I kind of feel like a bit of a stranger on this blog these days. I haven’t posted it so long I almost feel like I should introduce myself, but I won’t go that far.

My big problem is that my group will not move over to RMU, and although we continue to play RMC, we have our rules down to a pretty solid base for us, so it doesn’t really generate may questions, and it is those questions that inspire the best blog poists as we explore possible answers.

I have one thing that I have been thinking about recently, and I thought it could be of interest, and that is money.

The issue has come up twice in two concurrently running games. One is my RMC game, and the other is a Traveller campaign I am playing in.

Rolemaster

In my RMC compaign I only have two players, and both are playing fighters. There was a third player playing a rogue, but they dropped out when the game started to class with their local wargaming club, and wargaming was more their thing than roleplaying. The rogue has stayed with the party as an NPC, just incase the player ever comes back, but it looks unlikely and I would not go out of my way to save the NPC if something bad befell them.

There is also an NPC Channeling Healer. This healer is a centaur and weighs something like 900 lbs. This is not by accident. I gave the players a previous NPC healer, and one of the players stuck to the healer like glue. They became incredibly risk-averse and would avoid anything vaguely dangerous if the healer was not with them. That healer died in an ambush. They went with out a healer for a while, but RM combat with no magic and no healing is tough. There are three plotlines running through this campaign which is essentially a sandbox, all three plots are slowly advancing with or without the players involvement. They started exploring one thread and this centaur healer was supposed to be a great source of lore to explain some of the threats the team could face, but within minutes of meeting the healer, the team decided on their own that they didn’t want to go any further down that route and went off looking for more adventure elsewhere and they never posed any of the questions that the NPC could have answered.

A couple of adventures later, the team were delving into a strange underground dwarven temple complex. These dwarves were bleeding demons of their blood, and then drinking it to gain supernatural powers, but unfortunately they had a tendency to explode. The flasks of blood would explode if dropped, but a dwarf that took a bad critical would also explode. They tended to go very red in the face first and then boom! Essentially, any critical that delivered 3 or more rounds of stun triggered an explosion which I resolved on the Fireball critical table. This delve remains one of the best remembered sessions of the campaign so far.

Much of the temple could only be reached by rappelling down from floors above, which meant that their centaur healer could not come with them.

At that point I decided that I was going to give the characters some solid gold bars as treasure. These are the great big bars that you see in hollywood heist movies.

These are the kind of bars that people struggle to give you change for.

The characters let the treasure be seen by some farm workers as they were coming out of the temple, and rumours soon spread.

When they got to the next town, the mayor would not allow them in unless the gold was locked away in the town’s strongroom. That much gold could destabilise the economy. They could have it back when they left, and a banker in the town would honour drafts drawn against it.

So the team have had this store of gold and have used it to buy magical herbs which has then given them the ability to self heal even when away from their healer. Everything is good, and the team have kind of lost track of how expensive herbs can be and the rate at which they are spending their fortune. They had 48,000gp originally, and are now down to less than 3,000gp. There are some herbs, especially in the lifegiving/keeping area that they could no longer afford, and the rate they go through simple concussion healing and stun relief herbs burns hundreds of gold pieces each battle, or not far off that.

In this case, I was dubious about giving such a huge treasure, but I knew what I hoped to achieve, and it has done its job. It is nearly spent, but in the intervening time, they have leveled up and gotten tougher, and their healer has leveled up to 8th level and is more capable. The PCs are not 7th level.

I don’t think I would do it again in this game, but it certainly worked because the town was a major trading post so herbs from many biomes were available so they had money to spend and things to spend it on.

Traveller

We recently started playing Mongoose Traveller 2e. One of the first games our group started playing together back in the 80s was classic traveller so this brought back some fond memories. I have played many of the traveller editions, all except d20 traveller I think. I also play Cepheus System and have just picked up FTL Nomad, but haven’t read it yet.

Our GM is both roleplayer and wargamer, and tends toward being a min/max power gamer when playing.

Our team was lucky enough to get a Scout Ship as a mustering out benefit. This is a pretty basic but functional spaceship loaned to the character on the premise that the Scout Service will ask for favours in return, typically ‘off book’ missions they cannot do with serving scouts, or missions that need a quick response and their are no active scouts in the area but the players are close by. The scout ship in the book has no guns. It has an empty turret so that guns can be added, but as about the cheapest laser costs something like half a million credits and a typical mission reward is suggested to be Cr.10k, you can imagine that arming a ship is a major investment. Exceopt that our GM wants to be able to run space battles because he is a keen wargamer, so he gives us a beam laser (the most basic weapon) for free.

