Welcome to Myriad Realms!

What you see here is a culmination of over 35 years of old-school, pen and paper, fantasy role-playing game play-testing. This is the unique system devised by Brooke Wilton and Terry Barnett, with help from many friends along the way.

(Huge thanks to Steve, Carlo, Robert, Pat, Wayne,Jeff and everyone else who left their mark in the realms of Myriad and Dragonshadow Valley as well as in the the version we briefly had up in Neverwinter Nights.)

It all started with Runequest by Chaosium (1st edition, way before Avalon Hill ruined it.)

Actually it started with AD&D, but the brief infatuation with that game only lasted for about as long as dwarven women's beards... Runequest showed that a game could be meticulously realistic and down to earth. Sanity had emerged in gaming. When Runequest had been found, it was adopted immediately by my regular group of gamers (with rotating GM, in different worlds, but with a consensus on the system;) highly expanded years later, and never quite put down.

Now the system that spawned them has swallowed Stormbringer and Call of Cthulu whole; borrowed from equal parts Traveler, Champions, Gamma World, Boot Hill, Broadsides and Boarding parties, as well as the ubiquitous D&D, AD&D in all its editions. Heck, we even have an Arduin Grimoire and an Eldritch Wizardry, not to mention a Deities & Demigods: 1st edition, but I digress...

In our exhaustive study, we have tried every RPG out there, however, including but not limited to even the likes of GURPS, RoleMaster, Heroquest, Tunnels and Trolls, Bunnies and Burroughs, and Snits Revenge; some of which proved only to influence by way of providing a foil to the simplicity at the core of the RQ system: An elegance that left room for the elaborations we later piled on top.

This collaboration from the start has always been about discovering a way through trial and error to bridge disparate game systems as well as adventuring systems; to adapt to any enviromment or game style.

Along the way, a number of very satisfyling story arcs and campaigns have also evolved; with many different cultures and creatures and whole races in distant lands created and fleshed out, their destinies fulfilled in time. We never had time to paint figures: we were always creating worlds and bridging game systems.

We had thought our system still too close at its core to Runequest to publish previously, so we were content to continue to let it evolve with our own campaigns. As far as we knew, no-one out there still played anything close to the system we had perfected through continuous play for many years, but it still served us well.

Mongoose Publishing has now announced that Runequest shall be re-released as an open system, so we now have a free hand to publish our game system along with the worlds and modules we have been creating all these years!