The Rolemaster Blog

I am bringing together two threads here. The first is Gabe’s Lazy DMing and the second is a conversation I had with Marc about how he has house ruled the Patronage/Renown rules from One Ring in to RMu.

When Marc first mentioned Patronage he described it as a single figure, 0-6, that is used to represent the characters current standing with a particular NPC.… Read the rest

No plan survives contact with the players.

—Davena Oaks

After my latest session I opened up Michael Shea’s The Lazy DM to compare his advice to my emergent method of adventure generation—one that suits my current campaign, anyway. It’s from this book that I pulled the quote above, and, for the sentiment contained therein, at first Shea’s advice seemed like it would be of some use to me.… Read the rest

Welcome to another “Spin Cycle” blog post! If you aren’t familiar with my previous entries on re-purposing MERP products for Shadow World you can find my take on the Court of Ardor HERE, HERE and HERE.

As stated, this entry will look at the MERP adventure module “Thieves of Tharbad” and how the material could be spun into the SW Setting.… Read the rest

Thanks to Marc and his discord server I have had an opportunity to look into someone else’s RMu game.

Everything I run will of course be coloured by my own preference for play style. Marc was half joking when he said about me “You don’t don’t use any rules.” when we were discussing our GMing styles.… Read the rest

In his four histories of the tabletop rpg hobby, Shannon Apelcline claims that the industry moved, from the 70s through the 90s, roughly from D&D-centric to complicated and simulationist to emulationist, this last often with a specific intellectual property as its referent.… Read the rest

While it might be setting specific, I have always felt that most RPG systems ignore the importance of organizations for starting characters. In Rolemaster, chargen involves skills developed in adolescence and another set of skills in apprenticeship. There is a implied idea that the characters received some sort of systematic training to build the skills that establish their class or profession.… Read the rest

There are a couple of things I would like to write about this time.

The first is Marc’s Discord server. He has dropped the link on the ICE forums but that was a while ago so I thought I would repost it here.… Read the rest

I have been looking at the way that other games publishers deal with community content recently and at the same time at the way that they put adventures together.

7th Sea is the most Rolemaster-esque when it comes to community content.… Read the rest

I wanted to touch upon the subject of Resistance Rolls again, after a couple of discussion HERE & HERE and over at the FORUMS.

To start off, my “Deconstruction” articles are about stepping outside the box, and YOUR mental model built over 30+ years (based on the average age of the blog participants).… Read the rest