The 139-paged PDF contains all the rules needed to play, two magic systems and a bestiary. Kudos to Cubicle 7 and Cakebread & Walton for releasing the rules for free. The PDF doesn’t contain any artwork, but that’s negligible especially since the PDF is mainly meant as a System Reference Document. The rules of the game can be used under the OGL.

If you are a fan of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying and Runquest, you actually have the choice between quite a few different rule variants now. There’s Renaissance, Mongoose Publishing’s Legend, D101 Games’ OpenQuest, Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying and Goblinoid Games’ GORE. All those games are more or less compatible, so you can use material designed for one game in the other with ease.

Renaissance looks pretty interesting because it was created with the Renaissance era in mind. The magic system also looks pretty unique. If you’re looking for a skill-based RPG with a percentile dice mechanic, you should definitely check Renaissance out!

Related posts:

1. Old-school renaissance
2. [Freebies] FU: the Free, Universal Roleplaying Game
3. Freebies: Marvel Super Heroes

Stargazer: Thanks for taking your time to answer a few questions for our blog, Stargazer’s World. Let’s start with a couple of questions about you. Can you please tell our readers who you you are? I especially would like to know what your first roleplaying game was and how you came to work in the RPG industry.

Sarah: My name’s Sarah Newton, and I work for Cubicle 7 as head of their editorial team and line developer and house writer on the Starblazer Adventures, Legends of Anglerre, Cthulhu Britannica, and World War Cthulhu lines. I’m also responsible for their translated games, including Qin and the upcoming Yggdrasil. I’ve been gaming for (cough cough) over thirty years, and am absolutely passionate about the hobby. I began with Tunnels and Trolls back in 1980 – the old pink "Buffalo Castle" was the very first RPG product I ever bought, even before the rules, and I ended up having to make my own rules to play it! After that I got into Traveller, RuneQuest, Dungeons and Dragons (White Box then AD&D), and then pretty much all major RPGs right up to the present day, with the exception of White Wolf, which for some reason I kind of missed – I’ve only recently discovered Exalted, though I like it a lot.

I got working on RPGs through a curious quirk of fate. Back in 2008 Jason Durall was producing his bumper "Basic Roleplaying" rulesbook for Chaosium, and, as a lifelong d100 / BRP fan, I’d pre-ordered a copy. It came through prior to proofing; in a previous life, I used to write functional specifications for web development, so proofing is something I do instinctively, and I asked Jason if he’d like me to send him some proofs. He said yes, and introduced me to Charlie and Dustin at Chaosium, who expressed an interest in my "Chronicles of Future Earth" setting. That was my first ever RPG commission – although it was only published last January! After that I got into the FATE system and met Chris Birch, who’d just written Starblazer Adventures, and wrote Mindjammer and did the lead on Legends of Anglerre, which was where I started working for Cubicle 7.

Stargazer: Who are the RPG designers and SF writers that inspired you the most?

Sarah: I think I’d have to say Greg Stafford for RPG designer: the world of Glorantha and particularly its cosmology have been a constant inspiration since I "discovered" RuneQuest back in 1981. His inclusion of concepts from Joseph Campbell in roleplaying is a stroke of genius, and exactly fits the sort of things I’m looking for in a game: the quest of a hero for transcendence and transformation, and of course rollicking good adventure on the way!

For SF writers, there are two: Cordwainer Smith and Olaf Stapledon, the latter particularly for his book "Starmaker". Smith has again a mythopoetic approach to his SF; he’s by no means a hard SF writer, but instead groks that the genre is about wonder, speculation, and the possibilities for human beings to transcend their limitations towards something far greater. Olaf Stapledon is simply breathtaking in his vision: considering he was writing in the 1930s, his ideas are only now being discussed seriously in the scientific mainstream. That’s an amazing power of vision.

For modern SF writers, I love Stephen Baxter and Peter Hamilton, and of course Ian Banks. I’ve also recently got into Gareth L Powell, particularly his novel "The Recollection", which is beautifully written space opera, and absolutely great stuff.

