I thought I would put a quick post in an effort to stir some discussion on support products for RMU. We’ve blogged and talked quite a bit about Shadow World and there has been some discussions on a RMU.
Following the RMU threads on discord, RPGNet and others there seems to be some interest in game support material. No one expects that to happen quickly, Spell and Creature Law still need to to be published, errata corrected and POD’s rolled out etc.
It’s been stated that rule books generate more $ than supplements and modules. I think that’s hard to quantify given that virtually every game system can rely on older settings for support, and old modules can be converted or pillaged for material. So perhaps RMU can rest on the laurels of RM SW, Cyradon and MERP modules.
There does seem to be some interest in new material, and I can’t help but think that gaming material written specifically for RMU rules, races (species?), professions and creatures would be beneficial to system adoption. Of the varied comments:
Generic setting adventures. This could quickly fill the gap and it sounds like there are a number of people that could submit material.
A new setting. A new setting could really embrace the specifics of RMU, would not rely on Terry’s unique setting and could draw talented writers to participate.
Revision. It would seem that revising older RM material to RMU stats might be the easiest solution?
It appears that interest in RMU is peaking, with new members at the RMForums and perhaps new readers here at the RMBlog. This is an excellent chance to engage to RM players and invite them to participate in the community!
RMU is finally out! After years of waiting, we finally have a finished (sort of) product, so the best thing I could think to do to honor this moment is to immediately start assessing its rules and suggesting tweaks! This will hopefully be the first post in a series of RMU rules evaluations.
The rule under discussion today has to do with the way stats function in this latest iteration of Rolemaster. Unsurprisingly for those of us who have been tracking its progress, the “old” model of stats is preserved, with characters having temporary stats with determine bonuses for use in skills, and potential stats that serve as caps that the temporaries can grow towards.
This won’t be anything that some others haven’t discussed before, but I too have a handful of issues with the stat system as it is currently configured. Here are some of the gripes:
1️⃣ Rolling for Stats – This actually isn’t a gripe and I’m curious where people fall on this issue; for years I was a stat-rolling loyalist. RMU does give the option to use stat-buy and I have converted to that camp. I like that all players start on equal footing, so I’m already using one of RMU’s optional rules.
2️⃣ Potential Stats – This is actually one of the bigger issues I have, in that I’m not sure potential stats have much functionality. D&D doesn’t have them, and even with stat raises each level, characters don’t typically max out all their stats until pretty far into the leveling process.
My solution? I’m ditching them. All stats now have a “potential” of 100, so if a character wants to focus on developing one or two stats to the exclusion of others, so be it. With most skills drawing from three different stat bonuses, I think the effect will be negligible.
3️⃣ Smoothing the Stat Progression (even more) – RMU features a much smoother bonus curve compared to old RM2, but still requires referencing a table, and still has big spikes at the high and low ends. I suppose my question is why? Is this more realistic in depicting real-world ability progression?
On the ICE forums, Hurin has advocated for a simpler formula for stat bonuses that is easy to remember: (Stat-50)/3. This gives a simple linear progression that requires one less chart. I have actually toyed with a variation on this of (Stat-50)/4 which brings the stats a little closer to the RMU default curve, but this progression also rewards bigger bonuses before characters hike stats into the 90s. Again, simple is better and either one doesn’t seem to affect game balance.
4️⃣ Standardizing Stat Gains – As in prior versions, each player gets two stat gains each level, with the amount now partially determined by the stat itself, rather than the difference between the temporary and potential. You still roll however for the amount gained. Here’s another element where chance can separate players rather than choices made in character development.
As a result, I’m putting in standardized stat raises. Each level, two stats can be raised by a +1 bonus — the stats themselves then raise by the corresponding amount each level, whether using RMU’s curve of the smoothed progression, but the bonus is what really matters). This actually brings up another issue of whether we even need stats at all, since really all they do is provide bonuses. I believe a few of our RMU play-testers have gotten rid of them completely and just have players purchase bonuses, but I actually like seeing stats purely as a visual of the character as a whole and how they compare to the rest of the population.
