A Role Playing Games Blog
Basic Roleplaying
If you ever played Call of Cthulhu or RuneQuest you know Basic Roleplaying, the Chaosium Roleplaying System. Recently Chaosium released a generic BRP book that is meant to be a generic roleplaying game system that can be used to power any game regardless the genre. The people at Chaosium took the basic system that powered their games for a long time, added optional rules from it’s various iterations and put it all into a massive 404-page book. Although the attribute scale is 0-21 it’s mostly a d%-based system. All skill and combat rolls are done with percentile dice.
I recently picked up a copy of that book and I love it. Since I first played Call of Cthulhu I admired the simplicity of the underlying system. Later I bought a copy of RuneQuest, Elric and Hawkmoon and added them to my collection of BRP-driven games. I often thought about using the system in Elric or CoC to run games in other worlds and genres but in the end I always used other systems. But now this is finally much easier to pull off since the Basic Roleplaying book is a great toolbox if you want to build your own version of the BRP system.
I will definitely use the BRP system in the near future (I am still thinking about the SF setting I wrote about in my Goals for 2009 post). Even using it for a one-shot should be simple enough since it has everything you need to play, even including monsters and NPCs for several different genres. And even if you don’t plan to run a homebrew campaign or the like, you can still use a lot of the optional rules in your CoC game for example.
By the way, I first heard about this fine book in Kurt Wiegel’s video review:
Has anyone of my readers actually used BRP to run his homebrew campaign or a conversion? What are your thoughts? How easy is it to pull off something like that?
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I've been eyeing the BRP, but ended up buying Savage Worlds instead, as I think it better fits my GMing style. In Sweden, the equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons (Drakar och Demoner, translating into Dragons and Demons, 0 points for originality) was basically a Runequest ripoff, complete with ducks and everything. This means that the BRP is as canonical among older Swedish gamers as OD&D seems to be among Americans.
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I've been thinking of getting a copy of this just to have. I still a few old RQ things around the house. Someday, I may try to run a game with this rule system.
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