Stargazer: Most people probably know you because you have been one of the authors of Legends of Anglerre, the FATE-based fantasy roleplaying game by Cubicle 7. Can you tell us how you got involved in that project? And can you please share some insight on the development process. What was your goal when working on that game?

Sarah: I had the great privilege to work as lead writer and editor on Legends of Anglerre, thanks to the awesome support of Chris Birch and Dom and Angus from Cubicle 7. I’d just finished working on the Mindjammer setting book for Starblazer Adventures, and Chris invited me aboard to work on what we were calling "Starblazer Fantasy Adventures". I jumped at the chance – it’s a rare opportunity to be involved in building a complete fantasy roleplaying game from the ground up!

There were five of us closely involved in the development of Legends of Anglerre: me, Chris Birch, Mike Olson, Tom Miskey, and Marc Reyes, as well as writers such as Mike Chinn (the original writer of the Anglerre stories on the Starblazer comics) and David Donachie, who’s an Anglerre expert and a great cartographer – look for his work in the upcoming Legends of Anglerre Companion! We used to "meet up" for Skype conference calls once every week or so; we divided the necessary tasks between us, and I acted as project manager assembling the various contributions into a single manuscript. We also had a truly great playtest and peer review team on the Cubicle 7 forums, who bashed the rules around and helped us bug-check all through the process – I can’t thank all those guys enough, their contribution was invaluable.

My own goal with Legends of Anglerre was shared with Chris Birch: we wanted the game to really be the fantasy version of Starblazer. Completely compatible, for those cross-genre "fantasy spaceships" mashups, but also an absolutely complete game in one volume, with no need for endless splat books. We were also under clear instructions from both gamers and Cubicle 7 management *not* to write another 650-page monster! We condensed and edited and brought the entire thing in under 400 pages – still easily enough to kill someone with a single blow, but light enough to lift with one arm!

The thing is, although the Legends of Anglerre rules are simple and short – believe it or not, the entire rules are about 20 pages long, presented in the first and second chapters – we wanted the game to contain everything you’d need to run a full fantasy campaign in pretty much any genre. There’s plenty of scope for introducing your own flexibility – inventing your own spells, stunts, creatures, whatever – but if you *don’t* want to do that, there’s also plenty of pre-generated powers to use. There are rules for ships, sieges, running kingdoms (and staging fights between kingdoms!), guilds, empires, magic schools, and so on; there are rules for mass combat, high-powered and even godlike characters, other planes, extremely powerful creatures, creating magic items, the whole range of things you’d expect from a complete fantasy RPG – all in one book!

Stargazer: What part of Legends of Anglerre is your favorite? And was there something particularly complicated to implement using the FATE system?

Sarah: I love the powers system. We derived that from the psionics and special abilities rules in Starblazer Adventures, re-structuring them to be more logical and systematized, whilst retaining an incredible degree of freedom for spellcasters and the like. We were really keen to make sure the powers were flexible enough to work as magical spells, divine powers, monstrous creature abilities, however you want to describe them, and also to take advantage of the incredibly free-form feature set of the core Starblazer / Legends of Anglerre skill system. Starblazer Adventures, for example, lets you use a mundane skill (let’s say a weapon skill) to attack, defend, block, and perform manoeuvres; it allows a player to get truly creative with what he does with a skill, within the framework of the rules. We took that freedom, and plugged it into the powers system; now, for example, a spellcaster can use his Fire power skill to attack, defend, block other attacks, resist fire, and even create impressive fire-based manoeuvres, and then create stunts to do the really extra-cool high power stuff. We then took that into the epic and mythic space with the high-power rules, too.

I’m also very proud of the advancement system. FATE previously didn’t really have a well-defined advancement system, but a fantasy RPG needs one as a basic requirement – everyone wants to see their characters get more powerful and cool as they play. We worked very hard to make sure the advancement system wasn’t simply an "experience point" system, but was built into all aspects of the game – so you can use it not just to improve your own abilities, but to advance your own guild, warband, or even kingdom, or explore the powers of a magical item, or increase your prestige in your community. You can even become a god!

