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Thank God it is them and not you!

That is one of the lyrics from the Band Aid/Live Aid song “Do they Know Its Christmas?”

Even first level characters wield more power than your typical villager and the party even more so. The typical party is an independent group with a broad skillset and more often than not magical support.

There are a whole class of adventures that start with the characters trying to assist with some kind of humanitarian disaster, fire, flood, disease, and so on.

Frequently, the adventure then progresses to the party finding the root cause, normally a villains nefarious plan, and defeating it. Adventure solved.

Some of these adventures can dispense with the dastardly villain. If you have an evolving or degenerating situation, a town or city wide fire is a great example, the disaster itself can up the drama and risks and challenges.

As a GM, we can plot a timeline of probable events. If the disaster was a fire you could plot in the start of an organised bucket chain as the towns folk try to fight the fire, a stampede down narrow streets from animals that had spooked and are fleeing the fire. The collapse of the main temple roof sending burning debris high into the air and starting food fires all over town. The burning and collapse of a bridge cutting off the escape of half the town. You can have set plays you can apply anywhere or any time to action flags, a child cut off in an upstairs room, an person pinned down by a burning roof beam, nuns or priestesses trapped in a burning church.

You can build an entire dramatic adventure around this sort of scene. There are many challenges, opportunities for skill checks and magic use but no need for combat, you still get to inflict burn criticals and fall crush attacks (with secondary burn criticals if you want to be mean) so you can have an existential threat to your characters but no need to have an actual fight.

We could now set this entire disaster in a town during a winter religious festival, which is why so many people are crammed into the town, no room at the inn…

You can end the adventure with the characters being praised as being real heroes, assuming they deserve it. You can top it off with the surviving townsfolk giving the characters gifts as a thank you for their efforts. Maybe Tiny Tim, the child rescued from the burning house, has carved a little wooden action figure of his benefactor and wants to give it to him or her as a thank you.

Who would have thought you could make the medieval version of Towering Inferno into a nice little ‘feel good’ Christmas adventure session?

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RMu Steampunk?

I have a desire to do something Steampunky and I was thinking about how would one do this?

I was looking at the image above and thought how would I run that in the session. I came up with two approaches.

Many Monsters

This approach gives the GM the greatest amount of variety. let me take that giant scorpion machine and build it this way. Take a Gemsting from Creature Law (or any version from C&T or C&M) apply the heaviest armour (AT10 for RMu and 20 for Arms Law) and apply two size level increases. For an RMC Gemsting, it would add 20 hits and double the total and add 40 to its OB, and it can ignore two levels of criticals.

Few Monsters

This approach uses only a few creature stats. We take a Golem or other construct and then add, in this case, a poison stinger and scale the thing up.

From the GM’s point of view most machines would fall into the same basic stats as there are only a limited number of constructs. For the player characters, they would still see a myriad number of different threats and creations.

Which to Choose?

Both options have strengths and drawbacks. I play with a lot of systems and see a lot of different ways of doing things. Stars Without Number, for example only has about 8 different ‘creatures’. They are defined by ecological roles or niches such as small grazers and large predators. The actual physical characteristics are either rolled or picked from a set of tables on a body part by body part basis.

It means that if you have a vision for how you want your alien threat to look you can simply pick the body parts from a list and then apply the most suitable archetype.

If you don’t know what sort of alien threat you want to can just roll on each table and build a ‘monster’.

Classic Traveller had a very similar approach. It gave you the basic game mechanics and it was up to you clothe them in a physical form to describe to your characters.

You have a limited number of possible archetypes but a near-infinite number of possible bodies.

ZWeihander has a different approach. There are a few different challenge levels, a handful of different body templates that define the monster’s stats and the challenge level tells you how many talents you may add to that creature. From then on you can pick from a menu of about 40 talents, each on adds abilities and or modifies stats. That gives you the stats and basic nature of the beast and it is then just up to you to clothe it in a suitable appearance.

D&D and all its variations and derivatives have used a great plethora of different beasts and the stats that define them are largely arbitrary. If you want a 10 hit dice hamster then there is nothing to stop you.

From the player’s side of the GM’s screen, the stats that make up a monster should not matter, but often they will. We will all have played with someone who has strategized almost every monster so they know exactly how to best hurt every creature. Which attack with which weapon or what spells in what order.

With that sort of player, the few monsters approach means that they will soon learn how to defeat all the monsters. For argument sake, if none of them can bleed or be stunned then that is going to change the choices you make for weapons and offensive spells.

The greatest threat you are ever going to meet will always be the NPC villains. They have the same options as you and are probably a higher level. NPCs do bleed and they can be stunned, at least once you get them out of their machines, in the contest. So maybe a steampunk setting would just put more emphasis on the NPCs? Machines are just machines, they have stats so we can kill them.

