Posted on

Random Reading: Red Sister

This is not a book review…I recently started reading a great book, Red Sister by Mark Lawrence. Mark is the author of 2 other series: The Broken Empire and the Red Queens War. Like his other series, Red Sister takes place in a fantasy world with a lost high tech heritage—a bit like Shadow World!

When I’m reading a new fantasy series with a magic system I try to figure out if the portrayed system can be based on Spell Law/Rolemaster or if there are any cool spell ideas I can incorporate into Project BASiL. Having read quite a bit, I can say that many of favorite spells and lists were inspired by fantasy fiction.

Red Sister offers up several ideas that feed into recent discussion and posts here on Rolemasterblog. First is the idea that setting drives the rules and second, that Channeling could be rolled into Esssence (or eliminate realms entirely).

Of particular note in the book (no spoilers)

Races. The population was descended from 4 races. One that had great size and strength; one that had incredible speed, one that could tap into lesser magics and one that could tap greater magics. While this is a common trope, sometimes I do miss more differentiation between the races in RM and SW. Barring some stat bonuses (whose impact are minimized at higher levels) most races are defined by physical characterization than special abilities or extremes of nature.

Religion. The story focuses on a convent, one that trains young women in the esoteric arts. Holy Sisters, the most common are focused on maintaining the faith. Grey Sisters focus on stealth and poisons and have a talent for “Shadow Work” (mentalism?). Mystic Sisters manipulate threads (magic) and Red Sisters excel on armed and unarmed combat (warrior monks). What I like, and what’s been discussed here on this blog, is the idea of “agnostic magic”—magic defined by aspect, focus or effect rather than Essence, Mentalism and Channeling. Religions and churches train in magic and have access to this special knowledge, but magic use isn’t tied to or dependent on a diety.

So far it’s been a good read. If you like “Monk” stories I would also recommend Witches Blood.

Any books you’ve read that could fit the Rolemaster/Spell Law system?

Posted on

Surgeons, Healers, Physicians in roleplaying.

Elisha Mancer mini.jpg

Hey, I’m on a roll with short blogs–mostly because we got hit with several FEET of snow and we are still not plowed out.

If you are not familiar with Charles Stross you should be. He’s a successful author and also writes about the intersection of technology and social issues. His BLOG is worth following and his readers offer some in depth commentary.

Occasionally Charlie will bring in a guest blogger to cover his site while he’s travelling. His most recent is E.C. Ambrose. I’m not familiar with his books, but he writes dark historical fantasy about medieval surgery–cool right?

I thought E.C.’s most recent POST about the differences between Physicians, Surgeons and Barbers was a great primer and road map for varying healing professions in RM and SW. Of course, fantasy RPG’s allow for magical healing which could usurp traditional healing methodologies, but that will depend on the ubiquity of magical healing in your game. Peter tends to rely on herbs (which while “magically” could be considered a more mundane process than spells), while others have easy access to healing spells.

My first SW Misc Material upload was a Healing Chart meant to combine magical healing, mundane healing and herbs into a simplified chart. This connects Surgeons (mundane and technical), Priests (spells but with access issues), Herbalists (witches, shamans and low tech communities) with the location of the PC’s: cities, towns, villages, remote.

Anyway, given that SW does have a past history of high tech, it makes sense that various cultures would have distinct professional paths for mundane and magical healing. E.C.’s blog post provides a historical model for your own RPG setting.

Anyone read E.C.’s books?

Posted on

Buy it. “The Crimson Queen”

The Crimson Queen by [Hutson, Alec]

Hey, two blogs in one day. I meant to include this is a weekend roundup and forgot to include it in my earlier blog. Lots of standard tropes, many names are familiar, it edges up to LitRPG but it’s good. For self-published it deserves a boost. Check it out HERE.

 

Posted on

Weekend Library

Greetings all and welcome to my new column: Weekend Library.  I read quite a bit so I thought I would offer up a list of books that might be a little obscure but worth checking out for great game or campaign ideas for your Rolemaster, Shadow World or fantasy setting.

The Mechanical (3 book series). Interesting take on Clockwork men and alchemy. I got some ideas to update my adventure “The Lair of Ozymandias”.

Six of Crows. A grittier version of “Lies of Locke Lamora”. Good characters and ideas for a urban “Sting/Heist” campaign.

The Face Fakers Game. The writing is a bit inconsistent, but an interesting system of magic that gave me a few ideas.

