RuneScape

RuneScape is a browser-based Medieval European Fantasy MMORPG by the UK-based developer Jagex Ltd that runs on a Freemium subscription model. The free version of the game is self-contained and can be played on its own, but subscribers gain access to separate Member servers (marketed as an Expansion Pack) with more content in exchange for a monthly fee. The game holds the official Guinness world record for largest free MMORPG.

Gameplay primarily involves quests, combat (both Player Versus Player and Player Versus Environment), and, the Necessary Weasel of the genre, Level Grinding, along with a variety of side activities like Capture the Flag. RuneScape is somewhat uncommon among MMORPGs in that its quests are more elaborate than your basic Twenty Bear Asses Fetch Quests, instead focusing more on plot, puzzles, problem-solving, and Boss Battles. New content, usually (but not always) members-only, is released on a weekly basis.

The game was originally released in January 2001 in what would now be considered a very primitive form. The full world was much smaller, containing only a few small cities. There were only six quests, one server, and two developers. It gradually expanded until 2004, when the whole game was overhauled completely: such large changes were made to the game engine, the graphics, the basic game mechanics, and the content that the developers saw fit to call it "RuneScape 2" and retire the previous game as "RuneScape Classic". The Classic version is still playable today, although access is restricted to subscribing members.

It has a series of Expanded Universe novels: Betrayal at Falador (2008) and Return to Canifis (2011), both written by T.S. Church. There's also a Gaiden Game called "Armies of Gielinor", a multiplayer Turn Based Tactics game set during the God Wars, released through Fun Orb.

RuneScape's official site can be found at runescape.com.

Also has grown an entire Shout-Out page.

Not to be confused with RuneQuest.

Tropes used in RuneScape include:
  • 100% Completion:
    • The premise of the Completionist cape and its Trimmed version.
    • In the past, asking for a random objective after completing all possible random objectives would prompt the game to make fun of you, telling you to go outside instead.
  • Abnormal Ammo:
    • The fixed device, which shoots dyed toads.
    • There are explosive squirrels called Chinchompas.
    • Salamanders that act as flamethrowers can be used, which use swamp tar mixed with herbs as fuel.
    • The Oddball Aura lets your Dwarven Multicannon shoot things like beer, squid, and brains.
  • Acid Trip Dimension: The Cosmic Plane where starflowers grow, accessible through fairy rings. It looks like this.
  • Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Most endgame items are thousands of times more expensive than their lower-level counterparts. Rings are a good example: a +4 range bonus (usually out of 200 or so) will cost you around a million coins. And if you think that's tough, wait until you see the price tag on a spirit shield. On the other hand, the game has a real living, breathing, player-run, capitalist economy... so it's the community which isn't letting go of those rare items for a low price.
  • Addressing the Player
  • Adventurers Club: The Quest guilds: Champions Guild, Heroes Guild, and Legends Guild.
  • Aerith and Bob: Bob the Jagex Cat, Bob's evil twin also named Bob, and Bob of Bob's Fabulous Axes all share a game with people called Zemouregal, Azzanadra and Zaros, although weirder names like those tend to pop up more with non-humans. Player characters' names can also have this effect.
  • Air Guitar: An emote.
  • Alas, Poor Villain: At the end of "Song from the Depths", you find the Siren who's been causing the trouble...and she turns out to be trapped inside the belly of the Queen Black Dragon, subject to a powerful illusion that's making her believe she's back home on her island. When you break the illusion, she's horrified. She's killed shortly after, and the player character has a brief moment of mourning.
  • Alcohol Hic: Found in the dialogue of many an inebriated character.
  • All Deserts Have Cacti: The Kharidian Desert is indeed full of cacti.
  • All in a Row: There's an option to "Follow" another player. A group of players can follow each other in a chain, resulting in this.
  • All Swords Are the Same: In Classic, all melee weapons have the exact same fighting animation: you just bash your opponent with it and that's that. The modern game has a wider variety of stances for different types of weapon, but there are still a limited number of animations for slashing, stabbing, or bludgeoning -- the stabbing animations for a bronze dagger are the same as the ones for a mithril shortsword or a pair of gardening secateurs.
  • All Trolls Are Different:
    • They're violent and warlike by nature, with thick, rocklike skin and low intelligence, and they're named after the first thing they try to eat (or, if they don't know what it's called, the sound it made), which leads to some unusual names like "My Arm".
    • There's an aquatic variety of troll that sports fins and gills.
    • Mountain Trolls are able to change their bodies to adapt to their surroundings. In Troll Invasion, they've shown the ability to summon monsters and cast magic by consuming the flesh of Summoners and Mages, respectively.
  • All-Natural Gem Polish: Notably Averted. You can find gems while mining, and if you do, they have to be cut with a chisel using the Crafting skill before they can be added to jewelry. Some gems can even be destroyed accidentally when you try to cut them.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: The dragonkin to Lucien.
  • Always Accurate Attack: The special attacks of the Magic Longbow, Korasi's Sword, and Dark Bow.
  • Amnesia Loop: A major plot point in the "Rise of the Red Axe" quest series. At the end of "Forgettable Tale of a Drunken Dwarf"[1], the Player Character stumbles upon the secret base of the Red Axe and learns about their plan to create an army of Chaos Dwarves to invade Keldagrim. However, thanks to an ogre shaman working for the Red Axe, instead of making it back to Keldagrim to warn the Consortium, all your memory of the event is scrambled and you're left with an irresistible craving for beer and kebabs. After the resulting drinking party, the vital information has become slurred, drunken ramblings. In between quests, the same thing happens to Commander Veldaban, and the subsequent "Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf" quest revolves around re-discovering everything that was forgotten.
  • Anchors Away: The Barrelchest Anchor, which can be used as a weapon.
  • And I Must Scream:
    • Poor Arrav; he was raised as a zombie by the very person he fought against. Said person also decided to keep him conscious, effectively forcing him to watch as his body fought his own people. Also, the Void Pest in A Void Dance, and Akthanakos could be said to fit this role, since he was betrayed and turned into a guardian of his own imprisonment.
    • Pentyn in Enakhra's Temple has been trapped there for thousands of years in solitary isolation and was constantly tortured by Enakhra. To make it worse, he's been immortalized and can't move anything below the shoulder, meaning he can never leave the place.
    • Apmeken had her voice, sight, and hearing taken away, and she was forced to sit back and wait as her monkeys slowly died off and the people of the desert turned against one another and killed each other without her guidance.
    • The TzHaar, whose bodies are composed of rock and magma/lava, apparently remain fully self-aware as they harden into solid obsidian upon "death." Obsidian which is then broken up and made into currency.
    • Skaldrun: his identity and all memory of who he was was destroyed to make him a human library. He was then made immortal and frozen in a block of ice for several hundred years, fully aware of his surroundings.
    • Mother Mallum's host, Lucy, in "Salt in the Wound". Stated to have been only a child when the slug queen possessed her and forced to spend decades in a semi-conscious, waking nightmare of an existence before finally being granted a proper death at the end of the quest.
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes: Reach level 99 in a skill? You get a cape. It has reasonable combat stats, yes, but still a fancy cape with a special emoticon. Finishing achievement diaries and quests, as well as many minigames/activities gets you pieces of clothing and armor. Much of it is unique or otherwise useful, but most of it is strictly cosmetic.
  • Animated Armor: The best example is the Warriors' Guild, where you can have your suit of armor brought to life as part of a minigame. Animated suits of armor appear in other places, as well.
  • Another Dimension: Lots, but notably:
    • Zanaris, a realm ruled by Fairies. The entire Fairy Ring infrastructure uses faint energy that was left from Guthix closing the Portal of Life for the purpose of transport to other realms.
    • The Abyss, discovered when the ZMI had a teleportation accident and tried to replicate the effect, is used for fast Runecrafting altar travel.
    • Yu'biusk, the ancestral home of the goblin races, destroyed by Bandos long ago.
    • The Spirit Realm, a series of smaller pocket dimensions, with its only inhabitants terrorized by the Spirit Beast. The realm itself is a cross between Dark World, Mirror World, and Spirit World; doing one thing in this world affects the real world in the opposite way.
    • Kethsi.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • To avert Fetch Quest, quests will often provide some required items like spades or pickaxes or gems in the nearby vicinity, saving you the trouble of trekking away to find one yourself.
    • Having trouble with the Sliding Puzzle in "Monkey Madness"? You can skip it by paying Glough a bribe.
    • Sometimes if a puzzle is annoying there's usually a way to just bludgeon your way through.
  • Anti-Grinding: To ensure that all clan members participate in the upkeep of the Clan Citadel there's a Cap; each individual player can only grind away at the resources until they hit the cap, after which it's impossible for them to continue.
  • Anti-Poopsocking: A token attempt; if you're logged in for six hours straight, you'll automatically log off. You can log right back in immediately, though.
  • Anti-Villain:
    • The Balance Elemental, whom you must kill to attain the Stone of Jas. Which turns out to be a biiiig mistake.
    • The Easter 2011 event gave The Queen Of Snow just a touch of this. After you help cut down an evil holly tree to obtain the Year, it quickly became apparent that what you've fetched for The Queen Of Sunshine wasn't real. Turns out Snowie, one of the most endearing holiday characters in the game, stole the real one because spring is so foreign to her she literally can't see anything beautiful in it; despite knowing spring has to come to maintain order, she wanted winter to go on a little longer because she's perfectly in tune with it -- but still felt mighty guilty about it.
    • The Mahjarrat may be this, particularly the Zarosian variety. They were stolen from their home dimension and enslaved by a Jackal god, then freed by the Empty Lord(Zaros). They're generally nice. Where as the Zamarokian ones are basically just Ax Crazy Jerk asses. Sliske still tries to turn you into a Barrows Brother, and kills one of your friends. The others seem to not mind if you kill him, but is rather powerful, so they like having him as an ally.
  • Apocalypse How:
    • There are many instances of it, including Class 0, Class 1 (sometime during the Fourth Age), and Class 2 (after the God Wars). Classes 3, 4 and 5 can be found in some of the realms, and X4 is subverted at the end of the Temple of Senntisten and Recipe for Disaster quests.
    • Meta Example: Cluster Flutterer was responsible for deleting almost 40% of the player base over the course of a single weekend.
  • Apocalyptic Log: You find one in the "Shades of Mort'ton" quest, where the writing gradually devolves into gibberish as the author slips into madness.
  • April Fools' Day: There have been several.
    • 2004 saw the long-awaited introduction of horses to RuneScape -- toy wooden horses, that is.
    • In 2007, there was a fake "Behind the Scenes" update announcing that every update that month would be heavily cabbage-based. A similar "Behind the Scenes" prank was the April Fool in 2011, with a plethora of Shout-Outs.
    • In 2009, all the cabbages came to life and started bouncing around.
    • On other occasions, April Fools' Day heralded the fake release of new dragon items, including 2005's Dragon Plate (a toy spinning plate which you could spin and play with) and 2008's Dragon Kite (a toy kite that you can fly)[2].
    • In 2010, they announced a RuneScape theme park.
    • For 2012, they proclaimed that "P-hats" would be dropped all around RuneScape for players to pick up for free. ("P-hat" traditionally refers to the ultra-rare party hats that are some of the most valuable items in the game.) True to their word, major cities were littered with Pea Hats: green peas that you can wear on your head.
  • Arm Cannon: The Barrelchest Mk II is equipped with a literal cannon on its left arm.
  • Armor of Invincibility: Torva, Pernix, and Virtus: the most powerful armor in the game, dropped only by the most difficult boss monster in the game. They're tradable, but they'll set you back hundreds of millions of gold.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • None of the monsters can seem to figure out to just walk around the table from behind which the player is casting spells or shooting arrows at them. This has been somewhat averted in more recent updates, as monsters from Dungeoneering will attempt to run or move around obstacles when they are attacked from a range. You can still pin an enemy into a corner with a little maneuvering, but at least the token effort is still there.
    • This is lampshaded in a rematch with the Tree Spirit, where the text before the fight mentions there are no mushrooms to hide behind.
  • Ash Face: During the Recipe For Disaster quest, a goblin cook accidentally blows up his own cauldron and gets this.
  • Asskicking Equals Authority:
    • One quest lets you join the White Knights of Falador and be able to purchase their equipment. For the Master rank, you have to kill hundreds of black knights. And "Ritual of the Mahjarrat" lets you see Sir Tiffy in action, the old man is TOUGH.
    • The Void Knights have this system. The better a fighter you are, the higher your rank.
    • Ogres like this, the most powerful are the leaders.
  • The Atoner: Dr. Fenkenstrain after the Great Brain Robbery quest.
  • Audience Shift: The demographic grew older with the game, resulting in quest storylines becoming more mature, deaths becoming more graphic, and the profanity filter becoming optional.
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: Sometimes justified when individuals are chosen to be generals or other leaders just because they are the strongest.
  • Awesome Moment of Crowning: Veldaban in King of the Dwarves.
  • Baba Yaga: She's a major character in several quests and runs a magic shop. She lives on Lunar Isle in her chicken-legged hut.
  • Bad Boss: Kal'Ger the Warmonger, who opens every battle with a cutscene in which he kills one of the lower-level Kal'Gerion demons.
  • Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Subverted by Evil Dave, who tries to swap "bad" and "good" in his speeches, but ends up getting very confused.
  • Bad Powers, Good People: The Zarosian Mahjarrat, who, while not uniformly good, are generally on the player's side for right now. The Ancient magicks that Zarosians use are quite dark, including spells that freeze opponents solid, steal their health, and drain their prayer. The Zarosian prayers (called "curses") are much more offensive than the other prayer sets, and drain your opponent's strength to enhance your own.
  • Bad with the Bone: The Dorgeshuun goblins are pacifists, but when they have to fight, they use weapons made out of bone, including a bone club (which is just a large, heavy bone).
  • Badass Bookworm: Lexicus Runewright in Dungeoneering. He summons books that hit you with all kinds of attacks, and some that explode that do an almost guaranteed 500 damage (and in a game where 990 is the max hp you can have, this is a BIG problem).
  • Bag of Holding:
    • It is an adventure game with an inventory, after all. Also doubles as Hammerspace because you can hold large hammers, anchors, other weapons, and massive amounts of food and fish, all too huge to possibly keep within.
    • There's bags of holding for rune essence that you can place within the bag of holding, as well as a coal bag and gem bag available as Dungeoneering rewards.
  • Bag of Spilling:
    • All but one (up to five with the required level) of the hard-won items found in the dungeons of Daemonheim will disappear into Saradomin-only-knows-where once the dungeon is completed.
    • You drop most of your items when you die.
  • Baguette Beatdown: The Sandwich Lady. Don't make her angry!
  • Bald of Awesome: Saradomin and the Wise Old Man. Optional for the player. Sir Tiffy.
  • Bank Robbery: The Wise Old Man.
  • Barrier Change Boss:
    • Dagannoth and Gelatinnoth Mothers. They change colors depending on the type of attack you need to use.
    • Tormented demons, which change their protection prayer based on what you're hitting them with.
    • Astea Frostweb and the Skeletal Trio, who change their protection prayers randomly.
  • Bat Out of Hell: After a graphical update, now standard Vampires, angry Juvinates and Vyrewatch look like were-bats, the Vyrewatch having wings on their back and the other two having no wings to speak of.
  • Batman Gambit: The entire plot of "Hunt for Red Raktuber". Pescaling Pax anticipates your every move, and by the end of the quest, you're teleblocked and left for dead on a deserted island.
  • Bedsheet Ghost: Invoked in "Ghosts Ahoy", where you try to disguise yourself as a ghost by cutting holes in a bedsheet.
  • Big Bad: At this point, it is pretty much certain that the Big Bads of Runescape are the Dragonkin. In ritual of the Mahjarrat, they returned out of hiding and showed their power by killing Lucien, who at the time, was the most powerful Mahjarrat.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: There are more than 10 different types of giant spiders, Kalrag from the Underground Pass is the biggest attackable one. The Stronghold of Safety is packed with Giant Roaches. Giant Ants and Giant Wasps can be found in the Jade vine maze. There are Cave Bugs and Cave Crawlers underground. The largest insects however, are the Kalphite, which are like beetle-scorpion hybrids.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Played straight when you are the hero(usually in quests, averted when a group of heroes try to save you from Lucien.
  • Big No: When the player is kidnapped to Evil Bob's island. "No... what? Nooooooooooooo!"
  • Bigger on the Inside: Everyone's Player Owned Houses and Balthazar Beauregard's Circus are these, the latter can move it's current location in a box, once a week.
  • Bilingual Bonus:
    • The Burthorpe Soldiers speak in Latin.
    • Latin appears to be the official language of Zaros. The book that teaches you the Ancient Curses is written in Latin, the Zaros area in the God Wars dungeon has Latin inscriptions, and several prominent Zarosian characters and items have Latin names:
      • Torva, Pernix, and Virtus armor are Latin for "fierce", "nimble", and "valor" respectively.
      • Nex, the Zaros boss, is Latin for "violent death".
      • Nex's generals Cruor, Fumus, Glacies, and Umbra are "blood", "smoke", "ice", and "shadow".
    • Daemonheim battle themes are also named Glacialis, Desolo, Adorno, Occulo, and Torqueo. Glacier...Desolate...Adorned...Occult...Twisted.
    • The song called Norse Code includes a high flute. Its first series of notes is actually "RUNESCAPE" in Morse Code.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • At the end of the Blood Runs Deep quest, you manage to trap the Dagganoth Mother inside of the cavern and protect Rellekka, at the cost of losing Prince Brand and Princess Astrid, who died fighting the Dagganoth Kings. It doesn't help that you married the one opposite to your gender only a few moments before.
    • At the end of Ritual of the Mahjarrat, Lucien is dead, the Staff of Armadyl has been broken and thus rendered unusable, and the Stone of Jas has been placed somewhere where it won't be abused again. Unfortunately, Jhallan was used for the Ritual, effectively killing him, Idria was murdered by the dragonkin, a friend changed into a Barrows Brother and the dragonkin have destroyed Edgeville and intend to do the same to the rest of the world.
  • Bladder of Steel: When the Fight Caves minigame was first released, there was no way to save your progress midway through the fight. The only way to beat TzTok-Jad and earn the fire cape was to buckle up and sit at your computer for over an hour fighting your way through all 60+ waves of enemies. This was later remedied, and you can now save your progress by logging out in between waves.
  • Blessed with Suck: Zanik. Chosen by the gods and raised from the dead to become a brainwashed slave-general of the war-god Bandos.
  • Blood Knight: Bandos is the "Big High War God" who teaches that fighting is the highest calling of all, and his followers are almost universally aggressive and love battle. He has specifically bred entire RACES for war.
  • Bonsai Forest: The soil quality in Gielinor clearly isn't the best out there. Some graphics updates made the trees more reasonably sized, but many are still pretty small.
  • Boogie Knights: The dancing knights in the Party Room.
  • Booze-Based Buff: Drinking beer alters your stats, usually giving you a boost in one area and weakening you in another. Ordinary beer, for example, increases your strength, but decreases your accuracy.
  • Border Patrol: Try to enter a dark area without a light source and little bugs will swarm all over you, draining your health.
  • Boss Banter:
    • Nomad. Among others.
    • One of the more humorous examples is found at the end of the "Lunar Diplomacy" quest where players have to fight a copy of themselves (simply called "Me"). "Stop hitting yourself!" indeed.
  • Boss Rush: The Dominion Tower, where you re-fight quest bosses you've already beaten.
  • Bottomless Bladder: Your character can eat all the food he or she wants, but never has to go to the bathroom. In fact, he/she has never seen a bathroom before, as a discussion with Ali the Barman reveals.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: A lot of the rewards (more so with Level Grinding and minigame-type stuff than for quests). Typically overlaps with And Your Reward Is Clothes.
  • Breakable Weapons: All sorts of flavors:
    • Some weapons gradually degrade until they break, and you can repair them back to 100% by paying a fee depending on how degraded they are. Barrows and Chaotic gear are good examples.
    • PVP weapons such as Vesta's Longsword and Statius's Warhammer have a set lifespan: after a certain amount of time in combat, they crumble to dust.
    • Crystal equipment degrades in a fashion similar to Barrows and Chaotic, but as it degrades, it gradually decreases in power as well. When it's fully degraded, it reverts back to a crystal seed that can be shaped back into its more practical form for a fee.
    • The Hand Cannon has a rather annoying variant: it has a random chance of blowing up in your face, dealing you damage and destroying itself completely. Ouch.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall:
    • In the Runescape 2011 Easter event, a squirrel named the 'Antipodean Squirrel', is angry about how the Easter event is Northern-Hemisphere-Centric, and about how it is Spring in the northern hemisphere and how it is autumn in the southern hemisphere and it's not fair to have no autumn event. One response is to tell him to stop breaking the fourth wall; he replies, 'Yeah, like you stay in character all the time!'
    • Another example occurs when talking to the bartender in the Blue Moon Inn in Varrock. He states that Runescape is a computer game, but your character thinks that he is crazy.
    • You break the fourth wall in a way talking to the priest in Lumbridge, when you say that you are not from this world.
  • Breath Weapon: Dragons have a deadly firebreathing attack that sticks to you like napalm, dealing lots of damage unless you have a special anti-dragon shield. Wyverns, close relatives of dragons, have a powerful ice breath attack that can freeze you for massive damage and requires an elemental shield to defend against.
  • Brick Joke: A pretty grim one. After Sigmund uses a Ring of Life (an item which teleports the wearer to a spawn point when they're low on health) to escape death numerous times, Zanik finally cuts his hand off during The Chosen Commander to prevent him from leaving and kills him. After the quest is finished, if you go back to Lumbridge and talk to the Duke, he'll mention Sigmund's severed hand having teleported into the courtyard.
  • British English: The game being produced in Britain and owned by a British company many terms for things are the British terms and that can and does cause some confusion among American players unfamiliar with both the game and British terminology. An easy example is a 'Spade' commonly called a shovel in America. An especially confusing example is in clue scrolls that tell you to search the first floor of a building. What Americans know as the first floor is called the ground floor in Britain, so American players didn't know that the clue was telling them to go upstairs. A stickied thread was made on the forum to clarify this.
  • Broken Aesop:
    • The "Tower of Life" quest. The moral of the whole story is that meddling with creation is wrong, and life should be treated with respect. Your reward for completing the quest is access to a minigame where you can create new mutant life-forms, kill them, and harvest their organs.
    • In the "Ritual of the Mahjarrat" quest, the player learns that using the Stone of Jas empowers the Dragonkin, and that at one point the Dragonkin were powerful enough to destroy all life on a particular plane. Despite this, the player still uses the Stone of Jas's power once more during the quest, raising the player's combat stats before the ritual took place.
  • Broken Bridge: See Missing Secret below.
  • Brown Note: The Stalkers' natural language. A quote from an unknown mage:

