History
The core rules were originally written by Steve Perrin as part of his game RuneQuest. It was Greg Stafford's idea to simplify the rules (eliminating such things as Strike Ranks and Hit Locations) and issue them in a 16 page booklet called Basic Role Playing. Over the years several others, including Sandy Petersen, Lynn Willis, and Steve Henderson, contributed to their final form.
The BRP was notable for being the first role-playing game system to introduce a full skill system to characters regardless of their profession. This was developed in RuneQuest but was also later adopted by the more skill-oriented Call of Cthulhu and the dark fantasy saga of Elric in Stormbringer.
BRP was conceived of as a genre-generic engine around which any sort of RPG could be played, much like GURPS and the d20 system have become today. In order to underscore this, Chaosium produced the Worlds of Wonder supplement, which contained the generic rules and several specific applications of those rules to given genres. Superworld, specifically, began as a portion of the Worlds of Wonder product.
The fantasy game supplement Thieves World, based on the popular series of books by Robert Lynn Asprin, used both the system for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as well as the RuneQuest variation of the BRP for character statistics, representing the two most popular game systems of the time.
Read more about this topic: Basic Role-Playing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)