We do a couple of missions, the first one a bought adventure and the second was homebrewed. The made a success of the first one, but we got nearly wiped out partway into the second one because we were completely unprepared for fighting military robots, and that is what caught us by surprise. We escaped from that. All but one of the team members are hospitalised, and we need a new plan (which is better than needing new characters). Our patron suggests that he needed some supplies bought in from a different planet, we could do that supply run, and maybe some speculative trade along the way, and we could pick up some military grade weapons and armour and then both better informed, armed and armoured we could finish his mission. It sounded good so off we went.

Of course we run into pirates, and this is the GMs first chance to run a space combat and we absolutely wipe them out. The traveller ship design rules are overly balanced in my opinion. It is a case of the more money you spend the better the ship is likely to be in every way. If the values are near identical then the mass of the ship is the next most important factor as bigger ships can absorb more hull damage than smaller ships. If the price tag and the tonnage are comparable, then the number of ships is the next biggest factor. The number of guns a ship can mount is limited by its tonnage, at a rate of one turret for every 100 tons of mass. Small craft like fighters do not obey that rule and can mount one weapon regardless of their hull displacement. So a 100 ton scout has 1 hardpoint but three 5 ton fighters would be able to carry three guns. Our first fight was our MCr40, 100-ton scout ship vs three small craft totallying MCr25, 25 tons spread between all three ships. It was of couse no contest, and that may have been intentional. It was a case of one hit/one kill against the small craft, whereas they struggled hit us, and if they did out armoured ship absorbed most of the damage.

And then the money trouble slipped into the game. The salvage on those three ships came to about 5 million credits.

Just for comparison, the best armour in the books costs less than half a million, and the best weapons are probably less than Cr100k. You could kit a character out in quite exceptional gear, some of the best weapons and armour, and all the best supportive tech, for under quarter of a million if you just ignored the restricted stuff like battle dress or powered armour and personal fusion weapons.

We suddenly had nearly the best of everything. In Traveller, your gear is incredibly important. It can take you four years to learn a skill to +1, but the right computer program can give you a skill of +2 instantly.

So geared up to our ears, we went back down into our enemy military bunker to complete our mission, and despite them knowing we were coming we wiped the floor with the place and I am not sure anyone took any damage at all until the big boss fight at the end.

From there, we are so over tough that the GM has to send super-equipped opponents against us, which means their gear is worth more when we sell it. At its height, our fortune peaked at about MCr.75.

You can just see the GM struggling to find ways to take money off us, or find ways of neutralising our technological advantage, fortunately traveller gives each work a law level and tech level which restricts what gear we can carry, but even then, we have the best of the best of what is legal. We are simply too rich. I also think that it all points back to giving us that free laser in the spaceship right in the beginning. Without the gun, we would have had to run from the space battle or try and board and fight, but we could only have boarded one of the ships because the other two were fighters. Everything we could have gained from the encounter shrinks once you take away that ship’s gun.

This is not a systemic problem with traveller. None of the starting spaceships that characters can get are armed as per the rules, The odds are against a character having a ship at all. Teams without a ship have to buy passage when they move from world to world and buying passage depends on what they can afford and what is available. The cheapest travel only comes with a 10kg luggage allowance and that is going to strip away an awful lot of excess equipment if the team have little choice but take that option.

This is a case of an overly generous GM without a clear grasp of the impact of having too much money does to a game. No one wants to be a stingy GM where the rewards are no reward at all, but going too far the other way can be an equally damaging experience, and harder to fix.

With Terry’s unfortunate passing we are left with 2 basic dilemmas: understanding Terry’s thoughts and intents with material he had written and published, and guidance, ideas and rules for any new material that might be published. We will never have any new “Ask Andraax” articles or threads where Terry can answer player and SW user questions, clarify his material or adjudicate any conflicts in the material. So how can we move forward with “WWTS”? Obviously we can rely on what has been written: forum posts, interviews, comments and of course all of his original Shadow World material. But how should we utilize these resources?

One guideline that we can refer to is the concept of Orginialism. This is a term used in American law that guides the view of legal and constitutional interpretation using the context of the founding authors when they wrote it. The same rough idea can be used when viewing the written works of Terry as it relates to Shadow World. Terry was pretty clear about some of his greatest influences: anime, Star Trek, Dune, art, architecture and his experiences travelling overseas (Italy specifically). There is also the thought line that runs simultaneously through the development of the Loremaster series and the early MERP modules. His SW books, which could vary in tonality, was still a consistent work product. Each new book built upon the last without significant retcons needed. This is not simply about “Canon”, but about applying Terry’s ethos, influences and aesthetic style when reviewing new work.

This is a subject I’m going to write more about in lieu of possible new SW material, adaption of RMU for SW and even to influence the thought process around Shadow World development. To be clear, SW Originialism only relies on Canon material for guidance and interpretation. This is not to say that SW adjacent material: Sea Law, Races & Cultures, or even non Terry SW modules are useless. Most are solid products, useable in play and can add to the SW body of work. But that material wasn’t imagined, inspired or specifically included by Terry even if he had some level of approval or editorial control.