"It calls itself Plane-freezer Lakhrahnaz in our language. I regret asking it to say it in its own, for the combination of audible and inaudible sounds from its many lipless mouths caused me a pounding headache and blood to cascade from my nose, which Lakhrahnaz then froze."

  • Bubblegloop Swamp: Morytania, Lumbridge Swamp, Ullek ruins, Poison Waste, etc.
  • Build Like an Egyptian: There are four pyramids and one mastaba in the Kharidian desert.
  • Bullet Time: Seen in the Brimhaven agility dungeon as a Shout-Out to The Matrix when dodging the poison darts.
  • Call on Me: The "Path of Glouphrie" quest ends with the Player Character stuck in a Death Trap. As you start to collapse from the poison gas, you cry out mentally for help. Lo and behold, the telepathic gnome Hazelmere from earlier in the quest hears you and teleports in to rescue you just in time.
  • Canon Discontinuity: The Romeo and Juliet quest, which has been so thoroughly removed that most of the NPCs involved in the quest no longer exist in the game. They even deleted letters about it from the old Postbag from the Hedge archives.
  • Capital City: Many, such as Varrock, Falador, and Ardougne. Not to mention Lumbridge, capital of newbies.
  • Capture the Flag: Castle Wars. Also available as part of the Clan Citadel's battlefield editor.
  • Cast from Hit Points: The Lunar spell Energy Transfer, which restores a friend's special attack energy at the cost of your Hit Points. There's also a set of Empathic Healer spells.
  • Catching Some Zs: A side-effect of a dream spell.
  • Cessation of Existence: Runescape's actual afterlife is vague but existent, however this is implied to be the eventual fate of those whose souls are devoured by the Spirit Beast or Amascut, Goddess of Destruction. Fortunately, the former has been forced into the physical world where it can no longer do this.
  • Chain of Deals: One Small Favour, and a shorter version in The Fremmenik Trials.
  • Chained to a Railway: Zanik in Another Slice of H.A.M.. Done intentionally to complete Sigmund's persona as a Dastardly Whiplash.
  • Charles Atlas Superpower: With enough skill in combat, you can punch through armor with your fists, kill people unarmed, and block weapons with your bare hands.
  • Cheap Gold Coins: Gold pieces are the standard Global Currency. A typical tavern might charge one or two gold pieces for a mug of beer. A chocolate cake is about 400 gold pieces. A typical piece of armour could be anywhere from 40,000 to 20,000,000. A pumpkin costs hundreds of millions.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • The clock in "One Piercing Note" becomes important at the end.
    • There's a particularly insane one in "Dragon Slayer" (released in 2001). Melzar the Mad's notes mention a dream he had about the "great Cabbage of Jas." This was, in fact, the very first hint at the game's Myth Arc, which paid off almost exactly ten years later in "Ritual of the Mahjarrat," and isn't done yet... The Oracle of Ice Mountain, released at the same time as the Quest, also mentions something about Jas... and several other things that wouldn't really show up in the game for years to come.
  • Chekhov's Gunman:
    • Baron von Hattenkrapper, whom you first met as the seagull you fired out of a makeshift bellows in "Rocking Out", later becomes a significant character in the sequel, "A Clockwork Syringe", when he teams up with you to destroy the barrelchest army by air-dropping cannonballs on them.
    • Denath is first seen summoning Delrith along with a few other dark wizards in Demon Slayer. In Shadow Of The Storm, he's revealed to be Agrith-Naar, a demon roughly five times as powerful as Delrith was, easily 100 times more powerful when the player helped dismiss him back to his home dimension.
  • Chekhov's Skill: Usually enforced in quests where something in a former quest is something you will need to know how to do. Having the skill levels required before a quest is released may also count.
  • Church Militant:
    • Used to peaceful Saradominist priests and monks? Try visiting the God Wars Dungeon, where those priests are armed to the teeth.
    • The Temple Knights, who are Combat Pragmatist Knights with great magic knick-knacks, a huge information network and no qualms about doing whatever they think is necessary. Be glad they're on your side.
  • Circling Birdies: Used when anyone is stunned.
  • City Guards: Which don't have a very long lifespan.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Runecrafting altars (or at least the Astral one) were created by making dolmens out of Rune Essence, and then by using a lot of focus from a lot of people, convincing the stone that it was something that it was not.
  • Clothes Make the Superman: Aside from combat skill levels, the attack and defense bonuses given by weapons and armor are a major factor in how well a player fares in combat. Some complete sets of armor also give additional increases to attack or defense alongside the normal bonuses.
  • Cobweb Jungle: Enforced in the 2009 Halloween event. The rules of Halloween say that the Grim Reaper has to have cobwebs in his house, so it's the Player Character's job to negotiate with the Spider Queen (who lives in her own gigantic, over-the-top maze of cobwebs) to decorate Grim's mansion properly.
  • Cognizant Limbs:
    • The Swamp Creature encountered during the Temple Trekking minigame is this. Poisoning one part effects all its limbs; however, you need to kill all 4 limbs and the head to continue.
    • Tolna is the quest boss of A Soul's Bane, who has 3 heads. Poisoning any of his heads poisons the rest; killing all 3 of them transforms him back to normal.
    • Har'Aken, the final boss of the Fight Kiln, is submerged in magma and must have its tentacles damaged until it raises its head, giving you an opportunity to strike it before submerging again.
  • Color-Coded Multiplayer: Seen in minigames like Trouble Brewing, Castle Wars, Soul Wars, and so on. Red team and blue team are the standard (to correspond with Zamorak and Saradomin), although the Great Orb Project uses yellow and green instead.
  • Commonplace Rare:
    • An ordinary jug of wine is worth a small handful of gold if you're lucky. A half-full jug of wine is worth many millions of gp. This is because the ability to drink half a jug of wine was removed and wine jugs are now gulped down in one sip, so half-full wine jugs are no longer obtainable. Those that remain have become valuable collector's items.
    • Partyhats are some of the most expensive items in the game. They're little crown-shaped hats made out of paper.
    • Easter Eggs and Pumpkins are worth millions, and are still edible.
  • Continuing Is Painful: Dying makes you drop your items. Averted slightly with gravestones, so you only have to dash madly to where you died to get your stuff back.
  • Control Room Puzzle
  • Convection, Schmonvection: But actually falling into lava doesn't do much damage, either. Lampshaded and Handwaved by a dwarf miner when questioned about it, in a huge lava reactor where you have to mine away cooled lava -

Lava Flow Miner Dwarf: Logically, convection should make the air in this chamber hotter than an oven, and we'd all roast alive. But for some reason that doesn't happen!

