History of Brazilian RPG’s

Every time I read or watch something about the Brazilian scene of RPG, I feel forced to write down a huge comment with lots of corrections and addendums about the history of Brazilian RPG’s. So fuck it, I’m writing an article about that.
The 90’s
RPG’s have been in Brazil since the 80’s, but only in the format of imported books, with the first books in Portuguese coming out in 1991. In that year both the Fighting Fantasy series and GURPS were translated into Portuguese, and Tagmar had been published, being the first original game from Brazil. Tagmar was a fantasy game inspired by the Lord of the Rings and enjoyed a good run with a line of steady supplements until GSA Publishing went bankrupt in 1997.
In 1992 came O Desafio dos Bandeirantes (The Challenge of the Bandeirantes¹), also from GSA Publishing, which was a historic fantasy setting that took place in a fantasy version of colonial Brazil, circa 1650 , with pajés², Jesuits, babalorixás³ and bandeirantes. Just as Tagmar it also gets a good run of supplements until the end of GSA in 1997.
In 1994 Vampire: The Masquerade was published in Brazil and became a HUGE success, bringing tens of thousands of new players and starting a “boom” of RPG publishing in the country. At the same year Paranoia had also been published and welcomed here and in 1995 five new Brazilians games came into life: DEMOS Corporation, Monstros, Millenia, Defensores de Tóquio and Arkanun.
DEMOS Corporation was an espionage game famous for being extremely complicated. Legend says that its authors were engineers and enjoyed mathematic very much, so parts of the game system were explained in mathematic formulas (!) and its intent was to have been played with a scientific calculator pre-loaded with them!
Monstros (“Monsters”) was a satirical game, where the players took the role of monsters that fight adventurers and capture princesses, set in a generic fantasy world. Millenia was a sci-fi game, set a thousand years into the future, with humanity just getting back on its feet after a Dark Age when we are slaves to an alien race. All these three were ill fated and only got their core books, but that was different with Defensores de Tóquio and Arkanun.
Defensores de Tóquio (“Defenders of Tokyo”) was another satirical game, this time making fun of animes, which started to make success in Brazil during the 90’s. The game was a huge success with tens of thousands of copies sold and ended up becoming a generic system for anime-inspired settings. It is still in publication, now in its 8^th edition, called 3D&T Alpha.
Arkanun was a historical terror/fantasy game set in the middle ages, with players taking the role of humans fighting against “demons” that try to invade our reality to escape their own doomed dimension. It was a success and got dozens of supplements and other games based on it, like Trevas (“Darkness”), which is set in the modern times of the setting showed at Arkanun. It lose steam in the end of the 00’s, but recently a new company has bought its license and has promised a new edition of the game (actually, the same day that article came out, the company announced the cancellation of the project).
Following the huge success of Vampire, the biggest publishing companies in Brazil decided that RPG would be a cultural phenomenon and started a huge investment in it to dominate the market. Abril Group, the biggest publishing corporation in the country, took the rights of publication for AD&D. They started the line with First Quest, an introductory AD&D game, in 1995. Ediouro, another big name, comes in with Shadowrun also in 1995. Devir, the publisher responsible for bringing GURPS and Vampire to Brazil, invested in Cyberpunk 2020 in that same year. Abril then released AD&D three core books in 1996.
Legend says they printed over one hundred thousand of each core book of AD&D. The game sold tens of thousands of copies, but not even close to the hundreds of thousands that Abril was expecting. To cut their losses they sold the rights and the huge stockpile of core books to Devir, which followed publishing the line until the 3^rd edition came out. Even today, almost 20 years after the release, those copies of AD&D core books can still be found in every event, still new in the plastic, at dozens or even hundreds.
Ediouro also pulled back from the RPG market and sold their rights and stockpile of Shadowrun books to Devir. They continued to sell the remaining Shadowrun books, but decided to cut investment back in face of financial trouble (they just bought two huge stockpiles of books to sell and their Cyberpunk 2020 had also not done well, after all).
Still in 1996 comes Invasão (“Invasion”) a sci-fi game where the players took the role of government agents and conspiracy geeks fighting a secret invasion of two species of aliens, the metalians and the traktonians, the setting was the same of the Brazilian novel Espada da Galáxia (“Sword of the Galaxy”) and a bunch of comic books series written by Marcelo Cassaro, and were kept running way into the 00’s, with its last edition being released in 2004.
