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#RPGaDAY 8th, 9th, 10th and11th

So this is my third instalment of #RPGaDAY. Most of the questions this week seem to be about different systems so it will be hard to relate them Rolemaster.

8th What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

This depends on how you read the question. I think RM is a good candidate for this. One of the cool things about RM character sheets (booklets?) is that they hold just about everything you need to play. This is especially true if you include combat tables and spell lists in the character sheets. Bolt on things like Combat Minion and you get a game that you can get into and start playing very quickly. If you need to create characters in that 2hrs then having the first session exclusively dedicated to character creation will get all the characters made with time to spare. So my answer is RMC.

9th What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

This time I don’t think RM fits the bill. As a rule of thumb is seems that most GMs are levelling characters up every 3 sessions or so. In a mini campaign of 10 sessions that would advance the characters three or 4 levels. There is not really that much difference between a 1st and a 4th level character. At those lowest levels fighters are king and even the pure spell users have little more than shock bolt. Looking at the time, some players take forever to level up their characters so levelling up 3 times in 10 sessions takes a fairly big chunk out of your available playing time. So RM is not a good option for this particular format.

What does work well (shameless plug!) is my own game 3Deep. The game is set up for emulate TV series and episodes. With that in mine you can easily turn a 10 session mini campaign into 10 related one shot adventures and the whole into a ‘season’. Character creation is fast (roll five stats, pick a culture, spend 7 skill points and then flesh out the backstory) and there are no levels, experience is handled by improving stats and/or skills. While I am blowing my own trumpet the latest version of 3Deep will be available to buy from RPGnow and Drivethru from next week!

 

10th Where do you go for RPG reviews?

For me, my favourite RPG blog is http://www.stargazersworld.com/ which gives me a mix of reviews, news and opinion. they have a small team of bloggers and interestingly they like to experiment. Right now the blog is experimenting with being sponsored by Patreon.

11th Which ‘dead’ game would you like to see reborn?

Do games die? If that were true then there would be no RM2 players. The game is going on for 40 years old and has not had a new book published in decades and yet it is still probably the most popular version of RM there has ever been with many actives groups. Even in my previous answers I harked back to Car Wars with is a game from my youth. I honestly do not believe games die as long as people want to play them.

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#RPGaDAY2017 5th, 6th & 7th

This is the next instalment of my RPGaDAY month.

5th Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

For me it has to be the original Call of Cthulu from way back in 1981. For someone whos entire experience of RPGs at about that time had been D&D and a bit of Boot Hill CoC was like nothing else!

6th You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!

I am a big fan of ‘bitesize’ rpgs. When my PBP game was running I would dip in an out of that two or three times a day updating players posts and in the game I was playing in updating my actions.

My main Face to Face game I don’t think I could play that every day. There are just too many alpha male personalities in the group. We play for long weekends normally and that is about the limit before we get conflicts forming. We have been friends for over 30 years so everything gets forgiven and forgotten but a week would be too long.

Running this blog and all the other RPG related projects on the go makes it feel like I am almost playing at or with something every day.

So if I was to play every day then it would be an experiment of playing via Facebook messenger with an almost real time where the characters had a week to save the world. The players would be able to update their story at any time and I would do my best to reply as fast as I could. For me it would be most probably a week of sleep deprivation but it would be a memorable experience!

7th What was your most impactful RPG session?

This was a session where almost nothing happened, action-wise. The characters had been tricked into killing the dwarven queen of the iron hills and her bodyguard. We had then landed in a dwarven jail awaiting execution. As characters were were immensely powerful and could pretty much have walked out of there at will. The characters started a debate, it was obvious we were going to escape as we were on a quest to save middle earth but what do we do if confronted by dwarves? We were guilty of the crime we had committed but we were innocent of criminal intent and the world needed us. Do we take any more lives? What if it became unavoidable. We had an excess of righteous paladinic characters in the group alongside some rather more pragmatic characters.

The debate raged on for several hours, never once did anyone break from being in character and we had no NPCs with us. The party had only male PCs and female NPCs and the cells were split along gender lines. The GM did nothing for all that time except sit back and occasionally  correct a factual error in someones statement if the character would have known the truth but the player had forgotten.