  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: Traditional methods of torture aren't working on the zombie pirate decapitated head in "A Clockwork Syringe". It's time to bust out the dreaded Twiblik Night Special. After much ceremony, you open the box and reveal...wigs, make-up, and women's clothing. O...kay? After being mercilessly dressed up in wigs, eye shadow, and lipstick, the distressed zombie finally tells you the location of the villains' secret island hideout.
  • Cool Chair: Thrones in Construction, such as skeleton thrones and demonic thrones.
  • Corridor Cubbyhole Run: The Rogue's Den maze has a section like this. There's also one in the "Icthlarin's Little Helper" quest.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Subverted in "King of the Dwarves". The Consortium is accused of caring more about profits than the lives of their employees after several miners die in a collapse while rescue workers are instructed to repair the equipment. But it turns out, as the frustrated Consortium members later explain to you, if the equipment hadn't been repaired swiftly, it would have caused repercussions in the entire city's power supply, leading to even greater casualties, and the Consortium was only trying to control the greater damages.
  • Cowardly Lion: Cyrisus, a fellow adventurer the player meets in Dream Mentor. He has maxed combat stats, despite being terribly afraid of fighting. He achieved his maxed stats by fighting nothing but 300 chickens a day for 30 years.
  • Crazy Prepared: If you read the quest guide for "Love Story" and bring all of the required items needed to avoid banking in between parts, the Wise Old Man will note how it was rather convenient you had all the necessary items on you at hand the moment you two needed to create a device for that part of the quest.
  • Critical Existence Failure
  • Critical Failure: There's usually some chance of horribly failing something; for example, you could formerly lose the head of your hatchet or pickaxe by apparently swinging it too hard... and then losing the valuable head and having to buy it back from someone [3]. You can also have some pretty silly accidents in Daemonheim:

"You have a hilarious accident with the hammer and chisel, destroying the block in the process."

  • Crystal Dragon Jesus: Saradomin -- stained glass, monks, even church organs.
  • Crystal Prison: The goal of the "Merlin's Crystal" quest is to rescue Merlin, who has been trapped inside a crystal by Morgan le Faye.
  • Crystal Spires and Togas: Crystal saws, seeds, and bows. Made by elves, of course. And an enormous WALL around the (currently inaccessible) elven capital.
  • Curb Stomp Battle:
    • Lucien versus Hazelmere, Turael, Duradel, Mazchna, Ghommal, Sloane, Harrallak, and Cyrisus in "While Guthix Sleeps".
    • Properly trained and equipped players can slaughter anything in their path, a little awkward when you accidentally click on a man and crush his torso in one blow, in the middle of a city.
    • Some players leave very easy quests very late into their game career, ends up having battles like lvl34 Count Draynor vs Lvl128 N00b Destroyer.
    • The above becomes very noticable in the Dominion Tower, where you are given random selections of bosses to fight. If you're prepared to fight Nomad, but instead get the aformentioned Draynor, it's pretty obvious what the outcome will be...
  • Cutscene Drop
  • Cutscene Incompetence: In the updated Wolf Whistle quest, your character runs from a group of trolls carrying a man hostage, and then goes on a Fetch Quest to turn the tables. If this quest is done when you are high level, running away makes your character look like the new Cyrisus.
  • Cutting Off the Branches: The "Temple of Ikov" quest has you choose whether to protect the Staff of Armadyl or steal it and give it to the bad guy. When the developers made the sequel quest, "While Guthix Sleeps", they realized the plot sort of hinged on the bad guy having the staff, so everyone who chose to protect it received a note from the guardians that it had been stolen by somebody else.
  • Cutting the Knot: In "A Clockwork Syringe", you use all the stealth and cunning available to you to quietly sabotage the barrelchest factory by smashing equipment with a giant anchor.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: Implied with the Black Knights (or, as they are formally known, the Kinshra), who have been known to perform nefarious deeds, but are also explained to be another political faction.
  • Dark Reprise:
    • Shadow Forger Ihlakhizan's theme is that to Born To Do This track.
    • Temple of Tribes to the standard Goblin Village theme.
    • Creature Cruelty to Magic Magic Magic.
    • Demise of the Dorgeshuun to Dorgeshuun City.
    • Barb Wire to Barbarianism.
    • Return of Lucien to Temple Desecrated.
  • Darker and Edgier: As time went on, quests and storylines started getting heavier, with characters Killed Off for Real and such. 'One Piercing Note', for example, is a murder mystery where you end up seeing corpses covered in blood, corpses heavily mutilated and maimed, you end up helplessly watching a woman die, and the whole thing perpetrated by an insane woman who would never have done it had she realised what she was doing.
  • Dead Baby Comedy: At the end of the 2011 Easter event, you have to carve an ice sculpture to show the Queen of Snow why spring is a just as good a thing as winter. Out of the options of what to carve [4], the one that sticks out the most is the last one: "Cute baby animals... impaled on swords." Choosing this choice works just as well as the others.
  • Deal with the Mahjarrat: What caused the current state of the Barrow Brothers.
  • Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: In the Pest Control Minigame, death merely results in the player respawning at the entry lander of the Minigame, restoring their Life Points, Special Attack Bar, and Prayer at the mere cost of a bit of running to get back where they were. In a way, this may be beneficial for the group if the player has good special attacks to make up for a few seconds lost. However, a player using Dharok's Armour Set will have lowered power due to having full Life Points again, which could be a lot worse for the group. Similar things will happen if you die in any other "Safe" minigame, in which you keep all items on death.
  • Death Trap:
    • You get caught in one at the end of "Path of Glouphrie". Thick, sticky tar pours out onto the floor to stop you from moving. An enchantment prevents you from teleporting. Then comes the poison gas. And of course, at this point, the magical laser attacks start firing at you.
    • Most of the Brimhaven Agility Arena has these, including spikes, rocks, poison darts and spinning blades of doom.
  • Death World:
    • Ape Atoll, if you're a human. The monkeys are not friendly. If you stick to the tall grass, you can hide from their archers, but that won't save you from the poisonous snakes, spiders, and scorpions lurking in the weeds. You can create a talisman that will turn you into a monkey, but only if you travel through a lengthy, spiraling cave full of zombies, traps (also poisonous), and falling rocks. It's not a good vacation spot.
    • The abyssal plane, where everything is trying to kill you or impede you.
    • The Gorak's Plane, which is filled with many (of the same) powerful creatures who just want to kill you.
    • Also implied in the Mahjarrat's home plane.
  • Degraded Boss: Tok Tz-Ket-Dill has it's own eponymous quest, you fight a number of them throughout The Elder Kiln however.
  • Dem Bones: There are plenty of animated skeletons in the game.
  • Department of Redundancy Department:
    • From Elemental Workshop III: Body body.
    • When you leap onto a stepping stone near Tears of Guthix: You leap across with a mighty leap!
  • Desperation Attack: Dharok the Wretched's armor set effect. Many a player has died with a sudden 700 damage to the face thanks to this.
  • The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Aubury, the purveyor of the magic shop in Varrock, hands out freebies of the basic Wind and Mind Runes. The obvious scam is to take the freebies and sell them back to his shop, right?

The shopkeeper thanks you for returning the samples.

  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
    • In "The Chosen Commander", Zanik and the Player Character punch out The avatar of Bandos, god of war, although it helps that you have to disrupt its link with Bandos to be able to actually kill it.
    • Especially appropriate in "Salt in the Wound", where the mind-controlling horror you defeat was directly inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft.
    • The Slug Queen is killed by an average (although exceptionally skilled) woman by cutting a huge statue and having it fall on said queen.
  • Disappeared Dad: Bolrie, Golrana's father, in The Prisoner of Glouphrie. He's been locked up in a cell in Arposandra for centuries.
  • Disconnected Side Area: The island off the coast of Catherby. It looks like it's so close to the coastline that you could easily just swim to it, or even wade through the water to it. To get there, you have to travel across some mountains and then through a long and difficult underground dungeon. You can get back to Catherby with a Grappling Hook Crossbow -- but you can't get to the island from Catherby.
  • Discontinuity Nod: The Romeo & Juliet quest no longer exists, but you can still ask the apothecary guy to make the potion used to put Juliet in a coma.
  • Dog Stereotype
  • Doppelganger Attack: Combined with Doppelganger Spin in the fight against Nomad. Each of his clones is just as dangerous as the original...
  • Doppelganger Spin: ...but damaging a copy makes Nomad lose focus and forces him to dismiss it, and damaging the real one breaks the spell completely.
  • Downer Ending: One Piercing Note. Anna had gone completely insane, believing herself to be guided by St. Elspeth. The first victim was someone else, mistaken for Anna due to having her face slashed off and being dressed in her robes. In the end, three innocent lives have been lost to her madness, and if you decide to spare her, she throws herself off the tower anyway, believing the Icyene are coming to take her to Saradomin, leaving behind an Abbey on the verge of collapsing.
  • The Dragon: The leader of the Kal'Gerion demons, Kal'Ger the Warmonger, is this to the Mahjarrat Bilrach.
  • Dramatic Wind: While holding a two-handed weapon.
  • Dual-Wielding: The defenders, Torag's Hammers.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: Averted and played straight at different points. Average citizens never say thanks for averting the latest doom on the land, though.
  • Dungeon Bypass: The Tarn's Lair dungeon is a convoluted maze filled with traps and aggressive zombies. If you solve the maze and fight your way to the end, you can challenge Tarn for XP and a power-up to your Salve Amulet to make it more effective against the undead. Defeating Tarn allows you to fight his pet Terror Dogs in the final chamber. Of course, you'd have to go through the whole maze again to get there, so, as a convenience to Terror Dog slayers, Jagex released the Slayer Ring, which can teleport you back to the final chamber.
However, an unintended consequence of this teleport was that it worked even for players who had never completed the maze in the first place, thus allowing savvy players to simply buy or make a Slayer Ring and waltz straight into the boss chamber, bypassing the entire dungeon.
The ring was patched a few months later to Nerf this trick.
  • Dungeon Town: Keldagrim and Dorgesh-Kaan are the largest of them.
  • Early Installment Weirdness: Runescape Classic has many differences. See the trope page for a detailed explanation.
  • Easter Bunny: Played around with. In the 2009 Easter event, it turned out that the Easter Bunny was actually a rabbit wearing a rabbit costume.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Many. The Chaos Elemental is a textbook example. Other good examples are the monsters from Dream Mentor, the Muspah (which are myths made real), the Spirit/Corporeal Beast, and the Stalkers (one of them fires an eyeball twice the size of you at your party as an attack).
  • Eldritch Location:
    • Daemonheim, an immense, random dungeon complex that came into existence out of nowhere, is filled with horrific extradimensional monsters (see Eldritch Abomination), and has a 'taint' within that could irreparably damage the world should it escape.
    • The Abyssal plane, where everything seems to have eyes or tentacles, or both.
    • The Runespan, a maze of floating islands filled with nodes and creatures of elemental energy.
  • Elemental Crafting
  • Elemental Embodiment: In the workshop quests and elsewhere, elementals can be found.
  • Emote Animation
  • Endless Game
  • Enemy Scan: The monster examine spell.
  • Enemy Summoner: Quite a few monsters, such as Nechryael.
  • Energy Bow: The Crystal and Zaryte bows.
  • Enthralling Siren: The Anti-Villain of "Song from the Depths" is a Siren who sings the eponymous song.
  • Epic Flail: Verac's and Ivandis flails.
  • Escort Mission:
    • The Temple Trekking/Burgh de Rott Ramble minigame involves protecting refugees on their journey from Burgh de Rott north to the safety of the temple at Paterdomus and escorting mercenary adventurers on the opposite route to battle evil. Should be noted as being different than other escort missions, as your companions can level up, some of them could probably do the trek themselves with sufficient leveling..
    • Blood Runs Deep has the Player Character escort King Vargas through the Waterbirth Island dungeon. He's wounded and moves slower than walking speed, and the dungeon is filled with high-level aggressive monsters that pummel you with all attack styles, although no explanation is given as to why you can't just teleport out.
    • Inverted in Within the Light, where Arianwyn escorts you through the Temple of Light, killing any shadows that attack you.
    • Played for Drama with Zanik, according to this Postbag from the Hedge.

