fmitchell

That's more or less how I'd treat it. I'd keep the name "Intelligence" but use a different dictionary definition: "the collection of information of military or political value" ... or, more generally, practical value. Like social skills, INT exists to support players who lack those abilities in real life, but it doesn't replace good ideas or sudden insights. (It also has more specific roles in the rules, e.g. spell capacity, skill modifiers, which is why I'd just leave the name as is.)

That's one reason why I dislike attributes for Intelligence. Education or Quick Wits, maybe, but "intelligence" 1) is too general and 2) obstructs players' problem solving abilities. On the other hand, I would have declared that "gunpowder" in a fantasy world either doesn't exist or requires a more difficult alchemical process than as seen on that one episode of Star Trek (which Mythbusters demonstrated is kind of true in our world too). I'd also have him explain to the class what a "gun" was and why it needed "powder". Then we could all have a good laugh about silly barbarian superstitions.

Then, too, basket weaving typically doesn't have life-or-death stakes. More elaborate resolution procedures that slow time down to seconds are more satisfying than a single Russian Roulette style die roll. The trick is to extend existing mechanics to implement the Let's Try To Murder Each Other mini-game. YMMV (Your Murderhoboing May Vary), but I just view combat as a special case of What Happens Next. The more that rules for Killing Things depart from general rules for Doing Things, the more stuff I have to remember and the more annoyed I get when it's Killing Time. When the rules for Killing Things dominate the rule book, and I have to keep nearly all of them in mind, I truly resent having to stop the fun collaborative story-telling part of the afternoon to play a skirmish miniatures game. (Or, in the case of a certain RPG version by a certain board game company, a game of token and card arrangement.) RuneQuest/BRP/Call of Cthulhu, like most RPGs, define combat as a special case of task or conflict resolution. Fighting gets a chapter, sometimes less; maybe add a chapter for special circumstances, possibly another for gun porn. When more than half the rules and/or half the character sheet contain elements used solely during combat, the tail wags the dog.

"If it's not in the rules, it's not in the gameplay" sounds a bit ominous, but I hope they mean the game part of RQ. For example, take the Apocalypse World games. They have four page character sheets -- most of it explanatory text -- and a highly structured idea of Moves as points where the game rules cut in. There's one possible reading in which only Moves matter, and everything in the game reduces to Moves. However, Monster of the Week emphasizes an opposite reading: players describe what they want to do, and the GM decides whether its a Move requiring dice and formal procedures or a narrative action that just happens. I think Jeff Richard is, a bit clumsily, reiterating the design philosophy of the RuneQuest family of games: everything you need to know is on your character sheet. The character sheet doesn't constrain what you can do, but when the GM calls for a die roll or some other rules-related check the answer is right in front of you ... not buried in the rule book somewhere (*cough*attacks of opportunity*cough*, *cough*grappling*cough*). Also, regarding this: That's true up to a point, but there are a few games, notably the fourth edition of a well known one, where the imbalance between combat and everything else, and the stark separation between "combat mode" and "role-playing mode", was so great one could argue that it really was a game about combat, with the storytelling parts either hand-waved entirely or presented in an overly simplistic win-or-lose dice rolling contest.

I was thinking about doing this based on Star Wars D6 or Mutants & Masterminds / True20, or possibly modeled on RQ6 Fatigue levels. One possible version, off the top of my head: 1. All living (or differently alive) creatures have a few Wound levels, e.g. Minor Wound (x2), Major Wound, Unconscious/Dying, Dead. If a character already has two Minor Wounds, he/she/it acquires a Major Wound. If a character who already has a Major Wound sustains a Minor Wound, it takes up a Minor Wound slot; if none remain, the character continues to Unconscious/Dying. 2. Every weapon is rated based on the type of wound it causes: Minor, Major, Mortal (Dying), Fatal (instant Death). "Non-lethal damage", e.g. fistfights, may have a slightly different scale, e.g. Dazed, Stunned, Unconscious (+Dead if things go really badly). 3. Characters must succeed in a Soak (?) percentile roll to downgrade the wound level. E.g. if a weapon causes Major wounds, a simple success will downgrade it to Minor, and a critical downgrades it to Scratch (minor penalty, disappears after one round, can take as many as necessary) but no further. Penalties due to wounds (or Scratches) affect the Soak roll, so multiple wounds (or multiple Scratches in the same round) cand send a character sliding down the wound chart. 4. Larger and smaller creatures have bonuses/penalties to Soak, up to and including automatic success levels like Mastery levels in HeroQuest. The equivalent to Mastery for creatures and weapons may be called "Scale": a weapon that causes Major wounds to humans may cause Minor wounds to elephants, but an Elephant Gun would cause Major wounds to elephants (and Mortal wounds to lesser beings). Two kaiju may deal Minor wounds to each other, but at Scale 5 they do Fatal + 2 damage (a.k.a. chunky salsa) damage to humans. 5. Armor helps the Soak roll similarly to size (and in the case of high-tech armor Scale). Again, this is off the top of my head. The big questions are 1) how do you derive Soak and 2) does it increase like a skill or is it fixed based on SIZ and CON.

