A what and a what and a what? BRP is the Basic Roleplaying game I wrote about yesterday, RQ is RuneQuest (one of the games which used an early version of BRP and which is now available under the OGL) and GORE is a free game by Goblinoid Games created using the Runequest SRD.

So when I posted about BRP yesterday I didn’t reveal the whole shebang. Runequest was the original percentile system back in the day. Chaosium sold RQ to Avalon Hill and when AH was later bought by Hasbro further development of RQ was stopped. Recently Mongoose Publishing has acquired the rights to RQ and released the rules under the OGL. So we now have BRP by Chaosium and RQ by Mongoose. There are a few differences between both systems but material can be transferred from one system to the other without too much hassle.

And since RQ is available under the OGL, third parties can create derivative material, like Goblinoid Games did with GORE. While vanilla RQ is clearly a fantasy game, GORE like BRP can be used to run campaigns in multiple genres, making it a free alternative to Chaosium’s BRP. I still prefer BRP over the RQ SRD or GORE, but if you are looking for a free alternative, you should check out these links:

By the way, a good place to discuss all thing related to BRP and similar systems is the forum of the fan site Basic Roleplaying Central. There you’ll find a nice and polite community of gamers who enjoy all versions of the original percentile gaming system.

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