The Backyard in Berkeley

On May 1, 1966, a group of medievalists gathered in a backyard in Berkeley, California, for a party that included a Grand Tourney fought with padded weapons. Steve Perrin was twenty years old. The party became the Society for Creative Anachronism. Perrin became a founding member.

For the next twelve years, he fought. Rattan swords, padded armor, organized melees, tournaments with rules about weapon reach and body coverage. He learned what happened when a tall man with a long weapon engaged a short man with a fast one. He learned that armor didn’t make you untouchable — it absorbed punishment. He learned that where a blow landed mattered more than whether it landed at all.

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published Dungeons & Dragons, and the hobby that would consume Perrin’s life was born. He played it. He loved the idea. He hated the combat.

D&D treated a sword fight as a single die roll against a number called Armor Class. Hit or miss. No locations. No parrying. No distinction between a rapier’s thrust and a broadsword’s cleave. Armor made you harder to hit rather than absorbing damage. To a man who had spent a decade learning why that distinction mattered, the abstraction was intolerable.

He started writing fixes. The fixes became The Perrin Conventions. The Conventions caught the attention of Greg Stafford, who was building a world called Glorantha and needed someone to make it playable. Two years later, Perrin delivered RuneQuest, and nothing in the hobby was the same.

The Mold He Broke

Shannon Appelcline, author of the definitive RPG industry history Designers & Dragons, framed it as a trinity: “Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson founded the roleplaying industry with D&D; Ken St. Andre proved that the feat was replicable with Tunnels & Trolls; but it was Steve Perrin who broke the mold of D&D and proved that fantasy roleplaying games could be more than just variants of that primordial game.”

Before RuneQuest, every fantasy RPG was a D&D variant. Different settings, different monsters, different spell lists — but the same structural DNA. Classes. Levels. A jumble of incompatible resolution mechanics: d20 for attacks, percentile for thief abilities, different tables for saving throws. Characters who leaped in power at arbitrary thresholds. Armor that made you harder to hit rather than absorbing blows.

Perrin replaced all of it.

One mechanic for everything: roll percentile dice against your skill rating. One character model: no classes, no levels, just a list of skills that defined who you were and what you could do. One progression system: use a skill successfully under pressure, mark it, roll to improve between adventures — with the elegant twist that the better you got, the harder it was to improve, because you had to roll above your current rating to gain. One combat engine: hit locations determined by die roll, armor absorbing damage on each location, active parrying and dodging as skills you could train and improve.

Not a variation on the theme. A different instrument entirely.

The Unified Engine

The single most consequential innovation in RuneQuest was the unified core mechanic. Every significant action in the game — swinging a sword, picking a lock, casting a spell, resisting poison, persuading a king — resolved through the same percentile roll-under system. Your skill rating was your chance of success. Sixty-five percent meant sixty-five percent. No charts. No cross-referencing. No cognitive translation between subsystems.

D&D would not adopt a unified core mechanic until Third Edition in the year 2000, when lead designer Jonathan Tweet — who explicitly credited RuneQuest — introduced the d20 system. Twenty-two years. That is the gap between Perrin’s solution and the industry’s dominant game catching up.

Tweet was specific about what he borrowed. In interviews and public statements, he cited RuneQuest as the inspiration for D&D 3e’s unified d20 resolution, cyclical initiative, skill system, critical hits, prestige classes (from Rune Lords and Rune Priests), ability scores for monsters, armor penalties, creature templates, and PC magic item crafting. That is not influence. That is a parts list.

The skill-improvement-through-use mechanic appears to have no clear predecessor. Perrin described it as “actually something of an afterthought” — the original plan was to spend treasure on training. The afterthought became one of the most widely copied character advancement systems in gaming history, adopted by every BRP-family game and philosophically inherited by The Burning Wheel, The Elder Scrolls video game series, and dozens of narrative RPGs that treat growth as a function of action rather than accumulation.

Twelve Years of Swordfights

The combat system deserves separate examination, because it was Perrin’s most personal contribution — the place where twelve years of padded-weapon fighting became game mechanics.

