Author: Peter R

This time last week I was musing about city adventures. It seemed a common theme that the crux of the problem was that most city adventures involve wrong doing, and that there would always be people better suited to dealing with wrong doers than a heavily armed gang of vigilantes, or PCs as we like to call them.

The core of this months fanzine is city adventures. I think I came up with a pair of interesting and exciting situations for players to try and unravel.

As I was finishing writing the issue, I started to reflect and at the time what struck me was that what I was offering took this form (under th ehood, not literally)

• These are the bad guys
• These are their plans
• This is how they carry them out
• This is how the PCs can get caught up in this mess

I know GMs that love that structure. It gives them great flexibility to play out the ‘adventure’ in their own style. What it isn’t is a dungeon in city clothes.

For city adventures, palace intrigues/assassinations/insurrections are over done.

Equally, the sewers seem to be the ‘go to’ place to put the bad guys.

It is the middle ground that appears to be the hardest territory to run something. That is where the town guard walk the streets, where inconvenient witnesses could see too much.

If I were writing up and adventure idea for my own game, then I may happily burn a city to the ground. I could then run adventures arround the rebuilding. Doing that in someone else’s game is possibly overstepping the mark.

In adventures I have previously published, I have burned cities to the ground, open portals to the time of dinosaurs, had them ripped apart by active trees/treants, and infected them with the plague.

The common factor is that the city becomes the canvas against which the adventure takes place. In the city burning, there is only one potential combat encounter, but the adventure is best served by talking the situation out, not by killing the person that is being awkward.

In the dinosaur adventure it is pure hack and slash with T. Rexes in the street and pterodactyls in the air and big swishing tails mashing through the fronts of buildings.

The Treants may or may not have been borrowed from Isengard, an idea I can neither confirm or deny. Only this time the characters are on the inside of the ring of trees.

With the plague city/town, it is almost a casual obstacle in the characters way. They are supposed to resupply in the next town, when you get there is it is closed because of the plague. No supplies, no rest, but there could well be a chance to earn some serious brownie points and reputation.

What has struck me is, in the same way that the most dangerous threat that a PC can meet is an NPC, they are much more dangerous than any monster, so it is with city adventures. What makes the adventures work are the NPCs and their plans.

The actual setting is backdrop, even more so than in a dungeon or in teh wilderness.

One of the things I have to do this week is put together the July issue for the fanzine.

One of the things I want to include is an adventure for beginning level characters, which I consider 1st to 3rd level, set in a town.

Being in a town poses some challenges.

• From a hack and slash point of view, the town guard is more likely to a better bet than the characters at dealing with threats.
• There is a more limited selection of beasties to use for hack and slash encounters.
• Using intelligent creatures means they will more likely want a fair trial then be summarily executed by the characters.

From a non-hack and slash perspective we have other problems.

• Characters may not be diversified enough to have the social skills for a social conflict adventure.
• ‘Prime movers’ in social circles are highly likely to be a vastly higher level than the characters.

One of the things I struggle most with for urban adventures is how to create a challenge for the characters that makes sense for the characters to actively take part in. If the challenge is clearly illegal, what is to stop the characters simply calling the guard in to take care of it?

If it isn’t illegal, what is to stop the antagonists just calling in the guard to arrest the characters for the medieval version of harrassment?

In my face to face game, which we played before lockdown and we are due to play again in October or November, so has a chance of happening but no promises, the players are both hunting and hunted by at least one assassin. The actual number of assassins is not known. They could be the same person or different.

The identity of the assassin is also not known.

This is almost on a par with a superhero/villain with a public and secret identity. That is where some of the tension is coming from. The characters don’t know who they can trust. As they are also the hunted as well as the hunters they cannot afford to do nothing.

So over the course of today I will be wandering around the farm thinking of horrible things to do the the characters that are not to difficult for them to resolve, but not to easy either!

but probably slowly.

It is great that the ICE site is back up and running, and it looks like they preserved most of the data, everything important at least.

It is also great that RMu seems to be still making progress.

I think it was about this time two years ago that I last got excited about RMu being nearly complete. I wrote a series of posts about starting adventures, and cliches.

The point behind those posts was that to make RMu a success we need to get people playing it. New players are going to be starting at the bottom, whatever level that turns out to be.

