I've been deeply immersed in work, meaning I have had precious little time to spend enjoying more basic things in life; I've managed a couple game sessions recently (my son is running a biweekly Fallout RPG game, and I am two sessions in to a D&D 5.5 game that I decided on because it was the path of least resistance), but it looks like that will all be intermittent for me for the next several weeks.
When I get to this stage of "overhwlming tidal wave of work," I often find myself latching on to a single system and thinking a lot about it when time permits. As it happens this time the system is (once again) BRP from Chaosium. I've actually been spending a bit of time contemplating it already, as the recent BRP Creatures book effectively doubled the number of resources a GM might have and need for the game. The problem is, Chaosium is intermittent at best with its release schedule on BRP, and that schedule often includes stuff like the Vikings RPG, which is cool and all, but also not really what I want out of a BRP supplement for the most part. My expectations are unrealistically high: I would love a line of BRP books reminiscent of GURPS in the 90's, but I know that's a bit of a pipe dream. Luckily a lot of GURPS stuff from that era works well as generic sourcebooks...
Which gets to my idea for an April discussion point: analyzing what resources out there make good sourcebooks very specifically for BRP. These don't all need to be generic resources, either....they just need to be books that work well in being adapted to BRP.
With that in mind, I will take some time to compile a list for discussion, and I shall spend the next month seeing how much time I find to blog about all of this! I already have found a couple Shadowdark books that I realized would be fun to adapt to BRP, and there's more than one or two generic books that make good resources. No genre limits either, as of course BRP Is multigenre. Also, if I find an actual BRP-compatible book that people may not know about that is worth considering I will mention it as well.
Okay! A new target goal...we'll see how this goes.....
My first suggestion is Trilemma Adventures, a book I have talked about before on this blog, I think. It's an incredible art book (especially if you get the print version and not the POD edition), and gorgeously illustrated with hand-drawn 3D maps that are incredibly evocative. Every map includes a keyed set of locations with details, just enough to inspire the creative GM, not enough to bog you down in excess details, which means that all of the scenarios and maps in the book can be used very easily in your own world building. While Trilemma Adventures has an old-school aesthetic (and the monster supplement has a generic core version with additional books in a 5E and B/X flavor), the actual modules are suitably unique and interesting enough that all you as a BRP GM would need to do is match up the appropriate stats for relevant monsters and NPCs with your own resources, flesh out some of the artifacts and objects, and you are good to go....nothing here will make you feel like you're just reskinning a D&D module with BRP stats (not that there's anything wrong with that!), and this is an excellent resource if you are a BRP GM who's been looking for an excuse to flex some of the contents of the new BRP Creatures book, which has a robust fantasy bestiary within its pages; practically everything in Trilemma Adventures either has an available analog in the BRP Creatures book, or can easily be statted out.
So, if you want to do BRP in a fantasy setting, pairing the core rules with BRP Creatures and Trilemma Adventures will give you a load of instant resources for a lengthy campaign, either structured around the implied world of the Trilemma setting, or reskinned (100% easy to do) into whatever fantasy realm you want powered by the BRP engine.
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