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Reading List and Dark Space

Over Christmas, I set myself three goals, one of which was to read the Call of Cthulhu rules. I had only ever played the game, never run it, so was familiar with the rule in practice but had never sat behind the keeper’s screen.

It is now the middle of Feb and I am still reading.

Alongside that, quite a while ago I borrowed Dark Space from one of the guys in my Rolemaster group and I have now bought the book from him as he has said that he will never run it.

This throws up the issue of insanity in Rolemaster. I have written an article about this in the latest Fanzine. The gist of the article is about how dodgy using something as glib as a low-level neurosis spell is on a player or a player who has never experienced mental health issues trying to play a neurosis for laughs could be if you have someone sat at your table that has been struggling with their own mental health.

I don’t think the argument that a group may have been playing together for years and none of you have mental health problems so this doesn’t apply to you doesn’t stack up. People can and do hide issues for years. I know that my long term GM suffered from Schizophrenia for decades before getting a diagnosis. It is also recognized that role-players as a group have higher instances of mental health issues than the population as a whole. Presumably, the possibility of living someone else’s life for a while has an appeal. I cannot find the research right now but I think it was based upon a sampling of US role players so that may not apply globally but I cannot see why it shouldn’t. People are people all over the world.

Since writing the article in the fanzine I have been thinking about this a bit more. Not from a mental health perspective but from a game mechanic point of view.

Dark Space has two options. The first is to use Stress and Depression criticals from RoCoIII, which I am really not that impressed with. The second option is to use a new Stat called Rationality (Ra). The Ra stat is a complete carbon copy of the CoC Sanity stat and you lose Ra points depending on what the character experienced and loss of Ra leads to temporary or long term insanities, which you roll on a table. This pretty much imports all of the potential problems with CoC into Rolemaster.

The Criticals solution is equally crass. It just tells the player to play their character as either depressed or suicidal with a percentage chance of suicide each week.

I am thinking about a solution that has more shades of grey to it. We already have Co drain from the undead, could we have mental [temp] stat drain from a variety of stats. So studying some material that makes you question your very understanding of how the universe works could give you a resistance roll with your Re bonus as an assist but failure leads to a reduction in your Re stat, x number of points for every 10 points of RR failure. But, here is the first of two clever bits, if the trauma were emotional you could use In as the pertinent stat and damage the In temp as a consequence.

We can import the idea of temporary mental health issues from CoC. If you lose 20% of your remaining temporary stat in a short period of time but rather than rolling on a table what we, as GMs, do is you talk to the player and discuss how their character should react to this to that trauma. This negotiated behavior means that two characters facing the same emotional hurt could react very differently. One player could choose to be callous and unfeeling, wall themselves off from others and emotional bonds. Another player may choose to make their character desperate for emotional support.

As GM you are there and agreed with how the player was going to play this personality change. That means that you can use it to reward good role-playing. You know the criteria so you can measure performance against expectations.

Now we have a system that allows you to model different types of stress and trauma, it gives the player an active role in portraying the effects and the character gets rewarded for the player playing their character well.

You could also introduce parapsychology and psychiatry as skills and use these to restore lost tempory stats. There has long been a lack of clarity in how undead Co drain was supposed to be recovered.

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Bad Boy Druids

When I think of druids, I think of human sacrifices, wicker man style burnings, and an extremely ‘zero tolerance’ regime ruling through fear.

This doesn’t really fit well with the Rolemaster’s vision of the druid. I cannot help but wonder if the druid is needed at all as a profession. Are they no just clerics or evil clerics from a Celtic culture?

I can see a lot of role-playing opportunities for playing a druid in a Celtic or Roman-inspired campaign but after that, the profession starts to hit problems.

In the RMC Companion One, the druid is an animist with alternative base lists. It is inevitable then that the discussions this week on druids are going to center on the spell lists.

Animal Mastery

I quite like this list. It provides a lot of utility in almost every adventuring situation from putting guard dogs to sleep to being able to use Blofeld’s cat to spy against him (Animal Tongues + Befriending). Animal summoning can be used to boost the combat abilities of a party, and a bit of animal healing in there as well. It is a good all-round list with lots of uses.

