cjbowser

I think that the current stock of the BGB was a victim of Chaosium's recent huge sale. It will most likely be reprinted in the future.

Magic World is a great example of taking options from the BGB, marrying it to a setting or genre, and turning everything into a coherent, playable game. I really like Magic World. I do think that the percentile system that underlies BRP makes more sense to me than some iterations of D&D, but the BGB doesn't present it in an easily grokked fashion. That's what Magic World does. It's the game that pulls people in. Then, once they're hooked and understand the basic principles of BRP, they might decide they want to tinker which means they grab the BGB. All that being said, I also like the BGB, for what it is, a collection of BRP options. I've built some fun games from it since it was released.

3.5 is a fairly internally consistent rulebook. The bgb is not internally consistent. It presents a ton of options, some of which are completely incompatible with each other. That would confuse a new person to no end. Even other generic rules like Savage Worlds are internally consistent because it was designed from the ground up. The BGB came ex post facto. Most of us on these forums learned BRP through Runequest or CoC or Superworld or Worlds of Wonder or ElfQuest or Pendragon etc. Those are all settings that contained the necessary, internally consistent, rules. I know that if I was confronted with the CoC setting book that references a ton of random pages of the bgb, I'd still be playing D&D. For all the awesome in the BGB, it's not friendly to newcomers.It's for the old hands who already know the system.

The bgb is for tinkerers. Those who want to get under the hood and build their own things. However, like most things designed for tinkering, it's not an entry level product. It has nothing to entice the average, never-roleplayed-before consumer. They're looking for exciting settings with realized worlds. If they had to buy a setting book and try to parse the bgb for just the rules they need, they'd move in to something else.

I like the case by case basis approach. That implies each decision will be given due thought and proper consideration. That will allow the line to grow and hopefully spread in popularity.

The person calling in many cases was the author.

It wasn't a matter of the software keeping track or not, it was a matter of them not wanting/caring to give out that info.

Chaosium couldn't even give you an accurate number of how many they sold if you called and asked, so any sort of profit sharing plan means the creator will never get paid. I have a feeling that monographs will be considered part of the ancien regime, and something the new management will try to get away from. While there were occasional gems, most weren't worth the money. Those gems can be handled through the standard submission process.

It was in stock when the big sale started.

I think the BGB could do with some clean up and editing to make it painfully aware to newbies who are looking at the book for the first time that this is a tool kit with sometimes contradictory offerings. Then it needs kick ass setting books. Those are what will sell the line. Right now, in the shelves, we have very few options from the publisher of the BGB. We have more (and often better) options from Alephtar. There needs to be a sci-fi book next to Magic World. A superhero one. A post apocalyptic book. And so on and so forth. Call of Cthulhu was completely stand alone, so no player of that game has a need to look at the BGB. And monographs don't count. They are of wildly varying quality that has rightly earned them the sub title, "caveat emptor." And, you could only get them from Chaosium for the longest time. So, in several ways, they did nothing to sell the BGB. Maybe, if the new bosses can save the ship, BRP can eventually return to a place of prominence.

The Chaosium catalog now seems to remove an item when it's out of stock. However, based on the text of the sale notice, I don't think it's being reprinted. At least not in the near future.

A move to onebookshelf could also provide an opportunity to set up POD/PDF bundles. That would be nice.

I'd imagine PDF monographs will continue to be sold, at least of existing titles, because there's little cost associated with selling them.

Monographs are no longer part of Chaosium's business strategy. That's why they're 50% off and in the category of things that won't be reprinted.

That's not entirely true. If you check the copyright page of the Keeper's book, many of the people in the first paragraph provided very critical feedback of the book. In some cases, they provided 12 page written documents outlining some potential issues.

Charlie is no longer with Chaosium. Sandy mentioned it in a post on yog-sothoth and Charlie confirmed it on his Facebook page.

You mention selling it on drivethru. One important thing to bear in mind is that not all d100 games are open content. You can't take anything from the closed content games without violating their copyright. And that won't endear you to the d100 fans.

It doesn't have any new professions, but it does have new skills.

I devote a few hundred words to Damascended steel in an upcoming book. It's by no means comprehensive, but it does give an overview.

I'd think the most effective ways would be a combined CI/CDA weapons book. Maybe even go whole hog and do a pre-modern weapon book.

I ran In Search of the Trollslayer with newly created Magic World characters when MW first came out. I didn't need to change any aspects of the characters for them to survive.

Trying to appeal to the D&D crew isn't quite right, to be honest. The advantage/disadvantage mechanic existed in CoC7 long before the D&D playtests were released. It wasn't a matter of CoC7 copying D&D5 so much as a case of parallel evolution. Whether or not that mechanic works for you is a completely different story. I like some of the changes to CoC7, there are others I don't care. My personal favorite, however, has to be the reworking of Credit Rating.

Check the downloads section: http://basicroleplaying.org/files/category/58-halo/

Corum is very good. And not hard at all to track down. It's ~$12 at Chaosium. http://www.chaosium.com/corum/

This isn't so much a Lovecraftian reference as a reference to Lovecraft, but I thought it was interesting. There's an article about Lovecraft's interest in astronomy in the newest issue of Sky and Telescope.