The Copper Promise. A throwback to the early D&D style adventures. Fun but a straight forward translation of game to store.

The Dungeonneers. Witty and fun quick read. However, it’s interesting because it acknowledges all the traditional dungeon tropes and tackles them head on via a group of Dwarven adventurers.

Free the Darkness. What type of game would you have with a character that was good at EVERYTHING?

Mountain of Daggers. Very old school (Howard or Leiber). Short stories of a famed thief.

Low Town. Great urban low-magic fantasy.

 

Posted on

Limitless-Adventures Sword Coast Encounters

Sword Coast Encounters

Limitless Adventures have very kindly given me review copies of three of their ‘Encounters’ booklets. What I like about Limitless Adventures is that they sound like a Tuesday night gaming group that every time they have a great idea they publish it, and why the heck not?

The first of these I am going to look at is Sword Coast Encounters. What you actually get is 10 ‘5e’ encounters each confined to a single page for ease of printing. Each contains the opening scene, creature or antagonists stats, a GM only explanation of what is actually happening, advice on scaling the encounter to different challenge levels, the treasure and finally adventure hooks that could spin off of this encounter. When the encounters refer to locations or NPCs these are nicely grounded in the Sword Coast (in this instance). Below is one example.

 Fun Distractions

One of the nice things about this collection is that whilst many can be solved at the point of a sword there are equally moral dilemmas and simply fun distractions.

Limitless do say that every collection contains at least one new ‘thing’ be that a creature, magic item or spell but could equally be a new game mechanic or deity.

Encounters Scale Well

So to using these. I like the self contained single page format. I try to use the minimum of paper in my games but do always have the planned adventure and NPCs on paper. The single page format fits in well with that and as each serves as an adventure hook they could hang around in your campaign for a while. The encounters do scale well when that is required. Not every encounter scales but that is not always required, an interesting NPC is interesting whatever the level and a moral dilemma is independent of the party facing it.

From a RM perspective most of the creatures featured here do not exist in Creatures & Treasures (I will publish the conversions of some of these on Monday), I particularly like the chap at the top of the page here! The same can be said of the magic items. This is an interesting point. When faced with a magic item that does not exist do you a) create the rules required to have that item in RM or b) change the item to fit the RM flavour? What I mean is as an example a +1 ring of protection is a really common D&D magic item. Do you give the party a ring that gives +5DB/+5RR as a constant effect item or do you think well RM doesn’t really have rings of protection but an equally low level item would be a ring castng Aura x3 daily? Another common thing is the D&D potion of healing. You could easily have a potion that casts Heal I from Concussion Ways but equally you could scrap the magic and give the party a vial holding a dose of Rewk (a brewed herb healing 2-20).

I personally have gone down the healing potions are often herb preparations and the ring would be a daily item, Aura and Blur seem to work well as substitutes up to Shield and blade turn spells for more powerful D&D rings of Protection. My players like the idea that items sit nicely alongside their spell lists, it makes them feel like they are playing RM in an RM world rather than a RM in a D&D world.

All in all a D&D 5e DM could use these off the page with no serious prep and not a great deal if they wanted to use the adventure hooks to carry it on. As an RM GM it took me about 5 minutes to do the D&D to RM momster conversion. The power level seems about right. It took seconds to convert the treasure from Gold, Electrum, Silver to Gold, Silver Bronze. I use 1 D&D Gp = 1 RM Sp. Most encounters do not give out magic items from what I have seen and that suits my world where magic is not so common. In the ten encounters here there are what I would magic items one of which is a potion which I would probably make into a herb preparation and one is a collection of runes which are single use. The remaining ones would need a bit of conversion or simply swapping out to offer the party something that you as GM think they need or you know they will need.

There are definitely encounters here I have never used in the past and some I would never have thought of using. For that alone I think it is worth the pocket money prices (most booklets are only $1.99, Sword Coast Encounters is $2.99).  All in all I will seriously consider these if there is a matching booklet to where my party are adventuring. For more information then visit Limitless Adventures or the DMs Guild page for this booklet.

Posted on

Weekend Roundup: September 25 2016

images

I stand corrected on a previous news item.

Are these the Yinka/Y’kin?

Changramai Warrioress? Followers of Inis? Female Warrior Monks Kick Ass.

Iuraic has no words for empathy.

20 ranks in Rolemaster Herb Lore?

What are the Kulthean Dark Gods up to?

