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Out now in PDF: Rivers of London - The Roleplaying Game


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Rivers of London - the RPG

Magic has returned to our world

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The Rivers of London: the Roleplaying Game core book is out now in PDF. It contains everything you need to start exploring Ben Aaronovitch's magical version of London, based on his bestselling novels. 

Rivers of London players take on the roles of newly recruited members of the London Metropolitan Police Service’s special magic branch, aka “the Folly.” You will solve mysteries, catch criminals, and come to grips with the “demi-monde”—those who have been irreversibly changed by magic.

Buy the PDF from Chaosium.com now!*

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*When the full color hardcover is out in 2023 we'll send you a coupon deducting what you paid for the PDF off the cost of the book.

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About Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch is the first novel in the long-running series of urban fantasy novels, that focuses on the Officers of the Folly as they explore the magic-tainted city of London, and solve intricate, arcing mysteries.

You can buy Rivers of London and other novels from Ben Aaronovitch’s webstore, on Kindle and Kobo eReaders, and from all good bookshops. Ben Aaronovitch is also known for his work on both television and audio scripts for Doctor Who.

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Do you play Call of Cthulhu?

Rivers of London: the Roleplaying Game is based off the award-winning Basic Roleplaying System used in Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest and many other games.

If you are familiar with the core mechanics from Call of Cthulhu like rolling D100s, using Luck, and getting Hard Successes, then you’ll pick up Rivers of London: the Roleplaying Game in no time!.

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2 hours ago, MOB said:

29.99

Oooof.
That's just the PDF?

Does it follow the usual pattern of being about 1/2 the cost of the hardcopy -- so, $60 ?

That's a shame... I know lots of people who see $20 as at/near their PDF pricing limit.
I don't doubt Chaosium has good reason for the prices; but I suspect a non-trivial number of sales are lost at these price-points.

C'es ne pas un .sig

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If it helps, you get quite a lot for your money.  It’s a 400 page PDF plus character sheets and handouts.  It’s beautifully produced (naturally for Chaosium).  For those who are working to an absolute price cap it may be a deterrent, but for those looking for value I’d argue it’s an excellent proposition.  Similar PDF price point to Warhammer 4th ed, Coriolis, RQG.  They have done their research.

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10 hours ago, g33k said:

Does it follow the usual pattern of being about 1/2 the cost of the hardcopy -- so, $60 ?

Yes.

Note, if you buy the PDF direct from Chaosium.com, we take that cost off the price of the physical book when it is out. The way that works is on release of the physical book, every person who owns a PDF bought directly from Chaosium.com gets sent an email with a special coupon code. This effectively means you get to split the cost of the book into two payments over time, plus you get instant gratification now with the PDF.

3 hours ago, RandomNumber said:

If it helps, you get quite a lot for your money.  It’s a 400 page PDF plus character sheets and handouts.

Indeed - there are ten separate download files: the book itself (high & low res PDFs); plus all the GM and Player resources, inc character sheets, maps and diagrams, NPC Portrait Pack, plain text versions of the handouts, and a helpful rules crib sheet. Everything needed to play.

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2 hours ago, Matthew said:

Is there any chance of a fillable pdf version of the character sheets? I find that fillable ones are the best option for those of us wanting to go paper free.

Formfillable versions are part of the downloads and can also be found on the product page.

I would have one request regarding the character sheets: the backgrpunds are all tinged, either in blue, green or grey-scale. Would it be possible to get sheets with a white background to safe ink/toner? 

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Bit puzzled. The greyscale char sheets are on a blank bg. I've printed them and there's no sign of greyscale on the bg, unlike the blue ones, where you get blue speckling. 

With recent Chaosium products you can turn the background off in Adobe Acrobat (free version). Very handy for those of us who like to print out scenarios and scribble all over them. The Rivers PDFs are no exceptions. 

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6 hours ago, WisdomOfWombat said:

Formfillable versions are part of the downloads and can also be found on the product page.

I would have one request regarding the character sheets: the backgrpunds are all tinged, either in blue, green or grey-scale. Would it be possible to get sheets with a white background to safe ink/toner? 

