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Against the Darkmaster

I don’t know how many of you know of this game? To cut a long story short what Against the Darkmaster (vsDarkmaster for short) is is MERP plus house rules rebranded and launched as a new game.

It is so new that we only have the public play test, quickstart adventure and pre-gen characters to play with so far. The kickstarter is not even ready yet.

What is also interesting is that vsDarkmaster also has a marque called open00 under which they are going to release an SRD, system reference document, so any indie developers can release their own material for the system.

Even more interesting is that my own attempt at free to use monsters, under the brand of Open100 appears very close to the open00 and vsDarkmaster. By very close take a look at this.

StatOpen100vsDarkmasterDifference
AT3(1-20), 2(1-10) or by armour typeRigid Leather
DB5 + shield30 inc shieldnone
Hits5560+/-5
OB67 weapon60 weapong+/-7
Level33none
CriticalMnormalnone

You can see that there is barely a gnats whisker between the two versions of the same creature. In one you get a slightly higher OB but less hits but they pretty much trade off.

vsDarkmaster vs RMU?

So right now both games are technically in public play test. The difference is that vsDarkmaster is actively looking for play testers and engaging with bloggers and reviewers. I have emailed them and got a personal reply within hours, which considering the time difference is as prompt as you could wish for. They are also building a contact list of everyone who has play tested the game, you need to register to get the free version of the game. This is good marketing sense. 

The Kickstarter will also create a bit more buzz around the game. It gives them something else to talk about and share.

I would be shocked if there are less people queuing up to back vsDarkmaster than there are firmly committed to converting to RMU right now. The real uphill struggle for RMU is the ‘U’. RM2 players are reluctant to give up the RM2 way of doing things and the RMSS crowd are reluctant to give up the RMSS way of doing things and neither really want to give up their mass of companions, supplements and house rules.

vsDarkmaster does not have that fractured community. They have a whole new bunch of gamers waiting to play this new game.

vsDarkmaster also has a release date of 2019. I hope that RMU has the same release year but I would not be overly shocked if that slipped into 2020.

vsDarkmaster also has a sense of momentum. There is a public play test edition. That play test will end and it will be followed by a kickstarter campaign, and that will end and the game will be released in 2019. There will be stretch goals published as part of the kickstarter so we will know what future publications are in the pipeline.

With RMU we live in hope of the ‘singularity’ we don’t when that will be and we don’t know how long the post singularity period will be.

*IF* vsDarkmaster hits the shelves first, and that is certainly possible then what unique selling point does RMU have? Open ended rolls? Criticals? Weapon specific combat tables? Point buy skills? Spell lists? Sorry but vsDarkness has them all.

The real killer will be open00. I can honestly see 20, 50 or 100 publications for vsDarkness for every one for RMU. You could claim that the RMU publications will be more substantial or higher quality than all the indie releases for vsDarkmaster but that misses the point. Rather than spending $20 for an RMU supplement that you may use some, none or most of you can spend $0.50 or $1 on a booklet here or a booklet there that fill a particular need at that precise moment. It is a different world and a different way of selling gaming material.

Referring to Brian’s last post there is nothing to stop either Brian releasing Priest-King of Shade or Jengada releasing Nomads for vsDarkmaster, they could even combine the two and set Priest-King in the world of Nomads. 

I am not advocating that we all give up playing Rolemaster and play vsDarkmaster instead. What is viable is to use vsDarkmaster books, adventures and all the other weird and wonderful supplements as and when they arrive with RMU as the games are close enough. Once that is established we can write and sell our own adventures as compatible with any open00 system.

I don’t want it to happen but I could see vsDarkmaster being the death of Rolemaster. The cliche is ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. I think that will be the case. We won’t move over and abandon Rolemaster but I can see vsDarkmaster swallowing up all the new players who would be interested in RMU but discover vsDarkmaster instead. Without new players and new members coming to a community it will wither and die. If vsDarkmaster and RMU have to share the market and sales for this sort of game how viable will they be? Who knows but open00 gives the publishers,  
The Fellowship & Sego | Games, a revenue stream that ICE do not have. I know how much money ICE makes each year and it is not a lot. Also most of that is likely to disappear as ICE must withdraw RMFRP and RMC from sale when RMU is released as you cannot compete against yourself and the reason for developing RMU was to get away from the IP restrictions hanging over the older games and to unify the market so they did not need to support two versions of the same game. Supporting three versions of the same game makes even less sense.

