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More 'spring' cleaning and I can't believe I finally found this, over 40 years after it went missing -- my original copy of RuneQuest 2nd ed from 1980, the stand-alone softcover version with Luise Perrin/Perenne's cover art in color, by Steve Perrin & Ray Turney for Chaosium.

At some point ca 1984-85 I thought it was a good idea to tuck it into the back of an unlabeled folder behind some blank graph paper and an encounter I wrote pitting Sartar characters against Lunar Empire agents, across from some notes on heraldry and late 16th century fashion. There is a hint of flood damage here, minor discoloration of 2 corners of the back cover and almost unnoticeable paper wrinkling, but still looks pretty good for a used copy approaching 50 years old.

Taken from the HSOD and Andrews words…

“Finally made some canonical class symbols for anyone who considers these useful. In the comic, I only came up with aspect designs, because those were the symbols that appeared on the shirts. Classes were represented by the outfit designs, so they never seemed to need symbols. Still, as people speculated on classpecting and developed the ideas in their fanworks, class symbols started to seem like a missing piece of the lore.

The first image here is a better presentation of the crude-looking class pairing list I posted in an earlier Q&A. Again note that classes appear in the list linked as active/passive pairs, with an odd exception to the pattern, putting both witch/sylph fully on the active side, and maid/heir fully on the passive side.

The next image is a series of simple icons I came up with for each class pair, in this order:

- witch/sylph: witch hat

- prince/bard: scepter

- thief/rogue: dagger

- knight/page: sword

- mage/seer: eye staff

- maid/heir: abstract wavy shape, denoting malleability (it's basically John's hood)

- lord/muse: skull on pike”

“But these icons aren't meant to fully convey the classes alone. Instead they're treated more like "spokes" in radial designs which form a circle, so as to enclose an aspect symbol in the middle. That way the class and aspect can become a fully self-contained symbol.

Here's what they look like in radial form. The active ones are black, the passive ones are white. Also, the more active of the pair uses positive space to display the icons pointing outward. The more passive of the pair uses negative space, showing the icons pointing inward, cutting the shapes into the solid circle.

Note that because the list has the two odd pairs, witch/sylph and maid/heir, it was necessary to have both an outward/inward-pointing logic, and a black/white logic. Both witch/sylph are black, and both maid/heir are white, yet both also have inward/outward-pointing icon pairs.”

The first chapter of Point//Zero is now on Patreon!

As a 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes decided to transform diagnostic medicine so she dropped out of college and used her tuition money to start her own company, Theranos. Ten years later, Holmes, pictured here holding a micro-vial, is on the cutting edge of medical technology — her new blood testing method allows hundreds of tests to be run using only a few drops of blood. And, Holmes’ methods are cheaper, faster, more accurate, and less invasive than conventional methods which often require a separate vial of blood for every test. As Holmes told Wired.com earlier this year, “I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking… We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.”

She is featured as Forbes’ youngest self-made woman billionaire.

Her tests will revolutionize the public health world as we know it; Making diagnostic testing accessible and affordable for more people (and potentially saving Medicare and Medicaid ~$100 billion each over the next decade). (x)

She is a coauthor on 82 US and 189 foreign patent applications. (x)