"It's like... all the time we were adventuring together, it was all about you, you know? You were the hero, and I was the sidekick. I kept getting into trouble and you kept rescuing me. Even at the end, when we defeated Bandos, I got knocked out and you finished it alone. And in a way, I kind of resent that. I wish I'd done it myself. I don't want my whole life to be like that. I want to prove to myself that I can be an adventurer in my own right, be a hero, not just someone's sidekick, not even yours."

  • Even Evil Has Standards: Inverted in the Cave Goblin quest series; Sigmund says Screw This, I'm Outta Here to his boss, Johannes, essentially because Johannes has too many standards.
  • Every Proper Lady Should Curtsy: The standard bow emote for girl players. Males can also use it by right clicking.
  • Everything's Better with Chickens: A random event had you being attacked by the greatest Super Villain in all of Runescape... the Evil Chicken. They milked him for all he was worth too, with emotes like "Buk, buk, buk, BWHAHAHAHA!" and the like.
  • Everything's Better with Monkeys: Ninja monkeys, even.
  • Everything's Better with Penguins: Someone at Jagex definitely likes penguins too much.
  • Everythings Better With Platypus: Pet platypode, even.
  • Evil Chef: The Culinaromancer from "Recipe for Disaster".
  • Eviler Than Thou: After seeing the horrible acts the demon Agrith-Naar is capable of in Shadow of the Storm, Evil Dave decides that it's too evil even for him.
  • Evolving Weapon:
    • The Flail of Ivandis and weapons crafted from the branches of the Blisterwood tree gain power as you cremate Vyrewatch corpses.
    • Silverlight: originally an iron sword blessed by Guthix, later becoming Darklight after imbibing the blood of the defeated Agrith Naar in "Shadow of the Storm".
  • Exact Words: In "Thok Your Block Off", Thok decides to spare "Boney Face" and mentions he'd kill him if he saw him again. Unfortunately for Boney, that included going into a dead-end room and coming out again to see him walking about.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
    • If you hold you mouse cursor over the achievements at the end of a Dungeoneering run, a small tooltip pops up, telling you what you need to do in order to get that achievement. The tooltip for "Most Deaths" reads, "Exactly what it says on the tin."
    • One quest's MacGuffin is the "Idol of Many Heads". Examining the idol gives this text: "An idol. It has many heads."
  • Experience Booster: Lots. The Runescape Wiki has a list.
  • Expy: Word of God says Zanik is essentially Starbuck, and her voice is that of Regina Spektor.
  • Extreme Omnivore: Trolls, who are usually even named after the first thing they tried to eat (or the sound that thing makes, in case they don't know what it is). Can be amusing as 'My Arm' to as foreboding as 'Cliff'.
  • Eye of Newt
  • Fake Difficulty: Mourning's End Part II is considered one of the hardest quests, involving a huge Light and Mirrors Puzzle and multiple floors, and it's full of hard-hitting monsters. But even with all of this, someone at Jagex apparently thought that it still wasn't enough and decided to throw in an agility obstacle that is entirely based on luck with a high failure rate. Every time it's failed, the player falls down to the lower level and takes even more damage.
  • "Falling in Love" Montage: "Love Story" has one between Zenevivia and the Wise Old Man.
  • Fan Fiction: I present to you theRunescape Fanfiction Wiki. Mostly Crossover Fic. Runescape's own Stories forum also contains a lot of fanfiction.
  • Fantastic Caste System: The TzHaar, who divide into four castes: one consists of hunters, one of guardians, one of scholars and mages, and one of workers and architects.
  • Fantastic Racism: H.A.M., oh so much. Humans are also considered little more than food to Vampyres.
  • Fantasy Pantheon: Saradomin, Guthix, and Zamorak are the main gods. Armadyl, Bandos, and Zaros are more obscure. There's also the Menaphite pantheon of desert gods, the elves' crystal nature god Seren, and the monkeys of Ape Atoll worship a monkey god named Marimbo. As a joke, there's also a God of Cabbage named Brassica Prime.
  • Fate Worse Than Death:
    • Summer and her family, who were busy having their souls devoured by the Spirit Beast up until the point the player killed it.
    • Arrav, who is now Zemourgel's undead slave and who has almost no control over himself, forced to slaughter the people he once protected. Eventually does get some peace, but his wounds are too severe and he has no more magic to sustain him, he dies.
    • Becoming a Barrows Brother is also rather unpleasant, the originals becoming deathly ill, then dying, then having their spirits wrenched from wherever they were to fight again for their new master. Now you just get hit with an incorporeal maroon skull and die in horrible agony
  • Feather Fingers: Notably averted with the penguins. Ping and Pong are looking for musical instruments, but since they have no fingers, they can't play most instruments--you have to find them bongos and cowbells.
  • Feathered Fiend: The Evil Chicken. There's also a giant Roc that attacks you in the "My Arm's Big Adventure" quest.
  • Fetch Quest: Occasionally Played With:
    • Exaggerated in One Small Favour, in which you are asked something of the typical fetch quest, to get logs from a forester... who then asks you to get his axe sharpened at an axe store, and the owner asks you to ask a favor from a witch, who in turn asks something else of you... it ends up having you traverse almost the entire continent that the game takes place on.
    • Lampshaded in Rune Mechanics, where the characters make disdainful remarks about fetch quests.
  • Fifteen Puzzle: Actually a twenty-four puzzle.
  • Final Boss, New Dimension: Several:
    • The Culinaromancer can only be fought in his private dimension.
    • The Spirit Beast in "Summer's End" is fought in its Spirit Realm.
    • "Dream Mentor" has you enter the dream world to battle Cyrisus's inner demons.
  • Fireballs: Several versions, ranging from little fire spits to huge inferno blasts.
  • Firewood Resources
  • Fisher King: The Fisher King from "Holy Grail".
  • Fishing for Sole: Boots and gloves can be caught while fishing with a big net.
  • Fishing Minigame: In addition to fishing as a skill, there's also the Fish Flingers minigame, where you use trial and error to determine the correct hook, bait, and weight to catch different types of fish.
  • Floating Continent: Clan Citadels. Avalani mentions that they're "bastions of Armadylian power from an era long lost to us".
  • Flunky Boss: Quite a few instances:
    • TzTok-Jad summons four healers when he reaches half his life. If you don't kill or distract the healers, they heal him.
    • The pest queen from "The Void Stares Back" summons healers to restore her health and defilers to attack you and your NPC allies.
    • Eruni from "Do No Evil" summons demons to attack you and draws on their power to make herself invincible.
    • In Dungeoneering, Astea Frostweb summons ice spiders. Lexicus Runewright summons animated books.
    • Bork summons Ork Legions.
  • Fox Chicken Grain Puzzle: In the Recruitment Drive quest.
  • Freemium: Many skills, quests, and runes are only available to those who pay; actually, "many" would be the understatement of the year. The free part of the game is probably less than 5% of the total game, and free players have severely limited options when it comes to training and bank space, and they get an update once in a blue moon. On the upside, Jagex is a lot better than most games. There's still a fair bit to do in the free game, and they've started doing a lot more free content than they used to. They also advertise free-to-play content as an entire free game, with the pay-to-play content as a super expansion pack.
  • Freudian Trio: Saradomin, god of order (superego), Zamorak, god of chaos (id), and Guthix, god of balance (ego).
  • Frictionless Ice: "Myths of the White Lands" uses it for puzzles. It's also a stage hazard when fighting the Dungeoneering boss Plane-Freezer Lakhrahnaz and as a random room puzzle on Frozen floors.
  • Friendly War: The king and queen of the neigboring island nations of Miscellania and Etceteria amuse themselves by constantly declaring war on each other. It's also a case of Belligerent Sexual Tension: they eventually get married in "Blood Runs Deep".
  • Full Set Bonus:
    • Barrows armour is the most notable example, with each set having its own bonus.
    • Penance armour gradually restores your prayer points if you wear the full set.
    • Lumberjack clothing (and its equivalents for other skills) gives a small additional xp bonus for wearing the full set.
  • Fun with Acronyms: A few, including:
    • The Humans Against Monsters association. (Their logo is a ham.)
    • The Livid Vine, or "Lokar's Infernal Vine of Incredible Death"
  • Game Breaking Bug: Quite a few, although they're generally fixed within a day at most, and intentionally exploiting a bug usually earns you a permanent ban:
    • One infamous bug allowed some players to kill other players outside of normal PvP zones. This led to the Falador Massacre, wherein hundreds of players were killed; many of them lost millions of coins' worth of items.
    • When the Hand Cannon was first introduced, it was possible for multiple people to attack the same person in one-on-one PvP areas, resulting in instant death for that player.
    • An update to the game engine made it possible to attack monsters without being attacked back, allowing lots of players to solo the Corporeal Beast (strongest monster in the game, had never been killed by a single person before up to that point) and other normally Nintendo Hard boss monsters.
    • An update to the Dungeoneering skill briefly caused runecrafting to give 1,000 times as much experience as intended.
  • Game Over Man: During the Halloween season, Death will make personal appearances to collect your soul whenever you die.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Often played straight, but sometimes subverted into Gameplay And Gameplay Segregation. For example, you have to hunt a few types of creatures instead of killing them, which is justified only by a few creatures like chinchompas.
  • Gargle Blaster: Anything labeled 'Rum'. Drinking it can have your character exclaim "My liver is melting!" and then mysteriously wind up on Mos Le Harmless. Normal 'Rum' just gets you a message in the game log stating "You try very hard not to die"
  • Gas Mask Mooks: Mourners.
  • Gender Bender: The Makeover Mage magically changes his/her gender every minute or so. He/she will offer the same service to you, for a fee of 3000 coins. This gets lampshaded if you made the change between finishing "Throne of Miscellania" and starting "Royal Trouble."
  • Gene Hunt Interrogation Technique: When you torture a severed zombie pirate head in "A Clockwork Syringe", your character appears to have a lot of fun figuring out creative methods.
  • Genie in a Bottle: A random event. Seen also as a villain in the "Spirits of the Elid" quest.
  • Genius Ditz: How much of each varies between quests, but overall this is how the Player Character is presented.
  • Get Back Here Boss: The giant mole. Fortunately, it has been altered to still target you after it burrows. This still doesn't make it simple to find, though.
  • Get on the Boat: Want to visit Daemonheim? Take a boat from Al-Kharid. Want to visit Karamja, the Void Knight Outpost, or Entrana? Take a boat from Port Sarim. (And to actually participate in the Void Knight activity you have to get on another boat.) Want to visit Braindeath Island, Dragontooth Island, or Mos Le'Harmless? Take a boat from Port Phasmatys. And so on.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: "Jubbly" is British slang for "breast".
  • Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: Some of the boss fights are rather unexpected. For example, at the end of the "My Arm's Big Adventure" quest (where you have to teach agriculture to a troll), you're attacked out of nowhere by a giant roc who randomly happens to be nearby.
  • Global Currency Exception: Tokkul in the Tz-haar caves, Trading sticks in Tai Bwo Wannai village, etc.
  • God Mode: After touching the Stone of Jas in "While Guthix Sleeps", all your stats are boosted to 255.
  • Gods Need Prayer Badly: Most of the gods gain strength from the prayers of their followers.
  • Gold Makes Everything Shiny: Gilded armor is rune armor, but golden. You can also upgrade your dwarven multicannon to a golden version, which is functionally identical, but is definitely shinier.
  • Gotta Kill Em All:
    • The "cute critters" in "The Eyes of Glouphrie". It turns out they're secretly evil, and you have to find and kill them all.
    • A side quest involves killing many various creatures and getting their bones for an old man.
  • Gradual Regeneration: You have ordinary Regenerating Health (10 Hit Points per minute). Additionaly, there are also items and prayers that can increase your health regeneration rate.
  • Grandpa God: Saradomin.
  • Grappling Hook Crossbow
  • Great Offscreen War: There's several, but by far the most prominent is the God Wars.
  • Green Aesop: "Perils Of Ice Mountain"
  • Green-Eyed Monster: The Do No Evil boss Ayuni is a literal example. What this implies of Amascut is unclear.
  • Grim Up North: "The North" is referenced in several quests. Not to mention the Wilderness, formerly the most dangerous area in the game, and still pretty frightening. In the days when Runescape was entirely free, the instructions to reach the Wilderness were simply "go north".
  • The Guards Must Be Crazy: This is acknowledged during a cut-scene in the "Garden of Tranquillity" Quest, where a "veteran" guard explains to a new recruit that the life expectancy for a Falador guard is about 30 seconds. Right on cue, a high-levelled "player" comes and slaughters both of them.
  • Guns in Church: Averted with Entrana, where weapons and armour are banned. Played straight everywhere else.
  • Half-Human Hybrid:
  • Hammerspace: In addition to the typical Bag of Holding mechanics, lots of Emote Animations involve pulling things out of Hammerspace. Many of the skillcape emotes are guilty of this; for example, the fletching emote has you pull a log, a knife, and a bowstring out of nowhere. The fishing emote produces not only a harpoon, but a small dock and a pond as well. And so on.
  • Hand Cannon: Available as a weapon after "Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf".
  • Harmless Freezing:
    • The God Wars dungeon and combatants inside seem to be perfectly fine after being frozen for thousands of years. Averted, however, with the Ancient Magicks freeze-you-in-an-ice-cube ice spells, which are some of the deadliest combat spells in the game.
    • There's a handicap called Randomly Freeze in the Dominion Tower. All it does is stops you from moving and stops you from attacking until you click on a target or you retaliate.
  • Hate Sink: Subverted with Gadderanks. Though he appears to be a complete unsympathetic character at first (being the one human who sided with the vampires instead of simply being their victim), he agrees to help the player defeat the vampires and it's later revealed that they have his own wife, making his actions understandable if not condonable.
  • Have a Nice Death: Dungeoneering:
    • "Crafting Calamity" -- Killed yourself with a chisel.
    • "Spontaneous Combustion" -- Burnt yourself to death (due to a screwup with a firemaking door).
    • "Fishing Folly" -- Died in a hilarious fishing accident. "You have a hilarious fishing accident that you would have told your grandchildren some day, had it not killed you."
  • He Knows About Timed Hits
  • He Who Must Not Be Named: Zaros
  • Healing Shiv: When you use elemental spells against elemental wizards at south of Falador with their respective elements.
  • Healing Spring: The Oo'Glog spa pools can cure disease and poison and restore you to full health.
  • Hell Gate: The Pest Control minigame has players cooperate to destroy interdimensional portals that are vomiting out deadly alien invaders.
  • Hell Hound: A standard demonic foe. Special mention goes to Bouncer, General Khazard's particularly vicious pet Hellhound.
  • Hero of Another Story: Several quests, such as Dream Mentor, have the Player Character team up with other NPC adventurers. After you part ways, they go off on their own adventures.
  • Hidden Elf Village: Lletya.
  • High-Class Glass: A TzHaar playing the role of a rich guy in a theatrical production wears a monocle for his costume.
  • Hints Are for Losers: In Dungeoneering, you can enable Guide Mode, which highlights the rooms you need to go through to reach the end. It gives you a large XP penalty.
  • Hive Queen: Oodles of them. You've got the Kalphite Queen, Penance Queen, Pest Queen, Jadinko Queen, Mother Mallum, and the most powerful of them all, the almighty Queen Black Dragon. They're all huge disgusting bug things, too, with the exception of the QBD, who is of course a dragon and the Jadinko Queen, who's actually a fairly attractive, graceful lizard person; she's the only one who's an ally, fittingly enough.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Both the Stone of Jas and Staff of Armadyl eventually come round to bite Lucien in the ass.
  • Holiday Mode: Special events happen every Halloween, Christmas, and Easter and all give out appropriately-themed costumes, emotes, and items.
  • Homing Boulders: Quite frequently, in fact. Happens to most projectiles (including some literal boulders), apart from some special types. As for non-exceptions, they will hit you, even if you teleport away.
  • Horny Vikings: The Fremennik.
  • Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Referenced in the Stronghold of Security dungeon, with its four levels: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The 2011 Deathcon II event reveals that they exist as characters as well.
  • HP to One: One of the Nomad's attacks hits your maximum HP minus one, so you must be at full HP (or higher) to survive.
  • Hulk Speak: Goblins, trolls, ogres, Glod from "Grim Tales", etc.
  • Human Cannonball:
    • In "A Clockwork Syringe", firing yourself out of the cannon directly is too dangerous, so you weld a chain to the cannonball, attach a barrel to it, and ride in that instead!
    • "Between a Rock" involves a dwarf firing you out of a cannon.
  • Humanoid Abomination: The Mahjarrat, which look like skeletons in robes but are actually immensely powerful creatures from other dimensions. This is an indication that they need to perform The Ritual again, as directly afterward they are much more fleshed out.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Numerous instances, notably during the Hand in the Sand quest.
  • Hybrid Monster:
    • Make your own, courtesy of the Tower of Life!
    • Hobgoblins, the result of Bandos breeding Orks and Goblins to produce strong but agile footsoldiers.
    • Chaos Dwogres, the result of the Red Axe at creating Dwarf-like creatures who are genetically able to cast Magic, but with the natural strength of an Ogre.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism
  • Adventure Narrator Syndrome: Nothing interesting happens.
  • An Ice Person:
    • Kamil.
    • The Ice Queen and her soldiers.
  • Idea Bulb: An emote.
  • Ignorance Is Bliss: In "Devious Minds".
  • Immortal Procreation Clause: The Dragonkin.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Zaros.
    • And as of "Ritual of the Mahjarrat," Lucien. With the same artifact that skewered Zaros, on top of that.
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy: Apparently, giant ants are much more dangerous than barbarians wielding large axes, and blood-drained human prisoners are stronger than healthy human citizens.
  • In Soviet Russia, Trope Mocks You: The examine text of the Spirit Jelly is "In Runescape, acid gets indigestion from YOU!"
  • Incredibly Lame Pun: This game has so many puns that it's often ridiculed. The Crawling Hand, for example:

