Author: Peter R

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.

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.

I know I am terribly remiss in blogging these days. I have two blogs and I post to this one more often than the other, so that shows how bad I am at keeping things updated!

Long time readers of this blog will know of Navigator RPG. This was written back in September 2019. Nicholas had kind of threatened to pull the plug on RMU if it wasn’t finished by the end of the year. He exact words were that RMU would be done, one way or another by the end of the year. That was five years ago and we are still waiting for the game to reach a playable state (if you want monsters that is).

My response was to go back to square one. The origin of Rolemaster was as a set of house rules for D&D. The story goes that a D&D fighter was trapped against a cliff edge and terrible foe. They asked the DM how high the cliff was and was told it was 60′. D&D used 1d6 damage per 10′ fallen, and the fighter had more than 60 hit points, so they jumped, knowing that they could not die from the fall.

Those house rules became Arms Law and Claw Law, and then Spell Law replaced the D&D spells, and then Character & Campaign Law plus Creatures & Treasures turned the game in to a coherent whole.

So I went back to D&D, andthese days we have the OGL meaning that I could take open game content as my base, and rolemasterify it.

I didn’t just clone Rolemaster. I know that Rolemaster is often referred to Chartmaster and Rulesmaster. I think it is a hard sell to ask people to buy four $30 books before they can play a game. So I stripped out many charts, smoothed bonuses for stats so you don’t need to look up the stat to find your bonuses, and used fixed DPs. I stripped back the skill system, knowing that GMs will add in skills as they see fit.

I didn’t go for two hundred different professions, knowing that if anyone played the game they would build professions that fitted their setting.

What I did do was give the rules for creating your own Talents & Flaws, Cultures, Ancestries, Skills, and Professions, and the rules for converting D&D/OGL monsters to the game.

Rolemaster has always be a toolbox, so I built tools.

I also kept the numbered paragraph format, to make it easy to drop in house rules and supplement material.

Navigator RPG was the first of this line.

Navigator RPG

When I created Navigator RPG what I wanted to do was to make something that was backwardly compatible with Spacemaster. We had been told that there would be no Spacemaster Unified. HARP SF also seemed to be in the doldrums, so if I wanted to play Spacemaster I would have to make my own. I had lost my Spacemaster rulebooks in a house move many years ago.

Not only was Navigator RPG going to be backwardly compatible, but I wanted to ensure that Rolemaster never died, even if Nicholas gave up. So I made it Open Game Content, and the book was Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG. If you buy the physical book you needed to play printing and shipping, but beyond that, anything else was purely donation. the PDF was PWYW, and you can download it for free.

So far, there have been 2,156 downloads, of which 221 have been bought.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/288954/navigator-rpg?affiliate_id=730903

Pilot RPG

When I released Navigator RPG, I promised to create Pilot RPG, Nav’s Fantasy sibling. Then things went kind of sideways. Rather than getting on with Pilot, I was distracted by trying to turn the core game system into a generic toolkit. The name of the toolkit was Bare Metal Edition, and the idea was to put all of the rules for creating the rules on to github so anyone could fork the project to create their own games. Open Source Roleplaying in its purest sense. I had help with this, but I am a bit autistic and don’t play well with others much of the time.

Roll the clock forward to May 2023, and I finally get around to converting the rules to fantasy and Pilot RPG is born.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/462737/pilot-rpg-playtest-edition?affiliate_id=730903

The names Navigator and Pilot come from that quote by Sir Walter Scott on the front cover.

Pilot was released 14 months ago and has had 835 downloads and 48 purchases. Just like Navigator RPG it is PWYW, and you can download it for free.

Guide RPG

Another goal with Bare Metal Edition, was to push Rolemaster into genres that it hadn’t explored before. On the ICE forums, when we had a working Character Law/Arms Law, I had suggested doing some historical genre games, such as Robin Hood, as an example. We didn’t need magic or monsters for real world settings. That idea obviously didn’t fly.

I managed to find the time to convert Eldritch Tales, an OSR Call of Cthulhu clone, to Bare Metal Edition and Guide RPG, Cosmic Horror Open Ended Roleplaying, was put out. This was January 2024, only 4 months after Pilot RPG. That was 10 months ago, and we have seen 669 downloads, 21 sales.

