RPGs Never Change - Reading RuneQuest 2e

I picked-up a copy of RuneQuest, 2nd Edition, on a lark a few weeks back after Twinkee in the Table Shapers Discord server shared a link to some tabletop eBay finds. While I doubt I'll ever run a game using it, it's been a fruitful read. Released in 1980, only six years after Dungeons and Dragons is published, it is a snapshot of where RPG design was in the U.S. and that design and the writing have me thinking about how the hobby has and has not changed in 46 years and how I feel about this. Designed by Steve Perrin and Ray Turney, RuneQuest situates the player's character in Greg Stafford's Glorantha, a world of bronze-age pulp fantasy. It explicitly sets itself apart from other fantasy role-playing games (FRPs) by attaching itself to Glorantha and making an explicit effort toward to be realistic. It goes about this by stepping away from the class-based design of D&D and focusing on training one's skills and spells as the means of advancing, all with the explicit goal of accruing…