Thanks. I found them on the product page, but still not in the purchased package. I was pretty quick on the purchase and may have missed the page update.Thanks for the hint about the product page. Nice.

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I only had the chance to skim the PDF. The first impression is positive. The design / layout does not seem as sophisticated as your usual Call of Cthulhu releases, and I don't like every piece of art, but it's somewhere between OK to good, so that is fine 🙂 What I really dislike however are the Mr Punch images next to every boxed text (if the is the correct expression) and there are a lot of those! They make the whole look less sophisticated.

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On 12/3/2022 at 1:36 AM, Cloud64 said:

Bit puzzled. The greyscale char sheets are on a blank bg. I've printed them and there's no sign of greyscale on the bg, unlike the blue ones, where you get blue speckling. 

With recent Chaosium products you can turn the background off in Adobe Acrobat (free version). Very handy for those of us who like to print out scenarios and scribble all over them. The Rivers PDFs are no exceptions. 

Thanks for the advice on turning the layers off in the PDFs. I hadn't noticed that. Also you are right about the greyscale character sheets. On my monitor they looked speckled... this was more an issue of the monitor. In the blue and green character sheets, the background cannot be turned off though. And I really would rather hand out those to my players.

So, if there is a way to get the blue and green character sheets without the speckled background, I would be a very happy customer :)

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On 12/3/2022 at 6:07 AM, Matthew said:

Thanks. I found them on the product page, but still not in the purchased package. I was pretty quick on the purchase and may have missed the page update.Thanks for the hint about the product page. Nice.

The ones in the package are purely for printing - they don't have all the back end programming in them because you can't compile them all into one document and still have that programming work, at least as far as I understand it (they'd have to be separate pdfs in a zip file). But the separate form fillable ones are available on the product's web page at chaosium.com

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi I can’t insert photos into the pdf. Portrait bit of the filable character pdf sheet yet it just goes blank when I move the image over to it after insertion using adobe pdf editor???

Edited by MrMacabre

Les “fnarr fnarr” Frith

also known as Les the loquacious 

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12 hours ago, MrMacabre said:

Hi I can’t insert photos into the pdf. Portrait bit of the filable character pdf sheet yet it just goes blank when I move the image over to it after insertion using adobe pdf editor???

Click the Portrait box and the select Image dialogue will appear. Click Browse and navigate to you image, then click select. You can't drag and drop.

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I’m using an apple iPad not a pc when I click edit doc the tap Portrait box i add photo image and it goes in whole of doc??? When I scale die size and fit it in box the white box sits I top of the picture!?!?

Edited by MrMacabre
Spelling

Les “fnarr fnarr” Frith

also known as Les the loquacious 

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6 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

So you had a digital copy to read while waiting for the physical? Was the physical copy available or did you have to preorder (and possibly prepay) to gain access to the PDF in advance. If not, what kind of scheme did they have. @MOB, please let me know if this can be considered off-topic. I can drop the questions, but I really do not think it would stand on it's own as a thread and I must admit I would like to know if my strategy of buying a goodly amount from sources other than Chaosium has the benefits I postulate... I live in a Chaosium wasteland (CoC and some copies of MRQ when I ran the first Demo (Broken Tower) for RQG back in '17). but when I ordered the Starter Set to my FLGS they did bring in a few extra copies, a few sets of RQRiG and a few copies of the RBoM.

Seems like a win.

Yes, this is off-topic as it is not even possible to buy a physical copy of Rivers of London yet (but note an online seller should not be providing PDFs of any kind as part of the Bits and Mortar scheme).

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On 12/29/2022 at 9:35 PM, MrMacabre said:

I’m using an apple iPad not a pc when I click edit doc the tap Portrait box i add photo image and it goes in whole of doc??? When I scale die size and fit it in box the white box sits I top of the picture!?!?

Sadly adding an image to a form image box is not supported on Acrobat Reader on the iPad. See https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/insert-image-to-fillable-form-on-iphone-or-ipad/m-p/9203923

 

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