Brief thoughts: masks in your fantasy setting.

In my recent blog post I referenced the Mayan, Lord Pakal. Pakal was buried wearing a jade funerary mask and it reminded me that masks are very cool! You’ve probably used or encountered a mask in your RPG game—maybe it’s a powerful magic item, a funerary mask found in a crypt /tomb or worn for a festival or celebration. I was reminded of masks worn by cultures or organization in popular fiction and how the mask itself became a defining trait.

Masks can be powerful symbols—they can hide an identity or gender, signify membership, convey emotion, create equality and/or eliminate social barriers. In a fantasy setting, masks can convey tone or atmosphere to the group using a very simple description. One-off masks are great, but what about standardized masks worn by whole groups of people/fighters etc?

Two that immediately come to mind:

1.       The Immortals in the movie 300. Certainly the movie was highly stylistic and not that historically accurate, but the masks make the enemy both anonymous and menacing.

2.       The Seguleh. If you haven’t read the Malazan series—do so! The Seguleh were a militant, hierarchal society of skilled warriors. All wore masks, each one signifying their rank (1st being the best warrior).

I can’t recall any particular group that sports masks as part of their uniform in Shadow World—can you? I’ve included a few cool masks worn by some cultists and like the effect they had on the players.

Anyone have any magical masks they want to share: stats, powers, description etc?

Miscellaneous Musings

Heading off to vacation so I probably won’t get new posts up for the next 10 days or so, but I thought I’d put up some random thoughts.

  1. It’s great to see new contributors to the Rolemasterblog! People who don’t sign up for the RM Forums don’t see the various RMU development threads and may not realize there is ongoing discussion and activity. I think this blog helps spread the word about RM and perhaps reaches other RPGers who might not go the forums.
  2. I got a few more messages re: BASiL mentalism spells. Right now I’m making real progress on finalizing my next submission: Empire of the Black Dragon and I’m very focused on that. Writing is HARD, but I find that it’s easier to write following your creative impulses. I’m having a great time writing adventures–its just flowing so I’m going to go with it. Part of it is the “unique’ nature of the material which is more fortresses and layouts than regional & cultural overview. Reformatting mentalism spells is more work than creative but I will get around to it!
  3. I started another great book, The Twelve Kings of Sharakhai. I’ve always loved a good desert setting and we really haven’t had one with Shadow World yet. Terry? With that said, I wonder if someone could come up with a unique desert culture that isn’t the standard middle eastern/Arabian tropes? I’ve always been intrigued by the Synshari race.
  4. I’ve been reading a lot of other blogs (and linking to good posts I find here). Not many Rolemaster blogs and almost no Shadow World blogs. BAD!!! The ones that I do find haven’t had any recent posts–some have been inactive for years.
  5. Armor makes a difference! My PC’s generally go light on the armor due to our simplified rules and the inherent trade off between encumbrance and protection but a couple of them are reconsidering…. The had a “run-in” with an Alliance Jenaara and Kal-chah warriors and got their butts kicked!
  6. Peter, the banner pic you put up is much better than the word jumble that was up before.
  7. I have a great artist interested in doing the layouts for my next project–hopefully he signs on!!
  8. I’m loading up my kindle for my trip–any good book recommendations?

Special skills, special spells. Gods in roleplaying.

As part of the ongoing discussion of Clerics and Channeling in Rolemaster and Shadow World I thought I would call attention to a great blog and commentary over at Grognardia.

Peter has talked about rolling Channeling into the Essence Realm and I have basically rolled all of the Realms together–only organizing them by casting mechanism.

But this blog raises some earlier thoughts I had about Clerics and Channeling in general. Before Shadow World I was running a “diety-lite” setting where Gods were mere abstracts providing the homogenous powers provided by Spell Law Channeling. Now with Shadow World, I’ve fully embraced the use of active, involved Gods and built the Orhan/Charon spells lists and organizations to better define Clerics “special skills”.

However, were I to start from scratch I might do something different. Probably further consolidate all spells into the single realm of “Essaence”, and when and if applicable utilize “Channeling” as gifted benefits or powers from Gods or Higher beings when applicable. That’s basically what I’m doing now, but in the context of controlled spell acquisition and DP expenditure.

Interesting to read D&D design theory from 1984 and similarities between providing special Diety specific skills/spells and our own discussions on Diety specific spells lists.

 

Combat realism in Rolemaster & RMU. Good, bad, neither?

Interesting writing over on “Takeonrules

By this time, I had been playing Rolemaster and Dungeons & Dragons, games that placed a tremendous amount of rules explanation on combat and fighting.  And I maintain that by placing emphasis on combat, combat is more likely to occur.

