The Mirror Tells Her Lies

Way back last year sometime I did a direct comparison between RMu, RMSS, RMc/RM2 starting PCs and those of other d100 systems like vsDarkmaster and BRP.

In all cases the starting skill bonuses were within a handful of percentage points of each other. To all intents and purposes you could play any adventure from any game system using any rule system and things would work with little or no changes. When I say little change it would be things like Zweihander has no #hits or hit points so you would have to fill in the blanks or you would need to know what AT to assign to the actual armour descriptions.

This only works with starting characters. As characters level up or advance they diverge rapidly. Zwei characters barely change for great blocks of time, BRP/OpenQuest/Runequest has characters improving across the board by by a few percent at a time and Rolemaster has stepped progression with each level but that could be two ranks plus profession bonuses. In the early levels RMu’s DB inflation has not really kicked in either.

By sixth level RM characters are toting around core skills over 100 including skill, stat, profession and some minor power items. Many d100 games max out at 100 so never break that ceiling.

Seeing as almost noone is writing adventures for Rolemaster AND Runequest conversion rules were published in the back of the RM2 C&T books we can mine Runequest/OpenQuest/BRP adventures for modules, cool locations, NPCs and so on. On DTRPG there are nearly 250 books in the RQ/BRP/OpenQuest categories.

What prompted this post was an adventure I saw posted on Kickstarter. It is the book named in the title of this post The Mirror Tells Her Lies. What made it stick out was this bit of the description…

“The Mirror Tells Her Lies” takes full advantage of this quality. It is a take on the moral quandaries faced by PCs, in a place where all the dark places of their souls will be used against them. It is a short adventure, playable in one to two sessions, designed for experienced characters and players who love roleplaying their characters as opposed to hacking away at everything they see!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mhpress/the-mirror-tells-her-lies

Nearly all Rolemaster players and GMs are experienced. An ‘experienced’ RQ/BRP/OQ character is only the same as a 3rd or 4th level RM character. That means the adventure is quite possibly a good one for experienced players playing lower level characters, old heads on young shoulders.

If you can get the knack of doing the conversions to your preferred version of RM then I think these adventures could be a great source of inspiration. The adventure above is by Michael Hopcroft and is fully funded. It also says that it is the first of many. Lots of potential adventures there then!