Druid’s Peace

This is the first of the overpowered spell lists, in my opinion. It looks to be a bit like Spirit Mastery on steroids. We said last week that one of the strengths of the Bard was that they could affect multiple targets. Well, the druid can do that with knobs on. The bard needs two lists one for the songs and one to enhance them. The druid can do both at once, with nice long durations, a minute per level without concentration.

The list has that same feel as the Warrior Mage’s attacking list, which is packed with a cherry-picked list of all the best bits of the magician’s base lists. This list has that feel.

Druid’s Staff

So this is the big one. The spell adding, bonus giving uber-weapon of the druid that keeps on giving. The list has no reason for its existence except to pile heavy duty warrior mage style combat abilities on to a druid. Unbelievably there is a pair of optional rules attached to this list, that if the thing isn’t game-breaking enough for you as it is, you can ramp up the power by increasing the bonuses and boosting the spell adder/multipliers benefits.

Natures Forms

This spell list looks normal. Maybe I am just becoming desensitized. There are spells on this list that are giving +50 to +75 to stalk and hide attempts. I am not sure if this is overpowered or not. My Lay Healer character is frequently boosting his perception rolls by +50 using vision and hearing enhancing spells. More of this later.

Stone Mastery

Stone Mastery, or thermo-nuclear war mastery, is another gonzo combat list. This spell list is on a par with being able to cast the best of the magicians base lists but doing the rounds of prep before the battle. Stone Throw gives you the basic directed spells attack, that just gets bigger and bigger as you level up. Magic Stone gives you a free secondary attack that makes the stone explode on contact. At 5th level you are throwing water bolts and by 9th they are Water Ball area of effect spells, in addition to the damage done by the stone. Don’t get me started on Animate Stone or Spike Stones.

Tree Mastery

I think this list is a bit of a trojan horse. I am sure that the entire list exists to be a container for the 6th level spell Plantskin. This gives you an AT4 which is a lot like full plate (AT20) but with no movement or ranged attack penalties.

7th Level God

If you drew a line across the druid lists at 7th level you have a character that can do everything. They don’t really need a party. They have incredibly armour, they can move about almost undetected, they can gather information using animals and plants as their sources. They have incredibly ranged and melee combat abilities and you cannot discount their access to closed channeling lists which give them healing power as well.

They don’t need to find or earn magic items as they can make their own, pretty much on demand.

A lot of GMs start you at above 1st level and others use accelerated development in the first few levels, either will get characters enough power points, hits, and OB to take on more challenging adventures. A druid in that environment could race up to this power watershed at around 7th level in next to no time.

I cannot say that I would allow a player to use this profession in my game. The animist fills the same niche. You have three options, play a cleric of a nature god, play an animist or play a ranger but the druid is way off the power level of all the core rule pure spell casters.

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Two Types of Crunch

Step 4 and we haven't rolled any stats yet.

There was a thread on the forums this week about what do you like most about Rolemaster, HARP, and MERP. One of the things that stood out was half the people liked the detail and ‘crunch’ of certain rules. Others valued the simplicity or lack of ‘crunch’ of certain rules.

It was not that there are crunchy people and non-crunchy people. There was not one dissenting voice over the simplification of spell casting in RMu.

One the other hand there were two camps on the topic of combat. For some the one weapon, one combat table was desirable, but married up with a generic critical table for all piercing or all slash wounds. HARP has the least crunchy combat with one single roll on a different table for each class of weapon but those weapons each get their own unique critical tables. Less dice rolling, less tables but more flavour. The middle ground is the RMFRP way of tables for a group of weapons, all the possible armour types but the traditional generic combat tables.

The many types of RM/HARP/MERP combat table

The take away regarding combat is that there are four systems in common use, they all give the same net result, the same numbers of hits taken and the same scale and severity of criticals and largely use the same language, #hits, and A-E (and beyond) criticals.

Any table-driven combat system cannot get away from that appearance of crunch, you will never be free of the book or a laptop/tablet if you use automated software for your combats.

A different sort of crunch was apparent in people’s preception of skills. I think of this as ‘mined crunch’. You can have a few broadly defined skills, or you can mine down into more specific skills and then mine further down into detailed specializations.

