I expected Chaosium to forget about Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine after releasing it under the ORC-license, leaving its future entirely in the community’s hands. Fortunately, I was wrong. While there isn’t a deluge of new products for the system, since its release BRP got a Gamemaster Pack, a Quickstart, and now the titular Creatures book. The website says Age of Vikings belongs under the BRP line too, but that’s bullshit, that game should have been called RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Iceland. But I digress.

BRP: Creatures is a 168 pages long full colour hardcover book. It follows the BRP:UGE rulebook’s style and production values in every possible way. The cover art depicts a Vitruvian Monster, the book uses the same thick matte paper, there is a ribbon bookmark included, and the interior looks similar too, albeit with breezier layout and bigger fonts. The illustrations within are damn good, sometimes even funny, and very consistent within the same chapter. My only gripe is that several illustrations diverge from the descriptions significantly.

BRP: Creatures is a cornucopia of animals, humanoids, monsters, and NPCs for all genres. It contains both those in the BRP:UGE rulebook, and a fuckload of new ones. Most of the newbies aren’t entirely new though, but familiar faces right out of other Chaosium products, like the broos, ducks, and ogres¹ of RuneQuest, or the deep ones of Call of Cthulhu. There was an attempt to include a bunch of D&D-isms too in the book to make migrating D&D players feel warm and cosy, like colour-coded dragons, gnomes that aren’t elementals, and scaly kobolds. Your favourite pop culture creeps like the xenomorph, the Terminator, the Thing, and various flavours of aliens are also here. Several creatures in the fantasy section got multiple heritages, including dragons, giants, elves.² What’s strangely missing is cats. Sure, you get stats for lions, panthers, tigers, but I expected stats for domestic cats in the animal chapter and some feline humanoid in the fantasy or sci-fi chapter.³ But hey, you have to leave something for BRP: Creatures II, right?

Monster stat blocks aren’t all the book has to offer. There are rules for handling animals, harvesting megafauna parts, the good old chaos features, and hit locations for all shapes and sizes. There are also guidelines for creating heritages, kaiju, villains, and balancing creatures for various campaign power levels. The book also neatly sums up the frequently used spot rules in an appendix, so it’s completely playable with the Quickstart rules or the booklet from the Gamemaster Pack. Heck, you can use it with other Chaosium games too. There is a conversion guide for Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon,⁴ and RuneQuest. I would have been even happier if they included some spells for summoning and clear guidelines for using creatures as player characters.⁵ But hey, you have to leave something for BRP: Creatures II, right?

Being a Chaosium book, BRP: Creatures is of course full of typos and mistakes. I frequently noticed that stat rolls and averages don’t match, and had to use either common sense or my familiarity with earlier Chaosium products to figure out which one is right. An updated version of the pdf is coming soon, but that won’t help the book on my shelf… There is also a small inconsistency that annoys me. Monster entries start with a description, followed by attributes, attacks, notes, skills, powers. In some cases monster special abilities are explained in the description, not among the notes or powers. Even weirder, the angel entry has two power blocks, one before the skills, and one after.

BRP: Creatures doesn’t revolutionise monster manuals. It delivers exactly what it promises, with some hiccups. It’s a useful book, one well worth having on your shelf if you are Gamemastering BRP or any of its relatives. BRP: Creatures II when?

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The books are available at the Chaosium website and on DriveThruRPG.

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