Rivers of London: Classic Chaosium Project, Modern Chaosium Attitude

Rivers of London is a novel series by Ben Aaronovitch – a former TV writer who Doctor Who fans might remember as writing some of the better-remembered Sylvester McCoy-fronted stories. The novels revolve around Peter Grant, a young Metropolitan Police officer who after an encounter with the supernatural is recruited into the Folly – a secret society which traces its roots back to the 1700s, but which normalised its relationship with the Met in the mid-20th Century and effectively became its X-Files department. Practicing “Newtonian magic” – so called because it’s derived from a lost work of Isaac Newton where he devised a classical model of magic to match his model of physics – the Folly solves mysteries and keeps the peace between regular London and the demi-monde, the subculture of those touched by magic; in keeping with the Peelian principles of community policing, the members of the Folly are arguably part of the demi-monde themselves, whether by origin or through their extensive interactions with the supernatural.

Released in 2022, the Rivers of London RPG is an officially licensed product, and represents Chaosium simultaneously breaking new ground and returning to their roots. Although Chaosium’s first RPG was RuneQuest, many more of their early RPGs represented Basic Roleplaying adaptations of pre-existing settings, with Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Elfquest, Ringworld, and Pendragon/Paladin all falling into that category. Even Nephilim was an adaptation of a French RPG; the exceptions in their backlog are Worlds of Wonder, Superworld, Magic World, and the standalone Basic Roleplaying system (and Superworld was a spin-off from Worlds of Wonder, Magic World was a reprint of the 5th Edition Stormbringer system with the Moorcock-specific stuff filed off, and the standalone version of Basic Roleplaying is a condensation of systems from their other releases).

Critically and commercially, it’s those adaptations of pre-existing settings which have done really well for Chaosium. Sure, Elfquest and Nephilim didn’t do great, and Ringworld got snuffed out very abruptly when the licence got pulled by Niven (who’d apparently been persuaded by his agent that he could get a better movie deal if he did so… nearly 40 years later and we still don’t have a big screen Ringworld movie). But Stormbringer was well-received, Pendragon was astonishingly ahead of its time, and Call of Cthulhu is their cash cow, with the Japanese licence having kept them on life support during some of the company’s darkest hours.

Indeed, arguably RuneQuest was itself an adaptation of a pre-existing setting – Glorantha having been created by Greg Stafford back in the 1960s, and at least some aspects of the lore had gotten out to the game-buying public via boardgames before Chaosium took the plunge into RPGs. Really, the only member of the Basic Roleplaying family which established much in the way of momentum and wasn’t strongly based on a compelling pre-existing setting was Superworld.

When Chaosium suffered its existential crisis during the fulfillment of the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Kickstarter, leading to Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen mounting a boardroom coup to install new management, the incoming new regime appears to have decided early on that games tied to vivid, eye-catching settings were simply a better gamble than those which were not. For instance, they mothballed Magic World (which had a setting, but not one which seemed to generate much excitement or widespread recognition outside of its hardcore fans) and the standalone Basic Roleplaying line (though they’re taking a punt on bringing back the latter), and when they put out their new edition of RuneQuest they returned it to being focused on Glorantha, rather than taking the more setting-agnostic approach of its third edition (and the versions put out by Mongoose and The Design Mechanism). So in this, respect, putting out a game like Rivers of London is congruent with that approach.

On the other hand, Rivers of London is also a watershed moment for the new regime at Chaosium – because it is the first time they have put out a brand-new Basic Roleplaying-derived RPG which they have developed in-house and which is not a new edition of an existing game. That’s important if Chaosium has ambitions to keep pushing forwards rather than resting on their laurels.

---

It’s also stepping into potentially more contentious waters – because it’s the first such game the current regime has put out where they’ve had to answer to the creator of the IP they have been working with. Call of Cthulhu has the advantage that H.P. Lovecraft died over four decades before the game came out, and since then his work has gone firmly into the public domain; there is no need to maintain good relations with him and, perhaps, compelling reasons to take stances he would not approve of. Pendragon‘s source material is centuries old – Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, and the rest are not going to write angry letters any time soon.

