Basic Roleplaying: The BRUGE and the ORC

Chaosium have recently put out Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine, BRUGE essentially being a revision of the old Big Yellow Book version of Basic Roleplaying. I reviewed that here, and more or less everything I said there applies here: this is far from a “basic” volume when it comes to the sheer amount of rules presented, but the intention is that you aren’t meant to use each and every rule in there – as is the case with GURPS, you’re meant to pick and choose which options you want to go with in order to tailor the system to the shape you want.

For my money, I think BRP – in either its Big Yellow Book or BRUGE incarnations – does somewhat better at making this user-friendly on the referee than GURPS does. If you strip away all the options, the underlying baseline system is flat-out simpler, and the worksheet for choosing which options you want to incorporate is very handy and does a good job of helping you decide what combination of rules you actually want. In this new version, there are some notable differences in terms of content – RuneQuest-style Strike Ranks have been reserved to RuneQuest, a slimmed-down and less genre-specific Sanity system is provided instead of the full-fat Call of Cthulhu one, and most particularly rules for Pendragon-style Passions are offered. More generally, the text has been tidied up, clarified, and generally given another round of polish.

Nonetheless, I think if you judge BRUGE solely on its text, and a comparison of that with the Big Yellow Book, you are missing a trick; the differences are slight and in many instances may simply come down to a matter of taste. What’s different here is the presentation and the legalities, the latter being a bigger deal than the former, but both significant.

Let’s deal with the lesser matter first: the presentation here is much nicer. The physical book is printed on nicer paper, in hardcover, with a nice ribbon bookmark. The art is of superior quality and in full colour. The layout is nice and readable still, but at the same time makes much better use of space. The Big Yellow Book was published during the years when Charlie Krank and Lynn Willis were running Chaosium more or less by themselves – Sandy Petersen and Greg Stafford having each stepped away from the company whilst still retaining their stakes in the ownerhsip – and in that period, Chaosium’s general layout practices and the like didn’t really change that much. For that matter, they hadn’t exactly evolved rapidly in the years prior to Stafford’s mid-1990s withdrawal from active involvement, though industry-wide standards didn’t evolve all that rapidly in that period so this wasn’t so noticeable.

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The upshot of Krank and Willis not making significant updates to Chaosium’s standards of presentation weren’t so evident in the 1990s, but by 2008, when the Big Yellow Book came out, they’d become more evident. What had been cutting-edge in the 1980s and was absolutely acceptable in the 1990s was beginning to look increasingly creaky. Among the reforms the Moon Design crowd have presided over since Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen executed a boardroom coup against Charlie Krank and installed Moon Design as the new regime has been a full-scale uplift of Chaosium’s production standards, and this new version of Basic Roleplaying is one of the beneficiaries of that.

This book is a toolkit, and some may argue that presentation is pointless in respect of a toolkit. They are missing a trick – the presentation and layout of a book has a direct impact on how easy and pleasant it is to look up information in it, and a tool which is easier and more pleasant to use is intrinsically a superior tool to one which is, by comparison, more awkward and more annoying to utilise, and if you use a better tool, you will most likely do a better job.

“The best tool for the job” is an idea that applies to the legal situation surrounding the book – namely, the decision to issue it under the ORC licence. This is a new open gaming licence which has been hatched by a collective of game publishers – spearheaded but not led by Paizo – in the wake of the utter debacle surrounding the OGL earlier this year. In case you don’t recall, this saw Wizards of the Coast make a totally ridiculous decision to rip up the old OGL and impose a new licence on terms generally regarded as being much more favourable to them, and commercially ruinous for any third party publisher to commit to.

That kerfuffle led to Wizards undertaking a humiliating climbdown, insisting “I’m not owned, I’m not owned!” as they soiled their underwear and cried and gave up on their plans to kill the old licence and tossed out the D&D 5E rules as Creative Commons in the hope of generating a shred of community goodwill, having killed all of the goodwill they’d generated over the prior two decades comprehensively. What it did not involve, however, was the principle of Wizards being able to cancel the old licence unilaterally on a whim being tested in court; nor did it involve them amending the old licence to specify that it could never be revoked by them.

As a result, despite some of the concessions by Wizards being pretty massive (making the 5E rules Creative Commons is kind of a big deal), many regarded it as too little, too late – because Wizards had openly contemplated taking actions which would have been ruinous for the third party market once, nobody trusted that they wouldn’t do it again. Paizo and others continued their plans, already announced prior to the climbdown, to create the ORC licence, and BRUGE is the first gaming product I have bought to be put out under it.

To my eyes, the licence seems very sensible. Some legal jargon is involved, but this is necessary for it to have the desired effect. The main issue I see with it is that if you use the licence, then anything in your product which falls under the definition of Licensed Content has to be Licensed Content – which means that you can’t ringfence system content at all, though you can ringfence stuff like trademarks, setting elements, characters, factions, story concepts, and that sort of thing. (That stuff is Reserved Material by default; you can say “This thing, which would usually be Reserved Material, is Licensed Material”, but you can’t do the reverse.)

That said, I don’t think that’s commercially problematic. It makes it a bit harder to put out stuff for someone else’s system which is purely rules stuff and to have any protection for it – but this is arguably the price you pay to have a pool of open rules content people can use, and little stops you simply putting out such a product without licensing it at all (provided you aren’t copy-pasting Licensed Material) and indicating compatibility if that’s what you really want to do. As a first party publisher, it’s a perfectly cromulent licence to put your system out under if you are keen on letting people use it to produce material using their own game settings or story ideas, if you have no particular desire to make use of the setting and story concepts they devise but might be interested in utilising especially good system concepts they cook up. As a third party publisher, it’s fine if you want to be able to put out material based on settings or stories of your own devising, but don’t want to be especially proprietary about rules ideas you throw out there – and if you’re already working in someone else’s system, odds are you aren’t too precious on that point.

The OGL crisis and the rise of ORC seems to have happened at an opportune moment for Chaosium; though the first I heard of BRUGE was when they announced it was forthcoming as an ORC product, it seems to me that the project was already at an advanced enough stage then that they must have been working on it for quite a time before then, but Wizard’s self-inflicted gutshot to their reputation created an opportunity. Previously, Chaosium had been cooking up a bespoke Basic Roleplaying open licence, but it had its own issues – here they seem to have decided that they may as well go the ORC route and help establish new community norms in this area.

This is an easy concession for Chaosium to make, in some respects. Back when Mongoose had the RuneQuest licence, they put out their version of the game under the OGL, and they kept that up for Legend, which is what they renamed their second edition of the game to after they lost the licence. OpenQuest originally used the OGL and the Mongoose RuneQuest SRD as its basis, though it now uses its own SRD put out under Creative Commons (thanks to Wizards’ goofy nonsense). As a result, if you want to put out a game based on percentile skills and other RuneQuest-derived concepts, the means exist to do it without relying on Chaosium at all, and all you need to do is file down the crunch here and there and you end up with Basic Roleplaying. (Arc Dream have essentially been doing exactly this with their Delta Green RPG.)

Here’s where the production values help – it might be possible to put out a game which is essentially based on Basic Roleplaying ideas without dancing to Chaosium’s tune, but it’s certainly much, much easier to go along with them and use their BRUGE book as your main reference for your project, thanks in part to the terms of the ORC making so much of the BRUGE material available for you to lift and use directly as Licensed Material, and in part because the book itself is nice enough to use to make your job easier. Whilst nothing stops anyone doing a reprint of the vast bulk of BRUGE with their own layout, it’d be a serious job to make a version which looks and is presented nicer than this.

And it’s very clear that Chaosium want third parties to use this to publish their stuff on both a hobbyist and professional basis. Right in the back cover blurb, we’re told “Basic Roleplaying is the definitive resource to help you create and sell your very own tabletop roleplaying game! BRP is a complete, royalty-free system reference document (SRD). Use these rules, and focus on creating your world and scenarios!” It’s clear that Chaosium know exactly what the ORC is best suited for, and have decided to pitch BRUGE as being a resource for budding game publishers as much as people developing homebrew campaigns for personal use.

Will they succeed? It remains to be seen, but the perfect storm that sank Wizards’ doomed attempt at OGL 1.1 has also created the ideal conditions for BRUGE to shine in the wake of it. Judicious choices have clearly been made to ringfence what Chaosium value the most and believe themselves best-placed to protect – leaving out RuneQuest-style strike ranks or a lot of the more horror-optimised rules from Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition makes it a notch harder to retroclone those games with this directly, though anyone wanting to put out their own stuff for those games may find that the Chaosium community content programs for them are more helpful anyway, since what you give up in control you make up for in visibility on their dedicated marketplaces and, in RuneQuest, in access to source material. (With Lovecraft’s work thoroughly in the public domain, there’s nothing in principle stopping you from using BRUGE and the ORC to retroclone Call of Cthulhu, though the name recognition and production values on the game are such that you’ll probably struggle to get traction with a direct ripoff, and of course you may find you have to come up with your own versions of creatures and so on which end up incompatible with existing material.)

When the Moon Design crew took charge at Chaosium, they put the old Big Yellow Book line on ice in order to focus more on games with distinctive settings, since those did far better business for them than the generic rulebook ever did. I wouldn’t say this strategy has radically changed in the grand scheme of things – after all, they put out new versions of Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and Pendragon and inaugurated the Rivers of London RPG before hard copies of this hit the streets. The fact that they are returning to it now feels like a further sign of confidence from them – an indication that they think there is scope for a project which may never yield a new game line for Chaosium, but could help raise the profile of their house system and be of use to the wider community.

And who knows – maybe some products produced via the ORC for Basic Roleplaying will end up adopted by Chaosium? The current regime have proved themselves to be open to inviting third parties in to make upgraded first-party versions of their products – it happened with Harlem Unbound, it happened with Alone Against the Tide. Nothing precludes something similar happening to a sufficiently successful Basic Roleplaying-powered release, if it makes business sense for them and the creator in question to partner up like that.