If you have a look at vsDarkmaster you will see it is no RMU. It is not intended to be. It claims to be an evolution of MERP and it is true to its word. The thing is that we know how easy it is to drop a new spell law or an arms law into a MERP game to expand it. It is easy and it doesn’t break the game.

Take a look and see what you think.

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The Priest-King of Shade

Back in 2013 I submitted to I.C.E., and they accepted, my manuscript for “Priest-King of Shade”. There was no formal agreement, but at the time, product output was slow, RMU was just getting rolling and Terry was open to third party submissions. Nicholas gave the go-ahead and both he and Terry gave it a few editorial passes early on. Then things slowed down. For years.

Over the ensuing years, I continued to refine and add content, edit my own work and found various artists and others to help with floorplans and layouts. I continued to submit my new updated versions until I was told not to work on it anymore until a complete editorial pass was finished. 

That was several years ago. In a few weeks I’m turning 49 and staring down the barrel of 50! I have 3 more comprehensive modules nearing completion plus all the other RMBlog stuff I’ve been working on. Terry has announced he doesn’t have time to edit my project and I haven’t heard that anyone else will take on editing duties. The product needs artwork, layout, floorplans and probably another 20 pages to really polish things up. While I was really looking forward to having an “official” published ICE/SW module, I have no interest in waiting forever. My brother Matt (Vroomfogle) did all the work on the Shadow World Players Guide and was the lead design on RMU, so I’ll let that be our family’s official testament to our long standing commitment to I.C.E.

With that said, I’m attaching an early version of Priest-King in PDF format. It’s rough, the charts don’t quite fit on the page, these floorplans are shite and it just needs a lot of work. However, I have complete versions of all charts in excel, clarifications and can provide them if you email me. Since I never had a formal contract with ICE and I’m offering this for free I can’t imagine anyone will care.  Let’s call this PK.v.2. My most recent version has several more adventures and is hitting 180 pages. With professional artwork, layouts and newer material there is still a publishable product here. 

If you haven’t followed my blogs here, Priest-King is actually Chapter 2 in the middle of my extended “The Grand Campaign”. Chapter 3, The Empire of the Black Dragon segues into one of the Dragonlords storylines and injects the PC’s into the world spanning battle with the Jerak Ahrenrath and the Eyes. Heady stuff in my campaign!!

So while this is rough, it’s also free. How about this as an idea? If you want to contribute to this, help with one of the floorplans, or insert an idea etc, let me know. We can crowdsource this a bit and make it even better. I’m open to that and can focus on all my other projects!

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RMU House Rule #1 Stats

So here are the three uses I have for Stats…

  1. Stat Bonuses, this is the normal use for stats in RM. I want to keep the RMU magnitude and the addition of stat bonuses for finding the total bonus for skills.
  2. Fixed Body Dev, I will be using the Con Stat plus 1/2 SD plus Base Hits (From RMU Character Law).
  3. Unskilled Tests, I use the whole stat for unskilled tests. So if you want to know if your character can remember some random fact, for example, you would roll d100 OE and add your ME stat. 101+ to succeed. This means I can apply the full range of difficulty factors for these single stat unskilled tests.

So this means that I want and need a stat on the 1-100 scale. It also means that having a stat of 100 is better than having a stat of 98 even if the bonus is the same.

I also want point buy in some description.

I quite like Hurin’s suggestion of 3d10 – 15 has a lot of merit but that isn’t point buy. My objection to dice is simply the situation where a player that rolls well will forever out perform a character that rolls poorly.

RMU has a point buy option where all stats start at 50 and you get 10 points to spread over the 10 stats. You also get the option to buy down a one stat to have more to spend.