The simpler, broader defined skills, suggest a more traditional OSR style of play. If you want to say something diplomatic you just role play and say something diplomatic. An infinite array of skills leads down a path that leads to

Player: I want to say something to defuse the situation.
GM: OK, roll your public speaking.

There are strengths and weaknesses to both styles of play. If you feel self-conscious playing in characters and making speeches in front of the group then just rolling the dice holds a lot of attractions.

The broad skill approach requires a stronger character concept to play correctly. If there is just one Athletic Games skill and your character comes from a seafaring nation then you are going to be adept at games from rowing to climbing rigging and possibly swinging from ropes. Put that character in the far north and although you have the applicable skill it does not mean you can ski like a pro. You have to role play your character concept. There is no reason not to take skiing instruction and then be able to use the character’s core strength and trained balance to add skiing to their repertoire, but that should develop through play.

All of that can be avoided by having a great many layers of skills, and crunch, which tightly define what a character can and cannot do, and then a layer of similar skills to say what they know that could cross over. It is either replacing role-playing your character concept with a less flexible but more structured approach.

Neither is right or wrong. What I struggle with is the latter method does become very slow at character creation, a great many similar but different professions and a great spectrum of skills that all take time to pick and record. That married up with a very dangerous combat system and high lethality.

I see this kind of crunch as a more personal choice. Some people want it, some people don’t. The net effect is the same, characters are designed first and foremost by the player’s character concept and then the skills are bought to map that concept to the game rules. You can never totally escape combat tables if you play RM, HARP or MERP but the level of skill, and even profession crunch is within your power.

I think the Rolemaster community will always be polarised by this desire for more detailed simulation vs. less detailed simplicity. The four corners all suffer the same polarisation, character creation, combat, magic and spells, and monsters. The two sides cannot be reconciled because how could you possibly think it is a good idea to take away your ability to handcraft every monster in every encounter if that is what you love doing? The same is true for every aspect.

This is also why RMu has taken a decade to get this far and is still just a distant dream. There is little unity in a community that all wants different things.

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Once Upon A Bard

The game I am a player in at the moment has a Bard in the party. There are three important facts about this party/game that you should know. The first is that we are still what the GM calls low level, the party is 4th to 7th level. The GM is using accelerated leveling so we seem to be jumping a level or two for every about 10hrs of play. The second thing is that this is a very high magic world. Even peasants in the fields can cast cantrips and almost every family has a caster that knows at least one list and the first level spell. Finally, there seems to be a lot of role confusion in the party.

I will deal with the role confusion firstly.

The party is made up of a Magician who dresses like a barbarian, kilt and claymore, the whole chebang. That is how we met him and at first level our OB/DB combinations were so low that he could easily have been a real warrior/barbarian. The player is one of those that bought a rank in his claymore at 0th or maybe 1st level and has not touched the skill since. The player is one of those that has to grab every possible magic item for themselves. Much to other party members displeasure, he is hoarding a magical ring and sword that give a total OB bonus of +50. His total OB is probably +60 now. I think he is 5th level and has ~30PP.

We have a Noble Warrior. Also about 5th level, chainmail hauberk, sword and shield or a big old two-handed mace. He really, really wanted that sword and ring! I haven’t seen much magic from this character beyond the occasional Shield spell.

Me, my character is a 7th level lay healer. I am learning plate armour (AT17), I wield a spear, with shield most of the time. I have an OB of +48 (two-handed) or +28 one-handed. I am capable at Adrenal moves strength and speed with total bonuses of about +50 in each. I have more powerpoints than you can shake a stick at from background options and a multiplier.

The Bard. Our bard is wearing chain 13, uses a sword and is growing into his magic. I believe he has only just hit 4th level. He is lagging behind because he missed a couple of game sessions and was NPCd by the GM and picked up less exp during those sessions.

The role confusion comes from the magician looking like a barbarian, having the highest OB and only magical weapon in the party but being fight shy. The character talks the talk but when it comes to the action he wants to be as far away from the nasty monsters as possible. In our last fight against a particularly nasty and bigger than normal wyvern we wall charged in to save the innocent bystander but at the last minute the magician used Leaping to jump out of the combat and back out of danger.

The bard in this battle tried Calm Song but without success. He then spent a couple of rounds after the battle had started to get behind the Wyvern during which time he had both Shield and Blur) Attack Avoidance and either Cloaking or Brilliance lists. He then entered melee using position and magic to aid him.