I don't know if you can call GURPS's PDF-model "dwindled": they have a monthly magazine and a steady stream of supplements. PDFs allow SJG to deliver smaller supplements which would be impractical to put into print, and at less risk (as so many other companies have discovered). Add to that Steve Jackson's iron grip on GURPS quality (whatever you think of the system) and the fact that Munchkin is their big cash cow that could easily squeeze out other projects, it makes sense for them. D100's history makes that approach impractical, but there are still a few lessons to learn. First, it helps to collect all the similar or identical stuff in different books and publish a single, cleaned-up version. GURPS started with Compendiums for 3rd edition, then folded them into the main books for 4th. That's probably not going to happen to the same extent in the D100 world, but it would be nice if everyone used either Dodge or Evade, Persistence or Will, Endurance or Stamina, etc. And, as I've said before, a "BRP Elaborations" book would be a great follow-on to "BRP Essentials" once Chaosium gets back on its feet. Second, maybe smaller PDF releases aren't such a bad idea. Monte Cook Games is doing the same with their "glimmers" for Numenera and The Strange. Chaosium has its own Web store, and once the CoC7, RQ2, and RQ(k) work is out of the way they could produce new Cthulhu / Glorantha / "Essentials" content in smaller bite-sized pieces without committing to a print run. At the very least an Onyx Path style "translation guide" for older material (if it's still available on PDF) would be welcome. If the D100 publishers don't go all Palladium, maybe even translation guides between publishers might help. Yes, skill translation is just a big table (usually), but characteristics, attributes, combat rules, and magic/power systems aren't always so easy to translate. Finally, with no one company in charge, I hope the D100 publishers at least talk on a regular basis. Forking the system may be necessary, and even healthy -- Mutants & Masterminds is better for abandoning many d20 conventions -- but unnecessary changes just frustrate your customers. Dodge vs. Evade is a trivial example, I know, but you know Mongoose changed the name just so there would be one less thing to sue over. It would be nice to bring your Pirates & Dragons crew to Monster Island without poring through the whole setting for anything that takes some work to translate. (Not that I've ever tried it; maybe it's OK.)

It had a small pool of points: for humans, 32, split between ST, DX, and IQ with a minimum of 8 in each. Wizards could take up to their IQ in spells; spells also had a minimum IQ, somewhat like Tunnels & Trolls. Full TFT added Talents, which were (in modern terms) a mix of skills and feats; mechanically they worked like spells for non-wizards except some took up two or three IQ. In some ways TFT was more like the system in Fighting Fantasy books, co-written by the U.K. Steve Jackson. I played a full TFT campaign in my first year in college. It was fun, although some parts were a bit broken, e.g. you could "see through the eyes" of illusions so I used illusions of birds to scout out an entire freaking castle. It betrays its roots as a skirmish-level wargame: detailed rules for combat, virtually none for social interaction. Still, it's the first RPG I really played, though -- the White Box just confused me, AD&D was a chore, BD&D seemed easier but too limited -- and along with Traveller it's my old school. (I missed RuneQuest until college.) BTW, the rights to TFT belong to the former owner of Metagaming, who dropped off the grid, so SJ Games will never republish it. Dark City Games makes TFT-compatible solo modules and a free TFT retro-clone that replaces Talents with a more conventional skill system. I don't know if I'd ever run it again, even as a one-shot, although talking about it makes me really nostalgic. Maybe if I tinkered with the skill rules and replaced hex-based movement with Fate-style zones ... Honestly, though, I have trouble enough selling d100 to the whippersnappers I game with these days.