Eventually the escape did take place and only one dwarf died and that was an accident, quite literally as a result of a failed moving manoeuvre.

That was pure ‘role playing game’.

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#RPGaDAY2017


I was tempted to try and post every day for August but that would have crashed a lot of other people’s posts so instead I am going to do a few days at a time in my normal, regular slots.

So here goes.

1st What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?

I have had a hankering for a while now to play Car Wars, the Steve Jackson Games game from the 80s. I know it wasn’t released as a RPG we we always played it as one. The original rules are available for free. All I am lacking is another player or 5. It is one of those games where you could while away a lot of down time just designing and building cars. Fast and simple mechanics, what not to love?

2nd What is an RPG you would like to see published?

This has to be RMU. I think all of us would like to see the finished product and to see that particular production bottleneck cleared so ICE can get on with releasing more and more varied products.

3rd How do you find out about new RPGs?

For me it is from other bloggers. In particular http://www.stargazersworld.com/. I don’t have enough players that meet often enough to try every game I would like to play. Like most of us we have shelves of games we have bought and played a handful of times, if at all. I find it more interesting to read the opinions of people who have actually played a game rather than the marketing hype put out by the games designers.

4th Which RPG have you played most since August 2016.

This has to be Rolemaster Classic. In a close second is my own game, 3Deep, which is due to be released in print as a 2nd edition. There was a lot of play testing of that in the last year.

Third in line is RMU.

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Three Wheels On My Wagon

I am intrigued by ITDs critical tables. I have never seen them but it came up recently in a discussion on on armour by the piece that there are different critical tables by location and only three locations; limbs, head and body.

For me the only piece of RM that has to be retained is the critical; everything else has to earn its place at the table. If it is more effort that it adds to the game I am inclined to cut or replace it.

Despite my slash and burn approach to rules I am mostly still following the roll your dice, find the right table, look up the roll and roll your critical procedure.

In all the companions and discussions I have never seen a superior system. I don’t care about the #hits, the rounds of stun, the bleeding or whatever. It is the wit and dark humour I like and the graphic descriptions of wounds. You will never get that with 1d8 damage. Decades ago rolling a 20 and getting double damage used to excite me but “Your bolt goes right through his temple and stands there quivering. Astonishingly enough, he’s still standing. But any attempt to remove it will kill him instantly. +25 hits, stunned no parry 2 rnds and bleeding 12 hits/rnd.” is a level above.

I have a half formed diceless RM combat system and I have an outline for HARP/FATE bastardised system. That uses the HARP critical tables and FATE dice and has a working title of FART.

FART is really good fun and fast to play. It just needs some time spent on it writing it up and putting it out there to the FATE community. The mission objective would be to hook FATE players into trying RMU once it is released. It is my understanding that FATE is one of the most successful games of recent years but despite that you will never get to put your crossbow bolt into someone’s head.

So we have ripped just about everything apart recently on here. What, in your perfect combat system, are the absolutely non-negotiable elements?

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d20 SRD Monsters in RMU

Following on from a thought I had in response to BriH’s post earlier last week I have been thinking about creating a completely open and free to use monster book. Rather than Creature Law this would be Creature Libre.

The two parts of the puzzle would be an open source of monsters something like the the d20SRD monster index and the rules for monster creation. These we already have at least in part from Creature Law (PDF page 342).

Furthermore, by using a standard source (the d20SRD) and a public platform (this blog) anyone can contribute monsters to the project. Over this weekend I will re-read the creature creation rules and come up with a template.

The only issue will be art. Once all the content is written then I guess it worth looking at some kind of crowd funding to get the art done?

This is definitely on my To Do list and moving up the priority. If anyone is interested in publishing any unofficial RMU  material, if you want or need a monster then let me know and I will prioritise those monsters!

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If you cannot stand the heat…

A Lamprey

So far we have sent the characters up the creek without a paddle, half drowned them and made them fight under water against a new and unknown monsterous race. Today, it is apt to make their day go from bad to worse!