What we are going to do with the 50in50 part 2 may be fine for experienced GMs with campaigns to drop things into, but I think that is a bit tough for a new GM with new players trying to learn a new game.

I was chatting to a podcaster last night on Discord and they were talking about live streaming their next game, using a VTT.

I can see the value of that. The live stream goes out via twitch, which attracts a live audience, who can interact with the GM via the chat stream. Post-game the video goes out to YouTube for posterity, so people can catch up or learn how to play.

You could even take the audio, clean it up and podcast it for people who just want to get their RPG fix while not being fixed to a screen.

I am building up my experience with VTTs, Fantasy Grounds, and although I can see the point of it, I really struggle with them. I am not seeing the software as enabling, I am seeing the software as interfering.

This isn’t a problem, no one says that we have to use FG or roll20 for that matter. It just means that this is not for me. When I have been doing it we were using voice of Discord and the character management over FG. It was quite detestable. One of those things where if this was the only option I would rather not do it.

As I say, it is not for me.

I always have a commercial head on my shoulders. I think it comes from the fact that I work in both advertising and finance. For someone with the appetite for this I think it could be an interesting side hustle.

Right now, you would struggle to get 100 subscribers to a Rolemaster channel but post RMu’s release, I would seriously hope to increase the interest in Rolemaster ten- or twentyfold.

I did a quick survey of existing Rolemaster streamers and actual play channels and that would mean as long at they could get over the 1000 subscriber threshold required to earn anything, they would earn $20-$40 per session. That was assuming a 10 or 20 times increase in interest in Rolemaster.

That isn’t a huge sum of money, but I looked at other streamers for other games. Some regular Zweihander youtubers are earning a ballpark $50 to $150 per streamed session. Even HARP, which is not expecting any kind of new edition anytime soon is bringing in thousands of subscribers and multiple thousands of views of each video.

I am basing this on a typical $3/1000 views.

This isn’t going to be an instant pay cheque, some of those HARP videos have been around for 8-9 years and have had time to keep ticking away picking up the viewers.

The things is, if you and your group are happy to put your games online, you are being paid to play. That is good for you but it is also good for the entire community. The more stuff there is out there to bring people to Rolemaster the stronger the community will become.

You don’t need to be Critical Roll to make a difference.

…is it better to cook and fumble, than to not cook at all?

OK, so this has come up on two different discord servers in the past month. Rolling skills for what I call non-critical outcomes.

I want to take Heathrow Airport as an example.

Heathrow is quite busy with aircraft. It has approx. 480,000 takeoffs and landings each year.

Assuming perfect weather every day, and all the maneuvers are during the best lit hours of the day there would be no external penalties to the pilot’s flying skill.

Flying London to New York is probably Routine. We all know that the takeoff and landing are the more difficult bits. Let us call them +0 maneuvers.

What do you think a pilots skill bonus is? +50? I think that is reasonable.

So 1 in 20 take offs will be open ended down. That is 24,000 rolls that taking the OE-down roll + skill and an average second roll end up at about ~0 net roll.

What does that mean? A bumpy landing? A bit of a longer takeoff? I am not sure if there is an extra 5 or 10 seconds of runway at Heathrow for making a second roll, but I will let that slide.

What if that second roll wasn’t an average roll cancelled out by the skill? 1200 take offs and landings each year will be double open ended down. An average result of about -100

In RMC, a result of -100 as a Static Action says BLUNDER: You fail spectacularly. If possible, your static action has the opposite effect from what you intended.

If landing a plane is a MM then it depends on what you see the actual difficulty is. The result could be just 10% of the maneuver completed (Routine) to people taking actual damage (Light).

But what if it didn’t end there?

Of those 1200 double open ended down rolls, 60 are triple open ended rolls down with a result of -200.

Depending on your chosen version of RM passengers and crew could be taking E criticals at this point. about a quarter of E critical are fatal, which with an aircraft capacity of 300 on average; would give us about 90,000 dead people being body bagged out of planes each year.

But it doesn’t stop there… three of those 60 will, statistically, be quadruple open-ended downwards.

And that is just landing and taking off. What about taxiing the plane from the end of the runway to the terminal. This would be another roll to park the plane near the end of that movable corridor thing. Somewhere between 3 and 1200 planes would fail to stop at the glass walls of the terminal!

