Doing Something In D100

Recently I took advantage of Drive Thru RPG’s “Christmas in July” sale to buy a PDF of Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine, the newest iteration of Chaosium’s BRP system. In a few ways it was unnecessary: the text is expanded from the 2008 BRP “Big Gold Book”, and someone has the whole O.R.C. text as Markdown on GitHub.¹. However, I wanted a copy of the original text so that if I decided to build and publish a setting based on BRP – an ambitious task for someone who has trouble just getting games running – I’d have the reference text handy.

Why Basic Roleplaying?

Apart from the “open license” that isn’t that Open (Gaming) License, BRP is, as the BRP book itself puts it, one of the most influential RPG systems published. Games derived from it, or from which it was derived, include RuneQuest, Stormbringer, Elric!, Elfquest, Nephilim, Ringworld, Call of Cthulhu, and recently Rivers of London. Mythras, Legend, and OpenQuest are close cousins based on intermediate and apparently memory-holed versions of RuneQuest. King Arthur Pendragon and Dragonbane are distant relations.

In prior posts I discussed OpenQuest, and while that systems has several simplifications over Basic Roleplaying, the differences are not that great. See that article for the difference between success levels in BRP and OQ.

Fundamentally, though, both systems have a simple set of rules:

• All skills are percentiles. Roll percentile dice, and if you’re below or equal to your skill rating, you succeed. If you’re above, you fail. (Systems differ on how to define extraordinary success or failure.)

• Attributes are either percentiles or have percentile values attached to them, e.g. an INT of 13 has an “Idea” check of 65%. For comparing attributes to attributes directly, either use contested rolls of the associated percentiles or use the formula 50% + (Active_Attribute - Resisting_Attribute) x 5% to derive a single success percentile. The latter method is also printed out as a “Resistance Table”.

• Combat is simply extended skill use. Each round of combat, roll a weapon skill: if you succeed, you hit, and if you fail, you miss. (Most variants allow the target to mitigate damage by rolling a skill to parry, making some combats drag out a bit.)

Obviously there are more rules, notably “spot rules” which use the basic mechanics to handle specialized situations. BRP character sheets are notorious for consisting mainly of skill percentages, although Rivers of London makes a distinction between “Common Skills” listed on every character sheet and “Expert Skills” which default to 0% and are added only to characters with non-zero scores.

What Projects?

Riffing off the OpenQuest I presented over two years ago, here are some projects I might want to use BRP for.

System

• BRP GUMSHOE – I don’t know how well one can mesh Community Content with Open RPG Creative licensed content, but my basic idea was to convert “investigative” skills like most scholarly disciplines and information gathering techniques into simple “you have it or you don’t” labels much like GUMSHOE system from Pelgrane Press. Skills for actually doing things like running, shooting, setting explosives, etc. would remain percentile. See the GUMSHOE SRD for motivational examples and more details, and Lorefinder for the d20-based inspiration for such an undertaking.

• BRP Psionics – BRP already has a psionics system, but for general (science fiction?) use it’s probably missing a half-dozen specific skills. Unlike in OpenQuest a system can define as many skills as it needs, since they aren’t fighting for Growth Points or even necessarily space on a character sheet. See “Toward a Psionic System” for more about my initial proposal.

Setting

• BRP Godsplat – “Godsplat” is a setting I’ve been talking about for more than two years. Sometime during the Bronze Age Collapse, the titanic corpse of a deity fell from the sky and left an impact crater in central Anatolia, filled with the deity’s ichor, bone, and flesh. Some survivors of the event, guided by a mad prophet, learned how to turn this stuff into magical potions and artifacts. Others, who didn’t learn the trick, mutated into half-human monsters. I have sporadic notes on the Rites of the Fallen God and the unsettling powers of the Misbegotten, but those notes will need a lot of work, especially since I started porting them to OpenQuest.

• BRP Grigoria – Grigoria is the setting for a fantasy campaign I never ran. It originally used Magic World (2012), which was the Gold Book cut down to one magic system (“Sorcery”) and a few optional rules … essentially the old Stormbringer/Elric! RPG with the Elric of Melibonë material excised. I could retool BRP, or simply dust off MW, and try to bring the setting to fruition.

• BRP Kutheria – An ill-starred attempt to meld Hârn setting material with BRP rules ran aground at the sheer volume of said setting material, not to mention the two competing purveyors (Columbia Games and Kelestia.com, each with a claim on the original author’s material). I’d have to fix or elide a lot of stuff: wizards would work differently, priests may not work at all, and the Tolkien-lifted species may need replacing.

• BRP Orclands – A campaign I ran for all of two sessions posited an Australia-like continent populated by orcs but colonized by humans. Magic may adapt the Shamanism/Animism systems of OpenQuest and Mythras, since the original campaign was kind of vague on how shamans actually worked.

• BRP Terra Australis – This setting is actually five or six settings, each of which sets up a conflict between two competing philosophies and two or more resulting magic systems:

  • The Eastern Empire: The state religion is something called Taluism, but heretical magicians dwell in hidden places threatening to bring back the bad old godless days. Our heroes (the magicians) would probably used something derived from Nephilim or Enlightened Magic, both for BRP, while Taluism is mainly an NPC magic I presented previously.

  • Zanathar: The mountainous region between the Eastern Empire’s western frontier and the Midlands (below) is home to a number of broadly similar magical practices rooted in ritual magic and gaining temporary power from otherworldly beings. Right now the systems are a mess, with a mixture of Mythras’s Theism, my barely there ritual magic system, ideas from GURPS Thaumatology, and less coherent thoughts.

  • The Midlands: Discussed in detail, the major conflicts arise between the various religions, guilds, orders, and schools, notably the Sacred Order of Druids and the Witches’ Circles. I’d like to give Witches a memorable form of magic, but so far my notes on the subject are complex, conflicting, and woefully incomplete. This one may have to stay OpenQuest unless I have a BRP breakthrough.

  • The Westlands: Taluism has set up a “holy land” in the west, while the “pagan” kingdoms of the West use the magics that Taluism can’t neutralize: alchemy, artificing, herbalism, other techniques of binding magic, and slow-and-sure ritual magic. I have no concrete systems for these, and no preference for BRP, OQ, or anything else.

  • Vanaheim: Furthest “west” on the Polar Continent, believers in the Vanir struggle against Taluist missionaries, sailors with strange cargoes, and their own dark, fickle gods. This segment might have to stay with OpenQuest, since its Personal Magic and Divine Magic systems suit the setting best.

  • The Polar Circle: The inhospitable frozen south is home to tribes who practice OpenQuest’s Personal Magic and Shamanism (or something like it), but there are mysterious lights on the mountaintops …

• BRP Through Time – BRP already covers far more time periods than OpenQuest, but maybe I could tie it together with a time-travel setting. Preferably it would not be too derivative of GURPS Time Travel, TimeWatch for GUMSHOE, Doctor Who, The Chronicles of Amber, or Lords of Gossamer and Shadow.

So?

Grigoria might be the safest “starter project”. I have my old notes, and I don’t have to invent any (many?) system bits. At some point I wanted to extend BRP Sorcery spells to cover some of the same area as OpenQuest’s three magic systems, Legend Common Magic, BRP Magic, and potentially perhaps Call of Cthulhu magic², but maybe I can do that after I have a game running.

I could also try to revive Orclands, although I never really had a clear idea where it was going or at least how I would get there. As usual, I have notes, but I’d also have to plan for the party not to make it to the climactic revelation scene.³

If whatever I end up with is publishable, I guess I’ll have to learn Scribus, LaTeX, or typst (2) and try to get it on DTRPG or itch.io.