Thoughts on ancient structures in fantasy RPG’s and Shadow World.

We dropped anchor in the deep bay west of the Sullen Mountains. A solitary volcanic cone, trickling a faint plume of smoke from its summit loomed above us. The swells chopped but the water was relatively calm compared to the weather we had faced the past few weeks. To the north we beheld the Sunken City, the natives call it the City of Giants, but a cursory inspection of nearby structures indicated the occupants were most certainly mortal in size. The tops of huge blocks, broken towers and chipped obelisks worn down by the millennia spread as far as the eye could see. There must have been leagues of crumbling ruins above the water, but I could only imagine what secrets lay beneath the dark waves.

Travel Journals of Malco Teves, Merchant Captain of the Storm Sea Free Traders

Ancient castles, dark crypts, lost cities. Exploring ruins and structures is a key component in fantasy roleplaying, and if your games are similar most of these “ancient structures” are in fact really not that “ruined”.  I recently visited the Yucatan Peninsula and 4 different Mayan sites: Chitzen Itza, Coba, Tulum and a small complex on Cozumel. In some ways, Coba was the most interesting as much of the huge site (home to 55,000 people) is still buried under the jungle.  As I walked through the jungles, I definitely had my GM hat on, and thought about the experience through a roleplaying session. Peering into the jungle you can see numerous, huge, mounds covered in scattered stones, undergrowth and trees.  These are all buildings that not only haven’t been excavated, they are probably just piles of rubble. Most of the iconic buildings we see at these sites or in pictures are the result of complete rebuilding–often times done multiple times to either repair shoddy work or to correct architectural mistakes as archaeologists gather new information.

In other words, many untouched ancient ruins in real life wouldn’t make good adventure settings! Over time ancient structures degrade: they are buried under strata, collapsed in cataclysms or earthquakes, looted, stripped of cut stone for new buildings or leveled by conquering forces. In jungles, foliage quickly cover buildings and root systems crush and grind the buildings to dust. This reality is in sharp contract to our expectations as adventurers. Rarely do parties have to dig for days or weeks to uncover a tomb entrance or hire a work force to lift and move thousands of cut stones of a collapsed building. Many structures might not even resemble buildings as much as mounds of rubble or small hills which doesn’t work well for a cinematic approach to your game. I think we all tend towards “ruins lite” in our games: basically recognizable and functional structures with some crumbling around the edges.

But what if the buildings are much, much older than Earth comparables?  Right now the oldest constructions on Earth are 10,000 to 12,000 years old (Gobleki Tepi and Jericho) and GT was purposefully buried in 8000 BC to protect it! The 3 Eras in Shadow World span more than 100,000 years with many distinct high tech cultures and of course immortal Elves. These cultures left behind remnants of their civilizations across the planet.

Priest King of Shade (the opening vignette was taken from that) includes the ruins of a 1st Era Althan city. Over 100,000 years old, partially submerged and continuously explored and looted by subsequent cultures I had to think about how it would have survived or what it’s present state should be. Since we don’t have anything to compare to here and it was a city of advanced tech I had to guess at it. And what about other ancient lost ruins that may not date to the 1st Era but are still TENS of thousands of years old. Should we expect them to be intact, structurally sound and playable? Maybe hand wave their condition away due to “magic”?

I’m curious if anyone else has thought about this, introduced standard archaeology or excavation in any of their adventures or have thoughts on this topic?

Culture of Spiders

We have released a few adventure hooks that could easily be expanded into full adventure modules with a bit of effort. One of the prime candidates is The City of Spiders.

As this hook introduced a whole city for the characters to explore along with factions to interact with it is easy to imaging creating several adventures within this one location.

So there seem to be two types of threat in this adventure. People from the various factions and spiders, large and small.

What I would like to do is gather some ideas of what ‘monsters’ you think complement the classic giant spider? I do not want to end up with a D&D menagerie in every room but I worry that a mono culture could get a bit same old same old fairly quickly.

So my four initial ideas are Drider style half human-half spiders possibly related to the inner circles of the church, Gemsting (giant scorpions) living in the surrounding landscape and giant wasps, the original ecological reason why the giant spiders both evolved and why they are tolerated in the city. Finally, there could be golem or or automata in spider form.

So can any of you come up with really good monsters that could naturally sit in a city dedicated to spiders?