Ben Aaronovitch, however, is very much alive – and living authors can cause issues if they are not kept onside and happy with what you are doing. Authors can create problems from their end, especially if they don’t value the RPG adaptation of their work highly; I’ve already mentioned how Niven killed off the Ringworld RPG, which seems to be the result of him not really regarding it as especially important (or not as important as getting a sweet movie deal inked).

Authors can also get angry if they think you aren’t doing right by them or their work; one of the biggest goofs the Charlie Krank-led regime at Chaosium made was allowing their professional relationship with Michael Moorcock to sour, leading to him killing the licence and passing the RPG rights to his work to other parties. My understanding is that he became aware that royalty payments were just not showing up; Chaosium under Krank was pretty notorious for not paying their bills (I once played in the home campaign of a contributor to Beyond the Mountains of Madness who was being paid off in free product years after the campaign was published, because Chaosium couldn’t just cut him a cheque for what was owed), but failing to pay your licensors ain’t something you can get away with to the same extent you can fail to pay freelance game designers and artists.

Arguably, Rivers of London is poised to sit in a similar niche in the Chaosium portfolio to Stormbringer – Rivers of London is by no means a similar flavour of fantasy to the classic Elric stories, but it’s a currently-hot fantasy series, just as Moorcock’s material was still fairly fresh in the early 1980s. If you consider the big Chaosium hits of the 1970s and 1980s as being RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and Stormbringer, you’ve got a game based in an original world primarily revealed to the public through games, one based on classic genre fiction of yesteryear, one based on a highbow literary tradition, and one based on a present-day author’s work. The last category has been empty ever since Moorcock took his ball and went home (not without good reason), and that’s the niche Rivers slots into perfectly, like its very own Amigara Fault hole. (And Moorcock has written a Doctor Who novel as well! The parallels multiply once you go looking.)

It is, perhaps, a sign of the new regime’s confidence that they have righted the ship that they have attempted a project like this. By restoring the fortunes of their biggest-selling lines first, Chaosium also make sure they are not in the position that West End Games was in where the Star Wars RPG was so vital to their ongoing stability that when Lucasfilm pulled the licence they were unable to fill the gap. (Cubicle 7 feel like they have drifted into the same position – if the BBC and Games Workshop pulled the Doctor Who and Warhammer licenses at close to the same time, their product line would be kind of hollowed out.)

One of the first priorities they declared when they took over was that they wanted to mend bridges and pay off the old regime’s debts to the fullest extent possible, to re-establish Chaosium’s reputation in the field as a trustworthy company to do business with. They would be utter fools to undertake this project unless they were wholly confident in their ability to make sure they could pay Aaronovitch’s royalties in a prompt and painless manner – because Aaronovitch, whose career absolutely does not depend on maintaining good relationships within the RPG industry, could absolutely demolish that hard-won restored reputation if they treated him poorly and he decided to kick off a stink about it. So I shouldn’t think there is any danger of them not treating Aaronovitch right.

But what of Ben himself? Whilst dealing with a single author can go more smoothly than dealing with a big studio – it could potentially be much easier and faster for Chaosium to get Aaronovitch to sign off on something than it was for, say, Chameleon Eclectic to get approvals on The Babylon Project RPG, a process which derailed that game line through delays, since properties licenced from individual authors depend on that writer’s nod whereas properties licenced from big Hollywood studios and the like intrinsically depend on a wider range of decision-makers and internal company politics.

On the other hand, if Ben is either not motivated to get around to the approvals or not organised enough to do it efficiently, it may be worse. Similarly, because of the plurality of decision makers when you licence a property from a corporation, it can take a bit longer for adverse decisions to be made – but Ben could, in theory, get out of bed tomorrow and decide to kill off the licence, and depending on the terms he’s signed he could do it instantly (or just not bother to renew it if early termination is onerous or impossible).

However, there is an important difference this time around compared to Ringworld or Stormbringer: Ben Aaronovitch actually seems to want to be involved this time. Back when those two earlier games were put out, tabletop RPGs were still comparatively new and few established authors had much familiarity with them; neither Niven nor Moorcock even offered a brief introduction to the games based on their respective works, and it seems that beyond accepting a royalties check and doing approvals their involvement in the games was, well, about as extensive as Lovecraft’s involvement in Call of Cthulhu.