I need to make some furniture, could you lend me a HAND?
Haha. Very funny.

  • Indy Ploy: Invoked to fight the mind-reading Vyrewatch. Because they can predict your next move by reading your mind, the solution to defeat them is to have no idea what your next move is going to be.
  • Infinity-1 Sword: The abyssal whip was once considered the best all-purpose weapon in the game. With the introduction of Dungeoneering, a chaotic rapier has higher stats in every area, but requires a whopping 200k dungeoneering tokens (equivalent to about two million dungeoneering xp, or just over level 80) to obtain and has to be recharged with gold every few hours. The abyssal whip is tradable at a relatively affordable price and can be equipped as soon as you have the required level to wield it.
  • Infinity+1 Sword: Chaotic weapons are a very straight example. More powerful than their Infinity-1 Sword equivalents in every area, but they can only be obtained by paying 200k dungeoneering tokens. That's equivalent to dozens of hours of training, and once you obtain them, you need to spend wads of cash to repair them when they degrade after ten hours in combat.
  • Instant Death Radius: Several of the strongest boss monsters.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The game is full of them.
  • Interface Spoiler: Akrisae's Barrows Set is easily viewable on the Grand Exchange while searching for Barrows Armour, despite it not making too much sense for those who haven't done "Ritual of the Mahjarrat".
  • An Interior Designer Is You: Courtesy of the construction skill.
  • Interspecies Romance:
    • Many players' interpretation of their character's relationship with Zanik. The fact that her house has a double bed only adds to this. As does the player turning into a goblin during Land of the Goblins... Even Zanik ponders What Could Have Been in one of her letters to the player.

Zanik: And I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel something for you. Back when we were about to face Bandos, when we were standing by the portal about to go through, a part of me really wanted to grab you and kiss you. But I thought that was crazy, I'd just had an evil god inside my head and I thought I was going to die and I wasn't thinking straight and so in the end I didn't do anything. But now it seems maybe you wanted me to, and now I have to tell you I can't, and I'm sorry, and I have to try to explain.