So there’s my thoughts and rulings on just one aspect of the final RMU rules. My house rule fixes aren’t too drastic, and are centered on taking chance out of character development. Players deal with enough chance already due to the fall of the dice during adventuring, so any chance I have to take away another gripe of life’s RNG seems like a good thing to me.
Thoughts? Any surprises for anyone in the finalized version of RM Core Law?
This is the first book but it gives us characters, combat, and the regular GM fayre [poisons, disease etc]. You also get many of the customisation options.
What we are missing are spell law, creature law, and treasure law.
As we have a lot of non-human playable races, you can fudge some of the classic foes, your orcs, goblins and trolls etc. using the playable races and build them as basic NPCs.
Even without magic you can run a cool Robin Hood themed game or anything set in the real world or alternative history settings. There are many cool Crusades historical novels that spring to mind as potential first settings.
What I am going to do next is start reading and do a series of “Read Together” posts working through the chapters, and if I get any problems I can put them to JDale on the official ICE discord.
Welcome to my recurring blog series: “Race or Monster”. In these posts I try to uncover whether a particular humanoid or creature is best left as a “monster” or used as a race suitable for a player character. Of course, the individual GM is the final arbiter in their campaign, so I also want to examine whether a particular creature is even Shadow World “canon”. (see my most recent Race or Monster discussing the Droloi). Today I wanted to dive into the Saurkur.
So, unlike the Droloi which appeared much later in the Rolemaster supplement “Races & Cultures”, the Saurkur first appeared in “Island of the Oracles“, the 11th SW product printed in 1990. Like many non-canon modules, one gets the impression that IotOs was material that was retrofitted into the SW series. I had a copy at one point, but remember little about the book. I did think that the archipelago setting was very Shadow World, given the geography of many small land masses and island chains separated by the Flow of Essence.
From Terry’s comments on the development of Shadow World, there was certainly an internal tension between Terry’s creative vision and others at ICE that wanted SW to be a more generic setting that would appeal to a larger customer base. The inclusion of standard fantasy tropes was common in many of the SW non-canon books. But should the Saurkur be considered canon? Here is the few mentions (excluding the racial charts where they are classified as an “Alien Race”
General Info: 5’8″-7′ tall, 250-350 lbs, no professional limitations
Description: tall, thin, bipedal lizards. dark green to brown in color, hands have four digits, posses an uncanny strength for their build, and move very quickly, have long, thin tails
Mentions:
MASTER ATLAS III The Saurkur are a race of warm-blooded reptilian people that make up the bulk of the population of the Abarquan Islands (about 700 miles south of Kelestia). Loremasters believe them to be the descendants of a space-faring race that came to Kulthea on a colony ship which crash landed on the islands.
EMER I
The K’ta’viiri begin experimenting……Masters of genetics, the Lords of Essænce alter plants, animals,and races to suit their whim. These unusual races include the Krylites, the Saurkur, and the Kuluku
Master Atlas:
.Abarquan Islands: [Tropical/Humid] Saurkur (Mixed economies/Oligarchy/TL:4). Home of the Lizard-men described in the ICE SW module Islands of the Oracle.
That’s not much to go on, so unless you have Islands of the Oracle you may not have ever used or encountered the Saurkur in SW. As humanoid creatures, they may either be descendants of a seafaring race or a Ka’ta’viir experiment, but they are at least Tech lvl 4, have a organized culture and no professional limitations. There doesn’t seem to be any issues around breathing air, keeping their skin wet or any limitation on adventuring. In fact, they have unusual strength (+20 str bonus!!) and speed (although no Qu bonus) that should make solid warriors/tanks. They appear to be “Medium” size so they don’t have issues that might arise by playing a Troll or similar larger race. Of course there would be cultural issues assimilating into a human or Elvish community, but Shadow World does have alien-like canon races (Hirazi).
What are your thoughts? Are Saurkur Shadow World “Canon”? Have you had a PC play one?
First, to address the picture above. I thought it was amusing to include a reference to Shadow World, Dragons and the fact that it is a book although with no connection to Terry’s world.
