Blacksburg Tactical Research Center
| Private | |
| Industry | Role-playing game publisher |
| Founded | Blacksburg, Virginia (1985) |
| Headquarters | Blacksburg, Virginia, USA |
|
Key people
|
Greg Porter |
| Products | EABA, CORPS, Timelords, Macho Women with Guns, Infinite Armies |
Blacksburg Tactical Research Center, Inc., or BTRC is an American game publishing company most famous for publishing the TimeLords and EABA role-playing games.
BTRC was started by Greg Porter in 1985, in Blacksburg, Virginia. Greg had decided early on that he did not want the company to go into debt to release or promote products, so their first games saw very limited releases. Its first product was a board game, Concrete Jungle, a modern tactical game of small-unit military and police actions. TimeLords was its first RPG 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 supplemnets. 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 RPG 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 the BTRC 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",
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