Basic Roleplaying Ruleset
As has been mentioned on a number of threads, a commercial ruleset for Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying system (BRP) is currently in development, and I thought it would be helpful to start a new thread for it. The ruleset will be published by SmiteWorks.
BRP is a genre-neutral system which underpins many non-d20 games: it can be found in Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Elric/Stormbringer and Superworld (a 1980's superhero game). The RQ variant has morphed slightly, was re-released by Mongoose, and is not officially supported by this product. However, anyone familiar with RQ will find the BRP ruleset quite accessible.
The graphics skin is complete, and so are the basic ruleset logic/mechanics, so work is now focused on converting the reference material. The ruleset will come bundled with seven mini-adventures and the complete text of the core BRP rulebook.
It is designed to be an expandable ruleset, and extensions can be made (commercially or privately) to support the various systems which use BRP. At launch I do not expect there to be any official extensions, but I will be working on extensions for one or more games and hope to put something into the community to demonstrate how to tailor the ruleset to your favourite flavour.
At this stage it is too early to give an estimated publication date, but the project has been underway since April and is in a relatively mature state.
Stuart
Compatibility and Features
The new BRP ruleset has been designed to be backwards-compatible with the Call of Cthulhu ruleset. The ruleset name in campaign.xml needs to be changed from 'CallOfCthulhu' to 'Basic Roleplaying' and then it should just work fine.
It is always worth backing up your campaign directory before doing anything like this, but it will allow you to port from the old ruleset to the new one. The opposite isn't necessarily true, as new features in BRP (such as hit locations and fatigue points) aren't implemented in Call of Cthulhu.
As regards features, the ruleset supports player-to-player whispers, group chat, chat frame portraits, hidden rolls, encounters, the image tool bar, auto-complete fields and drop-down selection controls.
NPCs can be set up as racial templates, in which case the stats are given in terms of die formulae (such as '2D6+6'). When a racial template is added to an encounter list or dropped on the combat tracker, the ruleset rolls and resolves the stats and adjusts HP, damage bonus etc appropriately. The rolled totals are reported to the GM only.
Skills dragged to the hotkey bar (such as 'Persuade') keep track of the skill chance - any subsequent change to the skill chance on the character sheet is automatically reflected when using the hot key.
BRP rule options which are implemented directly include hit locations vs hit points, fatigue/power/sanity points, skill category bonuses based on stats, 'crucial' roll resolution (fumble/fail/success/special succes and critical) and the optional strike rank combat initiative system. These can all be switched individually on or off, and impact the way the character sheet, npc sheet and combat tracker function.
I'm sure there's more, but that is a quick list off the top of my head!
Stuart