1997 brought two new Brazilian games: Era do Caos e SIGNUS RPG. The first was a cyberpunk-horror setting that showed a Brazil of the future as a failed state with enormous socioeconomic problems which had brought society down to anarchy and chaos. On top of that, supernatural beings from horror stories from Brazilian folklore were real and out to hunt you down. It had gotten three supplements before its publishing house closed doors in the early 00’s. SIGNUS RPG was a generic system and did not make much success, being rapidly forgotten.
In 1998 Devir released Castle Falkenstein and a series of other little minor indie games, like Baron Munchausen, TOON, Mulheres Machonas Armadas Até os Dentes (“Macho Woman Armed to the Teeth”, I guess…). In addition, in 1999 the RPG magazine Dragão Brasil, which was operating since 1994, released Tormenta, a fantasy campaign setting for GURPS, AD&D and 3D&T, as a gift along with the 50^th edition of the magazine. That, along with the following releases of titles for previous games we have already talked about, wrapped up the 90’s. The decade finished with D&D 3^rd edition coming up in 2000, what would define most of the 00’s in Brazil as well as in the rest of the world.
The 00’s
With D&D 3^rd edition and its OGL and d20 System License, many companies in Brazil decided to take a chance and publish d20 related material. That provided a steady line of d20-related titles coming out until 2008 when D&D 4^th edition came out and the d20 System License was cancelled. Tormenta, the forementioned national fantasy campaign setting released the year before, which had rapidly become a huge success in sales, soon got a d20 edition and became the most popular d20 campaign setting in Brazil, outselling the official D&D campaign settings translated by Devir.
Despite the boom of d20-related titles, there still was market for new games, the fist being A Lenda de Kalahad, from 2000. A medieval fantasy setting, the game did not make much success, but manage to survive with the help of the internet until today. Next is Calíope, from 2001, another medieval fantasy game that was unable to get far.
Utopia, from 2003, was able to get a good run as the main system for Mitsukai Publishing campaign settings, until the company disappears after a series of polemic fights in court and outside of it (explaining all that would need an article of its own!).
In 2004 there were two new titles: Angus RPG and OPERA RPG. Angus RPG was the adaptation of the popular historical fiction series of novels Angus, and was famous for being extremely unbalanced and utterly bad. A common joke about the system was about the fact that a simple cow was able to deal more damage than a legendary warrior was, thus a farmer with some cows was more dangerous than a general with an army was, what may explain why the game actually figured a farmer character class! OPERA RPG was a generic system and was used in a lot of campaign settings published throughout the 00’s. It reached a moderate success and still has fans up to this day.
The next year then brought three new games: Nexus D6, RPG Quest and Primeira Aventura. Nexus was an independent game, with little impact on the market, which was sold at an event and then released in the web. RPGQuest was a different deal, rapidly becoming a huge success; it was a mixture of an RPG and a board game meant to bring new blood to the hobby. It only ended because the distribution system used by it used was bought by a corporation whose owners decided to change the rules of distribution, crushing most of the journal stands-based RPG distribution system of the time. Primeira Aventura (“First Adventure”) was an OGL fantasy game made  to be an introductory game for D&D 3^rd edition, but also with the ambition to replace it at some point, which had  a couple of adventures published for it but was abandoned in favor of the Tormenta RPG three years later. By 2007 the game Might Blade was released as a generic fantasy system, very similar to D&D, and continued to receive support to this day.
The 4^th edition of D&D that comes out in 2008 faced mostly disregard in Brazil as news came in about the restricted GSL and very different rules from the 3^rd edition. The companies that invested in the d20 brand either abandoned it or invested in new systems using the OGL, much like Paizo did with its Pathfinder RPG.
So, in 2010, as the decade got to an end, two new titles came out using the OGL Paizo-style: Tormenta RPG and Old Dragon. Tormenta RPG was, obviously, the game of the popular campaign setting launched in 1999 by Dragão Brasil magazine (oh, wait, an OGL game made by former editors and authors of an RPG magazine, where have I seen this before?). It was a huge success and was more popular in Brazil than the 4^th edition, translated by Devir, with a steady line of supplements. Old Dragon was a little different. Though it uses the OGL, it was more of a retro-clone of AD&D than of the 3^rd edition, and going for this feeling of nostalgia they also had a huge success in sells.