Stargazer: As far as I know you’ll be also working on the 2nd Edition of Starblazer Adventures. Can you please share with us what will be new in this upcoming edition. Will it be necessary for owners of the first edition to upgrade or are there are mostly minor changes?

Sarah: First: you don’t need to upgrade, but we hope you’ll want to. Starblazer Adventures 2nd edition is exactly that: it’s a new *edition* – it’s been re-edited. That means it’s been re-structured, some of the wording has been changed, there are clearer (and more) examples, and the typos and bugs of the 1st edition have been fixed. We’ve also taken the opportunity to include some of the new rules from Legends of Anglerre, such as future aspects, group characters, and the Fog of War mass combat rules. Structurally, the game is now in two books: a Player’s Guide and a Story Teller’s Guide, each approximately the same size. We had a lot of feedback on Starblazer 1st edition that the rulesbook was simply too big, and that players wanted something more portable they could read and use in play and for character creation. We’ve taken that on board, and the Player’s Guide contains everything players will need for the game, up to and including the core system rules.

We’ve also tweaked the equipment rules, the layout look n feel, character sheet, vehicles rules, and also included the trading rules I’d worked up for Mindjammer Adventures. We hope people will be keen to upgrade – although the 1st edition rules remain completely usable!

Stargazer: It occurred to me that a lot of FATE games like the aforementioned Starblazer Adventures, Diaspora and Bulldogs! are actually SF or Space Opera games. Do you think there’s a particular reason why FATE is used or is it just a sign of the popularity of the game system?

Sarah: I’m personally surprised FATE isn’t used more widely in all genres, although it does lend itself very well to a pulpy, action-packed style of play. In my own humble opinion, I think science-fiction roleplaying has been a bit dogged by a very serious, hard scifi approach, which is great for certain genres of roleplaying, but not particularly for action-packed space opera. To be completely honest, I don’t think there *was* a fully-featured, action-packed, cinematic space opera RPG system before Starblazer Adventures – I’ve been GMing science-fiction RPGs since the very beginning, and Starblazer is the first to feel properly space opera and let you play through the classic space opera tropes. Again, that’s all IMHO, of course!

Whilst I’ve not read Diaspora, I do own and love Bulldogs! – it’s a great game with a cool and very specific setting, with an awesome Starship Troopers feel. I love what Brennan and his team have done with the game, and wish them huge success. I think there’s loads of room for FATE love in the RPG community – it’s only been 5 years since Fred, Rob, and Lenny invented the FATE 3 system, and it’s certainly changed my RPG life. It was awesome seeing them sweep the board at the ENnies this year – congrats again, guys!

Stargazer: Apropos FATE and SF: You are the author of the Mindjammer setting for SBA and an upcoming novel of the same name. Can you tell us a bit about both? And can you give us some updates on the progress on the second edition of Mindjammer?

Sarah: Mindjammer is my attempt to write my perfect science-fiction setting. We’re now in the second decade of the 21st century, and the nature of science-fiction has gone through massive changes since the invention of SF roleplaying in the 1970s. We’ve been through 80s space opera, right through cyberpunk and beyond, and even surpassed the transhuman and singularity movements, to the extent that "transhuman science-fiction" is almost a tautology – pretty much *all* modern science-fiction is transhuman in one way or another!

I think science-fiction roleplaying should reflect that, whilst retaining its awesome, maximum game fun, action-packed feel. Mindjammer attempts to do that, by introducing transhuman themes such as longevity, augmentation, technological psionics, sentient starships, memory uploads (and downloads), and much more as the basic assumptions of the setting. Since winning the ENnie Judges Spotlight Award in 2010, we’ve been working on the Mindjammer 2nd edition, with heaps of new content and all new artwork by the enormously talented Paul Bourne. It should be out towards the end of this year, and followed by numerous other supplements.