    • Also, Dororan and Gudrun from Gunnar's Ground.
    • One way to interpret Bob and Neite, since Bob used to be human... although it's an unusual case, as Neite was once a human as well.
    • The marriage of the King Black Dragon and the Kalphite Queen, to coincide with the real marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
  • Involuntary Charity Donation: This is the plot of the "Let Them Eat Pie" quest. The peasants of the town are starving while the disgustingly fat rich glutton lives in luxury, so the Player Character poisons him with a disgusting pie made of rotten meat, steals from him while he's puking his guts out, and thus the citizens get their food.
  • It Makes Sense in Context: One quest involves working with a gnome to commit terrorism for a group of secret government conspirators, which is done by infecting the people and livestock of an entire city with a virus by shooting dye-soaked toads at a farmer's flock of sheep. The plague is a hoax.
  • It May Help You on Your Quest: In the Christmas 2010 event, where Santa Cl- I mean, Thorvar Crittersmash sent players into a Daemonheim dungeon he'd failed, giving them a bucket and telling them they'd know when to use it. After the third puzzle, that bucket became very useful because it was needed to catch the heim crab that stole Santa's hat.
  • It Will Never Catch On: Seen in "Meeting History".
  • Item Crafting
  • Jerkass Gods: Originally averted, with Zamorak being the only flat-out jerk among them, but as the game has gotten Darker and Edgier, dirty little secrets of the other gods have been coming to light. To wit: Guthix, formerly the nicest and still the most popular among players, was (apparently) complicit in Bandos's attempted genocide of the cave goblins, Saradomin was complicit in Zamorak's attempted genocide of the Zarosians, Bandos is an all-around Jerkass, and Zamorak has just continued being a jerk. The only major gods to escape this trope now are Armadyl and, oddly enough, Zaros, the latter of whom seems to be who the Player Character will be aligned with in the greater Myth Arc.
  • Joke Item: Several, especially the holiday items. Ironically, some of these are now the most valuable items in the game.
  • Justified Tutorial
  • Karma Meter: At least two quests let you choose which god to side with. Subverted in that whatever you choose has no real impact outside of those quests.
  • Kill It with Fire:
    • Both Glacors and Ice Strykewyrms are very weak against fire spells.
    • You fight Evil Trees by lighting fires underneath them to burn them down.
  • Killed Off for Real: Duradel, Turael, Cyrisus, Sloane, Ghommal and Hazelmere. Players are currently waiting for their Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Also Sigmund in The Chosen Commander, and in the Blood Runs Deep quest, Prince Brand and Princess Astrid. In the Ritual of the Mahjarrat, Jhallan and Lucien
  • King Arthur: Camelot is located just east of Seers' Village. King Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table can all be found there. Morgan le Faye lives in a tower to the south. A couple quests revolve around these guys, often referencing the Arthurian Legend.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: So much that there's even a thieving skill for it.
  • Knight Templar: Sigmund.
  • Knockout Gas: The quest "The Great Brain Robbery" has a section where Harmony Island is covered in knockout gas. You have to wear a scuba-diving helmet or you'll be knocked unconscious.
  • Large Ham:
    • Yk'Lagor the Thunderous.
    • Sigmund from the Cave Goblin series. It doesn't help he gets a hammy voice upgrade in the Dominion Tower.
  • Last Ditch Move: Nex uses the Wrath prayer upon death.
  • Last of His Kind:
    • Thurgo though you do find another one, and Ramarno, during Defender of Varrock.
    • Played straight with General Graardor. The only other Ourg in the game, Slash Bash, is a zombie, and even then it's only implied that he's a member of Graardor's race.
    • Char, she's the last of the Auspah.
  • Laughing Mad: Blink.
  • Leaked Experience: Taken to extremes in the Soul Wars minigame before it was updated. It allowed players to earn bonus experience in the slayer skill without doing any of the fighting in the game itself, up to the maximum level the skill allowed if one worked at it enough. This led to players who, with no combat experience whatsoever, are masters of a skill involving killing everything that moves.
  • Leitmotif:
    • The goblins have one, the H.A.M. members have one, and many others have one, too.
    • For areas, Daemonheim floors often have a single motif heard throughout most of the floors with the same theme.
  • Lethal Lava Land: The Karamja volcano, parts of the Wilderness, etc.
  • Level Grinding: The game is full of ways to do it, and it's the only way to really reach the higher levels. It's generally referred to as "training" by RuneScape players.
  • Life Drain: Several, including onyx-tipped bolts, Soul Split, and the Guthan's armor set, among others.
  • Light and Mirrors Puzzle: One of the hardest quests has quite a sadistic version of this: COLOURED lights and mirrors, which is much worse than it sounds, all the while being attacked by shadow monsters. The sequel features one as well, though in a much smaller area and without monsters attacking you.
  • Load-Bearing Boss: Bork.
  • Loot Boxes: The daily mini-game, Treasure Hunter, gives the gamer five crates and can only pick one, but they'll need a key to unlock, but those need to be obtain by either drops or using real money to buy a pack of keys.
  • Lord British Postulate: Before the release of the Ivandis Flail, Vyrewatch couldn't be killed. This didn't stop players from trying, and succeeding.
  • Losing Your Head: A zombie pirate in "A Clockwork Syringe".
  • Lost Forever: Holiday item rewards, but every holiday event gives you the emote rewards from previous events. Holiday items that can be traded such as the party hats are worth millions of coins as a result.
  • Luck-Based Mission:
    • Stomp. Every time he gets down by a 1/3 of his health, the ceiling caves in, causing rocks to fall, as well as small lodestones that have to be used on larger ones to stop Stomp from healing that 1/3 of health you just took off. The problem? The rocks are impassible and can block off the large or small lodestones. This was eventually changed so that the rocks can be cleared out of the way.
    • Dungeoneering has a puzzle where you have to sneak past a purple orb in a sort of turn-based puzzle, but your character can randomly 'stumble' which gives the purple orb a free move on you, making it nearly impossible to complete if this happens more than once.
    • In "Mourning's End Part 2", you have to cross a set of wall hand-holds with a ridiculously low success chance and a long run back when you fail. And you have to do this TWICE!
  • Lucky Rabbit's Foot: A strung rabbit foot — also known as a rabbit foot necklace — is an item that gives players a better chance of getting a bird's nest when cutting trees or ivy; it also gives them a better chance of getting long and curved bones in combat.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father:
    • Invoked in "Salt in the Wound". When a mind-controlled villager asks you to identify yourself in order to gain entry to Mother Mallum's lair, one of the options in the Dialogue Tree is "I AM YOUR FATHER!" (If you select it, she'll look at you funny and tell you to go away.)
    • Bob the Cat tries it out if you speak with him while you have a cat with you. He and your cat will quote the Star Wars scene, with Bob as Vader and your cat as Luke. It's just a joke, of course.
  • MacGuffin Delivery Service: You, usually during quests. Occasionally lampshaded.
  • Magick
  • Marathon Level: The Underground Pass, a long trek through a cave filled with monsters, traps, and puzzles. Bring lots of food, you will need it.
  • Mass Monster Slaughter Sidequest: Players who slay enough chompy birds with a special luring technique will be rewarded with fancy hats.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • The evil pirate Rabid Jack's ship is named This Albatross.
    • From the "Fremennik Trials" quest: Swensen the Navigator's name is the solution to his maze. Notice how his name contains only the letters N, S, E, and W--the four cardinal directions.
  • Microtransactions: Players can pay cash to buy additional spins on the Squeal of Fortune, which gives item and xp rewards.
  • Mid-Air Bobbing: Seen with the pets from "The Firemaker's Curse".
  • Milestone Celebration: Recipe for Disaster, RuneScape's 100th quest.
  • Minecart Madness: At least one quest involves navigating a maze of minecart turnoffs.
  • Min-Maxing: Fairly common; characters who take this to its logical conclusion are known as "pures".
    • Frequently, PvP-ers will level Attack and Strength disproportionately while leaving Defence ridiculously low or untouched, turning their character into a Glass Cannon who can down more balanced characters of the same combat level. This works fine unless their opponent finds a way to tank the hits and fight back.
    • Skill pures also exist, whereby characters do not level combat skills at all while working one or more non-combat skills up to level 99. This can be a detriment, however, as many lucrative skilling areas are guarded by aggressive NPCs who can and will prey on low-levelled players who lack the sense to flee.
  • Missing Secret: Acts as a form of Gameplay and Story Segregation in that many more cities and civilizations exist in the background than have actually been coded into the game. As a result, an absurd number of major cities and entire nations (most prominently Prifddidas, Menaphos, and Arposandra) are in isolation, be it mythic or overtly enforced by snooty border guards who will tell you that the place is "closed to outsiders". If an update eventually rolls around that lets you in (as with Keldagrim or Meiyerditch), this becomes an example of Broken Bridge: you'll still have to do a quest to get in and the people inside will be fearful or distrustful of outsiders. And the city will still be full of places you can't access.
  • Mithril: Downplayed. Mithril is stronger than steel, but still a rather low-level armour, at only 20 Defense to wear. In accordance with tradition, though, it weighs less than other metals.
  • Mix-and-Match Weapon: The Ivandis Flail, a combination flail/sickle/magical staff designed to battle Vyrewatch vampyres.
  • Mobile Shrubbery: The penguin's disguises in Penguin Hide and Seek.
  • The Mole: Many: King Lathas and one elf faction, more obviously Sigmund and the Stranger in Canifis.
  • Money Sink: The entire Construction and Summoning skills. Long overdue because of the billions high alchemy was bringing into the game.
  • Money Spider: Lots of enemies. Not really killed for gold, since nothing really drops a lot of gold. Rather, they are killed for items to be sold.
  • Monster Is a Mommy: Rocs and dagannoths in their respective quests.
  • Mordor: The Wilderness.
  • Motive Rant: The killer delivers one at the end of "One Piercing Note".
  • Multi-Armed and Dangerous: All TzHaar and TokHaar. Four arms, three fingers. They even use a base twelve maths system. Not all of them use that many weapons, though.
  • Names to Run Away From Really Fast:
    • The Dungeoneering bosses certainly have this. All of the Kal'Gerion generals (demons) and Stalkers (giant eyeballs) have very intimidating names:
      • From the Kal'Gerion Army: To'Kash the Bloodchiller, Har'Lakk the Riftsplitter, Bal'lak the Pummeller, Yk'Lagor the Thunderous and Kal'Ger the Warmonger.
      • Stalkers: How else would you react to names the likes of Plane-freezer Lakhrahnaz, Night-gazer Khighorahk, Shadow-forger Ihlakhizan, Flesh-spoiler Haasghenahk and World-gorger Shukarhazh?
    • Lucien. Sure, he doesn't sound like much, but if you meet him, run. Then teleport. Then log out. Then leave your house. Then book a flight to Russia. Then sneak aboard a rocket to the moon.
    • Nex... a single syllable that causes even the gods themselves to quake in fear.
  • Nature Spirit: One is found in God Wars Dungeon and the second is found in Mort Myre.
  • Nay Theist: The cave goblins. Considering their former god was both a Blood Knight and a Jerkass, it's hard to blame them.
  • Never Trust A Twitter: Every week Jagex releases a hint to the next update on Twitter. More often than not these hints provide no clues to the update whatsoever and make no sense until AFTER the update is released. The worst offender is the hint "Ruby Dragon" and the update was a thieving guild quest. There was no way the players were supposed to guess that based on the hint.
  • Nice Hat: The party hats. Their rare status makes them Serious Business.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The ends of Spirit of Summer and Enakhra's Lament. Certain parts of various other quests involve the player inadvertantly causing things to get worse before having to make them better. Some, unfortunately, are a result of stupidity being the only option.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: There are zombie monkeys, ninja monkeys, zombie monks, ninja implings, zombie pirates, zombie pirate robots ("barrelchests"), etc.
  • No Fourth Wall:
    • The barkeeper in the Blue Moon Inn in Varrock is aware that RuneScape is only a computer game and says as much if the player asks him for advice.
    • In the 2011 Easter Event, the player explicitly tells a squirrel to stop breaking the fourth wall.
  • No Hero Discount: Played straight most of the time. Occasionally Averted when a quest reward gives you a discount --for example, after proving your merit as a sailor and defeating some pirates in Cabin Fever, you can charter ships at half price.
  • No Pronunciation Guide: Until the 21st of February, when they actually added a Pronunciation Guide. The fact that they bothered to make it in the first place should give you an idea of how many instances of this trope exist in the game, such as the "Mahjarrat"[5] race, or the city of "Ardougne"[6].
  • Noodle Incident:
    • Marion the bartender said that she lost her skill in archery after an incident involving a Chinchompa named Fluffy and a butter churn. Also, there are these weird sea slugs called sluglings that you pick up to make rum. When asking Captain Braindeath why they call them sluglings, he responds that they call them sluglings because of "a long, complicated story involving three dead seagulls and a busted pipe". Why you even need slugs of any kind to make rum in the first place is a question better left unanswered.
    • The various misfortunes that befall the Varrock Museum's expedition barge.
  • Nothing but Skulls
  • Nothing Is Scarier: The Wilderness. Particularly the deeper areas where there's hardly anything, save for a few NPCs, and you could be attacked by a powerful player-killer any moment. The ambiance does not make anything better...
  • Notice This:
    • When the game wants to mark an object as important, a blinking yellow arrow will often appear above it. This is used to mark posts in the Brimhaven Agility Arena, to mark destinations in the tutorials, and so on.
    • The pinball random event has glowing rings appear around the post you're supposed to tag.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity:
    • Traiborn, considering his role in Love Story, and the fact that one of RuneScape's legendary heroes has not yet robbed the Wizards' Tower because of him.
    • Wizard Grayzag. He summons little imps as part of his wizarding career, but there's a lesser demon in the room next to him... and then the quest The Void Stares Back brings even more surprises. Really. He accomplishes two things -- being behind the whole quest line, and causing the real, irreversible death of an NPC.
  • Obvious Rule Patch:
    • The restrictions on where you can place a cannon. This is Lampshaded in a Postbag from the Hedge by Nulodion, claiming that he just felt as if he wasn't permitted to set up a cannon in dangerous areas.
    • "You can't light a fire here."
    • The Flash Powder Factory was patched to give a 50% reduction in points whenever you leave with more than 2 minutes left on the timer, to promote players to play through entire matches. Previously, players would leave the game early to get around Diminishing Returns for Balance by starting a new round.
    • The Dominion Sword can only be wielded two-handed, despite obviously being only a longsword, in order to fit in with the other two-handed magic and ranged dominion weapons.
  • Off with His Head:
    • Done pretty nastily in the Dungeoneering dungeon. There are dinosaurs that you can kill for leather to make armour, and although it can be done through combat, it kind of destroys most of the hides you could have gotten. However, you can design a Hunter trap designed to get a lot more hides by invoking this trope when the dinosaur goes for the bait.
    • Stomp. The entire boss fight is an attempt to destroy the portal that Stomp's head is sticking through. When this is achieved (after enduring a mountain of Fake Difficulty), the portal acts like a guillotine, separating Stomp's head from his body in a bloody, gruesome mess.
  • Offscreen Afterlife: There is at least one, if not many, but every ghost or otherwise dead character you encounter hasn't crossed over yet, and those who have come Back from the Dead (such as Zanik and, well, you) have no memory of it. The Spirit Plane that you summon summoning beasts from appears to just be a plane full of ghostlike critters rather than an afterlife for dead critters. Zanik herself describes the time period when she's dead as... nothing. The moments before she was revived were the moments just before her death.
  • Oh Crap: Many moments. Sometimes by NPCs during quests and the like (Garden of Tranquility's guard scene), and often by players (usually when finding a new room in Dungeoneering).
  • Old Shame: Romeo and Juliet, to the point where they edited a four-year-old letter (Issue 14 of Postbag From the Hedge, published December 2006) just to further erase the quest's existence.
  • Older Is Better: Equipment originating from the Barrows brothers or the Third Age is usually much better than any of the armor made during the Fifth Age.
  • Ominous Pipe Organ: Yk'Lagor's theme and several tracks in Morytania.
  • One Steve Limit: Parodied in some cases (an entire town where everyone is named Ali the Barman, Ali the Snakecharmer, etc.) and simply averted in others. Played straight with players' screennames.
  • One-Hit Kill: The Penance Trident's "Reap" special attack instantly kills the enemy. Of course, since it only works on low-level non-boss NPCs, it isn't very useful.
  • Only Smart People May Pass: Has an entire quest dedicated to this trope, including a chemistry puzzle loaded with chemistry-related in-jokes like nitrous oxide and dihydrogen monoxide.
  • Oracular Head: Postie Pete.
  • Orcus on His Throne: Many villains. Literally with Nomad, whose Cool Chair really does make him more powerful.
  • Our Angels Are Different: They're Icyene, such as Commander Zilyana.
  • Our Demons Are Different: Those in RuneScape originate from different planes and resemble red humanoids with big teeth and tails. Stronger ones have wings.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Created by a race known as dragonkin, which happen to look like Skeksis. Also, as well as various types of coloured dragons, there are dragons made entirely of metal.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The steampunk variety.
  • Our Goblins Are Wickeder: The ordinary surface goblins have green skin. Their intelligence is as high as most humans', but the way they're raised, they usually never reach their full potential. There are also cave goblins which have pale green skin and large eyes and are far more intelligent than their surface-dwelling bretheren.
  • Our Homunculi Are Different
  • Our Liches Are Different:
    • "Skeleton Mages" are an attackable monster in a few places. There's also Iban, who was resurrected by a witch and has a phylactery in the form of a doll whose parts you have to gather and assemble in order to defeat him.
    • Subverted with the Mahjarrat, who are powerful mages with skeletal faces and a penchant for necromancy... but are actually just a separate species whose default form happens to look like a human skeleton.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires may not even be undead, as far as anyone knows. Also, see Phantasy Spelling below.
  • Painting the Fourth Wall: Vanstrom Klause's shadow attack can be avoided if you aren't looking at him. That includes rotating the camera angle.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: Both averted and played straight.
  • Percent Damage Attack: Enchanted ruby bolts have a chance to take away 20% of target's health (with a few exceptions) at the cost of decimating player's health.
  • Phantasy Spelling: Vampires and vampyres both exist, but the two are fairly different. To be more specific, vampires are feral were-bats, while vampyres are more civilized, taking on a more human appearance the stronger they get. But that wouldn't stop either of them from chowing down on your neck, given the chance. A recent update has changed standard vampires to also being spelled vampyre however, for unknown reasons.
  • Physical God:
    • The Mahjarrat, especially Lucien after he acquired two artefacts of the gods, both with immense power.
    • The Mahjarrat who invented Dungeoneering wants to bring Zamorak back into the physical world.
    • The Player Character briefly becomes this after touching the Stone of Jas and being infused with a FRACTION of it's power.
  • Pimped-Out Cape: Skillcapes, with their ornate trimmings and over-the-top shoulderpads.
  • Pinata Enemy: The Living Rock Patriarch, which gives 30% more experience than a normal enemy and drops a number of noted items such as Diamonds, Rune Ore, Blood and Mud Runes as a 100% drop, totaling little over 200k for one kill, though it takes a couple hours to respawn per world and is surrounded by other aggressive monsters inside a single combat area.
  • Pirate: Loads of them, including a quest series based on them.
  • Pirate Parrot
  • A Plague on Both Your Houses: Zaros, in the events described in the Ghostly Robes miniquest.
  • Planet of Steves: Pollnivneach, where everybody's name is Ali.
  • Player-Generated Economy: With the Grand Exchange, trading is much more organized and elaborate than most other MMORPGs.
  • Plot Coupon: You'll be collecting these a lot during quests.
  • Plot Induced Stupidity: Several quests involve you being quite gullible. Of course, you can not be gullible, but you can't finish the quest by not being gullible.
  • Plot Tailored to the Party: In the final scene of "Salt in the Wound", you need Ezekial's explosives expertise to break through damaged walls, Kennith's persuasive abilities to manipulate a mind-controlled villager, and Eva's strength and combat skill to hold off the guards and deal the finishing blow.
  • Plotline Death: Quest NPCs seem to suffer from these. Others, including players, will be perfectly fine, except during the quests which need you to die.
  • Pocket Dimension:
    • The Runecrafting Guild was created within the 'shadow' of the old Wizard's Tower.
    • For the 2011 Christmas Event, a new Wizard's Tower was made for a Christmas Party in one. When asked about where exactly it is in relation to the original Wizard's Tower, the wizards will mention that you need to know the alphabet above Z to understand.
  • Poisoned Weapons: Daggers, spears, and ammo for ranged weapons.
  • Port Town: Several of them: Phasmatys, Port Sarim, Rellekka, etc.
  • Portal Cut: This is the fate of one of the boss creatures in Dungeoneering. The boss, simply called Stomp, is a large worm-like creature coming through a portal that calls down rocks during the fight. After the portal gets weakened several times, at the end of the fight the portal snaps shut, resulting in a surprisingly graphic death -- the wall where the portal was gets rather bloodstained, and the monster essentially thrashes itself to death.
  • Post Mortem One Liner: Thok delivers one after each boss.
  • Post-Modern Magik: A rare example: the Lumbridge Cook's magic cooking range.