If you tried to emulate a busy airport using Rolemaster rules, Heathrow would be a smoking crater in the ground. As most planes traverse London and have to maneuver into holding patterns, London would no longer exist. It would have been wiped off the face of the earth years ago, along with every other airport and connected city on the planet.

This would not be a problem because there are so many cars on the road each day that we all died in fatal road accidents anyway.

So do you make a player make a cooking skill test to prepare the parties food?

I would say, that unless it was exceptional circumstances, characters that know how to cook, can cook.

The skill description actually describes things like removing poison or safely preparing edible herbs or dangerous foods.

If cooking was used as a skill test for just cooking something just about every burger joint would need a morgue.

Degrees of Difficulty

Most of us are familiar with this ladder.

10-01 DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
Routine
Easy
Light
Medium
Hard
Very Hard
Extremely Hard
Sheer Folly
Absurd

I would suggest that we could scrap the entire top half. What is the point of asking a character to roll a routine skill test? Surely it is routine?

Revised DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
Hard
Very Hard
Extremely Hard
Sheer Folly
Absurd

What do you lose by curtailing the table? A small amount of granularity, by the time the characters have even two ranks in a skill and a bit of stat bonus, they are making Routine to Light challenges anyway with an averagy roll. At least to Partial Success.

Beyond about 3rd level Routine to Light are nonsense.

What do you gain? Well part of the criticism of over complexity in RM is mitigated, you get less senseless rolling at the table, and… when you do ask for a roll it will instill a great sense of drama in your players. The dice come out when things get serious.

Assumed success, where the characters can do what they are trained to do, until it becomes a focus of the drama, also creates a less adversarial GMing style. It is a bit like trusting people to do what they say they can do, rather than micro-managing them.

Conclusion

If it really doesn’t matter, don’t make people roll. If you do, you should expect planes to fall out of the sky and a TPK the next time someone tries to reheat some camp rations.

I am coming up to speed with the second wave of 50in50 adventures. I really wanted to do something Robin Hood and/or Arthurian in nature but the subject matter demands more than the short format adventure allows.

It could well be a future project, but now is not the time.

Last week I spent a day writing an adventure for Dissident Whispers. That adventure in the image below is my submission.

Hi! We're a collective building a book of short TTRPG adventures for a variety of systems including D&D, MÖRK BORG & Trophy Gold to raise money for #blacklivesmatter bail funds
We'll be publishing next Thursday so give us a follow to keep up to date! #RPG4BLM pic.twitter.com/J6TNWlUloV

— Dissident Whispers (@DissidentRPG) June 6, 2020

Now, what that tells me is that I am pretty terrible as page layout.

Here is a similar format adventure I wrote for Zweihander, but I did the layout.

You can instantly see how pedestrian my design is compared to a professional doing the layout.

What I would quite like to do with the 50in50 adventures is practice my ‘one page dungeon’ skills.

The general format I use is:

• Plot Hook
• Key setting info
• Location/map/key
• Significant NPCs
• GM Guidance for running the adventure
• Bestiary

I try and get all of that into around 1700 words and they fit on two sides of a sheet of US Letter paper. I can also fit in the location map and a piece of art or two for good measure.

What I like about these is that they are instantly gameable. If your players go off piste and you suddenly need something fun in the right place, a folder full of these will save your game session.

If I were to bold on my normal conventions of A Level; where NPC levels are described relative to the Average level of the party. H notation where numbers encountered are described as relative to the size of the party (H equals the number of Heroes). My bestiary provides alternative monsters for Low, Mid, High and Very High level parties.

Now what you have is not a single page but an adventure that will work with any number of characters, at any level in just a couple of pages.

I cannot write for Shadow World but I would be very surprised if you could not place these adventures into just about any setting. I am looking at things with a local influence of just a few miles around the actual location.

How does that sound?

I suspect that the adventures will be more ‘traditional’ and include more dungeons, temples, crypts and dark places. My first set of 50in50 adventures tended to be more towns, villages and wilderness.

Last week I was putting together the latest Rolemaster Fanzine. I had written one adventure and when I was looking back at it, the issue seemed a bit light, so I wrote another adventure dedicated to Siltoneous and Majyk, who suggested the monsters.

In the past twelve months, I believe I have written and published 20 adventures for the different versions of Rolemaster.