The river they have been careering down so far has been randomly generated and designed to make it virtually impossible to swim out of or row out of.  anyone reaching the shallows would be facing swimming rolls at something like -90 and taking krush criticals should they fail.

Now, I suggest giving them a bend in the river that has formed a bit of a calm pool. The river widens here and the rate of flow slows and the characters get a chance to reach the bank.

Finally, staggering to the bank it is time to reintroduce the Orcs that we had start this whole thing off in the first place. These have been tracking the river down stream assuming the characters will be killed in the rapids and their bodies washed up in this pool or another one further down stream. This is easy pickings for the orcs which is why they hand out near here in the first place.

This pool is also the domain of a huge lamprey. Once upon a time the orcs attacked a group of adventuring heroes just like the characters now. That party included an alchemist who was adept at making potions and the group regularly enhanced themselves with these. A perfectly normal lamprey fed off of one such magically enhanced hero and in drinking the hero’s blood also consumed a potion of Enlarge designed and dosed for a human. The same thing happened again with its second victim. The second potion was one of Extension used by the hero’s magician to extend the duration of his defensive spells. The final victim of the lamprey was the monk who had cast Strength III on himself. The combination of all this magic infused blood on the poor fish turned it into a huge monstrosity and trapped it in this pool. It now spends most of its time lurking in the mud at the bottom of the pool waiting for a victim of sufficient size to satisfy its hunger.

So returning to a current party they have just escaped or slain the freshwater merfolk and ended up in this pool where they can finally emerge from the river. As they do so they will be confronted with a band of orcs in front of them who have arrived at the same time. There should be just enough orcs that the party should not be certain of the outcome. I will not be specific as this is largely dependent on how the river run went, that could easily have broken many bones on its own and the fight against the merfolk.

The orcs know full well what lurks in the pool and will not go too close. They would prefer to use slings and spears to hold the characters off. They know full well what is coming next.

A Lamprey
Lampy The Lamprey, victim of mixing too many potions.

Warning: The image at the bottom of this post is really disturbing! It is a real, but dead, lamprey. It is just to give you a sense of how horrifying a lamprey is. That is a real one, we are dealing here with a fantasy 30′ one!

Behind the characters rising out of the water is Lampy the Lamprey. This is a 30′ long, 3′ diameter blood sucking fish.

Level 8
Base Rate 90
Max Pace/MN Bonus Run/0
Speed MS/AQ SL/SL
Size/Crit Huge/LA
Hits 90
AT (DB) 3(0)
Attacks 110 HGr 100/Special ✓ *
Enc 1
Special Attack Lampreys suck blood. If its grapple attack delivers a critical it will suck 3-30 hits of blood per round, starting the round after the critical was delivered. Ripping the lamprey off yourself or off someone else will deliver 4 ‘A’ slash criticals to the victim. Fire or eletricity may (Very Hard maneuver roll) cause the lamprey to release its prey.

So as the characters face off the orcs, out of the water behind them rises the giant lamprey intent on attacking the person most in the water. It will attempt to grapple and latch on to the victim and drag them back into the pool and down to the bottom. As soon as they are dead i.e. drained of blood it will return for the next victim.

If the body is not too laden down with equipment it will just be left to float back up. As the death is probably going to be from loss of hits if enough concussion hits can be restored before the soul departs then the character can be revived without the need for life giving. That does make it rather important to finish off the orcs quickly!

This ‘misadventure’ is a potentially interesting way of weakening a party or even bringing low a very powerful party. It is unrelenting, the river is extremely difficult to fight but can deliver real harm to the characters. The orcs are do not need to be particularly numerous or high level. Many partys will almost discount an encounter with half a dozen orcs but in this case the orcs are just the trigger at the start and by the time they are encountered at the end they may be significantly more dangerous!

The fresh water merfolk and the Lampy are not things the characters are ever likely to have met before and tucked in the middle there was a Naiad. I have given the Naiad an additional power. She can rescue some of the characters by casting waterlungs on the characters. The mechanism for doing this is actually via another of the alchemists potions. The ‘drowned’ characters will not have known this at the time but the naiad had taken a draft of the potion and delivered it using a ‘kiss of life’ type action.