So how about…

  1. All stat bonuses start at +/-0
  2. All characters get 3 +1s they can share between the ten stats
  3. A stat can be bought down so taking a -1 on one stat can add a +1 to a different stat.
  4. No starting stat can have a bonus of more than +15
  5. Once all bonuses and penalties have been assigned Temporary States equal 50 + (Bonus (or penalty) * 3)

So with this mechanism I keep my ‘no dice’ preference. There is no need to have any tables of bonuses.

There is an effective cap at 95 so the stats are not truly d100 but the 100 stat is impossible as +16 equates to a 98 and +17 is 101 which doesn’t exist in RMU.

The 3 +1s equate to 9 points of stat and RMU gives 10 stat points for free so that is pretty close.

I like to share my house rules as I think many eyes make problem spotting easier. We could add in the Hurin option of 3d10 – 15 as a diced option. the dice option gives a range of -12 to +15 which is skewed slightly in the characters favour but I think that is a good thing. The point system does the same but only on a smaller scale by giving the initial 10points/ 3 +1s for free.

Fixed Concussion Hits

Fixed concussion hits is a bigger difference between my rules and RMU beta and almost certainly RMU RAW. Joe public would get typically 100 #hits from a 50 Con + 25 (half SD) plus 25 for race.

Off the shelf RMU characters seem to be starting at level 2 or 3 because of the age analogy so that is probably 8 ranks in Body Dev (+40) plus their stat bonuses plus race so +65 #hits.

The difference then is about +35 #hits in favour of the house rules at the start of play.

The difference balances at about 10th level.

Stat Gains

So stat gains are tied to skill usage or training. When a character successfully uses a skill in a meaningful way or gets specific training in a skill or stat then the applicable stats get ‘ticked’. So if you used the Influence skill successfully, stat bonuses from Em, In, Pr, this would ‘tick’ Empathy, Intuition and Presence.

When the GM chooses to allow experience gains, I know different GMs have different ideas about requiring down time or training time etc, then the player rolls d100 for each stat that is ticked. If the roll is equal or less than the current stat then there is no change, rub out the tick.

If the roll is greater than the current stat then the stat increases by 1. We can now use the genuine Stat -50/3 for the Stat Bonus! We can also get stats up to 100 through stat increases.

The advantages as I see them are that the most used stats are the ones to increase, we don’t need dice for the stat gain amounts and we don’t have to look up that dice on a table. We still don’t need a table for the stat bonuses.

Characters with poor stats tend to increase quicker but stat gains become less frequent as the stats get higher.

The RMU max stat of 100 preserved.

Over to you…

This is what I want to achieve and if you like, my first draft of the rules. Can you improve? Are there other options you would suggest?

Have I broken anything? Would this work just as well in a modern or sci-fi setting? This last question will be a recurring theme as I would like one unified set of house rules with the maximum of utility.

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RMU House Rule #0

OK, so I thought I would take a break from my HARP series today and write about RMU for a change.

This is inspired by the comment made by Aspire2Hope on the post RMU to Infinity and Beyond.

So as you all know my RMC house rules do not use levels or professions. I also use point buy for stats and fixed concussion hits. Basically my entire character creation is dice free so I am perfectly happy to allow players to create their characters away from the gaming table. As long as we have discussed character background and motivations and that is all acceptable then the GM is no longer needed.

What I would like to start is another occasional series of posts where I/we:

  1. take what we know of the state of RMU
  2. for each aspect I state my intended goal
  3. We marry the two together to get a coherent house rule

So for example stat bonuses are neither linear nor exactly bell curve. I would like stat bonuses that don’t need a table to work out so I would throw out there (Stat-50)/3 gives a range of 0 to +/-17. That is slightly more generous than RMU as written with the rate of bonuses increasing and at the top end bonus, +15 vs +17 but it also does away with a table.

I don’t really want my house rules to break the compatibility with RMU too much. I would still like to be able to use off the shelf ICE products but at the same time I would like to promote my ideas of simplicity and speed of play at the gaming table.

