# Basic Role-Playing tags: #game/rpg/basic-role-playing The **Basic Role-Playing** system — BRP to its friends, and its friends are legion — is Chaosium's universal percentile engine, the unglamorous chassis underneath most of the publisher's best-known games. If you've ever played **[[Call of Cthulhu]]**, you've played BRP; you just didn't get the memo. It's the hobby's quiet workhorse: sturdy, unflashy, and so widely reused that it functions less as a single game and more as a meta-container for a whole family of them. ## The System BRP descends from Steve Perrin's **RuneQuest** (1978), the first role-playing game to hang a full skill list on characters regardless of class or profession. Chaosium simplified it down into a sixteen-page booklet, *Basic Role-Playing*, released in 1980 inside the second-edition *RuneQuest* boxed set. It was genre-agnostic from the jump: rather than commit to one setting, BRP shipped a modular core that you bolt genre rules onto. The 1982 *Worlds of Wonder* boxed set made the point explicitly — a core booklet plus separate booklets for different genres, spinning off *Superworld* and its cousins. That modularity is exactly what makes it a meta-container: Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and a small constellation of licensed settings all run on the same engine underneath. ## Mechanics The engine is the d100 percentile roll-under check. Seven characteristics — Size, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Power, and Appearance or Charisma — feed derived skills expressed as percentages. To attempt something, you roll percentile dice and hope to land equal to or below your skill score. No exploding dice, no dice pools, no narrative currency; just a clean "did you clear the number," with an experience check to nudge the skill upward later. Each edition reshuffles the edges — Call of Cthulhu caps skills at 100%, Stormbringer lets them climb past it — but the engine stays instantly recognizable underneath. BRP was also the first system to treat player characters and monsters under the same rules, which makes it egalitarian in the way assembly lines are. ## Games built on BRP - **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** — the flagship, and the reason most players meet the engine at all. - **RuneQuest** — where the engine was born; still the fantasy standard for players who like their checks gritty. - **Stormbringer / Elric!** — swords and sorcery on a hundred-point clock. - Licensed one-offs: **Ringworld**, **Hawkmoon**, **Nephilim**, and FGU's **Other Suns**, one of the early third-party licensees. - Derived branches like **Mythras** and Sweden's **Drakar och Demoner** keep the lineage alive well beyond Chaosium's own catalog. ## Editions - **1980** — the original sixteen-page *Basic Role-Playing* booklet (with RuneQuest 2nd edition). - **1982** — revised booklet in the *Worlds of Wonder* boxed set. - **2002** — *Basic Roleplaying: The Chaosium System* (third edition). - **2004** — the *Basic Roleplaying* monograph series. - **2008** — the "Big Gold Book," *Basic Roleplaying: The Chaosium System*, a build-your-own-game compendium. - **2011** — second edition of the Big Gold Book. - **2020** — the BRP System Reference Document, opened under an OGL. - **2023** — *Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine*, released under the ORC license, which has since spawned an open market of standalone BRP material. ## References - [Basic Roleplaying — Chaosium](https://www.chaosium.com/basic-roleplaying/) - [Basic Role-Playing — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Role-Playing) - [Basic Roleplaying Central](https://basicroleplaying.com/)