Smells Like Stream Spirit and Fanzine #11

So this week we have one 50 in 50 adventure and the latest fanzine on both RPGnow (pdf) and Amazon (print).

First up is Smells Like Stream Spirit…

You can tell from the stupid title that this is one of mine. It was actually one of the first I wrote for the 50 in 50.

In Smells Like Stream Spirit, the characters will encounter some naiads. There are two families of naiads in the area who are generally hostile towards each other, but the hostility has not turned into outright war – yet. Naturally, a couple, one from each group, has fallen in love with other. Depending on how the characters interact with the naiads, they may incite a conflict – possibly by accident – or cause the two sides to reconcile.

Fanzine Time!

This months issue is all about BASiL and contains 33 new spell lists. I am the first to admit that all the content in this issue is also available as a free download on this site but if you buy the print editions you get real physical books that you can read easily off line, share with your players at the gaming table. For me that is the real added value, real books for a hobby that cries out for pen and paper.

You can buy the pdf on RPGnow and the print edition on Amazon. The kindle edition should be along any time this coming week. If you have kindle Unlimited then you can read it for free!

Edit: The kindle version went live on Sunday. You can find it here.

I.C.E. Deep Dive. Loremaster Series Review pt.3: The Cloudlords of Tanara.

 

Welcome to my third review of the Loremaster Series; today we are going to explore what is possibly the most well known or popular of ICE modules: The Cloudlords of Tanara. Over the years there have been other reviews (see some links at the end) and Cloudlords has been treated to the Terry Amthor rewrite, but I’m going to focus on the original version and review it in the context of the Loremaster series and how it might have impacted the later Shadow World series.

Like the Iron Wind, the Cloudlords is undeniably “base DNA” of Shadow World where Vog Mur and Shade of the Sinking Plain felt like stand-a-alones. So despite some timeline issues and slight ret-conning, it’s easy to use Cloudlords as a canon SW book. In reality, most of the timeline and history issues are going to be lost on the players anyway!

First, let’s start with the cover art done by Gail Mcintosh. The Cloudlords is iconic cover art from the early golden era of RPG’s and is part of what I consider the “trifecta” of Gail’s early cover art that creates movement (everyone is wielding/swinging weapons) and depth (a contrast of foreground featuring the backside of a protaganist and a foe facing forward in the background). The trifecta:

Some would argue that these covers were less refined than her subsequent work for MERP covers or Dragon magazin but I think they are fantastic and captured the unique nature of early Rolemaster compared to the other d20 settings.

Once you turn the cover page you are immediately drawn into a whole new RPG module environment: a color map of “The Forge of the  Lords of Essence”!!!  That map label alone raises all sorts of questions and promises that are delivered further into the book. This is definitely not the “Caves of Chaos“!

Since Terry Amthor was the author of this book, you’ll note that the Table of Contents follows a familiar structure that is adhered to in later SW books: World Info, Geography, Flora & Fauna Politics & Power, Key Places, Master Charts and then Adventures. For regular SW users, this is a well understood template that has mostly continued throughout the product line.

The Introduction covers the fundamentals of the Loremaster world, but it’s not currently named Kulthea yet. The Flows of Essence are discussed, but primarily as the source of “magic” and the basis for RM’s three realms. In 1.17 Peoples, the test describes the isolationism of various peoples and creatures due to mountain ranges and broad seas. In the next section, History, it describes: “…a strong north-south flow of that invisible yet dangerous force of Essence. These elements combine to make passage..virtually impossible”. The kernels of SW are there but haven’t been fully fleshed out with the Flows acting as physical barriers.

The History section is a simplified version of the SW timeline: the 1st Era, Kadena, The Second Age, Loremasters, the Wars of Dominion and finally the Third Age. What’s different? There is no mention of Andraax, the Althans haven’t been tied to an advanced technological culture and there is no mention of the Lords of Orhan. In fact, it was the Loremasters who broke their creed of non-involvement to tip the scales of the Wars of Dominion.

The next few pages are some map symbols and B&W geography maps–Fenlon of course. As a GM these Fenlon maps are priceless–in fact, it’s all I really need to run a game. The maps depict trails, roads, ruins, towns, waters, cave cities, burials etc.  Amazingly, Fenlon also incorporates elevations, foliage types, and settlement patterns of people and animals. It’s really an incredible resource in these books, and frustrating that this type of quality can’t be produced at a reasonable cost. ?

