Time for another entry in my occasional series offering brief mini-reviews on RPG supplements interesting enough to pass comment on but not quite spurring enough thoughts for a full article. This time around, it’s various items from the Basic Roleplaying family of systems.
Alone Against the Static (Call of Cthulhu)
South Dakota, the 1990s: Alex and Charlie are a couple whose relationship is not doing great. Charlie’s brother, Mark, has offered them the use of his cabin in the woods, which should give them a chance to have a nice getaway to have some fun, talk things over, and patch things up. As Alex and Charlie settle in for their first night, they decide to watch a movie – but the broadcast reception out here is lousy and the vast majority of Mark’s videos are horror movies, which they’re not in the mood for.
Eventually, they hit on a tape which they hope contains something different, and it certainly does – because it proves to be camcorder footage of the cabin from the last time Mark and his wife visited, filmed by an unseen figure a la Lost Highway, cutting off partway through and playing this hideous white noise static. Then the power to the cabin cuts off. The next day, one of the couple wakes up to find that the other has taken the car to town to try and get help fixing the power. A day alone in the cabin – or walking in the surrounding woods – can’t be that bad, right? (Oh yes it could…)
Time for another entry in my occasional article series covering game supplements which didn’t inspire a full article but did prompt some thoughts. This time around it’s a classic fantasy special, with supplements for various fantasy RPGs with long, distinguished lineages: a Chivalry & Sorcery monster tome, a significant D&D 5E rules expansion, and some material for Basic Roleplaying and OpenQuest.
European Folklore Bestiary (Chivalry & Sorcery)
Like much of the 5th Edition Chivalry & Sorcery lineup, this is the product of a Kickstarter – in this case, a carefully unambitious one, in which stretch goals were sensibly not used to bulk up the book itself but to unlock various 3D printer files for printing miniatures. That’s not something which is necessarily all that interesting if you’re not into using minis for RPG or wargaming purposes, but it’s a nice approach to running a Kickstarter regardless, since it helps steer well clear of the “we added too many stretch goals and now our core product is too ambitious” trap.
Weighing in at a shade over 150 pages, the European Folklore Bestiary is an extensive collection of additional creatures for Chivalry & Sorcery – the schtick here being is that they are derived from medieval bestiaries and folklore, and so represent the creatures as people of the era might have thought of them. It’s a fun concept that’s suitable to the game’s overall focus on historical detail, and I don’t mind owning a hard copy now that it’s out, but at the same time I think it’s a product I would have been happy to just get the PDF for.
The main reason for this is that it’s just a little light for a 150 page supplement. Each creature has a full-page illustration accompanying, and whilst some of these illustrations fill that space nicely, others seem a little under-detailed – like the plan was for them to be smaller initially and used in the corner of a page, rather than blown up to full size.
Pretty much all the creatures here fit onto a single double-page spread, and since each creature has a full-size illustration this means that around half the book is artwork. In the remaining half of the pages, the fairly extensive Chivalry & Sorcery stat blocks often take up half the page, and the written details on the creatures in question are sometimes a little sparse. Not always – some carry more detail – but often enough that this is noticeable.
Of course, this may well be that you’re dealing with some creatures which just aren’t widely mentioned in the bestiaries, just a brief aside here or there, and so there’s not that much authentic detail to provide – but it still makes the book feel a little sparse. There’s a good bibliography at the end, though perhaps it would have been helpful to provide individual citations in the creature entries to better indicate the specific sources of particular beasts. I’m still glad to have the resource, but I think customers coming to this late might be well-advised to consider just getting the PDF.
OpenQuest has a new 3rd edition out. My thoughts on it are broadly in line with my thoughts on 2nd edition, since OpenQuest is one of those games where a new edition is taken as an opportunity for iterative improvement rather than radical reinvention. However, one thing which impressed me looking over the new book is the clarity of the design and the willingness to take a little space to explain some design decisions.
The refereeing advice chapter, in particular, is extremely good, offering a wealth of advice based on years of not just running and playing OpenQuest but a good knowledge of the rest of the Basic Roleplaying ecosystem. In this vein there’s quite a good bit at the start of the referee advice chapter where author-publisher Newt Newport explains what he considers to be both the traditional elements of BRP-ish games which OpenQuest inherits and embraces, and where it’s deviated from the rest of the field in general (and its immediate ancestor, the Mongoose Publishing edition of RuneQuest, in specific).
He doesn’t call it Basic Roleplaying, mind; OpenQuest uses the euphemism of “D100 gaming” to refer to BRP, wisely giving Chaosium’s protected areas of intellectual property a wide berth, but if you know your gaming history and a wider range of systems you know damn well that it’s not any particular percentile-driven system that’s being referred to by this but specifically BRP. Despite being coy about using the term Basic Roleplaying, OpenQuest is willing to namedrop Legend (which Mongoose renamed their second edition of RuneQuest to when they lost the rights to the name( and Mythras (which the Design Mechanism renamed their version of RuneQuest to when they lost the rights to the name).