Our bard seems to have just enough DPs to be able to pick up both some of his base lists and a couple of Open Mentalism lists. What he is lacking is anything overtly offensive. As a character, he was fully engaged in the combat.

Out of combat, he does have a lot of options and is one of the most useful characters. We are on a long ol’ quest and city hopping with long journeys in between. The noble warrior just seems to see the cities as R&R locations. The mage is turning into a pretty one-dimensional artillery piece. It is in these city sessions that the bard shines as our major source of information and of reputation.

From the players point of view his main complaint about the profession is that he feels inactive a lot of the time as he has to keep playing/concentrating to maintain his spell effects. He described it as prep, prep fail, prep, prep succeed, do nothing. It doesn’t help that he is the lowest level party member. I already have some spells I can snap off in a single round as I am now 7th level. I also get subconscious spells so even when stunned I am still doing stuff. I can un-stun myself, I can clot wounds and I can heal.

The player is mitigating this by buying up more non-bard lists to give himself more options. The Bardic lists that he has don’t get particularly useful until 5th level, when the effects start to last after the song ends. I would have said that all of the bardic lists ramp up from this point onwards. The open mentalism lists, in contrast, are giving him utility, more instant cast spells and a least a few subconscious spells. I can see why he may be seeing them as more immediately useful.

I think this is a shame. The character is from a supposedly affluent background, attended the best musical colleges so the backstreet thief style bard does not really suit. Combat boosts are not particularly fitting either.

If I was going to give the character a boost I would possibly consider something along the lines of reading people and body language. An Anticipations List based upon being able to see the person you are trying to anticipate the actions of. This could have combat and social uses. It would fit in with the social element of the bard and also with their mentalism realm. A first-level spell that gave a small boost to either OB or DB because you could anticipate your opponent’s action would not be overpowered or out of character with the profession. These could ramp up and be used in more situations as the list progressed. I would also see these as instant spells so the bard’s magic would be useful to them right from 1st level.

This just needs the GMs approval, a DP investment and time for the character to do the research. That is what I would do.

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Ranger Magic

Carrying on from Brian’s post on the RMu ranger it seemed fairly accepted that the way to make the Ranger stand out was through magic. I firmly agree with this. I played in a game a few years back where I had a thief character with a pretty hefty In stat bonus. I tossed 12DP into an open channeling spell list and just let it ride each level until I managed to get the list with just the one rank. The GM let us add stat bonuses to the spell gain roll so it was almost inevitable that eventually, I would get the list. Once I did get the list I put 12DP into a second list. During our adventures I had picked up a x2 Channeling multiplier which no one else could use. Being limited to 1st – 5th level spells plus quite good natural PPs/level (2 I think it was) and x2 from the item it didn’t take long for me to have so many power points that I effectively never ran out. Being a thief by profession my main emphasis was not a spell caster but being able to heal concussion hits was useful as was light’s ways.

The GM did individual experience and the more active you were in the session the more EXP you got. This lead to the mage and I being two levels higher than the rest of the party when they reached 10th and I was 23rd level before the fighter reached 20th. By that time I had 5 spell lists.

Almost everyone in the party thought I was a ranger. I played the character as a scout rather than an actual thief and that made me quite outdoorsy and then with magic on top the natural conclusion was that I was a ranger.

In my last four or five levels I actually learned transcend armour and plate AT17 and started masquerading as a Paladin using much the same technique. Platemail fighter type that lays on hands, a bit of an Aura spell here and there, but that is another story.

The point is that the thing that made the character stand out amongst his peers, and made people think he was a Ranger was the magic.

Image via Wizards of the Coast Magic: The Gathering

It was suggested that the Ranger could be an Essence semi, or a Mentalism semi profession. Part of the problem is that we each have very different ideas of what a Ranger actually is. Is it Aragorn, Robin Hood or Lawrence of Arabia? Primarily an archer or are they a commando built for stealth and up close hand to hand fighting?

If we start to make wood/forest/tree type spells for the profession do we cripple it for desert or nautical settings?

Does swapping the realm take away as much as it solves?

I was flicking through Companion One looking for some inspiration and I lighted upon the Arcane lists. Just using the small selection of arcane lists in RoCoI they would make a great ranger. The only one that is potentially borderline is Mana Fires but even then I can see a ranger being the one that instinctively saves people by using fire to drive away wild beasts.

Could the fact that the Ranger seems to be a natural fit for every realm not point to the solution that they are naturally every realm?

I would be very inclined to allow a Ranger to swap out one or even two of the RAW Ranger base lists with one or two of the RoCoI Arcane lists and treat them as if they were Channeling lists for casting restrictions. The enforced choice also means that we would get some very different Ranger builds.

Take a look and see what you think of an Arcane-ish Ranger. Would you want to play it?

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My Angel is Bigger Than Your Angel

Some artwork © Grim Press, used with permission. All rights reserved.

In December I wrote an encounter. The gist of it was that the characters come across an angel trying to deliver a message to some shepherds but the angel gets attacked by some big tough demons. The characters get to make the choice to intervene or not, if the angel is defeated it will try to pass on its message for the characters to deliver, and so on.

D&D has celestials as a type of monster, big tough angels. Rolemaster doesn’t have them or if it does I had an absolute failure in my research skill roll when looking for them.

In place of the missing celestial stats I used the stats for an Oriental Dragon and just changed the physical form factor to that of an Angel and tweaked the odd ability here or there. I was pretty pleased with the result.

The oriental dragon version of the angel was not my first choice. I started out by making a Hira’razhir cleric but their default level is only 3rd and that was not the sort of thing I was looking for in this encounter. I could have leveled up the Hira’razhir cleric but that was too much effort (I am extremely lazy).

All through this my thinking is very much RM2/RMC. I am 100% sure that the same effects could be achieved with RMSS/FRP and even more so with RMu with its archetypes and seven million talents. What I wanted could just as easily be botched, jury-rigged or finely crafted. Whether the end results would be any different depending on the route you took is open to debate.

The positive thing is that both options are available. The GMs that like to handcraft every encounter can be satisfied by taking a Hira’razhir and giving it a profession, all the racial stat modifiers are in C&T to roll up your NPC with the full profession and spell lists and everything that goes with it.

Equally, I could tweak a stat here, an ability there and change the physical description and the encounter was good to go.

Could I have done the same thing in D&D? I am not sure both options are available. The botch and make it up is definitely an option. Creating a monster strictly adhering to the monster design rules, I am not sure if they exist. My D&D experience ends with AD&D and Basic/Expert so I am drawing on a distant and outdated set of knowledge.

A few years ago I was involved in editing a version of the 5e SRD and at that time I honestly do not remember seeing monster creation rules in the book. That could just mean that they are not part of the SRD.

So I know I can easily botch, jury-rig and craft a monster in RM. What about competing systems?

RuneQuest

RuneQuest uses the concept that every creature can be a player character and as such, they are all customizable. Creating unique monsters is catered for in the rules. In addition, RuneQuest uses a skill shorthand, such as a single figure to use for all skill tests, Ogres get 20% in all skills except the few that really define their orgrishness. Having these rules of thumb or shorthand techniques makes botching something up quickly a viable option.

Zweihander

Zwei has two approaches. The first is treating all similar creatures as one. A Man Eater could be a lion, tiger, wolf or whatever. The basic stats do not change, just the visual appearance to the characters. You can have half a dozen basic templates and cover the entire natural animal kingdom. The same approach is taken with monstrous things. They are split into broad categories and from them you can dress them up as you like. Zwei also has a full cast of truly unique creatures, the same as any system but the general approach is that the role play trumps the need for unique stats for everything.

The second approach is found in the companion Main Gauche. In this book, you get a blank template and all the rules necessary to make any monster. These are the same rules used to create the stats for the core rules.

Zwei leads with botch it but backs that up with fully customizable monsters using a rules-driven process. A unique monster takes about 20-40 minutes if you have to read as you go.

Chivalry & Sorcery

One of the cornerstones of C&S is that Monsters are people too. What that means in practice is that they are just as customizable as player characters. Think of them as NPCs.