The name Guide relates to spirit guides and fits into the Navigator, Pilot, Guide series.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/466802/guide-rpg-playtest-edition?affiliate_id=730903

Mark RPG

This game came out on May 28, 2024, so about 5 weeks ago. It is Pay What You Want, 144 downloads, and 12 sales. What makes it special is that it is the first variant that is set in the real world. Mark RPG is based on The Curse of Capistrano, or as it is better known The Mark of Zorro!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/482624/mark-rpg?affiliate_id=730903

As I said back on the ICE forums, it should be possible to create a game without monsters, and magic, and base them in the real world, I said I could do it, and this game did it.

I freely admit that I pillaged Wikipedia for much of the setting information, and used Guide RPG (set in the real world but with the cosmic horror elements) and stripped out everything that did not apply. That gave me my core system. There may possibly be a few monsters left in, just for a bit of weird west fun, but for the most part, that section of the book is mostly snakes, bears, and bandits.

Sure, the number of downloads is smaller, but we are getting into niche genres.

Survivor RPG

This game isn’t written yet, but I have pencilled it in for a November/December release, and will be post nuclear holocaust, mutants and tech. Think Gamma World, Mutant Future, and Mutant Year Zero and you will get the gist.

This is another genre that Rolemaster or Spacemaster never touched, and will expand the range of the Bare Metal Edition stable.

All these games are cross compatible and build on what has gone before.

Further Forward…

I know when I want to create Survivor, but I also want to convert more OGL/OSR games and bring them under the BME banner.

I have plans for a World War II version based on Operation Whitebox and a Zombie Apocalypse version based on Survive This!! Zombies.

If I can find some good vehicle rules to convert, or if not, write them myself, I would quite like to create a Death Race 2000/Car Wars/Mad Max iteration as well.

Then there are sci-fi Mech warfare and superheroes, and why not prohibition-era gangsters?

These future games are not about creating an entire game from the ground up, they are about building just the rule variations needed to reflect the genre and the playable options. Then the fun of critical tables and some villains to fight.

If there are genres you want to see turned into a game, let me know, and I will do the research and build it.

So this is a re-run of how I set up Navigator RPG. Today I have put the Pilot RPG draft up on DTRPG as a Pay What You Want download. You can grab it for free, and any money it does raise will go back into developing the game.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/462737/Pilot-RPG–Playtest-Edition?affiliate_id=730903&src=RMB

I am a fan of putting things on public playtest, unlike RMu that has put behind a registration wall. The more eyes on the game the better, as far as I am concerned.

This game is covered by the OGL Open Game License. This means that you can grab it and hack it however you wish, and you can add community content. In this book, the Unarmed Attack Table and its condensed Claw Law were both community contributions, as was the Logo you can see on the cover (bottom left).

This is the Bare Metal Edition [BME] logo, which you can find on Github as a project. The idea is that all the rules, spells, monsters, items, etc. that I create as I iterate through genres will all feedback to a central public repository. In theory, anyone should be able to download the BME source files and build whatever they want.

This game builds on and extends Navigator RPG.

If you don’t have that game, you can grab it from DTRPG here:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/288954/Navigator-RPG?affiliate_id=730903&src=RMB

In both these games there is a lot of content you will recognize, both as being rolemaster-esque, and as being straight from Rolemaster’s great grandparent D&D. All I did was follow the same process, going from the d20 source to the open-ended game mechanics that we know and love.

I you look at the screenshot above (from Pilot RPG) you will recognize the skill cost progression, and the numbered paragraph structure. I wanted to keep the numbered paragraphs because they make drop-in house rules incredibly easy to share. You just replace one paragraph 7.3 with a new 7.3 and everything else remains the same.

If nothing else, these OGL versions of the game mean that should ICE go bust again, there is a free alternative version of the game, now both fantasy and science fiction, that will live on, and one that anyone can write adventures for and companion material.

Finally…

It is unfortunate, but all titles that are released on DTRPG for free or Pay What You Want get hoovered up en masse. They are then bulk rated at 2* or if you are lucky 3*. These star ratings are then used by the site as a ranking metric.

If you download either or both games, if you get an automated email prompting you to rate your purchase, please could you give it a half decent rating just to offset the trolls?

I am pleased to say that I have finished the monsters, or at least I have finished the core monsters. There are some OGL monsters that I would like to include, but they are most definitely bells and whistles and not a requirement.

As I was doing the conversion, I noticed that Pilot monsters have OBs on a par with RM monsters, but they tend to have lower DBs and #hits. Essentially, they hit hard, but they are much easier to put down, a bit of a glass jaw.

My first reaction was to fix that, but upon reflection, I want to leave it. It will be much easier to adapt the thousands of OSR adventures to Pilot RPG than it would be to convert them to RMu.

It gives a Pilot RPG character a more heroic feel, and you can put more creatures down with #hits even if you cannot roll a decent critical to save your own skin.

OSR adventures tend to use larger numbers of monsters, and the way they have converted over means that you are likely to be able to use those encounters as written.

The other thing I have done is get stuck into the treasure tables. I have converted over 10 or so today and I have another 13 pages to go. The changes are minimal, converting each +1s to a +5 and so on. Things that were doing a d6 of fire damage become an A fire critical, etc. These are minor tweaks to each item.

That is thirteen pages of items and then a big block of random encounter tables for each biome. Then, I need to finish off the missing attack tables.

None of these are a lot of work; they are just repetitive. I think the most time-consuming single task is getting tables written for d6s, d8s, and d12s into d100 tables.

I does look like it is possible to get the first draft of the game on DTRPG for Tuesday as a playtest edition.

You may see a lot of these between now and the end of the year. They help keep me on track as I feel that if I commit to telling the world about how much I have done, then I need to do something to justify it, and by telling the world how much remains to be done it motivates me to get it done.

Since the last post, I have started up all the monsters I have (basically the D&D SRD monsters) from B [Banshee] to D [Dryad]. There were no A monsters in the game book I am converting. If I have time for bells and whistles later I may try to add in more monsters, but no promises there.

I have copied across the weapons from Navigator RPG, and have found a list of 13 attack tables and so far 1 critical table that the fantasy rules have that the Sci Fi rules didn’t. I have made one attack table, and one critical table, Morning Star and Cold criticals.

Fantasy monsters are often poisonous, and I didn’t have any poison rules, so I have written those up.

In a completely unrelated subject, I have decided that the World War II version of the game is going to be called Ranger. That follows the theme Navigator/Pilot/Ranger and the US Army Rangers are also dead on the genre. I imagine that I will be able to get some public-domain imagery from the period that I can use for illustrative purposes.

You may ask why I am worrying about the WWII version of the game when I haven’t even finished the fantasy edition, but it was because I was having to cut out the firearms and grenade rules, and that started the mental ball rolling.

I have converted 25 monsters so far, and I have 77 more to complete. Following them are two big sections, a small one on converting monsters and creating your own monsters plus random encounter tables, and treasures and magic items.

Those will be the rules; then I have to circle back and complete any further combat tables and critical tables and then read Navigator RPG and Pilot side by side to check that there are no contradictions between the two systems.

The writing is the hard part, that is then followed by art direction, listing the images that I would like, finding what I already have, and sourcing art for the images I don’t have.

Then we go to layout.

Then we go to playtest.

Last time, I put the rules up for public playtest as a Pay What You Want download and made the commitment that the rules would always be free. It is my intention to do the same again and probably do the same for all of the books in the series.

Doing it this way means that I can go live before I have sourced all the art and reinvest PWYW donations to pay for the art. I can get playtest feedback, update the PDFs, and iterate until done.

That is enough rambling for today, I am now going to get back to monster converting.

Peter

I have been away for far too long, and there multiple reasons for that, but my own tardiness aside, what I want to write about today has its origins back in 2014.

When I started this blog, someone was asking where was all the playable material online. There were no free adventures or anything for someone running an RM game that was short of time to grab and run.

I also honestly believed that RMu was about to be released. I think we were all given that impression.

Five years later and there was still no sign of RMu, but we were told that there was definitely no plans for an SMu, or Space Master Unified.

I was pretty frustrated, as were many of us, and as I prefer SF to fantasy, that was a real pity.

