Basic Role-Playing (BRP) is a tabletop role-playing game which originated in the RuneQuest fantasy role-playing game. Chaosium released the BRP standalone booklet in 1980 in the boxed set release of the second edition of RuneQuest. Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis are credited as the authors. Chaosium used the percentile skill-based system as the basis for most of their games, including Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and Elfquest.
Donald Carl Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering, with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb, the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.
The Golden Raspberry Awards is a parody award show honoring the worst of cinematic under-achievements. Co-founded by UCLA film graduates and film industry veterans John J. B. Wilson and Mo Murphy, the Razzie Awards' satirical annual ceremony has preceded its opposite, the Academy Awards, for four decades. The term raspberry is used in its irreverent sense, as in "blowing a raspberry". The statuette itself is a golf ball-sized raspberry atop a mangled Super 8mm film reel spray-painted gold, with an estimated street value of $4.97. The Golden Raspberry Foundation have claimed that the award "encourages well-known filmmakers and top notch performers to own their bad."
The Heisman Memorial Trophy is awarded annually to the most outstanding player in college football. Winners epitomize great ability combined with diligence, perseverance, and hard work. It is presented by the Heisman Trophy Trust in early December before the postseason bowl games.
Nino Pio Ricci is a Canadian novelist who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He was born in Leamington, Ontario to Italian immigrants, Virginio and Amelia Ricci, from the province of Isernia, Molise.
The Ballon d'Or is an annual football award presented by French news magazine France Football that is one of the oldest and generally regarded as the most prestigious individual award for football players. It has been awarded since 1956, although between 2010 and 2015, an agreement was made with FIFA, and the award was temporarily merged with the FIFA World Player of the Year and known as the FIFA Ballon d'Or. However, the partnership ended in 2016, and the award reverted to the Ballon d'Or, while FIFA also reverted to its own separate annual award The Best FIFA Men's Player. The recipients of the joint FIFA Ballon d'Or are considered as winners by both award organisations.
Alderac Entertainment Group, or AEG, is a publisher of role-playing game, board game, and collectible card game products. AEG was formed by Jolly Blackburn in 1993 and is based in the city of Ontario, California. Prior to getting into their current markets, AEG was involved in hobby gaming magazines, with their first product the magazine Shadis.
Flying Buffalo Inc. (FBI) is a game company with a line of role playing games, card games, and other gaming materials. The company's founder, Rick Loomis, began game publishing with Nuclear Destruction, a play-by-mail game which started the professional PBM industry in the United States. Loomis added games and players while introducing computer moderation, and soon incorporated into the company Flying Buffalo Inc. The company published games in other genres, including card games such as Nuclear War and a role playing game called Tunnels & Trolls, a game similar to Dungeons & Dragons. Flying Buffalo acquired its 10,000th customer account number in 1980 and reached its largest size of 21 employees in 1983.
Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) was a wargame and role-playing game publisher from 1973 to 1996. Many of their games are now carried by other publishers.
The BBWAA Career Excellence Award, formerly the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, is the highest award given by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). It is given "for meritorious contributions to baseball writing" and voted on annually by the BBWAA. Winners are typically announced in December, with the award presented during induction festivities of the Baseball Hall of Fame in July. Winners are not considered to be members of the Hall; they are not "inducted" or "enshrined", but are permanently recognized in an exhibit at the Hall's library.
The State of Origin series is an annual best-of-three rugby league series between two Australian state representative sides, the New South Wales Blues and the Queensland Maroons.
Frank Chadwick is an American multiple-award-winning game designer and New York Times best selling author. He has designed hundreds of games, his most notable being the role-playing games En Garde!, Space: 1889 and Twilight 2000, and the wargame series Europa and The Third World War, as well as creating Traveller with Marc Miller.
James Daniel Lowder is an American author and editor, working regularly within the fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror genres, and on tabletop role-playing games and critical works exploring popular culture.
The Nandi Awards are the awards that recognise the excellence in Telugu cinema, Telugu theatre and Telugu television, and Lifetime achievements in Indian cinema. Presented annually by the Government of Andhra Pradesh, the award is named after the big granite bull at Lepakshi — a cultural and historical symbol of the Telugu people.
Miss World 1981, the 31st edition of the Miss World pageant, was held on 12 November 1981 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, UK. The winner was Pilín León from Venezuela, the first titleholder from her country since 1955. She was crowned by Miss World 1980, Kimberley Santos of Guam. Another Venezuelan, Irene Sáez, had been crowned Miss Universe 1981 in July, making Venezuela one of the few countries to hold both major international titles in the same year. The Continental Queens of Beauty were awarded for the first time.
Christopher "Choppy" Close is an Australian former professional rugby league footballer who played in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. A robust three-quarter back, he represented Australia internationally and Queensland in State of Origin, and played club football in Queensland and New South Wales. Close has the distinction of being one of a handful of players to be named man-of-the-match in State of Origin more than once. In fact the first two State of Origin man-of-the-match awards went to him.
Mitch Brennan is a retired Australian rugby league footballer and former coach. A Queensland State of Origin representative three-quarter, he played club football during the 1970s, and 1980s in Queensland for Souths and Redcliffe and in New South Wales for South Sydney, Canberra and St. George, with whom he won the 1979 premiership. After playing he became coach of Wakefield Trinity from 1996 to 1997.
Tom Foreman is an American broadcast journalist for CNN whose reporting experience spans more than three decades. Beginning as a local television reporter in Montgomery, Alabama, at WSFA, he continued on to work for WWL-TV, the CBS affiliate in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1990, Foreman relocated to Denver, Colorado, as a national network correspondent for ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and Nightline. In 2000, Foreman signed with National Geographic and anchored National Geographic Today, a daily news story focusing on major scientific and breaking nature news, and Inside Base Camp, for which he won an Emmy award as best interviewer. He joined CNN in 2004, and currently works out of CNN's Washington DC Bureau covering a wide range topics from breaking political news to international crises. His career has taken him to all 50 states and through more than 20 countries for coverage of earthquakes, civil wars, economic upheavals and social unrest.
The Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor is an award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given in honor of an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance in a supporting role while working within the film industry. The award is traditionally presented by the previous year's Best Supporting Actress winner.
The following are the winners of the 7th annual (1980) Origins Award, presented at Origins 1981: