Recently, I engaged in a close reading of the 2015 reprint of Runequest's 2nd edition, and one of the things which struck me is that it was in intent a very different game than how it's talked about by its devotees. Stafford, Perrin, and Turney present Runequest as a combination of a couple of things- a toolkit for making a fantasy world of a particular type they call "Bronze Age fantasy" and a game to play in that created world that's built around adventures of a sword-and-sorcery type that escalate from Fafhrd-and-Grey-Mouser to early Elric. This is even structured into the object of the game, which is to quest for a rune. Right there in the title!
All of the Glorantha material is included as examples of the kind of fantasy world you can create, with notes that additional Glorantha material will be available in Cults of Prax soon. So Glorantha, Mythic Earth, the things which would later be indelibly associated with Runequest- they're not at the center, the center is "make your own game with these principles".
The fact that it has an object also makes it interesting as a TRPG- it's gamelike in a way that feels "modern", but really comes from the fact that it's a game from the tail end of the 70s and before the definition of TRPGs as not really having an object or objective beyond "have fun" had solidified. So I thought, "why not try and play this the way it was intended to be played, and try and build off that initial intent?"
So I'm beginning with that world-creation segment, which is of course scattered a bit throughout the text, as while it's part of prep and generally explicitly given to the referee to prepare, I think it's meant to be an ongoing process- you start out with some prepared things and develop others in the course of play. But you do need some initial prep, and I'm beginning with a bit of deep prep: the Runes.
Runequest does not characterize these Runes (in either the reprint or the original) as specifically Gloranthan material, though this may be an oversight. They're familiar Gloranthan squiggles in shape, with a list of six elements, six forms, three conditions and ten powers in five pairs. Their definitions are similar to the ones you can read in just about any TRPG set in Glorantha published since 2007.
Are they important? Yes. Runes have three explicit functions and a fourth implicit function:
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Getting a Rune is the object of the game, so Runes function to provide a range of possible character goals beyond the two explicit end-states of Rune Lord (Mastery) and Rune Priest (Magic).
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Runes provide the primary way to characterize cults, which are described as "Rune cults". You make divine cults by picking some Runes and then writing the cult around that combination, and there are rules for how many you can pick for a cult of a given size and which ones can combine with each other.
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The Runepower Rune Magic calls upon the power or substance of a particular Rune, so Runes also provide a list of the ways in which this magic can affect the world.
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Implicitly, Runes define the nature of the world or setting in how they're characterized and which ones are used. The things which a given Rune represents are cosmologically significant by virtue of being marked as a Rune, and the categories they are fitted into also describe what the concept that the Rune represents is metaphysically. An element is a physical substance, a form is a kind of shape living things can be found in, a power is a kind of force that operates on things in the world, and a condition is a modifier, an "additional" thing which determines how that Rune is expressed.
This chost is long enough, let's save my Rune choices for the next one.