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I wanted to start a discussion for those of us in the hobby using a BRP system as to how you feel the current state of BRP systems are as a whole, and how we as a community can solve some of the percieved issues surrounding BRP to bring more people into the system. Personally I'm unhappy with the state of BRP as a system and although it's the only system I run I'm frankly worried about the future of the products surrounding the system. Although open license systems will always exist having a big, officially branded system is always great to attract new players. I feel the biggest issue facing BRP is fragmentation. For fantasy alone you have two major systems under Chaosium (Runequest / Heroquest). Runequest is further split into Runequest Gorlantha and Runequest Classic. To make matters worse both Heroquest and Runequest have Gorlantha labeling. While it's easy for those of us inside the hobby to understand the differences for those looking to explore BRP this extremely confusing. Throw Runequest 6 / Mythras into the mix, and you have 3 very similar sounding systems all currently in publication. Then you also have discontinued products like Magic World that also occupy some space in the BRP fantasy universe. To make matters worse BRP doesn't really have a currently in print Sci-Fi system. You have M-Space which is a sort of official Mythras Sci-Fi spin off, Fractured Hope and Swords of Cydoria, two great settings and frameworks but they require the BGB, and... Uh... Yeah. That's about it. I still feel the BGB is the best incarnation of BRP to date, containing everything you need to run a variety of campaigns and then using supplements and monographs to delve into more specific topics. However, big BRP developers would rather spin off into their own completely self contained books (IE Mythras) than create supplements under the big unifying Gold Bible. Plus, the BGB is now officially dead as well. So we have no unifying product currently in print, a bunch of fractured, splintered spinoffs of spinoffs for currently in print Fantasy products, and no hard official Sci-Fi setting. The saving grace of BRP for my group is I own just about every supplement created in the last few years and everything my players need to play is on only a few sheets of paper. If this was not the case BRP would basically be a dead system for my group and we'd simply rely on open D100 systems. How can we grow the BRP system as a community with the current state of products available and combat the confusing, splintered, and half out of print landscape of BRP offerings? We've been hearing rumblings about a fix from Chaosium for years and there's still none in sight. How can we grow this community and introduce others to the hobby when even after a player enjoys a session with me I can't really point them to a easy to understand, in print system they can buy and enjoy for themselves?

Magic World is the most recent supplement from Chaosium that is the Elric RPG stripped of Moorcockisms. Some people find it dull, but I find it streamlined and I feel it gets out of the way of the storytelling. So with that said, you might have more luck finding a play by Skype or one of those RPG playing sites for Magic World, but it could have a bolted on setting that doesn't appeal to you. That would be my first avenue of research. BRP is a relatively obscure RPG system in and of itself so trying to find a game under an older system would probably be next to impossible. Unfortunately I don't have any advice for you other than try looking for online tables of Magic World as I like the social aspect of roleplaying and don't play online. Hopefully someone else can swoop in with more pointed and useful advice. Best of luck.

I have no ties to the Elric property and it is still my preferred Fantasy system. Why? A combination of mechanical things. A lot of things are abstracted and not simulationist. I am well past the point of enjoying buying mountains of books and having to cross reference powers in half a dozen of them to figure out how they interact (D&D style) or even flip through several pages of rules on combat styles, combat maneuvers and those kinds of things. Magic World provides simple, cinematic combat. A couple of swings and misses until someone takes a big hit and then combat is over. Very dramatic and very deadly. I can reference everything I need about combat in a few charts which are pinned to my screen. Despite this simplicity it still scales well to heroic levels with skills over 100% and other rules that allow for PC expansion beyond traditional caps. This same thing extends to every day use of skills. They are all straightforward and relatively simple. This keeps the very large majority of gameplay rolling along at a brisk pace which is exactly what I want as a GM. Story first, mechanics second. However, due to the simplicity of the rules there is plenty of book space to handle the strange exceptions that happen without feeling bloated. Burning, asphyxiation, and little rules like that. Everything is self contained in an easily digestible book. Couple that with a very robust magic system that is only one extra book for a ton of content and I hate to repeat myself, but the whole system is simple and fluid, but gives enough framework to handle just about anything quickly and easily. The simplicity wins the day for me.

