RuneQuest (commonly abbreviated as RQ) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James, and set in Greg Stafford's mythical world of Glorantha. It was first published in 1978 by The Chaosium. Beginning in 1984, publication passed between a number of companies, including Avalon Hill, Mongoose Publishing, and The Design Mechanism, before finally returning to Chaosium in 2016. RuneQuest is notable for its system, designed around percentile dice and an early implementation of skill rules, which became the basis for numerous other games. There have been several editions of the game. History In 1975, game designer Greg Stafford released the fantasy board game White Bear and Red Moon (later renamed Dragon Pass), produced and marketed by The Chaosium, a publishing company set up by Stafford specifically for the release of the game. In 1978, The Chaosium published the first edition of RuneQuest, a role-playing game set in the world of Glorantha which Stafford had created for White Bear and Red Moon. A second edition, with various minor revisions, was released in 1979. RuneQuest quickly established itself as the second most popular fantasy role-playing game after Dungeons & Dragons. In the four years before the second edition was superseded, Chaosium published over twenty supplements to support it. The second edition and its supplements were republished as part of the 2015 RuneQuest Classic Kickstarter. In order to increase distribution and marketing of the game, Chaosium made a deal with Avalon Hill, who published the third edition in 1984. Under the agreement, Avalon Hill took ownership of trademark for RuneQuest, while all Glorantha-related content required approval by Chaosium, who also retained the copyright of the rules text. As such, the default setting for the third edition was the "Dark Ages of fantasy Europe", but it also included a booklet allowing play in Glorantha. A range of supplements were produced for this edition; generic fantasy was left unbranded, but others were marked as Earth, Glorantha, or Gateway (alternative fantasy) to differentiate them. A proposed fourth edition developed by Avalon Hill, titled RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha, was intended to return the tight RuneQuest/Glorantha relationship, but it was shelved mid-project in 1994 after Stafford refused permission, unhappy with Avalon Hill's stewardship of the third edition. In response, Avalon Hill, as owners of the trademark, began development of a mechanically unrelated game originally titled RuneQuest: Slayers. However, when