BASIC CREATURES - Classic Creatures & Critters for the BRP System

[NickMiddleton]

The basic series of monographs were very sloppily edited...if indeed they were edited at all. Creatures also has the old RQ ratios for HP distribution for head, chest limbs etc etc. Ok it only makes for 1 or 2 HP difference but it's still annoying, and in my opinion very lazy.

Bear in mind that releasing them as the BASIC monographs was I think a somewhat "off the cuff" decision. They were originally scanned, OCR'd and released as the Basic Role Playing monographs bask in 2004, several years before the Big Gold Book saw print, and were meant then to be literally RQIII sans Glorantha and the name "RuneQuest". They have only ever been a way of ensuring that this material for a previous BRP game that's highly compatible with BGB BRP are easily available without scouring eBay. And at least the egregious formatting errors introduced in the 2004 scanning / OCR'ing have been corrected.

There is clearly however an opening for a good BGB compatible Bestiary...

Cheers,

Nick

Edited January 29, 2011 by NickMiddleton

[Agentorange]

True, but, well I'm sure people have already seen my rant about those books ad nauseum. I think what annoys is not that they're rubbish because they've got lots of useful information in. it's just....how long would it have taken to edit them and make them compatible ? The magic book still doesn't contain errata thats been available for 25 years. It's sloppy. If Chaosium had asked nicely I'm sure that there are people here who would have done the editing for no more than an honourable mention ( I would have )

[seneschal]

Is Malleus Monstorom for Call of Cthulhu a good bestiary for BRP in general? Of course it has the Mythos beings, but does it make a useful animal/monster book for general purposes?

[rust]

Is Malleus Monstorom for Call of Cthulhu a good bestiary for BRP in general? Of course it has the Mythos beings, but does it make a useful animal/monster book for general purposes?

In my view, no, not really. A major part of the book describes mythos deities, ob-

viously much too powerful creatures for a normal BRP campaign, and even most

of the monsters are obviously mythos related beasties. I think there are not more

than perhaps a dozen creatures which could be used for a non-Lovecraftian or

at least non-horror setting without major modifications.

[Agentorange]

I'd second what Rust said, it's mostly mythos based so not very suitable. That said some Coc supplements are useful as bestiaries. Cthuthu Invictus has a nice bestiary based on Greek and Roman myth. Secrets of Kenya has a lot of natural African animals ( giraffe, hyena etc etc ) Obviously you need to do some work around hit locations and so on but that's not too hard.

[camazotz]

Mongoose's Runequest II: Monster Coliseum is pretty useful, although you'd have to do a bit of conversion work to use it with BRP. RQII lacks a HP total, using only HP by location, for example, and has some skills that don't really translate like persistence and resilience. I haven't cross-referenced how hits by location are determined but I am sure they skew differently from BRP. Other than that the stat blocks are probably close enough. That said, I have found Basic Creatures to be much simpler to use directly with the BGB and even ended up getting the Basic Gamemaster and Basic Magic so I could opt to use them in games as well. Runequest III....even with the serial numbers filed off....remains one of my personal top dogs, so I can't complain too much about these genericized copies of the RQIII books.

Still, maybe some day Chaosium will produce the equivalent Malleus Monstrorum for BRP....that would make my day.

[soltakss]

Hit Points are calculated differently, but not enough to force you to recalculate everything. I'd just use hit points per location as they are written for most purposes (RQ2/3, MRQ and BRP should be able to use hit points from any of the others without a real problem, OpenQuest doesn't use Locations so is a bit different).