Jason Durall

Holy crunchiness Batman! I think when I picked this up I was thinking of Tunnels & Trolls, which I believe is a pretty simple system, which made this extremely shocking. I somehow missed out on this one, back in the day. I played most of the TSR role-playing game a bunch (Marvel, Star Frontiers, Gamma World etc...), and then tested out a couple others once or twice (Villains & Vigilantes, Call of Cthulhu, Rifts etc...)

I was disappointed that this was so much like D&D with 5 of the 6 show more attributes being the same the just changed Wisdom to "Power" and went with it. Then they have "Hit Points". But they use percentile dice for tests. The crunch here is beyond Pathfinder which seems like it puts it into the niche group of people who want to keep track of how many hit points and how much armor each of their body parts has. There are 2 different types of magic, both use points. There's an initiative setup that uses a kind of "Speed Factor" (see D&D 1.0) type mechanic.

The entire book is overly verbose, with stat blocks that sometimes take up half a page or more. I was lost right from the first page of description about the main mechanic which is really bad. Then a page later they split a paragraph from page 3 to continue on page 6, which totally confused me.

The mini adventure wasn't bad and I like the idea of the rune magic, but this is just a system I would never play, and I think as mentioned, it's really only for hardcore, gaming nerds that love rules and record keeping. show less

A good universal system that can be used in many settings. The only thing that I found disappointing was it's personality traits, other then that I was very impressed.

The RPG I am currently running with my group, in which the players take the parts of British civil servants working for a secret department of the Security Services which is tasked with protecting Her Britannic Majesties Domains and Protectorates - and, incidentally the world - from all manner of unspeakable, tentacled monstrosities from beyond space and time. [a:HP Lovecraft|9494|H.P. Lovecraft|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1263313703p2/9494.jpg] called them The Old Gods, others have show more called them the Many-Angled Ones, but they are multitudinous and ever hungry for human souls (or quantum thought patterns, as modern terminology has it), and almost always possessed of some deranged cult that feels summoning them to our world is a good idea. Add to this the aspects of the espionage genre that [a:Charles Stross|8794|Charles Stross|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1218218373p2/8794.jpg] has woven into the novels on which the game is based and the authors make full use of here, and you have a fun game that can be played as any mix of Lovecraft and [a:le Carre|4400777|Le Carre|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg] that you wish.

The characters are not superheroes, or even necessarily heroes, just ordinary people who have been inducted (often forcefully after being involved in an Incident) into the dark secrets that hide behind our modern, wipe-clean world. Magic has always existed, of course, but the utterance of complex grammatical and mathematical summoning structures (or spells and incantations, if you prefer) was always hit and miss until Alan Turing developed both the computer and the algorithms that made the process a little safer. Hence there is a substantial emphasis on IT and CD (Information Technology and Computational Demonology), with gadgets like the specially adapted Apple product (nicknamed the NecronomiPhone) being a must have for any smart Laundry operative.

The system used is the classic BRPS (Basic Role-Playing System, usually pronounced 'burps'), a nice simple metric that leaves most of the emphasis on role playing rather than dice but offers a good solid backbone for the mechanical aspects of the game. It is also a natural fit for this setting; having been developed from the original Call of Cthulhu RPG system the players should feel right at home as their characters' sanity begins to ebb away when they encounter all manner of squamous, cyclopean terrors. show less

Based on Charles Stross's series (collected in On Her Majesty's Occult Service) where C'thulhu meets Len Deighton; where nerds and geeks have to become spies in order to protect the human world. Uses Chaosium's Basic Role Playing and a bit of Call of Cthulhu, but with some (very dark) humor thrown on; the worst opposition may well be your own bureaucracy, more than the eldritch horrors.