Table Tales: A long-awaited gem
Posted by Michael O'Brien on 18th Feb 2026
By Mark Morrison
Stealing the Eye is out this week in PDF. It’s a heist adventure for RuneQuest written by Todd Gardiner. It’s huge fun, and a perfect one-night session for both new players and seasoned Gloranthan veterans. Four pre-generated player characters are included, but it works just as well with adventurers from your regular campaign or from the RuneQuest Starter Set. Hop the wall and start robbing!
Stealing the Eye is all about scoring an ultimate prize, and I’ve sort of done that myself this week. It wasn’t a one-night affair; it took a few decades, but I finally got there. Cue star wipe and old timey 1980s music…
In 1981 my school librarian Miss Jones put Marc Miller’s seminal science fiction roleplaying game Traveller on the shelves at Bendigo High School. It looked cool so I borrowed it and we had a go. My friends and I were instantly hooked on roleplaying, and that passion soon took us to Dungeons & Dragons, and from there into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
The original AD&D Player’s Handbook has one of the all-time great roleplaying game cover, by D.A Trampier: a couple of thieves are chiselling the gems from the sockets of a towering idol to a forgotten god, while the rest of the party plan their next move. You just want to yell in pantomime, “It’s behind you!!”
I enjoyed AD&D for a couple of years until my friend Mark Holsworth introduced me to this new game he’d picked up called RuneQuest. Everything about it was thrilling, and still is to this day. Your adventurer can have any skills you want, you can wield any weapon, and everyone can cast magic. The game rules are quick and intuitive, and combat is visceral and dramatic. Best of all, it’s set in Glorantha, Greg Stafford’s mythic bronze age world with unique gods and societies. I was all in.
I’d been writing AD&D modules for tournaments and conventions, but my friends and I soon swapped to RuneQuest, and our scenarios were so well received locally we took a punt and wrote off to Chaosium in 1984 to ask if they were looking for material to publish. Almost immediately I received a lovely and enthusiastic letter from Greg Stafford, and was amazed by how approachable the company was!
We started to prepare our adventures for publication, but with one thing and another and a new RuneQuest edition to boot, sadly it never quite came together. But, around the same time I also enquired to Chaosium about writing for Call of Cthulhu, and that did blossom into a lifelong game writing career. I’m still at it.
In the meantime we kept playing RuneQuest, because a duck’s gotta duck. The Gods of Glorantha box set was a thrill when it came out in 1985, especially with that brilliant cover painting by Tom Sullivan. Daring adventurers stealing a gem from a statue, seems familiar, but this time the statue was Yara Aranis, the six-armed Lunar Goddess of the Glowline. Tom’s Call of Cthulhu cover art was always amazing (and a huge reason I got into that game) so it was a joy to see him paint a scene from my favourite fantasy world, with a nod to the good ol’ AD&D Player’s Handbook as a bonus. Compare:
Many adventures and many decades later, Todd Gardiner took inspiration from Tom’s painting and reimagined that very moment as Stealing the Eye, a scenario designed to introduce convention players to RuneQuest in the most exciting way possible.
When the time came to get the adventure ready for a wider audience, Michael O’Brien and Brian Holland invited me to give it a once-over and edit it. I playtest everything I work on so I ran it for my players, new RuneQuesters all: it worked perfectly as a two-hander with Scott playing Mago the Storm Bull from the RuneQuest Starter Set, and Rhiannon playing Diyak the baboon from the brand new free download pack of Elder Race Adventurers. Reader, that eye got stole.
-- Mago and Diyak make their escape from the Temple of Yara Aranis --
Todd’s adventure is so good there really wasn't much editorial left to do but format and streamline it. Our brilliant Chaosium staff artist Ossi Hiekkala painted wonderful new scenes for the cover and interior, our resident punk rockin’ cartographer Matt Ryan did a brilliant map, layout phenom Sim Cogswell made the PDF both appealing and easy to use, and Peter Whitelaw and Susan O’Brien made Spot Hidden rolls to hunt down wayward typos and the occasional errant stat. It’s all built on Jeff Richard and Jason Durall’s sterling work with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, which in turn stands on the shoulders of Greg Stafford, Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, and everyone at Chaosium of yore who paved the way. Publishing is a co-operative exercise, just like a good roleplaying session.
I think you’ll enjoy Stealing the Eye. It’s been a 42-year journey for me from that first letter from Greg, but finally (finally!) I have a RuneQuest publication credit to my name. It’s a real gem.
Get your copy of Stealing the Eye today!
And the RuneQuest Starter Set is on sale from Chaosium: was $29.99 now $19.99 (price inc PDF)