Cook: It's called the Cook-o-Matic 25, and it uses a combination of state-of-the-art temperature regulation and magic.

  • Powerful Pick: Played with; while pickaxes are wieldable, they are much less effective than weapons made of the same grade of metal (or even a couple of levels below them). However, they're not worthless in combat, as they are still stronger than some weapons made of lesser metals. Some bosses even have armor that has to be broken with the pickaxe before you can damage them with normal weapons (although you can still hack away at them with your pickaxe if you wish).
  • Protagonist-Centered Morality/Gameplay and Story Segregation: There's no Karma Meter in this game, so you could theoretically slaughter everyone attackable in a given city and still for all plot purposes be considered that city's greatest hero. The game pulls no punches in mocking this.
  • Psychological Torment Zone: Tolna's Rift.
  • Public Domain Character: King Arthur, Romeo and Juliet (gone), Robin Hood, etc.
  • Punny Name: A Running Gag with the White Knights. They all have names like Sir Amik Varze (ceramic vase), Sir Tiffy Cashien (certification), Sir Tendeth (certain death; guess what happens to him), Sir Vyvin (surviving), Sir Prysin (surprising), the list goes on and on. Apparently, it even extends to family members--Sir Tiffy Cashien's adopted daughter is named Eva (evocation).
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Except during the Recruitment Drive quest, where the player must be female in order to beat one of the challenges, as you must fight a character that no man can defeat. Males who have to pay for the switch get their money back and a free "makeover" voucher to make themselves male again.
  • Purple Is Powerful: Zaros.
  • Puzzle Boss: The Gluttonous Behemoth, which will rapidly heal itself by feeding on a nearby carcass if its HP drops to half. Put a player or a fire between the Behemoth and its food source.
  • Rage Against the Heavens: The cave goblins' questline runs on this trope. Justified somewhat in that the cave goblins' former god falls somewhere between Blood Knight and God of Evil, although all of the other gods take a PR drubbing as well.
  • Rainbow Pimp Gear:
    • You can equip any combination of clothes you want. ANY. Keep in mind that the equipment in this game ranges from blue armor to magenta robes to mime costumes and everything in between.
    • The Infinity mage robes play this trope very straight.
  • Random Drop
    • Rare Random Drop: The Draconic Visage from almost all dragons, the godswords from the God Wars Dungeon and many more.
  • Randomly Generated Level: The premise of Daemonheim and the Dungeoneering skill.
  • Reality Warper: Jagex moderators, within the game world. A few of their abilities:
    • Teleport anywhere on the map instantly
    • Be any combat level
    • Have infinite lifepoints
    • One Hit KO any monster
    • Spawn infinite amounts of any item
    • Float in midair
    • Walk on lava (Ironically enough, the Wildywyrm can swim through it)
  • Recurring Riff: Dungeoneering areas. Some other areas too.
  • Recurring Traveller: Bob the cat, Elfinlocks.
  • Red Herring: Subverted. A red herring is crucial to solving a puzzle in the Fremenik Trials quest. Then again, it also turns out to be a regular herring covered in some kind of dye. Zig-Zagging Trope?
  • Reference Overdosed: Plenty of them everywhere.
  • Relax-O-Vision: Parodied.
  • Reset Button: Unless you want the entire world to be rebuilt from scratch, do not break the Edicts of Guthix.
  • Retirony:
    • Turael mentions during While Guthix Sleeps that he may retire soon. He dies during the quest.
    • Examining one of The Forgotten Warrior's allies during Vengeance results in the message "She was about to retire."
  • Reverse Grip: The Dragon dagger and the Keris.
  • Road Runner PC: You can run. Most non-player characters cannot.
  • Rodents of Unusual Size: Giant rats. Big enough to get rat steaks from them.
  • Room Full of Crazy: A progressive example in Melzar's Maze, which has a number of cabinets that can be opened and searched. The first ones contain books, stacks of paper, and other mundane objects. As you progress, you start to uncover complete human skeletons, followed by stacks of loose bones, each one carefully labeled with a number. The last two merely contains piles of dead rats. Notes found in nearby bookshelves indicate Melzar was attempting to raise his countrymen from the dead, but was having trouble getting beyond ghosts and animated skeletons. The final record says he's selected two to try growing flesh on... one room before you encounter a pair of zombies.
  • Ruins for Ruins Sake: Zigzagged with Daemonheim. Many areas of it seem to have been designed to be lived in, such as barrack-like bedrooms, libraries, and dinner halls. On the other hand, there is no concrete reason for there to be small fish ponds, lodestones, golem statues, and other puzzles in some rooms.
  • Running Gag:
    • There are several references to the short lifespan of guards.
    • Cabbages. They have almighty power and are key points in a number of plotlines. They were also part of a few April Fool's Day updates, notably one where they all became quite lively and you met the God of Cabbages, Brassica Prime.
    • It's been quite well established that penguins are evil communist masterminds.
    • Heim Crabs are also developers' favorite target for running gags.
    • Anything about skeletons and their eating habits examine texts.
    • Horses being mythological creatures in the world of Runescape.
    • Your character really doesn't like the navigator of the Lady Zay.
    • Pirate Pete has a tendency to give concussions to those who travel with him. Flanderized during A Clockwork Syringe.
  • Rustproof Blood: Present in some dungeons.
  • Sacrificial Lamb:
    • In In Search of the Myreque, you're introduced to several of the resistance group against Morytania's vampires, and all of them are given backstories and motivations for joining the resistance. And then two of them are killed when the villain of the quest shows up.
    • In Quiet Before the Swarm, you get introduced to eight of the Void Knights and a few other people at their outpost. You talk to all of them and learn some things about them. Six of them die shortly afterwards.
  • Sacrificial Lion: In While Guthix Sleeps, NPCs that the player has probably spent a lot of time with during previous quests, slayer tasks, and so forth are killed by the Big Bad to let the player know just how serious this situation is.
  • Sadistic Choice: Choosing between saving Korasi and saving Jessika in The Void Stares Back.
  • Sand Worm: Strykewyrms, particularly the desert strykewyrm.
  • Sapient House: The Dominion Tower was once a young boy whose mind was sealed into the tower to escape his dying body.
  • Say Your Prayers: And indeed, praying can often save your life in this game.
  • Scaled Up: The Completionist cape emote briefly allows the player character to transform into a giant black dragon. (The trimmed version of the cape transforms you into a golden dragon instead.)
  • Scenery Gorn: After a certain quest, Edgeville gets utterly trashed by a savage attack by The Dragonkin. It's functionally identical to before, but there are enormous scorch marks and lots of eternal (but non-spreading or damaging) fire everywhere.
  • Schmuck Bait: In "Let Them Eat Pie", you feed someone a rancid pie, then listen from downstairs. You hear him begin to be violently sick, then the game tells you the sound effects only get worse, and asks if you're sure you want to hear the rest. The sound effects really do only get worse.
  • Screw Destiny: Happens in The Chosen Commander.
  • Sealed Badass in a Can: Azzanadra, the powerful mahjarrat who was sealed away in a pyramid by his enemies.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can:
    • This seems to have been the standard operating procedure for dealing with anything associated with Zaros, although technically speaking the "Evil" is in question.
    • Mother Mallum of the "Slug Menace" quest.
    • Dungeoneering was created by a Mahjarrat who wants to return Zamorak to the physical world.
  • Secret Test: The Lady of the Lake secretly tests your generosity in the "Merlin's Crystal" quest by disguising herself as a beggar and asking you for food.
  • Selective Condemnation: So prevalent that even Lampshade Hanging is done to that.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: Some players stay at combat level 3[7], and only level up non-combat skills like cooking.
  • Senseless Sacrifice: Many characters in While Guthix Sleeps.
  • Separated by a Common Language: Being developed in Britain and using British terms for items can and does confuse American players unfamiliar with the game and British terminlogy in general. Adding to some confusion, some "American" (or, rather, more easily recognizable internationally) symbols and terms are used, such as the American dollar sign symbol for banks on the minimap.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike:
    • Recipe for Disaster, which at the time of its release was the game's longest and most difficult quest, is the sequel to Cook's Assistant, a tutorial quest.
    • Demon Slayer and its sequel Shadow of the Storm. From an early-game freeplay quest where your biggest Fetch Quest is 25 bones and your biggest fear of dying is accidentally aggroing a level 9 mage, to a long, desert-based quest with several puzzles and a level 100 boss capable of using protection prayers.
    • Infamously in the Plague quest line, it goes from two easy (if rather long) quests to the Underground Pass, which is a very, very long trek through a monster-infested cave. Some people still consider Underground Pass to be one of the hardest quests in the game, and the quests afterwards (Regicide, Roving Elves, and the infamous Mourning's Ends) just get harder.
  • Serial Escalation: With achievement capes. Which Pimped-Out Cape will you be wearing today?
    1. The original achievement cape was the ordinary blue cape, which, in RuneScape Classic, was only available through the shop in the Champions' Guild, which required 33 quest points to enter. That was before capes could be dyed any color, so wearing a blue cape was proof that you'd done (at the time) almost all of the quests in the game.
    2. Of course, eventually the Legends' Guild was added to the game, and with it came the new, even more prestigious Cape of Legends, which could prove that you'd gained over 100 quest points to access the Legends' Guild.
    3. Then we got Skillcapes (requiring level 99 in one skill) and the Quest cape (all quests complete).
    4. Not enough? How about the Dungeoneering Master Cape, for level 120? (Dungeoneering is the only skill that maxes out at level 120 rather than 99. There is still a cape for Level 99 Dungeoneering.)
    5. Next up we have the Max cape, for all skills at level 99.
    6. But wait, there's more! The Completionist cape can be obtained after maxing out every skill, completing every quest, completing every miniquest, and completing every task.
    7. Thought we were done? Nope! If you want a trimmed Completionist cape, you also need to do all of this. For perspective, the Castle Wars requirement alone takes nearly two thousand hours to achieve. Minimum.
  • Shaped Like Itself: "Many words could be used to describe the force of nature that is Nex - graceful, vicious, quick, cruel, efficient, deadly. The only word that truly describes her, though, is Nex." This gains some additional meaning when you learn that "Nex" is the Latin word for a violent death.
  • Shapeshifting:
    • Mahjarrats can change their forms to whatever they want, which ends badly for Jhallan in The Tale of the Muspah -- he has a nightmare while he hibernates and transforms into a Muspah, a mythical beast in Mahjarrat culture, which takes most of his strength.
    • Various quests require the Player Character to turn into a goblin, a monkey, etc.
  • Shifting Sand Land: The Kharidian desert.
  • Shoot the Messenger: Kal'Ger the Warmonger does it when he hears bad news.
  • Shout-Out: So many, we had to split off a separate subpage. See RuneScape/Shout Out.
  • Shrug of God: Jagex deliberately leaves Zaros' alignment ambiguous.
  • Significant Anagram: Wahisietel is a mahjarrat who hasn't been seen in decades and is believed to be in hiding. Ali the Wise is a mysterious man who seems to be an expert on mahjarrat and is very interested in their goings-on. Jagex deliberately drew attention to this parallel by using the name as a word-scramble puzzle in a Chaos Elemental letter--some people solved it and got Ali the Wise, others solved it and got Wahisietel, and the fandom said, "Hey, wait a minute..."
  • Simon Says Mini Game: Present during the 2010 Christmas event.
  • Sinister Scythe: A holiday item.
  • Skull for a Head: The Mahjarrat.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The cavern you explore during Myths of the White Lands and Trollweiss.
  • Snake Oil Salesman: Lampshaded.

Musician: "Did you know music has curative properties? Music stimulates the healing humours in your body, so they say."
Player: "Who says that, then?"
Musician: "I was told by a traveling medical practitioner, selling oil extracted from snakes. It's a commonly known fact, so he said."

  • Some Dexterity Required: In the early days of RuneScape, things including but not limited to mining, smithing, and woodcutting required much more clicking than they do nowadays.
  • Sound of No Damage: If your enemy is hitting zeroes on you, there's a sound effect of stuff scraping off your armor (if you are wearing armor, that is).
  • Space Compression: Cities, towns and other settlements take almost as much space as forests, even though largest cities have the size of a medium-sized village. It takes only less than half an hour for a player to walk from one end of the mainland to another. Yet the manual, NPC stories and historic tales might leave the impression of large cities and vast lands. Very notable example is Burgh De Rott. Vampyres think that town is deserted, but it's less than 100 meters from the capital of Morytania where town should clearly be seen, especially for the fact that flying vyrewatch approaches very close to the settlement.
  • Space-Filling Path: The Ourania Runecrafting Altar, among others.
  • Spikes of Doom: Present in some of the locations like agility courses. They won't kill you instantly though.
  • Spiteful AI: The Chaos Dwarf Battlefield is a prime example. Attacking any chaos dwarf causes all of them to become aggressive towards you, ignoring the Black Guard that are attacking them - getting shot at by 5-6 chaos dwarf hand cannoneers at once can kill you pretty quickly, unless you have the Protect from Missiles prayer/Deflect Missiles curse on, in which case, they'll walk all the way across the battlefield to start bashing you with their hand cannon instead of firing at the Black Guard. This can be abused to lure them to the back of the battlefield, where Black Guard berserkers will make quick work of them, and they do go back to their normal routine of engaging the Black Guard after some time has passed, though.
  • Stalked by the Bell
  • The Starscream:
    • Zamorak is a successful version of this to Zaros.
    • Branches of Darkmeyer reveals that Vanescula Drakan serves as one to her brother Lord Drakan. She even kills her other brother Ranis during the quest.
  • Stat Grinding: You do not actually level up your character; your combat level is calculated based upon a series of formulae that only use certain skills deemed combat skills. You don't get all of them increased at once, you instead have to level them up individually. The way you do so is to practice your skill so that you gain experience for them. Non-combat skills are leveled up the same way.
  • Stealth Pun:
    • Players with high enough dungeoneering can raise a smaller version of a Stalker (floating eyeball monsters that live in Daemonheim) as a pet. Speaking with the pet yields a variety of creepy dialogues in which the sneakerpeeper sings songs confessing its eternal love for you and claims to collect your hair, bellybutton lint, and dead skin to make hairbrushes, slippers, and hats. Well, that explains why they're called "Stalkers".
    • At first glance, the quest "A Tail of Two Cats" might look like it's already met its one-pun-per-title quota. But if you look a little closer, you'll notice that it's suspiciously close to "Kitties".
    • When you wear a Monkey Cape, you've got a monkey on your back.
  • Stock Femur Bone: It's strange how majority of creatures seem to drop these kind of bones.
  • Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle: The Three Plus Five Make Four puzzle, the Fox Chicken Grain Puzzle, and many others.
  • Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: Bard Roberts' "The Great Brain Robbery" shanty ends with the lines "Mi-Gor tried to stop your heart's pace / Your foe's arm part anchor, part mace / Struck without delay / But him ye did slay / made him look a total...[beat]...moron."
  • Summoning Ritual:
    • Some of the quests include this. "Shadow of the Storm", for example.
    • Bilrach intends to do this to Zamorak.
  • Summon Magic: The Summoning skill, despite not technically being part of the Magic skill.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial:
    • During Nomad's Requiem, when you fight Nomad he screams 'You can't hide from my wrath!' when he shoots of an attack which always does 750 damage. Guess what? He's lying.
    • From the 2010 Christmas event:

Player: You look familiar. Have I seen you before?
Santa Claus: No! I am the mighty Fremennik, Thorvar Crittersmash! I do not know anything about this "Santa" you speak of!
Player: I didn't say anything about Santa.
Santa Claus: Oh, you didn't? Good, because he's not here, and I'm certainly not him.

