Basic Roleplaying . Net

Issue Two has finally made an appearance!

See here

Uncounted Worlds Issue 1

Finally, after numerous trials and tribulations that I won’t bore the world with (mainly because it would be too depressing to rehearse them all again…), the first issue of Uncounted Worlds is now available! At the moment it’s available as a free PDF or at-cost PoD in A4, saddle stitched format from Lulu. I’m also passing a copy of the PDF to Chaosium, and will be putting a copy up here and do intend to try to do a reformatted US letter format edition at some point.

I’m currently viewing this as more a sampler issue than a full issue – there is far too much stuff by me in it, and as well as a lack of dicersity amongst the authors there’s precious little art as well. Both are things I intend to try an remedy for the next issue, so if you have material you would be willing to contribute please get in touch.

Outpost 19 Cover

I am pleased as punch to announce (some what belatedly here, as we’ve had some issues!) that on 18th December 2008 Chaosium released the PDF edition of my BRP Monograph, Outpost 19, a science fiction scenario, complete with a sketch of the wider setting, pre-generated characters, maps and handouts.

Inspired by Chaosium’s original Worlds of Wonder, specifically the SF component Future*World, classic SF such as Heinlein’s A Tunnel in the Sky and modern SF such as the works of Alastair Reynolds and Ken Macleod, and too much UK children’s TV SF from the 1970′s, it is set on an archaeological research station on newly colonised world at the edge of settled space. There has been an outbreak of an unknown disease at the station and teh player characters are trouble shooters scrambled from the sponsoring corporations nearest offices to try and resolve the problem.

Hopefully a print edition will follow in the new year some time. In the mean while, in amongst the mince pies and obligatory festive visits to relatives, I am working on improved versions of the maps and some of the other handouts to support the monograph. Happy Holidays everyone!

Ashes to Ashes

The game is beginning to get supplements. Chaosium have launched the dark fantasy setting Ashes to Ashes as a monograph PDF with a print edition to follow soon:

This Basic Roleplaying setting casts the adventurers as mavericks in a fantasy world that is losing a war it does not even know that it is fighting. Hidden demons and their mortal minions—many of whom do not even know who their masters truly are—manipulate events from the shadows, experimenting with social control mechanisms to steer the human cattle in the direction that they want them to go. The adventurers’ goal is to discover and stop them.

More information can be found at Chaosium’s catalogue page

Berlin 61

Also just released, or technically re-released, is Berlin ’61. Again this is currently available as a monograph PDf and will be in print form shortly. This a BRP reworking of the product originally released via the MRQ STL / OGL.

A setting for different Basic Roleplaying genres. Includes information on life in the city during the cold war, key locations, and special organizations. Battle spies, assassins, cultists and the Dark Herald Kototh. A great back-drop for espionage adventures in the 1960s style, and silver age superhero action!

More information can be found at Chaosium’s catalogue page

Plus of course there’s a whole slew of supplements in various stages of development but with as yet no firm publication date, as well as the recent wave of Call of Cthulhu specific monographs. And Chaosium have a number of other irons in the fire – the BRP Adventure contest is still open (move quickly though, closing date is next Thursday!) and Jason Durall has recently turned in the manuscript for the Basic Roleplaying Quick Start (see his blog post for July 1st), plus there are a number of projects no yet formally announced. The ones I definitely know of are mine: I’ve got a scenario with Chaosium awaiting art and layout, and a couple of very short pieces as well. It seems reasonable therefore that there will be others…

I’m working on getting the Chaos Project moved into a WordPress plugin at this time.  After that it should be pretty easy to allow folks to add new items to the Chaos Project.  Right now you can take a look at the alpha-preview of it.

Basic Roleplaying - The Chaosium d100 System

I’d really like to review the published version of Basic Roleplaying.  But I can’t.  As a playtester we are supposed to recieve a copy of the final published rules but while everyone else seems to have recieved theirs I have yet to see a copy in the post as yet.  I’m not sure if I got lost in the shuffle or what even though Dustin confirmed my address.  Once I get a copy I will post my review of it.

I hope those of you that have gotten copies already are enjoying them.  Let us know what you think!

Basic Roleplaying has been loaded onto a truck and is on it’s way to Chaosium.  It’s expected to arrive Tuesday June 24th.  After which I imagine the pre-orders and playtester copies will be shipped out.  That ought to keep the Shipping Shoggoth busy.

Chaosium has also posted the final table of contents which I am re-posting below.

1. Introduction 5
2. Characters 15
3. Skills 46
4. Powers 85
   1. Magic 89
   2. Mutations 102
   3. Psychic Abilities 111
   4. Sorcery 122
   5. Super Powers 141
5. System 169
6. Combat 187
7. Spot Rules 211
8. Equipment 237
9. Gamemastering 278
10. Settings 297
11. Creatures 329
12. Appendices 372
    Index 376
    Character Sheets & Important Tables 381

Character Sheet

Somehow, no matter how pressing more important tasks are on a new setting or campaign, it’s always more fun to create the character sheet…

lastrefugesheet

yrthsheet

gatewardensheet

Only the Gate Warden Sheet was created with the new BRP in mind, the other two were aimed at Elric! / Call of Cthulhu variants.

No doubt I’ll get distracted and create some more soon…

So, with the imminent arrival of BRP in print and it already being available as PDF, and the fact that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (ish) on a first issue of Uncounted Worlds, I thought it was time I turned my thoughts back to After the Scouring.

It looks likely that I won’t be running this again this year – the Thursday Group’s real life commitments are such that playing time’s at a bit of a premium, and we’re having fun with a RIFTS game at the moment; well, with the setting anyway – every session is regularly punctuated with ritual cursing of the game system and the atrocious layout of the rule book… And by the time we finish the RIFTS run it’ll be winter and I have to run Call of Cthulhu or one of the players will hurt me. But everyone’s expressed an interest in returning to the setting and characters of After the Scouring, so it looks like I have a golden opportunity to port the setting from RQIII to BRP in advance of playing again next year.

So, my intention is to develop my ideas of how I’m going to do After the Scouring using the new BRP core rules here, as a sort of ongoing journal.

Some clear objectives need spelling out in the first instance. AtS was always intended to capture the “real world changed in strange but ultimately explicable ways” feel of classic British post-apocalypse SF (Sword of the Spirits, Peter Dickinson‘s Changes trilogy, John Wyndham’s Chrysalids) I read as a child in the shadow of mutually assured destruction in the 1970′s. So ultimately, although there are supernatural elements to the setting, the feeling should ultimately be that these are somehow manifestations of a superior understanding of the universe (if not an actual superior technology). And I wanted the sense of distance from the change in the world to be close. Settings like Dreampod 9′s excellent Tribe 8 are great – but I didn’t want the “fall” of the old world to be mythology – I wanted it to be close and viscerally immediate. In the second half of the game we played last summer, the characters met an NPC who not only lived through the Scouring, but was sufficiently old at the time of the Scouring that he remembered watching CSI: Miami and of course one of the player characters was actually born before the world changed as well.

So those are the touch stones of the setting. When I ran the game last year, we basically just used RQIII with a few tweaks. I need to spell out those tweaks, and see which ones are key and which we just tinkering. I also need to think which bits of RQIII that aren’t in BRP were providing essential elements of the setting and thus need recreating. So that’s the topic for the next post or two I think.

The core BRP rule book is at the printers, on schedule for a late June release, but Chaosium have announced that copies can be purchased now in PDF format – see here!

And the new BRP isn’t the only PDF available – see here – and they have indicate that more PDF titles are likely to follow.