Swords of Cydoria and Fractured Hopes are my go to roleplaying settings. I often mash them up. In fact I ran the Swords mission in a Fractured Hopes world during the last campaign I ran. It went absolutely sideways and I loved it. Great settings both of them.

Personally I'm against anything that slows down combat. I want it cinematic and I want it quick. Doing a "price is right" style comparison would slow down combat for little benefit. It's simply a more granular "success matrix" that fluctuates based on skill values. Doing any sort of "effect" or comparison on the tens digit, or reducing each other's skill percent likewise slows things down. If my players complain about things like this, I remind them it is merely an abstraction. This is not meant to be a combat simulator or a video game. It's a quick and easy way to drive the narrative. Once you remind them to enjoy the ride and not try to game the system, the ruffled feathers usually subside. If you strive for realism or "fairer" mechanics with dice you'll end up with a system like D&D 3.5 - so rules top-heavy they have to put a rollover warning under the front cover. Remind your players to push the system to the back and bring the roleplay to the forefront. It's one of the things D100 is great at - enough framework to cover most situations, but abstract enough to stay out of the way of your story.

I'm firmly in the same boat as you. I like loose frameworks to follow, but come up with most hard rules through roleplay these days. My players call it "experience" but what they don't know is I'm just lazy.

Highly recommend it. I like its voidship rules better than Cydoria's, however Cydoria's ships are powered by tech while voidships in Hopes are powered by magic. Void Sorcery is a big thing in Hopes, however Earth was destroyed by a race of biomechanical aliens who experimented on humans so there's tons of mutations / cyborgs, bio weapons, human psionics, everything you'd basically expect. I love the weapons section of Hopes. It says everything in the BRP core book exists in some of the fragments of Earth. Basically it's not too long after the loss of earth, the defeat of the evil invading aliens, and the tech is still floating around but the knowledge to make most of it is lost. Everyone who can't get their hands on high tech weapons relies on sword / shield / spear. It's got cool concepts you could steal for a Cydoria campaign or similar rules with a different stylistic design you could plug and play if desired. I would 100% buy both and pick and choose what you like from each.

I run a magic world / mythras mash up and I've been running organizations similar to how classic fantasy / mythras does it. It's a simple rank system. It doesn't decay over time as the connections you have in the organization will always remember what you've done for them - unless they get deposed, but that's another story. To track fame / infamy I use the allegiance system in Magic World. It's not exactly infamy per say, but players are much more likely to be recognized for their alignment so to speak the higher it is. I keep a loose track of the organizations they are part of, the locations of the branches they've assisted and the higher the rank the more renown they are out from that location. I know it's not a hard and fast ruleset, but it's a great yard stick so to speak. Create a local organization, have player ranks in them, and make those deeds known to those familiar with their organization. Use allegiance for more like a light fame / infamy / alignment system. Works well for me with little overhead above what I'd already be keeping track of.

So I picked up Fractured Hopes and Chronicles of Future Earth. Not the biggest fan of Chronicles. It's a great setting, but doesn't really introduce any new concepts. However, if someone was looking for a future fantasy type of setting book I would absolutely recommend it. Personally I tend to run my own settings so there wasn't much I could "steal" from the framework it put forth. Fractured hopes is very solid. It's very kitchen sink science fantasy. It has a bit of everything. Tons of cool concepts and setting things that would be easy to lift from it. Great book. Has a different feel from Swords of Cydoria which is more fantasy - sci fi. I will certainly get mileage out of the both of them someday soon. Dying to play them.

So I got my copy of Swords of Cydoria - interesting stuff. The setting is very sci fantasy with a touch of Numenara (ala somewhat rare alien tech). I enjoy it. I might not run it straight up, but it has lots of cool concepts. Chronicles of Future Earth is still in transit so I'll report back when I get it.