Anyway, this is the second installment of “Named Things” where I’m noting certain elements of Shadow World that are worth indexing. Today, due to their brevity I’m grouping 2 categories in this post: Dragons and Books.
Dragons.
For those familiar with my take on the origins of the Dragonlords, I was attempting to put together a greater Dragon genealogy that went from the Dragonlords to their offspring. My assumption is that lesser Snakes, Serpents, Drakes and Wyverns were byproducts of Ka’ta’viir experiments in the late 1st Era, while intelligent, powerful Dragons were offspring from those Earthwardens that underwent the Ritual of Ascension.
So after a search through the various canon SW books I came up with a list of all the named Dragons (exclusive of the 6 Dragonlords):
Ssamis T’zang, The Light Dragon
Kaedan, Undead Gas Dragon
Vaalg Stoyy, Fire Drake
Motar Voorg, Red-Gold Dragon
Ssoei Womiis, Gas Drake
Ssoei Womuul, Gas Drakes
That’s it. I thought for sure that there was about twice as many tucked into the expanse Timelines, but in reality, there are only 6 named Dragons presented by Terry. Given the scarcity, I revised my plan and made the named Dragons above part of the few original Earthwardens that underwent the Ritual during the Interregnum.
Books.
I’m a sucker for cool, ancient tomes of magic and power. They can be great plot devices for adventures, provide knowledge and spells to the group, or exposition to a campaign. Certainly Shadow Worlds immense timeline begs for the need to transmit ancient knowledge or history to the players, and lost tomes can be a great way to do so. So what books can be found in Canon?
Book of Gates
Book of Theky’Taari
Syka’av Klytaru (The Book of Lord Klysus)
Omiar Akalataru (The Codex of Lord Akalatan).
Book of the Ring
Book of Air Book of Earth Book of Ice Book of Light Book of Water
Again, far less than what I would have guessed! Did I miss any named Dragons or Tomes?
This isn’t the first time I’ve discussed this; one of my first blog posts went into way more depth and complexity on this subject; you can find it HERE.
The elegance of splitting the offensive bonus (OB) into attack and defense has been a hallmark of RM since it’s first publication. It’s intuitive and hands more agency to players during combat. However, I’ve always felt there was 1 piece missing that took this a step further: allowing OB to be split into 3 parts. Attack/Defense/Initiative. This also feels intuitive and we’ve been using this system for years (if not decades now). I’ve played around with the conversion figures depending on the initiative system I was using and testing, but it’s always felt “right”.
Not only does it create 3-dimensionality to combat decisions, but it brings in weapon type choices that go beyond their ability to deal damage or inflict a critical. As we all know, striking first can be the real advantage in Rolemaster!
The news is: there is now news! Unfortunately, I’ve been busy with real life and haven’t had time to finish up the myriad of projects I’ve been working on lately. I’m probably averaging 1 page/week versus 1 page/day which doesn’t feel like much progress.
Anyway, I keep track of things on the RMForums and Discord just to get a sense of new player activity, trends and any possible news. I do get a fair amount of questions about the status of Shadow World
Per the recent Directors Briefing, Nicholas wrote:
I will be turning my attention back to Shadow World and indeed everything else once we have RMU Core Law and RMU Spell Law safely published.
Besides that, I don’t have any insider knowledge or updates on Shadow World, and Matt hasn’t had any meaningful contact with ICE in years, although he remains the SW forum moderator and primary RMU author. I wish I could answer more definitively! Let’s assume RMU Core & Spell publish in mid 2023. There will be a push to get the other RMU support material finished, errata and various fixes to the published material and probably a host of other issues particular to game publishing. My best guess is 2024?
In the meantime I’ll try to pump out material when I can, with the goal to upload material that is about 80% done and would allow them all to be possible publishable SW material. Matt (Vroomfogle) is unlikely to have time to contribute but is a great resource for mapping given his background https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoskeptic/
Thanks to everyone that reached out and your supportive words!! And, if you are new to Rolemaster, Shadow World or this blog here are links to my file resources:
