Game RPG EABA:Main Page

The core rulebook of the EABA role-playing game says that the game's unusual name is "pronounced ee-buh", but is silent on the name's origin. However, even if it wasn't printed in the rulebook, game developer Greg Porter made no secret of the etymology: EABA was an acronym for "End All Be All"; this was the ultimate roleplaying system. The page for the latest edition of EABA on the website of Porter's company Blacksburg Tactical Research Center does acknowledge the acronym but calls it "self-mocking", but it's not clear just how seriously it was originally meant; the rulebook doesn't use the phrase "end all be all" but does refer to EABA as "a role-playing game for the new millennium".

Whether EABA is really the end all be all of roleplaying games or a role-playing game for the new millennium is a subjective matter, but it's definitely a game that I think deserves to be better known than it is. EABA combines a flexible point-based system that allows considerable character customization with an elegant "universal chart" that makes it easy to compare effects. It might not be to everyone's taste—there are those who find such character-building systems too fiddly and open-ended and prefer more guidance in character choices—but what it does it does well.

(For what it's worth, when I say "there are those who find such character-building systems too fiddly and open-ended", I do not include myself among those. I personally very much like point-based character-building systems. But I realize they're not everyone's cup of tea.)

And it's under a custom "Open Supplement License", presumably inspired by but distinct from the better known and more widely used Open Game License, that allows anyone to create supplementary material compatible with the EABA rules. Unlike the OGL (or the more recent Open RPG Creative License), the EABA Open Supplement License does not allow straightforward copying of the core rules themselves, nor does it provide a way for those using the license to designate part of their own work as open content that can be used by other licensees. However, anyone wishing to create EABA supplements using Wongery material may do so through a combination of the EABA Open Supplement License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License or, when it is available, the Akinetic Media License.

EABA's roots go back as far as 1990, when Greg Porter created a game called CORPS, the Conspiracy Oriented Roleplaying System. As the name implied, the first edition of CORPS was not a generic RPG system, but had a defined setting, namely an alternate Earth where popular conspiracy theories were true. A second edition of CORPS in 1995 divorced the system from the setting and made it into a truly universal system—no longer the Conspiracy Oriented Roleplaying System, but now the Complete Omniversal Role-Playing System. Porter still saw improvements to be made, however, and in 2003 released a ruleset still with some inspiration from the original CORPS but altered enough to be effectively a new game, and given a new name: EABA. As of 2012, EABA is now on its second edition. (Meanwhile, while the old CORPS rules are no longer officially supported, they're still available from both the BTRC site and DriveThruRPG... and there's also a supplement adapting the original CORPS conspiracy setting to EABA 2.0.)

Unfortunately, EABA 2.0 is not available in print, though you can get inexpensive PDFs either from DriveThruRPG or from the BTRC site directly. EABA 1.1 is available in softback format from DriveThruRPG, but of course that's not the latest version of the rules. I hope EABA 2.0 is made available in print at some point; PDFs are nice for searching for words and for certain other functions, but I definitely prefer to also have print copies of books if possible. The EABA 2.01 PDF is loaded up with all sorts of interactive Javascript features, but as nifty as those are they for me don't make up for the lack of a print version. Oh well.

And of course if you want to give EABA a try before committing any money to it, there's a condensed free version available at the BTRC website.

With the exception of this overview page, all pages in the Wongery EABA Gamespace are released under the Open Supplement License, a copy of which appears at the bottom of each such page. The name EABA itself is a trademark of Blacksburg Tactical Research Center.