The more I reflect on this the more it seems that RMu and in particular Creature Law will end up being the perfect accompaniment to a steampunk setting. We have a wide range of base creatures from which to start but we also have archetypes we can use as a base. Regardless of which method we use we can apply talents that give us the abilities we want. If the thing needs wings to fly or a poison sting then we just apply the right talents.

I was hoping, originally, that this steampunk thing was going to be a Christmas one-shot. I would only need two or three threats. I could strip out all the magic (pure, semi and hybrid) professions and have the PCs are just fighters/rogues. As RMu will not be released in time I think this project may be pushed back into the new year. The sad thing is that the part I need the most is Creature Law and that has always been the least well developed of all the books we have seen to date.

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College of Calculations

This post may be a bit jumbled, I was reading, writing and the calaculations all at the same time, bouncing between HARP, Spell Law, College of Magics and my own notes.

HARP College of Magics.

This is a little bit of a weird book for HARP. It absolutely must have been intended to be part of the core rules. In the core book magicians have an upper limit for the number of spells they can learn that is greater than the number of spells in the core rules. Either it was intended that this book be compulsory or it just didn’t make the release deadline.

What is contains that excites me is a formal set of rules for spell creation and in HARP parlance, scaling.

I am not going to reproduce the rules in detail as they are clearly ICE intellectual property. I am going to work through a few examples of spell creation.

First up is Light. In Rolemaster this would be a set of spells Light I, Light II and so on.

Using Channeling as my base we get this progression.

2nd Light I
4th Light II
8th Light III
9th Utterlight I
13th Light V
15th Light X
17th Utterlight V
18th Mass Light
50th Mass Utterlight

2. Light I – Lights a 10’R area about the point touched; if the point is on a mobile object or being, it will move with the object/being. If this spell is cast onto a target, they get a RR. If the RR succeeds, the light is centered on the point where they are standing, but will not move with them. If the target fails the RR the light remains centered on the target and will follow with them until it is dispelled, or the duration ends.

Under HARP rules these are one spell with different scaling options. Here is the Light spell.

Light

PP Cost: 6
Range: Touch
Duration: 10 rounds/rank
Spell Type: Utility
RR: — Spheres: Universal
Description: Creates a small globe of light centered upon the point touched. This globe will be as bright as a torch and illuminate up to a 20’ radius area. If the point touched is mobile then the spell will move when the point is moved. The caster may vary the illumination from the maximum size down to a small point with a round of concentration.
Scaling Options:
Increase Duration (1 minute/rank) +5 PP
Increase Duration (10 minutes/rank) +6 PP
Increase Radius (up to 50’) +3 PP
Increase Radius (up to 100’) +8 PP
Utterlight (no magical darkness may exist in radius) +6 PP
Artificial Daylight (works on certain undead as sunlight) +6 PP

The most obvious difference at first glance is that:

HARP Light costs 6PP and RM Light is 2PP,

HARP Utterlight I is 18PP while RM Utterlight is 9PP

At first glance I cannot see a direct correlation between HARP PP costs and RM levels.

If we were a Magician the levels would have been slightly different.

3rd Light I
7th Light V
17th Utterlight

In this case Light I would cost 6PP and light V would be 9PP and Utterlight 18PP.

One thing to remember is that in HARP you can learn up to 3 ranks per level including 0th level. So a 6PP spell is capable of being cast at 1st level if you put 6DPs into it per level.

I had a further look at all the available spells and everything that you would consider a 1st level spell in RM cost 3PP or 4PP in HARP, with 4 being by far the more common. I think there is a built-in assumption that pure casters will be buying two ranks per level in their core spells. If we half the cost of the HARP spells (to reflect 2 ranks per level) Light becomes 2nd level (6/2 = 3 being 0th, 1st, 2nd). Utterlight would then be 18PP /2 = 9 or 8th level. This is much more in line with the Channeling list.

So what about magicians? I would have said that if you are developing spells as individual spells then a magician is much more likely to put more ranks into Lightning bolt than into Light. A progression of 1 rank per level would mean that Utterlight for a magician would come in at 17th level which is exactly what you find in RM.

Fire Bolt

I have to ask myself if I have massaged the numbers to make them fit or have I identified the underlying philosophy.

This time I am going to build an RM fire bolt using HARP rules and assume that the magician is going to spend 2 ranks per level on it. It is much more important than something like Light but not as important as Fireball or Lightning bolt.

Spells are defined by an aspect, in this case Element (Fire); a type, in this case Attack; and Attributes such as casting time, range and duration. Fire Bolt has a range of 100’. Each of these has a cost which you add up and then divide in a rather simple formula. The basic spell comes out at a cost of just 3PP but it is tiny in size. There is now an option to scale up the critical size. Fire bolts are a regular E critical type spell so I need to scale the damage up. Once I have taken all of these factors into account you end up at a 13PP spell. Using my 2 ranks per level we have a 6th level Fire Bolt. In RM it is also 6th level.

Fire Bolt III is the same as Fire Bolt I but with a 300’ range and is 11th level.

Let me scale up the HARP fire bolt and see what happens. Each additional 50’ of range adds 1PP to the spell (or half a level by my reckoning). A 300’ Fire Bolt would be 2 levels higher, or 8th level.

I think I can see the logic and the connections now.

If you had to pour 4DP into Fire Bolt to get a working spell for seven levels I think that is a major investment. On the other hand, would you continue to do the same once you have the working spell? If we assume 1 rank per level after you have a functioning spell then the levels fall back into line. In this case 10th for HARP and 11th for the RM version.

So my outline rules appear to be. Calculate level by 2DP per level for core functionality spells and one DP per level for scaled up versions of the same spell.

What that gives us is spells that will fall within a level of their RM equivalents.

What you also get is more options that you ever had before. Sure there are plenty of versions of spells there is fire bolt with a range of 100’, 300’ 500’, there is triad of flame and corner fires but the HARP rules allow you to mix and match every effect from every possible spell. What you end up with a base cost that you can then extrapolate into a level.

The rules seem pretty simple to use and easy to read.

What would be perfect is if ICE were to create a RMu version of these rules. It may be possible as they are already talking about creating a HARP to RM handbook. It would be amazing if these rules ended up in that handbook.

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How Do You Spell That?

I am a huge fan of Spell Research for a few reasons. The first is that for NPCs if they start throwing spells that the characters do not recognize it puts a bit of wonder back into the game, especially if you are playing with seasoned old hands.

I also like it for PCs. They tend to research low-level spells because of the time constraints and it gives casters something to do while the fighters are recovering from wounds.

For the player, it is a way of strengthening their character’s concept and individualizing their character. It adds spells to existing lists which makes them more functional for no DP cost.

In some respects, magical guilds are little more than window dressing in many games as lists can be learned just by spending the DPs. Spell research on the other hand made gaining access to research materials and libraries really useful.

The same is true for your clerics that can make great use of religious houses, festivals and gatherings to do the prayer needed to create new spells.

I have a lot of very unused HARP books. In college of Magics there are rules for new spell creation. Every effect and magical aspect is listed along with all the target, range and duration parameters. Each has a point cost and there is a simple formula to turn this point cost into power points.

HARP doesn’t have the concept of spell level. As each spell is scalable what we think of as Sleep V, Sleep VII… Lord Sleep are just the same spell with different scaling options applied and higher DP costs.

For us the DP cost would equal level and scaled options would equate to higher level versions of the same spell.

What I haven’t done yet is attempt to recreate specific RM spells using the College of Magic rules. What I am expecting to happen is that the RM level will exactly match the HARP power point cost. The reason I expect them to match up perfectly is that the same brains are behind RM as HARP. If you are going to have much the same team working on both systems and they are largely compatible, compatible enough to cross stat Shadow World for both systems, then chances are something as basic as a power point is going to be the same in both sets of rules.

If all my suppositions are right, or even if they are wrong but there is a typical and consistent error then the two systems can be brought into line.

It then means that there are a set of rules that can be applied to any spell the characters want to create. At the moment it is a little bit arbitrary. The player designs the spell and then the GM has to assign a level to it. This can lead to mismatches in expectations. If the player has already worked out how they want to stack the spell with something else in Spell Law but the GM has not recognized the potential ‘abuse’, if that is the right word.

With formal rules in place, much of that disappears. Spell research becomes a process of describing the effect you desire from a menu of possible effects. Then running through the costs to arrive at the PP cost or level. It really is a 5 minute to 30 minute job depending on whether you know what you want or if you are browsing for inspiration.

I just think it is a pity that with all the crunch already in all the other RMu books, that rules like these didn’t make their way into Spell Law.

It is that one fact that may point to my theory being wrong. If when I try this the numbers for the spells in Spell Law do not add up it could mean that back in the day when was first converted from D&D to the spell lists we now know there was no system in place.

When HARP was written they may have taken the opportunity to standardise all the existing spells with a set of coherent rules.

Trying to apply that to all the spells we have in Spell Law may have resulted in a swathe of 3rd level spells rather than a neat 1st, 2nd, 3rd and spells that we all know and love suddenly jumping about in level. Where we have a spell that could be a 2nd level Magician Base but a 5th level Closed Channeling and a 6th level Closed Mentalism (looking at you Shockbolt) the HARP rules do not set out to differentiate by realm.

The work needed to either fix all the existing spells and reorganize the spell lists may have been deemed too much effort for too little gain.

I have an adventure in mind which will require a spell caster to have some alternative Light Law spells. This will be my chance to try out HARP spell creation in RMC.