Runes

Runes are small, weightless stones that allow magic users to cast spells. Some of these spells can be used for combat while others can be used to benefit the player casting them.

Runes can either be bought from the various Rune shops found across RuneScape, created from rune essence through the Runecrafting skill, procured from drops by killing monsters, or picked up from spawns on the ground. It should also be noted that four runes-earth, air, fire, and water-can be substitued for when wielding the staff of earth, the staff of air, the staff of fire, and the staff of water respectively. The only time an elemental staff cannot be used to substitute for runes is when setting up a portal in the Portal Chamber of a Player-Owned House (POH). Keep in mind that Player-Owned- Houses is a member-only feature.

Free-to-play Runes
All players can use the runes listed below, though free players can only craft runes up to body runes, and the two magic stores (in Varrock and Port Sarim) only sell the basic elemental runes, chaos runes, and death runes.

Members Runes
The Wizards' Guild located in Yanille has the cheapest rune shop available to members. Located on its upper floors, it sells every available rune in the game, excluding astral, cosmic, and combination runes.

Only members can use the runes listed below.

Combination Runes
These runes are members only, and act as one of each of their composite runes. To make them take the talisman to the altar you are going too. For example, if you wanted to make dust runes you'd bring air runes, and earth runes, and the earth and air talismans to either the air altar or earth altar.

Rogue Trader
This is from Ali Morrisane's Rogue Trader minigame, which you can do if you've finished The Feud quest.

After you complete the Rune Mysteries quest you can go to Ali Morrisane and talk to him about getting runes for his bazaar (here it means street shop). After some extensive walking or teleporting with the Amulet of Glory, and some sudoku puzzles, (4 by 4 - easy, or 9 by 9 - hard). You can now get runes for a cheaper price. An interesting note is that prices stay the same while you are buying or selling runes.

Respawn locations
Here is a list of respawn locations of runes throughout RuneScape.