I like the "fiction first" point a lot. That's how I prefer to run my narratives, but it drives gameplay very well in BRP. In 3.5 D&D I ended up doing this a lot of the time anyways since I didn't want to look up rules constantly for all the nonsense my PCs tried to do. If your players can get a grasp of that (not - I want to cast 3 levels of fireball at the person with the lowest resistance kind of thing) then they will enjoy BRP or any d100 based system really.

That's exactly how I prefer to run my campaigns - hence my unbridled love of MW. I build a setting, throw things occasionally at my PC's, but otherwise let them play in it.

I'm going to grab Fractured Hopes, Swords of Cydoria, Chronicles of Future Earth, M-Space, and River of Heaven for my initial needs. I'll probably tap Numenara and Shadowrun for concept stuff. If none of those scratch my itch I'll probably reach out for Eclipse Phase and Traveller. (Who am I kidding - I'll end up with them eventually...) Thanks again everyone.

Any good bits in particular to yank out? Spaceship creation (probably one of the main reasons I'll try to track down old Traveller), cybernetics, good hacking rules that don't make a separate game within a game the other players can't participate in, a good comprehensive weapon and armor set, anything of the like?

Not to derail the topic at hand, but any suggestions for D100 Sci Fi systems while we're at it? It's not a burning need but I'd like to run something in the future. I prefer science fantasy so I was going to try to do some Numenara conversion (been planning this for a while now). Shadowrun of course has some ideas I can steal but I wouldn't run it as is. I don't know of any science fantasy D100 systems though so I'll probably hack together something myself. As far as material I could cannibalize (or possibly run wholesale) I have OpenQuest's sci fi supplement as well as M-Space on the docket. Is the Mindjammer stuff any good? How's the Traveller edition? I've heard good things about Traveller as well, but not the latest edition. Chronicles of Future Earth seems abandoned for the near future but I might grab a physical copy off Amazon. Is the Swords of Cydonia monograph any good? What about Fractured Hopes? Any other suggestions?

Spent some time paging through OpenQuest. It's pretty much exactly what I want. Feels pretty close to Elric / Magic World, handles skills over 100%, combat is very similar... The free PDF feels like a stripped down version of MW. I also look forward to going through the additional genre books. Thanks everyone.

Sorry, I thought I put in there somewhere - I'm looking strictly for fantasy at the moment. So that's a no on Blood Tide and some of the other supplements you mentioned. You'd have a shorter list of things I liked about the older RQ supplements. Magic was handled terribly IMO, sacrificing stats for anything more than minor magic, you were basically shackled to your organization to advance in magic at all, and a lot of the spell effects were highly costed for their effects. RQ6 / Mythras magic is basically the 100% better version of that entire system and I have used those magic systems in Magic World and intend to do so again if I stick with it. Combat likewise was equally terrible. It added things like fatigue, strike ranks, and other bookkeeping that didn't enhance the gameplay as opposed to the current BGB combat. Again, if I wanted to go with combat with the extra overhead I'd just go with RQ6. It is wholesale the better system. However, I don't want the extra overhead and bookkeeping and I don't feel it adds value to the combat light campaigns I tend to run. MW / BGB combat works much better in my opinion. Character creation for both RQ3 & RQ6 is also more overhead with hit locations, individual armor locations, and some extra skills I wouldn't really use in my campaign. Health pools and major wound tables cover my needs just fine with substantially less overhead. I did like RQ6's weapon styles, but MW has a similar system that covers what I would need in a combat light campaign. I also prefer resistance rolls and the grade checking system in MW combat to RQ6's "price is right" style of rolling. Overall, I thought MW covered my needs with less mechanical complexity but had enough rules to sufficiently cover most issues I would run into in gameplay. However, with Gorlantha / RQ being the default BRP fantasy from most major publishers now, nothing really bolts into MW as easy. Both the BGB and MW are being sunset, and those had IMO the most concise rulesets. Yes, you have things like legend, OpenQuest, etc, but they don't have the same kind of streamlining, quality control, and consistency across supplements like MW / BRP essentials looked like it was going to have. For example, I have the basic creatures supplement from Chaosium. That might work OK for legend or openquest, even though it isn't made for it, and I could do some minor conversions to get the creatures running in Magic World, but it would have been much nicer to have a bestiary pre-tuned for MW. I feel like this is the biggest issue with D100 systems at the moment - yes everything is compatible-ish, but there is no central standard with GOOD quality control and consistency across supplements. I have to scour supplements across dozens of tiny publishers or crawl through DriveThruRPG to find content and then hack it into Legend, OpenQuest, Magic World, RQ6, what have you. If you swap genres it's even worse - barely anything is compatible outside of the characteristics and some of the skills. Mechanically you might as well be playing an entirely separate system. BRP essentials / expanded MW content was going to provide that more centralized and streamlined set of content I was looking for.