The Mindjammer novel is Cubicle 7′s first foray into fiction to support its RPG lines, and is a 400-odd page action-packed novel of transhuman adventure, set right in the New Commonality of Humankind. If you know the Mindjammer supplement, you’ll already know some of the main characters. I’m personally very excited about the Mindjammer novel – it’s not only a cracking story of far future space opera, cinematic and geared up to gamer expectations, it’s also proper science-fiction in its own right, dealing with some of the implications of the hyper-advanced technologies which the Commonality has. The story deals with a team of troubleshooters working for SCI Force – the Security and Cultural Integrity Instrumentality – working with a culture which is being "Rediscovered" by the Commonality, and which isn’t dealing with the culture shock very well.  What they discover – well, I won’t give any more away than to say it could threaten the Commonality itself!  You can read more in the novel itself, available online and in good hobby stores everywhere from mid-October; check out www.mindjammer.com for more!

Stargazer: While doing some research for this interview I noticed that you have written “The Chronicles of Future Earth” for Basic Roleplaying. I actually bought a copy of that book mainly because I was intrigued by the setting. Alas I was a bit disappointed that the scope of the setting was quite limited. Do you think there will be more material for the Future Earth in the future?

Sarah: Definitely yes! The Chronicles of Future Earth was my first ever RPG book, and originally was pitched to be five times as long – well over 200-300 pages! Chaosium obviously didn’t know me as a writer at all, so were quite naturally cautious, and preferred the first book to be more modestly sized, which is the book you see today. They’ve asked me to write a player’s guide for the Venerable Autocracy, which I’m in the process of doing, and hopefully that will hit the shelves during 2012. I also have material for a trilogy of campaign scenarios and several supplements, so there’s plenty more if people want to see it. Everyone has said very kind things about Chronicles, and at the same time said they wanted more, so hopefully we’ll be able to oblige!

Stargazer: Is there anything else you’re currently working on? What else would you like to share with our readers that I forgot to ask you?

Sarah: Most of all, I’d like to say thanks to gamers everywhere for keeping our hobby going. It’s thanks to everyone’s passion, enthusiasm, support and dedication that people like me are able to produce games, and it’s a great honour and a privilege. Sites like Stargazer’s World play a crucial role in this, and great thanks and kudos to you, Michael, for your dedication in keeping it going. It’s a great hobby to be a part of!

For me, the next year or three are looking busy, with lots of material coming out for Starblazer and Mindjammer, Legends of Anglerre, Chronicles, and Cubicle 7′s upcoming Call of Cthulhu sourcebook "World War Cthulhu". For Starblazer, we have the long-awaited Planet Killers, and a very exciting new setting which we’ll be announcing in the new year; for Mindjammer, we have the second edition "Mindjammer – The Expansionary Era", Mindjammer Adventures, Planeships and Slowboats, a Commonality atlas, and PDF scenarios; for Legends of Anglerre, the upcoming Companion, plus a trilogy of scenarios, and an exciting historical fantasy setting sourcebook. I’m also working on two more Mindjammer novels, and some other fiction projects which have to remain under wraps for now. It’s a hugely exciting time to be working in the industry!

Thanks again for the opportunity to be interviewed, Michael, and best wishes to yourself and everybody reading Stargazer’s World. Happy gaming!

Stargazer: Thank you for taking your time answering our questions. Good luck with the Mindjammer novel and all your other current and upcoming projects! Take care!

By the way, you can follow Sarah Newton online at her website sarahnewtonwriter.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Interview: Evil Hat Productions
2. An ICONic interview: Steve Kenson!
3. Interview: Bill Coffin

Some care instructions came with the Battlemat instructing me to use only wet erase markers (which i found at a local store) and never to use any red or orange markers. Something in the ink makes them permanently stain the vinyl. Never to fold the mat but rather just roll it up into a tube.

When I first opened the mat it had some wrinkles that you can see in my photos. But after a few games those wrinkles have dissapeard and the mat lays flat at every game.