The anatomy of a story metaphor that we started with was put the characters up a tree, throw stones at them and then get them down again. Over the past three posts we have done the up the tree and thrown the stones. The getting them down again is the perfect time to throw the characters an adventure hook. Right now they are God knows where, beaten and bloodied. Now is a good time to kick them into a different direction.

Scroll down for the scary Lamprey photo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A real lamprey
A real lamprey
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But I am no mermaid

This post follows on from A River Runs Through It. We left the characters in the water in a fast flowing river, going over rapids and generally up the creek without a paddle.

I was once told the general anatomy of a story is ‘Put the hero up a tree, throw stones at him and then get him down again.’ Now it is time to throw some stones metaphorically speaking at the characters.

It is entirely possible that one or more of the characters may have drowned by this point. If you had one character go overboard early on during the river run they could have gone under and drowned long before the last character goes overboard. For now, we will let them believe they have drowned. Think of them as being unconscious rather than dead as that may have implications regarding automatic spells.

So everyone is by now in the water. Some have drowned others are keeping their head above water. We are not just going to wait for them to drown. Those that are still with us will feel something brush their legs under water. They can maybe see some massive sort of fish maybe six to eigth feet long and silver green moving deep below them. More seem to a circling and coming closer.

Let the characters worry for a couple of rounds and then have the first one feel a hand grab an ankle and drag them down. I would have a knot of the forms grab the characters attention in front while the first attack comes from below and behind!

As the character goes under they will get the first real look at what has them and it looks like merfolk! These though are bigger than your usual half man half fish types. That does depend rather on whether your characters have ever met any merfolk before.

What we have here are freshwater merfolk. These are bigger and more deadly cousins of the more common saltwater variety.

Any characters that have previously been ‘drowned’ have actually been rescued by a naiad. This water spirit has cast waterlungs on them once they were unconscious and towed them to a safe underwater cave. The naiad wants the merfolk gone from her river and the characters landing in her lap are the opportunity she has been waiting for. Once the merfold attack she will revive any unconscious ‘drowned’ people and quickly convey to them not to ask questions but go save their friends. The characters should then see the scene of the surviving characters being attacked and circled by the merfolk.

Freshwater Merfolk.

Freshwater Merfolk – Found in treacherous waterways such as rapids and below waterfalls; 6’6″–8’6″ from head to fin.
Crippling Flaw (Must totally immerse once a day in water, –10 to all activities for each missed day (at –80 a coma ensues, at –100 death occurs).

Innate Spell Caster, has the following mentalism lists to their own level. Speed (closed mentalism), Self Healing (open mentalism), Attack Avoidance (open mentalism). They gain 3PP/level.
The fair skin of a merman’s torso blends at the waist into the silver and green shimmering scales of their fish’s tail. Freshwater Merfold are very uncomfortable above water but can breath air if they must.  They are fond of sunlight and like to bask in shallow streams.

Unlike their sea born cousins they do not build manors and palaces. They are much more ‘barbaric’ by comparison. Freshwater merfold wear strings of animal skulls, bones, precious stones, or gems as raiment. Average lifespan is 30 years.

Level 6C
Base Mv 90
Max Pace Dash/+25
Speed MF/MD
Size/Crit M/-
Hits 80D
AT(DB) 1(35s)
Attacks 95 Melee/60 MCl 30
Enc 1-10
Bonus EP E
Outlook IQ Aggressive

For weapons they prefer daggers, knives, short swords and short spears. Things that do not compromise their manoeuvrability in the water or weigh them down.

Next time we will put the characters in even more trouble.

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A River Runs Through It

I want you to bear with me with this post. It is a first of a mini series that should be greater than the sum of its parts.

I hope I am not the only person who does this or it will sound really naff but I have often used river journeys for the players to hand wave large sections of cross country travel through relatively safe territory. As a player we did this in Shadow World and as a GM I let my players load their horses and kit on to a barge and it took days off an otherwise uneventful journey.

