Peter R – Page 43 – The Rolemaster Blog

September 30, 2016September 30, 2016

Rolemaster Ghosts

In the next session I will be throwing 5 3rd level PCs at a few 3rd level Rolemaster ghosts. The undead do not drain levels like they did in D&D back in my day. Rolemaster Ghosts drain constitution from your Temp stat which you need to rest to recover at a rate of a point a day of light activity or more for complete bed rest. This is a lot less devastating than losing entire levels

The objective of the confrontation is to try and bring the characters low by using a massively underpowered foe. It is sort of my chance to play something to the maximum of its ability and not have to hold back and just see how they all cope.

The ghosts earthly remains.

Using the ghost also means that I can justify all the bump in the night style of scary stuff without having to ‘break the rules’. Also in the Sinister Secret module there are a number of NPCs who are placed there to try and dupe the PCs and try and steer them away from discovering the smugglers. I don’t have the smugglers but I can replace the NPCs with ghosts and now they want to steer the PCs away from disturbing the ghosts earthly remains.

To my knowledge the players have never met a ghost before so it is one of those monsters that the rules lawyer in the party will not know exactly how to handle once they have even identified them as a ghost. You must remember that Rolemaster Ghosts appear like living beings at first glance.

Lack of skills

In the past I have mentioned that one of my players has focused all hist development points into Perception, Body Dev, Weapons and Magic and nothing else. This adventure is the one where he will need a wide range of skills. I want to emphasise his lack of skills beyond combat. Looking back at Brian’s Consolidating Skills post this character is a warrior mage but lacks any of the magical skills that would allow him to identify the ghostly apparition. The ghost being incorpreal can walk through walls and doors but the character cannot pick locks.

The ghost can definitely effect the physical world as its primary attack is a medium claw attack so it can leave a room by walking through the door and then lock it from the outside without trouble. If can unlock a door and let the zombie hordes in from the outside if the characters take refuge inside the house. If can of course slam doors and throw open windows in best hammer horror style.

Not a hack and slash event

Going by the NPC roster in Sinister Secret I have 6 figures I can turn into ghosts if I wanted. In addition I am surrrounding the house with a graveyard that I can raise as zombies. I don’t want this to turn into a hack and slash event but I can use the zombies to push the characters into the house if need be.

I am quite looking forward to using a monster I have never used before and one that lets me achieve everything I want from a session.

September 27, 2016

Prepping for The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

Following Brian’s suggestion I have taken the haunted house from The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh as the basis of my haunted house. We are going to play this on the 16th so it is time to finalise my prep.

You can see, but probably not read my hand writing, that I am doing my usual sprinkling of post-it notes.

Noting the Encounters

The top post-it has just enough details for me to run an encounter with the snake(s). The original module had just a single poisonous snake at this point but I have swapped that out and made it a pair of vipers. The note reads 2x Vipers and then just enough details from Creatures and Treasures, the level, Mv, hits, AT, DB and OB etc. The block handing down below are the details of the poison taken from Character Law about the type and effect of the poison.

In this way I have saved myself two book look ups just by copying the core details onto the page. From a prepping point of view it takes very little time to write out just a single note so I can do a page or two each time I take a tea break.

Keeping track of Experience

The other thing that is popular is the game journal. We play so infrequently that the chances of remembering every step or clue in the game from one session to the next is almost nil. By taking my post-its off the page when they are finished with, the combat done or the NPC encountered. I can move them to where I keep my journal notes. I also use that for experience; so the details of the fight or however the vipers in this case were circumvented goes with the note into the journal.

As I am converting from one system to another there are a lot of changes to make to a bought module such as this but no more than if I was writing an adventure myself. The point is that I cam looking up the rules that will be called into play now rather than at the gaming table.

What to convert?

The sort of things I have noting are:

Converting D&D Potions into Rolemaster Herbs where possible.
Converting Monsters over to Rolemaster creatures if they exist, if not I am doing a manual conversion.
Creating NPCs as RM characters.
Checking and inserting the rules for poisons, diseases and traps.
Setting difficulty factors for traps, locks and manoeuvres.
Converting money from D&D to the Rolemaster decimal system.

Funnily enough it is the conversion of the magical items into RM herbs or into RM spell effects that makes the biggest difference to the feel of the game. D&D just does not have the herb culture and being able to smoothly integrate the herbs into the setting where they did not exist before works well. Conversely Rolemaster does not have a potion culture like D&D so by toning the use of poisons down helps.

In the current adventure there is a ring of protection +1 to be had fairly easily. We all know these from our D&D backgrounds but again they are not a Rolemaster ‘thing’. In the game as it will be played it will be a Ring (Daily III item casting Blur). They are not exactly the same but the trade off is that the ring of protection is a constant effect item that would give +5DB but I am giving away a +10DB but can only be used three times a day for short periods.