Hit locations: attacks allocated to specific body parts, each with separate armor values and hit points. The game advertised combat “based upon 12 years of actual hand-to-hand combat by the author while in the SCA.” Dave Arneson had included a hit location chart in Blackmoor (1975), but he admitted he never actually used it in play. Gary Gygax explicitly rejected the concept for AD&D. Perrin made hit locations practical, fast, and central.

Armor as damage reduction: D&D’s armor made you harder to hit. RuneQuest’s armor absorbed damage from landed blows. Any SCA fighter could tell you which model matched reality. The distinction propagated through Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, GURPS, and eventually into video games from Fallout to Dark Souls.

Active parrying and dodging: combat as a back-and-forth exchange, not a passive check. Strike ranks based on DEX, SIZ, and weapon reach — a deterministic initiative system that accounted for the physics Perrin had experienced firsthand. Critical hits at a 5% rate, which Tweet confirmed inspired D&D 3e’s critical hit system. Twelve-second combat rounds, far shorter and more granular than D&D’s one-minute abstractions.

The system had a flaw Perrin would spend decades acknowledging. Strike ranks worked in theory — accounting for weapon reach and body size created tactical depth — but the implementation was, in his own word, “clumsy.” The bookkeeping burden slowed combat. DEX/SIZ min-maxing distorted character creation. Lawrence Whitaker, designing Mythras decades later, deliberately abandoned the system because “SRs can become problematic when handling multiple disparate actions.”

Perrin eliminated strike ranks from SPQR. He knew. The honesty matters.

The Blueprint

The Basic Role-Playing system — BRP — is the architectural achievement that outlasted everything else.

Perrin built RuneQuest as a complete game for Greg Stafford’s Glorantha. But the percentile engine underneath it was genre-independent. In 1980, Stafford and Lynn Willis distilled Perrin’s mechanics into a sixteen-page booklet called Basic Role-Playing — the system stripped to its core. Two years later, Perrin packaged BRP with genre-specific supplements in Worlds of Wonder (1982): fantasy, science fiction, and superheroes in one box. It was the first generic RPG system, predating Steve Jackson’s GURPS by four years.

Appelcline called Chaosium’s failure to develop Worlds of Wonder further “arguably Chaosium’s greatest blunder.” The concept was right. The timing was right. The execution was modest, and the opportunity passed to Jackson.

But BRP itself became infrastructure. The percentile engine powered RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Elfquest, Ringworld, Superworld, Pendragon (in modified form), Nephilim, Magic World, and at least fifteen other distinct product lines across five decades. In Sweden, Drakar och Demoner — published under BRP license in 1982 — became the best-selling RPG in the country, moving over 100,000 copies. Its modern descendant Dragonbane (2022) carries BRP’s DNA into the current market. In 2023, Chaosium released BRP under the ORC License, one of the first systems to adopt the post-OGL open framework.

The modularity is BRP’s deepest strength. Because the engine runs on transparent percentile math, a Game Master can bolt on subsystems — Sanity for Call of Cthulhu, cult advancement for RuneQuest, superpowers for Superworld — without destabilizing the core resolution logic. Add a subsystem, the d100 still works. Remove one, still works. This is why the chassis survived four decades without a fundamental version collapse. The foundation was clean enough to build on indefinitely.

The Resistance Table is the crack in the foundation. It resolves opposed characteristic tests on a 50% ± 5% per-point-differential scale — and it represents, as Perrin himself acknowledged, “almost an entirely different game system” from the percentile skill rolls. Two resolution engines in one game. He eliminated it from SPQR, stating flatly that “the game does not need two separate systems for resolving situations.” Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition moved beyond it. RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (2018) retained it — a decision some reviewers called “a remnant from a long haunted past.”

The Propagation Chain

The list of designers who explicitly built on Perrin’s work is without parallel in RPG history outside of Gygax himself.

