Blacksburg Tactical Research Center

Blacksburg Tactical Research Center (BTRC) is an American game publishing company best known for the TimeLords, Macho Women with Guns, and EABA role-playing games. They have produced a variety of role-playing games, card games, and board games. Since 2003, they have published exclusively in PDF format.

History[]

Blacksburg was started by Greg Porter in 1985, in Blacksburg, Virginia. Greg had decided early on that he did not want the company to take on large amounts of debt to release or promote products, so their first games saw very limited releases.^[1] Its first product was a board game, Concrete Jungle, a modern tactical game of small-unit military and police actions. TimeLords was its first role-playing game product, released in 1987. It did not initially sell well, but maintained a cult following that allowed a second edition to be published in 1990, followed by a number of supplements. The 1988 release of Macho Women with Guns saw unexpected success and several printings, and allowed the company to continue and expand its line of role-playing game products.

The company then focused on generic role playing game systems, first with CORPS, and followed by their flagship system EABA in 2003. With the creation of EABA, they moved to release games exclusively in PDF format, either through online download or print on demand. This allowed Blacksburg to produce more games and continually update them without reprinting new versions every time, but also limited their reach into gaming stores and slowed sales. The move to PDF only also allows the games to use many of the built in features of the PDF format across any platform, such as automated dice rolling, live links, and mapping. BTRC's work has been called "the bleeding edge of PDF game development",^[2]

Published games[]

Role Playing Games[]

• TimeLords, 1987
• SpaceTime, 1988
• Macho Women with Guns, 1988
• CORPS, 1990
• WarpWorld, 1991
• Epiphany: The Legends of Hyperborea, 1996. Experimental diceless open sourced system and setting.^[3]
• EABA, generic role playing system, 2003
• Hollyworld, 2005
• Purgatory Bay, 2011
• EABA v2, 2012
• Epiphany 2e, 2021. Reworking of the original Epiphany system, no longer diceless.^[4]

Game Supplements[]

• Guns! Guns! Guns!, 1991. Firearms design rules for any role-playing game.
• Stuff! 2006. EABA based item design tool for any role-playing game. Nominated for the 2006 Ennie award,^[5]

Board Games[]

• Concrete Jungle, 1985 ^[6]
• The Con Game, 1989 ^[7]
• Black Death, 1993 ^[8]
• Slag, 1995 ^[9]
• End of Days, 2008 ^[10]
• Soft Landing, 2009^[11]
• Hunted, 2017

Card Games[]

• F*CK This!, rude and crude card game, 2004 ^[12]
• Dumbass!, less rude card game, 2006 ^[13]
• Infinite Armies, 2005, winner of 2006 Origins Vanguard award
• Footsteps of the Prophet, 2008 ^[14]
• Alien Zombie Tentacle Apocalypse, 2010
• Donner Party, 2016 ^[15]
• Killing Lee Garvin, 2019 ^[16]

Experimental Games[]

• Posturing and Pretentions, 2002. Satirical role playing game
• EBON, 2006. A complete role-playing game that fits on a single sheet of paper.^[17]
• Tag!, 2020. Intended for game conventions, each player's convention nametag is their game piece.^[18]

References[]

• Gamewyrd: Interview with Greg Porter, retrieved November 27, 2006
• e23: Publisher Information: BTRC, retrieved November 27, 2006
• Blacksburg Tactical Research Center web site