Section 2.1 The Environment.

A page and half, covers basic terrain types, weather patterns, the calendar, hints at some moons and a sampling of creatures. Interestingly and in line with SW, there are very few monsters: Steardan, Garks, Demons & Undead are referenced. Under Demons, there is a reversal from the Iron Wind, ad the Pales are described as having 6 levels with the weakest being the First Pale. Here again, we can see world design shifting into place for the 1st Edition Master Atlas that came out in ’88-’89.

Section 2.2 Peoples.

Terry creates 4 distinct peoples, but are there perhaps any more iconic peoples of Shadow World than the Duranaki? Spiked and colored hair, leather armor, odd black weapons, live underground–very punk rock. It’s in the Worship sections that Terry starts developing the eventual SW pantheon. The Sulini have “Numa” the Ocean God, the Myri have Ilila, Earth Goodess, Allanda (Storms), Keo (Moons), Davix (Festivals) and Phaon (Sun) and the Yinka have Yugal.

3.1 Politics and Power

In a previous blog post, I discussed the Xiosians and part of my solution was based on this book.  The Cloudlords of Tanara are Zori  who crossed the mountains and discovered an ancient abandoned city with artifacts (the Cloudlord Gear) and the Steardan. They, like many historical cultures, co-opted the ancients legacy and became the Cloudlords. This section also covers the political powers of the Myri, Duranaki and Yinka and finally includes the Cult of Ezran.

The Cult of Ezran. Basically an outcast group of the Cloudlords was corrupted by a wandering Elf, a servant of the Unlife. Cloudlords makes no mention of the Priests Arnak, but it’s natural to ret-con Teleus as a Priest. Now an Undead, Teleus rides a “Demon-Horse” and wields the Implementor–an idea that probably morphed into the Heralds of the Night. To combat the Implementor, there are 3 very cool “swords”, the Narselkin. Give it to Terry, he comes up with the coolest magic items and these are no exception. Each has particular powers and meant for an Essence user, Fighter and Channeler.

Cool Places. The layouts and fortresses found in the Cloudlords are a step forward in the development of the “Lords of Essence” aesthetic. These buildings are clearly a fusion of classic marble style with industrial high tech features, radiant heat, locking doors and laen and shaalk panels. There are lots of odd rooms that are interesting but feel more like a standard dungeon “puzzle room” than a logical room in a fortress or structure. Other layouts include a Lords of Essence forge, a Duranaki hold, vaults for the Narselkin and the temple of the Yinka.

Finally, the module has detailed master charts for NPCs, military, a huge herb chart, and a great section featuring unique and notable magic items!!

The last sections cover details on the Navigators–a more involved section than the paragraphs in the Iron Wind 3rd ed. Plus there is a glossary that makes for an interesting read and touches upon a lot of later SW content. Special metals and materials, languages etc.

Over all, the Cloudlords of Tanara is a fantastic supplement and takes the base DNA found in the Iron Wind and really morphs into the Shadow World style.  When compared to the canon established in the original Master Atlas, there just isn’t much change. Perhaps the most significant is the additional of the pantheons of the Lords of Orhan and the Dark Gods of Charon.

So why is it relevant? Clearly in design and layout it establishes all the later SW products and while it was re-written by Terry decades later the original Cloudlords of Tanara makes a great stand-alone setting or as part of your SW campaign.

Here  and HERE are some other reviews that I like coming from people more outside the Rolemaster bubble.

 

Game Campaigns. Do they End with a bang or do they end with a whimper?

So I needed to take a small break from my 2000 word blog posts, so I thought I would write some quick thoughts on campaign endings.

As a GM it’s important that a campaign, or extended adventure series end satisfactorily. From a design standpoint, some of that can be charted through a multiple act structure, but the open ended nature of gaming (and RM dice!) means that things can go astray. It can be frustrating to have the final act end with the players feeling dissatisfied, the conclusion anti-climactic or the challenge easily met.

On the other hand, it would also be too easy to manipulate dice, events and other factors to force a cinematic ending to a long game session or campaign. Acting completely neutral means that hours of hard work managing a well designed narrative could “end with a whimper”. Uhh…”So that’s it?” the players ask. That can feel very deflating for the GM.