Zero Magic

I was thinking of doing some Zero-Magic adventures based upon the stories of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Although the stories hint at magic and witchcraft, there is no explicit magic in the stories.

Brutal Rolemaster criticals and no magical healing is a tough mix. That then begs the questions of would it work and would it be fun?

The question of viability comes down to if there is no way of healing characters beyond regular medieval healing, the first aid and second aid skills and maybe medicine and surgery. A mortal wound really would be a mortal wound.

Or would it?

Is this not the perfect place to implement FATE points. Spend a fate point to either re-roll a critical against you, or have the GM downgrade it to the next non-fatal critical to the same location. A bit like a RMu called shot in reverse.

I know there was a Robin Hood campaign set, from back in the Fantasy Hero days. I don’t have the book any more, but I know a man how has and I could borrow it if needs be [I still have his copy of Dark Space, but he doesn’t want it back].

As I remember, there was virtually no magic in the Robin Hood campaign book, which is how I would have it.

Healing herbs is something I am thinking about. Without them it reinforces how special the lack of magical healing is. With them, every PC will be buying herb lore and they will be trying bypass that element of the setting. I think that is a shame.

But, would this be fun? I think the magic ingredient is the FATE point. If you character is going to die through an arbitrary bad luck dice roll you are less likely to get invested in them and their adventures. On the other hand, if you had one or maybe two FATE points, where you would feel relatively safe when you had both, but the first time you used one you would be noticibly closer to living on the edge.

Use both your FATE points and I think you would feel positively vulnerable.

Big Magic

To me, it seems like if you are going to do a campaign of no magic, one should do something afterwards to compensate. To please the people who do like magic, powerful wizards and wonderfully evil witches.

Keeping it all in keeping, a campaign of Arthurian Legends would be the logical (to me at least) next game. Arthurian legend comes with built in magical weapons in Excalibur. Powerful spell casters with Morgana and Merlin, the mysticism of the lady of the lake and the enchanter Menw ap Tairgwaedd.

You have monsters such as the questing beast and the giant Ysbaddaden, and some classic foes in the Black, Red and Green knights.

It almost feels like these should be done Arthurian first, because that is closer to a classic fantasy game, but rich in legendary lore, and then run the Robin Hood campaign afterwards to continue the ideas of battling around England slaying foes of literary history.

Which Way To Choose?

I can see two ways of running this. The first is to have as much as possible, as authentic as possible. It would be extremely difficult to write them as drop-in ‘one-off’ adventures and encounters like we did for the first 50in50. these would need to be saved up and used as part of a new game set in 9th century Britain.

The second option is that only the GM knows that the characters are playing knights of the round table and members of Arthur’s court. What the characters see and hear is that of a local warrior king and his knights and retinue. The ‘real’ characters identities are a bit of a private joke for the GM.

I prefer the first option, but it would make the adventures less immediately useful.

The legends of King Arthur are called the Matters of Britain. They are one of the Matters, or great cycles, The others are The Matters of France and The Matters of Rome.

The Matters of France dealt with Charlemagne and his Paladins and The Matters of Rome dealt with Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar. You have to admit that a series of adventures covering several thousand years, [I am not putting a number on it because I will be wrong and Hurin will correct me 🙂 ], must sound tempting.

I would prefer option one, making the adventures part of an obvious Arthurian campaign, with the name characters and places such as Avalon and Camelot. A GM could always choose to rename and reposition the adventures into their own world. The real names do at least conjure the right images, in my opinion.

What do you all think?

Recently I have spent quite a lot of time hanging out on the Castles & Crusades discord server. The C&C crowd are really nice people and many of them have a strong affection for Rolemaster. I was chatting yesterday about virtual Gen Con and the sentiment was that they would jump into a Rolemaster game at the first time of asking if they could find one.

But what does this have to do with our 50in50 ‘take 2’ adventures?

What I would like to do is dual stat the adventures. We cannot go publishing very detailed RM stats, as they would break ICE’s copyrights but we can point people to book and page.

I would like to dual stat as many of these as I can to Rolemaster and C&C. Troll Lord Games, the publisher of C&C recently created 3rd Party Publisher guidelines, logos and badges.

If there is already goodwill between the C&C following and the much smaller RM following, they would seem to be natural bedfellows.