My reaction was to ‘do a Rolemaster’. The origin story for Rolemaster is one of taking D&D and converting it to the D100 system that we all know and love. These days there are plenty of D&D retro-clones built off of the D&D System Reference Document and the Open Game License [OGL].

Some of these retro-clones step outside of the fantasy genre and one of them, White Star was a FS version of D&D that borrowed heavily from Star Wars and Dr Who, and countless other classic TV and movies, you got Jedi, Cybermen and countless others. All of that was under the OGL and free to hack however you wanted as long as credit was given.

I wrote a bit of software that could make critical tables for me, and a formula to turn D&D damage dice into RM-esque attack tables, and I was 90% of the way there.

D&D had discrete spells whereas RM had spell lists, but I was a fan of HARP style spells with scaling. So I turned D&D spells into the bastard children of HARP but where D&D used per level as a common scaling device, I started using per rank or scaling. I compressed related spells (think cure light wounds, cure serious wounds and so on) into single spells but with scaling, etc.

There were some cool ideas in RMu, such as Combat Expertise, all potentials being 101, and the Vocational skill and some cool suggestions that seemed to fall on deaf ears, like stat bonuses of (Stat-50)/3.

All in all I kept what I liked about RM2/RMC. I adopted what I liked from RMu, and I imported stuff that I liked from elsewhere. The result was Navigator RPG.

That game is virtually backwards compatible with all existing SpaceMaster materials and at the time, if ICE had failed again, it would have kept the Space Master game alive. In the spirit of keeping the game alive I a) made the game free as in free speech – it is OGL so you are free to hack it as you wish, and b) made it free as in beer. The game is PWYW so you can download it for free. It is available in print soft and hardback and you only need to pay print and shipping. I make nothing if you pay the minimum price.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/288954/Navigator-RPG?affiliate_id=730903&src=RMBlog

I also promised a Pilot RPG, a fantasy version of the same game. In theory, that should have been even easier to create.

This is where things went sideways. Firstly, it is never a good idea to think “This will be easy!” Secondly, Terefang from this blog and the RM forums had a brilliant idea. In the spirit of open gaming, we could abandon the OGL/D&D parts, write an absolutely minimal RM system, make it modular, so character stats was one part, skills another and so on, and then create a github for it so anyone could fork off to make their own games or contribute to the project. This was called Bare Metal Edition or BME.

As with many projects, it started with a lot of enthusiasm while we did the easy bits and then floundered when it became work and progress slowed.

That also consumed the time I had free that I had earmarked for Pilot RPG.

So Pilot RPG ended up on the backburner of eternal inactivity.

Skip forward now until November this year. Knaz started talking to Brian and I via the blog and email. The subject of Navigator RPG came up and it got me starting to think about Pilot again. The stumbling block last time around was the magic system. For Navigator RPG, I had made the Star Knight (read that as Jedi) meditations (read as mind tricks/force) by kind of eyeballing it and making a best guess. With BMI, Terefang had noted that the HARP spells had little or no rhyme or reason behind their math but had shared some stuff with someone I cannot remember the name of (sorry!), and between them, they had a balanced system. When I read the BME magic rules, I didn’t understand them, and they seemed pretty incomplete, or I was missing something.

What I didn’t want to do was bash out a wonky, eyeballed system when there was an open and balanced system out there.

With Knaz’s interest, and not understanding what we had written for BME, I thought ‘sod it!’ and I dug out my draft of Pilot, and my OGL source game, and then this week, I started keyboard bashing.

All of the character creation is done, and the dreaded spells are done (in my best cobble-it-together eyeballed version). Most of the weapon and combat tables are done.

Much I can import from Navigator RPG as the rule system is the same and then just fantasize it.

The last biggest task remaining is converting all the monsters and magic items. Converting big lists of items is a chore, but in principle, it is not a huge amount of work. The monsters will be a lot of work, though.

I honestly think I can get this done before Christmas.

Considering that we still don’t have all of RMu yet, I am only 4 years late, in RM terms that is but a blink of an eye.

I will get this finished.

I will ensure that it will always be free.

I will let it all be added to BME so anyone else can build their own game off it.

