Devil’s Staircase: Wild West RPG

So this has nothing to do with Rolemaster, at all or in any shape or form. Devil’s Staircase [DS] is about as far away from the crunch and simulationism of RM as you can get, without playing FATE.

So why am I writing about it?

Well, I wrote the game two years ago now and it spent a year in playtesting, Spectre771 proved to be the lead playtester. I did all the layout, with loads of help from twitter followers giving free advice, in August and finally this week I have launched the crowdfunding campaign for the game.

What I really, really need is for people to spread the word about the crowdfunding. The address I need sharing is https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/devil-s-staircase-wild-west-roleplaying#/.

So where does Rolemaster come into this?

I am trying three different approaches side by side at the moment.

Strand 1 is Navigator RPG. That is offered for sale as PWYW for the playtest. The money from the playtest all goes back to funding the development of the game. The approach means you need to be able to work with a drip-feed of money. We are talking very small amounts and regardless of when the books are bought you get your funds at the same date each money.

Strand 2 is DS:Wild West. This game had a year’s playtesting, there is a free quickstart on DTRPG and now crowdfunding.

Strand 3 is Plague, Famine & War. These adventures can easily be a vehicle for new professions, new monsters, new spell lists. I can remember really enjoying buying modules and they had all sorts of new things to add into my game (B/X D&D back in those days). I am extremely careful not to use any ICE intellectual property in these adventures, which makes using new monsters and magic items and all that jazz even more useful. Creating all that stuff is fun as well. Why? Because ICE released the original companions at a rate of about one a year. An adventure takes less than two weeks to create. Seven fully-featured adventures like this could contain seven new professions, seven or more spell lists, seven new monsters, and magical items. That pretty much sounds like a companion right there but you also got seven full adventures as well.

Rolemaster fans deserve new things, new toys, and new challenges. On top of that having a flow of new releases for RM makes the system seem more alive and vibrant for potential players. It is also easier, especially for new younger gamers, to find $3 every few weeks than it is to find $20-$30 for a full-on companion.

So, supporting DS:Wild West even just by sharing the link anywhere and everywhere will indirectly help Rolemaster, past, present and future.

The Mirror Tells Her Lies

Way back last year sometime I did a direct comparison between RMu, RMSS, RMc/RM2 starting PCs and those of other d100 systems like vsDarkmaster and BRP.

In all cases the starting skill bonuses were within a handful of percentage points of each other. To all intents and purposes you could play any adventure from any game system using any rule system and things would work with little or no changes. When I say little change it would be things like Zweihander has no #hits or hit points so you would have to fill in the blanks or you would need to know what AT to assign to the actual armour descriptions.

This only works with starting characters. As characters level up or advance they diverge rapidly. Zwei characters barely change for great blocks of time, BRP/OpenQuest/Runequest has characters improving across the board by by a few percent at a time and Rolemaster has stepped progression with each level but that could be two ranks plus profession bonuses. In the early levels RMu’s DB inflation has not really kicked in either.

By sixth level RM characters are toting around core skills over 100 including skill, stat, profession and some minor power items. Many d100 games max out at 100 so never break that ceiling.

Seeing as almost noone is writing adventures for Rolemaster AND Runequest conversion rules were published in the back of the RM2 C&T books we can mine Runequest/OpenQuest/BRP adventures for modules, cool locations, NPCs and so on. On DTRPG there are nearly 250 books in the RQ/BRP/OpenQuest categories.

What prompted this post was an adventure I saw posted on Kickstarter. It is the book named in the title of this post The Mirror Tells Her Lies. What made it stick out was this bit of the description…

“The Mirror Tells Her Lies” takes full advantage of this quality. It is a take on the moral quandaries faced by PCs, in a place where all the dark places of their souls will be used against them. It is a short adventure, playable in one to two sessions, designed for experienced characters and players who love roleplaying their characters as opposed to hacking away at everything they see!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mhpress/the-mirror-tells-her-lies

Nearly all Rolemaster players and GMs are experienced. An ‘experienced’ RQ/BRP/OQ character is only the same as a 3rd or 4th level RM character. That means the adventure is quite possibly a good one for experienced players playing lower level characters, old heads on young shoulders.

If you can get the knack of doing the conversions to your preferred version of RM then I think these adventures could be a great source of inspiration. The adventure above is by Michael Hopcroft and is fully funded. It also says that it is the first of many. Lots of potential adventures there then!

Cities of Hârn

We have an English saying, which is in the same sort of vein as Murphy’s Law ( Anything that can go wrong will go wrong ) and Finagle’s Law ( hope for the best, expect the worst ). This one is to describe something as ‘just like busses, you wait for hours for one and then three come along at once.’

I know I have already posted today but I just got an email about the Hârn kickstarter and it fired two thoughts.

The first was that plenty of people seemed to like Hârn as a rolemaster setting. The whole thing being d100 based made adopting material fairly easy and the harsh realities of Hârn fits well with those that like their Rolemaster gritty and dangerous.

The second was the way that people, even to this day still reuse the Pete Fenlon maps and floor plans from the old MERP books as they have never found anything better.

Keep those floor plans in mind when you see some of the images below.

So I had an email from James Eisbert at Columbia Games, the publisher of Hârn promoting their kickstarter, Cities of Hârn.

You can check it out yourself here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/columbiagames/cities-of-harn?ref=ekv5oe

But it is this sequence of images that got me…

If we look at that last panel in detail you can see how they have atomised every possible common form of door, ladder, stairs and surfaces. That is going make setting difficulty mods pretty easy.

I also liked the whole zooming in from city to building to interior scope.

If you world need maps and cities then I think one could do a lot worse. If you buy in at the $1 level you get the first PDF immediately which I think is fair. For a dollar you get to see what you would be buying into.

It looks good value to me.