New games also came in, as if sensing blood in the water, with Dragon Age RPG being released in 2010 and Mutants & Masterminds in 2008, both by by Jambô Publishing.
The 10’s
While Tormenta RPG and Old Dragon were selling by the thousands, two small revolutions happened that would define this first half of the decade: small print runs and Kickstarter. While in the 90’s and 00’s a small company had to have a minimum of two thousand copies print to reach a good unit cost ratio, by 2011 it was possible to obtain a good one with print runs of even less than one hundred copies. With all the Kickstarter-like websites that opened in the country, it was also possible to know in advance if a game would have good acceptance with the public. That lowered the risk of investment, and companies and independent authors are now are able to test new experimental games and unseen genres. Something just as important as was the game design competitions that began taking roots in this decade, revealing new authors and games that otherwise wouldn’t be known or made otherwise.
The first sons of that change are Busca Final (“Final Quest”) and Violentina, the last one being successfully financed in Kickstarter in 2011. Both are narrative games, the first being about a quest to bring back magic to a fantasy world that lost it, and the second about stories of ultra-violence inspired by the movies of Tarantino. Both had innovative systems and settings, and provided a taste of what was to come. At the same year Terra Devastada (“Wasteland”), a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse, was released and it sells well and is now on a path to become a cardgame.
Not only national games benefit from these changes, but the translated ones as well. Brazilian editions of Trail of Cthulhu, 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, Fiasco and Shotgun Diaries all came out in 2011. Shotgun Diaries was a curious case. The original version published by John Wick was only a PDF of 18 pages only, with a simple design and close to none illustrations. The Brazilian version was sold inside a metal box that came with a 20 page book, next to a hundred tokens used in the game, six dices and a CD with a soundtrack for the game that include zombies sounds, emergency alert system, etc. In 2011 also came out the only third party product for D&D 4^th in Brazil, the Ohmtar campaign setting, which was cancelled in 2013 after the 4^th edition, well, had been announced dead to the world.
By 2012 the explosion of titles continued: Dust Devils was translated, and Abismo Infinito, Space Dragon and O Reino de Bhundamidão were national games released that year. Abismo Infinito (“Infinity Abyss”) is a horror game about astronauts that remain in cryogenic sleep for so long that, once they wake up, they can no longer separate reality from dream and start going crazy. Space Dragon is sci-fi game based on the game system of Old Dragon, the setting is based on the sci-fi books, shows and movies from the 50’s. Finally, O Reino de Bhundamidão (“The Realm of Asstheygiveme”) is a satiric fantasy game with bad puns.
Last year still has brought Game of Thrones RPG, Blood and Honor, The One Ring, Savage Worlds, Monsterhearts and Dungeon World on the translated front and Pulse and UED ? United Earth Defense on the national titles front. Pulse is a game about creation and confirmation of hypothesis, with settings including time travel, futuristic crime investigation and more, and UED ? United Earth Defense is a game set in a post-apocalypse Earth where aliens have invaded and wiped out most of humanity three hundred years ago, and since then the planet had entered an Ice Age. It’s a game about survival and the search for hope in a desperate situation.
And that bring us to this moment, 2014. There is a lot going on right now, but we had better leave that for another time, after the end of this year.
¹ Bandeirante is the member of a Bandeira, an expedition meant to explore the interior of colonial Brazil searching for gold, slaves and/or anything of valor. Despite being little more than groups of raiding slavers, those expeditions are responsible for most of Portuguese inland expansion and were romanced as daring explorers in the late 19^th e early 20^th century when Brazilian national identity was formed.
² A pajé is a spiritual leader and healer of indigenous tribes.
³ A badalorixá is a priest of the Candomblé and other related afro-brazilian religions practiced by the slaves bring from Africa and used in the sugar farms of the 16^th and 17^th century.
Para os brasileiros: se esqueci de algo que os gringos precisam saber, sintam-se livres para comentar aqui e eu atualizo o artigo.
For english speakers: Maybe I don’t have the best english writting skills, but let’s face it, I still write better than like 90% of the people in the USA. So fuck it. ¯\_(?)_/¯
Revision of the english text thanks to Christiano Linzmeier Vepech