RMU and it’s implied setting.

[Disclaimer. I haven’t finished reading the RMU Core book and haven’t even started on Spell Law or Treasure Law, but I wanted to start the discussion and/or provoke some thought!]

Because RMU Creature Law has not been published yet, this post may be a a bit premature. We’ve blogged a lot about the relationship between game rules and the associated setting; mostly the “gap” between Rolemaster and Shadow World. Now that RMU is quickly becoming whole and fully formed I was wondering what the rules are implying to you about a setting? Professions, races, spells and now alchemy rules all inter-relate and drive a concept about a setting. To me, clearly it’s not Shadow World but neither is it a generic quasi medieval, European setting nor a Gygaxian ecosystem. We’ve always argued that a ruleset should have strong supporting adventure material. Maybe just adventures in the beginning, but ideally a world setting that matches the metaphysics of the magic system, a cultural history to support the races and economy, and a physical framework for adventuring. To me, RMU is not a dungeon delving system. But the rules should inspire the setting and the setting should support the rules…

My first setting impression that RMU invokes is a bit of a steampunk setting. Perhaps it’s the dabbler or the style of Treasure Companion that feels more tech than magic. I’m reminded of the the Ketty Jay setting: flying ships, a construct/golem, daemonist, ancient civilizations, magic and firearms.

I’ve included a few links to past posts, but I’m very interested in readers thoughts!!

The Next Generation

Peter’s newest post (welcome back Peter!) had me thinking of a recent opportunity that has arisen. My lifelong friend, and part of our gaming group in the 80’s, asked if I would be interested in DMing a game for his son and friends. These are kids in their early twenties, and are just casual gamers that played around with D&D the last few years.

I’m a bit rusty, my regular game group has slowly dissolved since COVID and for the last 35 years I’ve been almost exclusively a Rolemaster/Shadow World players barring a brief run of Pathfinder that Matt ran 10 years ago. I’d like to give it a try, but it would likely be a 1-shot “all-nighter” since they don’t live in commuting distance.

I’m left with a few decisions:

  1. Run a D&D game for them. Downside: The last time I played it was 1st ed., so I would need quite a bit of review and learning. Upside: I suspect it’s the ruleset they are most familiar and I’m sure I could find a ton of game material to choose from.
  2. Introduce them to Rolemaster. They would have to be open to it, but this would be the easiest for me. Upside: Tons of experience, I have lots of material. Downside: I wouldn’t want to bore/overwhelm them with chargen, but, that is part of the process in learning the character a game.

If I had my preference, I’d run them through my “Legends of Shadow World“. It was designed to be “tourney style” and playable in 4-6 hours. I think it’s dynamic material and I already have pre-gen characters for them to use. There is a “but”. It’s a 50th level adventure that leans into Shadow World quite a bit. So these new players would need to get their heads wrapped around skills, abilities and spells of a 50th level character and would need some deep background on SW given who their characters are.

As I get older, I’m more focused on collaborative story telling and setting material and less concerned about rules. With my SWARM ruleset, these characters have less skills and far less spells than core RM rules allow, so it’s not completely overwhelming. The style of play at 50th level is not that different than most any other level (barring 1st to 5th) and the larger than life personalities lend itself to more of a Superhero game style.

What do you think? Can relatively unexperienced D&D players handle 50th level Rolemaster adventure?

#RPGaDAY2017 19th, 20th and 21st

I am sure that bulk answering these questions twice a week completely misses the point of #RPGaDAY but to be honest I don’t care.

Yesterday Sparta commented on a post I wrote at the beginning of July. The significance of that is that we are obviously reaching new people and they are looking at what we are writing. This is a good thing. I have no idea but it is entirely possible Sparta and others found the blog through the #RPGaDAY hashtag.

Insidentally one of the most most common good search phrases that brings people to the blog is [shadow world amthor]. The busiest day so far this month was the day that Brian mentioned the fanzine on the RM Forums!

Anyway, I digress.

19th Which RPG features the best writing?

This is a really subjective question. What is best writing anyway? The D&D Basic box set (red cover) that got me started had a life long impact on me so that must have been pretty good I would say.

I am actually going to put forward Champions as my answer though for this question. That was a brilliant system and the rulebook was a pleasure to read. It also changed the way I thought about RPGs and character generation forever.

20th What is the best source of out of print RPGs.

The only sites I have ever looked at for these are ebay and amazon marketplace. I guess the point of this question is that if you scanned twitter for the answer to this question then you are going to find a few gems of sites that are little known but will worth knowing about.

I bet scribt has a load of old RPGs uploaded as illegal copies, you seem to be able to find just about anything on there!

21st Which RPG does the most with the least words?

I assume they do not mean shortest rule set. I know there are tons of one page ‘rulebooks’ out there. I am going to answer with CarWars again. We used to role play it ans I think the game has a single character stat for your life which was 3 if you were healthy and maybe three skills driving, combat and mechanic if I remember rightly. So your entire character sheet was 4 words long and 4 numbers. The vehicle character sheet was a box with maybe 6 sets of initials, MG for machine gun, RR for recoiless rifle, PR for puncture resistant tyres and so on. It has to be the game with the least vocabulary of them all!