Ben, on the other hand, is one of us, as the eagle-eyed might spot in a recent photo he put out of his bookshelves on Twitter. He does provide an introduction here – establishing his gamer credentials by talking about getting a copy of the original Dungeons & Dragons beige box in the late 1970s (presumably one of the Games Workshop imports) and talking about how he loves RPG worldbuilding and has always dreamed of having an RPG adaptation of his work. His involvement extends further than that – he’s listed as an author on the credits page (and thanks to that “Aa” he’s listed first), he writes a little bit of introductory micro-fiction about Peter Grant trying to introduce his friends to Call of Cthulhu, and there’s a small number of little “Ben Says” sidebars dotted throughout the rulebook where feedback and ideas offered by Ben on his readthrough of the material are added in.

Ben might just be putting on a polite facade, of course – projecting an image of someone who’s totally down with this roleplaying stuff, because a good chunk of his audience would probably be unhappy if he said “actually, tabletop RPGs are rubbish”. I really don’t think that’s the case, though. He could have absolutely gotten away with taking the same arm’s-length approach that Moorcock and Niven did, and I don’t think anyone would have publicly scolded him for doing so; everything he writes here suggests that he is genuinely keen on the game, and is just tickled pink to see Chaosium putting it out. At the same time, the scarcity of the “Ben Says” boxes suggests that he is largely happy to sit back and let Chaosium do the game design stuff, rather than trying to be excessively interventionist.

So long as Chaosium can keep those good vibes going, there’s no particular reason why their relationship with Aaronovitch should be troubled. In fact, his relationship with the game seems to be right in the sweet spot – engaged enough to offer support, but not so interventionist as to throw Chaosium off their stride. Many publishers and game designers would be thrilled to have licensors who took a similar stance.

As for the game itself, it’s got a lovely presentation – with nice full-colour art, a crisp, clear, readable front, no distracting background patterns to impact readability, and two ribbon bookmarks. The actual execution is an interesting mix of classic Chaosium design and organisation principles with modern attitudes, which is exactly what you’d want to do when introducing a new game line which feels fresh and distinct enough to appeal to a new audience whilst still being part of a longer-standing family of games.

In putting out the original versions of Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, the 1980s Chaosium seems to have been acutely aware that they were making an offering which might attract people who had not touched RPGs previously, but were fans of the source material. That would be why they were based on a deliberately simplifed version of the RuneQuest system, that would be why the original Basic Roleplaying pamphlet bundled into the earleist copies took such a didactic approach in introducing people to the idea of RPGs, that would be why they made sure to include starter scenarios.

That idea of going out of the way to be beginner-friendly carries over here. For Chaosium’s major lines, the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set and RuneQuest Starter Set have largely taken up the job of introducing absolute beginners to the format – being modestly-priced boxes crammed with useful material and designed from the ground up to guide purchases from being utter beginners to budding referees. For a brand new game line, of course, Chaosium don’t necessarily have the luxury of gambling that they’ll be able to put out a Rivers of London Starter Set (after all, if the game commercially bombs, they and Aaronovitch may decide to let the line quietly die rather than send good money after bad).

That being the case, the core rulebook includes features normally more associated with those Starter Sets – most notably, a little solo scenario, The Domestic, inspired by Aaronovitch’s short story of the same name. It also includes a fairly gentle system; the flavour of Basic Roleplaying here clearly takes Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition as its starting point (complete with attributes calculated as percentiles rather than on a 3-18 range), but with further tweaks. The number of attributes has been cut back, for instance, the magic system is more forgiving, there isn’t an extensive Sanity subsystem (though there are rules for suffering psychological trauma). The baseline character generation system takes the quick generation version from the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set (and the 7th edition Quickstart) as its basis. The rule from Call of Cthulhu about using one fifth of your skill/attribute for an extreme-difficulty role is absent – the only rolls are normal (full score) or hard (half score). A lot of additional rules are shuffled into an appendix, rather than being presented as truly core.

Perhaps the most intimidating thing about a Call of Cthulhu character sheet is the long skill list; that is done away with here. Instead, everyone has two Combat Skills (Fighting and Firearms), and a set of nine Common Skills, which represent the sort of thing anyone could have a stab at. Everything which doesn’t come under a Combat Skill, Common Skill, or attribute is an Expert Skill, which cover the sort of thing where if you don’t have specialist knowledge or prior training, you’re not going to be able to attempt. (Drive is listed as a Common Skill, not an Expert one, but giving all player characters in a modern day setting the ability to drive to a baseline level of competence is probably helpful.)