So I've been away from the hobby for some time but I used to love Magic World. I looked at Chaosiums site to see no new supplements even after all this time so I did some research. Turns out Chaosium imploded, scrapped MW, and took on the banner of RQ. I don't like Runequest - RQ6 is a well made supplement but way too rules heavy for my taste and I pretty much despise older RQ rulesets due to various design choices with the mechanics. However, RQ6 also got rebranded to Mythras, old RQ stuff is being re-released by Chaosium and Gorlantha is being shoved into the limelight. I also don't like the newer editions of COC which is fine, because my old copies haven't stopped working. In short, I'm completely unhappy about the current state of BRP based fantasy and Chaosium has lost most of the good will I've given them over the years. I also have no idea what is going on with "Mythras" and if it is going to be it's own line, or be absorbed into Chaosium? I was looking forward to "BRP essentials" as well as the possibility of a Magic World like Sci Fi or Science Fantasy package. Although MW continues to run, I like continuing to add to my campaigns and nothing Chaosium is putting out will tickle my fancy. I love the D100 system, but I'm kind of at a loss as to where to get good, regular supplemental content from. I loved the direction Chaosium was going with the "Worlds" supplements, Enlightened Magic re-release, and MW supplements and now it's all kind of... Gone. Is there any material or publishers making good high fantasy content (or content used in high fantasy) that would bolt into MW with ease? I already bought classic fantasy for Mythras just to support the author, but as stated previously I'm unlikely to run Mythras in any capacity. Any suggestions you guys could provide would be great. I know my thoughts are kind of jumbled but I feel like the rug was yanked out from under me and all excitement I had about jumping back in has been dampened.

I have heard a lot about RM and I had considered picking it up just for a read through and some historical perspective (us late 80's kids not staying off your lawns and whatnot ). Anything useful in the game or would it just be an artifact I keep around for occasional perusal?

I was actually curious about this myself recently. I was looking for damn near anything that had a space or cyberpunk setting I could lift from. I was playing too much Shadowrun on the PC lately. I think I'll be purchasing several PDF's of other sci-fi / cyberpunk games in the near future and examining if the mechanics are worth lifting or if you should just pull setting stuff from it and just use BGB character creation. Would anyone be interested in me posting my results?

I see it mostly as a when would an animal bite situation. An alligator or crocodile is most likely to grab your leg, drag you down, and just snack on you. Dog or cat like animals, like a wolf or wildcat, are much more likely to pounce and scratch you, then rip out your throat with their jaws. They aren't going to be biting a human leg into a death roll. To reflect this, a crocodile is much more likely to severely injure your leg by pure strength alone. Other animals are much more likely to go for softer tissue where their damage would still easily incapacitate or kill the target. They will mechanically still rely on ambush, wear down, and outnumber tactics like in real life. Instead of mapping the PSI of bite force of animals into the game, they simply made the mechanics back up how the animal would attack in real life. This may make it so individual numbers do not match up in any sort of linear way, but encourages GM's to map encounters according to real life situations. Like in real life, a lone wolf isn't much of a threat as they wouldn't engage you. However, a pack of wolves is a serious issue. A lone crocodile will still drag you down and completely wreck your day however. This could also be representative of how much tissue an animal can take off. A crocodile is much more likely to rip off a whole limb from a bite, where a wolf or big cat will take off a much smaller chunk using just its jaws. As a GM, if you're going for realism of combat effects use hit locations and have wolves and large cats more likely to knock down targets and grapple them then go for head attacks. Crocodiles will go for legs, breaking and ruining them, then munch you down from there. The actual numbers on the animals don't matter at that point.

