Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine – First Impressions

So I was a complete @chaosium_inc fanboy yesterday and downloaded the new version of the Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine. This is my impressions from a quick skim read. Bear in mind that I’ve got a long history with the previous version of the book, 2008 Big Gold Book (BGB), so I’ll be comparing it to that.

On the one hand, it is a tidied-up version of the BGB, so as an old hand (who was in the playtest) there’s a lot of familiar content. But there are also new bits that bring it into the modern age. The book’s author Jason Durall gives a breakdown of what’s different over at Basic Roleplaying Central.

The main big thing for me is the presentation, which is now clean full-colour art.  Probably less art overall than the BGB, which was full-on black and white, almost in the style of a 90s book, but more impactful. Certainly, it brings it up on par with the recent full-colour editions of Savage Worlds.

The devil is in the details, and only a full read will see if the new version really makes it a streamlined generic system that you can put together a new game out of. BGB was more like a reference book of BRP’s greatest hits and a bit dry with it for my tastes.

One thing as a publisher that is exciting is that the WHOLE of the book, sans product identity (trademarks etc) is released as open content under the emerging Open Roleplaying game. Even the draft version of the ORC license, this is a much more generous license than the previous BRP-OGL.

Tis was the night before Chaosium’s (New) Basic Roleplaying

The nerves of this old BRP fan are set afire since tomorrow a new version of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying, or Basic Roleplaying Universal Engine as they are billing this version, will be released in pdf form tomorrow, with print to follow later in the year.

So many questions that demand answers?

What will be the differences between this and the previous version, 2008s Big Gold Book (which was on sale for $1 back in January)?

What form and terms will its release under the new ORC license be?

What support will Chaosium give it? Or is it expected to come from Third Party publishers?

I’m going to have difficulty sleeping tonight 🙂

Basic Roleplaying, I’ll buy that for a Dollar!

I have warm rosy memories of being on the playtest group for Chaosium’s Big Gold Book of Basic Roleplaying sometime in the 2000s. The book is a big, bold attempt at making BRP a generic system which you can use for any genre or mash-up of genres.  It also pulls from various Chaosium games over the years, being a great-hits compilation as well. Well recommended.

Basic Roleplaying Gold Book

Five Flavours of Fantasy D100 gaming

This is my personal take.

Even though I’m the author of OpenQuest, which being one of D101’s main gaming lines takes up a lot of my energy (writing, developing and promoting), I like to play different styles of D100 Fantasy gaming

RuneQuest is the grand-old standard of D100 gaming. It’s where D100 has its start.  RuneQuest 2 (now sold as RuneQuest Classic) is my white box.  The new version RuneQuest Glorantha is an updated version of RQ2, with new rules, Such as characters now have their own Runic associations, which provide the basis of their magic, and Passions that reflect their relationships with their communities and their enemies. It’s a perfect match for Glorantha, not only for nostalgia reasons but because it’s been designed for it. But it does come at the cost that some of its systems are a bit clunky and a bit old school that sometimes you question whether or not you should just house rule the damn thing. Strike Ranks come to mind directly. But as a long time Gloranthan fan since the 80s, it is lovely to have an edition of the game which is easy to share with the players, both in terms of presentation, playability and clarity of setting.

Mythras on the other hand is the slick generic system I would have died for during my early RQ 3 period, when I was making up my own settings, in the late 80s. Now it’s here, it’s no surprise that with a complete all in one rulebook – sans setting and adventure – its spawned a series of setting books, some of which move outside the genre of Mythic Fantasy, and with the release of Lyonesse last year, its own standalone games. I need to get more hours in running Mythrasm get my own Isle of Death adventure/setting book out there and a series of blog posts about the various supplements that are available for the game is in order.

OpenQuest is my take on Fantasy D100 gaming, pairing down the subsystems to an almost minimalist “one roll then meaningful effect”. I was a big fan of the all in one rulebooks that Games Workshop released Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer as in the 80s – effectively they were the main rules + the companion set, that were boxsets in those days collated into one book, with new art and colour plates.  Stormbringer is my Swords and Sorcery gold standard and in many ways my favourite BRP game, but not one I’d play on a regular basis because I think it’s not balanced in any way shape or form 😀  So OQ is a tribute to that format, in so far that the printed version had a section of colour plates. Its also allowed me to explore and give structure to the rather rambling campaign structure of other D100 games, something as a fan of Basic/Expert/Companion/Immortal D&D which had a very clear view of where the characters were heading has annoyed me previously.  Since OpenQuest is close to my heart, I ramble on about it on its own blog on openquestrpg.com.

