably that ever will be. This link goes to a fan site for the system.
And of course I need to list Chaosium. Their republication and expansion of Basic Role-Playing definitely gives me hope for the future of RuneQuest-like mechanics, if not under that name.
Rick Meints definitely deserves a link for republishing some of the greatest of the RQ2 supplements.
Kev's Website has the best RuneQuest III character generator I've seen so far. Incredibly flexible. It would be more fun to test it if I actually had people to play with, though.
Irony Games. Nothing directly to do with RuneQuest, but these guys serve the online roleplaying community like nobody else. Online dice rolling, maps, you name it. I don't check them every day, not even once a week, but it's good to know that they're there when I need them.
Andy Gryc Software, home of the incredible AutoREALM—a freeware program that's an incredibly useful tool for all sorts of FRP mapping. You can map anything from a single tavern up to a world with this program, and export the results to universal formats. I know it works under Windows 9x, but if you're running some other version it would still be worth giving it a try. My apologies to non-Microsoft users, but don't feel bad: you're not subject to the dominion of Gates. Yowza! That might make up for not being able to use this kick-ass program! NEW: Autorealm 1.1 now available!
Issaries, no longer gets a link from me beyond the mandatory one to their legalese. I never liked their Hero Wars/HeroQuest systems, and I simply cannot understand why they hold the RuneQuest trademark when they DON'T PUBLISH THE GAME. I do not expect to create new material set in Glorantha.
ECKZYLON (Virgil Greene's page). Virgil is an old friend, a stalwart contributor to Interregnum when I was publishing it, and a more gifted writer than he is willing to admit. His "Vampires: The Varieties" article was the single most commented-on piece on the entire IR site. His site includes information about a world-setting he has been working on for GURPS, and also has a writeup of an adventure that I had a lot of fun in (hint: look for "Mr. Resistance"). I rely on him for information about what's going on with all genre shows, by the way. He'll deny it, but he's an encyclopedia of SF TV lore.
The Fantasy Library. Joe Teller and Kiralee McCauley's site, which also included the new Interregnum site before the APA ceased publication. Large and filled with all sorts of good stuff.
Rich
Staats' Home Page. Rich may be the
hardest working man on the RPG con circuit—his guide to
running a panel should be required reading at every science
fiction convention in the world. How he manages to combine that
with a very busy full-time job AND a family is beyond me.
If his hair was blue-black, I'd suspect him of wearing a cape and
tights under that mild-mannered exterior. Rich is also One Of Us,
one of the dwindling crew of RuneQuest fans out there, and his
site shows it. Oh, almost forgot to mention that he was one of my
most dependable Interregnum writers!
Charibdis/Epimetheus' Blog. I guess he doesn't want people to link his real name to his blog (although his photo is on the blog, so I'm not sure I understand why), but he's an old friend and we've done a lot of gaming together. This is his new blog, since the old site got too slow to use. He has an in-character blog for one of his RPG characters, too; I don't know if he's linked to it from here, but if not I'll post the link to that, too. He hasn't posted a new entry in a long time (a year?) but maybe some day that will change.
The IrfanView Home Page. I've seen a lot of bad software, but something like this makes up for years of Gates-caused crashes. Well no, it doesn't, but I still respect the hell out of a fine piece of programming like this. Not only is it the absolute best way to quickly flip through all the images in a folder, but it's an excellent way to play music and even do some image editing. And here's the amazing thing: even though it's free, the author, Irfan Skiljan, frequently updates and improves the program! How he manages to do this while living in Bosnia is utterly beyond me, although that's probably just my ignorance talking.
ComputerHope. A great online reference for HTML, DOS, and lots of other software. I check them often when I'm having problems making a .BAT file or assembling ready-to-print file lists.
Salon Magazine. They can definitely be pricks, and they harbored two of the most obnoxious bloviating jackasses ever to crawl out of the scum (David Horowitz and Camille Paglia, if you were wondering, although now they're gone). And they're having money troubles, and they're definitely in danger of being co-opted by commercialism. Nonetheless they've broken political stories that others wouldn't touch, and they carry regular essays by Joe Conason—bravo! Updated every weekday.
I no longer recommend Bibliofind. Amazon.com acquired it some time ago, and have managed to completely destroy it. It now doesn't even pretend to be independent—it drops you straight into the Amazon rare book search. What's more, their selection sucks! I recently searched for a rare book, and although ABEbooks and Powells had several copies, Bibliofind has none. Amazon.com truly deserves to burn in hell for this.
And not just for this. Amazon.com has devastated the world of used book stores. Many great little stores have been destroyed by an avalanche of venture capital dollars, pumped by those bastards into a concern that still hasn't made any money—but will if it can destroy the competition. I envision Jeff Bezos as Sauron, lording it over Golgotha. Are his investors the Ringwraiths, or Melkor? It doesn't matter, because much of the damage has been done. There is no punishment severe enough for what these greedy bastards have done.