It may just be my lack of experience with the rules but I found this the slowest game to create a unique monster in. It may get quicker over time but or it may just have been me. I fact is that the rules for customization are there.

vsDarkmaster

It is so long since I have read these rules that I could not fairly compare them. I also read an early beta rather than the finalised rules. What I am expecting though is no more trouble than RM presented. They share the same DNA and when I have compared monsters across systems before there was barely any difference, a few points of DB here and a few points of DB there.

Conclusions?

What I was hoping to find was that RM was more flexible than most. RM has always prided itself on its modular design and how everything is tweakable. It turns out that all the d100 systems I looked at offer the same flexibility. Some wanted you to go down the rules driven route while others were happy to promote the botch it and see method. Which is ‘best’ is a personal GMing style question.

Is this a function of the d100 system? If everything is operating on the same general scale does it lend itself to tweaking the figures?

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An Interesting Start

Is it the butterfly effect where some small event begins a chain of events with significantly bigger but unforeseen consequences?

I cannot even remember the conversation that started it but I ended up emailing back and forth with Ken Wickham, from the ICE forums and trying out his super light ABS12 game system. Ken got me talking about 3Deep, my vanity project d6 system and I sent him a very rough first draft of the rules. Prior to that, it ran entirely from my memory as it was written by me for me.

One thing lead to another and I published 3Deep as PDF and Print on Demand, I then, at Ken’s suggestion, bundled up some blog posts and started selling them. The idea of selling collected blog posts turned into the fanzine and today I have released the 33rd monthly issue.

Enter Brian Hanson and Egcdld on to the scene and we started doing the 50 in 50 adventures. From there I started adventure and supplement writing as a serious hobby. All the while I kept up this blog. Sometimes it settles back to an easy once a week, sometimes it ramps up to a more exciting a blog a day for a special event.

Finding things to write about, week in week out for years is sometimes a challenge. I saw a really nice series of blog posts by Jeremy Friesen called Let’s read “Stars Without Number”. Rather than a book review Jeremy dedicated a blog post per chapter and did a really detailed look at the rulebook. This appealed to me. I don’t like reviewing things I haven’t played as a single blog post. It hardly seems fair to take years of someone’s work and reduce it down to 500 words, spout an opinion on it, having never actually used it in the way it was written to be used, i.e. playing the game. The Let’s Read idea solved that problem. Yes, I may not have played a game but I am not glossing over most of it in just 500 words, here are 6,000 words over two months showing I have really read your work. It also serves the purpose of I know what I am going to write about for the next two months when I take on one of these extended Let’s Read projects.

Let’s Read lead to a read-through of Zweihander. That, in turn, lead to me starting to write supplements and adventures for that system. This was at the beginning of 2019. In the same way that I can be rather prolific on this blog, I can also be rather prolific on Discord and I am an active member on the Zwei (or Grim & Perilous) discord server.

I have always loved collaborating with people, think back to the 50 in 50 adventures, and in the Zwei dicord I put together collaborative projects know as the Grim & Perilous Book of … Where the last word was one of Chases, Murder or Monster. The basic idea was to get people teetering on the brink of becoming publishers to take the first step. Rather than take on an entire project or adventure module on their own, they could submit a single scene, monster or encounter to the collaborative project. It was an easy point of entry to publishing and I paid everyone on a royalty basis managed by DriveThruRPG.

I believe the three books I pushed forward are all silver best sellers or on the cusp of gaining their silver badge. My best selling supplement for Zwei is an Electrum best seller today but not far off of a Gold best-seller medal.

Zwei became my testbed for Rolemaster projects. They have so much in common, gritty d100, skill based and simulationist with an emphasis on actual wounds over hit points of damage. They use an AP based combat round and there are dozens of other points of similarity. This is not unusual. If you want to write a gritty simulationist d100 fantasy RPG you are starting at the same point and using the same tools. At the end of the process, you are never going to be that far from the same destination.

My interest in publishing continues to grow. I have published 3Deep as PDF and Print on Demand (POD), Devil’s Staircase was successfully crowdfunded and published both as PDF and POD. Navigator RPG is in playtest (and looking good) with a new version of the playtest document nearly ready to upload and finally a new game The Things That Grown Ups Cannot See [Things!] is being proofed and edited prior to its playtest release.

Things! is another collaborative project with the writers drawn from the Zweihander creator community.