Skypirates of the Floating Realms, IS the minimalist D100 game that I’ve designed from bottom-up, keeping only the rules that are completely necessary for this rather light-hearted (think post-Monty Python films, Jabberwocky, Time Bandits etc) fantasy game. It’s always a nagging thought in my mind when I play other D100 systems, that my GMing brain is overburdened by subsystems and magic effects that I simply do not need. If you are familiar with the Black Hack (which is d20 fantasy-based), this is my attempt to downsize d100 into a short 6 x 9 format book. I’ve been playtesting it since spring of 2021 and our party of Argyll the Dwarf and Boris the Bear, Priest of and I’m aiming to get the game out to crowdfunding later this year.

The fifth flavour which I often forget – because I’ve not played it since the late 80s – yet has an immense effect on me are Gamesworkshop’s Warhammer RPGs of the 80s. This is basically Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st, which is the ultimate doorstop of complete RPG, and their Judge Dredd RPG, which is very much Warhammer lite. Broadly speaking both games have percentile skills as characteristics and talents which add bonuses to skill rolls, or allow you to do new things with a skill. Warhammer Fantasy complicates matters with a career system, which sees sewer-rat zeros progress to high-level heroes. Although I never got to the high-level characters, I suspect they play more like AD&D 1st characters, where low-level characters are charmingly scummy and more akin to Call of Cthulhu characters. One of the writers of the Enemy Within Campaign said as much, saying that his direction on the early parts of the campaign was effectively along the lines of go write D&D adventures mixed with Call of Cthulhu.  As much as I liked the Old World setting, it vibed off familiar British Grimdark sensibilities and played a good chunk of the highly impressive Enemy Within Campaign. Like Warhammer FRP, GW Judge Dredd comes with an immersive world which the rules support fully, the crazy post-apocalyptic near-future sci-fi of 2000 AD comic’s most popular character. It has a much simpler character structure, effectively it has four career types (Street, Tech, Med, Psi Judges) which you stay within for the entire course of your game, but where it jumps into the deep end is a complex Action Point system for Combat. It looks good on paper but fails apart as a solution to everything in play. I had a recent re-read of GW Judge Dredd, and actually remembered that it was my first d100 game, before even Call of Cthulu and RuneQuest!

 

Free D100 Games

OpenQuest-basicsIts official the D100 Renaissance has caught up with the D&D OSR as far as free rulesets are concerned.

I’ve added a new link category “Free D100 Games” on the Right Hand Sidebar, for quick reference;

Note: I’ve not included Legend, because its not free and RQ6 (which is basically the updated version) supersedes it, or GORE because that’s incomplete and unsupported.

So there’s now no excuse not to download one of the above and give D100 a whirl 🙂

RuneQuest and me

So last post was me & D&D, so where do I stand as far as the game that I probably reverer more in the Old School stakes?

RuneQuest 2 is where the story starts for me. In Pavis in Glorantha sometime in the mid 80s. A one on one session with my friend I rolled up a simple character who could just about wield a sword and was a couple of thousand of lunars in debt to the Fighting Guild as a result. His name lost to me know, but I remember he had aspirations to be an initiate of Humkat (the Gloranthan Warrior god of Death and Gloom). So off on a trip to Troll Town, a Troll strong hold established by the Hero Arkat in the Dawn Age. With me so far… don’t worry it was all new to me and a good three quarters of the game was my GM friend explaining the background to Glorantha and all its associated workings (Cults, HeroQuesting, Myths as a way of changing reality). Solid foundations which I’ve built on still, but still a huge learning curve that fortunately I fascinated with.

RuneQuest 3 is where it all took off. The Games Workshop Hard covers (RuneQuest, Advanced RuneQuest and RuneQuest Monsters) at pocket money prices made the game accessible to all in the UK, and when they chucked them in the bargain bin during the Great Betrayal (when they dumped all their RPG support around White Dwarf 100 at the end of the 80s) everybody and his brother had a copy. This time I was in a proper group of about five playing in a generic setting, possibly Griffin Island, fighting off zombies with a young twenty something Civilised Peasant Farmer whose claim to fame was he was OK with a Pike (about 40% from memory). Next session I wanted more so with the GMs OK I rolled up a Sorcerer called Tel-Kar-Nath who new the sum total of one spell, Venom (“I shall turn your blood to poison!”).  Next session I had grabbed the reins of GMing and huge files of notes were produced.

Stormbringer 1st Edition (a slight detour). Also in the same bargain bin as a result of the Great Betrayal. I’ve gone about this game before, but this was a revelation in terms of scope of what the game could do and how you could modify the D100 engine to produce a very different style of game. A very lethal style of game 😉

Then at University having access to a student grant and making a solid investment in the future I got all the Glorantha Boxsets  from the newly opened Travelling Man (up in Headingley Leeds for those who could remember it). Que the 10 years long campaign set there that one day I WILL PUBLISH the setting for. During this time we kept on striping out the crunch until the system resembled what OpenQuest is today. These were my glory years running RQ set in Glorantha – both at home and at at cons. RQ 3 for me was story gaming done right, a post for another day.

