Runes in Rise of Kingdoms is another set of items that you can get by dispatching your commanders to pick them up. The runes is used to give you a temporary buff and you may only have one rune activated at a time. These runes are used to help you speed up gathering rate, accelerating your action points recovery and research / upgrade faster.
But in this guide, I am going to share about Runes in details. There isn’t 1 type of runes, but there’s actually 5 tiers that depends on the level of enemies that are guarding the altars, sanctums, and shrines all around the zones in Rise of Kingdoms. So ideally, you will always want to get the highest rune level to maximize the buff bonus.
What Are Runes in Rise of Kingdoms?

Runes is basically a glowing stone that rotates after defeating the guardians around the holy sties. There is four tiers of runes: white (3%), green (7%), blue (10%), purple (15%), and orange (20%) that corresponds directly to the level of guardians.
Rune Tiers:
- White (upwards to 3% Buff)
- Green (upwards to 7% Buff)
- Blue (upwards to 10% Buff)
- Purple (upwards to 15% Buff)
- Orange (upwards to 20% Buff)
White Rune (Common)

Green Rune (Uncommon)

Blue Rune (Rare)

Purple Rune (Epic)

Orange Rune (Legendary)

Each runes comes with various modifier that gives you a temporary buff like increasing your gathering rate, faster marching speed, doing more damage and such. If you are serious about making progress like Lohar’s Trial and Karuak Ceremony, it’s a smart idea to have a few runes in your items tab.
Runes Modifier:
- Action Point Recovery Rate
- Building Speed
- Research Speed
- Gathering Speed
- Wood Gathering Speed
- Food Gathering Speed
- Stone Gathering Speed
- Gold Gathering Speed
- Defense Bonus
- Attack Bonus
- Health Bonus
- March Speed
In the beginning of game, you won’t be able to get the highest tiered runes right away since they are gated further to the center. Thus, you will start with white runes first and then green runes and finally orange runes as your kingdom advances within each objective completed via Monument.
How to Get Runes in Rise of Kingdoms

To get runes in Rise of Kingdoms, you will have to defeat the guardians that is guarding the holy sties. I recommend rallying with your armies to get support and to kill these guardians quickly if you are starting off. However later in the game when you have Tier 4 Troops / Tier 5 Troops they becomes quite easy to kill.
Guardians will always drop white runes, a small chance of green runes and even smaller chance for blue and purple runes with the orange runes being the most rarest. The chances of dropping better rune rarity depends on the quality of guardians you are battling against.
Guardians at the Lost Temple, which is located in the middle of the Kingdom has far much better chance of dropping purple / orange runes. This is also where major power alliances are located at, vying for control to gain access to the Lost Kingdoms.
Also a cool trick to reduce your action points is do the chain-farm barbarians method. You will need commanders who has AoE skill like Aethelflaed or Baibars and group up the barbarians together to kill them all in the same time using the active skill.
Conclusion of Runes in Rise of Kingdoms

One friendly game tip for all of these players out there in Rise of Kingdoms. If you are currently controlling the Lost Temple. You can maximize your chance of getting the legendary runes by doing a couple of hours in advance before the reset.
This means killing the guardians at least 2 hours before 00:00:00 UTC. This will give your alliance members and you some time to scoop up the runes you want. By then the guardians will respawn and will be ready to drop runes on the next kill within the short timeframe.
If you have runes in your inventory, you can use it to increase your troops combat effectiveness for Expedition Mode and Ian’s Ballads for instance. Which is incredible useful if you are currently on progress and need extra boost to push.
Make sure to rally army these guardians as they can do hefty damage if your troops are not strong enough to handle them. If you want to offset some of the incoming damage, you can do so with Alexander the Great or Richard I for instance. But ideally, the peacekeeping commanders will make quick work out of them.
And that’s all folks! I hope you found how to get runes in Rise of Kingdoms helpful and insightful. This is pretty straightforward and easy to do so once you get hang of high level troops, and joining top alliances do help out quite a lot. Be sure to try out Rise of Kingdoms on PC.
Happy ruling governors!