How do you think BRP is doing?

[RosenMcStern]

What do the copper and silver seller designations mean ?

They provide a rough estimate of copies sold. Note that this does not give you more than a hint about book sales, though. Mongoose sells big in dead tree.

Well with Rod's setting Classic Fantasy, he hasn't really detailed the setting in print yet. The book is really about establishing a way of playing BRP to emulate DnD. It is the top selling BRP monograph on Chaosium's web site . Maybe it isn't important what differentiates the setting as much as what it is emulating. Sometimes you can go a long ways riding on some one else's coat tails. I also do sense from reading posts on websites and forums that there are plenty of D100 or BRP players that don't like Glorantha or are tired of it and want to try something new. Who knows how much actual market share they can grab, as long as it is sustainable.

There is also Elric as a good Fantasy setting for d100.

The point is that Rod's supplement has a precise goal: let's re-play OD&D supplements with a less unrealistic system. It could be given a setting, but this would denaturate it a bit.

The Green is more unique, but my personal opinion is that there is no real market space for another really big fantasy setting for d100. It could - at best - attract 10% of the interested players, with another 60% playing Glorantha/Eternal Champion, and 30% doing their own homebrew.

And, admit it: when you have such a beauty available for OpenQuest, do you really need Yet Another Fantasy Book for BRP?

Edited July 21, 2010 by RosenMcStern

[wbcreighton]

There is also Elric as a good Fantasy setting for d100.

Absolutely, and it is being revised to work with the MRQ2 rules. It suits the taste of a percentage of the fantasy market.

The point is that Rod's supplement has a precise goal: let's re-play OD&D supplements with a less unrealistic system. It could be given a setting, but this would denaturate it a bit.

Classic Fantasy II will give more detail to the realm. But I think the main thrust is to have a framework for a campaign world that will be easily adaptible. For that segment of gamers out there who always wanted to wield the plethora of magic items and spells found in AD&D, Classic Fantasy fits the bill.

The Green is more unique, but my personal opinion is that there is no real market space for another really big fantasy setting for d100. It could - at best - attract 10% of the interested players, with another 60% playing Glorantha/Eternal Champion, and 30% doing their own homebrew.

And, admit it: when you have such a beauty available for OpenQuest, do you really need Yet Another Fantasy Book for BRP?

I think the Green is perfect as a drop in to a campaign world. The players stumble across a hidden valley or lost island and viola The Green finds a home. The problem for setting books is that each player doesn't need it. The best sellers will be the books made specifically for the players to use.

Are you referring to Life and Death ? It looks like it might be another The Green, good for supplementing a campaign. But will players need it ?

BTW since you mentioned Italy, Steve Perrin just announced on his SPQR yahoo group that he is invited to be the:

RPG Designer Guest of Honor at the Lucca Comics & Games show in Lucca Italy in late October

Edited July 21, 2010 by wbcreighton

[Agentorange]

Thank you very much for the boost of confidence. I have been trying to write a larger campaign style adventure for this but it is coming along pretty slowly. Your enthusiasm helps to give me a needed kick. I have a lot of ideas for plenty of expansions, but I do not know if any will ever see the light of day. I would of course love to see Chaosium adopt the Green as a fully supported setting, but somehow I doubt if that will happen.

You're welcome, I really liked The Green, for me it had one of the qualities that marks out a good RPG supplement, namely: it told you everything you needed to run a game....but left you wanting to know more.

I'm in the process of writing a review, but it'll be a couple of weeks before it's up as I'm really busy at the moment with other stuff.But fear not, 90% of what I'm gonna say is compliments.

[Agentorange]

.

Rod's and Puck's settings are good. But what distinguishes them from the plethora of other settings? I think Chaosium will do them justice, but with Glorantha as a competitor for d100 fans, what is their possible market share?

The market share is I suppose those people that don't want to play in Glorantha, or prefer the Chaosium flavour of BRP to the Mongoose one.

[threedeesix]

The market share is I suppose those people that don't want to play in Glorantha, or prefer the Chaosium flavour of BRP to the Mongoose one.

That would be me. Personally, I have never liked Glorantha, which is why I used to convert Greyhawk over to RQ in the first place. Nothing against the setting, I just didn't like everyone having magic.

Rod

[RosenMcStern]

The market share is I suppose those people that don't want to play in Glorantha, or prefer the Chaosium flavour of BRP to the Mongoose one.

It is still a small share. And these people already have Elric, and all the stuff (which is now two supplements) that d101 produces for OpenQuest. As a publisher alreday working in a niche, competing for an even smaller niche with other, good products that use the same title is unattractive.

This does not mean that good non-GLoranthan Fantasy products will not appear for BRP / d100. It is just that it is not viable to bet on them as flagship products like Glorantha or Cthulhu.

[dragonewt]

It could be possible that with enough of a critical mass of BRP/D100/MRQ products, that these systems will gain in general popularity because they offer one core system (d100), with many options, choices and backgrounds to choose and combine.

I am interested to see how Chaosium's move to use RPGNow will affect the visibility of BRP. If customers can now immediately see that all of the BRP/MRQ/D100 products belong to the same family and that these provide a large and varied range of choices, then there might be a new up-take.

BRP has now changed from a small niche system that was only available via a small web site that could be found if you already knew what you were looking for. Visibility and scope is the key.

I only just revisited White Dwarf magazine from 1997 to 1986. A a continued and consistent stream of articles and advertising for RQ, CoC, Elric and other Chaosium products was present. This would have captured a sizable mind-share.

Edited July 22, 2010 by dragonewt

[Puck]

As a publisher alreday working in a niche, competing for an even smaller niche with other, good products that use the same title is unattractive.

It could be possible that with enough of critical mass of BRP/D100/MRQ products, that these systems will gain in general popularity because they offer one core system (d100), with many options, choices and backgrounds to choose and combine.

Visibility and scope is the key.

I think this is an important point. Sometimes more and more competition between similar products increases demand for all of them. It never really made sense to me but it is true. That is why fast food restaurants always group together in an area. As people see more and more products for BRP in the mainstream the entire ball of wax may move forward. This could be particularly true with something like BRP where all the games and settings are joined by one familiar system. I think the key is continually working toward bringing the entire series out of the niche; and that seems to be happening more and more.

[rust]

On my German "home forum" there was yesterday a post of someone who is searching for

a used copy of the BRP main rules - the first ever post of this kind I have seen over here.

It seems that things are still moving at glacier speed, but there can be no more doubt that

they indeed have begun to move.

[Master of the Game]

May I remind you that one item out of that "plethora" of historical settings is running for Product of the Year at Ennies?

Do you really think that putting out yet another Fantasy or Post-apoc supplement could have achieved the same result?

As one of the judges for the awards I can't tell you how glad I was to see Rome entered this year. I just wish the core had been entered last year. I'm a huge fan of the system, and was incredibly glad to see it revived in such a spectacular fashion.

If you haven't voted yet, I'd recommend it (you can do so here until the 25th). Niche product or not, win or not, we get 10,000 or so votes every year, plus the backing of GenCon. That's a lot of eyes that might check out the books to see what they're all about.

[kaddawang]

As one of the judges for the awards..<

Quick, everybody make a APPx5-roll!

Dang, a 98...

[rust]

I just made one of my irregular visits to Chaosium's website and discovered this:

http://www.chaosium.com/article.php?story_id=445

It almost seems that Chaosium is planning to use the Chronicles of Future Earth as the new

BRP setting that has been asked for so often in this thread here, especially since the supple-

ment is announced as Volume One of the Urth setting.

Congratulations to Shaira (), in my view this setting has a good chance to become a real

success, because it can use the entire "bandwidth" of the BRP system, from magic to tech-

nology, in a genre that is not yet overcrowded with similar settings.

[wbcreighton]

And for this setting to work they need to follow it up with vol 2, 3, etc. In reality it would be great to see a release schedule for that setting for the next year.

[Nightshade]

While it looks like an interesting setting, the "Fall of the Empire" vibe might turn off some people.

Its kind of a conundrum; if you produce something too off the beaten path, it can be a little too odd for many people (reference Tekumel or perhaps Jorune, or even moreso the Madlands from GURPS Fantasy II); if you stay within comfort zones, it can be too bland to get too much of a following given there's other such settings around.

[RosenMcStern]

The concept sounds cool, in any case. I am currently working on something that is a rehash of one of the more exploited cliches since the '60s and George Romero (the Dead take over the world), and it is a very, very successful setting here. It is just a matter of how you present it to your audience. We will see how well Shaira can present her ideas. Uhm, and artwork matters, too, at least to attract the casual gamer to the book.

[dragonewt]

... if you produce something too off the beaten path, it can be a little too odd for many people ...

Is this how Call of Cthulhu established itself?

[neorxnawang]

With respect to the original topic, I'm discouraged. Allowing sales on rpgnow was a huge and long overdue step, but the market is so full of games competing for dollars now that I doubt that BRP will ever really get off the ground. You can get a good idea of the size of the market at its best by looking at the downloadable book stats on Chaosium's website and extrapolating. It's not big.

Classic Fantasy demonstrated that it is possible (with a lot of work) to use BRP to emulate or fit the more popular gaming niches (maybe any gaming niche), but it requires a huge amount of work for little reward. Call of Cthulhu and similar historical/investigation/character interaction games (a category into which I would put Rome) will always have its fan base and market segment to which it appeals, and BRP is well suited to this: you're walking down previously cleared trails when doing a book like this, and just have to get the background information down and tweak it.

