Open Source Roleplaying, and Success by Amazon

A recent industry report by the creators of Roll20 shows that the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game is a legitimately popular RPG, sitting between Pelgrane Press's 13th Age and Monte Cook's Cypher System in popularity. I've written in positive terms about BFRPG before, and I think it's a solid old school system. I still love its declaration of "This is OLD SCHOOL" even if I'd prefer a layout with a bit more pizazz. But BFRPG is smart in ways that other RPGs haven't thought about.

If you read the Project News page on the Basic Fantasy site, you will see that the game is constantly undergoing a process of being honed, re-proofed, corrected, and occasionally updated in very minor ways. It reads like a log of updates to a piece of software, right down to the release numbers and the idea of "release candidates" for print versions.

Basic Fantasy is, to my knowledge, the only RPG out there that is actually serious about the idea of being an open source RPG. You can literally download the Open Office document files that the rulebook PDFs (and the printed versions) are derived from, work on them, and if you want - make them your own. Swords & Wizardry has a single RTF document, but it's not the actual source of the layout for the print versions. Of course, this constrains the layout (see above), but it's a radically open concept in gaming.

The community recently leveraged this to create a Field Guide, a bestiary full of creatures both new and old. If you look at the amount of material between new classes, races, and additional/alternate rules, it's clear that there is a possibility for BFRPG to release a fairly thorough "Advanced" or "Companion" type of product with the ability to branch far beyond its four races and four classes. And since the rules are all modular, you can plug any of them into a game. And it doesn't even have to be BFRPG; it could just as well be Moldvay or Labyrinth Lord or LotFP.

But I don't think the open source approach is the only reason for Basic Fantasy's spread on Roll20, which I suspect may reflect broader support than many people realize. Because Basic Fantasy RPG is able to spread through Amazon. When I pull up FATE Accelerated, I see this on the third page of the related items scroller:

The Basic Fantasy rulebook pops up all over the RPG recommendations on the Internet's largest store, and it's a complete RPG for only five bucks. It has 83 reviews and 73 of those give it five stars. When you look at it you also see a book of monsters and four adventure books, each of them under $4. BFRPG, the Field Guide, Adventure Anthology 1, BF1 Morgansfort, BF2 Fortress Tower and Tomb, and JN1 The Chaotic Caves combined cost only $23.96, and easily provide a weekly group with a year's worth of adventure. At $5, extra copies of the rulebook for the table are not an expensive luxury; each player could have the rulebook, even though they don't really need it.

I suspect that BFRPG has been quietly spreading old school gaming ideas through its placement on Amazon. And that's all to the good. Not everything in the OSR is loud and shiny and front and center; a lot of people are just playing straighforward RPGs that make a good time for them and their friends. Which is kind of humbling from the perspective of those of us toward the center of OSR circles.

Basic Fantasy has been continuously revised and updated, even if only incrementally, for almost a decade. It's a quality open source product and its community is doing as much as any publisher out there to build old school roleplaying. It is what it says on the box: a meat and potatoes old school experience. And it deserves more acclaim than I think it gets.

First Impressions: Iron Falcon

I've supported Chris Gonnerman's Basic Fantasy RPG for years because it's free, because it has a strong community ethos, and because it was a major trailblazer for the OSR. But I've never switched to it completely, because it was just that little bit different from how I wanted things. It was B/X but not as much as Labyrinth Lord, and not OD&D enough. Now, Chris has released the very early version of a new clone, Iron Falcon. It's an OD&D clone, but a clone of OD&D plus Greyhawk, for the most part.

From the draft thus far, it's really close to how OD&D ought to be, with Greyhawk included. A few anomalies – like percentile Strength and weapon versus AC – that I'm not fond of go away in this revision; I can't say that I mind. All the things that Gonnerman had done away with in BFRPG, like descending AC and alignment, are all there in the core section. The spells that are there work like in OD&D, such as Charm Person, which lacks Greyhawk's convoluted saving throw scheme (also familiar for AD&D players).

Where Delving Deeper is a clone which is obsessed with getting into the gritty details of the original OD&D booklets, and where Swords & Wizardry is a nice, light game that is more in the "ballpark" of OD&D, Iron Falcon is looking to be a tight, feature-complete clone of OD&D as it was played in the early days. As Chris says on the BFRPG forum thread:

Greyhawk is the first published book that shows the game in a recognizable form; it's how Gary's own game worked, as much as he was able to publish it. I recall having heard that the game was undergoing heavy development, changing all the time, so Greyhawk can be little more than a snapshot... but it's the only snapshot we have.

From what I've seen, and from what Chris has put forward thus far, it's an extremely worthy effort to put together rules that would have been recognizable in 1975 as the D&D rules. If it continues on these lines, I could seriously see switching to Iron Falcon as my go-to rule set for OD&D type games. It has everything I would want from a clone. (Well, everything except robots. But that can be fixed.)

The Other Free Basic Rules

A lot of people are going to get a set of free basic rules today. I want to encourage people to check out Basic Fantasy RPG, which is a totally open-source project and is completely, 100% free. BFRPG has been free since 2006, and is a clone of B/X without race-as-class.

There are a lot of clones that have come after BFRPG, including the more B/X-like Labyrinth Lord, but I've always liked BF's straightforward split of race from class. It does a good job with the straightforward nature of ascending AC, and breaks up characters into narrower bands for gaining to-hit bonuses, which makes everyone slightly better at fighting. But it doesn't get into the comically high armor classes of 3.x. And if it gets rid of 1 XP per gold piece of treasure as a rule, it's listed as an optional rule and is easy to restore.

What was important about Basic Fantasy when it first appeared in 2006 was simple: here was a game that declared, with capital letters, "This is OLD SCHOOL." That was awesome. It was a shot across the bow: this was saying that the old school play that had been dismissed in favor of the new "latest and greatest" was a valid way to play the game. And in 2006 it was considered more or less acceptable to dismiss and ridicule the way that people had played D&D in the '70s and '80s as being primitive and/or foolish.

Basic Fantasy has had great community support, and J.D. Neal's modules are excellent takes on the standards created by B2 and X1. There are supplements to add whatever you like to BFRPG, and plenty of free resources from the community. The second bold move on the BFRPG cover was to put a disclaimer: "Don't Buy This Book!" By making BF totally free, Chris Gonnerman created an atmosphere where the game's fans have given generously and openly. I think that's an awesome thing for him to have done.

A third thing was accomplished by BFRPG that isn't usually recognized: it was the most compact single-volume version of the game when it came out. Basic Fantasy is only 154 pages when you include the index and Open Game License. That's quite an accomplishment. Labyrinth Lord is about 19 pages shorter, but that's still no mean feat. Both are also in more readable fonts than the Basic and Expert rulebooks, hence the longer page counts.

If you wanted to run a basic game tomorrow, Basic Fantasy has all the tools you could want. If you already know the rules, it's also worth checking out the adventures and supplemental material. I particularly like The Chaotic Caves, a B2-style module that would be fun for people who've played the original Keep too often and know all its secrets.