''Balastor's Barracks'' is a
tabletop role-playing game
A tabletop role-playing game (typically abbreviated as TRPG or TTRPG), also known as a pen-and-paper role-playing game, is a form of role-playing game (RPG) in which the participants describe their characters' actions through speech. Participa ...
adventure for ''
RuneQuest
''RuneQuest'' (commonly abbreviated as RQ) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson (game designer), Steve Henderson, and Warren James, and set in Greg Stafford's mythical world of ...
'', originally published by
Chaosium
Chaosium Inc. is a publisher of tabletop role-playing games established by Greg Stafford in 1975. Chaosium's major titles include '' Call of Cthulhu'', based on the horror fiction stories of H. P. Lovecraft'', RuneQuest Glorantha'', ''Pendragon'' ...
in 1978. Set in
Greg Stafford
Francis Gregory Stafford (February 9, 1948 – October 10, 2018), usually known as Greg Stafford, was an American game designer, publisher, and practitioner of shamanism.
Stafford is most famous as the creator of the fantasy world of Glorantha ...
's world of
Glorantha
Glorantha is a fantasy world created by Greg Stafford. It was first introduced in the board game '' White Bear and Red Moon'' (1975) by Chaosium and then in a number of other board, roleplaying and computer games, including ''RuneQuest'' and ''He ...
, against the backdrop of an
ancient ruined city, the
adventurers
An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme sp ...
search for a lost artifact.
Publication history
As ''RuneQuest Scenario Pack 1'', it was the first published adventure for ''RuneQuest'' in 1978. In 1983, a revised version appeared in the ''
Big Rubble: The Deadly City'' boxed set,
which set the adventure in the Griffin Gate area of the Big Rubble, along with other related scenarios. It was republished in 1999 by
Moon Design Publications
Moon Design Publications are publishers of tabletop role-playing game books set in Greg Stafford's world of Glorantha. They were founded in 1998 by Rick Meints and Colin Phillips in the UK.
History
In the 1990s, American expatriate Rick Meints was ...
in ''Gloranthan Classics Volume I – Pavis & Big Rubble'' . The original edition was republished in 2016 in softcover and PDF format and included in the ''RuneQuest Old School Resource Pack'' as part of Chaosium's RuneQuest: Classic Edition Kickstarter. with a POD edition in 2020. Likewise, a Classic Edition of ''Big Rubble'' including ''Balastor's Barracks'' was republished in 2019, with a POD edition in 2020.
Contents
Originally published as a 24-page booklet with a cardstock cover. The booklet is divided into an introductory section, two maps, and a description of 35 rooms containing over 60 monsters who seem to have no relationship with each other or the environment.
The revised version in ''Big Rubble'' shrank it to 14 pages, mainly cleaning up the layout, and reducing the number of monsters to around 45.
Reception
In the August–September 1979 edition of ''
White Dwarf
A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to the Earth's. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes fro ...
'' (Issue #14), Jim Donohoe thought the adventure was "too much of a killer dungeon to be satisfactory as a campaign." However, he believed ''Balastor's Barracks'' might be usable as a single introductory adventure, since "If used as a solitaire dungeon, ''Balastor's Barracks'' will give a feel as to what a party of ''Runequest'' characters can handle. The layout of the Barracks — three tough complexes and a few odd rooms —— means that only a party of very tough characters can expect to survive." Given its lack of general usability, he gave the adventure a poor rating of only 5 out of 10.
Writing a retrospective review for ''Guide de Rôliste Galactique'' in 2009, Jérôme Bianquis thought that even though this was a very early publication by Chaosium, it was a poor effort that did not fulfill the potential of ''RuneQuest''. Bianquis especially noted the numerous monsters shoehorned into a succession of rooms that "have no particular reason to be there, and one wonders how they manage to live together, and to feed themselves." He concluded that it was an adventure "without imagination, and without any interest."
References
External links
* {{official, http://www.chaosium.com/runequest
Role-playing game supplements introduced in 1978
RuneQuest adventures