A wizened old dwarf chisels symbols of power into her ornate hammer. A defiant orc beats his fists together until his body is struck through by tattoos crackling with arcane might. A night elf knits herself into the thrumming weave of leylines underfoot in search of lost knowledge. A tauren gently coaxes life back out of a land ravaged by war and demon-fire, painted fur rustling in the breeze.
These people each come from vastly different walks of life in search of radically different goals, but they all share one thing in common: the art of rune-casting, that first and most enduring of the Titans' gifts.
They are all Runemasters, and their power is woven from the ancient magic that undergirds Azeroth herself.
Click Here for the Runemaster Handbook
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For a bit more context...
It's an old shame of mine that I still play World of Warcraft. It's not one of my worst shames—not even in my top 10 (which no, I will not be listing here)—but it’s still not something I'm proud of. For the record, my shame stems from the fact that my subscription money supports an abusive company and its despicable little overpaid executives, not that I still casually enjoy WoW; you should all know by now that I have dull, trash tastes.
Despite those misgivings, I’m still fond of the world of Azeroth. It’s by-the-numbers kitchen sink pop-fantasy done in a maximalist visual style and tone that evoke the feeling of "Fisher-Price toy set but for grownups", and it's been copied and emulated so much over the decades that it sometimes evokes Seinfeld-esque disgust for being so quaint and unoriginal nowadays, despite originating many of those styles, tropes, and moods. But it introduced me to online gaming and fandom in a way that has shaped much of the creature I have become. It gave me a hobby, friends and loved ones whom I still play with to this day, and perspectives I'd otherwise lack; I can’t not care about it on some level.
Fortunately for me, the kind of nostalgia I get for my earlier memories of Warcraft doesn’t involve me running Molten Core on a private German permadeath server for the millionth time or some such. Instead, it makes me turn toward the weird peripherals from the early days of the IP; the spin-off board games, the card game from before they came up with Hearthstone, the handful of comic books and novels I managed to read, etc.
And World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game is right at the top of that list.
The WoW RPG is the d20 tabletop port of WoW published under the Sword & Sorcery label, which included many properties during the early 2000s OGL craze that I call the 3E Gold Rush. It’s also the sequel to the Warcraft RPG, which makes it one of those rare instances where two editions of a game were both made for 3.5E rules, rather than one being made for 3.0E and the other updating it by +0.5.
Let's get it out of the way now that 3E d20 was never a good match for anything Warcraft. 4E and 5E came a little closer to capturing the feeling, but nothing short of a bespoke system made from the ground up would ever "feel" like WoW, and I doubt Blizzard will ever bother with that. But that's okay, because I'm happy to explore and fiddle with the failed attempt, and find everything about it that I like.
I should probably save the rest of the history talk for an actual blog post on the subject, and just get on with my point: I decided to kill two birds with one stone by turning this trip down memory lane into an exercise in good old-fashioned class handbook creation.
I have never made a handbook before in my life, and I don’t think anyone on the internet has ever written extensively on my subject here, so let’s bumble around in the dark together shall we?
