Binding BRP

 

More adventures in bookbinding.

Some time ago I got a copy of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying when the PDF was on sale at DriveThreRPG for 99c.

I printed it full-size and bound it in a fan-glue binding (the green one). The BRP Quick-Start rules were free, so I did them too (the floral cover, on the left). Both of those bindings have been around for a year or so, and since then I've also bought a PoD paperback edition of the rules.

Recently I thought I'd like a copy in a more compact form, so I printed the Big Yellow Book in A5 signatures, and stitched and bound it into a Little Big Crimson Yellow Book, on the right.

Now Chaosium have released a shiny new edition of BRP, with an editable RTF text block available under the ORC. However, even without any illustrations, and with all the text at 10pt, an A5 production of that comes to somewhere around 700-800 pages, so it might be a while before I get up the gumption to lay that all out and print it in signatures.

Space Opera Revisited

Some years ago — quite a few years, now — I ran a space opera campaign using the Hero System Star Hero rules.

I put my house rules and some other campaign information, including some session journals, on my website at https://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/terranempire/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html. (There was another that I'd done previously, also using the Hero System, set in a slightly modified version of Jack Vance's Gaean Reach.)

Terran Empire cover

It was nominally run in the Terran Empire milieu, though in fact not a lot of that background ever made it into the foreground of the game. I think there were some hints of covert Vorgon interference in Terran space, and the party did a salvage job on a drifting Hzeel freighter, but that was bout it.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed that campaign, and the main reason it folded (apart from my usual mayfly attention span) was because I was getting pretty sick of the Hero System's constant pernickety accounting. I had a character generation app that helped a lot, but even so...

It occurs to me now that the generic nature of the Chaosium Basic Roleplaying System, along with the simplicity of its basic mechanisms, might suit me a bit better. I don't know the system very thoroughly, but one way to amend that might be to build a whole heap of stuff in it, and one way to do that might be to convert my old campaign to it.

So I thought I'd give it a go. Why not?

There is a pretty comprehensive BRP sci-fi horror game already in existence, New Horizon, but it is pretty massive, about a thousand pages just in the two volumes of its core rules, and I don't know that I have the endurance required to absorb that much milieu information when I already have a milieu that I'm somewhat familiar with.

Mythras

 

Once upon a time, many years ago, there was a roleplaying game called Runequest. It was very popular, probably second only to AD&D at the time. Somewhere I have a copy of Runequest II but I haven't looked at it for years and years.

It went through several iterations, the latest of which is (I believe) Runequest 6. Mythras, as far as I know, is pretty much RQ6 renamed — there may well be some minor differences; I haven't kept up with the changes in Runequest through the ages.

I just ordered a copy of Mythras, though whether I'll ever actually use it to play a game is uncertain. There were elements of the Runequest milieu that I didn't much like, the heavy emphasis on cults and their relationships being one of them, and I think that when played straight, Mythras carries that on. But I don't know for sure to what extent — I shall have to read the system in more detail.

There's a freebie quickstart PDF version available from from DTRPG called Mythras Imperative.

In common with others of its ilk, it's intended to allow you a "try before you buy" experience. It contains enough information to get into character creation, and to run the beginnings of a campaign.

I guess, if you were willing to put in the work yourself, you could use it as the basis to create your own fully-fledged game, but I think that would be a lot of work to save a few dollars on the complete rules.

There's a companion volume called Classic Fantasy which is basically intended to enable those who want to play AD&D with the Mythras mechanics.

I also ordered a copy of that, because I've found in the past that I tend to end up trying to force whatever fantasy game I'm running into a D&D mould. And that's why I've been running an AD&D campaign for the last few years — because I figured that I might as well just use AD&D to play AD&D.

However, something I don't much like about D&D in any of its manifestations is the way that characters fairly rapidly become enormously overpowered. If you want to play a game in which characters can mow their way through armies of mooks without breaking a sweat, and completely ignore the perils of curses or disease or what-not it's fine, but I prefer a less superheroic campaign style. Unless I'm playing a superheroic campaign, of course.

There's a possibility that a Mythras-based AD&D-style campaign might be a solution. Maybe.

Chaosium, the owners of the Runequest brand, appear to have republished the d100 engine used for Runequest and Call of Cthulhu et. al. into a sort of universal, non-genre-specific game they've just called Basic Roleplaying. It looks interesting to me, a lot simpler than games like GURPS or the Hero System, both of which are phenomenally accounting-heavy when it comes to character creation and maintenance.

I nabbed the PDF of it from DTRPG because it was on sale for 99 cents, but I really prefer physical books when it comes to RPG manuals. It's available in hard-copy from Chaosium, but they want to charge an additional $US85 for postage, and though I'd like a copy of my own, I don't want it that much. It doesn't seem to be available in print anywhere else: Amazon lists it, but as usual when they're listing a book they can't actually get but don't want to delist, they show it at a massively inflated price, in this case about $350. Absurd.