A lot of the ideas about pushing your Luck and spending Luck from Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition make it in here, and there’s a neat mechanic where if something comes up in a scenario where you really, really want to use an Expert Skill you don’t have, you can spend 10 Luck to make a roll against a baseline and see if you succeed anyway (with success representing you recalling some random factoid or little trick you’ve picked up in the past). If you succeed at that roll, and nobody else in the party has the skill, you can invest a further 10 Luck to permanently gain that skill, representing your character turning out to have had a bit of training in that field all along.

This is a clever riposte to the bit of game design in GUMSHOE (as wheeled out in Trail of Cthulhu and so on) which calls on the referee to jot down all the skills that player characters in the party possess when doing adventure design, so you don’t inadvertently put in something important that none of the characters are able to interact with, you can just design the adventure as you like. If the players want to pass that test bad enough, one of them will be able to do this – and if they’re already putting Luck down to make the attempt, they will probably also use Luck to adjust the roll if they get a near-miss.

Some of these revisions – like taking out the most extreme level of difficulty – reflect the fact that despite this being an investigative RPG, the tone of Rivers of London is much, much lighter than that of any Cthulhu Mythos material (or at least any Mythos material worth its ichor), and the RPG is intended as a fantasy RPG, not a horror one. At the same time, I suspect that some of these revisions could have made it into core Call of Cthulhu – either in 7th Edition or a potential 8th Edition – if Chaosium had wanted to do a version of the game which prioritised being beginner-friendly over and above backward compatibility.

To my mind, that would been a mistake; one of the nicest things about the 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu rules is that whilst they do make these updates, you could write conversion guidelines for prior editions on the back of a business card and probably have space left over, and the deep bench of existing material is one of the game’s strengths. You don’t make a game more beginner-friendly by putting out a version which is incompatible with the vast majority of what already exists, because that means beginners get tripped up if they try to grab some older material to use in their games – and having a deep bench of old stuff in PDF or second hand is more accessible to participants on more limited incomes.

For that matter, the raging success of the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set – and the fact that it presents you with enough stuff that some adventure collections are usable with just the Starter Set – suggests that Call of Cthulhu is probably close to the sweet spot for people who want that style of game, the extra crunch compared to Rivers of London being mild and perhaps suited to the more studious and academic air of the game.

Which leads me on to the setting stuff. The assumed date of campaigns is fairly specific – it’s 2016, a shade after the events of the novel False Value, at which point the Folly has gained approval to expand its ranks due to the uptick of magic (and therefore magical crime) since 2012. Player characters are assumed to either be Metropolitan Police officers drafted in or outside specialists recruited as consultants (hence being able to use a variant of the Call of Cthulhu occupation system in character generation).

The setting material offered here is fairly light – an attempt seems to have been made to avoid putting in lots of spoilers (though some are inevitable if you’re to give referees any hope of actually presenting the Folly in a roughly canonical fashion), and whilst I think this may be a bit over-hesitant, I suppose giving a light introduction is more beginner-friendly and with the series now being very extensive (with over two dozen novels, graphic novels, novellas, and short stories to its name) a deep dive into the setting might be quite long. (A setting encyclopedia crammed with spoilers and details would probably be a reasonable supplement idea, or possibly a project for Aaronovitch to do off his own bat which would nonetheless be super handy for Rivers of London referees.) I think perhaps a bit more setting detail in the introduction chapter may be helpful for anyone giving the book an initial cover-to-cover readthrough, especially if – like me – they’ve not read the books, but otherwise it seems fine.

The advice on designing scenarios and running games is also quite good – you get all the guidance on modern roleplaying techniques, respecting players’ boundaries, moderating content, and so on you could want. Perhaps especially useful are the guidelines on how to set your game’s tone and calibrate content if you want to hit an atmosphere congruent with Ben’s own work – if you don’t want to do that, of course, you could go more grimdark, but having these pointers is perhaps useful if you are invested in using the Folly as-is.

