The Rolemaster Blog

I am a huge fan of Spell Research for a few reasons. The first is that for NPCs if they start throwing spells that the characters do not recognize it puts a bit of wonder back into the game, especially if you are playing with seasoned old hands.

I also like it for PCs. They tend to research low-level spells because of the time constraints and it gives casters something to do while the fighters are recovering from wounds.

For the player, it is a way of strengthening their character’s concept and individualizing their character. It adds spells to existing lists which makes them more functional for no DP cost.

In some respects, magical guilds are little more than window dressing in many games as lists can be learned just by spending the DPs. Spell research on the other hand made gaining access to research materials and libraries really useful.

The same is true for your clerics that can make great use of religious houses, festivals and gatherings to do the prayer needed to create new spells.

I have a lot of very unused HARP books. In college of Magics there are rules for new spell creation. Every effect and magical aspect is listed along with all the target, range and duration parameters. Each has a point cost and there is a simple formula to turn this point cost into power points.

HARP doesn’t have the concept of spell level. As each spell is scalable what we think of as Sleep V, Sleep VII… Lord Sleep are just the same spell with different scaling options applied and higher DP costs.

For us the DP cost would equal level and scaled options would equate to higher level versions of the same spell.

What I haven’t done yet is attempt to recreate specific RM spells using the College of Magic rules. What I am expecting to happen is that the RM level will exactly match the HARP power point cost. The reason I expect them to match up perfectly is that the same brains are behind RM as HARP. If you are going to have much the same team working on both systems and they are largely compatible, compatible enough to cross stat Shadow World for both systems, then chances are something as basic as a power point is going to be the same in both sets of rules.

If all my suppositions are right, or even if they are wrong but there is a typical and consistent error then the two systems can be brought into line.

It then means that there are a set of rules that can be applied to any spell the characters want to create. At the moment it is a little bit arbitrary. The player designs the spell and then the GM has to assign a level to it. This can lead to mismatches in expectations. If the player has already worked out how they want to stack the spell with something else in Spell Law but the GM has not recognized the potential ‘abuse’, if that is the right word.

With formal rules in place, much of that disappears. Spell research becomes a process of describing the effect you desire from a menu of possible effects. Then running through the costs to arrive at the PP cost or level. It really is a 5 minute to 30 minute job depending on whether you know what you want or if you are browsing for inspiration.

I just think it is a pity that with all the crunch already in all the other RMu books, that rules like these didn’t make their way into Spell Law.

It is that one fact that may point to my theory being wrong. If when I try this the numbers for the spells in Spell Law do not add up it could mean that back in the day when was first converted from D&D to the spell lists we now know there was no system in place.

When HARP was written they may have taken the opportunity to standardise all the existing spells with a set of coherent rules.

Trying to apply that to all the spells we have in Spell Law may have resulted in a swathe of 3rd level spells rather than a neat 1st, 2nd, 3rd and spells that we all know and love suddenly jumping about in level. Where we have a spell that could be a 2nd level Magician Base but a 5th level Closed Channeling and a 6th level Closed Mentalism (looking at you Shockbolt) the HARP rules do not set out to differentiate by realm.

The work needed to either fix all the existing spells and reorganize the spell lists may have been deemed too much effort for too little gain.

I have an adventure in mind which will require a spell caster to have some alternative Light Law spells. This will be my chance to try out HARP spell creation in RMC.

My next face to face gaming weekend is fast approaching. It is a chance to both play my Lay Healer and to run my Forgotten Realms based RMC campaign.

At the end of last session the characters had killed an evil witch but not before she had opened a portal to another realm, think Stargate SG1, a big mirror showing rippling water and then out of it came giant octopus tentacles trying to drag characters into the mirror’s surface.

That was the climactic final fight scene.

Everyone survived and no one was seriously hurt.

Over the past dozen weekends I have slowly loaded the characters up with life-preserving and in two cases life-giving magics.

This is originally a D&D setting so there is an expectation that there will be clerics to hand to cast Raise Dead in the parts of lift from published modules. In the previous session I had expected someone to die. I wasn’t going to bend any rolls to save them. I had done my part by making sure they had the magics needed to survive death.

I will confess that I was a little disappointed that no one died. I wasn’t out to kill them but they are not a high-level party, averaging around 6th level. The big bad monster should have been able to kill them and on any other day, it probably would have killed someone. If he had killed a PC it would have made more of a statement of just how dangerous the beast was. As it happened I have thrown a troll at them in the past and it has given them more trouble.