I doubt Chaosium will go all Palladium/TSR over fan material. stormbringerrpg.com is still up (if a little slow). Chaosium has bigger worries right now. OTOH, my big interest in Magic World was the ability for players to go out and buy a single, complete rule book. *sigh*

I guess "d100" isn't a bad name for the extended Chaosium / Mongoose / Design Mechanism / Alephtar / etc. clan. After all, the D&D-like games are called "d20", but unrelated games use d20s (e.g. Cypher System, HeroQuest, King Arthur Pendragon).

I don't know about hardcover, but it's part of the Call of Cthulhu 7 Kickstarter so it should be out in dead tree form soon-ish. (Emphasis on ish.)

Especially since the Big Gold Book has been relegated to the digital archives, a Companion for multiple genres might take off. (To the extent anything not D&D ever takes off.) I'm even imagining optional rules for Sanity, Education, classic psychic abilities, mutations, cybernetics, vehicle combat/chases, and so forth ... if you've got them.

There's a lot you can do in 32 pages. (Just look at GURPS Lite.) Since you need only 10-12 pages to explain the core concepts of BRP, you have 20+ pages for RQ-esque combat rules, multi-genre skill and equipment lists, and some useful GM advice. Let's hope they don't 1) fill space with the traditional "what is roleplaying" section, 2) use big type and a lot of hand-holding like the 16-page "BRP" pamphlet, and/or 3) fill up most of that space with art and a long-winded adventure. As I said in another thread, I'm still hoping for some kind of eventual BRP Elaborations book with all the optional rules and resources from the Big Gold Book.

The first three versions of GURPS had exactly that problem. New advantages, disadvantages, and skills would crop up in each world book; some were borrowed from previous books, and some were modified from previous books. GURPS eventually had a two volume "Compendium" of just the new crunch, or rather the "official", generalized, and playtested versions. Eventually 4th Edition, among its other changes, created fully general and orthogonal advantages and disadvantages, which the new genre books simply leveraged as needed. (Even then, new rules and new advantages/disadvantages pop up, most notably the alternate magic systems in Thaumatology and "Alternate GURPS" issues of their magazine Pyramid.) d100 (is that the preferred nomenclature?) is nowhere as complicated*. That's why I think you could compile new options for BRP from previous sources, adjusted for the latest edition's terminology. --- * While you actually don't need higher mathematics to create GURPS characters, a spreadsheet and/or an accounting degree is very helpful. Or the GURPS Character Assistant, available for the low price of $15 (used to be higher).

I'd prefer to have a small book called BRP Essentials ... and a separate (big) book called BRP Elaborations(?) which contains all the optional rules from the BGB and elsewhere, as well as general advice on customizing BRP for a particular genre, world, and campaign. That would be the place for Sanity, Allegiance (maybe with content from the Magic World Chronicler's Guide?), hit location rules, variable armor, Powers, and so forth. Actually I'm picturing a book resembling the Talmud with BRP Essentials text in the center and optional rules written around the generous margins ...

I once ran a one-shot (using PDQ, alas) where the PCs were the zombies. In an isolated Old West mining town that had seen better days, self-willed intelligent revenants (the PCs) rose from their graves in varying states of decay ... just ahead of the shambler / "fast ghoul" mass rising. So they had to contend not only with frightened mortal townsfolk but shamblers that tore through anything in their way. (Since I adapted the BRP/RQ hit location rules for PDQ, and struggled to mesh the splatterpunk "simulationist" aesthetic with the PDQ narrativist rules, I wonder if I should retool it for BRP.) The animated Flash series "Xombie" inspired the original, but lately I've been obsessed with CW's iZombie, (In that series, victims of the Zombie Virus "rise" with their minds intact but must consume human brains to keep from turning irrevocably into Romero-style shamblers. The brains give zombies flashes of the deceased's memory and impose some of their personality traits and skills; zombies, particularly the central character, go through dramatic personality shifts.) In that series, zombies live (mostly) secretly among the living, with only a few unfortunates becoming "Romeros", but you could postulate an apocalyptic version where the virus goes, well, viral. (A scratch can transfer it.) You'd have a multi-sided, almost World of Darknessy conflict where the clueless authorities (police, CDC, agents of a vague yet menacing government agency) try to control a problem they don't understand, more ruthless interests who know just enough to be dangerous try to exterminate all zombies, free-roaming Romeros menace the living, and the tiny intelligent zombie community (including some or all of the PCs) tries desperately to survive.

I haven't listened to the recording, but arguably there's too much Cthulhu in Cthulhu. Lovecraft et al. made up creatures and gods as they went along, but most adventures recycle Cthulhu, Mi-Go, the Great Race of Yith, etc. until they're no longer unsettling. Kevin Crawford's Silent Legions (for OSR D&D, alas) includes random tables for generating your own "mythos", and I'd rather see more of that than yet another stat block for Deep Ones and Shoggoths.

And now for the defensive rebuttal portion of the thread ... I wasn't talking about "the D&D at the table", which is always different from the rules as written. (As is every set of rules.) I'm talking about an Official World's Most Popular Game(tm), which at least has the virtue of giving everyone something to react against. From what I can tell, 5th edition did a hard reboot back to AD&D 2nd edition, then incorporated better mechanics from the d20 era (and maybe 4e). Which sounds a little like what Chaosium is trying to do. Which is what I find so frustrating about the whole thing. At the core, all the d100 variants are far more similar than they are different (yes, even CoC 7). The rest are just details. What's the skill for ducking out of the way? Dodge? Evade? Something else? What's the skill for swinging a sword? Calming a crowd? Walking across a rope bridge? How do you define a Critical? A Special Success, if such a thing exists? A Fumble? Who goes first in combat? How do you figure out the penalty for X? What are the effects of damage? How do skills improve? And so forth. It would be nice to have a standard vocabulary for all of these, even if some GM/publisher somewhere decides for whatever reason that Sense, Listen, and Search are now a single skill called Perception, or that players only get K improvement rolls per session, or even that basic characteristics are now percentiles for some mad reason. The structure of the BGB was great: here's the "default" game, and here are options you can mix and match for your game. Maybe "BRP Essentials" will be the new version of that, only instead of options players and GMs get minimal mechanics they can extend or revise however they like ... which is BRP's greatest strength. As a rules tinkerer, though, I'd like to see the 30+ years of options in one place, as deltas to the "basic rules". So am I, but that's not what I'm talking about. Other companies own their house systems, so that they can decide what, say, Tunnels & Trolls, the Storytelling System, HERO, GURPS, the Cypher System, or whatever is. WotC let the cat out of the bag with the d20 SRD, but for better or worse they control the D&D brand so that when someone says D&D (and maybe a version number) nearly everyone knows what they're referring to. It would help explain games to newbies if we could at least say that Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, BRP, OpenQuest, Legend, DesignQuest (or whatever), and everything else have the same core rule engine, and it's called ... something? The Chaosium alumni rallying around the sick man of gaming was an ideal opportunity to rally behind one RuneQuest / BRP / d100 going forward. Instead, as the XKCD cartoon I linked to above predicted, the answer to all the RuneQuest / BRP / d100 variations is apparently yet another RuneQuest different from all previous RuneQuests / d100s now on the market. And I guess now we Let The Market Decide ... although, to quote Benjamin Franklin, "If we don't hang together ...".

I guess I'm just exasperated that there's no single BRP standard-bearer anymore. D&D-like games have, well, D&D (with the unpopularity of 4th edition giving rise to Pathfinder and the OSR as alternatives). The Storyteller/Storytelling system, second edition, extracted out a core system, with a subsequent upgrade; it's not as popular as it was, but that's not a fault in the design. GURPS has gone through a few versions and a plethora of world books, but several years ago SJG put out 4th edition which (mostly) reconciled differences, consolidated redundancies, and provided a stable base for variations. Tunnels & Trolls, maybe the second oldest FRPG, has gone through several versions, but at least there's a linear order (even if version 6 never really happened) with the occasional branch. Cypher System is only a few years old, with only two mostly-compatible variations, but they felt the need for a general Cypher System Rulebook anyway. According to Chaosium's new plan, they're going back to a regime of The Glorantha Game, the Lovecraft Game, and a generic booklet (maybe). Meanwhile, the Design Mechanism, D101, Mongoose, Alephtar (soon), and whoever else have their own takes on the same basic mechanics. Chaosium letting a thousand flowers bloom (maybe) worked in the 1980s when tabletop RPGs were popular yet insular. In the 2010s having several variations of the same thing, some ultra-specialized and others competing in the same "general system" space, seems destined to create even smaller niches in an already niche market. And time and attention are scarcer resources than they used to be. They're competing not only with vendors in the same ecosystem, but potentially with themselves. Honestly, I wish them well, and if I have the money I'll pick up RuneQuest 2016 (or 2017, or 2018 ...). It's just that the BGB started to bring all the variations of the same ideas together, and now the variations are drifting further apart than ever. If this keeps up BRP/d100 will turn into Fudge, just an oddball die convention with suggestions for use.

