Basic Roleplaying Quickstart Rules

Introduction to Chaosium's simple, fast, and elegant skill-based percentage systemthat is the core of most Chaosium roleplaying games, including Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, SuperWorld, and others.

At some point, almost every gamemaster wants to create their own Mythic World. That's what the Basic Roleplaying System (BRP) is all about! It is simple, fast, and elegant, using a skill-based percentile system. Combat is fast and deadly, and with a strong focus on non-combat skills that some game systems are challenged to support. Players roll percentile dice against the Gamemaster-led opponents, or even themselves. 

In this BRP Quick-Start booklet, Chaosium has collected the essential Basic Roleplaying rules for a quick introduction to one of the most influential roleplaying systems in the world.

Basic Roleplaying was designed to be intuitive and easy to play. Most Basic Roleplaying mechanics are simple and logical.

Virtually all rolls determining success or failure of a task are determined via the roll of percentile dice.

• The system is remarkably friendly to newcomers. It is easy to describe the basics of the game system to non-gamers.
• Players of other game systems find Basic Roleplaying to be much less mechanistic and less of a barrier to the actual act of roleplaying.
• Most of the information players need to know is present on their character sheet.
• Characters evolve based on practicing the skills they use the most, and do not arbitrarily gain experience based on ephemeral elements such as levels or experience ranks.
• Combat can be quick and deadly — often the first blow to land is the deciding blow.
• The internal consistency of Basic Roleplaying allows for rules judgements to be made rapidly and with little searching through the rulebook for special cases.

Looking to create your own game based on BRP?

Check out the BRP System Reference Document and start designing!

 48 page PDF plus character sheets
Authors: Jason Durall and Sam Johnson
Cover Art: Paul Carrick
Interior Art: Kevin Ramos, Lisa Free, David Ingersoll
Editorial: Jason Durall

Basic Roleplaying is copyright ©1981-2020 by Chaosium Inc.; all rights reserved.

Basic Roleplaying® is the registered trademark of Chaosium Inc