Things that I think will cause the most debate will be what to keep in and what to throw out. So we could have a set of simplified house rules and a set of optional house rules that plug in things that I don’t feel the need to use but others do. Allegedly, I am not always right and if that is the case then having alternatives would be good.

This is also an opportunity to build things that are missing like dedicated two handed weapons tables and fix their lack of stopping power.

The big one will be magic. I have never been really happy with Spell Law but it was always too big a challenge to fix but committing myself to doing publically may force me to get the job done.

So that is my intentions. The first and foremost task will be to completely rebuild character creation.

Anyone up for a challenge?

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Monkey See, Monkey Do

This is our latest 50 in 50 adventure and it is a great one to GM. If you are into making noises and impressions there are some great animal noises to make. If your players are the sort that immediate leap for the Spirit Mastery list and then try and interrogate the hell out of the first peasant/guard/goblin they get their hands on then they are out of luck. If they are the sort that like to put everything to sleep then given the numbers of attackers you can throw at them then they are out of luck. If they are motivated by gold, silver and things that glow under Detect Essence spells then they are out of luck.

In Monkey See, Monkey Do, the characters wander into an area dominated by some unusually aggressive and carnivorous apes. The apes react badly to the presence of intruders, and have a lair in a series of caves beneath the ruins of an old watchtower. The apes have a large enough presence that outright combat may prove to be hazardous.

This is aimed at d100 systems but is generic enough in nature to be adapted to others.

This PDF supports Adobe layers and the page backgrounds and images can be disabled to make printing easier.

The adventure comes with a 32″x24″ battlemap of the wilderness taking up twelve pages and a 32″x30″ battlemap of the caves, also taking up twelve pages, that can be printed out and assembled.

I will also point out that I do know that Apes are not monkeys but that would have ruined my title!

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Read Through Reviews

There is HARP, RMC/RM2, RMSS/RMFRP and there is RMU. Most of the readership here seem to be in the RMC/RM2 camp. Up until last month I had only a vague understanding of just how different RMFRP was to RMC.

I cannot say I like RMFRP but I can see that there are some good elements in it.

On the other hand I read the HARP Fantasy rules last year and I did like what I read. I have also bought HARP SF and Folkways but I haven’t even read them so I have no valid opinion.

So apart from admitting my general ignorance I thought I would steal someone else’s idea educate myself as well as anyone else that is interested. The idea comes from the TakeOnRules blog. What the writer did was read and discuss one chapter of the Stars Without Number rulebook in each posting. Trying to cover an entire game system in a single post can often miss some of its best features especially if you have never actually played the game.

So I want to do something similar with HARP Fantasy. We all know RMC/RM2 so I want to do a detailed walk through of the HARP rules relating them back to RMC/RM2. If this proves popular I would like to do something similar with HARP SF as my next Sci Fi game will be HARP SF. Finally, Folkways is probably the newest ICE publication I have and the one that the least people will have read so I thought a decent review of the actual book would be valuable.

This will not be a rigid “The next 20 posts will all be on HARP”. I am too scatterbrained for that. If something peaks my interest then I will write about it or if something is important then I will discuss it. I think there is a lot of HARP DNA in RMU so I think that these articles could be interesting to the whole RM community. I also think that it will give us RM players a better understanding of HARP.

TakeOnRules failed, in my opinion, in so much as they got about eight chapters in and then I don’t know if there was a loss of interest or the summer slowdown killed it but whatever happened the series has been stagnant since mid-July. I will take any feedback as we go on how to make these the most interesting reads that I can. We also have the advantage that HARP and RM are sufficiently close that something great in HARP could easily become a house rule in RM. As to the timings I may try and whizz through some of these faster than one post a week. Things still seem a bit slow on the forums so we can help fill the summer RPG vacuum.

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Hypothetically

In Hypothetically, the characters return to a village to find a note asking them to explore a nearby temple. The note mentions a small amount of money that is included with it, but the money is missing. Will the characters over react over what is probably not a lot of money for them?

They can also explore the temple itself, and a map of this is included.

This adventure hook has both a temple floor plan and monster stats for both RM and 5e for a new creature. If you players know C&T inside out then this one will have them guessing. I also wrote this just as I was starting to get into my recent revisiting of H P Lovecraft so there is a certain sort of horror element. At least there can be if you emphasis the sound qualities of the temple.

The other stand out features are the two significant NPCs. I would really hope that the GM has some fun with the inn keeper and the patron if he is ever introduced to your world.

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Adventure Structures

Whilst I quite liked the RPGaDay as it forced me to think about questions I would not have otherwise asked, it can be a bit of a task master. With the month over I can now write about what I want to write about as and when I want to. Today it is about how we structure adventures, not from a playing at the table perspective but the written page and how we present them to the GM. I raised this topic last week and  have been thinking about it ever since but now I want to throw it open to a wider audience.

There are two fashionable structures. Scenes and Locations.

Imagine a simple adventure where an urchin gets caught trying to rob a PC but then says he was planting a letter on them. He had to do this as his parents are being held captive by thugs. The thugs work for a crime lord. The contents of the letter incriminate the PCs in a coup against the current ruler, planned for tomorrow.

So lets play with this adventure.

In the Scenes method each scene has a brief outline and a scene objective. You then describe the scenes that make up this adventure. The players may proceed from scene one to two to three sequentially or they may leap from scene to scene. Rather than random monster encounters you can have a collection of ‘interrupted scenes’ that may or may not happen.

So…

Scene 1: “Caught Red Handed”

Objective: introduce the adventure to the party
Props: Incriminating Letter
Cast: Urchin
Location: Street or Market
Synopsys: An urchin tries to plant an incriminating letter. When caught confesses that he had to do it to save his parents.

Scene 2: “Fire In The Hole”

Objective: Rescue the parents and learn who is behind this plot.
Props: none
Cast: Uther & Annie (the parents), Vignir (half orc knifeman), Barny (human wrestler) and Mildew (Elven archer)
Location: Squalid backstreet terraced house
Synopsys: The players need to rescue the parents. Vignir, Barny and Mildew have orders to kill all three members of the family once they know the letter has been planted. The thugs work for Maris Piper the harbour master and suspected black market racketeer.

Scene 3: “The Viper’s Pit”

Objective: Confront Maris Piper
Props: 
Cast: Maris Piper (Elven Bard), Sailors deck hands and salty sea dog type thugs.
Location: Probably at the Harbour Master’s Office or attached Warehouse
Synopsys: The players may try to confront Maris Piper. Maris will try to claim innocence of the whole affair but if the confrontation turns violent will call for help from dock workers in his employ. The players may learn that Maris is himself just a pawn and has been paid by an unnamed foreigner to sow civil unrest.

Interrupted Scene: “What’s this then?”

Objective: complication
Props: the letter
Cast: Town Guard
Location: Anywhere in town
Synopsys:If the players are carrying the letter then they may be stopped by a patrol of the watch and subjected to a search. The letter is by its very nature incriminating.

…and so the adventure goes on. I would create scenes for each ‘action point’ and interruptions for any time where the adventure could be extended, if things are going too smoothly then a complication could be fun or if I wanted to showcase a particular piece of the world culture.

Practically I would put one scene on a single page so the extra white space is usable for notes or tracking adlibs.

The scenes are intentionally non-prescriptive. The party may cast a powerful sleep spell over everyone in the house and rescue the parents that way without any conflict or use telepathy to read the thoughts of the thugs and then walk away. As long as the objective is met then the story moves forward. A hack and slash game could approach the scenes one way an investigative game completely differently but the game notes remain the same.

Locations as a method is slightly different. You would still have the plot hoot of the urchin but then we would describe the terraced house in detail. The harbour master’s office and warehouse would be described and mapped and the possibly the location of the coup (Throne room?), a guard room in case the characters are arrested and anywhere else characters may go.

So now it doesn’t matter which order the players visit these locations. They could go from the introduction to the hovel to the guard house, tak their way out of trouble then to the harbour or they could get descriptions of the thugs from the urchin, ask around on the street and then head to the warehouse that night, bypassing everything.