In doing so, Newt ends up being a little modest when he refers to OpenQuest as being a “little brother” to Mythras. This might be true in terms of, say, rules complexity or big-name settings – OpenQuest hasn’t landed a licence on the level of, say, Lyonesse or Luther Arkwright, Mythras has. But in terms of seniority, OpenQuest has the edge, the original version having emerged in 2009; this is clearly earlier than the emergence of Mythras, even if you regard Mythras‘s “zeroth edition” as being the 2010-released second Mongoose edition of RuneQuest, which is now called Legend. (To recap the argument for doing so: Nash and Whitaker of The Design Mechanism did the original design on Mongoose’s second RuneQuest/Legend before they did Mythras, and they’ve said previously that Mythras is basically the “director’s cut” of that game, the original release of Mongoose’s second RuneQuest/Legend having suffered a butchered edit.)
What particularly impressed me, though, was the clear explanation of some aspects of the Empire of Gatan, the sample setting provided here, in which Newt does the decent thing and levels with the reader – something which RPG setting designers, fond as they are of keeping secrets and wanting to keep interpretations of their setting open are often reluctant to do. Here he points out explicitly how much of the setting material provided is from an Imperial perspective, and gives a more clear-sighted rundown of what he considers to be the Empire’s positive attributes and which aspects of it he considers to be significant flaws in the society depicted.
Some might question whether this is necessary, but in the realm of speculative fiction it’s not unknown for authors to design settings which reflect how they believe the world should work (or how they believe the world actually works – which results in a world infused with their personal worldview which, inherently, is going to include some personal biases and preconceptions), and especially not unknown for uncritical readers to brush past all the indications that you aren’t meant to take the in-character statements about the world at face value.
This sort of ambiguity suits movies and books and videogames with strong designer-imposed plots better than they do RPGs. In the former, the events of the story can help tease out what the author actually thinks about the world in question. In an RPG, everything ends up filtered through the referee, and the action of the plot is up for grabs, so there’s much more scope for people to miss the point of a setting – and therefore not get the best out of it – without this sort of direct statement of “this is what this is about”.
This sort of clarity is very much OpenQuest‘s stock-in-trade, and this remains true of the new edition, making it a welcome inclusion in the somewhat crowded penumbra of BRP-derived games.
As with any game with its long pedigree, the publishing history of RuneQuest is awkward and complicated and has included more than a few missteps – I get the impression, for instance, that Moon Design/Chaosium these days consider farming the publication out to Avalon Hill and then to Mongoose to have been serious historical mistakes, and given how annoying overcomplex RuneQuest 3 was and generally shoddy the Mongoose RuneQuest products often were I can’t altogether disagree with them. However, between that, Mongoose’s SRD experiments, and Chaosium’s own attempts to promote the Basic Roleplaying system in other ways when they no longer had control of RuneQuest (including putting out the component booklets of RuneQuest 3 as Basic Roleplaying monographs), there has been a proliferation of fantasy-leaning setting-agnostic Basic Roleplaying-based systems out there.
I already covered Magic World in my review of the Stormbringer RPG, due to the fact that Magic World is basically 5th Edition Stormbringer with the Moorcock scraped off and a new setting tacked on the end, but it’s probably worth taking a look at various other BRP-based fantasy RPGs I’ve gathered over the years and see whether they are entirely redundant, or whether their differing focuses makes them useful for different purposes. It seems particularly apt at this point in time because the new Moon Design-controlled Chaosium has made it clear that generic or setting-neutral RPGs are not where their heart is at: they would rather put out games where, as in pre-Avalon Hill editions of RuneQuest, or Call of Cthulhu, or Stormbringer, the game is constructed around supporting a strong setting from the get-go, rather than a setting being an afterthought, opting to allow other publishers to struggle over the crowded “generic BRP-ish fantasy” space.
In the not-too-distant future one of my Monday night group is going to be running some of Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton’s Clockwork & Chivalry, so I thought I would check it out. The conceit is that it’s set during an alternate version of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s (exactly how many Civil Wars were fought in that period is apparently a non-trivial question). The twist is that Parliament, supported as it is by the craftsmen and merchants of the middle classes, can bring a range of amazing clockwork devices to bear on the battlefield; meanwhile, the Royalist forces bolster their chances by turning to alchemy, and whilst most of those persecuted for witchcraft in this age are innocents, there are a few genuine Satanists with true magical power lurking in the shadows.
The default starting point for the game is the aftermath of the Battle of Naseby, which deviates from the result in our world due to it being the first fight where the various clockwork and alchemical contrivances were used on the battlefield. In this version, King Charles was captured and quickly executed by Oliver Cromwell, who has declared himself Lord Protector; however, the Royalist forces under Prince Rupert of the Rhine still control significant sections of the country (King Charles II is too young to lead the war at the moment, so he is staying in Paris with his mum). An uneasy break in the fighting has occurred as both sides come to terms with the twin shocks of the apocalyptic battle of Naseby and the sudden regicide following it – but surely that cannot last.
Refereeing and Reflection 