Which leads in to the thorny question of whether you want to do that. There’s no getting around the fact that the idea of a Met Police department which consists basically of good people trying to do a difficult job under difficult circumstances and maybe not always getting it right may raise eyebrows among people who have had difficult experiences with the police, particularly if they come from communities which have historically been targeted by police forces such as the Met. The fact that the Folly specifically exists to police an underground subculture cuts especially close to this; think of Black folk targeted by stop and search teams, think of LGBT+ folk busted for “public indecency” and similar, both still within living memory.

It appears that Aaronovitch was at least somewhat aware of the difficulties here, and did his level best to try and alleviate them. Glancing over the setting stuff there seems to be at least some acknowledgement of the fact that police interactions with cultural minorities can be fraught, and an attempt seems to have been made to wire in some diversity into the material. Peter Grant is Black, this core rulebook book emphasises the diversity of the Metropolitan Police, to my knowledge the books do as well, doing some Googling suggests that LGBT+ characters are included in the series; there’s apparently some bits where Peter Grant as the narrator gets pronouns wrong, but apparently he improves and so this is either the character learning and growing or Aaronovitch getting better on that front. In addition, the fact that the Folly is a distinct organisation which has been somewhat uncomfortably grafted onto the Met and sits a little aside from it perhaps helps somewhat.

Nonetheless, police-focused stories sit differently in the wake of Black Lives Matter (especially after the George Floyd murder), and the Met Police in particular has had some hideous scandals come out recently, both in terms of endemic force-wide bigotries and the awful murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer (and the utterly disgraceful police response to the Clapham Common vigil). It is really, really hard to feel positive about the Met – even a weird underfunded off-shoot of the Met – at this point in time, given that the force seems to be a shitshow and given that “police” as a feature of society seems to be a thing which deserves a philosophical rethink. The Peelian principles are on the face of them good – certainly a better starting point than many American forces seem to use – but whether the Met or any other UK police force has ever lived up to them as an institution or simply used them as a figleaf is another question.

This is a fundamental problem with the Rivers of London concept, and not really one which the RPG is going to solve; it is a mild headache for Chaosium, and I am sure it is something which causes Aaronovitch himself the odd sleepless night. In the appendix some guidance is offered for devising other investigator organisations, and it would be wholly viable to use the book to run a game set in the same world and cosmology as Rivers of London but just ignore the police thing altogether. It would be a mild shame to skip over all of it – the details on how the Met works, in particular, are quite nicely presented and researched (and indeed you could happily use the book as a resource for presenting the Met in other RPGs, especially Call of Cthulhu, if you needed to know the inside details on how the institution works). But if you were determined to skip it, you could.

Nonetheless… “fuck the police” isn’t what the books are about, and so it can’t be the what the game is about. If you want a Basic Roleplaying-derived RPG about how law enforcement work will grind you down and chew you out and make you a moral and physical husk, Delta Green is right down there at the end of the bar making eyes at you, go say hello if you like. (But maybe text a friend for a safety check-in later on, that game plays rough.) If you draw the line entirely at even contemplating a neutral-to-positive portrayal of some areas of police work, then Rivers of London was never going to satisfy you.

If, on the other hand, you regard “police who genuinely have the best interests of the community they are policing at heart” as a valid concept for a game (even if you think that is as fantastical as the magic in the setting), then Rivers of London is not half bad. It landed a silver Ennie in the “best rules” category at Gen Con this year, and I’d say that’s merited – it’s a nice sprucing-up of Basic Roleplaying and a solid application of it to the setting.

Finally, Chaosium have managed to produce something to sit on the “game based on work by a currently-active author” plinth that’s sat vacant for decades, and it’s worth the wait. It’s a judiciously chosen mixture of long-standing Chaosium design practices and modern approaches to roleplaying, cooked up by a diverse and highly capable team, and strikes the sort of balance between being approachable, being entertaining, and being informative (the latter being provided by the real-world Metropolitan Police details) which the current regime at Chaosium have made a hallmark of the Call of Cthulhu line in recent years, and which pays off here. If the police aspects and the potential to slip into copaganda offers a sour note, I wouldn’t blame anyone for being troubled by it, but I think they handled it as responsibly as they possibly could without simply abandoning the project altogether.

I genuinely think we’re in the middle of a Chaosium golden age right now, and Rivers of London is one of the fruits of it.