It is little tweaks like this that make the module feel like it is native Rolemaster rather than converted D&D.

It is the potted rule lookups on the page where they are needed that save time at the table.

The monster stats on the page with any special rules to run them that helps speed up combat. As I have said before for NPCs I note down the general plan for the first three rounds of combat and if or not they would try to escape and how.

Keeping it Sinister

Finally I have one other type of post-it on these pages. I am using them to remind me to lay on the atmosphere. This is meant to be a haunted house. With all the ideas I have to use from the 100 Creepy things books (http://www.rolemasterblog.com/azukail-games-100-creepy-things-events-encounter-outdoors/ ) I want to lay on the spooky effects. This is not intended to be a dungeon crawl and these little reminders are there to reinforce that point.

September 23, 2016

Demons and Devils – 5ex5

I have had an incredibly busy week, so much so that I missed blogging on Monday completely! What I should have been doing is working on the D&D 5th Edition conversion to a D100 system. I am doing this conversion very much with a Rolemaster hat on and it is interesting to see what D&D has that Rolemaster doesn’t and what it does very differently. One of those are the Demons and Devils.

Demon Princes

You can tell I am working on the Monster Manual right now can’t you. Demons are a classic fantasy monster and we have our own rolemaster demons with our type 1 to 5 pales and so on. When you compare that to the D&D world you get an entire ecology of abominations to play with from relatively weak monsters to named demon princes. I had forgotten just how many of these there actually were in the core D&D books.

Crusading Knights

I think that D&D had its origins in a fairly real world concept. You can almost see the fighter class being cast as a crusading knight. As soon as you take a step in that Christian direction then demons and devils are nature enemies to be defeated.

Rolemaster has a strong Tolkien heritage

Rolemaster on the other hand has a strong Tolkien heritage and in that setting there are certainly no devils but the Balrog certainly seems demonic even if they are of the maiar. Once you step away from middle earth then that demonic niche needs filling. I think the developers gave us elven demons and human demons to fill the gap. Seeing as Middle Earth had no devils then Rolemaster has no devils.

I think it is interesting that in 30+ years I have never felt the need to reintroduce devils back into the monsterous ecology of my game world which is in fact their natural environment of Faerun.

September 16, 2016September 16, 2016

My No Profession & Level-less House Rules

In the past I wrote a fist full of posts about character creation and advancement in Rolemaster Classic without professions or levels.

Rather than leaving these as a scattered collection of posts spread over two months I have brought them all together in a single PDF. I have stripped out every mention of RMU for two reasons. Firstly, the RMU I know is the beta version and is liable to change before publication and secondly I agreed to a non disclosure agreement to get access to the beta documents. It is not right to then disclose any of the RMU rules in this case.

So having sanatized the document and collated it I ave also edited it and removed a shocking number of typos (I didn’t realise how bad my typing gets at times!). I have put the finished document on RPGnow where you can grab it for free just by sticking a 0 in the price box.
I would be interested in hearing what you think of them when taken as a whole.

September 12, 2016

The Neological Naga Demon and the Franken Game

That sounds like a terrible B movie but right now I am preparing to spend a lot of time on Nagademon, or more correctly NaGaDeMon, and having never heard the words Franken Game until recently I have found myself using it twice this week.

What is a Franken Game?

A Franken Game is a game put together our of parts of other games. Originally Character Law was a bolt on replacement for must of the Players Handbook, Arms Law was a replacement combat system and Spell Law a drop in magic system. If you decided to take HARPs scalar spells and dropped it into RMC then you are now playing a Franken Game.

I once took the vehicle rules from Car Wars and converted them to d100 and used them as part of Spacemaster. It makes a lot of sense. How big a part of Spacemanster are 21st century cars trucks and motocycles going to be? The answer is tiny so the developers could not justify spending hundreds of hours perfecting rules for them. How big a part of Car Wars are cars, trucks and moticycles? Probably 95% I would say so dropping Car Wars into Spacemaster boosted that aspect of the game in an area I needed for the campaign I wanted to play.

This is insanity!

The best rules for insanity has to come from Call of Cthulhu, so why reinvent the wheel? Just make the minor changes needed to make it look and feel like Rolemaster (think of that as the surgical stitching) and there you go. you have sown together your own Franken Game. Most of us have shelves of games you have played int he past but are not playing now. All these games have elements we really liked when we played them and bits that we didn’t necessarily like. Using them as a library of body parts allows us to customise our own games to fit the worlds we want to play in. It is also great fun and as long as you don’t break the rules too much in doing the conversion to d100 OE (open ended) then the original games play testing should safe guard your Franken Games balance.

NaGaDeMons Ahoy!

I mentioned this in my last post. National Game Design Month. It is the NaNoWriMo of the gaming world. Let me digress for a moment.

