Rune Master - Characters
Book 1 covers character creation (including the 12 basic races), the basic skill list and rune mastery.
RuneMaster
Rune Master is a roleplaying game I started writing in the fall of 1998. I have been "writing" roleplaying games since probably around 1980, but they were all partial in some sense though a fair amount of time had been spent on a few of them. The goal of Rune Master was to actually carry it through to completion—to a "publishable state", whatever that means. Realizing I needed more direction than that I considered and decided that a system for questing at high power levels would do. It always bothered me that the Rune Quest rules talked about questing and the rules were even named for that, but never really treated with it (yes, there was an expansion, but that isn't the same thing). So the name Rune Master arose naturally from the premise.
Nearly ten years later the rules were somewhere around 1500 pages divided across six books and still growing. The major failing of the system is complexity which was slowly addressed. Whether the rules are too complex is a matter for individuals to decide. I have been running campaigns based on the rules for much of the ten years and find them to be usable. One of the play testers has also run multiple campaigns using the rules and had enjoyable play with a diverse group of players.
One non-rule approach to the complexity is the use of utility programs. The first iteration were web applications run off of my local web server. Though easy to write they required a particular environment (Apache, PHP and MySQL) and had limitations due to the stateless nature of the web. I finally decided on wxPython as the language to create a crossplatform set of utilities with. Unfortunately the documentation is rather less than good. Still, the first such tool has been roughed out and is much more capable than its web application predecessor. (Thanks to Michael Pedersen)
Still, these rules have been superceded by a new effort, Troll & Hero. Originally conceived as a "lite" version of the Rune Master rules it became apparent that an actual split was desirable. Rune Master is left for reference. Though I am not relinquishing copyright (many, many hours have been poured into the effort) I am not averse to derivative works. If you create something based on Rune Master I would appreciate acknowledgement of that.
Rune Master - Combat and Skills
Book 2 covers combat and extended skill descriptions.
Rune Master - Creatures
Book 3 is the Rune Master beastiary with creatures ranging from the normal (crocodiles, brown bears, rats, etc.) to the fantastic (gryphons, dragons, giant spiders, etc.) to the unusual (vorpal bunnies, khatin, kaablin, etc.). It also covers the spirit world.
Rune Master - Religion
Book 4 covers various religions, alchemy, elementalism and shamanism.
Rune Master - Economics
Book 5 is primarily useful as a price list and equipment guide.
Rune Master - Magic
Book 6 covers high magic.