This is an interesting new bit over at Chaosium: Magic World, a self-contained Basic Role Playing-powered fantasy RPG that sounds like its designed to be an all-in-one book for using BRP straight up as a traditional fantasy RPG (i.e. trope laden). 100 spells, 60 monsters (sounds a bit low to me but maybe they can finally release a bestiary for BRP some day) and best as I can tell BRP streamlined only for fantasy gaming as opposed to dumbed down or anything. I'm looking forward to it, although I admit this book will be entering a rather crowded corner of the RPG market (BRP/D100 powered game systems, which includes Legend, Openquest, Runequest 6 that is forthcoming, GORE, BRP itself and lots of fanbrews; never mind all the OOP games out there).
I did a quick search on Ben Munroe's author name to see what he was all about and found this interview on him. He has a lot of pervious publishing credits with the BRP mechanics, including Nephilim, which is good.
UPDATE: Here's an even more recent review about Ben and Magic World specifically on basicroleplaying.com. From reading this review, it looks like Magic World is going to be its own distinct game/product line, and it's best described as a stealth return of the old Elric system, which I actually liked a lot (even though I had no interest in gaming in the Young Kingdoms).
Anyway, I'm going to cross my fingers on this one and hope it is a nice, clean complete package. I'm starting to move away from the days of multi-volume mega-rulebook-heavy games, and am so enamoured with the genuinely pleasant and not overly encumbered Traveller game nights I've had going that the prospect of the same using BRP (or Magic World) for fantasy gaming sounds pretty tempting. I technically could do that with BRP right now (as my wife did last year) but its got lots of fiddly bits that you need to decide on. Legend can do that too (and I'd like to use it as such) but I'm still running into two problems: the ongoing lack of effort by Mongoose to fix edit and errata issues with their books, and the difficulty in actually getting my hands on them.
Maybe Magic World's strength will be in its tight no-nonsense design; I'd like that.
I'm excited about this too.
ReplyDeleteMongoose is on my 'bad list' so anything thing from them is off limits anyway.
From reading the threads on BRP Central I'm thinking this sounds like something that will get a lot of use at our table, since it will have a lot of the stuff I'm using all in one location.
Yeah, I think so as well. I'm glad their producing Magic World, as it will be nice to have a good dedicated BRP-powered ruleset for fantasy, and I am sure I can get my Wednesday group to play it.
ReplyDeleteAfter Mongoose released Legend with a completely new set of errata issues (by omitting half the traits from the Monsters of Legend book) and then didn't fix the errata in the Arms of Legend reprint of Arms & Equipment...I mean, if there was only one book that needed fixing, that was it! I also wonder about some of what they decided to do...iirc they were supposed to fix strike rank in the core, but they didn't, then stated that strike rank was now repurposed to work the way the original error stated. Suspicious stuff.
Thanks for posting this. Defintely something I will be following. I agree with knobgobbler about Mongoose, I just can't deal with their quality control issues, or seeming lack thereof.
ReplyDeleteSadly I don't think it will take much to make a competitive product to Legend. Mongoose's got the right idea with some of its books, but the product still feels "evergreen" to me, and they don't seem to bother with quality control....I'm still perplexed as to how they let Monsters of Legend go to press with so many missing traits.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of some of TSR's old days when they would release rulesets missing entire sections that thad to be added back in with later releases (Gamma World 3rd comes to mind here!)