There is an old joke about a school caretaker bemoaning the throw away culture of today and how they don’t make things like they used to where you could repair things rather than just throw it away and buy a new one. Take this broom for example, they don’t make brooms like this any more… Its had 5 new handles and 7 new heads but it is still going strong!

If you had a game you loved but you thought you could swap out the combat system for something ‘better’* and then you think “hey I like these scalar spells!” so you swap out the magic system. After a while you think there has to be a better way to handle all this profession bloat and skill bloat. So if you replace character law, arms law and spell law are you still playing Rolemaster?

I think the answer is yes you are. If you have magic structured into realms and roles are open ended and combat is driven by criticals, these are the hallmarks of the rolemaster system.

On the other hand what if like the broom with the 5 new handles and 7 new heads, there is nothing left of the original system? I think at that point you have crossed the line from Franken Game to a completely new system. If you then make sure it all works together and covers all the bases then you have a new game on your hands.

Most GMs feel we could write our own game

Most of us [GMs] feel we could write our own game. Equally most of us never will. This is where the Nagademon comes in. It focuses the mind into a single month of effort to actully write up all those ideas you have about how to create a perfect roleplaying game and get them down into a document. One month to break the back of the project. You can take as long as you like with the editing afterwards and that sort of thing. you could even go one step further and put your game on RPGNow or Drivethru. Afterall what have you got to lose?

*better is in inverted commas as your better and my better could be completely different!

September 10, 2016

D&D 5th Edition SRD and 5ex5

I have had quite an intersting day today working as part of a two person team converting all of the D&D 5th Edition SRD over to D100. The project is called 5ex5 as in 5th Edition x5, th emost obvious way to get from d20 to d100.

What is interesting from the Rolemaster perspective is that it will make any future products based upon it very easy to convert to Rolemaster and many will pretty much be able to be used off the shelf.

Free content for RM GMs

If you consider how much is published on Drivethru or RPGnow for free or Pay What You Want, this could explode the amount of free content for RM GMs.

It sounds pretty easy just multiplaying everything by 5 so d20s become d100s and a +1 bonus becomes a +5 and so on. The reality is that in the Monsters section alone there are over 10,000 edits to be made. You would have thought that one could just find and replace to change one thing to another but it doesn’t work that way as you have to check every reference as no one wants a dice rolls for durations or areas of effect multiplied.

The inner workings of D&D 5th Edition

What I have learned to day is a lot about how D&D 5th Edition works. I had only read the free basic version rules before but today I have read in detail then entire combat section of the SRD and I am quite impressed. If nothing else I should walk away with a pretty good knowledge of the inner workings of 5e!

So how long is this going to take?

I have no idea but I hope it is only going to be a few weeks as I have decided I want to have a go at NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Money) in November and there is only so much of me to go around. I am not sure I will have the time spare to do both.

September 5, 2016

The Week Ahead

You how some days you just know it is going to be a long grind and that is just the preparation for the next game session? i have one of those weeks in front of me. I have discovered a new task to hate and that is equipment lists.

I remember the days of not worrying about emcumberance and buying 200 torches for a gold piece. This week I am having to prepare custom equipment lists and lists of things that can be bought at a particular location.

It is entirely possible that this new place could become a long-ish term base for one of the characters I don’t want to ‘wing it’ and at the same time because of a shift in the available technology I cannot just half or double the prices in Character Law. So I am going through lists revising the weights of anything that is largely metalic downwards and increasing the costs.

That may not sound like a bog deal but the weight in metal is really important to essence and channeling spell users. If you introduced Aluminium or even polycarbonate into the Rolemaster universe then spell casters have a wail of a time. (Before anyone comments again, it is wail as is screams of laughter and not whale as in big fish as they are hardly known for partying hard!)

Anyway equipment lists got me thinking, as always the player is going to encounter someone who has this alien superlight equipment first and they are probably going to take a pasting because of the faster ad free movement and the armour plus spells combo. I am pretty sure they are going to grab the opportunity to upgrade a lot of their kit while they are at it.

The question is does a GM every introduce something into their world that would at first glance appear to shift the balance of power without thinking about the consequences?

Or to put it another way, “What the GM giveth, the GM can take away.” It is an interesting idea though when you take magic and thrust it into a potentially high tech arena which is not necessarily metal dependent such as kevlar or polycarbonate based.

I already know the shortfall in this new technology I am introducing, why the players will prpbably not become aware of it and why the originators do not take it into account, but in the meantime I need to get back to my amazing new equipment lists and stock prices.

September 2, 2016

100 Creepy Things and Events to Find in a Spooky House II – Book review

This is the third and final (at the moment) volume in the horror effects series by Azukail Games. This booklet (100 Creepy Things and Events to Find in a Spooky House II) has far less strange mists and fogs and noises in other rooms than its siblings but more architectural spookiness. You get more doors and windows that don’t go quite where they should, the classic branch suddenly breaking the window at night and other real Hammer Horror icons of the genre.