If you end up downloading it, and you like it, you can thank Knaz, it is their fault, they poked the bear.

My next session of Lost Mines of Phandelver will be a week today. The characters have made it to the town and have been picking up rumours. There were three possible ways that they could have chosen to go from what they learned, and I picked the one that I thought was most likely to appeal to the players.

I am recreating all the maps in the module using DungeonDraft and then importing them into Fantasy Grounds for us to play. DungeonDraft has a trace image function so I can easily screenshot the PDF map, save it as an image and then draw over the top. It makes building maps quite quick.

I assumed that they would go after the bandits, and two of the players immediately latched on to those clues, but then the most stubborn player decided that they needed to head back and deal with the goblins and help rescue their NPC patron.

I, of course, had planned and mapped the bandits and set up all the encounters on Fantasy Grounds. The effort isn’t lost because I know that they will come back and deal with them.

There was more than enough to do in town to keep them amused during the session and it was only at the end of the game that they finally decided on their next course of action.

I now have this week to build all the maps, encounters, and loot parcels for Cragmaw Castle. I also copy’n’paste the adventure text into Fantasy Grounds Story boards so that I can link from those to the encounters, maps, images etc all from within the VTT.

My prep looks to be 8 planned encounters, one map to create, one trap, and about 10 parcels of things that could be found and looted. Then just copy the text over.

So far I have been pleased with how the conversion from D&D to RMC has gone. I have had to increase encounter numbers because the characters are tougher than first/second level D&D characters but apart from that it has been easy to find equivalent monsters, spells, and items.

During the pandemic, we started a Shadow World campaign and I got to play. We made it to about 5th level, but then the game fizzled out and we stopped playing. The GM caught covid, and that caused the first break, then they had another time clash, and before you know it two months had gone by and we had lost all the momentum.

Now the GM has lost the motivation to restart the game and that was the end of that.

I was running a game set in my generic, not quite forgotten realms. It started as a one-shot for us to learn how to use Fantasy Grounds, and it turned into a campaign. The characters are about 6th level now.

I have often been interested in converting between systems and for their current adventure I have taken Lost Mines of Phandelver, a low-level D&D 5e adventure, and I am converting it to RM Classic.

I haven’t moved over to RMu yet for two reasons, the first is that we can only play via Fantasy Grounds and there is no FG support yet for RMu, and secondly, the RMu rules are still only partially published and I don’t what to faff around with house ruling the missing parts or using beta stats.

RMC is complete and we know it and it is well supported.

It is interesting to convert D&D stuff to RMC. A 10′ pit is no threat to a 5e character, a few hit points lost that are recovered at the first rest. In RM they can break your hip, if not your neck.

I am also dealing with a level disparity. My characters are 6th level, and the adventure is written for 1st-5th level D&D characters. Some challenges are way too easy, such as stock goblins, but the adventure has a young green dragon as the main showdown, and RM has lots of options for me to use, lesser drakes, greater drakes, and if I really needed it, actual dragons.

D&D 5e characters are a lot more robust than RM characters, and they recover faster. It will be interesting to see if these many small encounters will grind my characters down, and what seemed easy at the start becomes death by a thousand cuts by the end.

I want to use JDales NPC generator to create all the NPCs for this adventure. If you have not seen this already it gives output like this.

The nice thing is that it will do down to 0th level.

The above NPC will just be one of the pirates on the ship. If the characters are 1st or 2nd level then 0th and 1st level pirates should be a fair challenge.

I would like to include a variety of NPCs, such as a scholar as the ship’s quartermaster, thieves as basic pirates, and laborers as deck hands.

Then add in a couple of named NPCs as the captain and first mate.

However the players decide to approach this, the GM should be able to pick out some suitable NPC stats.

I have one really minor sticking point. If you look at the example above, that 1st level laborer is a child of 11. This is because Core Law ties level to age. What I want is low level threats, not a kindergarten pop-up pirate ship.

The solution is simple, I just write my own descriptions. The players should never know the villains level or stats.

What I want is a fun and interesting first experience of Rolemaster. I also want the player characters to win. It would be a really crappy session if you died before you have even finished creating your character. This is Rolemaster not Traveler!