Since I de-listed BiblioFind, I decided to do a quick survey of the remaining used book search engines out there. I checked the top six as listed by Google, and found that BookFinder came out the best: it listed nine copies of the rare book I was searching for, ranging in price from $5 to $124. What's more, it was the only search engine to list them in order of price. I should note that it actually checks other used book services, including ABEbooks and BiblioFind. But there are other services that do the same thing, and they didn't do nearly as well.
If you're wondering, the rare book I was searching for was The Adventures of Phunsi, an absolutely wonderful book by Alison Mason Kingsbury. It was published in 1946, and is long out of print. It's about the adventures of a young zebra who is captured in Africa and brought to New York City.
Another point you may be curious about: In the search I did ABEbooks got 4 hits, BiblioFind got 3, and Powell's—another popular service—got NONE! Instead, it came back with "There were no results for your search, so I took a guess and replaced your keyword 'phunsi' with 'fans'. " How stupid is that?
The American Book Exchange is much like Bibliofind used to be, except that it's at least partially owned by another bookselling monster: Barnes & Noble. But it's worth checking out as well, and lets you deal directly with bookstores—rather than demanding cumshaw for the gatekeeper.
BookSense.com is the web page of the American Booksellers Association, which is the national association of independent booksellers. They have a searchable database representing the contents of thousands of used book stores, and they're NOT owned by some corporate behemoth. Why not check them out?
The Recommended Fantasy Author List. A very good, very large list of recommended fantasy authors. I've contributed to that list, although I myself don't recommend all the authors on it.
Your-Site (my host) no longer gets a link from me, I'm afraid. They don't deserve it.
SendPad WAS an extremely useful little online email utility. Unfortunately it's gone now, and I haven't been able to find a similar service online. Sucks. If you know of a useful web site or service, drop me a line!
HTML Goodies is an online collection of how-to tutorials for HTML, javascript, and lots of other stuff which is great for an online publisher to know. It's pretty well-written, and more importantly, it's easy to understand. Since most other computer tutorials seem to have been written with the specific intent to cause a Save vs. Insanity roll, that's a Very Good Thing indeed.
The Dysfunctiona1 Fami1y Circus. Probably the single funniest cooperative web project ever made, the DFC took cartoons from the horribly saccharine and unfunny Fami1y Circus comic strip, removed the original captions, and allowed viewers to suggest their own. Editors winnowed the results to the funniest only, at least in their opinion. Fortunately their instincts were mostly good, if "sick" "twisted" and "insanely funny" are good. WARNING: If you are easily offended, don't go here. I mean it. There's stuff here to offend almost anybody. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Incidentally, lawyers stopped the DFC and forced the removal of the archives from the original site. A copy of the archives later popped up on another site, and later disappeared from there too; I don't know, maybe the lawyers found it. Recently I found yet another set of archives at the link above. If that goes, I'll keep looking for new ones and will link to them when I find them. However, if you like the DFC archives as much as I do, you may want to download the whole website while you can and store it on your local hard drive. There's a great little program called SiteSnagger that allows you to do this. PC-Magazine requires you to register with them in order to download software, but I found a source for SiteSnagger that's not as nosy. One odd thing about SiteSnagger: it captures sites quite nicely, but those sites don't transfer easily. In other words, you could download this site (for example) to your hard drive, but if you were to then burn the downloaded files and graphics to a CD-ROM (for example) or a different folder, the images might not display from the new location—and possibly nothing would display. I suspect the program uses location-specific HREFs, rather than simply using filenames.
Space Moose. If the sick, sick humor of the DFC appeals to your sense of humor, I'd recommend looking at Space Moose, too. A remarkably twisted and funny comic strip indeed. Interesting story: I sort of saved this site. That is, I used SiteSnagger to capture a copy, and when the strip went dark in 2003, my copy was used by someone else to put up this archival version. It's not perfect—my snag was screwed up a bit—and I just noticed that the two-part strips are all missing, but that can be corrected. Incidentally, I suppose there's a chance that someday the main site will go up again. For future reference, the URL is http://www.spacemoose.com.
FARK. This is a much more popular site than mine, so much so
that I'm reluctant to say much about them (just as I'm holding
off on listing The Onion; they've got enough hits, including mine,
without further publicity from me). But to give them credit, FARK
is usually a good way to get a few laughs or find some odd bits
of lore. And they're updated really frequently. Note: Under
another personna I've had two submitted links accepted there. A
really pathetic achievement that I'm rather proud of.
Bored? Looking for something fun online? alt.humor.best-of-usenet is always good for a laugh. I used to send quite a few things there.
webmaster@maranci.net Copyright 2000 by Peter Maranci. Revised: April 25, 2005. v.3.28