The production quality is equal to that of the other two ‘spooky’ publications and the content is equal, you get 100 special effects spread over 22 pages. Each is numbered so you could quite easily just roll a D100 or just pick the effect(s) you want.

The way that the events in this book are presented is very flexible, you get a lot of ‘if the players have lights then this happens, if they don’t then this happens…” sort of conditionals. This means that most of the events if not all will work even it things are not set up exactly as described. Afterall these are really just inpirations or as that horrible phrase goes “thought starters”.

Going off at a tangent; ever since I first saw the first of these books I thought that there was a potential adventure(s) in here for a rather twisted illusionist but I have taken that idea a bit further. The perfect villain is not not an illusionist but an Alchemist. A 8th level achemist with the following lists Organic Skills, Lesser Illusion, Rune Mastery, Invisible Ways and Essance Hand could prepare runes of light and sound mirages and telekinesis. These are only 2nd and 3rd level spells so the rune paper, which they could make themselves would only take a matter of weeks to create. If over the space of a year the Alchemist produced 10 sheets of 3rd level rune paper they could effectively ‘haunt’ any location they liked.

Illusions have a nice long 100′ range and using mostly sounds of thumps on the floorboards, screams and the sound of doors opening and closing etc. most of the atmospherics could be cast from rune paper at a safe distance. Telekinesis could be used to open or close doors or windows, again all from rune paper and from a safe distance. Once people are scared and running around looking for the source then a single invisibility spell and retire to safety.

Our alchemist could easily drive away peasants from a farm house and if people get brave or curious and start to come back then just throw more illusions at them. The rune paper is not lost when the spell is cast, it is just blanked ready for reuse. Our alchemist friend just has to recharge the runes the used. I would go so far as to say that because the illusions are not intended to last for ages, blood stains that appear and dissappear, a sudden scream from the attic and so on, attempting to detect essence is likely to fail as those spells detect active magic but the illusion is already over. Those higher level spells that can tell you what happened in a place in the past minutes or hours will not identify our alchemist as he is 100′ away and cast the spell into the attic but was never there himself. It is almost the perfect crime. Once he is living in his stolen farm house then people seeing lights on in the place are quite likely to ascribe it to the ghost anyway. Should the alchemist be discovered then it is debatable from a peasants point of view which is worse having your house inhabited by ghosts or by an ‘evil’ wizard?

Someone in my games is definitely going to encounter this nasty little achemist.

August 29, 2016

Melos, A contribution to Aioskoru

Quite a while ago now I produced half a dozen blog posts in support of Ken Wickham’s Aioskoru world setting. Things than kind of went off the boil a bit and I didn’t do much more beyond describe NPCs, three settlements and some adventures based around a ship full of orcs.

So recently Ken emailed me and said that he had bundled up a lot of his Aioskoru material from his blog and posted it on RPGnow. He had kept the format simple so that it was easy for him to update but he was putting it our there. He has had over 200 downloads of the material he has produced which hopefully means that the setting may get more supporters and continue to grow and develop.

I am always willing to lend a hand so I bundled up my old blog posts, re-edited them to turn them into a coherent supplement and submitted them to RPGnow. They have only been up for a few days but they have already had about 50 downloads. You can download them yourself for free at the link below. (click the cover image)

Melos, A contribution to Aioskoru

The ship on the cover refers to the sloop full of orcs in the featured adventure material.

If you want to download it and you like anything in it then let me know whar you think!

August 26, 2016August 25, 2016

Azukail Games – 100 Creepy Things and Events to Encounter Outdoors

Azukail Games has given me another new toy to play with in the form of the booklet 100 Creepy Things and Events to Encounter Outdoors a sibling product to http://www.rolemasterblog.com/100-creepy-things-events-find-spooky-house/.

Azukail Games aim to, in their own words, “Publishing RPG Supplements to Help GMs” and their supplements normally comprise lists of really useful things that normally a GM has to come up with off the top of his head. These could be NPC names, tavern names or books on the shelp of a library or in this case 100 Creepy Things.

The elements in this work are not confined to your typical haunted house so you get sinister mists and fogs, my favourite is a stray dog who’s lead ends in a bloody tatter s on. There will inevitably be some cliches in here as any collection that missed them out would be blatantly incomplete but there are enough things listed to keep it fresh for a long time.

If you are not running a horror based campaign then you will not be dipping into this week in week out but the whole point of just about every one of AG’s resources is to have them to hand for when you need them. Right now this supplement costs just $1.59 on RPGnow and it is definitely worth that and more. There is a huge potential here to use each and every one of the 100 events as the jumping off point for an entirely new adventure!