For "fun" I tried to sell some Cypher System gamers on RuneQuest/BRP/whatever ... and then I had to give it a name ... and then I had to explain the history. Yikes. This whole discussion has left me a bit confused, but from what I understand there will be five in-print heirs to the original RuneQuest: the future RuneQuest N, where N is either 4 or 7, which is a mashup of RQ2, RQ6, and a half-dozen other things. a "Basic Role-Playing" pamphlet extracted from the previous work (if that's still in the cards) Call of Cthulhu 7, which changes too much for some people yet hardly anything important. The rules soon to be formerly known as RuneQuest 6. OpenQuest 2, from the bastard Mongoose line, which IIRC had a Glorantha adventure and is connected to a publisher of HeroQuest Glorantha content. That's not including other scions of Mongoose including Legend or the Renaissance line (SRD, Clockwork & Chivalry, Dark Streets, Pirates & Dragons). Nor does that include the to-be-republished RuneQuest 2, nor the tons of Call of Cthulhu 2-6 material still out there, nor the lovingly preserved Big Gold Books and Magic Worlds, nor the silent legions of homebrew d100 systems, nor the upcoming Revolution D100 inspired partly (I suspect) by the aforementioned state of affairs. sigh Yes, I know it's been 37+ years since RQ 1, and specialized rule-sets have some advantages, but it would be nice to point to one thing and say "This Is The Game". We just can't have nice things. Or, as they say in the computer industry, the nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.

I never saw the original Worlds of Wonder, but at one point I tinkered with my own "Quick Critters" format: HP ( = STR = CON = SIZ), AP, DEX, Attack % and damage for each attack, MOV, special powers or skills, optionally MP ( = POW). (Otherwise I'd probably just assume MP = POW = 10.) INT if necessary would depend on the type of creature, usually fixed INT of 5 or if sapient 10 or 13. Then I proceeded to develop some sapient and/or supernatural creatures -- animals don't interest me -- and realized I couldn't assume STR = CON = SIZ = HP after all, and INT and POW were a bigger deal, and more creatures broke the starting assumptions than followed them. There's probably a few creatures in my notes with the abbreviated stats, but I converted most to the full 7-characteristic plus N-attribute template for whatever d100 variant I intended to use them for.

Players calculate three success levels -- Normal, Hard, Extreme -- once for each skill, at least until that skill changes. They're certainly stable during a session. Bonus and penalty dice ebb and flow over the course of combat, and in some non-combat uses. They're orthogonal to success levels. The practical effect varies with the skill level: one bonus/penalty die modifies a 50% skill by +/-25% but 10% or 90% only by about +/-9%. (As I've said previously, I kinda like this effect over linear modifiers: an unskilled character doesn't get a huge bonus, and a skilled character doesn't get a tremendous bonus or penalty either. Granted a multiplier might have the same effect.) If you wanted to calculate bonuses or penalties ahead of time you'd have nine numbers to track per skill ... or rather 15, since some tests may require two bonus/penalty dice. (I'm not sure if a Referee would ever use three, but I can see an argument for doing so in rare cases when success/failure by fiat seems heavy-handed.) People who can multiply and divide percentages in their head as easily as breathing may not see the benefits. For those of us whose arithmetic is a little shaky, especially in the heat of simulated battle, it's perhaps a slightly bigger deal.