Blog Post worth a read. Thoughts? I haven’t spent much time on 5th Ed., but I get the impression that the focus has deliberately changed to support role-playing and narrative rather than combat. Other new games like Monte Cooks Cypher System are paving the way for new role-playing narrative forms.

Is RM and RMU chasing down the rabbit hole for ever greater combat realism?

Weekend Library

Greetings all and welcome to my new column: Weekend Library.  I read quite a bit so I thought I would offer up a list of books that might be a little obscure but worth checking out for great game or campaign ideas for your Rolemaster, Shadow World or fantasy setting.

The Mechanical (3 book series). Interesting take on Clockwork men and alchemy. I got some ideas to update my adventure “The Lair of Ozymandias”.

Six of Crows. A grittier version of “Lies of Locke Lamora”. Good characters and ideas for a urban “Sting/Heist” campaign.

The Face Fakers Game. The writing is a bit inconsistent, but an interesting system of magic that gave me a few ideas.

The Copper Promise. A throwback to the early D&D style adventures. Fun but a straight forward translation of game to store.

The Dungeonneers. Witty and fun quick read. However, it’s interesting because it acknowledges all the traditional dungeon tropes and tackles them head on via a group of Dwarven adventurers.

Free the Darkness. What type of game would you have with a character that was good at EVERYTHING?

Mountain of Daggers. Very old school (Howard or Leiber). Short stories of a famed thief.

Low Town. Great urban low-magic fantasy.

 

An introduction to Solo Roleplay

I thought I would write a short mini series on Solo Roleplaying, what it is, what it is good for and how to do it. At first glance the very idea of Solo roleplaying is almost oxymoronic, how can a hobby so dependent on conversation and social interaction be done on your own. Isn’t that just day dreaming?

Firstly I would say that solo roleplaying is slightly miss named. It should really be GM-less roleplaying. You can solo with a whole group of players or just a single player, namely yourself. The only thing you don’t need is the GM.

So how is this going to work?

I will get into the actual mechanics in a future post but the principle is this. You use your imagination to fill in 90-odd percent of the details but when you come across a key point, to phrase it as a yes/no question and roll the dice. To show you what I mean imagine your favourite RM character is in the dungeons of a castle and you are trying to escape. I hope you can see the character, the dark passages of the dungeons and so on. Your character reaches the end of the passage. If you were playing this in a group you would probably ask the GM “Are there any guards?” At that point you would roll the dice.

The rules and tables that make up a solo roleplaying set of rules are called an engine. A solo engine is a little like a magic 8 ball but give an answer something like ‘no, and…’ to ‘no’ to ‘yes’ to ‘yes, and’. You can think of that as almost open ended down, fail, success, open ended up. If you have ever had your players make a moving manouvre roll then you have been using a solo engine.

Player “Can I leap the chasm?”

GM “roll your MM”,

Player ” open ended downward, -200″

GM “Not only do you fail to make the leap but you fall and take 8hits and are stunned for 2 rounds.”

Anyone who has rolled a MM or a random encounter have to some extent abdicated their GMing responsibilities to the dice.

Solo engines just formalise this into a set of rules that take account of how likely the answer should be yes or no and how to move the plot or adventure on.

Solo engines also normally have a mechanism for plot twists or a chaotic factor that can force the story in a different direction. Normally you just use common sense for that setting to fill in the details. If you are in the dungeons of a human king then chances are the guards are going to be humans armed with culturally common weapons and armour. If you are in a orc stronghold then they are likely to be orcs. You don’t need to roll to determine that. Likewise the solo engine does not replace skills. If you want to pick a lock the you don’t ask the solo engine, you roll your skill.

Solo engines can be as complex as dozens of rolls from pages of tables to a single roll of 1d6, but they all do the same job to a lesser or greater extent.

In the next installment I will go more into why you may want to look into solo engines.

 

 

Thoughts on Resurrection in Rolemaster & Shadow World.

First off, Happy New Year! Over the holiday break I’ve been able to plot out a number of blog topics for the coming year and working on at least one new interview. I’m also hoping that my long gestating Shadow World module: Priest-King of Shade will make publication this year! (It seems unlikely that “Empire of the Black Dragon” will be published anytime soon even if I get the final draft to Terry and Nicholas in the next few weeks).

There was a recent POST on the RM Forums about Resurrection that caught my attention. It included a great poll that broke down some good options for Resurrection, but I wanted to explore the subject in greater detail as it touches upon several other blogs I’ve written recently. This topic is really a subset of the “impact of magic on a setting”. I explored another subset of this in a blog on “Musings on Magic and War” and a sub-topic of the “Gap between game rules and setting“.