    • From "A Clockwork Syringe":

A parcel consisting of:


1x large and totally inconspicuous crate assured to not contain anything dangerous at all


Has been delivered to your player-owned house.

  • Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Funny how Nex seems to have a bank set up right before her chamber, isn't it?
  • Swallowed Whole: Jones in "Deadliest Catch". He gets better.
  • Sweeping Ashes: Happens to Hazelmere once. Fatally.
  • Swiss Army Tears: Any adventurer that drinks from the Tears of Guthix will improve in the area that he/she is weakest in, because Guthix is the god of balance.
  • Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors: Melee->Ranged->Magic->Melee. In theory.
  • Talk Like a Pirate: While some pirates mock players who speak in this manner, there are still a few who use this trope. There's even a book, in game, on pirate speak, explaining some of the terms.
  • Take Your Time: Played straight, except for Shadow of the Storm (at a certain point, you'll take damage until you proceed).
  • Tap on the Head:
    • Citizens of Pollnivneach can be easily knocked out with blackjacks. Bizarrely, attempting to knock someone out with your bare fist gives the same message as trying to use any weapon besides a blackjack: "You need to find a different weapon. You want to knock him out, not kill him." Apparently, bare fists are deadlier than wooden clubs.
    • This is what happens to your character when you are transported or wish to go to places like Braindeath Island or "The Pit". Unfortunately, your character's Genre Blindness prevents them from catching on to the distraction tricks.
  • The Team Normal: The Horsemen of the Apocalypse wanted to start a clan called "The Horsemen", but War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death makes four...and you need five founders to start a clan. So they grabbed a random guy who happened to be nearby, and that's why The Horsemen is led by War, Famine, Pestilence, Death, and Frank.
  • Temporal Paradox: Lampshaded in the Evil Dave part of "Recipe for Disaster", when you try to explain to Dave why you need to save him (he's in a time bubble).
  • Teleport Cloak: Several capes have teleports, notably the Ardougne cloak.
  • Teleport Interdiction: There are all sorts of ways to block teleportation. The most obvious one is the "Teleblock" spell, which, when cast on another player, temporarily prevents them from teleporting. There's also some areas, notably the Wilderness, where teleportation is either limited or completely disabled.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Lampshaded once when Jagex sold T-shirts with "Worst update ever" written on them in Real Life.
  • Thieves' Guild: The Thieves' Guild in Lumbridge.
  • This Is My Human:
    • Bob the Cat has a pet human named Unferth. In the "A Tale of Two Cats" quest, Bob even asks the Player Character to look after Unferth while he's away.
    • The TzRek-Jad pet feels this way about its owner, in a rather adorable fashion.

"Human pet, scratch my ears now; I command you!"

  • This Page Will Self-Destruct
  • This Trope Is Bleep: Though changes of late have made this more of a Scunthorpe Problem, since definite "cuss words" are permitted more often, but certain others are not. (Example: "Phone") Of course, this may have been resolved, also.
  • Thriving Ghost Town: All over the place.
  • Time Travel: Courtesy of the Meeting History quest, notably with the player character introducing the concept of Herblore to the Humans in the 1st Age!. [8]
  • Title Drop: Quite commonly in quests.
  • Tomboy and Girly Girl: Korasi and Jessika.
  • Too Much Information
  • Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: In "Deadliest Catch", Thalassus spits Jones out after swallowing him whole when the Player Character feeds it some karambwan.
  • Training Dummy: Lumbridge, Varrock, Burthorpe, and various other locations have training dummies for practicing combat. The Thieves' Guild has a pickpocket training dummy.
  • Tranquillizer Dart: In the quest "A Clockwork Syringe", if you're spotted during a Stealth-Based Mission, a dart will be thrown at you, the screen will turn black, and you'll wake up unharmed in an unguarded jail cell which can be easily escaped.
  • Trial and Error Gameplay:
    • Underground Pass has a rather sadistic version of this, where you have to guess which panels are safe for you to walk on, and which aren't. You take 150 damage for each wrong guess, and the path is different for each person. And you have to pass through at least once or twice more before unlocking the shortcut. Hope you remember the correct path.
    • Dungeoneering has a similar puzzle where you have to guess the correct path through 3 rows of spikes, which deal 100-200 damage every time you hit them. Hope you weren't planning on using that food later...
  • Triumphant Reprise:
    • "But We Can Fight" to "Zanik's Theme"
    • "On The Up" to "Down and Out".
  • Turns Red: Some of the quest bosses; Nomad, for example.
  • Twenty Bear Asses: A few of the earlier quests. However, the developers realized how formulaic it was, and created a formula for making them. Hence - the Slayer skill.
  • Überwald: Morytania.
  • Ugly Cute: Sneakerpeepers, In-Universe. Their examine text is "Isn't it abhorable?"
  • Uncommon Time: Rammernaut's and Dreadnaut's theme.
  • Unperson: Saradominists tried (some try to this day) to erase the of existence of Zaros.
  • The Unfought Mother Mallum and Lucien.
  • Unstable Equilibrium: In the Agility Arena, one trap shoots poisoned darts at you that reduce your Agility skill. If you get hit by them, you're probably gonna keep getting hit.
  • Up to Eleven: According to Grim, when he harvested Zabeth Corvid, the musician was so drunk that he actually stumbled a few seconds into the future. Grim even calls it the "after-afterlife".
  • Urban Segregation: Varrock, Ardougne and Keldagrim. To some extent, Darkmeyer and Meiyerditch.
  • Useless Accessory: Among the myriad of armor and weapons, several pieces of equipment offer no stat bonuses whatsoever, such as the Brass Necklace and Cyclopean Helmet, relegated to only serving cosmetic purposes.
  • Vader Breath: Mi-Gor, who coughs when he speaks.
  • Vendor Trash: Lots of items. In fact, some minigames and aspects of the game have items specially designed for them.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential:
    • With the Burthorpe/Taverley regional update came a new pet, the Baby Troll, which (like the rest of its race) gets its name from the first thing it eats or attempts to eat. Yes, you can feed it a pet.
    • The 2012 Easter event asked the player to aid either the Evil Chicken or the Chocatrice in breaking Easter eggs across the land and converting the chicks inside to either chocolate or drumsticks.
  • Video Game Stealing: The Thieving skill.
  • Vigilante Execution: Zanik in the beginning of "The Chosen Commander", after the Dorgeshuun elders allow a poisoner to live.
  • Visible Silence: Parodied in one quest.
  • Vulnerable Civilians: Depending on how powerful your character is, it can be easier to kill civilians than talking to them, since you have to right-click to talk to them, but the default left-click option is to attack.
  • War for Fun and Profit: Most of 'Royal Trouble'.
  • Walk It Off: But you'll be doing that for a long while, directly proportionate to your max Hit Points.
  • Wall Master: Wall beasts, seen only as giant hands that reach out of cracks in the walls to grab you.
  • Warp Whistle: There's a huge variety of items and spells that can be used to teleport yourself to different places around the map.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: According to Postbag From The Hedge, TzTok-Jad (enormous boss monster capable of killing players with one attack) is allergic to chickens. Using a raw chicken on him has no effect though.
  • We Buy Anything: General stores usually buy any tradeable items from you.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Humans Against Monsters. Not so much with Sigmund who represents the worst of Saradominism.
  • Wham! Episode: While Guthix Sleeps
  • Whatevermancy:
    • The Culinaromancer, a mage who draws his power from food.
    • Lexicus Runewright, who is referred to as a Libaromancer (i.e., using books as his power) by another adventurer's Apocalyptic Log. Also, hobgoblin geomancer.
    • The Oneiromancer. Given the nature of her abilities, it would seem likely that her title fits best to the suffix -mancy.
    • Wizard Mizgog, who mentions that he's working on Beadromancy during the 3rd Cryptic Clue Fest.
  • What Measure Is a Mook?: Used in the Vengeance! saga, to an extremely depressing effect.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • What the Hell, Hero?: The player calls out Xenia after the quest 'The Blood Pact' when it's revealed that Xenia was faking being injured and used the rescue mission to test the player, putting Ilona's life at stake in the process. The player is not amused.
  • When Trees Attack:
    • Ents (before they were discontinued), evil trees, undead trees, tree spirits in the centaur valley, and the Jade Vine if left too long untrimmed. Ironically, the latter were almost driven to extinction because of the amount of slayer experience they give upon death, but players found a way for them to reproduce eo that everyone is happy.
  • Whip It Good: The Abyssal whip.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Solus Dellagar.
  • Who Dares?:
    • Yk'Lagor the Thunderous: "YOU DARE STEAL MY POWER?"
    • Kal'Ger the Warmonger : "YOU DARE FAIL ME?"
    • This exchange from "Ritual of the Mahjarrat":

Lucien: "You dare mock the power of Lucien?"
Beat
Sithaph: "We dare."

The Weird Old Man - you know, the one who's fascinated by the kalphites - once told me that 'All you need is love'. Well, I tried that for a week and let me tell you what happened: I got 173 complaints from postal customers, a few bodily dysfunctions that I didn't know I was capable of, and irate letters from my mum, asking why I've not been visiting her. So, what have I learned? Never listen to weird old men in the desert, especially if they are beetle fans - PP

    • Most of the Tasks have punny names. For example, a mining task is named "Take Your Pick". Another task requires killing a zombie in a sewer; its name is "Draaaaaiiiiiins..." And so on. Doubles as Reference Overdosed.
  • Worthless Yellow Rocks:
    • Trolls discard some valuable stuff, though they could at least eat the sharks that an adventurer that was about to be cooked as an alternative.
    • Often seen literally in the in-game economy; gold ore and gold bars (among others) are not particularly valuable, usually being less expensive than steel bars.
  • Written by the Winners: Take a look at the Siege of Falador. Basically caused because the White Knights drove out their rivals, the Kinshra (who were at that time important cofounders of Falador), thus splintering Falador and ticking the hell off the Black Knights. Why would they do this? Because the king was sick, thus giving the opportunity. But you ask any Saradominist, they'll tell you the Kinshra just 'relocated' and then attacked a year later, 'completely unprovoked'.
  • Yet Another Christmas Carol: The 2009 Christmas Event had the players take the role of the ghosts trying to scare the Scrooge Expy.
  • Yet Another Stupid Death: It is REALLY not a good idea to try and unlock a door in Dungeoneering with low HP. And if you die due to an accident this way, you get mocked for it in the end of the dungeon.
  • Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: In the "Thok Your Block Off" Fremennik Saga, a brain-eating zombie wanders towards Thok, pauses...then wanders away and starts eating a Forgotten Mage instead. Justified as Thok is fearless, which is a sign of low intelligence.
  • Your Mom: One of the insults you can use while interrogating a zombie pirate in "A Clockwork Syringe" is "Yo momma has enough chins for 99 ranged!"
  • You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry: The angry giant Glod bellows the Stock Phrase when you fight him in "Grim Tales". And indeed, he is very unlikable when he is angry.
  • Your Costume Needs Work: Your character will try and tell two children, Amelia and Rory, that you are the hero in the Myreque quests. Rory insists that if that was the case, you would be taller, stronger, and wear a bow tie. Telling him that you would never wear such a thing convinces him that you are definitely not the hero.
  1. ↑ The name of the quest is a Stealth Pun
  2. ↑ The real anticipated items were the Dragon Platebody and the Dragon Kiteshield
  3. ↑ This was a random event that has now been removed
  4. ↑ Including a stag, the Easter Bunny bringing eggs and cute baby animals
  5. ↑ MAH-jer-att
  6. ↑ arr-DOYN
  7. ↑ 3 is the lowest level, there is no level 1 or 2
  8. ↑ in past B, Sara grew unhealthy due to coughing due to an life illness, by learning what she took in the current past, the character went back a few years to Past A; when Sarah was a Baby, by mixing the medicine and telling her father the recipe, she would be healthy in the new future, and her father; Rodger would remain sane from not hearing her constant cries, he will tell then you the story of the first humans arriving to Runescape, amongst other things you have influenced within the Past...
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.