On Friday the creator of Zweihander and I had a Skype call and he offered me the chance of becoming Art Director of Grim & Perilous Studios, responsible for the POD products for the Grim & Perilous Studios Community Content Program, known as the Grim & Perilous Library.

This puts me in a funny old position. I have always ‘goaded’ ICE with the point that as a private individual I could do X, Y and Z. I wanted to see more access for 3rd party ‘indie’ publishers, ideally a community content program. I have repeatedly tried to purchase an official license to write for RM but with no success. The attempts on the forums to create an adventure path have faltered and appear to have died, but in the fanzine I have written one to the best of my ability. The Guild Companion has faltered and gone the way of the Norwegian Blue, but this blog is still going strong and puts out more free content than the Companion has managed for several years now. The Guild Adventurer managed 4 issues in about 7 years. The fanzine has run to 33 issues so far.

I have produced two adventures, The Jungle Collection is a standalone adventure module, and Plague, Famine & War is a four-part mini-campaign. If ICE had a Community Content Program they would have earned money of every single sale.

I cannot help but think, if this is one person, what could two, three or ten people do?

Now, I will be helping people to achieve everything I have always wanted to achieve but for a game system that could be the death knell for Rolemaster as a viable game system.

None of us are ever going to stop playing it. I am not suggesting that. I mean we are all getting older, players will inevitably drift away, groups break up, old GMs and players die off. There must be countless players who would want to play RM but the only game in town is 5e. Without new blood where do new customers come from? Without customers, where is the community? Who is going to drive RM forward into the 2020s and 2030s?

Zweihander has that community, it has that following. As more games go to PDF and POD only, Zwei has gone the other way and you can buy it in bookstores all over the place. Every month that goes by does not put RMu in a stronger position. It is odd to be enjoying the success and dynamism of Zwei but deep down knowing that this is what RM should be doing.

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Happy New Year!

I hope 2020 pans out to be a good year for everyone.

I have to say that I am a little disappointed that we didn’t see RMu released in 2019. I am not that surprised but I am disappointed. If the game was close to release I would have expected to see a ramping up of marketing and promotion activities. There are so many places to get exposure these days. I am basically a nobody in the gaming world and even I get multiple offers to be interviewed or join discussion panels for podcasts and discord live chats every month. Prior to the release of RMu, I would expect to see Nicholas everywhere!

I also expect to see a review copy as or before RMu hits the (virtual) shelves. It would be ironic if it ends up that I have done 10 part read through reviews of HARP (which is old) and Zweihander (which is a direct competitor as a gritty d100 setting neutral RPG) but don’t get to review RMu which is the lifeblood of the blog going forward from 2020 onwards.

If you have been reading the blog fanzine in 2019 you will know I have been writing an RMu adventure path. That went from the first encounter to a climactic finale in 2019. In 2020 I am building that outwards, adding side quests and more setting information. The intention is to make it less railroady and give GMs more options. The January issue looks at Halfling culture in my south Asian setting and adds in halfling related side quests.

2020 also looks like it is being targetted by a resurgent RuneQuest. They are pushing their creator resources and kickstarting (figuratively) their Community Content Programme. Chaosium has also run discounts on Call of Cthulhu core rules. If there is a resurgence in interest in the 1980s brands, this could be a good thing for Rolemaster. The difficulty is that it could also mean that between Zwei and RuneQuest, how many d100 systems does a gamer need and if RQ is first to market will that have scratched the retro itch before RMu gets a chance?

It also calls into question the multi-core book model. RuneQuest is offered as a single volume complete system for under $30 and Zwei does the same for under $40. The RQ free quickstart has even won and ENNIE award for the best free product. I do worry that the price of entry into the RM world could be too high. I look forward to seeing Nicholas’s plans for the launch of RMu.

It feels like my Rolemaster life is all on hold waiting for RMu. My game and my playing aren’t scheduled until February, and January can seem like a long, dark month. I think we should all send positive thoughts to Nicholas’s way and hope that the editing passes all go smoothly. I don’t want to be writing a whistful post about the imminent arrival of RMu this time next year.

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Thank God it is them and not you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RMu Steampunk?

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

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

Many Monsters

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

Few Monsters

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

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

Which to Choose?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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