By Mark Morrison
Behold, a new header graphic appears! Thanks to our talented graphic designer Monika Godyń for assembling this wonderful collage from covers by Loïc Muzy for Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest and Basic Roleplaying, along with Ossi Hiekkala's cover for Age of Vikings.
So, challenge accepted: I’ll write something about each game. Let’s start at the bedrock. It's very cool, and very basic:
A dozen years ago I started teaching Writing for Interactive Narratives at Swinburne University*. In other words, stories for games.
I was asked to set a Dungeons & Dragons module as a group writing assignment. This was 2012, before the huge explosion of RPGs in modern pop culture which kicked off with Critical Role and Stranger Things. Very few of the students had played D&D, so learning that and writing for it felt like an arduous adventure, and rulebooks would be expensive.
So, I suggested that the Chaosium engine Basic Roleplaying would be a better choice. The Basic Roleplaying Quick Start from 2009 was a complete game in less than 32 pages which covered any genre you wanted to write for, and best of all it was entirely free to download.
I knew that the new writers wouldn’t truly get the idea of roleplaying games until they had played one (remember, this was before the actual play explosion), so I figured that I had better write a scenario example in the style I was looking for, and host a sort of mini-con so that everyone could roll dice for the first time.
I have always loved RuneQuest Vikings, so I wrote “A Cold Death”, a BRP adventure set in Norway about six Vikings returning from the raids. My splendid videogame industry colleague Terry Lane contributed amazing character art, and my gamemaster pals Ben, Louise, Scott and Jye donated their time to run a table each. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in class, and hope it was for the students too.
I was so pleased with the results. The students quickly grasped the idea of percentile skills and were able to write up their own stories and stats. Their scenarios presented original situations with surprising themes, and we had a fun playtest day where everyone played each others’ work. Some of them formed groups and kept playing RPGs together afterwards, and “A Cold Death” also found life beyond academia: Pedro Ziviani went through the text and changed it into a Mythic Iceland adventure, and it is now being updated again for a future Age of Vikings release.
Meanwhile, the DIY spirit of BRP exists to this day. Anyone can publish their own material using the BRP SRD, and the game engine was just recently celebrated in the new 2025 edition of the Basic Roleplaying Quickstart, for Chaosium’s 50th Anniversary. As well as the core rules it has three marvelous short scenarios which give a taste for what BRP can do. Will your players be 17th century musketeers off rescuing “The Prisoner of Richelieu”; a shipwrecked spaceship crew exploring a hostile planet in “Footsteps in the Dark”; or bold fantasy adventurers exploring “The Lost Temple of Garthoon”?
Jason Durall has done such a great job of revising his own work on Steve Perrin’s legendary game engine, building on the foundation that Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis set in the 1980s when they created BRP as a more streamlined version of RuneQuest. BRP went on to power Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Superworld, ElfQuest, Ringworld and more, and all of those genre flavours are still present in the full Basic Roleplaying rulebook for you to build your own game worlds with.
It all reminds me that I yearn to run a Western sometime soon. When I’m ready to ride that range, I know just the system to use for it.
* In one of those circle-of-life things I walked into a university classroom to start teaching exactly 30 years to the day since I started university myself. All of my 2012 students did better than me; they were already in Second Year, whereas I went on to fail First Year Arts three times, mostly due to the fact that I majored in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons instead. Apparently you have to do work to pass, who knew?
