That's definitely one of the best combat systems on the market. It's not rules-light, but it's solidly rules-medium. The combat manoeuvres are a nice touch, and add a lot of flavour. True, the skills could stand to be a bit more detailed, as well as the skill improvement rules. However, that's purely down to preferences! For many others, it could be just the right amount of detail.

It retains many of the best selling points of the RQII & III but it takes these little joys and turns them sour in the combat system. What a painful way to resolve combat. I'm glad I wasted only $9.99 on it because the old books are still out there and far cheaper. If you want a game system that can do anything, from gritty realism to surreal high fantasy space opera wu shu kung fu go buy GURPS. If you want to play RQ and enjoy it, go find the old RQII or III. If you must have shiny and new, buy the Basic Roleplaying from Chaosium, it's like RQIII but with no background.

Runequest is back. It's about time. Writing: The rules are clear, divided logically, and contain enough background explanation for a player to understand the logic behind the rules. Technical Presentation: The book is not overloaded with artwork, useless fonts, or 4 cm wide decorative borders, keeping the page count down and the rules readable. There is enough art to break up the monotony. Rules Notes: The skill list is the same simplified skill list as RGM. This helps keep the game flowing, although it can be frustrating (using the same skill to swim or jump a pit is slightly humerous). Combat is fast and deadly. Fights can still devolve into a "hack until you hit the same location twice" contest, but the special effects available on successful hits mitigate this. GM's are advised to print out the options on pages 88 and 89 and hand copies to their players. The magic systems are superbly done. In particular, the completely revised spirit magic system feels 'real' and makes the spirit-working shaman a viable and unique character. Divine magic has recieved another overhaul, and is both appropriate to the nature of the game, and highly playable. Divine magic may be too powerful, but I have not played enough to reach that point. The best thing about the magic system is the recommendations for different worlds. Running a Conan-esq Swords and Sorcery world? Dump Common and Divine magic and restrict your magicians to Shamans and Sorcerers. Running Mythological Hawaii? Stick to common magic... Magic very flexible and very good. The "myth" system is very promising, although I have not used it, yet. I don't like the "improvement points" system for character advancement. One of the virtues of Chaosium RQ was that a character tended to automatically advance in the skills most often used (i.e. rolled on) in a game. On the other hand, this often left the GM scrambling for ways to give the players a chance to make certain die rolls. I use a combination of experience checks and improvement points. On the downside, there are only a handful of monsters in the book, and no guidelines for build-your-own. If I did not have years of experience playing and GM'ing RQ, I'd be hurting for monsters. The promised "Monster Colessium" supplament will help this, but it's still pricey. I would have liked some guidelines (a la D&D 3.x) on assigning stats and abilities to build your own monsters, or to modify existing monsters.

All in all, this is a far superior game to Mongoose's first edition RQ. While not as flexible as BRP (Chaosium's current publication) it is simpler to play, and it's strengths greatly outway it's weaknesses.

I'd recommend this game system to anyone looking for a moderately fast to play, simple game system, that focuses on characters which are at a human-like level of power. With minimal adaption it could be used in any fantasy world.

I still have to play test this system, but after the first read, it appears pretty solid. There is no classes - which I like. The character creation system is interesting and organic. It allows you to create pretty much any kind of character for a medieval setting - fantasy or not, even if the default setting includes magic and fantasy elements.

The combat system appears a bit more complicated than other systems, and is not what I would call a rules-light system. Still, it looks simple enough. I will reserve my comments on the actual combat system for after a thorough play test...

Overall, I am happy with my purchase. My only complaint would be with the price of the PDF which is very close to the dead tree version.