Now imagine that you give you players an option of taking a boat down stream, a two day journey, or walking which takes about 10 days as the terrain is quite difficult. Where they are is a small settlement and the river rafts are the main form of employment. The costs of downstream travel are cheap as the raftsmen earn their money poling heavy cargo up stream.

So that is the setting and motivation to get your players on the raft. You then carry on with some description of the start of the journey, silently drifting along with the current, the wildlife that use the river to come down to drink, otters swimming alongside, majestic birds seeming to defy the current and hold their position on the water as the raft floats by. The banks rising as the river enters a channel showing the bands of rock strata and how the raftsman deftly steers the craft with just a single oar and the lightest of touches to drift the raft into the smoothest water.

The channel starts to narrow and the flow of the river starts to increase. The raftsman tells any character interested how the edges of the river are dangerously turbulent and filled with submerged rocks that can cut a man to pieces. He says how beautiful the river is here but just wait as it is like a demon up ahead.

He then tells the characters that the only real danger are from the… At that point a spear takes him in the chest and he is whipped over the side and into the water complete with the only oar!

On the bank a small band of orcs or goblins jump up from behind some bushes and wave weapons threateningly. They start to follow down the bank as best they can.

So now the characters are in a drifting raft without a paddle.

We can generate the river randomly as it continues down the channel. Just roll an couple of D100 OE, once for the left and the other for the right. Round the numbers off unless any of the characters are exceptionally good at estimation. Now take the rounded figure and subtract it from 100. So a a roll of 75 would also give a result of 25. This is the difficulty factor for any rowing or swimming rolls on that side of the raft. So if you rolled a 34 and 82 the raft is about 30 feet from the left bank and 80 feet from the other but any skill checks to go left are at -70 because of the turbulence and submerged rocks and rolls to go right are at -20 as the water is calmer on that side.

So now we have a river that is full of eddies and whirlpools near the banks but is calmer in the middle unless you make two low rolls in which case you basically have rapids.

When you get a failed rowing rolls you can check to see if anyone falls overboard! This can bring in various skills from adrenal moves balance to acrobatics. I would use the characters whole Agility stat and apply a difficult factor depending on the failure of the rowing or piloting skill roll.

I am not a fan of rolling these sorts of rolls on the fly as it can lead the players to realise everything is random. I tend to use random number tables so I am just looking up and crossing off a result rather than randomly rolling. It also looks like I am checking off points in the plot.

Eventually, one or more characters are going to end up overboard. Using the same difficulty modifiers for swimming you can introduce A unbalancing  or krush criticals which could give you stunned characters in the water.

This gives you a whole new challenge for the player characters, to rescue their comrades.

There are plenty of other things you can do to make this situation worse. The orcs that originally threw the spear could easy continue to track the raft hurling stones at the characters or give them slings, there are plenty of stones around after all.

This is a very physical challenge in which the players need to work together to survive. It is also just part o e of an unfolding mini adventure.

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33, 66, 77

One of the things I really like about RMU is the new 33/77 rule for breakage. The sheer simplicity of the mechanic really appeals to me. The actual check dice roll, d100 OE, fits in with the natural Rolemaster way of doing things, when to trigger the roll is obvious and can add some excitement to combats. The resolution is simple enough, an absolute failure breaks the item, a failure gives a -10, partial success a -5, 101+ no damage. I don’t even need a table for that.

I think having the strength values for weapons on the Arms Law pages for each weapon would be a bonus but that is easily fixed with a pencil notation so no worries there.

I am a massive fan of simplicity and ‘stillness’.

Stillness is achieved when the GM is coping with an unexpected situation without flicking though pages and swapping books trying to find the right rule, chart or loose piece of paper.

If that means having an extra column of numbers or small subsidiary table on the combat chart then I am all in favour.

There is not really much more to say about breakage really, I just thought I would praise where praise was due. It is very easy to criticise things that we don’t like.

Here is a thought for the weekend.

Take your RMU beta Creature Law and read the description of the Doppelganger (PDF page 200). Now isn’t that an entire campaign in its own right!