After going on a d100 campaign binger for half of 2023, I’m fine selling most of these titles and moving on after the honeymoon phase. I cannot get over how RuneQuest or Basic Roleplaying operates with its five-tiered system: Critical, Special Success, Success, Failure, and Fumble, which must be matched against your opponent, who also operates on the same tiers. Or the need for a lookup table to get the math right should any number of modifiers be introduced—Oi.

Call of Cthulhu’s 7th edition abandoned complex modifiers for the popular advantage/disadvantage subsystem floated by 5e Dungeons & Dragons. And one would hope Chaosium was building a unified system here because it felt right in my last partial run on Masks of Narylothotep. Still, it was perplexingly absent in Basic Roleplaying—newly revised—and sorely needed for RuneQuest: Glorantha, which came out three years after Call of Cthulhu 7e. Why the split in design? Why not rally behind a core vision for the d100 and Basic Roleplaying?

My feelings further fermented on Chaosium after reading the pristine ruleset from Dragonbane. This d20 roll-under system borrows many things Chaosium did innovate on—skill advancement being one of them—and nearly every other modern RPG out there. The perfect framework to run RuneQuest on isn’t with Chaosium; it’s at Free League. A fellow gamer even expressed this opinion at a GameHole Con demo. “This feels RuneQuesty, and it even has Ducks!”

Many of Chaosum’s early innovations are still influential across the hobby, but I believe the d100 cannot compete with the mighty d20; the d100 has all these metagame tricks to justify itself (flip the results, count doubles for a critical), where the d20 works. However, here are some rules from Chaosium’s d100 games I love.

Hit Points & Wounds. Dealing damage is felt; a minor wound is just a few hit points, but a bigger wound triggers meaningful table rolls. Critical hits? Ecstasy. I’m excluding hit-location since no game master wants to track that level of information across five bandits.

Passions. Tell the gamemaster precisely what the character is about, and players will actively invoke Passions in play because it’s literally “what my character would do” and isn’t being used to excuse garbage behavior. During gameplay, I loved those real-time player-to-character, character-to-party dilemmas. They always made for impactful character growth.

Experience. Advancement is tied directly to active skill use and training, letting players progress their characters organically in the story.

I look forward to seeing what Chaosium does with the 6th edition of Pendragon, as it runs on a d20 and is Basic Roleplaying–adjacent. Maybe their work here will leak into future Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and BRP editions. Regardless of my opinion on design trends in the tabletop hobby sphere, many of their titles are in the top 30 on RPGgeek and have been for a long time.