I’ve had both in my years of gaming–some incredible finales and some now real duds. Now, spending much of time writing game hooks, modules and adventures I’m exploring the mechanics behind these conclusions. This has become critical in my “Legends of Shadow World” tourney module. At 50th lvl things better be pretty epic!!!!

  • If at 50th, death has no real meaning due to lifegiving, is their any tension in combat?
  • If a great crit roll can kill the most powerful of entities, then a lengthy combat could last mere seconds, robbing it of impact.
  • What reward provides the payoff to players? There are no new spells, probably not any artifacts they haven’t obtained and not much upside to another level up is there a real payoff?

But looking at those above, I can’t help but think they are not unlike the same questions for lower level characters.

  • “The end” provides a out of game break that can hand wave away any severe injuries. There are no “next room” or “next level” to survive with wounds. So many lower level final acts lose some of that tension as well.
  • Crits are always the wild ace in the RM game.
  • What is a commensurate reward for any level?

The mere fact that it’s the “end” creates new problems the GM has to anticipate. What has been your experience? Is just finishing reward enough?

Here are a few blog articles (of varying usefulness) on the subject. HERE and HERE

 

 

Stop Press! Publication Round Up!

Last week was an über week for us.

First up we have The Inn of Dusk. This is the latest 50 in 50 adventure  hook and the 17th so far.

The Inn of Dusk is an inn that has been haphazardly extended over the years. It is the focal point of the local community and sits near an old and now rarely used trade route. The Inn has a secret and is far more dangerous to visit than might be though; quite what the hazard is can be chosen by the GM from a list suggested for different power levels.

Next up we have had a bit of cross over with the Fanzine.

Issue 9 went out in both Print and Kindle editions. This was one of my favourite issues so far with three adventures, new monsters and the return of the Shadow World section.

Overlapping with the delayed print and kindle editions, the PDF version went out much earlier, we have Issue 10 of the fanzine (February 2018). This is a really important issue as it contains the first printing of BASiL (Essence pt 1), completely updated advice and notes from using BASiL.

Essence Part 1 added 35 new spell lists to Rolemaster. It is available on RPGnow/Drivethu as PDF and in print and Kindle on Amazon.

Oh and I am experimenting with new look covers. These latest editions are up to 70 to 80+ pages so we are putting out a decent magazine I feel.

 

Finally, Azukail Games published the Ominous Place Name Generator last week. It is a Pay What You Want product so if you want to treat yourself to something new then pick up a copy.

Cabin in the woods!

I love this adventure hook! I am not going to tell you much about it as it could spoil the surprise if your players got wind of what is actually going on.

What I like about this particular publication is that it is one of the most substantial documents. You get a one page adventure hook but also full colour printable battle maps. You print off the twelve pages and join them together to get the layouts for the adventure. It seems to me that we are ever inching a little closer to producing a really full on adventure module.

In The Cabin in the Woods, the characters may have been hired to deal with a group of bandits or otherwise have heard of them.

The bandits have a cabin in a clearing in the woods but the characters are not the only party looking for the bandits, and it is possible that the characters, and the other party, are both disguised as bandits, leading to several potential outcomes when the actual bandits arrive.

Tie a yellow ribbon around the Angry Druid!

This post was meant to be published yesterday but I was up before dawn on my way to my first ever elite fencing competition. The difference between sport and combat is that I would have died about 17 seconds in if this was a combat but as it was I vanquished two foes but was defeated five times myself. Not the best hit rate by anyone’s reckoning. If there is every a quest to save the world, I am probably not the hero you are looking for.

The weird title to this post is a bastardisation of the latest two 50 in 50 adventures. I wrote ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon‘ and Brian produced ‘The Angry Druid‘.

I always try and have fun with my adventure titles and in this case Tie A Yellow Ribbon is obviously a reference to a dreadful 1970s song but is a deadly serious adventure which could cost either the players or hundreds of innocents their lives.

On the other hand The Angry Druid sounds like a dangerous foe, which he is, but is actually a bit of a tongue in cheek adventure.

We have passed a bit of a milestone and you can now by a bundle of the first 10 adventures, at a discount if you have bought any of the individual issues. The 1-10 bundle is obviously going to be the first of at least 5 bundles.