I now currently own two Chessex Battlemats. When I first started using the Battlemats I would draw out my dungeons on the fly. Keeping my players guessing as to what was coming up around each corner. Lately however, I have switch to drawing out my dungeons before hand. This can kill the eliment of surpize for my players but it does allow me to draw very detailed maps and I almost always get some oohh’s and aawww’s from my party. That’s saying a lot for a guy who can’t draw.

Related posts:

1. D&D 4th Edition: Miniature Combat
2. Review: The World’s Greatest Screen
3. One GM screen to rule them all

Hopefully it will be equal parts nostalgia and mini-review; I’ll try to include some gaming tidbits or ideas that can be of use to you. So without further ado gentle reader here we go…

5. Call of Cthulhu RPG (3^rd Edition): This was my first Call of Cthulhu product. Well that’s not technically true, since it wasn’t mine. In the late 80’s when we were starting to play role-playing game we didn’t have money to buy every game and each person got the game that they wanted to run; we often mail ordered games together to save on shipping and handling. I don’t remember what I ordered that particular time, but my friend Luis ordered the Call of Cthulhu 3^rd edition Boxed Set and became our official Cthulhu Keeper.

Boxed Sets have a special place in my heart. There is some sort of magic to opening that box and taking out all the different components. I remember that after Luis read the booklets, I got to read the Investigator’s Book with its red cover and the profile of the pensive man. Inside the sparsely illustrated book I got my introduction to Lovecraft and the Call of Cthulhu game. Although I must admit that upon first reading the book there were some details that confused me (for some reason the Resistance Table was hard for me to understand, but I was a pretty green gamer back then). The sample Harvey Walters’ character sheet and the one page example of play at the end of the booklet fired up my imagination and creativity.

Another thing that got me was the reading lists. By this time I knew who H.P Lovecraft was, but I was YET to read any of his works. After playing the game I became obsessed with reading the mythos stories and thus began a long love affair with Lovecraft and works inspired by his writings.

Years later my friend Luis moved and couldn’t take all his gaming books and I inherited his Call of Cthulhu boxed set. It’s still in my collection; the box has almost all the original components: The Investigator’s Book, The Keeper’s Book, the Sourcebook for the 1920s, character sheets and a map of the world. Only missing are the dice and the cardstock investigator figures.

But I got something better, copies of our old characters! The Keeper used to keep our character sheets (ironic I know) and when I opened the box I found some of the old character sheets we played with. I don’t think these are the very first character we used, but these were some of the first investigators we played. I’ve collected those character sheets into one PDF file, Including a copy of my character Rupert Edgard “Iggy” McNuggart, historian and antiquarian; for anyone interested in seeing what we played back then around 1995. Be aware we created these characters using the 3^rd edition rules, and excuse any mistakes made, we were all eager teenagers back then.

I have later editions of Call of Cthulhu in my collection, even the Basic Role-Playing game system I first experienced in Call of Cthulhu, but nothing compares to the thrill I got from the boxed set!

4. Cthulhupunk: The Cthulhupunk book is a GURPS sourcebook for playing Lovecraftian adventures in a cyberpunk world. Although the book is out of print (according to the Steve Jackson website) you can still get copies out there on the Internet. Later editions of the book have a nicer cover, but my copy from 1995 is graced with the art of Albert Slark, showing a cyborg stalked by a Hound of Tindalos. While I’ve seen other pieces by Albert Slark and love some of them, let’s say this is not one of those pieces. Despite the horrid cover, this is one excellent book.

By 1995 I was better versed in the Lovecraftian mythos. I had read the stories and played games set in the 1920s and modern times, but here was a thrilling idea, Lovecraftian adventures in a cyberpunk setting. Besides my love for the mythos I also brought the book because of the author, Chris W. McCubbin. I am a big fan of his work and back then he wrote one of my favorite columns in White Wolf Magazine, Out of the Parent’s Basement. So when I saw the book I snatched it up! I love GURPS sourcebooks, even if I rarely play the game, and this book did not disappoint.