The wilderness years came for me in the late 90s when we gradually drifted away from our regular RQ3 Glorantha game due to entering the wacky world of employment. Then there was the case of mistaken identity that was HeroWars (effectively 1st edition HeroQuest), a wonderfully epic narrative game which is nothing like RQ.

Mongoose RuneQuest – The return!  Well sort of. Bad editing and shonky rules take the sheen off what should have been a fine version of the great and glorious game. But the release of a SRD did lead to the following …

OpenQuest is my RuneQuest (with a bit of Stormbringer thrown , which is why its got so many demons). Originally designed to be a small fantasy interpretation of my favourite bits of BRP/RQ with my own common sense house rulings. Its kinda grown into OpenQuest Deluxe (a open tribute to the collected RQ3 Deluxe of the 1990s produced under Ken Rolston’s time as RuneCzar during the so called RQ Renaissance) and then be paired back to the slim and slender version of OpenQuest Basics. Its been a great journey which started at lunch in my office in 2007 and continues to this day.

MRQ2 Lawrence Whitaker’s and Pete Nash’s go at refreshing MRQ, and a damn fine one too.  I never got to play this one because my group at the time would have none of it, and Greg Stafford pulled the license from Mongoose a year or so into the license.

RuneQuest 6  Loz and Pete now working together as the Design Mechanism revised and expanded version of MRQ2 which is the ultimate big book RuneQuest dwarfing all its prediscesors. A fine version of the game and a worthy inherittor of the name RUNEQUEST 🙂

Magic World available as PDF

Chaosium’s self-contained Fantasy version of Basic Roleplaying, based off a de-Moorcocked Elric!/Stormbringer ruleset with elements of RQ3, all pulled together by Ben Monroe, is now available as a pdf.

Congratulations to Ben Monroe who put together this fine book, who I know has endured many trials and tribulations to get it out. Hats off to you sir 🙂

magic-world-pdf-cover

RIP Lynn Willis

I’ve just heard that one of the founding fathers of D100 gaming has passed away, Lynn Willis who had a hand in a staggering chunk of Chaosium releases and was one of the driving forces behind the mighty Call of Cthulhu, went to the great gaming table in the beyond yesterday. Although I never knew the man except for his work on the Chaosium releases that shaped my adolescence/young adult years, the dedication and love he put into those books shines through and had a quiet but powerful influence on me.

I don’t think it was an accident I reached for my copy of Call of Cthulhu last night 🙂

Read the Chaosium announcement for more information

Magic World character + RuneQuest 6 detailed review + Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition podcast

Over at that hotbed of BRP grognards, The Tavern , there’s a couple of recent threads that may tickle the fancy of D100 lover.

Ben Monroe editor in chief of the upcoming Basic Roleplaying Magic World, has posted an example character.

OpenQuest editor/rules consultant Graham Spearing has been enthused by RQ6 and is posting his chapter by chapter thoughts on the book.

Also yog-sothoth.com has posted the recording of the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition seminar given by Mike Mason and Paul Fricker

12 Days of the UK OSR Day 2: BRP Rome

BRP ROME COVERFor my first UK OSR review, I’ll be looking at Basic Roleplaying Rome published by Alephtar games for Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying Game, by UK author Pete Nash.

The first half of the book gives a full comprehensive guide of the Roman Republic from its foundation to the its end with Augustus’ establishment of the Empire.  There’s a lot of info here, that is peppered with pull out boxes of gameable info. You could argue that by picking up the right selection of history text books you could produce a similar guide, but the genius of BRP Rome is that it does this heavy lifting then peppers it with gameable nuggets (such as some rules for Chariot racing) in highlight boxes scattered throughout the text.

The second half of he book gets down to business giving rules for Character gen, distinctive Roman Magic and Creatures. Finally there is a selection of Adventure seeds and biblography.

Why this book is important to the UK OSR?

Despite being published by an Italian company (which is very apt 😉 ), its by a British Author ( Pete Nash – one half of the Design Mechanism that are now working on RuneQuest 6). It is a break out product that shows that UK RPG writers can get international acclaim.  Without any reviews it got a Silver Ennie, an awards ceremony infamously dominated by 3.5 D&D product.

Apart from the core rules, its very much a solid all in one book. UK game books in the 80s were very good at craming as much gameable material in between the covers, and this continues that tradition. In many ways it could have been released as a series of White Dwarf articles back in the day. “Ancient Rome using RQ”, with parts 1-3 coveriing the setting material, whille 4-5 covering the rules specific chapters (chapter 6 would have had to have been a Fiend Factory special 🙂 ).

To my mind it sets the bar high, of what a UK style book can achive in today’s crowded market as well being a bloody good gamebook which can run a wide range of Roman games out of the box.