RM was initially designed as an insert rule-set for the D&D world, and as such, still contains quite a bit of D&D DNA that is rarely questioned. As the forum responses suggest, Resurrection and its uses differ from GM to GM and raises a lot of issues around the games metaphysical setting as well.

RM expands upon the basic DnD Resurrection by dividing death into 3 separate processes:

  1. Soul departure. RM Soul departure rules are byzantine—calculating the time of death from unconsciousness and then applying a number of rounds for soul departure based on the character’s race. Unnecessarily complicated? Absolutely.
  2. Physical deterioration (stat loss). There are some vague rules in RM about recovering lost stats but despite a comprehensive healing system RM never fleshes out a consistent framework for causes of stat loss (undead, Unlife, spells, drain etc) and spells to cure temporary stat loss. A consistent system could unite various processes that use different mechanisms: unlife draining, life levels, Unlife corruption etc.
  3. Soul recovery. Returning a soul to the body is a fairly straight forward affair, with a number of spells at various levels allowing for resurrection.

Spell Law provides three spell mechanisms to deal with these: lifekeeping (keeps soul from departing), preservation (keeps body from decaying and stat loss), and lifegiving (returns soul to body). There are various iterations of these spells and herbs that allow for body preservation and lifekeeping. The first question I have is whether this is the best framework to deal with death and resurrection and at what level should these spell abilities occur? I don’t think I thought about this enough in my Spell Law rewrite so I may end up going back and changing some things! The second question is how rare is resurrection and how does the metaphysical framework of the setting  enable resurrection?

Barring the two extremes: resurrection is very common and easily obtained or it doesn’t occur at all except in myths, there are two aspects that could be explored.

Economics. If we conflate resurrection with technology and healthcare than the U.S. healthcare system is a great model for seeing resurrection in an economic framework. Resurrection can be seen as an expensive, elective procedure available to the wealthy and/or privileged. Is this any different than what we know of medieval or class based societies? The wealthy live longer, healthier lives because they have access to healthcare, safer environmental conditions and better diets? Does treating Resurrection as an expensive, exclusive, service unbalance or disrupt the game setting? Resurrection alone is not an age prolonging treatment, just an option for traumatic injury or illness. (I would argue that life-prolonging magic should also be available either through a spell list or ritual magic).

Religion. For resurrection to work there needs to be a meta-physical framework for “souls”. What is a soul? Where does it go? How does it come back? In Shadow World, Eissa is the Orhan god of death, but does she alone control the gate to death and the disposition of souls? Why/how do some souls stay on as ghosts or undead while others pass to somewhere else? Do Elves have souls? If not than what happens to them? Are followers of the Dark Gods prohibited from resurrection since they are opposed to Eissa? Even if you don’t use Shadow World as a setting these can still be valid questions. What about “spirits” and other totem spells introduced in the RM Companions—how do they figure into all this? To me, this seems like the setting drives the mechanism and not the other way around. This makes it hard for generic rule sets like RM to be a good fit for any setting without the setting being genericized.

For the GM that wants resurrection and wants it rationed via the settings religious structure than there are lots of great options. Perhaps resurrection is only available to followers of a “God of Death”. (Probably not the most popular of Gods) Getting resurrection from a Death Cult might require quite a bit of sacrifice from the party. Another option is that a priest can only resurrect someone from their own religion. That would neuter the “generalist” Cleric in the group unless the party was all part of the same religion.

Some things to think about. Personally I’m going to review and revise my spell list “Life Mastery” and follow this basic framework.

  1. “Resurrection” is a higher level ability (starting at 12th lvl?) thus making it rarer in general.
  2. As a Closed list, Life Mastery is only available through a few of the Gods.
  3. In general, most religions are reluctant to provide services to follower of another god. (UOC and the Orhanian pantheons provide some leeway).
  4. The cost will be high in either an offering or services.
  5. Stat loss, both temporary and potential will be notable, increasing the cost of resurrection.

These rules almost preclude a battle-field resurrection occurring. Instead, the group would need to find a cleric of the right religion, of the right level, pay the cost in either money or service and the resurrected player will need to recover and pay a cost in stat loss. That’s a lot of hurdles that may not make sense for the group. However, it does provide an adventure hook if they do.

5th Excepting Perception, Stalk & Hide and Body Development, of all the skills in all the books which one would you say is the single most important for a player to take?

Brian: Attunement. In our rules, every spell ability in an item, power storing, recharging etc all require attunement skill. Plus, many althan/ka’ta’viir devices use mental interfaces which can be accessed with attunement. So even non spell-casters should have some ability, especially at higher levels.

Peter: Lore skills particularly those relating to herbs. Whether you use Herb Lore, Herbalism or Lore:Technical. I suspect that my game is a bit more hack and slash than Brian’s but being able to select the right herb and apply it is a key skill for my players.