thekobold

of the U.S. that is... I've posted elsewhere already but just found this thread and thought I'd contribute. thekobold, a.k.a. "Rob" - thekobold being chosen as my name here as I've been out of role playing games for over 20 years and recall the kobold as one of the lowest and most humble (in a sense) of monsters: suitable for 1st levels to go out and slay. newbie fodder, you might say. so go easy on me folks. I have yet to even play a BRP game, and only got my copy in the mail a short while ago. I've played a wide variety of games (dating back to an earlier era of course), most of which being D&D 1st edition and the early Traveller, but including (1st edition of everything I think), Paranoia, Gamma World, Aftermath, Merc (original), Top Secret, Bruce Galloway's "Fantasy Wargaming", and a host of other more obscure & fly by night rpg's from the same time period (generally '78-'86). I might even be considered "old school": I seem to remember gaming via play by post on BBSes before the internet was born. Dang I'm gettin' old! -- edit: going through all this thread's posts, I'm glad to see so many pencil & paper fans my age...don't feel so old now. phew!

Someone else posted this in another thread I believe: Chaosium BRP Charakter Generator 4.10 (Freeware) worked for me last I checked (more recently than your post) edit: seems like something that might be able to be hosted here in the downloads section, considering it's freeware and the original hosting site is down?

Sorry to put you off - I did see Ashes to Ashes on Chaosium's main site. I couldn't gather from the description there ('The world is not a happy place. This Basic Roleplaying setting casts the adventurers as mavericks in a fantasy world that is losing a war it does not even know that it is fighting. Hidden demons and their mortal minions—many of whom do not even know who their masters truly are—manipulate events from the shadows, experimenting with social control mechanisms to steer the human cattle in the direction that they want them to go. The adventurers' goal is to discover and stop them.') exactly what time of fantasy setting this is - at the moment my prospective players are interested in something they're somewhat familiar with playing, a LotR or Greyhawk type of world. I poked about on the internet looking for preview pages (something like what drivethroughrpg.com offers for example) to see if I could discover more about it, but no dice, so to speak. Just today, I finally found this link at rpg.net and based on what I read there, ('What was once a vibrant World of wealth, learning, magic and high medieval fantasy is now a World of poverty, low magic and scarce resources where people struggle to survive, against the World and against each other.') am planning to order a copy. If it makes a difference (even on principal if not in any substantial $ way), from where's the most profitable way (for you) to do so?

Thanks for all the links CJ! Great stuff.

Thanks for the reply and all of the links Nick. I'll be checking those out (and already have a copy of your fanzine). After my post, I did find the news link to Sword & Spell, which I hope is still actively in development, as well as some other resources. I somewhat regret not looking a bit harder before posting, but really appreciate the responses here that have saved me a great deal of time. Perhaps it partly is the marketing - as I said, I've been out of gaming for quite a while. The BRP ecosystem is a new thing to me as it supports more than just the fantasy genre. It might be just my lack of familiarity with the way supplements are advertised/organized. In the beginning, just to see what was out there, I did an Amazon search for "Chaosium" expecting to find more than I did (about 50 results all but one or two seeming to pertain to the Cthulhu game/mythos, excluding the BRP core rules itself). I'm very glad to have found this site/forums! I hear what you're saying about the OGL - my day job being working with computers all day, I've been been generally inclined towards GNU/CC types of licensing. You're right in that a lot of poor/mediocre material gets published - both in the software realm as well as in the paper rpg world (a quick visit to the local game store proved your point).

I'm very new to Chaosium's BRP and only just getting back into RPGing in general after decades. I was disappointed to realize that there doesn't seem to be any fantasy oriented BRP supplementals, in particular a bestiary or spells book, or an expanded weapons/armor module. The idea of playtesting my own creations is daunting (although I'm sure with its own reward), and I wonder what others here might have used as a workaround? I'm familiar with the 3.5 SRD monsters, and saw a post on the forums here on converting from that format to BRPs, but again, I'm curious to know if there's another avenue to take that'd save time/energy (if not money). Are the Runequest Bestiary (Bestiaries?) by Mongoose fully BRP compatible, and are they worth the expense, for example? Again, I'm very re-new to RPGs, and have been wondering if another system like Pathfinder might be more worth exploring, esp. due to the Open Game License it utilizes. Maybe that's a dangerous question to post here, but have at... Any feedback is appreciated, thanks.