Going forward there is going to be a post each Saturday with a round up of what we have published this week. I think I will recap any new uploads in the same post.

I feel that this is going to grow in importance in 2018. Looking at the Directors Briefing for January, if you are not using Shadow World then excepting RMU there are no planned releases for RMC/RMSS or Spacemaster for 2018 at all.

While we await the Singularity we will try and keep RM alive and kicking!

Playing for time

Have any of those reading this ever played an adventure backwards?

What I mean is, your group sits down, you hand out the character sheets and then say “You are stood on the rocky ledge with a precipice falling away into darkness at your feet, opposite you the rock cliff face disappears up into the darkness above your heads. Waves of heat emanate from the depths below. The only sound is the approaching beat of leathery wings, you have found the subject of you quest, the Dragon Lord is coming. What do you do?”

Having played out the finale you can then retrospectively go back and reveal how the players got there.

To take this one step further you could just suddenly reference an NPC they have never heard of, one that didn’t feature in that first/last scene. As soon as someone notices this new NPC, you put the current scene on hold and play a flashback to how the party met that NPC and how they joined the party. Once that is played out you then pick up the previous scene exactly where you left off.

If you use miniatures then you could prepare tableaus of the key scenes and reveal them every time there is a cut in the action.

If you were playing this traditionally the session(s) may go like this.

  1. The players get given a quest to slay a dragon
  2. they adventure into the mountains
  3. they meet a hermit/ranger who can show them the way into caves
  4. battle with dragons kin/defenders
  5. hermit dies
  6. adventure further into caves
  7. dragon lord end of level boss
  8. joyous return to the starting point.
  9. Deliver whatever thing the quest giver demanded
  10. Start next adventure

To play it in an alternative manner could go like this.

<session 1>

7. dragon lord end of level boss
1. The players get given a quest to slay a dragon
2. they adventure into the mountains <cut scene>

<Session 2>
4. battle with dragons kin/defenders <cut short>
3. <flashback> they meet a hermit/ranger who can show them the way into caves
4. <concludes>battle with dragons kin/defenders
5. hermit dies

<Session 3>
8. joyous return to the starting point.
9. Deliver whatever thing the quest giver demanded
10.Start next adventure

So why even attempt this?

What I am thinking is that sometimes ending a session with the successful conclusion of the quest can seem a little contrived. It is a bit like when you know the perilous scene in a movie isn’t the end because you still have an hour to run. Ending the session at the end of a quest can sometimes rob the end scene of some of its energy, or even, if you know that your players have to leave at a particular time to catch trains or planes then you could hurry a scene up to get to a convenient stopping point. Putting the end of the quest at the front of the session means that for an action ending (point 7 above) it gets a real wow! factor. For a story ending (point 9 above) ‘the end’ is obviously not ‘the end’ and so does not bring with it a loss of energy.

So imagine again that you took your players character sheets and made multiple copies. To one you tippex out their primary weapon and replace it with “Blade of the Balrog”. As soon as your player notices you stop the scene and play a flashback where the players play out a scene that ends with the character acquiring the Blade of the Balrog. If someone dies you pass a prepared note to one character saying that “You have a vial that contains a shard of a saints soul, if someone on the point of death is anointed with it they will be restored to life.” If anyone questions where this came from then, you guessed it, cut scene back to before the character died and you have a challenge where the prize is the vial.

I have painted this very much in a hack and slash sort of way but then my main group is a hack and slash group. It actually works even better in a role play heavy session. In a hack and slash group if someone dies in the opening/quest completing battle then it doesn’t matter as they were alive and well in all the flashbacks so they are still included. You may have to keep people alive through some mechanism if they were alive at the start of the battle; they must arrive in that state. Without the hack and slash element then chopping and changing the time line is easier.

This time imagine an adventure where the players start trapped in a collapsed mine. Where you would normally describe the setting and NPCs if the players were in a normal scene, this time you do the same but you put much more emphasis on the NPCs, as if the characters know them. It soon becomes apparent that someone has triggered the mine collapse trapping the characters and NPCs here. As the characters talk to each NPC it triggers a series of flashbacks as to who they are and the players learn why they are here in the mine and what part of their back story. Think alone the lines of a TV detective in the final scene where they reveal who the killer is.

As a session format it certainly is challenging and something different. Any thoughts or experiences?