The Rivers of London RPG is a complete game. Rivers of London isn’t Call of Cthulhu dark, but it can be dark, and it’s a game where you agree on tone collaboratively before starting an adventure together. In Rivers of London, player characters probably have phones with replaceable batteries and with a quick-release set-up to eject the power cell. Cast a spell, and your smartphone’s battery will explode. Magic is real and like the monsters, not always your friend.
The Rivers of London core rules is decorated generously with pictures of Mr Punch, and you only need to read the first book in the fiction series to know how sinister that is. Monsters are real, some might be your friends, but some most certainly aren’t. In fact, “Influencer” is a thing you can be in the social media sense in Rivers of London, and you could find yourself pitched in a PR battle against an entity with decades of experience manipulating the press. The rivers, among other things, are diety-like spirits with spheres of influence. It’s those cops in beat-up cars with big engines that kick down doors or hit the library books, when appropriate, in a supernatural world. It’s the British class system, and the cops that clash with it, are drawn from it, fight it and navigate it. No wonder this feels like a proper Rivers of London game, not a BRP with Rivers of London stuck on it (not that there was ever a chance of Chaosium doing that). He wants a BRP Rivers of London, and we can see how rich the game is with Ben Aaronovitch. Ben has views, and this isn’t a paper exercise of monetising the franchise. What’s not speculation Ben’s one of us he’s a tabletop gamer. Just how much of “there’s an RPG coming” did Aaronovitch know and react to while writing False Value? I learned that he specifically wanted Chaosium’s BRP, the Basic Roleplaying System, the stuff of Call of Cthulhu, for Rivers of London.
I got to interview Ben over Zoom on a lockdown Friday night. Those recruits are our Player Characters. Until that point, the book’s police characters, DCI Thomas Nightingale and PC Peter Grant, start the groundwork for recruiting members of the Special Assessment Unit. The timeline is important and makes sense. The news that Rivers of London was getting an RPG broke in 2019. In particular, Rivers of London is set after False Value, the 8th book in the series, published in 2020. I doubt I’m alone, and there’s a small risk. I want it to feel like my Rivers of London, but I don’t want it to ruin the series for me. As a result, I’ve a particular interest in Chaosium’s new Rivers of London tabletop RPG.
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