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EABA v2 is the next edition of our universal rpg system, designed from the ground up for use with tablets or other computers.
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Aliens, politics, exploration, intrigue, ancient secrets, chaos and war? Yes. Read the Full Story
Sometimes you can't go home. Purgatory Bay is an experimental rpg outside the normal EABA mold.
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Men of steel in the age of steam. Not your grandfather's steampunk.
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| Blacksburg Tactical Research Center is a little game company nestled in the Appalachian foothills, slowly and tediously handcrafting the finest role-playing games and supplements for a small audience of die-hard fans, and for new converts acquired through word-of- mouth advertising. We do it because we love the work. Though managing to get some non-game fiction published would be nice too... |
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I've been asked why so many BTRC settings are dark or apocalyptic. Well, it is mostly because they are more interesting. No one wants to play Papers & Paychecks, role-playing the hazards of picking up the kids at soccer practice. PC's are almost by their nature, outside the bounds of polite society. They are the instigators, troublemakers, troubleshooters (sometimes both), and monster slayers who almost always have insane amounts of violence as a tool in their bag of tricks. These kind of folks don't sit well with peace, stability and revenue-collecting authority structures like governments. So, making a setting free of this top-level authority, reducing its reach or power, or setting the PC's apart somehow is the way to give them that freedom of action. James Bond may live and work in a polite society, but he deals with threats behind the scenes and has a literal license to kill. Players in Call of Cthulhu deal with threats from beyond time and space, and if a shoggoth or two suffers an unfortunate fate, no one will be filing a missing person report with the police. I just tend to take this to the scale of the entire gameworld. Everything is screwed up somehow, so the problems and restrictions faced by players tend to local more than system. Conversely, I tend to make settings where this freedom of action is countered by internal restrictions. In Code:Black, PC's have all sorts of gadgets and powers at their disposal, but the excessive use of them can turn one towards evil. The Victorian universe of Verne is pretty damned grimy from a moral standpoint, even for the supposed good guys. The players have to rise above the baser biases, hypocrisies and bigotry of the day to be better than their foes, rather than merely differently despicable. Dark Millennium looks at things from the standpoint of faith, and what harsh and pragmatic actions can one take in service of the greater good without losing one's spiritual way. WarpWorld is a post-apocalyptic setting where deities are real and one can advantageously align with them, but is this faith, or a devil's bargain?
Call it a personal style. I like settings that give you the freedom to act, but also force you to make difficult moral choices, as a character and to some extent as the player. Can you have a character do things that are necessary, even if unpleasant? Can you stand for what you know is right, even at great cost? To me, this makes things more interesting than merely having big monsters that require big spells or big guns to take out. Not that I don't appreciate a good scenery-chewing climax to a plot, but how you get there is also important.
EABA is our foray into open source, or in this case, open supplement gaming. We sell the game and some supplements, you do whatever the hell you want with it. Okay, there are plenty of free, public domain role-playing games out there. Why should you pay for EABA?
Because it's not just an open supplement system, it's the best damn role-playing system you're going to find, and it's an open supplement system. I originally planned on putting a long philosophical rant about here. But, that would be a disservice to a lot of people I respect in this industry, competitors/friends whose products I have played and playtested for well over a decade. If you're reading this, you're already looking for a new system, one that started from scratch, that tries and hopefully does everything you want in a role-playing system. In an era of $50 hardbacks, we wanted a game that you could afford without busting your budget. EABA is that game.
There are free rpg's and there are open source rpg's. And then there is EABA. EABA is the result of a lot of thought, hard work and grueling playtesting. We wanted to make a system that was realistic, heroic, fast, flexible and all the other buzzwords you've come to expect. It's got plenty of original ideas, but we're also not afraid to borrow from some of the best games that have gone before. We wanted a system for the 21st century, one that could be entirely Internet-based and computer-friendly. The price? Less than half what a similar game would cost on store shelves. Pocket the difference, or use it to buy a couple EABA supplements...
EABA is fully hyperlinked, color-coded, indexed and organized into 150 pages of role-playing goodness. And if you don't have access to color printer or won't be reading it from a computer screen, we've also included a grayscale version optimized for laser printers. You can grab the free thumbnail version of EABA from here. EABA is also an open license system. You can publish anything you want for it within the limits of the EABA Open Supplement License, the latest version of which is right here.
Mechanics-wise, EABA is an open-ended d6 system. There is no limit to the number of dice you can theoretically roll (though you're unlikely to ever need more than 8d6). But, you only get to keep the best three results, which puts an upper limit on the total you can roll.
Even super-powered adventurers can find tasks beyond their reach.
Adventurers are built on points, with separate points for skills and the six attributes of Strength, Agility, Health, Awareness, Will and Fate. Fate is used for paranormal powers, for luck, or as an attribute that can be customized for a particular gameworld, to represent genre-specific attributes like honor, sanity and so on. A detailed powers section lets you create individual or global power frameworks, from traditional magic, to psionics, superpowers, gadget-meisters or anything else you can imagine.
In terms of scale, EABA covers everything from normal people up to superheroes of significant power. A level of 6 is about average for Strength, which is a lifting capacity of 50 kilograms and does a kicking damage of 2d6 (1d6 per 3 points of Strength). Each 3 points doubles the effect of an attribute, so a Strength of 21 would be able to lift 1600 kilograms and do a kicking damage of 7d6.
EABA is heroic in scale, but still realistic. Easy to learn, advanced enough for the most experienced gamemaster. We promise a lot, and we think EABA delivers on those promises. Want a second opinion? Try one (or all) of the known reviews of EABA products from the review links on the main BTRC page. Give it a try.
EABA v1.1 (US$13.00)
As a test of the iPad as an rpg platform, a version of EABA and the Ythrek gameworld have been created expressely for the iPad. The content is the same, but with reduced outside margins to make the text larger and with an added navigation bar at the bottom of each page. If you have already purchased EABA from RPGnow and can give us enough information to verify the purchase, you can get the iPad version of either product at a greatly reduced rate. Email us if this applies to you and you are interested.
EABA v1.1 (iPad optimized)(US$8.00)