The numbering of scenes tends to imply a sequence of events and the accusation of railroading but in reality the scenes should cover all possible scenes, a director’s cut if you like. What happens at the table could be completely different.

Old style (1980s) D&D modules were very much location based. Those from the 1990s and 2000s were more scene based. Five years ago Scenes were certainly all the rage but I have seen Locations being touted as the new best thing in some very recent releases.

There is no intrinsic reason why Locations have to be dungeon crawls or why Scenes have to be railroad tracks.

If we think back to Octomancer. You could have that as a set of scenes, “In the Marshes”, “The Watcher in the Gatehouse”, “The Librarian says Shh!”, “Invitation to the Palace” and the showdown “Splish, Splash we were having a bash!” or we could just detail the marsh, the gatehouse, the library, palace and the cistern system and just let the GM manage everything.

So is there any advantage to one over the other?

I think if you are an improv style GM then scenes work well. As long as you have the objective and the few key facts from the summary to hand you can go completely off piste and yet guarantee the story moves forward by creating opportunities for the objective to be completed. If the objective is to impart a key piece of information but the archer nails the NPC in the first round before they utter a word then you just need to create a new way for that information to get into the players hands.

With locations it sometimes becomes obvious when you have gone off piste when suddenly the rich descriptions that are used in some locations can trail off as the GM no longer has the full details in front of them or the players just do not know what or where to go next.

The flip is that scenes can assume that an NPC is still alive in Scene 3 but the players killed them in Scene 1 or that the big showdown is meant to take place on the docks, at night in a raging storm but the players attack at dawn when the villain is on their way home.

Writing location adventures can take a very long time to details hundreds of rooms, taverns and crime scenes but then they never get used. The same can go for NPCs as well. If you put the NPC’s stats in with the location but the players meet them somewhere else then the GM has to page flip to have the right stats in the right place. If you put all the NPC stats in a single reference then the GM definitely has to page flip to run every single encounter.

So what do you think? Do you have any preferences? Does it vary with game style? Do Scenes work best for fantasy genres but locations best for modern day games?

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Naga, Naga, Naga!

This is the latest 50in50 adventure with one of Adrian’s brilliant battle maps of the central location. I was on form when I wrote this and even found the corresponding 5e monster, right down the the correct variant!

In Naga, Naga, Naga nagas have taken over a farm and killed the inhabitants. They are now preying on any who pass on the nearby road. The characters may be investigating the missing, camping nearby and get attacked or visit the farm itself and be lulled into a false sense of security.

There are lots of plays of playing this adventure. You can vary the numbers of Nagas, the location of the encounter or the tactics to change the challenge level.

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RPGaDay2018 Day 31: Share why you take part in RPGaDay

August is a bit of a dead zone for RPGs in general and the ICE forums in particular. I think there were something like 3 posts on the forums yesterday and they were pretty much ‘me to’ or ‘thankyou’s.

We [Rolemasterblog] are the ICE forums, ugly friend. If you cannot get a date with the ICE forums then people come here instead. So if the ICE forums go down [I really wish I hadn’t made that dating reference now) then our popularity leaps up and like now when no one is posting on the forums then people come here for their daily dose of Rolemaster.

So the prompted 31 posts in 31 days is a great way of giving the RM community something to read and hopefully react to. I know that most of the comments are from the stalwart followers but we had Voriig Kye comment on the post about Land of the Blind with a valuable contribution and a misguided comment from someone blaming me for breaking RMU. I have done many things but that you cannot lay at my door. I rather like RMU, just not the size rules but as with everything I will have a work around but the time I play. (Composite attack charts with all the size results built in go most of the way and dedicated combat tables for +1 and -1 sized weapon will complete the task).

If you read 10 blogs on the same day you would get 10 very different interpretations of each question. RM is by far my favourite fantasy game but I do like to dabble with other game systems some times. If I ran something SciFi right now then it would probably be HARP SF and if I did something modern day then it would be GhostOps. So mentioning other systems seems perfectly reasonable to me. I also think that most GMs would happily transplant rules or mechanics they like from one game system into RM. Why not, rpgs are great for customising and RM is such an easy system to modify.

