To me, Steve Perrin is the most important rpg designer, ever. Since the very beginning, he has epitomised what I like in a role-playing game: an old-school feel, but with more unified, more logical mechanisms than D&D. To me, his maiden oeuvre, the original
Chaosium version of
RuneQuest (1978), is simply perfect, and has remained my favourite rpg to this day.
As you may know, the origins of
RuneQuest lie with the
Perrin Conventions, a set of xeroxed sheets of paper that were passed on from avid gamer to avid gamer in the Bay Area and then all over the US which "improved" the original D&D combat rules with a more streamlined approach to them. The
Perrin Conventions are available
here, but they are the later version that appeared in
Chaosium's All The World Monsters vol.2, not the original ones from the xeroxed copies. There were many differences between the original xeroxed version and the one that ended up being published within
All The World's Monstes vol.2: the latter concentrated on the combat rules, whereas the former had a lot of magic rules and other stuff.
Anyway, there's been talk round the internet that the complete
Perrin Conventions would soon be republished, possibly in a revamped form. This new publication would be as a digest-sized illustrated game rule book. Unfortunately, no ETA at the moment.
All I can reveal is that Steve Perrin is currently working on the "new"
Perrin Conventions, which will be heavily annotated and include details on the campaigns they were used in, including the campaign world he has been running under a dozen different systems since Steve first started role playing in 1974. Huzzah!