While there will be different opinions, styles of play and inclinations among SW users, I certainly think that volume of books that Terry wrote over the years provides enough material to make informed decisions about new material.

I started this blog ten years ago (7th November 2014). The question that kicked it all off was “Where is all the playable material?” from someone who pointed at all the supporting material posted on blogs for many game systems. People sharing adventures, or just adventure seeds, and homebrew content.

When I started, I thought RMU was just around the corner, and I still hope that they will publish the last of the core rules within the next year.

I have mostly dropped off the blog for the last couple of years. Partly, it was RMU frustrations. My group won’t play RMU because it isn’t finished. There are no monsters; it is just the core rules and none of the options they are used to. It isn’t similar enough to the game they grew up with. They don’t want to learn a new version, and characters feel underpowered. It wasn’t fun. That is quite a basket of grumbles. Getting them to give up RM2 and move the RMC was hard enough, which is ostensibly the same game.

Over the past ten years, there have been times when I have doubted that RMU will ever be finished. That fear kicked off one of my own projects, now called BME or Bare Metal Edition.

For me, the big problem remains, where is the playable material? Who is writing adventures for RMU?

My experience in RPG publishing both as an indie publisher, as an art director for Grim & Perilous Studios, and doing freelance work, has shown me that none of the big publishers can make adventures pay. Wizards of the Coast don’t produce modules like most of us grew up with. They produce one or maybe two substantial adventure paths each year and focus all their marketing power on just one or two books to get the sales volume to make them pay.

Many bigger publishers have community content programs. The idea is that we, the fans, create the adventures using their intellectual property. The publisher takes 10%- 20% of the cover price, the fan gets 50%- 60%, and the rest goes to DriveThruRPG/Roll20, who runs the stores. This model worked for a short while. Most of the community content programs are now effectively dead in the water. A handful still function. The flaw in the model is that the same volumes are so low that the publisher’s 10%-20% take did not cover the expense of them having someone manage the program and promoting the titles. No promotion -> No sales -> No Income -> No promotion. A death spiral.

For the last five years, DriveThruRPG/Roll20 has said that there will be no more community content programs except for the ones where they are already in talks with the publisher. More have shut down than have been created in that time, and as far as I can tell, there is only one more in the pipeline.

Even if Colin at ICE had the time to promote a CCP, ICE would probably not be able to set one up. Too late to the party.

ICE cannot afford to write adventures that won’t make money. Their only option is to ask us to write adventures and then offer us a royalty payment. That means we take all the risks, writing stuff that gets binned if Nicholas doesn’t like it. Nicholas is one man; he cannot do everything and has a day job. There are stories I know to be true of works that have been written, submitted, accepted, and shelved for years. That is no way to treat your fan base trying to help the game survive.

So where are the adventures going to come from?

When I started the fanzine, I wanted that to have at least an adventure a month, but that was a struggle. When RMU started to appear as books I hoped my players would adopt it, but that didn’t happen. It is hard to write adventures when your players won’t play the game.

The fanzine is not dead; it is just sleeping.

This brings me to BME, Bare Metal Edition. These are Rolemaster retro-clones. I have taken open-game content and a bare-bones set of Rolemaster-style rules and done translations. Slowly but steadily, I am crawling through the different genres. So far, we have Sci-Fi/Space Opera, Fantasy, Cthulhu, Zorro, and WWII. Every game is cross-compatible, so you can mix and match elements from each game.

The core concept in BME is openness. Anyone can write for it, publish adventures for it, or create supplemental material. Write an adventure and sell it, and you get to keep all the money. I typically produce two iterations of the game each year: one in the Spring and one in the Fall.

The other thing I am building for it is conversion rules. The first set is conversion tools from Traveller to the Sci-Fi game. I already have some Traveller adventures and am bringing on a new writer who wants to write for Traveller and Cepheus Deluxe. Those adventures can then be ported to BME.

I just really wish that ICE could embrace the concept of openness. Would I rather be creating for Rolemaster? Do I think other people would want to write for the game? Would people want to take the core of RMU to work up a Space Master Unified? Yes to all of the above is my guess.

You don’t have to give away all your intellectual property. ICE could create a document that contains just the core of the system. Just enough to create a viable NPC, a selection of spells (like the ones that Rolemaster borrowed from D&D in the first place) and some monsters, and then make that single document Creative Commons Attribution. Bolt on an RMU-compatible logo, and I would nearly guarantee that we would see RMU-compatible adventures appearing within weeks. With that in place, the popularity of RMU would increase, and I would expect the sales of all the core books to uptick along with it.

Unfortunately, Nicholas does not do openness. Which is his prerogative; he owns the IP.