Now that’s an Essaence Storm!

Nature, nurture, skill bonus, stat bonus, talents, professions…the DEBATE is endless.

Shadow World Chegains are now the new Cool.

Real life cool treasure. Ancient craftsmanship. Here, here and here and last…here.

 

 

 

 

Posted on

100 Creepy Things and Events to Find in a Spooky House II – Book review

This is the third and final (at the moment) volume in the horror effects series by Azukail Games. This booklet (100 Creepy Things and Events to Find in a Spooky House II) has far less strange mists and fogs and noises in other rooms than its siblings but more architectural spookiness. You get more doors and windows that don’t go quite where they should, the classic branch suddenly breaking the window at night and other real Hammer Horror icons of the genre.

The production quality is equal to that of the other two ‘spooky’ publications and the content is equal, you get 100 special effects spread over 22 pages. Each is numbered so you could quite easily just roll a D100 or just pick the effect(s) you want.

The way that the events in this book are presented is very flexible, you get a lot of ‘if the players have lights then this happens, if they don’t then this happens…” sort of conditionals. This means that most of the events if not all will work even it things are not set up exactly as described. Afterall these are really just inpirations or as that horrible phrase goes “thought starters”.

Going off at a tangent; ever since I first saw the first of these books I thought that there was a potential adventure(s) in here for a rather twisted illusionist but I have taken that idea a bit further. The perfect villain is not not an illusionist but an Alchemist. A 8th level achemist with the following lists Organic Skills, Lesser Illusion, Rune Mastery, Invisible Ways and Essance Hand could prepare runes of light and sound mirages and telekinesis. These are only 2nd and 3rd level spells so the rune paper, which they could make themselves would only take a matter of weeks to create. If over the space of a year the Alchemist produced 10 sheets of 3rd level rune paper they could effectively ‘haunt’ any location they liked.

Illusions have a nice long 100′ range and using mostly sounds of thumps on the floorboards, screams and the sound of doors opening and closing etc. most of the atmospherics could be cast from rune paper at a safe distance. Telekinesis could be used to open or close doors or windows, again all from rune paper and from a safe distance. Once people are scared and running around looking for the source then a single invisibility spell and retire to safety.

Our alchemist could easily drive away peasants from a farm house and if people get brave or curious and start to come back then just throw more illusions at them. The rune paper is not lost when the spell is cast, it is just blanked ready for reuse. Our alchemist friend just has to recharge the runes the used. I would go so far as to say that because the illusions are not intended to last for ages, blood stains that appear and dissappear, a sudden scream from the attic and so on, attempting to detect essence is likely to fail as those spells detect active magic but the illusion is already over. Those higher level spells that can tell you what happened in a place in the past minutes or hours will not identify our alchemist as he is 100′ away and cast the spell into the attic but was never there himself. It is almost the perfect crime.  Once he is living in his stolen farm house then people seeing lights on in the place are quite likely to ascribe it to the ghost anyway. Should the alchemist be discovered then it is debatable from a peasants point of view which is worse having your house inhabited by ghosts or by an ‘evil’ wizard?

Someone in my games is definitely going to encounter this nasty little achemist.

Posted on

Azukail Games – 100 Creepy Things and Events to Encounter Outdoors

Azukail Games has given me another new toy to play with in the form of the booklet 100 Creepy Things and Events to Encounter Outdoors a sibling product to http://www.rolemasterblog.com/100-creepy-things-events-find-spooky-house/.

Azukail Games aim to, in their own words, “Publishing RPG Supplements to Help GMs” and their supplements normally comprise lists of really useful things that normally a GM has to come up with off the top of his head. These could be NPC names, tavern names or books on the shelp of a library or in this case 100 Creepy Things.

The elements in this work are not confined to your typical haunted house so you get sinister mists and fogs, my favourite is a stray dog who’s lead ends in a bloody tatter s on. There will inevitably be some cliches in here as any collection that missed them out would be blatantly incomplete but there are enough things listed to keep it fresh for a long time.

If you are not running a horror based campaign then you will not be dipping into this week in week out but the whole point of just about every one of AG’s resources is to have them to hand for when you need them. Right now this supplement costs just $1.59 on RPGnow and it is definitely worth that and more. There is a huge potential here to use each and every one of the 100 events as the jumping off point for an entirely new adventure!

100_creepy_things_and_events_to_encounter_outdoors_cover