Sandy Petersen designed Call of Cthulhu (1981) as a mechanical fork of RuneQuest. Perrin did not design Call of Cthulhu — the Sanity mechanics, the Mythos lore, the horror pacing are all Petersen’s. But the game runs on Perrin’s engine. Call of Cthulhu has been in continuous print for over forty years and is arguably the second most important RPG franchise in history. Every percentile skill roll, every damage-reduction armor calculation, every improvement check in that game traces to Perrin’s 1978 design.

Jonathan Tweet designed D&D Third Edition (2000) and called RuneQuest “the role-playing game that taught how to design RPGs.” The unified d20 mechanic, the skill system, the critical hits, the prestige classes, the monster stat blocks — all cited as RuneQuest-derived. When the founding game of the hobby redesigns itself based on your innovations, the propagation case is closed.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1986) adopted percentile skills and hit locations in a framework clearly influenced by RuneQuest. The d100 percentile system spread through the entire Warhammer 40K RPG family: Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and their successors.

George R.R. Martin received Superworld as a birthday gift on September 20, 1983. He ran a two-year campaign in Albuquerque. The campaign became the Wild Cards anthology series — twenty-nine volumes and counting since 1986. Martin stated without qualification: “Without his game, there would never have been a Wild Cards series.” A tabletop RPG session directly birthing a major work of speculative fiction is vanishingly rare. Perrin’s Superworld did it.

The Design Mechanism, publishers of Mythras: “Steve Perrin’s achievements were many and monumental. His impact on our work, and his influence on Mythras, immense.”

Ken Rolston, who worked on RuneQuest Third Edition, later designed The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Oblivion. The “learn by doing” skill system in those games — use a sword to get better at swords, cast spells to get better at magic — is a direct translation of Perrin’s 1978 experience-check mechanic into digital code.

The Stafford Question

The attribution must be stated precisely, because it is sometimes blurred.

Greg Stafford created Glorantha. He commissioned RuneQuest. He provided the thematic direction and the religious framework that made the game’s magic systems feel like living faiths rather than tactical toolkits. He is one of the great world-builders in the history of the hobby.

Steve Perrin designed the game.

The original credits read: “Steve Perrin and Ray Turney, with Steve Henderson, Warren James, and Greg Stafford.” The preposition “with” for Stafford rather than “and” is significant and intentional. Perrin’s detailed six-part memoir, published on the Chaosium blog, establishes the division: Stafford created the world and commissioned the RPG. Perrin designed the percentile skill system, classless character model, hit locations, strike ranks, and combat engine. Ray Turney created the magic systems. Steve Henderson and Warren James — both SCA members — were co-designers. Luise Perrin, Steve’s wife, provided the iconic cover art.

Chaosium confirmed this in 2016 when Rick Meints called Perrin “the creator and lead author of the original groundbreaking ’78 and ’79 editions.” Appelcline wrote: “Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha often gets the lion’s share of the recognition… but the mechanics of Steve Perrin’s design were no less innovative.”

RuneQuest’s genius lay in the marriage. Neither world nor system alone would have achieved what they achieved together. But this project scores mechanical design, and the mechanical design was Perrin’s.

The Five Phases

Perrin’s career spans forty-five years and five distinct design phases, each building on the last.

Phase one was corrective. The Perrin Conventions (1976) were targeted fixes for D&D combat — phased melee rounds, dexterity-based resolution, knockback mechanics drawn from SCA experience. He was a rules hacker working within someone else’s framework.

Phase two was paradigmatic. RuneQuest (1978–1980) transformed specific combat fixes into a complete game system. The leap from “house rules for someone else’s game” to “a new paradigm for fantasy RPGs” in roughly two years is extraordinary. Greg Costikyan, writing in Ares Magazine, called it “the most playable and elegant fantasy role-playing designed to date.”

Phase three was expansionist. Worlds of Wonder (1982) and Superworld (1983) pushed toward universal applicability. Perrin later acknowledged that Superworld was “influenced entirely too much by the Champions system” and that he “could have developed the method of using points in a different direction that fit the basic system better.” Many designers never publicly admit design mistakes. Perrin catalogued his.

Phase four was peripatetic. Robot Warriors for Hero Games (1986). Adventures and supplements for TSR’s Forgotten Realms. A twenty-two-column game design series for Comics Feature magazine. Work in the computer game industry at Spectrum HoloByte, Maxis, and Interplay. The output shifted from system creation to cross-system fluency, broadening his design vocabulary across multiple frameworks.

Phase five was synthesis. Steve Perrin’s Quest Rules (SPQR), published independently around 2002, represents his most self-aware design. He deliberately eliminated the two subsystems he’d come to recognize as flawed: strike ranks (“cluttered up combat”) and the Resistance Table (“the game does not need two separate systems”). He incorporated lessons from Hero System point-buy, GURPS advantages and disadvantages, and White Wolf degrees of success. When he returned to Chaosium as creative consultant in 2019, he brought this mature perspective to RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha — ensuring the new edition remained faithful to what he called the “masterpiece opus” he’d helped create forty years earlier.

He died in his sleep on August 13, 2021, at age seventy-five. Atrial fibrillation. George R.R. Martin reported it was painless.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Steve Perrin was a translator.

Not between languages. Between domains. He translated physical experience into mathematical systems. Twelve years of SCA combat became hit locations, damage reduction, active parrying, weapon-reach initiative. The translation was so precise that historical fencers would later cite his GURPS Swashbucklers work as reference material, and so clean that the resulting mechanics could be lifted out of their original setting and applied to horror, science fiction, and superheroes without breaking.

This is the throughline of his career. Every design decision, from The Perrin Conventions through SPQR, was an attempt to narrow the gap between what the game says happens and what would actually happen. Not in pursuit of pedantic realism — Perrin understood that games are abstractions. But in pursuit of coherence. The rules should feel like they’re describing the same world the players are imagining.

The unified core mechanic was a translation problem solved. D&D had different mechanics for different actions because it had inherited different mechanics from different wargaming traditions. Perrin asked: if the world is unified — if swinging a sword and picking a lock happen in the same physical reality — why does the resolution system pretend they don’t?

The classless system was a translation problem solved. D&D had classes because wargames had unit types. Perrin asked: in reality, a person is the sum of their skills, not a category. Why is the game different?

The skill-improvement-through-use system was a translation problem solved. D&D awarded experience for killing and looting because wargames awarded victory points. Perrin asked: in reality, you get better at what you practice. Why is the game different?

The answer, every time, was the same: the game should work like the world does. Not perfectly. Not with the granularity that makes play impossible. But with enough fidelity that the rules and the fiction point in the same direction.

The designers who followed him — the ones who built Call of Cthulhu, redesigned D&D, created Warhammer and GURPS and Mythras — were continuing the same translation project. The techniques differed. The principle was Perrin’s.

What Remains

The unified core mechanic, now so standard that designers who use it don’t know they’re citing RuneQuest.

The classless, skill-based RPG paradigm — a design tradition that includes GURPS, World of Darkness, Burning Wheel, and every system that asks “what can your character do?” instead of “what class is your character?”

The BRP engine, still in active production after nearly five decades, powering Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest and Dragonbane and whatever comes next under the ORC License.

Wild Cards. Twenty-nine volumes of speculative fiction born from a Superworld campaign in Albuquerque, because Perrin built a system flexible enough that George R.R. Martin could run superheroes in it and come out the other side with characters worth writing novels about.

The proof — delivered in 1978 when the hobby was four years old — that D&D’s design assumptions were choices, not laws. That fantasy role-playing could work on entirely different principles. That the mold could be broken.

Perrin did not create the most games or the most commercially successful games or the games with the highest production values. He created the game that taught an industry it had options. He built the blueprint that everyone studied, including the people who made the game he was trying to improve.

And when he found the flaws in his own blueprint — the clumsy strike ranks, the redundant Resistance Table — he said so publicly, and fixed them, and published the corrections under his own name.

Total: 31 points. Year: 1978.

Total: 31 points. Year: 1978.