Elfquest Revisited

Following in the wake of their Kickstarters to put out special archival rereleases of old RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu material, Chaosium have done the same for Elfquest. In some respects this is an odd call – Elfquest was always one of their less loved RPGs, in part because Steve Perrin ended up using it as a testbed for the 3rd edition RuneQuest mechanics, which were several orders of magnitude too crunchy than were called for when you’re doing a light RPG intended to appeal to fans of the Elfquest comic and be a gateway drug into roleplaying for them. On the other hand, revisiting the game in this fashion also makes a certain amount of sense. Elfquest, despite never becoming a majorly famous franchise, has kept chugging along over the years, and with the broader propagation of RPGs into the cultural zeitgeist in the intervening decades perhaps there’s now more of an overlap between Elfquest fans and RPG players (or potential players). In addition, the Elfquest line was fairly…