The supply side of the market is extremely fractured: Chaosium isn't backing up the money truck to anyone or doing much in the way organizing things, and as is typical in any publishing niche, everyone does their own thing with their own people. It's basically a conglomeration of indie publishers trying to do their own products on a scaffolding of a system that isn't well supported.

So I anticipate that the BRP bubble will go the way of most other potentially high-quality efforts of the past that you rarely hear anything about any more: eventually, people inclined to write books and who are good at it will follow the path of least resistance and turn to where the support is.

Gloom and doom, that's me. I don't really have a prescritption for the problem, either, beyond a coordinated marketing effort that Chaosium, I don't think, is up to and that the nature of the game publishing industry and its tendency to attract people who want to do their own thing (of which I am supremely guilty) doesn't lend itself to.

Of course, if someone wants to prove me wrong and say, "Hey, Moeller, quit your nihilistic prophesizing and join our rebel alliance" or "write a chapter for (such and such)", I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

[seneschal]

Is this how Call of Cthulhu established itself?

What? You mean, you don't have an old aunt who is growing webs between her fingers and toes whose locked library is filled with musty tomes of materials better not described, written in ancient indecipherable characters?

Some of us found Call of Cthulhu, what's the politically correct term? Ah, inclusive.

[seneschal]

Gloom and doom, that's me.

You're not a fan of RuneQuest Ducks, per chance?

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=527432

[kaddawang]

BRP has a small, but rabid, fanbase that is slowly growing.

With the Gold Brick, the new RuneQuest, Newt's OpenQuest-crusade, some quite stunningly neat historical supplements from Alephtar, and Cthulhu on it's third decade I'm pretty sure it won't die anytime soon. The Laundry is on it's way, and there is a comforting level of BRP-related buzz on the boards I visit.

All is not bleak:)

The now-available monographs were long overdue, but the monographs won't sell this game. Catchy books on the shelf does that(and even in print, most of the monographs are not catchy). CoFE might very well be the one, but with Chaosium's past release schedules, the plan of releasing it in several volumes worries me slightly.

[Nightshade]

Is this how Call of Cthulhu established itself?

You know, using a setting/subgenre that is probably one of the most recognizable crossover case in two fannish genres isn't particularly the best counterexample. In many respects, for anyone who was looking at a horror setting that was at all inclusive, Lovecraftian horror was the beaten path at that time. If you were going to get a horror based setting that was going to get any traction at all at that time its hard to picture one that was going to get any more attention. Later I suspect you'd have gotten better luck with certain kinds of survival horror, but they didn't have the name recognition.

The only thing that worked against CoC was the doom that's imbued in the setting, and its not a coincidence that the game has tended to emphasize the investigation, fighting cultists and blowing stuff up parts of the genre, and not the going mad and losing parts.

[dragonewt]

Some of us found Call of Cthulhu, what's the politically correct term? Ah, inclusive.

However, CoC was a completely new and mostly untried RPG genre that had not been played before (especially in the main-stream).

CoC was one of those possible failures that took a risk, competed with contemporary Space Opera and Dungeoneering RPG settings, and defined its own popular arch-typical genre in the RPG mind-set (as well as expanding on the pre-existing CoC literature).

Is it possible that this type of success can be repeated?

Edited July 26, 2010 by dragonewt

[dragonewt]

A BRP version of the Kerberos Club (or something similar) would be interesting (although it would be a touch similar to Cthulhu by Gaslight combined with Super World).

The setting was written for O.R.E, and a conversion has already been done for Savage Worlds.

The key point to note; the way the material is written and presented helps to uniquely define the feel of this mixing of genres.

Edited July 26, 2010 by dragonewt

[seneschal]

However, CoC was a completely new and mostly untried RPG genre that had not been played before (especially in the main-stream).

CoC was one of those possible failures that took a risk, competed with contemporary Space Opera and Dungeoneering RPG settings, and defined its own popular arch-typical genre in the RPG mind-set (as well as expanding on the pre-existing CoC literature).

Is it possible that this type of success can be repeated?

You're right. Call of Cthulhu was "the" horror RPG in much the same way that Traveller was "the" science fiction game, although they had minor competition from Chill, Space Opera and lesser-known, less durable titles. At the time, those genres had never been done before. Today, of course, there are constellations of sci-fi games and crypts full of horror ones. So what RPG genres haven't been done to death and offer a similar opportunity? Sword and planet (Interplanetary), ancient historical (BRP Rome), Western (Aces High, Supernatural Western), and espionage (Berlin '61) are semi-neglected niches our intrepid BRP fanatics have already tackled. Any others you can think of?

[MrJealousy]

Any others you can think of?

Errr, toon?