My mission in this coming weekend is to kill someone, kill them heroically and then bring them back. That may seem mean but when we play only a few times a year I want to make these sessions stand out. To pack in all the RPG experiences. Death does need to be part of those experiences. If death isn’t a real threat then victories are not real victories. It all gets devalued slightly.

The last session involved a lot of incompetent goons, a witch and a horror from another plane. Before that was real ghosts in a haunted house and before that was an evil wizard in his hidden lair.

There have been a lot of magical opponents and my group is magically very strong, a sorcerer, warrior mage, elemental warrior, mystic and cleric. I am thinking of doing a session of unrelenting combat, they are in the first dungeon level of a castle. I can activate some Golems, motivated by the witch’s death and see if the characters will fight their way out or head into the dungeons deeper levels. Either work for me. It would be most sensible for them to try and fight their way out immediately but then this group doesn’t always do the sensible thing.

I do not believe I have ever actively set out to kill a character before so that will be an experience in itself. NPCs I will happily kill like flies if I get bored of them or they have served their purpose but never a player character.

Looking over their character sheets the characters have the capability to raise three characters from dead. My action will take one of those ‘three strikes’ out.

Now I wonder how many Brass Golems it will take to kill on character and only one?

I was unexpectedly busy this week, so this is a little late.

Plague, Famine & War II was released on Sunday. This is another low level adventure and rather than being set in the port, where the first episode was placed, this one takes the characters up a mountain.

I recently saw this tweet…

I’m increasingly convinced rpg settings should consist of 3 things:

1. Core concepts
2. Adventures
3. Random tables of details for anything that might come up
   With the first 2 being as short as possible and the third being the majority of the presentation.

I like that philosophy and judging by the range of supporting comments that the original poster received many other people do as well.

I can see more of a balance between 2. and 3. but the principles hold true. This is basically what I have done with the Fanzine adventures. A few of the barest maps, lots of random tables and but a strong sense of style.

With these PF&W adventures we are getting the same sort of thing again. They were originally intended as drop in adventures, drop the first one on any port and you are ready to go.

Once you have two or three, the third episode is being written, one almost has enough to create a foothold in an entirely new setting, in the same way that Waterdeep was the default jumping off point for Forgotten Realms.

It begs the questions of what would make this setting unique? What is the rest of the world like?

Do those questions need answering? I think that PF&W will only be three or possibly four episodes long. A mini campaign of sorts. So far we have had a sea adventure, a mountain top battle against the elements and part three is going to be a low-ish level dungeon crawl. I think a fourth part with a city-wide threat, a bit like the end of one of the Avengers movies would be quite cool.

I don’t really want to map an entire city, although Dyson Logos has some good city maps. I am thinking of a hybrid approach where a nice map is provided for the GM and pre-, post- adventure but during the actual high intensity action sequences a random table is used to detail the rat runs of cross alleys and side streets, the shops and businesses on those streets.

I am thinking that I create a d10 grid, the first column gives a quick glance down the street to say whether it is a terrace of small cottages, a small public square, a cluster of shops, a junction with side roads and so on. Then another column to tell you what kind of shop or business, if the player asks, then further columns for the owner name, the quality of the place and so on.

An organised GM that loves prep could use the random tables to map out entire city blocks. A GM that doesn’t do prep could generate the city on the fly. I dislike obviously rolling dice in front of the players to determine world facts. I like to appear that everything was plotted well in advance. So I would use a table of random 1-10 numbers to achieve the same effect but without the dice rolling. A simple glance at a row of numbers would tell me that the next stand out building is a cheap bakery, run by Hamish Goodfellow. If the PCs run past then I don’t need to know any more, if they try and hide in the bakery or burst in, asking if there is a rear exit, I know enough that the chap behind the counter is probably chubby (being both a baker and anyone called Goodfellow must be chubby and happy looking).

So I was contemplating at what point do these adventures constitute a setting? I think the defining feature would be do I want to keep on writing for the same world? If the answer is yes, then I am building a setting one adventure at a time. Every little fact or reference adds to the fabric of the setting.

If the answer is no, I have written a series of adventures and now I want to move on so something different then no this was not a setting but a drop-in mini series.

I am tending towards the latter. The adventures in the fanzine are all set in impenetrable jungle with strong asian influences with a little dash of ninjas and shoguns. PF&W are set in a euro-centric medieval fantasy world. I don’t know where I want to go with the next series but I do have a particular monster in mind and that will probably limit my terrain types and suggest a setting.

Right now I have more ideas for adventure concepts than I have time to write.