That was a brilliant game and we spent months playing a CW campaign with just these couple of skills. The next game I played after that was champions and the game after that was RM2. Champions and RM2 were all about skills (and powers), that is what what defined your character, that is what allowed you to craft exactly the character you wanted to play. But that was the impression I got with just Character Law and shortly afterwards Companion I. So at that point there were maybe 45 skills. Over the years we added every companion and all the Laws but with 200 skills the characters were no more unique. In fact I think the most skills that were added the more similar the characters became. Some of the skills became essentials such as tumble attack and tumble evade, two weapon combo and iai strike, at least in our games. The same was true of herb lore and sense ambush.

I suspect that that experience of playing CW with the 3 word (4 words if you include the characters name) character sheets may have stayed with me and gone some way towards inspiring my super light RM variant. You never know.

Five Days until next Game Session plus traps and puzzles

Next weekend I will be running my next face to face game session. I have read over the game notes and the adventure module. I have just decided that the main trap/puzzle that the players have to solve I don’t like.

Lots of these old D&D modules have magical traps and puzzles in them which seemed fine when I was 14years old but now when I look at them I just don’t like them. Dare I say they are a bit silly? So I need to come up with my own replacement puzzle (in this case it performs as a lock to get deeper into a magicians tomb) that I feel comfortable with and gives a more serious tone to the adventure.

For this I think I want to construct something based around an astrolabe. I thought I was on a winner and being original until I did a Google images search and the top results were all for the Game of Thrones astrolabe. I read the books a few years ago and the idea must have stuck. What I did discover was that an astrolabe was not actually what I was looking for. What I was imagining was actually an Orrery.

An Orrery

Now, an Orrery is a great basis for a puzzle and seeing as the dead dude in the story was actually an alchemist the creation of a magical orrery is entirely consistant with the story and the world.

I am intentionally not giving my players any permenant magical items at the moment just scrolls, potions and single use items. One reason being that in a previous campaign I played in the game became completely overshadowed by the magic items the characters carried. To some extent it became that we were playing the equipment list not the characters. The other reason is that single use items force the characters to make choices. The item is used now or later but it cannot be used both ways. The only items that have are healing, the most powerful of which is a scroll of life giving, a single use bring a dead character back option. I like that one because it gives me the option of killing a character and knowing that it wil not be final.

Anyway back to the Alchemist’s tomb. I cannot tell you the actually trap/puzzle I intend to use as I am sure my players read the blog. What I have said here is not a spoiler for them as they have already know to expect something and its size and positioning will tell them exctly what it is when they see it.

Going right back to the beginning I have noticed now that in every D&D module I have converted over to Rolemaster I have removed either traps I think are immature or monsters that I simply cannot believe could have evolved or anyone would have created. The very first of which was the Gelatinous Cube. In the first game I ran for my players when they came upon a trap their first reaction was that “Oh this is a D&D adventure it wil be filled with silly traps.” It also brought out anecdotes about dungeons that had been ‘abandoned for centuries’ with corridors filled with locked doors behind which were two hobgoblins. How did they get there? Who fed them for the past 200 years? What were they waiting for? Needless to say I very quickly scanned through the adventure for any such room or other silly traps and I didn’t find any, thankfully.

Assuming we all started roleplaying with D&D back in the 70s and 80s we must have been much more accepting then or is it that I am now much more intolerant?

Rolemaster and Faerun

As a setting Faerûn can be a bit of a marmite setting. The diehard Gygax followers have never accepted it. Greyhawk adherents never needed it and it seems that with every new edition of D&D they feel the need to reinvent it. So why bother with Rolemaster and Faerûn?

I will not deny that Faerûn is not perfect. The original (grey box) edition barely sketched out the world as a setting for half a dozen modules and we were kind of teased into it by Elminster articles in Dragon magazine. After then there were so many seismic shifts that it is hard to keep track of it, gods dying, Mongolian hordes and volcanic eruptions not withstanding. Another criticism leveled at the Forgotten Realms setting is the über powerfull NPCs such as Elminster and Drizzt Do’Urden.

I, like many other roleplayers, cut my teeth in the D&D world, Greyhawk in my case, but then moved on to other games and other worlds. Last year I started to plan a new campaign after not GMing for a few years and I offered my players the option of a D&D game just for old times sake and I was surprised at the negative reaction. Despite that the D&D game had moved on generations since we last played no one was interested. We have always been dedicated Rolemaster players and that is what they wanted.

Setting a rolemaster game in Faerûn is pretty easy. Creatures and Treasures (I, II and III) cover 90% of all the creatures you will ever need. There are very simple rules included in C&T I to convert any that are not there over to Rolemaster and you are 50% of the way there. The other 50% is the NPCs.

There are numerous excel based spreadsheet type character sheets to help speed up character creation and my favourite piece of software (Rolemaster Charactder Utility) makes creating a middle to high level character the an hours work. This is where you can decide if you want and all powerful Elminster or not.

If you have a party of experienced D&D players then having a go at Rolemaster, even with a fairly simple adventure will be an eye opener (in a good way I hope)!

I am a RM2/RMC (Rolemaster 2nd Edition and Rolemaster Classic) player but there are other flavours available including a freebie 3000L_HarpLite (High Adventure RolePlaying) which has everything you need to get playing.

Why not give it a go?