The Rolemaster Blog

Last week I was putting together the latest Rolemaster Fanzine. I had written one adventure and when I was looking back at it, the issue seemed a bit light, so I wrote another adventure dedicated to Siltoneous and Majyk, who suggested the monsters.

In the past twelve months, I believe I have written and published 20 adventures for the different versions of Rolemaster.

Zero Magic

I was thinking of doing some Zero-Magic adventures based upon the stories of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Although the stories hint at magic and witchcraft, there is no explicit magic in the stories.

Brutal Rolemaster criticals and no magical healing is a tough mix. That then begs the questions of would it work and would it be fun?

The question of viability comes down to if there is no way of healing characters beyond regular medieval healing, the first aid and second aid skills and maybe medicine and surgery. A mortal wound really would be a mortal wound.

Or would it?

Is this not the perfect place to implement FATE points. Spend a fate point to either re-roll a critical against you, or have the GM downgrade it to the next non-fatal critical to the same location. A bit like a RMu called shot in reverse.

I know there was a Robin Hood campaign set, from back in the Fantasy Hero days. I don’t have the book any more, but I know a man how has and I could borrow it if needs be [I still have his copy of Dark Space, but he doesn’t want it back].

As I remember, there was virtually no magic in the Robin Hood campaign book, which is how I would have it.

Healing herbs is something I am thinking about. Without them it reinforces how special the lack of magical healing is. With them, every PC will be buying herb lore and they will be trying bypass that element of the setting. I think that is a shame.

But, would this be fun? I think the magic ingredient is the FATE point. If you character is going to die through an arbitrary bad luck dice roll you are less likely to get invested in them and their adventures. On the other hand, if you had one or maybe two FATE points, where you would feel relatively safe when you had both, but the first time you used one you would be noticibly closer to living on the edge.

Use both your FATE points and I think you would feel positively vulnerable.

Big Magic

To me, it seems like if you are going to do a campaign of no magic, one should do something afterwards to compensate. To please the people who do like magic, powerful wizards and wonderfully evil witches.

Keeping it all in keeping, a campaign of Arthurian Legends would be the logical (to me at least) next game. Arthurian legend comes with built in magical weapons in Excalibur. Powerful spell casters with Morgana and Merlin, the mysticism of the lady of the lake and the enchanter Menw ap Tairgwaedd.

You have monsters such as the questing beast and the giant Ysbaddaden, and some classic foes in the Black, Red and Green knights.

It almost feels like these should be done Arthurian first, because that is closer to a classic fantasy game, but rich in legendary lore, and then run the Robin Hood campaign afterwards to continue the ideas of battling around England slaying foes of literary history.

Which Way To Choose?

I can see two ways of running this. The first is to have as much as possible, as authentic as possible. It would be extremely difficult to write them as drop-in ‘one-off’ adventures and encounters like we did for the first 50in50. these would need to be saved up and used as part of a new game set in 9th century Britain.

The second option is that only the GM knows that the characters are playing knights of the round table and members of Arthur’s court. What the characters see and hear is that of a local warrior king and his knights and retinue. The ‘real’ characters identities are a bit of a private joke for the GM.

I prefer the first option, but it would make the adventures less immediately useful.

The legends of King Arthur are called the Matters of Britain. They are one of the Matters, or great cycles, The others are The Matters of France and The Matters of Rome.

The Matters of France dealt with Charlemagne and his Paladins and The Matters of Rome dealt with Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar. You have to admit that a series of adventures covering several thousand years, [I am not putting a number on it because I will be wrong and Hurin will correct me 🙂 ], must sound tempting.

I would prefer option one, making the adventures part of an obvious Arthurian campaign, with the name characters and places such as Avalon and Camelot. A GM could always choose to rename and reposition the adventures into their own world. The real names do at least conjure the right images, in my opinion.

What do you all think?

Recently I have spent quite a lot of time hanging out on the Castles & Crusades discord server. The C&C crowd are really nice people and many of them have a strong affection for Rolemaster. I was chatting yesterday about virtual Gen Con and the sentiment was that they would jump into a Rolemaster game at the first time of asking if they could find one.

But what does this have to do with our 50in50 ‘take 2’ adventures?

What I would like to do is dual stat the adventures. We cannot go publishing very detailed RM stats, as they would break ICE’s copyrights but we can point people to book and page.

I would like to dual stat as many of these as I can to Rolemaster and C&C. Troll Lord Games, the publisher of C&C recently created 3rd Party Publisher guidelines, logos and badges.

If there is already goodwill between the C&C following and the much smaller RM following, they would seem to be natural bedfellows.

I can easily add the stats to Brian’s 25 as I know the system and I have already published for it.

Brian has an organised plan for his 25 and five of them are already written or outlined. I have done nothing!

At least some of these adventures will be ‘low magic’ or ‘no magic’. Adventures where playing a good old plain fighter, thief or rogue will be more than adequate.

It is possible that these will be low low level or entry-level, probably 1st to 5th. Even if you have a caster in the party, they will not be throwing people through walls or razing the battlefield at those levels.

I remember writing the first set of 25 and how much fun it was. I am quite looking forward to getting started with this again.

For those of you that are enjoying a holiday and long weekend despite the pandemic and social distancing, we wish you the best in these trying times! Due to the out of service status of the Rolemaster Forums, ICE is a bit of a “black box” right now, but nonetheless things still seem to be happening.

1. Conversation over at the Discord Servers covering ICE, RM and all their products and games. There seems to be 50 active members so that’s something.
2. Navigator RPG. Peter has published his Navigator game system and will be expanding into fantasy and other genres at some point. (correct me if I’m wrong Peter)
3. New “50 in 50”! So, while I still owe #50 from the last challenge, we are moving ahead with another 50 small adventures, game hooks, plot devices etc. I have mine already fleshed out, I’ll discuss in a sec.
4. Emer IV. The last redesign that will complete the continent seems to be moving forward with artwork. As I have mentioned before, while we all like new Amthor material, there is already a lifetime of content between Jaiman and Emer modules already published!
5. Belatedly, I finally got “The Lair of Ozymandius” out as part of my 50in50 contribution. I think it was only 2 years late!

Although I’ve had to shut down my businesses, staying at home didn’t end up being very productive for writing. Fortunately, now that things are loosening up I’ve been able to get a lot of material written that I’ll be releasing over the rest of the year. Not sure what I’m going to do about BASiL Mentalism with the forums down. My queue looks like this:

1. Edit of Priest-King. Just completed the first pass through with notes by Nicholas and now have to feel in a few areas that I left out.
2. #50 of the 50in50: The Tower of the Elephant, which is my own interpretation of the famous Conan story.
3. New 50in50. For this new challenge, I’ve decided to do 5 adventure hooks for 5 different categories: The Weapons, The Tombs, The Towers, The Heists and The Magicians. I’ve got 5 mostly fleshed out, so once we start publishing these won’t fall behind (hopefully)
4. Chapters 3-5 of Legends of Shadow World. #3 is mostly complete and I have to polish up #4 and #5 which are more basic battle arenas.
5. SW Players Channeling Guide. I consolidated all of my various Shadow World religions, spell lists and errata into a book with a focus on player use.
6. Book of the Pales. I’ve been picking away at this, but got a burst of work done so I can see the end of it. sort of.

If you want to see any of my product, you can see it here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?author=Brian%20Hanson

If you like something, rate it! Thanks to everyone who emails or messages me.

It was sad news this week, that GenCon has been cancelled. I saw someone on Discord (Marc maybe?) saying that it should be pushed back to October rather than cancelled but that isn’t so easy. These convention halls do not lie empty all year. Every week there is someone running something, and right now I guess everyone with something booked is worrying about whether their event will go ahead. I only looked as far ahead as mid-November but there was no space for a GenCon 2020 in the list.

The real concern about GenCon was that it was going to be the first outing for RMu, in the wild. There is going to be a virtual GenCon but that will not have the same impact as teh in-person event.

It is encouraging that RMu is far enough along to be able to play it as an organised play. For that we are thankful.

Adventures!

Brian has suggested that we write another set of 50-in-50 adventures this year. I think the three of us are up for it and this time we want to expand on last time and build in more game stats, maps and battle mats.

I am quite excited about this. They are a lot of work, coming up with an adventure for every week, for 25 weeks, but they are also great fun to do.

One of the best bits is of course that it keeps Rolemaster on the front page of DriveThruRPG for the best part of a year, even if it is just on the “Newest” list.

I have a hankering to write some viking-esque adventures. You may well see them cropping up in the next round of 50-in-50.

This month’s Director’s Briefing suggested that there could be special printed materials for the organised play games at GenCon, should the con go ahead.

I have been lurking on the fringes of many discord servers and the feeling is probably 50/50 that it won’t happen and equally 50/50 as to whether people will attend even if it does run.

I saw the build up to GaryCon and right now the build up to Con of Champions [CoC].

CoC is significant, Tabletop.events who is organising it provides all the software and support for many smaller cons and they are in trouble. CoC is a fund raising initiative to keep the company alive.

https://tabletop.events/conventions/con-of-champions

GenCon, is 80 days away. Is that a long time in pandemic terms? It is my guess that Americans will be free to go to a mass gathering in 80 day’s time, but there will be no exhibitors or visitors from Europe.

Indiana’s roadmap for reopening the state economy only extends to July 4th but it doesn’t seem to me that you could run a con under those guidelines.

https://backontrack.in.gov/files/BackOnTrack-IN_WhatsOpen-Closed-stage5.pdf

But the Good News Is…

The very idea that there could be something of RMu that is ready to ‘show and tell’ at a major con is great news. We have all been wildly speculating and my bet was for an RMu GMs screen. It would give the Con GMs all the updated tables in one place, and the outside is a great place to show off branding and art.

You can get a GM four-fold GM screen with full-colour inserts printed and under $30, including a profit margin if you put them on sale!

My mind is ever commercial. If I am right and the screen is the ‘special thing’ then I can see diehard RMu fans clamouring to get them. That on its own could start the RMu product line and feed funds into finishing the books.

Another interesting bit of positive news is that there have been so many posts on this blog since the lockdown has been going on that I have struggled to find a day when someone else hasn’t already posted something.

A thriving and active community is a good thing!

Last week I highlighted the ICE RPG discord server. At the time of writing it had 51 users. It now has 64. I am in the UK and I am used to discord being all tumbleweed and silence before midday and America wakes up. Even now there are 20 people online.

Yesterday, Terry Amthor joined the server!

If you have any time to kill, get on to discord and give it a try.

https://discord.gg/YBrepAB

I’m not sure that’s a good title for this blog post, but I’m writing this “on the run” but look at that picture. To me, that could have been my roleplaying group back in the early 80’s. How about you? If that seems familiar it’s because A LOT of Rolemaster players are in their 40’s and 50’s now.

First, I should say it’s fantastic that we can enjoy the same game we have played for 30+ years or have rediscovered RPG’s later in life with friends and family. However, my second thought is that everyone I’m seeing on the RM Forums (out of commission right now), RolemasterBlog.com and the new Discord server are all around my age. Where are the new young Rolemaster players–like in that photo? We know that RPG market is growing…

Before this starts off like a lot of our blog posts with critiques of ICE let me say this. I.C.E. is a “virtual company” with no real employees or hard assets. They are leveraging their existing IP and putting out a few new products through a mostly volunteer basis. I have no expectation that they ramp up into another serious production/print/gaming company.

The issue that I want to raise is about authorship. Who will be writing new products for I.C.E. in the future? My brother Matt developed the SW Players Guide, built the Nomikos Library resource, contributed to most of the ICE material published in the early 2000’s and was on the ground floor for RMU development, but he’s mostly moved on to other endeavors. It seems like Nicholas and perhaps one other person does the bulk of the writing for HARP. RMU is being shepherded by a small volunteer group of 2-3 people and Terry is the sole author for Shadow World. While I’m not a published ICE author, I do write quite a bit of content–but I’m 50. I can see myself writing stuff for another 10 years, but that’s not that long. RMU and Priest-King have both been in development for 10 years and that doesn’t seem that long ago. Terry is 60. He has a impressive publishing resume, but how long will he be inspired to write? Nicholas has a busy and demanding career; how much work can he realistically do?

Let’s tie the two together. I.C.E. was founded by young people in college, most in their early 20’s. The growth in RPG players is: overseas, youth and females. Does I.C.E. now need to recruit new, relevant writers to appeal to today’s player demographics? What happens in just the next decade as we all enter our 60’s and even 70’s? Will our writing be relevant or we just existing for the small core of die hards our own age? Who takes over after that? Does ICE sell it’s catalog to a young upstart company or established gaming entity?

If you want to get your daily dose of Rolemaster, HARP, or RMu, there is now a well supported discord server.

Follow this link https://discord.gg/YBrepAB And it will take you straight there. If you haven’t used discord it is pretty much the IRC, Internet Relay Chat, of the 90s brought up to date.

There are even voice chat games going on.

When I checked this morning, there were 50+ members and even in my timezone there were 15 online.

We cannot magic the forums back up, but between the blog and the discord we can keep the community together and active!

Another cloudy day of stay-at-home quarantining, so I thought I would throw this out to our faithful blog readers! Please respond in comments by #, answer as few or many as you would like.

1. Favorite magic item. Do you have a favorite item found in a RM book or module or something you made up yourself?
2. Best 1-5th lvl spell for a non-spelluser to have. What single low level RM spell would be the most useful to a non-spell user?
3. Favorite spell. What is your favorite RM spell. Why?
4. Favorite weapon. Most of my players seem to make weapon choices based on the attack chart and/or how common it might be as a magical item. However, weapons can be a great component of a character build. Putting aside efficacy, what RM weapon is the coolest?
5. What is the best adventure module you’ve played using the RM rules. It doesn’t have to be a ICE product.
6. Favorite profession. Why?
7. Favorite setting. Do you have one or do you just run adventures without a setting?
8. Favorite Shadow World NPC. If you are familiar with SW, do you have a favorite?
9. Coolest skill. Yes, perception might be the overall utility skill, but what skill (from any RM edition) do you think is the coolest?
10. Best non-cover artwork. We’ve discussed cover art quite a bit in this blog and elsewhere, but interior art is also important in providing tone and atmosphere. Do you have a favorite piece of interior art found in an ICE product?

While the purpose of by “spin cycle” blog articles is to re-purpose MERP and other modules for use in Shadow World, Assassins of Dol Amroth (AoDA) is an excellent module for quick, easy to run adventures in any setting.

Cover Art. First, the cover is another great Angus McBride piece, showing a female assassin ready to ambush a shadowy mounted figure. Is she the hunter or the prey? There are small details like the soft boot covers for stealth, the gargoyle broach and the color patterns on the inner cloak (is it reversible?) that add a lot of depth to the scene.

Scope. Rather than a hybrid regional overview with adventures, “AoDA” is a simple product comprised of 3 adventures: Murder on the Docks, A Home be the Sea and The Hill of Shades. There are 18 pre-set PC’s; 6 for each adventure with stats and descriptions. The professions are basic MERP: Warrior, Scout, Thief, Ranger, Animist, Bard and Mage that could easily be adapted back to RoleMaster.

Adventure 1: Murder on the Docks. This is a short, simple adventure, pitting the group against a formidable assassin in a run down warehouse. Reading it through the first time, some things weren’t made clear and there wasn’t a clear segue into the next adventure, but it did keep the theme of “Assassins”! Total of 6 pages with artwork, most of it dealing withe warehouse layout. I think it’s good for a short gaming session.

Adventure 2: A Home by the Sea. In a run down manor, the PC’s will encounter another group of Assassins. Again, this is really a self contained adventure that could be played in a single session. Of the eight pages, most of it are lengthy room descriptions for the manor layout. This was true for Adventure 1’s warehouse descriptions. Kudos to the author–many MERP modules had only the briefest descriptions for rooms.

Adventure 3: The Hill of Shades. The denouement of the module is the players confrontation with the Assassins guild in their secret hideout. Again, these are straight foward single session adventures, but easy to use and great drop in for a campaign to build player experience.

Overall, this product is more a generalized adventure series than a true Middle Earth product, but it’s fun and basic. Artwork is generic and most has little to do with the content and the layouts and maps are about as weak as you’ll see in any ICE product. However, if you need some filler material or want some challenges regarding assassins then this could easily work. For Shadow World, this is a great drop for virtually any city.