Chaosium has been making waves with its recent revamp of the Basic Roleplaying System – and soon it’s going to get absolutely monstrous.
Chaosium unveiled a first look at an upcoming creature compendium for the Basic Roleplaying System. Titled, simply Basic Roleplaying: Creatures, the new book will provide a whole slew of new friends and foes across a variety of genres. Including the distant past and even the modern day. It’s a golden time to be getting into BRP.
Basic Roleplaying: Creatures – For All Your Monster Needs
If you haven’t been following along, the Basic Roleplaying engine is the same ruleset that powers many of Chaosium’s various RPGs. You’re probably most familiar with it from Call of Cthulhu. You might be familiar with it from the recent Basic Roleplaying contest, during which Chaosium put out the call to creators and designers to invent their own genres using the BRP system.
And if you take a look, you’ll see the true breadth of it. The engine is designed to span genres and timeframes. It by and large does. It’s a fairly simple system with a lot of wiggle room to play around in. It’s a d100 engine that allows for a lot of skills, and a creative designer can come up with any number of special powers that work off of that core system.
Which is why it’s so exciting to see Chaosium pull the covers off a new Basic Roleplaying book. Not only will this be a good catalogue of creatures for GMs to pull from when coming up with their own adventures, it’s also an exciting developement for designers. Because here will be a look at how Chaosium’s own designers use the system. Here’s a possible template for what onsters in a variety of genres can look like:
“Basic Roleplaying: Creatures collects animals, monsters, nonhumans, and nonplayer characters drawn from history, science fiction, fantasy, prehistory, mythology, and the modern world, allowing for any gamemaster to use them in any D100-based game. Coming soon!”
That’s quite a spread, honestly. And just looking at the cover gives you a taste. Hopefully the book will also come with a set of creature creation guidelines. Though in fairness, that isn’t always needed. GMs are gonna GM – and a big part of that is just fiddling with numbers and winging it to see what you come up with. Case in point, the latest D&D Monster Manual doesn’t have any monster creation rules, and yet, there’s still plenty of people homebrewing up their own monsters.
At any rate, keep an eye out. The new Basic Roleplaying: Creatures is due out “soon.” Which probably means in the next three months – going by Chaosium’s typical meaning. I’m sure there’ll be an actual release date eventually. For now, though, if you want to learn more about the Basic Roleplaying System – the same ruleset that’s taking off with Call of Cthulhu – you can follow the link below.
I’m hoping to see a blend – give e a mythological sci-fi creature any day of the week and I’m happy!
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