This is an incredibly interesting discussion with some really cool stuff to check out. RQ6 did say that in real combat opponents generally choose to strike for the head to quickly incapacitate a target (RQ6 Core book, Pg 145, "The Head? Again?"). However, do note that with some of these charts they are comparing to DEAD bodies. So it makes sense that a large proportion of the dead would have received head blows. A body blow or limb blow may have been recovered from. Head blows? Not so much. Still, really cool to see some research back up RQ6's system. Pretty cool about the Visby grave and how the mercenaries changed their tactics too. Great thread.

I've been thinking about this lately, and I really don't see a need for this personally. No offense on the work being done however, as someone else may use it. I personally think MW does the system fine as is. At over 100%, you get to attack more often. This is not only more realistic than your Cleave example, it simply makes more sense. You've worked with your weapon for so long you can simply do everything quicker and with more finesse than your opponent. However, doesn't your Cleave example step on the toes of the system already in place for very little gain? I mean, attacking three times at 50% each would accomplish the same thing as a three person Cleave right? Also, when in an BRP game would you want to be surrounded and need to Cleave? You'd almost certainly be dead before you could Cleave them all down. If they are small simple opponents that you cleave down then was Cleave needed at all or was the character ever really in danger? Overall this seems like a niche option that's already covered by the system. It's providing more options and thus bloating the system where I personally don't see it's need. Another thought I had was how do you handle the "feats" from certain other skills without stepping on role playing opportunities? For example, the feat proposed for athletics. Now, jump rolls that would normally be very tense are trivial for someone with a high athletics. Also, any PC without the expanded jump probably couldn't make jumps the PC with it could make. It's completely removing some role playing and tension building options at the GM's disposal and making a character so good at one thing they can completely control the narrative if that situation comes up. The situation a GM can call for jump rolls would be completely dominated by the PC with the feat and he would have to craft entire situations on making sure PC's with certain feats don't have those situations arrive often because they'll then dominate the narrative. For example, there's a pit in a crumbling dungeon that drops down into an abandoned cell. The PC's have to jump over it to continue. Normally this would be a pretty tense moment with failure having a pretty severe consequence. Now, instead, the PC with the jump feat effortlessly jumps over the pit, ties down a rope to something, and the PC's just scuttle across. Zero tension, zero consequence. You can't make the pit bigger to make the jump PC have more tension, because then if he fails the whole thing is shot and it just cements his control over the narrative. I'm not saying it's a usable example in actual game play, it's just the first one I thought of. I just don't see a good way to handle this with your standard MW campaign. This is fine for superhero type campaigns as they all have their niche and can save the people or thwart the villain with that one niche and it's fine. But for run of the mill adventurers obtaining super powers through play, I'm not sure I could ever find a good use for this. I'm OK with PC's learning spells to tackle these types of situations as that has a cost but slowly working your way towards super human every time you make a successful roll under stress (as per the rules of gaining experience rolls) makes this system too hard to GM. As a good rule of thumb, remember what your players talk about the most. Do your players ever remember that time you simply selected a feat you had and jumped across the gap? Mine don't. Do your players remember the time you had the right spell for the occasion and helped everyone leap across? Sometimes, but most of the time it makes for some good hi5's and we move on. Do your players remember the tense moments where everyone has to make a skill roll and Bill failed but then was caught by a quick reflex roll from Jill and pulled to safety? Absolutely. Not trying to criticize here, but lately I've been trying to import more "flavor" into BRP games myself. However, for every mechanic I think about porting over I think about the increased burden of GMing, as well as how it impacts game play. So far, I haven't found a single mechanic that fits my rule of thumb for porting over, as none of them really solve any role playing needs. The more I try, the more I realize why I switched over to a rules light system. Does that mean you guys shouldn't keep it up? Absolutely not as somebody may see some use for these in a unique campaign. However, for run of the mill MW campaigns, I would advise against tacking on extra systems unless they are magic systems.

Keep up the good work Zomben. My wallet doesn't thank you, but my play group does.