I can easily add the stats to Brian’s 25 as I know the system and I have already published for it.

Brian has an organised plan for his 25 and five of them are already written or outlined. I have done nothing!

At least some of these adventures will be ‘low magic’ or ‘no magic’. Adventures where playing a good old plain fighter, thief or rogue will be more than adequate.

It is possible that these will be low low level or entry-level, probably 1st to 5th. Even if you have a caster in the party, they will not be throwing people through walls or razing the battlefield at those levels.

I remember writing the first set of 25 and how much fun it was. I am quite looking forward to getting started with this again.

It was sad news this week, that GenCon has been cancelled. I saw someone on Discord (Marc maybe?) saying that it should be pushed back to October rather than cancelled but that isn’t so easy. These convention halls do not lie empty all year. Every week there is someone running something, and right now I guess everyone with something booked is worrying about whether their event will go ahead. I only looked as far ahead as mid-November but there was no space for a GenCon 2020 in the list.

The real concern about GenCon was that it was going to be the first outing for RMu, in the wild. There is going to be a virtual GenCon but that will not have the same impact as teh in-person event.

It is encouraging that RMu is far enough along to be able to play it as an organised play. For that we are thankful.

Adventures!

Brian has suggested that we write another set of 50-in-50 adventures this year. I think the three of us are up for it and this time we want to expand on last time and build in more game stats, maps and battle mats.

I am quite excited about this. They are a lot of work, coming up with an adventure for every week, for 25 weeks, but they are also great fun to do.

One of the best bits is of course that it keeps Rolemaster on the front page of DriveThruRPG for the best part of a year, even if it is just on the “Newest” list.

I have a hankering to write some viking-esque adventures. You may well see them cropping up in the next round of 50-in-50.

This month’s Director’s Briefing suggested that there could be special printed materials for the organised play games at GenCon, should the con go ahead.

I have been lurking on the fringes of many discord servers and the feeling is probably 50/50 that it won’t happen and equally 50/50 as to whether people will attend even if it does run.

I saw the build up to GaryCon and right now the build up to Con of Champions [CoC].

CoC is significant, Tabletop.events who is organising it provides all the software and support for many smaller cons and they are in trouble. CoC is a fund raising initiative to keep the company alive.

https://tabletop.events/conventions/con-of-champions

GenCon, is 80 days away. Is that a long time in pandemic terms? It is my guess that Americans will be free to go to a mass gathering in 80 day’s time, but there will be no exhibitors or visitors from Europe.

Indiana’s roadmap for reopening the state economy only extends to July 4th but it doesn’t seem to me that you could run a con under those guidelines.

https://backontrack.in.gov/files/BackOnTrack-IN_WhatsOpen-Closed-stage5.pdf

But the Good News Is…

The very idea that there could be something of RMu that is ready to ‘show and tell’ at a major con is great news. We have all been wildly speculating and my bet was for an RMu GMs screen. It would give the Con GMs all the updated tables in one place, and the outside is a great place to show off branding and art.

You can get a GM four-fold GM screen with full-colour inserts printed and under $30, including a profit margin if you put them on sale!

My mind is ever commercial. If I am right and the screen is the ‘special thing’ then I can see diehard RMu fans clamouring to get them. That on its own could start the RMu product line and feed funds into finishing the books.

Another interesting bit of positive news is that there have been so many posts on this blog since the lockdown has been going on that I have struggled to find a day when someone else hasn’t already posted something.

A thriving and active community is a good thing!

Last week I highlighted the ICE RPG discord server. At the time of writing it had 51 users. It now has 64. I am in the UK and I am used to discord being all tumbleweed and silence before midday and America wakes up. Even now there are 20 people online.

Yesterday, Terry Amthor joined the server!

If you have any time to kill, get on to discord and give it a try.

https://discord.gg/YBrepAB

If you want to get your daily dose of Rolemaster, HARP, or RMu, there is now a well supported discord server.

Follow this link https://discord.gg/YBrepAB And it will take you straight there. If you haven’t used discord it is pretty much the IRC, Internet Relay Chat, of the 90s brought up to date.

There are even voice chat games going on.

When I checked this morning, there were 50+ members and even in my timezone there were 15 online.

We cannot magic the forums back up, but between the blog and the discord we can keep the community together and active!