The layout and art are excellent, set the tone of the book most effectively and are of exceptional quality. The first chapter, an overview of the Cthulhu Mythos is a clear and concise presentation, ideal to introduce the uninitiated to the concepts. I particularly like the timeline. The second chapter, the Cthulhu World, presented the dark future where the game is set. The distant time of 2045!

Fifteen years after it was written the future story of our world is badly outdated. The Commonwealth of Independent States that came into existence after the fall of the Soviet Union, and must have seemed so important back then, is given greater geopolitical importance that it had in our world and their dissolution is a harbinger of dark times in the game’s timeline. Still it is amazing some of the things the author predicted that echo real life events, devastating hurricanes, pandemics, the stock market collapse, and drug wars. Our world is not quiet the one portrayed in the book but it certainly has elements in place.

The Bestiary and Investigator chapters are GURPS specific and may not be as useful for gamers not using the system but the creature write up are informative and the weird science devices are imaginative and dark. The Cultist and the Adventure Seed chapters are chock full of ideas for adventure set in this setting.

Here is MY adventure seed idea for Cthulhupunk: I’ve always wanted to run a Cthulhupunk adventure where the players are hired by a music company executive to “procure” the sheet music to a particular piece. The executive claims the composer is an eccentric who still writes music in paper and although he was paid for his work he refuses to relinquish it. If the players investigate the composer was very popular and successful until he worked on a particularly disastrous production that was generally panned by the critics and ignored by the fans. Further investigation reveals the composer worked with sounds recorded by American historian Rupert Edgard McNuggart during an Antarctic expedition in the early 20^th century. The sheet music is actually part of a ritual to awaken or call terrible things from beyond our world. What will the characters do? That’s just an idea…

I think Savage Worlds would be a great fit for a Cthulhupunk campaign, and there is already a Savage Wolds Cthulhu book, Realms of Cthulhu. But if you want to do the conversion yourself there are documents out on the internet to help you. You can also see some sample NPCs at the Steve Jackson Games website to wet your appetite for the book.

3. Cthulhu by Gaslight: Of all the books on my list this is the last one I got. Surprising since Victorian England is one of my favorite time periods, but nevertheless I did not get this book until some years ago. It includes a great overview of the times, politics, timeline, travel, even clothing and fashion, details for creating Investigators for this time period and a great series of adventures. While I don’t usually run pre-made adventures, the adventures in the book contain many great ideas and details for adventures set in a period not everybody is familiar with. The map of London and the color plates are up to usual Chaosium standards. A great book overall.

I can’t wait for the publication of Space 1889 Red Sands, which Michael reviewed some weeks ago, so I can mix my love for Space 1889 with the Cthulhu mythos. Imagine discovering a temple to the Great Old Ones in Mars, protected by degenerate High Martians, or perhaps a Mi-Go settlement. The possibilities! However I’m not the first person to suggest this.  There is an article in heliograph.com about exactly this idea.

Even if you don’t want to mix your horror and your retro sci-fi there are many adventuring opportunities in Cthulhu by Gaslight regardless of the system you use.  Here is another Adventure Seed Idea: I love the spirit of exploration of the age, with so many opportunities to discover the secret places long forgotten or hidden away. The characters begin in London where the family of a friend lost in exotic places asks the characters for their help. They find a map hidden among his papers and must fight the cultists who want to recover the map, followed by a mad dash across the world to reach the location before the cultists. What awaits there? This could be played as a pulpish adventure or a dark and dangerous tale in the vein of Lovecraft’s stories.

This book is an excellent source of information for the period, whether you play Call of Cthulhu or not. Highly recommend!

2. Call of Cthulhu d20: If you’ve read any of my previous posts this must come as NO surprise. I’m a big D20 fan and the possibility of playing Call of Cthulhu with the D20 rule set just tickled my fancy. Granted the nature of the system results in a different gaming feel. Investigators in the D20 version are more resilient, but the author, Monte Cook, did a great job of capturing the feel of the mythos and paring down some aspects to make the characters feel like normal people, not super characters of other d20 games.

