For the runes I decided to do a 4x4 grid of runes and then tile them across a plane. Then I projected the tiling runes onto a non-tiled UV set so I can paint out where I don't want the runes when I project onto the blade Since I always forget how to do this on the first go I'm going to put it in this thread so I might…
Cleaned up the runes after projecting them onto the blade UVs and did some polishing. Think I'm going to add in a bit of an energy effect that could pan across the blade. It took some additional setup to get the back faces to not render for the WoW-style weapon effect. Here's the couple of nodes that I had to plug in.