The Tablelands: Ars Magica without Mythic Europe

I'm with Erik here. Moorcock's world and Glorantha (another setting with the Order/Law and Chaos as "Forces" split) have leaning to much towards ether side as bad. Neither side of the duopoly can clearly be defined as "Good" or "Evil" until you get to the extremes and then both are "Evil" (though with Chaos it is much more in your face evil).

Funny how the RPGs based on both were designed by Chaosium, both using a variant of their D100 system, and can fairly easily be mixed and matched (along with material from any of their other D100 based games such as varies CoC, Delta Green, Hawkmoon, BRP, Ringworld, ElfQuest, Superworld, etc). They actually take up the most space on my bookshelf of any publisher, dating back to RuneQuest 1st edition.

The existence of a modern fiction work counterexample does not negate or disprove this observation.

Is the realms any more than arbitrary labels in D&D? I have not seen anything resembling realm interaction rules. No realm specific character generation rules. No mechanical difference between human and inhuman magic. Admittedly, D&D is a system I am only started to learn, so I may have missed something.

For Moorcock it is pretty clear that Elric is Good and Chaos. Chaos does not make him Evil, even if it causes problems.

In earlier editions I don’t think it gets much beyond the Detect Good, Detect Evil, Protection From Good, Protection from Evil spells. 3+ added chaos & Law to that, I believe. And definitely 4+ (but maybe 3.x as well) has creature categories such as Abberant, Fae, Outsider (any being from another plane), primal to name a few creature-types and certain spells do not work on them but there isn’t, far as I am aware, anything like auras or realms though there may be in certain settings. So it is by no means the same or even all that similar but should you travel to a particular plane of existence there may be more mechinical effects related to being in a land where a particular alignment or type holds sway.

Elric himself may be good-ish but he isn't Chaos even if he happens to serve Chaos.
In Stormbringer we see what happens to a world when Chaos gets too dominant there - it begins to dissolve into formless chaos.
In another Elric story he visits a world where Order is dominant - it is a featureless desert where nothing happens. Stasis.

It is made very clear throughout all the Eternal Champion stories (Elric, Hawkmoon, and a whole lot of other incarnations) that too much of either Chaos or Order is very bad for humans and life as we know it. A balance between them is desirable.

is/serves/belongs to - his powers derive therefrom

Absolutely. We could probably endlessly debate if bad is Evil or just bad, but the point is that Chaos is compatible with, and as you say even a requisite for, Good and with Evil, and so is Order. In the same way that the Magic Realm is neither (or possible both) Good or Evil. However, modelling Moorcockian realms using ArM RoPs is going to take revision beyond recognition.

Actually, my copy of the Elric RPG has the RuneQuest logo on it - it's not a funny coincidence. They just slapped a new coat of paint on something they already had. Of course they're (fairly) compatible.

Is your copy one of the editions of "Elric of Melniboné"? Those are by Mongoose and directly based on the Mongoose Runequest rules. They are the editions that have "RuneQuest" on the cover and as you stated are only fairly compatible, since the Mongoose rules are only loosely based on BRP.

Stormbringer 1st~5th (and Elric! which is 4.5) are the versions by Chaosium, none of which have the RuneQuest logo on their covers.

The editions of RuneQuest are also confusing in the order they came out. It was 1st, 2nd, 3rd, MG 1st, MG 2nd, 6th, 4th. Only the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions are by Chaosium. Their edition numbers correspond with the version of BRP they are based on.

EDIT: There is such a long gap between 3rd and 4th because Chaosium lost control of the Runequest trademark. When they got back control they released 4th in 2018, based on the 2008 BRP 4th. Newest version of BRP is still 4th, though a 2020 printing.

More confusing than that.

The 3rd edition of Runequest was published by Avalon Hill Games, and it took quite a while before Chaosium got back all the rights for RQ.
The first published edition of BRP was based on the first two editions of Runequest, and first appeared after RQ 2e.

3rd was printed by Avalon Hill, but designed by Chaosium. I guess you were answering between my original post and edit since I did mention that they lost control of the rights to RQ. You also have Games Workshop who published Stormbringer 3rd and later copies of RQ 3rd.

The first published version of BRP was the first time they released the core system. However they used it internally for the basis of all but one of their games (though some used D20, with the only real difference being the system numbers divided by 5). This includes all of the games they released before that first public release of BRP.

EDIT: The game not based on BRP is Prince Valiant.

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Runequest came first. Then they separated out the core of the rules as BRP.
Runequest was never based on BRP. It is the other way around - BRP is based on Runequest, just like most of their other games.

True. But none of the non-RQ games that Chaosium published have the RQ logo on them. Non-RQ games with the RQ logo are released by other companies and are based on a version that is not "Chaosium RQ/BRP". The most common are based on some version of the Mongoose rules. I personally dislike the Mongoose rules, so avoided them after I bought their 1st edition.