RuneQuest's "roll d100 for everything" is well over 35 years old. "Player rolls all the dice" is at least as old as the Buffy RPG, probably older. I'm not saying Numenera was original, just that the simplicity and consistency was striking. That, and the asymmetry between player-facing rules (tiers, pools, Edge, Effort, skills, assets, Descriptors, Focuses, etc. etc.) and GM-facing rules (negotiate a number, let the player roll for it, narrate what happens), cut through a lot of my prior assumptions about what an RPG should look like. I realize this is the "compliment CoC 7" thread, but one of the BRP-isms that I like less and less is that NPCs and monsters have about the same complexity as PCs. Its great if you want to allow any kind of creature at all as a PC, but as a feature it imposes more complexity for very little benefit, especially in CoC. Defining NPCs with difficulty levels instead of skills mitigates that somewhat, but once combat starts each NPC/monster needs at minimum HP, Armor, % to hit and damage (for each weapon), DEX (for initiative order and base Dodge), and any special skills like Stealth, (increased) Dodge, or Listen. RuneQuest requires even more: Combat Actions, hit locations (w/ HP and AP for each), etc. Compared to the one-line monsters of Original/Basic/Advanced D&D, the Monster Rating of Tunnels & Trolls, or Cypher System's omnipresent Level (from which you can derive Health and possibly damage if not given), that seems like a lot. Combat in BRP or CoC is generally more dangerous than in other systems, so the extra detail is probably warranted especially if you're striving for "realism". And Keepers can always use "average" creature stats or a small library of stock NPC types. Still, I wish you could summarize any nameless NPC with a number or two.

It might be a long time away. Chaosium has more pressing priorities, Jason Durall (the author) had other commitments last I heard, and the nature of "BRP" will have changed by the time he gets back to it.

By the way, another hidden gem in the rules is removing opposed rolls outside combat. To BRP veterans that may sound insane, but hear me out. I've been playing a lot of Monte Cook's Cypher System in the past year. One of its best ideas is that everything boils down to a roll against a Difficulty Level from 1 to 10. Everything. Shooting at a floating inverted pyramid? Prying information out of an innkeeper? Calling down lightning? The GM looks up or makes up a number from 1 to 10, and the player tries to beat it*. Oh, and the player always rolls the dice. The GM rolls no dice except for a d100 on random tables, if she wants to. In CoC7, if a player uses a non-combat skill on an NPC, e.g. Intimidation or Fast Talk, the GM determines whether the roll is Average, Hard, or Extreme based on the NPC's opposing skill. So why even give an NPC an opposing skill? Exactly! The GM could just note an NPC would require a Hard skill roll for Fast Talk, but an Average roll for Intimidation or Credit Rating. So imagine the Investigators go off in a direction the Keeper didn't anticipate. The Keeper improvises an inn, and then an innkeeper, and decides to make him hard to fool and easier to scare or bribe. That translates directly to Hard for Fast Talk but Average for Intimidation or Credit Rating. Like a Cypher System GM caught off guard or improvising a whole adventure, our Keeper simply sets a level based on story logic and lets the player roll for it. Now, in previous editions the Keeper could just as easily make up a skill number and do an Opposed Roll, but some of us, at least, have a problem coming up with the "right" number under pressure. 30%? 50%? 75%? 90%? How hard should it be to crack that guy? What if the NPC criticals? Setting a fixed difficulty eliminates extraneous randomness. While four options (Auto/Regular/Hard/Extreme) seem pitiful compared to a number from 1 to 10, it's probably about as many options as a GM needs for most encounters with ordinary humans. Also, whereas a novice Keeper would either get flustered or happen upon the Opposed Roll technique (or worse, the Random Skill followed by Random Roll Against Skill), this shortcut is implicit in the rules. (Better if it were explicit, admittedly.) Part of the brief for CoC 7, I'm convinced, is to draw in new players by sanding off BRP's rough edges and baking in the sort of techniques Keepers used to develop only through experience. --- * Technically the player tries to roll the Difficulty Level x 3 or higher on a d20. Skill levels, special abilities, ordinary gear ("assets"), certain unique items ("cyphers" and "artifacts"), and spent levels of Effort decrease the effective Difficulty Level; if it goes to 0, success is automatic. An astute reader will note that an unmodified roll can never exceed Level 6, which is why players have several options for lowering the effective difficulty.

Fair enough. Not sure why you had to tell me you couldn't, but whatevs. Yeah, that's likely to be a problem. Hopefully Chaosium -- once they no longer have Kickstarter promises to keep -- can set up European printers, distributors, and/or publishers. Because just the Keeper's book is a lot of dead tree to ship over the Atlantic.