On that point there was one discussion this month that has my imagination working. You all know that I am not a fan of Spell Law and realms of magic. I had also mentioned that I liked the Champions supers rpg. So there was a discussion about Hero System and Shadow World. So Champions uses points to buy super power type effects. So 5 points would buy you 1d6 of damage but those costs could be modified with advantages and disadvantages so if you were trying to model a fire attack then you could reduce the final costs by taking a disadvantage that it doesn’t work underwater. Champions/Hero System also had three ways of grouping ‘powers’. The first was a multipower where you had a pool of points and then defined slots that utilised that pool in different ways. You paid for the pool and then a smaller cost for each slot. Only one slot could be active at any one time so it was a good way to model one ‘thing’ being used different ways. So if I wanted to model a sword then I could have one slot as a killing attack to represent the edge of the blade, a second slot as a stunning attack to represent using the flat of the blade to subdue and I could have a slot that added to my defence to represent parrying.

The second grouping was called an Elemental control and that allowed you to group closely related (thematically) powers. You paid the full price for the first power and then all the others were at half price. Each could be used simultaneously if you wished but they had to be part of a conceptual whole. So if you had control of gravity, for example, you could bundle the ability to fly (antigravity), telekinesis (manipulation of gravity) and a protective force field (superdense gravity) all into the one elemental control.

There was a third grouping and that was the variable power pool. Here you paid for the pool of points but you could redefine how those points were used and shared between powers on a round by round basis. If I remember correctly there was a skill based roll required to redefine how the points were used. In a supers game for example Batman’s utility belt would be created as a variable power pool which is why it always contained exactly the right thing at the right time.

So if we imported hero system’s point system (say 1 RM Development Point gave 5 hero system character points) you could have each spell list defined as some combination of Multi power, Elemental Control and the 50th level spell would be the Variable Power Pool. So Sudden Light, Shockbolt, Lightning bolt, Corner Lightning and Following Lightning would all be slots in a multi power as they are all discrete. Light, Shade, Darkness etc would all be part of an Elemental Control. You wouldn’t need Light I, Light II etc. as these effects would be controlled by how many powerpoints you used to put into the power.

I could easily see how all the spell lists could be converted to Hero System powers. The advantage would be that all spells would be inherently balanced as they were built from a menu of effects that had already been priced for balance. The second advantage would be that there would be no concept of realms, magic is magic. If your magic only worked when you had an opportunity to pray to your deity then that would be a ‘disadvantage’ and it would make your magic cheaper to buy so you could buy more with your development points.

What is more is that new lists could be build easily as all the components are off the shelf components. Hero System has something called an Energy blast and it doesn’t care if that is fire, radiation, pure magic or lightning. The special effects are then either purely cosmetic or used to choose advantages and disadvantages. So you could use an advantage of a powerboost against metal armours as an advantage and a penalty against organic armours as a disadvantage on a lightning bolt.

For us the special effects would define the critical table. That would help tie the system back into Rolemaster so it still feels like RM and not like Hero System.

The more I think about this the more I think the hero system parts would have to be under the hood and not on display. RM has a bad enough reputation for being rules heavy and the version of Hero System that I have has about 250 pages of powers rules. Imagine adding 250 pages to Spell Law and then having all the lists on top of that! No, I think one could redefine all the lists as Hero System powers and resent them as completed things. What you would really gain is something as flexible as the HARP scalable spells with the flavour of RM lists. Rather than learning 1-10 and then 11-20 you could learn either the elemental control or the multipower or you could choose to put more DPs into either one to make the spells more powerful (effectively the same as granting the I, II, III… lord versions of the same spells). The top slot would then be the variable power pool. 

I think this idea has mileage and I would like to talk to anyone who has blended RM and Hero System in the past. Luckily for me the Hero Games forum looks nice and active. Incidentally I just did a quick search of their forum for rolemaster and it returned 60 results and more for Shadow World. So if I am lucky there could be a solution already out there. I will add this to my todo list!