This review will also include a few comments on Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, as it uses the same system.
The Good
The rules themselves are simple and straightforward, with mechanics that are pretty intuitive. It uses a basic d% roll not unlike the GURPS 3d6 vs target, D20’s d20 vs DC, or Planet Mercenary’s 3d63 vs. target. Most rolls don’t require endless tables to see what happened, and you know pretty simply whether or not you’ve succeeded or failed without having to consult tea leaves.
Character design doesn’t use classes and levels, which is huge. Like other good systems, you’re actually designing a character rather than just a combat stat block. You roll stats and do some math (more on this later), pick a career, assign skill points, add a few more things, and you have a character.
Scenario design is approached from a very “story first” philosophy. In BRP you’re there to tell a story, not just rack up piles of bodies and bags of loot. The “Designing Adventures” section in the BRP rulebook even comes right out and says in as many words that they use a Hollywood movie screenplay structure, followed by “If this outline sounds familiar, it should. It’s Star Wars, Harry Potter, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, The Terminator, and about a hundred or even a thousand other movies you’ve seen or books you’ve read.” That said, they also advise the GM not to rely too heavily on the story structure if it won’t work.
There’s a lot of good advice on setting up campaigns of various types from single-shot adventures to finite to ongoing, and how to base the adventures, arcs, etc. The advice in the adventure design section is well worth the purchase price, especially if you’re used to the generic “here’s a cave full of goblins. Kill them and steal their stuff” model so many games these days push.
An entire chapter is dedicated to different generic settings for gaming, including 20 specific genres and advice for not only setting them up, but modifying and combining them. They cover a pretty nice variety from cavemen to space opera, with a variety of setting assumptions and realism levels. It also includes a nice section on worldbuilding and a lot of what you’ll need to make your world come to life.
Its money system is very abstract. While this takes a lot of the economics out of the game, it also takes a lot of the economics out of the game. There isn’t a system for determining down to the dollar how much X will cost, so you lose that if that’s what you’re into. However, you won’t spend time micromanaging purchases, and that’s a good thing.
BRP and Cthulhu aren’t patterned as Quest For Stuff. Equipment is there for a purpose, and in keeping with the story first mentality in the scenario design section, exists largely as a storytelling device. For example, in an Old West game you don’t have fifteen different revolvers, you have three: light, medium, and heavy. Want a light-caliber snubnose? Light. Wand a big ol’ hogleg like a Colt Peacemaker? Heavy. Something in the middle? Medium.
And then there’s the famous SAN check… Sanity is a core (if optional) feature of BRP, most famous for its inclusion in Call of Cthulhu. If you’re including it in a setting, your characters are in very real danger of going completely insane and watching your SAN score slowly get chipped away can be far worse than mere physical damage.
A nice selection of creatures is included in the BRP core book, and there are plenty more in Call of Cthulhu. The BRP creatures give a nice starting selection for GMS, with plenty of workable advice on creating more.
I love the Cthulhu Mythos as literature and a game background. In-house we consider the Alliance a Mythos world because of certain themes and a joke about what will happen to any group who ever decides to go back to Earth. The Call of Cthulhu RPG in its various forms has been a solid source for the Mythos in gaming since I was a kid.
On a purely aesthetic level, the Call of Cthulhu books are gorgeous. Nice, well-made hardcovers with good-quality paper and integral ribbon bookmarks. And the internal artwork is beautiful. Full-page paintings for every chapter, well-done pictures where relevant, and they all fit with the ‘20s theme. These are easily some of the best-looking books in my collection, and I’ve been collecting RPGs and wargames for over 40 years now. Other game companies should take note of this. You make a product this good, and I’ll happily pay $100 to put a couple of your books in my collection just to look at.
The Bad
I have only one real issue with BRP:
Character generation is not great. Random attributes (with optional point-buy for them), and a lot of math to generate your skill category bonuses from said attributes. Rolling a new character can take a while and has to be done a certain way. It isn’t as flexible as a more developed point-buy system, but it comes close.
My other, lesser, issue is that it doesn’t have the breadth of source material as some other systems, so you’ll end up doing a lot of work as a GM to fill out your settings. That said, conversions exist between BRP and two very well-supported systems. GURPS Cthulhupunk has some pretty straightforward conversion rules, so if you wanted to you could use GURPS sourcebooks and convert them over. With D20 Call of Cthulhu being a thing, you could probably convert a lot of D20 source material as well.
As criticisms go, the ones I have for BRP are pretty low-key and come down to personal preference more than anything else. Your mileage may vary.
The Ugly
I wouldn’t describe anything in BRP as ‘ugly.” There are parts I would change, but nothing absolutely awful. All my objections above come down to personal preference rather than being anything I would consider a systemic problem.
Final Verdict
I can see why this system has dedicated fans. In play it seems solid and intuitive enough, and the rules are flexible enough to support a wide variety of campaigns and worlds. The adventure, campaign, and world design sections alone are worth the price.
If I had gotten into it when I wanted to, back when it was basically Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, I’d likely still be playing it today. As it stands, I’ve been playing a different universal system long enough, and have a large enough collection of source material, that it’s a lot easier to stick with what I know and can run intuitively.