There’s turmoil in the D&D space as gamers react to likely changes to the 5e ecosystem.
As tabletop gaming groups begin to discuss and look for alternatives, Chaosium has decided to mirror New Year, New Game sale by dropping the price of their Basic Roleplaying system to just a buck. The download is usually $21.95.
The PDF is 400 pages long, making the offer attractive, and the Call of Cthulhu publisher will keep it live as long as the New Year, New Game sale persists.
Chaosium’s electronic shelf describes the game;
This book comprises a roleplaying game system, a framework of rules aimed at allowing players to enact a sort of improvisational radio theater—only without microphones—and with dice determining whether the characters succeed or fail at what they attempt to do. In roleplaying games, one player takes on the role of the gamemaster (GM), while the other player(s) assume the roles of player characters (PCs) in the game. The gamemaster also acts out the roles of characters who aren’t being guided by players: these are called non-player characters (NPCs).
From its origin, Basic Roleplaying was designed to be intuitive and easy to play. Character attributes follow a 3D6 curve, and the other Basic Roleplaying mechanics are even simpler. Virtually all rolls determining success or failure of a task are determined via the roll of percentile dice. This means that there’s less fiddling with dice of different types, and the concept of a percentile chance of success is extremely easy for beginners and experienced players to grasp. There aren’t many easier ways to say a character has a 70% chance of succeeding at an activity.
Nicely, the system powers many RPGs, and there are over 2000 matches on DriveThruRPG. Games include the new bestseller from FrostByte Books The Comae Engine, Chaosium’s own Regency Cthulhu and Ben Aaronovitch co-authored Rivers of London: The Roleplaying Game.
It’s worth noting that games like Rivers of London are self-contained and don’t need additional rules, but the current offer lets you check out the vanilla rules for almost nothing.
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Chaosium burned their own OGL goodwill a few years ago when they burned everyone that used the Wizards OGL (spread by Mongoose’s licensed version of RuneQuest) despite the OGL being in use for years. They tried to recover with a new OGL of their own but I don’t know how that worked out as I’m still unhappy about how they handled it.
As Mongoose was itself a RuneQuest licensee, its ability to issue perpetual OGL licenses for RuneQuest was flawed: any such licenses could only have a duration equal to its own right to use the RuneQuest IP, no longer. And Mongoose’s RQ license terminated in 2011.
Chaosium waited nearly a decade before cancelling the license. If they had done so right away everyone would have understood.
There was a complete change in ownership at Chaosium during that time. (Two, effectively!) And a whole new publishing strategy, once the RQ and Glorantha IPs were back under the same roof. So their change in thinking (or in action) over that time is somewhat understandable.