I like how the heroes play, in some ways more than I like how D20 Modern characters work. They used the Insanity mechanic from Call of Cthulhu, a great idea since I think it’s one of the strengths of the Chaosium game. Through numeric and mechanical formulas it emulates how the characters lose their minds. If you have players that love role-playing it gives them an idea of how to play this. For the more mechanically minded there is the real fear of the ever shrinking Sanity. A very elegant mechanic indeed!

There is also the fact that the mythos creatures in the book can be used in other D20 games. Now I had the stats so my D&D character could conceivably fight Cthulhu. Ask my players, they will tell you there is always some Lovecraftian feel to my games, no matter the genre or the system.

Although the book is out of print there are resources out there for the enterprising GM. Yog-Sothoth.com has D20 conversions for various adventures, including the famous Masks of Nyarlathotep. There is even an online character generator. The characters in the PDF earlier in the post were actually rolled up to play Masks of Nyarlathotep. Imagine the D20 characters finding the journal, or letters from a long dead family member and how it draws them into the adventure… Call of Cthulhu D20 may be dead but definitely not forgotten!

1. Deities and Demigods, the Cthulhu Mythos: This was my very first contact with the Cthulhu Mythos! I had just begun playing D&D some months before when a neighbor had a garage sale. To my surprise and delight he had been a D&D player and was selling his collection. I purchased an early edition of Deities and Demigods for $10, one that included the Melnibonean Mythos and of course the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Erol Otus art captured my imagination; here were horrific creatures, pools of eyes and mouths, Cthulhu with its horrific stare. I read and re-read that chapter, but I never unleashed any of the more powerful creatures upon my unsuspecting players, some deep ones perhaps. I did roll the dice when they mentioned the name Hastur to see if the Unnamable One appeared. There was a 25% chance… Alas, he never did!

If you can get your hands on a copy I believe the Cthulhu Mythos as they appeared in Deities and Demigos would be great for old school games out there such as the Basic Fantasy Role Paying Game or OSRIC.

This first contact with things Lovecraftian began my long descent into the Lovecraftian world. It piqued my interest as well as that of some of my friends, it led to us playing Call of Cthulhu and my voracious reading of all things Lovecraft. This interest continues, I believe I’ve read most of what Lovecraft wrote and many of the stories inspired by the Mythos.

As a final note, I realize some of my Top 5 choices may seem a little dated (hey I’m not denying my age) and I may have missed some of the newer Cthulhu themed games out there. Some like Cthulhutech and Trail of Cthulhu I am yet to read and I am looking forward to the Realms of Cthulhu for Savage Worlds I already ordered (hey writing this had some effect on my wallet!). But I know my good friend Michael is a fan of the first two and has written about them before so even if they are not on the list I know they are well represented.

Well that’s all for now, the first Top 5 list is done!

What are your favorite Lovecraftian gaming products?

Related posts:

1. Lovecraftian Week: Roundup post
2. Review: Cthulhu Rising
3. Lovecraftian posts from the archives

If you are still unsure about whether you want to buy a copy of the BRP book or not, you should have a look at the free BRP Quickstart PDF. The 48-page PDF has been released just recently and contains character creation, rules (including combat), a couple of short adventures from various genres and even some monsters.

If you ask me, the BRP Quickstart PDF is one of the best quickstart products I have seen. Especially the fact that they added several adventures is a nice touch. You can download the BRP Quickstart PDF here at the Chaosium site. Please note that you’ll have to register an account there in order to be able to download the PDF.

Related posts:

1. Basic Roleplaying
2. CthulhuTech Quickstart
3. Chill Quickstart Rules

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:

• GORE
• Runequest SRD Luxury Edition

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.

Related posts:

1. Gaming on the cheap
2. Freebies: Renaissance
3. Basic Roleplaying Quickstart PDF

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?

Related posts:

1. Basic Roleplaying Quickstart PDF
2. Chimera Basic is out! Get it now for free!
3. [Freebies] FU: the Free, Universal Roleplaying Game